Without his friends to help protect him, it wasn’t long before a group of boys was able to sneak up on Ollie while he was sleeping and capture him in a net. They were the same boys who had tormented Ollie at school. The oldest one slung Ollie over his shoulder as they skipped back to town, singing and celebrating. “We’re going to turn him back into a boy, and then we’ll get Edvard’s whole farm!” They cheered. “We’ll be rich!”
They kept Ollie in a cage in their house and waited. When, after a week, he stubbornly remained a locust, they switched tactics.
“Tell it you love it,” the boys’ mother suggested.
“I love you!” the youngest boy shouted through the bars of Ollie’s cage, but he could hardly get the words out before he started laughing.
“At least keep a straight face when you say it,” the older boy said, and then he gave it a try. “I love you, locust.”
But Ollie wasn’t paying attention. He had curled up in a corner and gone to sleep.
“Hey, I’m talking to you!” the boy shouted, and kicked the cage. “I LOVE YOU!”
But he did not, nor could he force himself to, and when Ollie began making locust shrieks all night, the family gave up and sold Ollie to their neighbor. He was an old hunter with no family and little experience in matters of the heart, and after a few feeble attempts to show the boy love, he abandoned the effort and sent Ollie outside to live with the hunting dogs. Ollie much preferred the dogs’ company to the man’s. He ate with them and slept alongside them in their doghouse, and though they were afraid of him at first, Ollie was so gentle and kind that they soon grew accustomed to him, and he became one of the pack. In fact, he felt so accepted by them that one day the hunter found he was missing a giant locust but had gained an extra-large dog.
The months Ollie spent as a dog were some of the happiest of his life. But then came hunting season, when the dogs were expected to work. On the first day, the hunter brought the pack out to a field of tall grass. He shouted a command and all the dogs began to run, barking, through the field. Ollie followed along, barking and making a fuss. It was good fun! Then, suddenly, he tripped over a goose in the grass. The goose leaped into the air and started to fly away, but before it could get anywhere there was a loud crack and it fell back to earth, dead. Ollie stared at its body in horror. A moment later, another dog trotted up to him and said, “What are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to take it back to Master?”
“Of course not!” Ollie said.
“Suit yourself,” said the dog, “but if Master finds out, he’ll shoot you.” And then he grasped the dead goose in his jaws and trotted away.
The next morning, Ollie was gone. He’d run away with the geese, chasing their V-shaped migration from the ground.
When Edvard heard that his son had been found and then lost again, he sank into a despair from which those who knew him worried he’d never emerge. He stopped leaving his house. He let all his fields lie fallow. If old Erick had not brought him food once a week, he may well have starved. But like the locust plague, Edvard’s time of darkness eventually passed, and he began to tend his farm again and to turn up at the market in town and in his old pew in church on Sundays. And after a time he fell in love again and married, and he and his wife had a child, a girl they called Asgard.
Edvard was determined to love Asgard as he had failed to love Ollie, and as she grew up he did his best to keep his heart open. He let her love stray animals and cry over silly things, and he never scolded her for acting out of kindness. When she was eight years old, Edvard had a hard season. The crops failed and they had only turnips to eat. Then one day a flock of geese was passing overhead, and one of them left the formation and landed near Edvard’s house. It was very large, nearly twice the size of a normal goose, and because it didn’t seem afraid, Edvard was able to walk right up to it and grab it.
“You’ll make a good dinner tonight!” Edvard said, and he carried the goose inside and locked it in a cage.
It had been weeks since they’d had meat on their dinner table, and Edvard’s wife was excited. She stoked a fire and prepared the cooking pot while Edvard sharpened his carving knife. But when Asgard came into the kitchen and saw what was happening, she became upset.
“You can’t kill it!” she cried. “It’s a nice goose, and it didn’t do anything to us! It isn’t fair!”
“Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” Edvard told her. “In life, sometimes you have to kill in order to survive.”
“But we don’t have to kill it,” she said. “We can eat turnip soup again tonight—I don’t mind!”
And then she collapsed in front of the goose’s cage and began to weep.
At another time in Edvard’s life, he might have scolded his daughter and lectured her about the perils of softheartedness—but now he remembered his son.
“Oh, all right, we won’t kill it,” he said, kneeling down to comfort her.
Asgard stopped crying. “Thank you, Papa! May we keep it?”
“Only if it wants to stay,” said Edvard. “It’s a wild thing, so keeping it in a cage would be cruel.”
He opened the cage. The goose waddled out and Asgard threw her arms around its neck.
“I love you, Mister Goose!”
“Waak!” the goose replied.
That night they ate turnip soup and went to bed with their stomachs grumbling, happy as could be.
The goose became Asgard’s beloved pet. It slept in the barn, followed Asgard to school every morning, and sat honking on the schoolhouse roof all day while she was inside. She let everyone know the goose was her best friend and that no one was allowed to shoot it or make it into soup, and they let it be. Asgard made up fantastic stories about adventures she had with her goose, like the time she rode Goose to the moon so they could see what moon-cheese tasted like, and she regaled her parents with these tales at dinnertime. That’s why they weren’t terribly surprised when Asgard woke them up one morning in a state of excitement and announced that Goose had turned into a young man.