Don’t call the quacks, but I fell for a goose who thought I was his daddy!

He’s one of the world’s great travel writers. But as PAUL THEROUX reveals in this enchanting memoir, his most extraordinary encounter took place in his own backyard

The greater part of my life, more than 50 years, has been spent doing what I am doing now — writing in ink on a lined white pad, hoping not to be interrupted, alone and grateful for my solitude.

Weekends are a waiting period; most uninvited talk (the phone, repairmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses) drives me to distraction; national holidays are an annoyance; vacations — when I am unable to avoid them — make me impatient, unless I find a quiet place to read.

Travel for me is not a vacation but rather an immersion, a long spell of dedicated observation during which I write in the evening, summing up the day. I hope to live like this until I die — selfishly, you might say, but it is the only way I can think straight and write well.

For the past 30 years I have lived in a remote part of a hawaiian island, on a steep bluff among my own clumping bamboo, surrounded by hills covered in dense forests of casuarina trees.

The beach is half a mile down the hill, and if the day is sunny, which it usually is, after lunch I set up my folding chair under the palms and continue to write. When I’m done, I go for a swim. I feel lucky to have lived a life of having the day to myself. In the evening, I usually make dinner, and when my wife comes home we drink, we eat, we share the news of our day. Sometimes we see friends. Apart from one man on the other side of the island, no one I know in hawaii reads anything I write.

In the mid-Nineties a friend from down the hill came for a drink and remarked on the tall grass in the meadow in front of my house.

I said I’d been meaning to cut it, but the amount and the height was daunting. It was up to my chest, and thick — guinea grass, not pretty, and regarded as invasive in hawaii. It smothers native plants, and you can’t use a lawn mower on it — a scythe, perhaps.

This neighbour, the late Peregrine eliot, was a landowner in Cornwall, and familiar with farming life. In hawaii, he was usually barefoot and bone idle, wearing an Aloha shirt and shorts — always with a smile.

‘What you want are some geese,’ he said, gesturing to the grass.

AFeed store sold me three embden goslings, which grew quickly into two good-sized ganders and one plump goose.

The pure white, orange-beaked breed originated in Germany; the stark purity of their feathers gives prominence to their eyes, as blue and luminous as the Pacific. Being heavy — a gander 20lb, a goose somewhat less — they are usually raised for their meat.

They went to work on my grass, and were good-tempered and alert. One gander paired with the goose, and the remaining gander seemed to imprint on me.

After a year or so the goose was sitting on eggs, on a nest in a sheltered spot under the house. One day, there was a commotion — panicky shrieks from the gander, agonising honks from the goose.

A neighbour’s dog had burst through the woods, killed the goose and injured her mate; both lay in a mass of bloodstained feathers.

‘I’ll buy you another goose,’ the neighbour said, when I confronted him. ‘If I kill your dog,’ I said, ‘I’ll get you another from the humane society.’ I did not see his dog again, though I do battle with other predators and pests — feral cats, wild pigs, mongooses, roof rats and tenacious half-pound Norway rats.

I put three still-warm eggs under a duck that had just begun to sit on a large clutch: a Muscovy duck, used to brooding for 35 days. One morning, before the duck eggs hatched, I saw a wet, yellow gosling tumble from beneath her.

This was in 2008, on April 23 — Shakespeare’s birthday.

The first moving creature Willy saw was me, and he snuggled in my hand. When I put him in a warm cage I kept it at eye level and made sure he had plenty to eat.

he doubled in size in ten days, and within a month grew pinfeathers, then fledged in earnest — spiky feathers that gave him bulk and turned him white.

When I held him, I could feel his pulsing heart, his warm body. And very soon, when I said ‘Willy’, he responded with a little caw. For the first time since my children finished school, my writing day was changed, brightened in unexpected ways.

Willy was to be attended to, fed with pellets, and the horse trough filled with water so he could climb in and splash, diving, beating his wings and then grooming himself as he dried off in the sun, pecking at his feathers and combing them smooth with his beak.

The other geese snapped at the grass, now an acre of close-cropped lawn, as Perry eliot had promised; Willy waited near the door of my studio and squawked in recognition when I appeared at lunchtime to feed him by hand.

Often, he simply lingered, working his beak and lengthening his neck if another goose came near, possessive of me.

Geese are usually in motion, except at night, though their sleeping habits are a riddle: they seem to stay awake all night, and tuck their head under one wing to nap briefly during the day.

The gander remains with the goose, and can be very aggressive in the mating season, attacking any intruder — even me. But Willy served as my protector and would often chase away any gander that assumed a threatening posture or aimed his beak at my shins.

Unlike the others, Willy could be stillness itself, sated with food, when I rested with him on the low lava stone wall after my own lunch and stroked his feathers.

The dense down over a goose’s breast is a pillow of warmth you can sink your fingers into.

The flocking instinct of geese keeps them in a loose gaggle, but it’s accurate to see them as a little family, because a gaggle’s apparent cohesiveness is an illusion, as in many human families. One or two birds in a gaggle always lag behind, pecked at by the others — especially the strongest male.

Willy’s reflex was to associate with the others, but there was tentativeness in it, because the other birds objected with fleering squawks when he got too close, poking at him, body-checking him, crowding him away from the pellets when I fed them together. he was of the gaggle but not in it.

I recognised this oblique behaviour from my own family life when, as one of seven children, my instinct was to stay with the group even when I was rebuffed, or mocked, or bullied by my older brothers — or my sisters, who, as girls, were licensed to tease with impunity.

When older, imposed on by the petty alliances of my siblings, I remained at the periphery in the magnetic field of affinity, but did not wholly separate myself from the dominant others in the flock.

I don’t say Willy was me, but I could identify with his being sidelined and always watchful. And I saw his remedy, the way he often hurried — goose-stepped — away from the others at feeding time, to meet me covertly at the side of the house to be given his own meal. he ate it alone, round about the time of day I was eating alone, too.

he hurried to me when I called him by name. On my arrival at the long driveway, when the iron wheels of the entrance gate clanked against their rail, he emitted a squawk of recognition from 100 yards away. I might have been away for months, but when I returned he flew to me, low to the ground as embdens do, and settled by my side.

Geese vocalise in various ways. I grew to know the sounds Willy made — the caw of contentment; the shriek; the harsh squawk; the hiss; and, loudest of all, the trumpeting after overcoming an adversary. All these noises are very different from the soft honks and grunts of a female.

Now and then Willy scissored his beak without a sound, as though in a silent stammer.

Like the other geese, he spent a good part of his day preening, cleaning and ordering his feathers with his beak. Geese bathe rather than swim, diving and immersing their heads and beating their wings in the water to sluice them. A pool or basin of shallow water seems necessary for geese to mate, a ritual which is brief and smothering.

For a time, Willy had a companion goose but, in the clash of ganders during the mating season, he was forcibly driven from this partnership and spent more time with me. In those days and weeks when I felt

Willy chased away any gander aiming his beak at my shins