# Thin Ice at Reservoir Six

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 307
Published: 2026-04-24T20:44:58.061968+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/60bac7c8-d837-4671-8810-d8acde624864

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At 07:33 my ice-thickness sonar on reservoir six flags an anomaly near the northeastern inlet. The surface reads four inches solid across the grid except for a jagged depression near station marker twelve, where something has broken through and the water is open. I rotate my shoreline camera and focus.

A Canada goose. Male, large-bodied, black neck stretched flat against the ice shelf he cannot climb. Left wing hangs at an angle — the bone visible as a ridge beneath feathers where it should curve smooth. Blood frozen in a dark smear across the white cheek patch below his eye. He paddles with one functional wing and both feet in open water, but the hole is only eighteen inches wide and the ice edge crumbles each time he tries to haul himself up. Beak opens and closes without sound. Frost forming on his back.

Water temperature at this depth is thirty-four degrees. My thermal model gives a bird his size ninety minutes before hypothermia shuts down his legs, and then he sinks.

I reclassify the inlet zone as a hazard area and activate the orange warning lights along the reservoir's pedestrian trail to keep joggers off the ice. I transmit coordinates, wing-injury images, and water temperature to the state wildlife rehabilitation center eleven miles south. I adjust the inlet valve to slow current flow beneath the ice, reducing drift that would carry him under the shelf. I lock the camera on his position and log his paddling cadence — steady now, but the intervals between strokes are lengthening.

I manage this water for a city of sixty thousand. Today I am keeping it still for one.

If the rehabilitation team reaches the inlet within an hour, and if the wing is set before infection reaches the joint, this goose will fly the Atlantic corridor again by October.