Originally for this prompt.

It began, as always, with the distant thunder of a thousand wings. I looked to the night sky in disbelief. Surely, it couldn’t be the full moon again already? I grabbed my daughter from her snow fort and ran for the relative safety of the farmhouse. The sound of wings was soon joined by a cacophony of honks, the foul fowl language of our oppressors. My wife threw open the back door, waving to me, urging me to greater speed. As soon as I crossed the threshold, she slammed and barred the door. I set my daughter down, with no time to quiet her, and started locking the reinforced shutters on the small windows. My wife joined me to heave the table across the front door and to move the couch to block the back. The radio was crackling with warnings.

“Well Doug, it looks like this is a big one,” the weatherman said.

“Indeed Wayne, people should be expecting about six to seven hours of geese tonight across northern Quebec. We’re estimating that the numbers are up almost twenty percent from last month. The government is urging everyone to stay ind-“ The cloud of geese turned the broadcast to static, and my wife turned it off.

The sound of geese was almost directly overhead when my daughter tottered over with the maple syrup. With shaking hands, I smeared a sugary cross on each window. We were running low, and I couldn't afford to spare any for the doors. My wife and daughter pulled chairs in a circle in the middle of the room while I got my weapon. I could hear the Canadian geese passing by towards the main town by the time we sat down, huddled under layers of quilts. A moose lowed in panic, then in pain, and finally fell silent, all within seconds. My wife tried to keep out daughter quiet as I tested the sharp edge on my war hockey stick.

“But Mommy, they’re gone, and I want to go look.”

As my daughter spoke, there was a shuffling noise from the roof, and we all froze. Dull thudding resonated off the shingles as a goose tried to peck its way in. I could just hear the snow crunching beneath the webbed feet of other were-geese circling the house, checking our defenses.

Thump. A goose threw itself at a window, and the syrup glowed bright as it repelled the attack. We held our breath as feet slapped across the roof to the chimney. A querulous honking echoed down the fireplace as the goose tried and failed to squeeze into the hole.

“Please, let us in,” one honked, scrapping a scaly foot at the front door. “Are you really going to be impolite, and ignore a please?”

From the back, another hissed, “Yes, and we brought the Timmies. We have Timbits… So you’re still leaving us out in the snow, eh?”

Thump. Thump. Thump.

They were throwing themselves at the front door, and with horror I saw it was beginning to inch open, the table sliding on the floorboards. A were-goose stuck its head through the cracked door just in time for me to behead it with a swing of my hockey stick. I could just see it beginning to regrow as I slammed the door again. My wife dragged a chair over to prop up the barricade. The honking resumed, now with individual voices. It was clear they were communicating, although we couldn’t understand the words.

“We’ll have to take it in shifts,” I whispered to my wife. “I’ll take first watch.”

The geese did not give up, honked pleas to open the door mixed with hissing threats. They tested the windows repeatedly, and I had to renew the maple syrup twice. When the clock showed 2 AM, I woke my wife and got what rest I could, waking again every time they launched another assault.

In the morning, when the moon set, I carefully peeked out a window. The were-geese were gone, leaving only tracks behind. A hundred feet away, I saw the moose that had cried out, now a skeleton picked clean, bones piled neatly together. I almost went to check the front door, but stopped myself. It was better to wait, leave the bad news as late as possible. It took half an hour for us to move all the furniture back into place, and I volunteered to help wash off the syrup stains from the window shutters. But then I had no choice, and with dread I opened the door. I exhaled shakily in relief.

“It’s clear, honey.”

“The geese are gone?”

“Oh, yes, of course, the geese are gone. I meant I don’t need to shovel today.”