"Mason." The goat said to him.

Life returned to his face and his body as quickly as it had left. The goat's ability to talk was as wondrous as its previous appearance had been, and if it could talk, then it could tell him its secrets, but Mason had gone through too many emotional vicissitudes in too short a space of time to ask his questions.

"I want to thank you Mason for everything that you have done for me and this forest. Your ambitions are admirable, and to reward for all that you've done I'm going to give you what you need to realize them. Under the roots of the tree that's at the center of the forest you'll find a seed, bury that seed in the ground and anything that you grow on that land will grow in the blink of an eye, just like this forest, so you can take it and use it to grow your crops and feed the world, good luck to you."

The goose had heard him. Mason had spent years waiting for this moment and now that it was here he became irretrievably overwhelmed by it. He remained down on his knees crying while Robert and the goose got ready to leave with the goat.

"Are we done here?" Robert asked the goose.

"Well?" The goose asked the goat.

"Yes, we are," the goat answered, then turned to Jessie and the two guards that had followed it from its enclosure, "I would like to thank you all as well for all that you have done for me during my time here, and I wish you the best."

Robert, the goose and the goat turned to leave, they had done what they came to do and it was now time for them to go.

"Wait!" A voice called out from behind them as they were leaving. It was the girl, Jessie.

"Take me with you."

"Take you with me where?" Robert asked her.

"Wherever it is you're going, I just want to be close to the goat, please, don't take it away from me."

"Sure, you can come with us," the goose answered.

The goose had quickly assessed the situation and concluded that, with Jessie being so upset about the goat being taken away and holding a large assault rifle in her hands, this was potentially a deadly situation which needed to be defused, and the quickest way to do so was to tell her that she could come along with them, and aside from that, Robert's house was in need of a feminine touch. Robert wanted to protest but quickly grasped the goose's reading of the situation.

"Yeah, come along, it'll be fun," he said to Jessie.

So Robert and Jessie and the two talking animals got into Robert's car and got back on the road to Queens. Robert had taken a closer look at Jessie when they were making their way out of the forest back to his car and she couldn't have been more than nineteen years old. Robert watched her sitting in the backseat of the car with the goat on her lap while he was driving and wondered what she must have gone through to make her leave home and travel to the forest when she was still just a young teenage girl. Robert had a daughter of his own who was fourteen and lived her mother in Spokane. Because she was on the other side of the country he only got to see her for a weeks during the summer and he regretted the time that they spent apart. He wasn't sure what he could do for Jessie that would help her to move on from whatever had happened early on in her life. For now she seemed to want nothing more than to continue being with the goat and he was happy to leave it at that for the time being, but there was something about the nature of Jessie's attachment to the goat that he felt was significant with respect to the pilgrimage and thus something that it was important he understand.