Early one recent afternoon, Elwood and Mary Carson of Eclipse were driving home on Bridge Road when their hearts were suddenly pulled in a different direction.

“Oh my God — look!” Mary Carson, 72, exclaimed to Elwood Carson, 74, who was behind the wheel.

A maimed Canada goose that had been hit by a vehicle — Mary Carson thinks it was one of the 18-wheelers forever rumbling back and forth — and the maimed bird was attempting to drag itself onto the center median.

As another motorist stopped traffic, Elwood Carson “picked the goose up and cradled her in my arms.”

“I told my wife, ‘You drive the car, let me hold the goose,’” he added.

Just before noon Monday — about a month later — the Elwoods met Heidi Pocklington, a volunteer wildlife rehabilitator with the Virginia Beach Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, behind the Dollar Tree off Bridge Road.

Next to a peaceful lake fringed with woods, it was near where the Elwoods rescued “Lucy the Goosie,” as Mary Carson had named her.

While Mary Carson supervised, Pocklington, Elwood Carson and a reporter quietly herded back toward Lucy a flock of geese that a woman parked farther down the parking lot had been feeding — a pastime not recommended by wildlife rehabilitators, incidentally.

As her feathered friends got closer, Lucy increased her honking. Pocklington crept around and opened Lucy’s crate.

What happened next wasn’t exactly according to plan. Instead of heading toward the woods, Lucy soared into the air in the direction of Bridge Road and suburbia, with the other geese quickly catching up.

The injured goose came to Karen Roberts, another wildlife rehabilitator, for rehabilitation via PETA, which the Carsons had called for help.

When he picked Lucy up off the road, she was trying to substitute her right wing for an apparently broken leg, Elwood Carson said, and she had lacerations.

“It was just a pitiful sight to see her try to get on the median and up the curb,” he said. “When I tried to pick her up, she was hissing at me and trying to defend herself. She didn’t hurt me in any way.”

Roberts had nursed Lucy back to health at home. Pocklington, who had traveled to North Suffolk to release the goose, said she personally has rehabilitated ducks, crows, pigeons and squirrels since getting her state permit in 1998.

“We try to release geese back to their own families,” she said. “We know who they have been hanging out with.”

Lucy is about a year old and still has “something wrong” with her right leg, which was dislocated rather than broken, Pocklington said.  “It’s not something to euthanize her for,” she added.

Seeing Lucy take to the skies, Mary Carson admitted feeling a little sad. “She’ll fly off, and we won’t see her,” she said.

“I’m not sad one bit,” her husband said.