The Snow Geese (23 page)

We took our seats, Brenda and I opposite each other, Marshall at his usual table across the aisle.

‘I saw the northern lights,’ I told Brenda. When she turned towards the window I could see tundra moving across the lenses of her blue-framed glasses.

‘That’s good,’ she said, smiling, and nodding, as if agreeing that I had indeed seen the northern lights.

‘Aurora borealis!’ Marshall declared, without explanation or commentary, as if he were a commissionaire, announcing the aurora’s arrival at a grand ball. He was looking away from us at the tundra outside the right-hand, eastward window.

‘I’d never seen the lights before,’ I said.

‘Yep. Aurora borealis,’ he repeated, still gazing at the flat barren grounds. ‘The northern lights.’

‘I guess we’re pretty close to Churchill,’ Brenda said.

‘Ten minutes,’ Marshall said.

It was already past eight o’clock. The
Hudson Bay
was more than an hour behind schedule. Brenda fluffed out her brown hair.

‘You packed?’ Marshall demanded.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘You should be.’ He checked his watch. ‘Five minutes.’ Marshall’s leatherette travel bag was ready at his feet; his olive anorak was draped over a chair.

I followed Brenda back to the roomettes and packed my things. The
Hudson Bay
pulled into Churchill exactly as Marshall had predicted. The three of us stepped down to the platform. We followed the baseball caps and lumberjack shirts of the Cree families through the small terminal building. The grain elevator loomed at the end of the line, on the edge of Hudson Bay: grey, massive, brutal, conceived on a different scale to every surrounding structure. At the terminal the track frayed into six or seven spurs along which cars of grain could travel the last few hundred yards to the silos. Black-and-white snow buntings flitted from spur to spur, pecking at spilled wheat. A pair of Canada geese honked in the muskeg between the station and the frozen Churchill River. The cold was bracing. The light was silver and fierce. The sense of space was dizzying. I scanned the sky, looking for snow geese, but there was only the elevator, rearing at the end of the line like a vast tomb. An emblematic design: the railroad, time; the elevator, doom.

I shook hands with Brenda and Marshall. We were wearing gloves and our handshakes were clumsy. Marshall set off for Gypsy’s Bakery, where he intended to wait out the day before boarding the train again that evening. He carried the leatherette bag in his left hand, the orthopaedic stick in his right, and he walked away down Kelsey Boulevard with the brisk, rolling gait I had first seen in Union Station, Winnipeg, just thirty-six hours before. I watched him go, then lugged my bags to the bed and breakfast on Robie Street.

7 : CHURCHILL

I
T TOOK ME BY SURPRISE
, that I should feel so lost without geese. For several days it seemed I did nothing but walk, tramping from one end of Churchill to the other, establishing the beginnings of a home range, getting to know the axis of Kelsey Boulevard and the streets that led off it eastwards to La Verendrye Avenue, orientating myself first by prominent landmarks like the grain elevator, the Anglican church and the Northern Stores, and then by smaller points of reference: a pink garage door, a blue roof. It was the end of April, but on the front of one house silver tinsel and a string of gaudy lights still picked out the outline of a Christmas tree, and in a yard a handmade sign, bordered with green tinsel, read simply,
Peace on Earth
.

There wasn’t much snow. Snowmobiles and rusting Bombardier snow vans were pulled up on the dirt shoulders of the roads, out of their element. Four-wheeler all-terrain vehicles sped past, most of them ridden by children in quilted parkas, hoods thrown back, hoops of fur trim bouncing on their shoulders, and there were more ATVs parked in Hudson Square, where wire netting defined the back corner of a baseball diamond and parallel lines of snow were set hard in the tier-angles of the timber bleachers.

The elevator loomed at the end of the line: a central section for cleaning grain and an annexe on either side, like wings, for storage. I walked along the spurs towards it, the rails spattered with bunting guano, the elevator tomb-grey, derelict, its windows smashed in by frost. A long enclosed gantry of rusting corrugated iron led to a gallery eighty feet above the wharf, with red chutes that would swing out over the water when the ice cleared, grain schussing down them into ships’ holds. A harbour tug, the
George Kydd
, rested in dry dock; two yellow dredging cranes sat on caterpillar tracks; steel masts carried coronas of arc lights high above the wharf.

The Churchill River was frozen, the ice buckled where it had driven into the quayside, crumpling on itself, heaving up boulders and sooty rubble. Behind a breakwater, ice clamped the hulls of a larger tug, the
Keewatin
, and the four grey barges that in summer would take fuel and machinery to Inuit communities further north: Arviat, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet. Men in hard hats and coveralls were working on the barges, preparing them for the season. A welding torch fired deep in a hold: the entire day seemed seeded in that dense, blue-white flare.

*

T
HE CURLING CLUB
had a bar and lounge with finely-scratched Perspex windows overlooking the rink’s four sheets of ice. Finding a space at the orange Formica ledge that ran below the windows, I pulled up a plastic stacking chair beside a man in his mid-thirties – burly, pale, clean-shaven, wearing glasses in black plastic frames bound at one hinge by a skin-coloured plaster, the man’s skin paler than the plaster. Teams representing local businesses – the Port Authority, Hyska’s Insurance, R&V Yamaha – gathered below us on the ice.

My neighbour leaned forward, elbows on the orange Formica ledge, chin resting on a plinth of laced fingers. He wore a cherry-coloured acrylic sweater and a blue wool hat, or toque. His features – narrow eyes, flat nose, thin lips – fought shy of making too big a splash in his wide face. We talked as curling got under way, the lounge filling up with supporters of one team or another, the air thickening with hubbub and the fug of crushed-in bodies and cigarettes. Sam had served as a mechanic with the Canadian Air Force; now he was a machinist at the port. He spoke with the diffidence of someone expecting a setback.

‘This isn’t the season for polar bears,’ he said. ‘You don’t see too many tourists in Churchill unless they come for polar bears. I don’t see why anyone would come to Churchill unless they wanted to see polar bears.’

‘I’m looking for snow geese,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the snow geese to come up on their spring migration. I started off in Texas and came north more or less with the geese.’

‘That’s pretty far, eh? How long did it take you?’

‘I’ve been travelling for a couple of months.’

‘I guess snow geese’ll be here soon. We’ve got Canadas here already, and snow geese come up soon after. So you like curling?’

‘I’ve never seen it before.’

‘Must look pretty strange. Rocks and brooms and such.’

‘Are you a curler?’

‘Me? No way. I don’t even like it. There’s not much to do round here. It’s just good to get out of the house.’

A curling team, Sam explained, consists of four players, led by a skip. The game is played on a track or sheet of ice forty-six yards long from foot line to foot line. At each end of the sheet there’s a tee surrounded by two circles, one red, one blue; the area inside the circles is the house, twelve feet in diameter. The player has to slide the curling rock towards the house, aiming for the tee, letting go before he reaches the hog line. Two of his team-mates can use brooms to polish the ice in front of the stone, clearing away grit, straw or ice crystals, the friction of the brushes generating heat, melting the ice, keeping it smooth and fast, or ‘keen’.

Players were testing grey curling rocks, feeling for the weight of a stone by easing it forward and back, each stone shaped like an Edam cheese, buffed to a shine, glinting in the bright lights. The bar was crowded, stifling, rowdy with laughter and argument.

Sam and I went downstairs to the rinkside, pushing through a swing door, and I was instantly woken and pepped up by the chill off the ice, invigorated, as if I’d stepped out into the purged, clarion tone of high mountain air. We sat on a bench below a poster reminding players of the six ‘essential’ rules of curling, the top of Sam’s toque right under the words
Each player must deliver when his turn comes
. Skips were squatting in the houses, shouting instructions; stones were rumbling down the sheets; players were pulling on flat-soled Bauer and Asham curling shoes, or handling Duke 8-Ender and Lowry’s 100% Horse Hair brooms, or crouching, like runners in starting blocks, in the black rubber Marco hacks set in the ice behind each house. The chilled rink resounded with the tocks of stones caroming off other stones.

‘Have you ever been on a snowmachine?’ Sam asked.

‘No.’

‘It’s pretty fun, I guess.’

He offered to take me out on to Hudson Bay; I accepted earnestly. He leaned forward, elbows on knees; he cupped his face in his hands, letting his chin rest on their heels. Now we gave all our attention to the curlers. Some used the strength in their arms to push the stone down the sheet; others tapped the power in their legs, kicking out from the hacks and sliding, stone in hand, eight, nine, ten yards up the ice, right up to the hog line. They slid until the friction on their gloves, shoes and jeans began to slow them down, and only then let go, eyes fixed on the stones as they sailed away towards the tees, plying the centreline or veering in sad, inexorable drifts to left or right. Sweepers kept pace with the rocks, scrubbing at the ice in front of their feet, skips shouting ‘Up! Up! Up!’ at them while players on neighbouring sheets scooted from house to house – one shoe slippered in a Teflon slider, the other with its tread exposed for traction – and waiting curlers knocked back bottles of Labatt Blue and Bacardi Breezer, rocks colliding musically with other rocks, in and around the houses.

*

F
OR DAYS
,
GOOSELESS
, without purpose, feeling increasingly lonely and foolish, I walked. People warned me not to walk along the coast, to watch out for polar bears: I never strayed far beyond the small woodframe houses. I walked to the elevator and Cape Merry, gazed out across the great white plain of Hudson Bay, then walked back down the railway line towards Winnipeg. I sat in Gypsy’s Bakery drinking tea, writing in my notebook, or installed myself in the library, leafing through books, staring at the fibreglass polar bear that stood on the shelves, stepping from Fiction D–F to Fiction J–M. Winds howled in from the north; temperatures dropped to ten below. My hopes fell with them. I knew better than to expect geese in such conditions.

Solitary, adrift, craving familiar ritual, I ran through a white storm to the tiny Anglican church, its walls shipped to Churchill from England in 1890. North-easterly winds lashed in across the frozen bay throughout the service of Morning Prayer, catching the church broadside with cuffs and buffetings. There were tin panels inscribed with the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments, a rectangular canvas painted with the glyphs of Cree script, and a wooden plaque engraved with a sentence from Ecclesiastes: ‘Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.’ The church shook whenever the wind gusted. A congregation of four, huddled beneath a pendant electric heater, sang hymns with no accompaniment in this precarious fastness by the sea.

Ruth greeted me warmly in the anteroom. She was in her fifties, a few isolated white strands in her neat black hair, chips of red stained glass hanging from her ears. She wore a chunky hand-knitted zip-up sweater with a flopping collar. Two Canada geese were knitted into the front of the sweater, facing each other across the zip. Ruth zipped it up, bringing the bills of the two geese together in a tender kiss, then nuzzled her chin in the neck of the jersey.

We sat down under black-and-white photographs of pioneer Anglicans. I said that I was from England; Ruth said that her parents had come to Canada from London in 1934. They had settled in Toronto, where her mother had found work as a chocolate dipper.

‘She’d sit down just like this,’ she said, ‘with a marble board in front of her and all the centres ready to her left. The centres might be, I don’t know, a nutty something or caramel or what have you. One of the servers would come by with a pail of fresh chocolate. There was one server for every five dippers. She’d ladle out some chocolate on the marble surface and my mother would swill it around a bit so it cooled down and she got it to just the right temperature. Then she’d pick up one of the centres and roll it once, twice, and whatever dripped off at the end would be that little peak you get on chocolates. Those liquid centres such as cherry would actually be hard before she dipped them, but the chocolate coating would be hot, which would melt the cherry centre. When she came home she smelled of chocolate. She always loved to eat chocolate, but later on she developed diabetes. She couldn’t eat it any more. That was always something missing from her life, that she couldn’t eat chocolate.’