The Snow Geese (25 page)

*

M
ORE AND MORE BIRDS
were arriving from the south. Ducks gathered in the tundra pools around Goose Creek. They muttered while the frogs clicked: the background uproar had texture now. Ruth had collected waste grain from the elevator and left heaps of it on the mossy ground behind the cabin. I kept my bird books and binoculars by the sink and tried to identify the passerines: American tree sparrows with rust-coloured heads and a dark spot on their breasts; white-crowned sparrows with zebra-striped scalps; dark-eyed juncos remembered from David’s bird-table at Riding Mountain.

One morning a truck pulled up outside the cabin. I heard the door slam, feet on the four stairs, two knocks on the door. An elderly man was standing in the porch, holding up a purple string net bag containing three bulbs of elephant garlic, produce of Chile, purchased at Spice World in Orlando, Florida.

‘I’m looking for Ruth,’ he said.

George came from Nevada, Iowa. He had smart Polaroid glasses, a grey moustache, and a grey fedora, a shade darker than the moustache. He was devoted to birds. Since retiring from the US Navy, he’d made the trip to Churchill once a year to photograph migrants. I was explaining that Ruth was attending her nephew’s wedding when George spotted something in the yard and reached for the binoculars on the sideboard.

‘I’ll be darned!’ he exclaimed. ‘If it isn’t a cowbird! A goddamn cowbird! Can you believe that! Knock me down with a feather! A cowbird!’

A brown-headed cowbird – a kind of blackbird with a brownish hood and a bill like a finch’s. Like the European cuckoo, the cowbird is a brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other birds and leaving these foster parents to rear the young cowbirds as their own. When we looked up the cowbird in the field guide, I understood George’s excitement. The guide showed the winter and summer ranges of each species by means of shaded bands on maps of North America no bigger than postage stamps, and though the cowbird’s breeding range broached southern Manitoba and extended quite far north in Saskatchewan, it never got close to Hudson Bay. This cowbird outside the cabin at Goose Creek was either a pioneer or it was lost: a vagrant, like Gallico’s snow goose.

‘So Ruth’s in Tobermory, huh? And you’re here to look after the animals?’

I told George about the snow geese and my idea of following them from one home to another. He reacted just as he had reacted to the cowbird.

‘I’ll be darned!’ he exclaimed.

We went out to watch birds, driving slowly in the Cheyenne along the tracks of Goose Creek, binoculars round our necks, maintaining the vigilance of sentries. We wound down the windows, admitting the tremendous frogsong. The tundra between the tracks and spruce trees was sodden, mossy, bristling with tussocks, glittering with meltwater pools. There were ducks everywhere. George and I raced each other to call out the names.

‘Pintail!’

‘Shoveler!’

‘Scaup!’

But George was the expert. He identified a flock of five bufflehead from their swift, low flight; I remembered their white head-dresses from South Dakota. He pointed to a circling northern harrier and knew that up close you’d see it had the round face of an owl. He spotted a new gull, fresh from the south: Bonaparte’s gulls, much smaller than herring gulls, with thin straight black bills instead of the heavy down-curved yellow bills of herring gulls, and wings angled at the elbow like a tern’s. George knew that bonies were named after Charles Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon; that they wintered along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts of America, and bred in a wide band from Alaska across the Yukon to James Bay – these gulls may have flown north-west from New England, or straight up the Central and Mississippi Flyways with the snow geese and cranes, or on the long haul from Orlando, Florida, like the elephant garlic. We saw an American kestrel perched on the nib of a spruce, flocks of snow geese in familiar undulating skeins, the black necks of Canada geese poking above sedge tussocks.

We left the truck and walked, stopping now and again to raise binoculars and scan the tundra. I spotted a wader, and George recognized it immediately as a lesser yellowlegs, grey-speckled, slender and elegant, with a long thin bill like a pipette, its light body raised high on straw-yellow legs, up to the shins in meltwater. The calls of snow geese some distance away made a faint tinkling like wind chimes or marinas where the halliards are pinging on metal masts, and the honking calls of Canada geese seemed to sound on both in-breath and out-breath, like harmonicas or the rubber black-bubble klaxons of classic cars.

‘Wow,’ whispered George. His binoculars were trained on the tundra. ‘Look at that.’

I raised my binoculars. I tried to steady the lens, as a sniper would. In the open ground were sedges, heaths, moss clumps, rivulets, small pools, thickets of shrubby willow, the browns of single-malt whiskies and old sellotape.

‘Bitterns,’ whispered George.

There they were: two American bitterns,
Botaurus lentiginosus
, cryptic, secretive birds, a kind of egret, standing motionless, practically invisible in their brown, black-stippled plumage, their necks stretched, their bills, which had the scabbard shape of herons’ bills, thrust skywards. The bitterns had noticed us and were pretending to be reeds, trusting that the genius of their posture and colouring would conceal them from view.

‘Oh my,’ whispered George. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

The birds didn’t flinch. They might have been whittled from wood, or chanced upon in the thick of a bole. Birders call them thunder-pumpers on account of their booming territorial calls, but this pair were committed to a strategy and wouldn’t risk a whimper.

‘Wish I had my camera,’ whispered George.

Later, alone again in the cabin, with Saila sleeping by the Cummer stove, her body twitching, as if in the grip of last throes, I referred to field guides and found the bittern’s pumping call rendered in the peculiar phonetics of birdbooks.
Oong-KA-chunk!
one offered.
Oonk-a-lunk!
another transcribed. I tried to imagine the sound of a bittern. I concentrated on the phonetic renderings. But how did you convert the signs to actual song?

*

R
UTH
’
S CABIN
, Sam’s gentle friendliness, George’s passion for birds: these were gifts. Without them, I might easily have lost heart. In the last bitter days of April, trudging back and forth through Churchill, I’d passed the travel agent on Kelsey Boulevard again and again, thinking how easy it would be to go in, buy a ticket, fly home. In Gypsy’s Bakery I’d made lists of things I had to do in England, as if I were already there. I’d thought of friends I would see, haunts I would revisit, foods I would eat, pieces of music I would listen to. And I’d nursed resentments against the place I was in, with its white storms and frontier harshness, the elevator bearing down like a force of oppression.

Most of all it was the cabin that lifted me, that restored my energies and refreshed my enthusiasm for the journey with snow geese. I had somewhere of my own, a secure base. Forms were distributed in fixed, reliable patterns. My feet learned the width of rooms, my hands the location of handles and switches. I settled into routines, unchanging from one day to the next – getting up at dawn to follow Saila down the corridor; pouring water from the yellow plastic drums into the sink for washing-up; spooning Missy’s Friskies into her bowl on the sideboard, Mrs Amos King of Pennsylvania seeking Strawberry Corelle dishes and other strawberry-themed items. I dusted Ruth’s framed proverbs and family photographs. I confided in Saila. I cooked comforting, familiar dishes. I slept with the curtains open, just in case I woke in the middle of the night with an aurora right outside the window, diaphanous and spectral.

One night I dreamed of the ironstone house. But it was in the wrong place. It wasn’t in the middle of England, beside a wood, with farmland sloping upwards to the south and west, a spire poking the sky to the north. The house was on the edge of Hudson Bay, with caribou and polar bears wandering in the garden, the windows filled with dazzling white: pure floe.

How could I not think of home, when so many birds were homing overhead? When I’d set out, going back had been too far off to contemplate, beyond the horizon, not visible for the curve of the sphere. But now return seemed imminent, within reach, as if I’d gained a coign of vantage and saw my home range in the distance, a day’s walk. Only Foxe Land lay between me and that known world. I was restless again, restless for the known. I felt the draw of the familiar, as if I’d entered a field of gravity. I wanted deep attachments instead of fleeting encounters. I wanted the things I saw and heard to accord with the things I remembered. I wanted roots. And all these were waiting beyond the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak.

Homesickness and nostalgia no longer refer to the same condition. Both describe states of return-suffering, but while the homesick individual longs to go back to a particular place, to return in space, the nostalgist longs to go back to the past, to return in time. Both can be a medium of escape. You might dream of going back to some idealized place or time because you are frightened or unhappy in the here or now, as I had been frightened and unhappy in hospital. Then, it was as if illness were itself a foreign country, where nothing was recognized or understood; as if being ill were a kind of expatriation, a forced removal from conditions to which you had become habituated and attached. Going home was at least a kind of going back. Home was a reprieve from the unpredictable.

I wanted to guard against such fantasies of escape. I couldn’t rush back to the old ironstone house whenever circumstances outside it became inhospitable. Nowhere was my sense of belonging as complete or unambiguous as it was in my childhood home, but if I saw that sense of belonging as something exclusive to the ironstone house, then I would never really leave, never grow up, never look for my place in the world. Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.

One afternoon I drove the Cheyenne along the coast to see the wreck sitting just offshore near Bird Cove. The shorefast ice had yet to break up, but further out, beyond the lead, the ice was already in pieces, with shards of blue sea showing between the floe hunks. I took the metalled road towards Cape Churchill, turning off down a track, pulling up close to the edge of Hudson Bay. I didn’t walk far from the Cheyenne, scared of polar bears hidden in the tundra hollows. Snow geese flew high overhead in loose, flexing chevrons. In front of me, gripped by ice, was a ship, rusted all over, decaying, its sad-looking cranes and davits and broken funnel distinct against the blue and white. It had been driven aground, caught in a windstorm in September 1961 while carrying nickel ore from Rankin Inlet to Montreal. I stood by the Cheyenne, panning across the wreck with my binoculars, flocks bleating high overhead. But all I could think about was the ship’s name.

The
Ithaca
.

*

T
HE NUMBERS OF
snow geese flying over the cabin at Goose Creek began to drop in the second half of May. Many had already settled at the nearby La Pérouse Bay breeding colony; many were flying further north, up the coast of Hudson Bay, then swinging east to Southampton Island and Baffin Island. After walking past it so many times, thinking about going home, I pushed open the door of the travel agent on Kelsey Boulevard and booked myself on a flight to Baffin. The next day I picked Ruth up from the airport and drove her back to the cabin. I’d already said goodbye to Saila. Ruth said she wanted to pay me for looking after her house and animals, and I said I wanted to pay her for letting me.

Sam and I met for the last time in Gypsy’s Bakery. His smile wasn’t conventional; it was a kindly scowl. Sometimes he took off his blue wool toque and scratched his head, revealing thin, wispy hair, but never for long. He was wearing an old leather bomber jacket, a T-shirt just tight enough to hold a pack of cigarettes against his upper arm, and a gold watch strapped so the face was on the inside of his wrist: to tell the time, he had to turn his palm upwards, rolling the forearm, the face just where a nurse would feel for a pulse, his body’s timekeeping adjacent to the watch’s.

He’d suggested we drive out to Cape Merry. The sky had been clear all day, with waterfowl and passerines rafting in on clement, moderate winds from the south. Sam’s pickup was parked outside Gypsy’s – no ordinary pickup, but a Ford F100 from 1956, painted bright scarlet, with natty chrome plaques on both doors (
Custom Cab
in a sloping script) and genuine running boards you could hitch a ride on if the cab were full. The seat was a banquette, sprung like a trampoline, covered with a brushed cotton sheet bearing faded motifs of pink flowers. Ruts and frost heaves set passengers bouncing. On the rear fender was a sticker that read,
If you don’t like the way I drive – Stay off the sidewalk!
and Sam had glued a Canadian Air Force shield to the dashboard, with its motto
Per Ardua ad Astra
. Through striving, to the stars.

‘I’ve just got to get something from the shed,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll drive out to the Cape.’

Sam’s shed was a small free-standing garage next to his bungalow. Inside stood a Harley-Davidson and a gyrocopter. The gyrocopter had no wheels or rotors: it was an elaborate cage, standing on the points of its tubing, as if on tiptoe, with a black seat resembling a child’s car safety seat lodged in its centre. An old guitar case, wrapped with packing tape, leaned against one wall, close to a pair of Rossignol cross-country skis with boots clamped in the bindings. Over the workbench a hand-written sign said,
Clean up better than you found it, OK?
and above that was a long plywood shelf with a lip where Sam had written:
Fragile! Gyrocopter Rotor Blades!
He rummaged around for a while, then hoisted a green kitbag over his shoulder.