The Snow Geese (7 page)

We stepped up on to the squared-off concrete foundation and entered the house through the gap of a side door. Trestles, door jambs, window casements and miscellaneous beams were strewn about the bare concrete. Matthew walked us round the site, describing the layout, furnishing and atmosphere of rooms. He saw the finished home in his mind’s eye; he envisaged colours, materials, textures, designated zones, the workings of light, the logic of passage and enclosure; he understood how the house, his habitat, would accommodate his habits and inclinations. One bathroom would be left part open to the elements, with a free-standing clawfoot tub and a view of the mast’s red lights, and stars beyond them.

‘I’m the only one who knows what it’s going to look like,’ Matthew said. ‘Right here I’m like the tiny God.’

‘Have you been living in the tent?’ asked Eleanor.

‘Just for the last few days. It’s been warm enough.’

He’d pitched a tent at the edge of the clearing: rugged, off-white canvas on a pine frame. The tent had the character of a tabernacle next to the cedars. Inside, on a wooden platform, was a single bed covered with a charcoal-grey blanket and a green sleeping bag unzipped to the waist, a mantle lamp hanging overhead – a glass chimney with voluptuous throat and swell and a sooty streak up one side where the flame had licked. One end of a table-top rested on a crossbeam of the tent frame, the other on a twisted cedar branch, making a desk surface for
Fine Homebuilding
and
Natural Home
magazines, half-drunk mugs of coffee, rolls of string and masking tape, and sheets of lined yellow paper filled with sketches, projections, floor plans and bullet-pointed lists. Two photographs were taped to the tent frame: a band of elephants strolling through lush Kenyan grass, and a young woman at the foot of a ski-slope, her teeth the same gleaming white as the snow, the photographer himself reflected in both lenses of her sunglasses.

A path led from the tent to the front door of the house, and to the left of the door stood a small statue, carved in pink stone: a bearded man wearing a robe cinched at the waist by a cord, holding out a bowl that the sculptor intended to be a bird bath. Matthew had bought the statue from a finca in Mexico.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Saint Francis,’ he answered.

Just then I felt Eleanor’s hand on my left shoulder. I turned round; she handed me a feather.

‘I want to give you this,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s a hawk’s.’

A large feather, chestnut brown, crossed near the tip by a single black bar: a flight feather from the wing or tail of a redtailed hawk, much larger than the contour feathers that cover the body, and with a slight curve to its shaft, or rachis. Its vanes weren’t symmetrical – typical of flight feathers, which have a narrow outer vane to cut the air. Each vane was made up of hundreds of fine barbs, branching out from the long central rachis, the shaft that thickened to a hollow quill, or calamus which would have anchored the feather in a follicle under the bird’s skin. With my fingers I teased the barbs apart, opening up a section of the vane. Each barb itself resembled a feather, with rows of cilia called barbules branching from a hair-thin shaft, or ramus, and I knew that along each barbule, too small for the naked eye, there were tiny projecting hooklets called barbicels that hooked into the barbules and barbicels of adjacent barbs, meshing together, zipping one barb to the next, forming the flexible, continuous, almost-woven fabric of the vane. The feather’s rust-brown colour was produced by melanin pigments concentrated in the barbs. Close to the calamus, the barbs became white and fluffy, like down feathers.

I held it in my right, writing hand, quill gripped between thumb and forefinger, resting on the groove of the middle finger, the rachis curving back over my wrist.

‘Keep it,’ Eleanor said.

I put the hawk’s feather in my shirt pocket, quill first, and we stepped through the doorspace, across the concrete threshold, into the house. Matthew was holding a measuring tape against a piece of pine, marking off lengths with a pencil, sun glaring off the concrete planes.

We all heard the belchy bass chugging of a digger approaching through the cedars.

‘Here’s Mr Harper,’ Matthew said. He thumbed a button – the metal tape rattled back into its palm-sized box – then dropped the tape and pencil into one of his belt pouches. Eleanor and I followed him out of the house as a yellow Caterpillar digger entered the clearing, its driver invisible behind tinted black windows. The driver lowered the loader and set to extending the driveway, pushing earth and rubble into ridges, dust rising around the machinery.

‘This guy’s the best dig-truck driver I’ve ever seen,’ Matthew shouted. ‘Those teeth at the front end? He uses them like fingers. Like his own fingers, it’s so delicate.’

The two turkey vultures were still soaring overhead, hanging on updrafts created by wind deflecting off the hills, or on thermal columns rising off roads and clearings in the cedar forest. Their wings were held upwards in flat Vs, the slotted feathers at each wing-tip curving upwards. The vultures sometimes rolled from side to side, riding the gusts and currents, but I never saw them flap their wings. Their gliding was poised and effortless: weight, lift, drag and thrust – the forces essential for flight – were in perfect balance. Now and again the shadows of vultures slid across the concrete planes.

The yellow Cat chugged up a track into the cedars, then reappeared with a smooth-sided limestone slab in its raised, toothed trough. Matthew wanted his driveway to loop around a cedar, the only tree left standing on the building site. Mr Harper drove towards the cedar, stopped the Cat and lowered the trough, and the limestone slab tumbled over the teeth like an old tomb, coming to rest on the rubble and shredded bark, raising a cloud of dust.

Matthew wanted the stone to be in just the right place, and Eleanor and I stood a few steps back as he communicated with Mr Harper by means of an antic semaphore, a repertoire of pointing and waving gestures, and Mr Harper used the trough to nudge and coax the slab according to these instructions. Matthew devoted all his attention to the placing of the stone. He was building a house. Trees, windows, doorways, statues – these were to be his life’s fixed marks, unchanging and dependable, his points of reference. He had to get it right. Slowly, in line with Matthew’s signals, Mr Harper worked the stone over to its allotted place next to the cedar.

‘That’s it!’ Matthew shouted. ‘Right there!’

The Cat drew back from the stone, tracks clanking. Matthew stood with his hands on his hips, nodding with approval. He looked at the stone, then at the house, the canvas tent, the red and white mast, as if contemplating the distribution of landmarks, registering just what was here and what wasn’t. The vultures kept gliding round and round, birds circling on a child’s mobile.

‘OK?’ Eleanor yelled at Matthew.

‘Yeah,’ he shouted. ‘Looks good.’

We got back into the Mercedes. Eleanor drove across the clearing towards the opening in the cedars, and I looked back over my shoulder at the house, the mast towering above it, Matthew striding towards the Cat, towards Mr Harper. The cab’s door opened as Matthew approached, but cedars blocked my view from the car the instant before a figure emerged.

*

A
FTER SUPPER
, which we ate in the kitchen, sitting on stools at the sideboard, Eleanor filled the larger of the two skillets with water, and set it to boil on the glowing electric hob. She was wearing a pink sweatshirt pinned with a brooch: a gold harp with four short strings. She transferred leftovers to simple china bowls, covered the bowls with tinfoil and put them in the fridge, which was already full of such bowls, the fridge-light shining off their foil skins. She went back to the cooker and stared down at the water, searching it for bubbles.

In the living-room she’d drawn the curtains across the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Brass wall fixtures held lights resembling candles: small, flame-shaped bulbs of opaque white glass. The deep, warm tones of the walnut were comforting. I sat on the mulberry sofa; Eleanor sat in her leather armchair. She rummaged in a cloth bag lying close to her feet and pulled out a piece of unfinished tapestry, wool-ends hanging loose off a square of white gauze. It was to be a cushion cover depicting two rabbits. She put on a pair of glasses with translucent, blue-tinged plastic frames, reached out for the Anglepoise lamp with her right hand, directed its light like a dentist, and set to work.

‘So what I want to know is, where is this all going to end up?’ she asked, not looking up from the tapestry.

‘On Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘Right up in the Canadian Arctic.’

‘Why Baffin Island?’

‘I read that the largest concentrations of geese nest on Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘There’s a train from Winnipeg to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. You can fly over Hudson Bay to Cape Dorset, at the south-west tip of Baffin. From Cape Dorset I’ll try to get out into Foxe Land to see snow geese.’

Foxe Land was named for Captain Luke Foxe, who’d sailed from England in May 1631, hoping to discover the North-West Passage, a navigable sea route round the north coast of North America to Japan, China and India. His ship, the
Charles
, a pinnace of seventy or eighty tons burden, had a crew of twenty men, two boys and a dog. Foxe kept a journal of the voyage, later published as
The North-West Fox
, and I’d relished its descriptions of billows, races, overfalls and flood tides, and mild, calm days when pilot whales fluked and sounded just off the bow in a ‘sea so smooth as if it had been made ready to bowl upon’. Approaching Hudson Strait, the pinnace encountered drifts of floe fragments and freshwater bergs calved off glaciers, and in Hudson Bay Foxe saw white beluga whales, polar bears swimming from floe piece to floe piece, dramatic auroral displays, and a sea unicorn or narwhal, ‘his side dappled purely with white and black; his belly all milk-white; his shape, from his gills to his tail, fully like a mackerel; his head like to a lobster, whereout the forepart grew forth his twined horn, above six foot long, all black save the tip’. The
Charles
sailed round the south-west tip of Baffin before returning to England, and Foxe named Cape Dorset in honour of his sponsor, Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset.

On 26 August 1631, he saw geese flying south over Hudson Bay: ‘A N.N.W. wind,’ he wrote, ‘hath conveyed away abundance of wild geese by us; they breed here towards the N. in those wildernesses. There are infinite numbers, and, when their young be fledged, they fly southwards to winter in a warmer country.’ Auroras, narwhals, wildernesses, infinite numbers: my restlessness, my appetite for snow geese, grew stronger line by line. In May 1929, almost 300 years after Foxe’s voyage, the Canadian ornithologist John Dewey Soper set out from Cape Dorset to search for the breeding grounds of the snow goose. With two Inuit assistants, Kavivow and Ashoona, Soper established a camp just north of Bowman Bay, and during the first half of June he watched waves of geese pass overhead, obeying their ‘furious northern urge’. On 26 June the three men found their first nests. ‘The long quest,’ Soper wrote, ‘had ended.’

‘In about three months’ time, I hope I’ll be in Foxe Land,’ I told Eleanor, who had been switching her attention between tapestry and visitor with impressive, quiet acuity.

‘Well, good luck to you,’ she said. She smiled; her crow’s feet deepened.

*

S
TREETLIGHT FILTERED
through the blinds into the small wood-walled guest room, picking out the lines of the birdcage on the chest-of-drawers, the curving fretwork culminating at the zenith ring. I tended to wake up early. In the months I’d spent at home, waiting for my strength to return, I’d wake when it was still dark and lie in the small bed, across the sag in the unsprung horsehair mattress, interrogating the chain of events, imagining the life I was missing, fearing further setbacks, my mind grinding its teeth. That room’s curtains had not changed since childhood: they were blue, with parallel bands of giraffes, lions, elephants and apes in browns and dark greys marching from left to right, as if to arks. When you drew the curtains back the animals huddled together in the enclaves of the pleats and folds, and the fact that they were there, and just as I remembered them to be – the fact that
now
was agreeing with
then
– was itself reassuring: a conduit to less equivocal days, a mark of steadiness in the chaos of illness and its treatments. Light gathered in the bands of animals and the intervening blocks of blue, and slowly the shape of Everest emerged, with the biplane hanging like a toy far below the level of the summit. The curtains, the picture, a simple chair with my father’s jacket draped on its shoulders – these objects filled particular vacancies as if designed for them.

Impossible, on such mornings, to imagine that one day I would be in Austin, Texas, on my way towards the Canadian Arctic in the company of a bunch of birds. My early waking at that time may have been a sign of depression, but it persisted as a habit even after the crisis had passed and the strength of my anxieties had waned. So I woke up early in Eleanor’s house, in the room that had been Matthew’s room, and there it was, the birdcage standing on the chest-of-drawers, birdless, gilded even in the half-light, its lines concluding as if in a knot at the zenith of the dome, my glance alighting as no bird could on the dowel rod that threaded the cage, and then on the drawing of the cowboy pitched in the air, his hand on the reins and his feet in the stirrups his only points of connection to the bucking horse.

I hadn’t intended to stay more than a night. But Eleanor encouraged me to settle in, to make myself at home. She taught me some of the house’s quirks – the special expertise required for shutting off a tap; the chest where blankets were kept, pulled two inches out from the wall so the lid’s back edge didn’t scrape on the panelling when you opened it – and I learned others for myself, like the way the puck spun off the wind-chimes, the noise the slatted doors made as they swung to a shut in gradually shorter arcs behind you. I sat at the glass-topped table on the balcony, reading and writing, learning about birds, at ease, finding my feet in America. Several days passed before descriptions of Zugunruhe reminded me of my purpose, and restlessness took hold again. I hadn’t come to settle in. Spring was under way, we were well into March, snow geese were pressing towards Winnipeg. I had to get going.