Waiting for Unicorns

by Beth Hautala

  “All is well on the ice,” Dad would say. “No fish, but I’m not starving yet,” which meant that he still hadn’t seen any whales, but that he wasn’t giving up.

  “All is well on land, too,” I’d tell him. “No bears and the natives are friendly,” which meant that I was safe and that Sura and I were doing okay.

  “See you soon,” Dad would finish, and we would say good-bye until our next scheduled call-in.

  “Copy,” I’d reply. “Over and out.”

  “Over and out,” he’d respond.

  And then the radio would go silent again.

  ONE AFTERNOON WHEN THE SUN felt a little warmer than we were used to, the Birdman, Simon, and I packed a lunch and went looking for birds. It was weird, going to look for them when they were all around us. But apparently, big things would start happening in the bird world as the weather shifted toward spring.

  “We are not looking for everyday, ordinary birds,” the Birdman said. “We are looking for something else.” The Birdman was pretty energetic for an old man, and sometimes his birding treks across Churchill got kind of intense. “We are looking for something that must be sought.” And he swept his arms up and around, taking in all of Churchill and Hudson Bay.

  “Sought?” I asked, wondering what, exactly, would be required.

  “Sought,” he repeated. “Do you think wonderful things will simply fall into your lap without the slightest effort on your part?”

  I blinked at him. I’d never really thought about that before.

  The Birdman wagged a teasing finger at me. “You of all people should know better, Talia Lea McQuinn,” he said.

  “I should?”

  “You should,” he insisted. “All good things always require a little effort.”

  I was beginning to turn this thought over in my mind when the Birdman turned to Simon. “We will have to keep our eyes open and our lips still.”

  Simon’s lips were never still, and I laughed as he broke into spontaneous song—a made-up tune about people who talk too much and people who don’t talk enough.

  For the most part, though, we kept our mouths quiet and saw a number of birds that afternoon. None of them were all that unusual to the Birdman—he had a pretty exhaustive list. But for me, they were all rare and wonderful.

  I wanted to learn to identify them, so the Birdman had given me his little pocket field guide to Canadian birds, and I pored over it, trying to memorize the names of the birds I’d never seen. Verdins and nuthatches, plovers and turnstones, gulls, ravens, and all kinds of birds of prey. There were photos and descriptions of songbirds, too—warblers, swifts, sparrows, larks—and other insect-eating birds. But none of those had arrived in Churchill yet. Things hadn’t thawed out enough to hatch their breakfast, lunch, and dinner—mosquitoes, blackflies, and other pesky bugs. But they’d be on their way before long. Or so the Birdman said. Even though it had warmed up a bit, I had a hard time believing spring was only a few weeks away, considering how wintery everything still looked.

  “Just wait,” the Birdman said. “One morning you’ll wake up and realize exactly how quiet it’s been. There’ll be songbirds everywhere, and you’ll suddenly discover you’ve missed their song.”

  I figured he was right. He’d been coming to Churchill long enough, so I started listening for them—for those birds whose names I was just learning. And even though it was the first time I’d ever missed them, their absence suddenly felt loud.

  Just before we stopped for lunch that afternoon, the Birdman led us out toward the end of a rocky peninsula jutting into the bay. The ice was beginning to recede from its edges, and I followed the Birdman’s finger as he pointed out the shape of a massive bird in flight. Settled on a driftwood log bleached white by the sun and smooth as bone was an eagle majestically folding up his impressive wingspan. He studied us imperviously from where he rested on the tip of the peninsula.

  The bald eagle was one of the few birds I could identify without Simon or the Birdman’s help. I’d seen them a few times before, and they never failed to make me catch my breath. They seemed to carry themselves differently than other birds, like royalty, even though they were scavengers.

  “All right, you two,” the Birdman said to Simon and me. “Tell me what you know about your national bird.”

  I laughed, because though we were in Canada, there was still a bit of national pride invoked by the Birdman’s request, and Simon and I were happy to prove our allegiance.

  “Well, it’s a bird of prey, but it rarely kills its own food like hawks or owls do,” Simon began. “Except for fish—it kills a lot of those. Mostly, it just eats whatever it can find.”

  “And it typically lives near large bodies of water and forests of old growth, because it likes to nest in tall trees,” I said, scanning the snowy shoreline behind me. This far north the trees didn’t get very big because of the poor climate conditions.

  The Birdman nodded and followed my gaze.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But if large old trees are unavailable, the eagle will nest on the ground. They’re resourceful birds,” he said.

  “Oh, and they usually return to the same nest every year,” I added, proud of what information I remembered from school.

  “In 1782, the United States Seal was designed with the bald eagle on it,” Simon said. “It has thirteen arrows in one talon and a thirteen-leafed olive branch in the other—for times of peace and times of war. Thirteen on account of the thirteen original colonies,” he finished.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Simon grinned and shrugged. “I like history.”

  “You like history?” I asked. “No one likes history.”

  Simon just laughed.

  The Birdman handed me his binoculars and I peered through them, loving their magic. As I looked at the world through them, space opened up on itself, compressing everything around me. Where only a blur of feathers or a flash of color was visible before, the flicker of the eagle’s opaque eyelid and the individual shafts of his wingtip feathers came into view—close and immediate. How nice it would be to see like that all the time—never missing the most important things, however tiny or far away. I shifted the binoculars away from the eagle and worked my way down the shoreline. But everything was empty and still. As far as I could tell, the eagle was alone.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” I said suddenly, lowering the binoculars and returning them to the Birdman. “They mate for life.”

  The magnificent bird stretched his wings and stood on tiptoe for a minute, like he was assessing the wind, and then he lurched into the air. Simon and the Birdman watched him leave, but I scanned the sky and the shoreline for something else, wondering if his mate was out there somewhere. Wondering if he was going to her.

  After we had done enough seeking to satisfy the Birdman, we ate the lunch Sura had packed for us: caribou jerky, fried touton, and a couple of apples with cheese. Then we washed it all down with water from our canteens.

  I had watched Sura make touton one afternoon, perched on the counter as she deftly blended flour, baking powder, salt, bear fat, and water, using her hands to shape and knead the mixture into a smooth dough. The bear fat part made me nervous, but really, it was pretty much just like the fat my mom drained off bacon from those Saturday morning breakfasts we used to have together. Smelled the same, too. And with some sugar sprinkled on top, I might as well have been eating a doughnut from the corner bakery back in Woods Hole. I was getting brave about trying new things. Well, at least a little bit. It helped that Sura was sort of easing me into it.

  After lunch, the three of us continued on, taking the back roads on the edge of town, wandering into the scrub now and then, though never very far because of the possibility of bears, and the Birdman refused to carry a gun.

  Before long my boots were caked in icy mud from the road and peat moss from the scr
ub, and Simon was pulling lichen and twigs from my hair. I felt like a walking collection of arctic habitat.

  “You look like you grew here,” Simon said. “Like you belong here.” He carefully untangled a bit of black spruce from my hair. His words hung in the air for a minute like a bird in flight. And then I let them land on me and sink in.

  “Thanks,” I said. And I ducked my head, hurrying after the Birdman before Simon had a chance to say any other nice things to me.

  We made our way back toward the bay, which was still frozen over, but the sun had started warming the shallow waters, especially where the Churchill River emptied into the bay. Ice was gradually receding from shore and there was a good twenty yards of open water around the edge now. Even though it was early, we searched for shorebirds and waders with their long beaks and stilt-like legs. But our efforts went unrewarded; it was still too cold. Instead I listened as the Birdman described them, imitating their calls as he showed me their pictures in the field guide.

  “In a few weeks’ time sandpipers, plovers, and stints will scour this shoreline for food,” he said. And my imagination was filled with flurries of wings and peeping cries that would ring out among the rocks and ripples.

  We headed home after that, but before we got very far the Birdman suddenly stopped and pointed to the sky where a small white bird hovered, beating the air with his wings the way a hummingbird does. It looked almost as if there were an invisible string suspending him over the ring of open water around the shore.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s an arctic tern,” said the Birdman. “And he’s early. That, my dear, is the bravest, most determined little bird to rise over icy waters.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because he’s so early?”

  The Birdman nodded. “He’s unusually early.”

  The bird hung against the blue spring sky, so white he looked more like the absence of blue in the shape of a bird. Only a small cap of dark plumage gave him away, low over his face, making him look like a tiny aviation pilot, his hat resting low on the bridge of his nose.

  “He’s brave because of the distance he covers,” the Birdman continued. “The arctic tern makes a round-trip flight of about forty-four thousand miles every year. He flies from the Arctic pole to the Antarctic pole, and then back again, every year. It’s the longest migratory distance of any bird on the planet. In his lifetime that little bird will make the equivalent of three round-trips to the moon!”

  “Really? That’s crazy!” Simon glanced up at the sky like he could somehow eyeball the distance across the blue cloudless span. It was hard to imagine one little bird covering that much ground. It made the distance I’d traveled from Woods Hole to Churchill seem like hardly anything at all.

  Later that night, I dug out the coordinate ruler I used to plot Dad’s route over the ice, and I measured the miles between Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Churchill, Manitoba. I drew a straight line across the map—the way the tern flies—adding it to the dot-to-dot picture slowly forming across the grid. Marking out the miles, I divided the distance the tern flew by the number of miles between Woods Hole and Churchill and came up with just over twenty-eight.

  That little aviator bird flew the same distance between Woods Hole and Churchill twenty-eight times every year. I let out a low whistle. I’d only made the trip once, and that was more than enough for me. Compared to that little bird, I wasn’t very brave.

  I returned my ruler and pencil to their places in the desk drawer, then stood back and studied the map on the wall, trying to make a picture or a shape out of my dots and lines. But all I could see were two separate routes, and they wouldn’t intersect until Dad came back for me.

  THERE WERE TWENTY-FIVE paper loops left on my chain the afternoon the Birdman took Simon and me over to the CNSC. It was just over fourteen miles out of town, so we drove there in the Birdman’s ancient Land Rover.

  I told Simon I’d show him where my dad worked, though it would have been better if Dad were here so he could show him some of the stuff he was working on himself. Even then it wouldn’t be half as interesting as Miss Piggy. But Simon wanted to go. I invited Sura to come along because it seemed like the right thing to do. But she shook her head, saying something about there not being enough room in the Birdman’s truck, and the ride being a bit too bumpy.

  The CNSC is a research facility for scientists, sort of like a small university right on the edge of the Arctic. Dad had been coming here for a while, so he was pretty good friends with a lot of the people who worked here year-round. The Birdman, too, had done some work at the CNSC—on birds of course—so he already knew his way around.

  “Why don’t you two go on in,” he said as we pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll come find you in a bit. And stay out of trouble.” He pointed at Simon as we got out. Simon placed one hand over his heart in mock disbelief, and I laughed.

  The research center had enough room for more than eighty people to come and stay, plus labs, office space, classrooms, a kitchen, laundry room, and dining hall. I gave Simon a quick tour before we wandered down to my dad’s office.

  I unlocked the door with the key Dad had given me before he left and flipped on the lights. It was strange. It looked like Dad had just stepped out for a minute. Papers and manila filing folders were piled everywhere, several crates of research equipment he hadn’t needed were stacked in one corner, and various maps were pinned to all four walls, starred and dated where whales had been located in previous years. The place was a mess. Dad called it organized chaos, and he knew right where everything was, so I didn’t dare touch anything for fear of misplacing something important.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is where you can almost always find my dad when he’s not out on the ice.” I gave the room a little one-handed sweep, wanting to apologize for the mess, but Simon didn’t seem to care.

  “This is really cool!” he said, eyeing the crates of equipment. “My dad is a financial adviser for the military. I bet this is a lot more interesting! Where is he right now, your dad? Do you know?”

  Simon stood in front of one of the maps on the wall.

  “Hudson Strait, sixty-one degrees, thirty-two minutes north, and seventy-one degrees, forty-one minutes west,” I said, tapping the spot on the map with my finger.

  “What?” He looked at me like I’d just said something in a different language.

  “Those are the coordinates,” I said. “I chart Dad’s location on a map I have at home every time he calls in. That’s where he was the last time we talked. It helps me keep track of where he’s at and where he’s been. It’s sort of nice to know, ya know?”

  “But how do you know how to do that? To chart coordinates?”

  “Dad taught me,” I said, smiling. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  I opened a cupboard door, revealing even more stacks of papers, boxes of notes, and a number of cardboard tubes. I grabbed one, uncapped it, and pulled out a map, unrolling it across the floor.

  “See these?” I asked Simon. Thin lines ran at regular intervals from north to south on the right side of the map and from east to west along the bottom edge. “These are the meridian lines,” I told him, tracing a line from top to bottom. “And these are the parallel lines.” I ran my finger left to right. “They always stay the same even when maps are drawn in different sizes.”

  Simon nodded.

  “So, picture a globe in your mind,” I said. “Where’s the equatorial line?”

  “Right in the middle,” Simon said easily.

  “Good.” I held up a ruler. “When plotting a location you always measure in minutes and seconds,” I said. “That’s what this ruler is marked with, rather than inches and centimeters.”

  Simon’s face was a mixture of confusion and surprise. “Why would you measure distance in increments of time?”

  “On a map, time and space are the same thing,”
I said. “We’re just only used to thinking about time on the face of a clock. But if you think about time across the globe, you’re actually covering a certain amount of distance every second. Time is just how fast the earth spins.”

  “All right,” he said. But the puzzled look on his face gave him away.

  “It’s like this,” I said, trying to explain it to Simon as Dad had explained it to me. “A sphere is three hundred sixty degrees around, right?”

  Simon nodded.

  “And there are three hundred sixty meridian lines on a map,” I continued. “So, if you divide the total degrees of a globe into equal slices, you get one degree of space for each slice. Make sense?”

  “Kind of,” Simon said, but his furrowed brow didn’t relax.

  “Stay with me,” I said. “Each one of those three hundred sixty single-degree slices is the same as sixty nautical miles, and also sixty minutes of arc—or how round that distance is.”

  I showed him what I meant, curving my hands around an imaginary globe. “So, that’s how you get measurements in distance, hours, minutes, and seconds. Each single-degree slice is sixty minutes wide. And there are sixty seconds in every minute. You just break down the measurements from there.”

  “Hmm,” Simon said, running his hand through his hair until it stuck up off just one side.

  “It’s sort of like a card game,” I said. “It makes more sense once you actually do it.”

  I handed Simon the ruler. The map we had spread out on the floor in front of us charted the Hudson Bay area, up into the Baffin inlets, and east toward Victoria Island. I pointed to the bottom edge of the map. “Churchill lies fifty-eight degrees, forty-six minutes, and nine seconds north of the equator,” I said, “and ninety-four degrees, ten minutes, and nine seconds west of the prime meridian.” I pressed my finger to the dot that marked Churchill on the map. “Here.” I handed Simon the ruler. “Measure it and see if I got it right,” I said.