The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  I hoped that within two or three weeks I would be back at work, but there were complications. I went back to hospital for another ten days, and then my mother and father picked me up again and drove me home. I slept in the little room. I could smell my father’s clothes. The bed was tiny: a child’s bed. I slept on the diagonal, corner to corner, across the sag in the unsprung horsehair mattress, and when I woke up the first thing I saw was my great-grandmother’s watercolour of Mount Everest, with a biplane flying towards the mountain, the word EVEREST embossed in black capitals on the cardboard mount. The picture hung above a table I’d always loved – it had a secret compartment, one flap hingeing where you least expected, with a knack to tricking the latch and always the same things inside: an old bible; pairs of cufflinks in a tissue nest; a clothes brush shaped like a cricket bat, the handle wound with waxy black twine.

  There were further complications: hospital for the third time in as many months, a second operation. And then the need for serious convalescence – a few months, probably, for rest, for things to settle down, for my strength to come back. I gave up hope of meeting the university’s requirements that year, and did not wish to be anywhere but home. My parents had moved into this house a few months before I was born: it had been the hub of my life, the fixed point. And now that everything had turned chaotic, turbulent and fearsome, now that I had felt the ground shifting beneath my feet and could no longer trust my own body to carry me blithely from one day to the next, there was at least this solace of the familiar. The house was my refuge, my safe place. The illness and its treatments were strange and unpredictable; home was everything I knew and understood.

  A medieval ironstone house in the middle of England, miles from the nearest town. The stone was crumbling in places, blotched with lichens and amenable to different lights, ready with ferrous browns, ash greys and sunlit orange-yellows, with paler stone mullions in the windows, and a stone slate roof that dipped and swelled like a strip of water from gable to gable. A wood of chestnuts, sycamores and limes stood a stone’s throw to the east, with a brook, the Sor Brook, running through the trees to a waterfall – a drop of nine or ten feet, with a sluice beside it, my handprints preserved in the concrete patch of a repair. Rooks had colonized the chestnuts, sycamores and limes, and when the trees were bare you could see the thatch bowls of their nests lodged in the forks, and black rook shapes perched in the heights, crowing like bassoons. The tall broach spire of a church poked the sky to the north, farmland drew away in a gentle upward grade to the south and west, and every one of these aspects – the wood, the farmland, the shape of the spire, the sounds of the rooks and brook – was a source of comfort to me. These things had not changed for as long as I could remember, and this steadfastness implied that the world could be relied upon.

  I waited for my condition to improve. I wasn’t patient. The edge of my fear rubbed off as the weeks passed, but I became depressed. In hospital I had longed to return to the environment I knew better than any other, because it was something of which I could be sure; because the familiar – the known – promised sanctuary from all that was confusing, alien and new. But after a while the complexion of the familiar began to change. The house, and the past it contained, seemed more prison than sanctuary. As I saw it, my friends were proceeding with their lives, their appetites and energies undimmed, while I was being held back against my will, penalized for an offence of which I was entirely ignorant. My initial relief that the crisis had passed turned slowly to anger, and my frustrations were mollified but not resolved by the kindness of those close to me, because no one, however loving, could give me the one thing I wanted above all else: my former self.

  Leaves hid the nests in the tree crowns. Swallows returned in April, followed by swifts in May. After supper we’d sit out at the back of the house, watching swifts wheel overhead on their vespers flights, screaming parties racing in the half-light. Rooks flew in feeding sorties from the wood to the fields. You could hear the Sor Brook coursing over the waterfall in the trees, the sibilance of congregations saying trespasses, trespasses, forgive us our trespasses. But the sound was no longer a source of comfort. I couldn’t relax into the necessity for this confinement. I felt the loss not just of my strength but of my capacity for joy. I tried to concentrate on the swifts, to pin my attention to something other than my own anxieties. I knew that generation after generation returned to the same favoured nesting sites, and that these were most likely the same birds we had watched the year before, descendants of swifts that had nested in the eaves of the house when my mother and father first moved to it; descendants, too, of swifts my father had watched as a boy, visiting his grandparents in the same house.

  My mother suggested a change of scene, and we drove to a hotel close to the Welsh border. We had no idea it would be the venue for a ladies’ professional golf tournament. Each morning, before breakfast, I walked down to the practice tees to watch the women loosen up their swings. I found The Snow Goose and read it straight through, remembering Mr Faulkner, the room’s high windows, the grooved desks. I was suspicious of the story’s sentimentality, its glaze of religious allegory, the easy portentousness of its abstract nouns, and I laughed at Gallico’s attempts to render phonetically (as if they were birdsong) the East End speech of the soldiers in the pub and the upper-class diction of the officers. But something in the story haunted me.

  *

  MY FATHER LOVED BIRDS. A birdfeeder hung from a bracket at the back of the house: a long, thin tube of green wire mesh, chockfull with premium Hsuji peanuts. You could see the feeder through the French windows that opened on to the small paved terrace, and if you sat still you could watch coal tits, great tits, blue tits and sometimes nuthatches ransacking the store of red-husked nuts, the nuthatches easily picked out by their blue-grey backs and the way they clung (upside-down, tails-up) to the green mesh. I’d never paid them much attention as a child. A wren’s habit of cocking its tail wasn’t nearly as alluring as sport or pop music or television. I didn’t want to listen when my father pointed out wagtails speedwalking across the lawn, chaffinches perched on the roof-angle, or the way a green woodpecker flew in bounds, folding its wings and losing height between bouts of flapping, so that you saw an undulation like someone stitching a hem and could say the name of the bird before you’d even made out the colour of its plumage.

  But when we came back from the hotel, I wanted to learn about birds. I couldn’t shake The Snow Goose from my head. I wandered round the garden, equipped with my father’s Zeiss pocket binoculars and a simple beginner’s field guide, looking for birds, trying to learn their names. Sometimes I’d describe a bird to my father and he’d name it for me: goldfinch, blackcap, yellowhammer. It must have been a surprise for my parents to see me showing these signs of enthusiasm: for months I’d been sullen, despondent, introverted, caught up in my own fears, resentful that my life had been interrupted so violently. In hospital, I’d longed to be at home. But by the end of May I was sick of it, restless, hungry for new experiences, different horizons. When I read Gallico’s descriptions of the flights of geese, I wondered at the mysterious signals that told a bird it was time to move, time to fly.

  I shared it, this urge to go. I was getting stronger. I was strong enough to be curious. It was as if I were trying to redeem my earlier failure to notice, the way I gave my attention, as I never had done as a child, to the swallows, swifts, rooks, wagtails, finches, warblers, thrushes and woodpeckers around the house – my father ready with a name, a habit, a piece of lore. I loved the swifts most of all. I’d never watched them so intently. My father said that after they left the house at the beginning of August many of them wouldn’t land or touch down until they came back to nest the following May: they drank on the wing, fed on the wing, even slept on the wing. I thought of Gallico’s snow goose flying south from the Arctic each autumn, the pink-footed and barnacle geese moving back and forth between Rhayader’s sanctuary and their northern breeding grounds. Why did birds undertake such
journeys? How did they know when to go, or where? How did swifts, year after year, find their way from Malawi to this house, my childhood home?

  I was excited about something for the first time since I’d fallen ill, and I needed a project, a distraction, a means of escape. I carried books about bird migration up to a room at the top of the house, a real cubbyhole, tucked in under the roof, its low ceiling mottled with sooty drifts and rings, as if candles had smoked runes on to the cracked plaster – a room we knew as the eyrie, because it had the high, snug feeling of an eagle’s nest. The pattern of fields I could see through the little two-light window was second nature to me, and I knew what each field was called: Lower Quarters, Danvers Meadow, Morby’s Close, Allowance Ground. Sometimes swifts screamed past the window as I sat in the eyrie, studying ornithology.

  *

  WE ARE TILTED. This was the first thing to understand. The axis of the Earth’s rotation is not perpendicular to the plane of the Earth’s orbit round the sun. It is tilted at about 23.5 degrees. The tilt means that the northern and southern hemispheres are angled towards the sun for part of the year, and away from the sun for another part of the year. We have seasons. Climates turn welcoming and inhospitable in regular sequence. Food supplies dwindle in one place even as they burgeon in another. All creatures must adapt to these cycles if they are to survive. Migration is a way of coping with the tilt.

  Hooded warblers, weighing a third of an ounce, fly more than 600 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, and so do ruby-throated hummingbirds, less than four inches long, their wings beating twenty-five to fifty times a second. Red-footed falcons fly from Siberia and eastern Europe, crossing the Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas on their way to savannahs in south-eastern Africa; demoiselle cranes fly over the Himalayas en route to their Indian winter grounds; short-tailed shearwaters fly from the Bering Sea to breeding colonies off southern Australia, arriving each year within a week of the same date; the chunky, short-legged waders called red knots fly all the way from Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego, an annual round trip of almost 20,000 miles. An Arctic tern, flying from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again, might travel 25,000 miles in a year – a distance roughly equivalent to the circumference of the Earth.

  Six hundred thousand greater snow geese breed on north-eastern Canadian Arctic islands and migrate south each autumn over Quebec and New England to winter quarters along the Atlantic from New Jersey to North Carolina. But these are far outnumbered by the lesser snow goose, Chen caerulescens caerulescens, probably the most abundant goose in the world. The lesser snow occurs in two distinct colour phases. ‘White-phase’ snow geese have white plumage and black wing-tips; ‘blue-phase’ geese have feathers of various browns, greys and silvers mixed in with the whites, giving an overall impression of slaty, metallic blue. Blues and whites pair and breed together; they roost and migrate in mixed flocks. Both have orange-pink bills, narrower than the black bills of Canada geese, with tough, serrated edges for tearing the roots of marshland plants. A conspicuous lozenge-shaped black patch along each side of the bill gives them a grinning or leering expression.

  Six million lesser snows breed right across the Arctic, from Wrangel Island off Siberia in the west, to Hudson Bay, Southampton Island and Baffin Island in the east, and at the end of summer they migrate to wintering grounds in the southern United States and northern Mexico. These are demanding, hazardous journeys of two or three or even four thousand miles, but the advantages of migration outweigh the risks. In the high Arctic latitudes, snow geese find large areas of suitable nesting habitat, relatively few predators, an abundance of food during the short, intense summers, and twenty-four hours of daylight in which to feed. And before the Arctic winter sets in, before their food supplies are frozen or buried deep under snow, they can fly south to exploit the resources and hospitable conditions of their winter grounds.

  As I read, sitting in the eyrie, I kept thinking back to Gallico’s story, Frith arriving at Rhayader’s lighthouse with a wounded goose in her arms, either a greater snow goose or a white-phase lesser snow, knocked from its course by a storm as it flew south in its family group. I sought out photographs of snow geese: the wintry, laundered freshness of white plumage immediately after moult; the dense, lacquer-black eyes that glinted like china beads; the wing bedlam of flocks rising from marshland roosts. I was drawn to these images. I felt shackled, cooped-up. It was as if I’d glimpsed birds through the high, barred window of a cell. Day by day, my restlessness intensified.

  Then my father found an old map and left it on my bed in the dressing-room – a map of the Americas, rumpled and stained, worn through wherever foldlines intersected, with the flights of migrant birds streaking across it from one end of the continent to the other, Cape Horn to the Chukchi Sea. And the first thing to catch my eye was the long curve of watercolour green that represented the flight of midcontinent lesser snows, perhaps 5 million birds, from the Gulf coast of Texas north across the Great Plains towards Winnipeg; over boreal conifer forest and open tundra to Hudson Bay; and then on across the bay towards Southampton Island and a peninsula at the southern tip of Baffin Island called the Foxe Peninsula, or Foxe Land. I traced this route again and again across the map, dreaming of escape. Huge numbers of lesser snows nested in Foxe Land. One area, the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak, was said to support more than a million geese. What would they sound like, a million geese? What would it be like, I wondered, to see those flocks with my own eyes, coming into Foxe Land on the south winds?

  I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with snow geese to the Arctic. The pang of nostalgia, the intense longing to go home I had experienced in hospital, had now been supplanted by an equally intense longing for adventure, for strange horizons. I was as desperate to get away from home as I had been to return to it. I went back to the university at the end of the summer, but my heart was no longer in my work. I kept thinking of snow geese. I had been immersed in everything that was most familiar to me, that reeked most strongly of my past, and I was hungry for the new, for uncharted country. I wanted to celebrate my return from the state of being ill, find some way of putting the experiences of hospital behind me, the fear and shock of those weeks, the sense of imprisonment. I wanted to declare my freedom to move.

  I booked a flight to Houston for the end of February, intending to find snow geese on the Texas prairies and follow them north with the spring.

  *

  THE DAY BEFORE I left for Texas, I took the train home from London. In the afternoon, my father and I went for a walk. A pink kite was snared in the churchyard yew tree; there were clumps of moss like berets on the corners of the headstones. We climbed a gate and strode out across Danvers Meadow, heading westwards, leaning into the slope, last year’s sere beech leaves strewn through the grass. My father was wearing tan corduroy trousers and an old battered green waxed jacket; in one pocket he kept a matching green waxed hat in case of rain. We were walking at a steady pace, talking about the journey ahead of me, the rhythm of the walk going on under the words like a tempo.

  A drystone wall ran along the ridge ahead of us, and we knew exactly what to expect from that vantage: gentle undulating country, a system of quickthorn hedges, stands of trees, fields ploughed or planted or left for grazing, and, beyond Lower Clover Ground, a cattle building with a corrugated roof, the herd’s breath rolling out as vapour over wide steel gates. There were three straw bale ricks next to the building, with ladders and broken wood pallets propped against them, and further down the valley, beside the Sor Brook, stood a farmhouse with smoke rising from a brick chimney, a clutch of chicken sheds, a bunting of pink and white towels strung on a clothes line. This prospect was as familiar as our faces, as inevitable and apt, with spinneys, hedges, fields, slopes and the two buildings in their allotted places, each thing distinguished by a name: Hazelford, Buck Park and Jester’s Hill; Frederick’s Plantation, Stafford Wood and Miller’s Osiers; the Brake, the Shoulder of Mutton, the Great Ground.

  We clim
bed a stile and walked on down towards the cattle building, the backs of my large black gumboots flopping against my calves. The drone of a twin-prop plane made us look up: a few cumulus clouds, purple-grey underneath, topsides gleaming like schooner sails; the furrowed white streamer of a contrail; the bounding flight of small birds. We heard the clang and judder of cattle on the steel gates, the herd breathing like organ bellows. A triangular sign said Use Crawling Boards on this Roof, and on the far side of the building there were grey feed troughs and wire fencing rolls, an open flatbed trailer, an old matt red Massey Ferguson combine and a heap of distressed farm machinery: ploughshares, harrows, iron scuffles, rusting discs and tines. Beyond the building the ground fell away to our left, down to the Sor Brook and the cricket-bat willows planted alongside it, their leaves a flashy bluish-green in summer. The brook ran past the farmhouse: a former mill, a tall, narrow building with white-framed windows under black timber lintels.