The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  We passed the farmhouse, keeping to the high ground, with the Sor Brook meandering below us on our left side, and then we turned down the slope to the brook and walked back against the current through Keeper’s Meadow and Little Quarters, the ground here disrupted by the red-brown earthworks of moles. Month-old lambs, and ewes with daubs of red paint on their haunches, grazed close to the quickthorn hedge; wool tufts were snagged on the quickthorn. There was a constant background chirrup and twitter, and at intervals the boom, quite far off, of a bird cannon. We walked side by side, opening gates and latching them shut, getting closer and closer to home. The spire came into view, the weathercock’s tailplumes glinting in the low sun, and then the white stone chimneys of the house: our points of reference. There was no part of the world I knew so well, or loved so deeply. We walked up to the house, gravel crunching underfoot, taking our coats off as we approached the front door, the rooks garrulous in their high perches. I trod on the heels of the gumboots to get my feet out, and my father put one hand out against the wall to steady himself while he unlaced his boots.

  Later, with the heavy red curtains drawn across the French windows, we leaned forward over my map of the Americas, following the flight of snow geese from Texas to Foxe Land. The mantel clock ticked; the fire snapped and puttered like a flag.

  *

  I FLEW TO HOUSTON, rented a metallic blue Chevrolet Cavalier and drove west towards Eagle Lake. It was exhilarating, just the thought that I should be in Texas, on my way to find snow geese, under my own steam, out in the world, in the new. And it was the new: coarse scrub prairie and fields ploughed for rice and sorghum running flat in all directions; windmills, cylindrical rice bins and galvanized farm sheds; pumping jacks going like metronomes in the blue half-light; and the silhouettes of mesquite trees like ancient Greek letters propped up on the narrow levees. I was already looking for geese: excitement – threshold alertness – warded off jetlag, and my eyes, like two small birds, flitted from place to place.

  It was dark when I pulled up at the Sportsman’s Motel, a single-storey, L-shaped building on the edge of Eagle Lake, pickups berthed at the room doors and a stuffed goose keeping vigil over the reception desk, wings akimbo. I hardly slept, my mind firing all night with anticipation, self-reliance, the prospect of Foxe Land.

  A lady at the Chamber of Commerce had suggested I talk to Ken about snow geese. I called him from the motel that first morning.

  ‘I’ll meet you for lunch at the Sportsman’s Restaurant,’ he said. ‘That’s right across the lot from where you are. You can’t miss it.’

  Eagle Lake was a small prairie town with streets shaded by live oaks and magnolias, and white clapboard houses sitting in their plots like palaces in broad demesnes, boasting porches, decks, stoops, swingseats and awnings. American flags hung limply from peeling white poles. Red-winged blackbirds perched on the telegraph wires like notes on music staves. A railroad, the Southern Pacific, bisected the place, and every so often bells would ring out at all the level crossings, their clangour soon obliterated by the thunder of yellow locomotives and gravel-heaped gondolas plying the line from San Francisco to New Orleans, sending tremors rippling out under the buildings into the prairies.

  I was the only person out walking. Hunters drove past me in pickup trucks, here to shoot ring-necked pheasants, sandhill cranes, chukars, mourning doves, scaled quail, white-tailed deer and the wild boar called javelinas, but especially the ducks and geese that wintered in their thousands on surrounding prairies. Waterfowl were spoilt for roosting ponds as well as rice and corn stubble in which to feed. The hunters, too, found everything they needed in Eagle Lake: Johnny’s Sports Shop for camouflage gear, hunting knives, electronic bird calls, high velocity steel and premium tungsten Tumble ’em with Tungsten! shells, and Benelli, Browning, Remington, Winchester and Lakefield shotguns and rifles; guide services like Davis Waddell’s Prairie Waterfowl Hunts or Lonnie Labay’s Double ‘L’ Hunting Club; foul-smelling taxidermy studios to mount their canvasback, bufflehead or white-phase snow goose on a piece of Texas cedar driftwood and thereby make a trophy of it; and the Sportsman’s Restaurant, across the lot from the motel, across Boothe Drive from the Dairy Queen, to serve as their canteen, rendezvous and home-from-home.

  Inside, the Sportsman’s walls were hung with colour prints depicting hunting scenes: men setting decoys at dawn, sallies of startled ducks, the lope and fealty of labradors. Stuffed fowl took wing from driftwood mounts; miniature models of flying ducks dangled on fine chains from the hubs of ceiling fans: waitresses reached up and tugged on ducks to set the wooden blades turning. An angel, made of stained glass, hovered in one corner of the restaurant, the feathers in her wings suggested by intricate lead seams between almond-shaped pieces of smoky white glass. She wore a yellow dress sashed with a bolt of red cloth, and she carried a lamb.

  The hunters wolfed down chicken fried steaks or chewed cuds of Red Man, Beech-Nut, Levi Garrett or Jackson’s Apple Jack chewing tobacco, all kitted out in camouflage dungarees, shirts, jackets and caps, and necklaces of aluminium bands – identification bands removed from the shins of shot geese and strung on leather thongs. The foliage in their camouflage might be a crowded branching lit by little silver-grey leaves, or a pattern of palmate leaves like those of a maple or plane tossed in with the lobed leaves of oaks, or a design of fronds and the long, blade-shaped leaves of reeds and rushes, and sometimes men wearing these three distinct habitats sat together at the same table as if to illustrate the world’s variety of bush and cover. The linoleum floor tiles were blotched with camouflage olive and khaki, and so were the tabletops, which meant that the hunters’ arms disappeared when they reached for the salt cellar or sugar jar, the patterns and colours of their sleeves getting lost in those of the tables.

  In flat-toned, drawling voices they exchanged stories of endurance and derring-do.

  ‘I was hunting one time in Colorado. Three days we rode up and down those slickass mountains, looking for elk. Didn’t see squiddly. Driving home, killed a deer with the truck. Caught it square on the fender. Knocked it dead.’

  ‘Least you got something.’

  ‘I used to deep-sea fish whenever I was able. I never got sick. I got queasy once, but I never got sick.’

  ‘Oh, I got sick. I got real sick.’

  ‘Only time I got sick was fishing with my doctor. I had to look at him eating pickles. That made me nauseous, looking at the guy eating pickles. Doctor gave me some tablets. Said, “Here, take these.” So I took the tablets and – boom – slept for six hours, right there on the deck of the boat, face upward. You know how hot the sun gets on the Gulf? When I woke up I was chargrilled. Blistered like a fish. You’ve never seen blisters like these. Oh boy!’

  ‘One time I took these guys ice-fishing in Iowa. Three mafia bosses. Sunglasses, camel-hair overcoats, cigars. Drove out in a black limousine with smoked windows and a chauffeur. Chauffeur drove this limousine right over the lake, pulled up where I’d drilled through with the auger. Bosses had him wait there in the limousine while they jigged for bluegill!’

  Ken saw me standing at the door, scanning the tables, and beckoned me to come over and join him. He was sitting alone, wearing a camouflage jacket and a baseball cap that declared his allegiance to the Dallas Cowboys – a short, compact man of about forty, stroking his ginger goatee beard between thumb and forefinger as though thinking deeply on some chain of cause and effect. His contact lenses were tinted electric sapphire blue; his pupils were set like peppercorns in rings of blue; these strange eyes glowed with significant candlepower. A stuffed white-phase snow goose was mounted on the wall behind him, wings spread wide. The black tips to the wings weren’t decorative: the concentration of melanin pigments – the pigments responsible for dark colouring – strengthens the primary flight feathers, making them more resilient, an adaptation often seen in birds that undertake long migrations.

  ‘Glad to see you,’ Ken said. ‘Take a load off and have a seat.’

&n
bsp; He had a small rice farm attached to his grandfather’s ranch; as a sideline he acted as a guide for hunters. We ordered lunch and talked about snow geese. The numbers of lesser snows had been causing concern, Ken said. The population was growing beyond all predictions. Two thousand pairs nested at the Cape Henrietta Maria colony in 1960; 225,000 pairs nested there in 1998. A hundred years ago, lesser snow geese wintering in Texas and Louisiana kept to coastal marshes between the Mississippi Delta and Corpus Christi, Texas, feeding on the roots and rhizomes of rushes and marsh grasses. But with the agricultural development of the Gulf and Great Plains states, large numbers of geese had begun to winter further north on inland prairie habitats, incorporating waste rice, corn and barley grains into their diet. The geese were now finding an almost unlimited supply of food between Winnipeg and the Gulf of Mexico. This abundance, together with the establishment of wildlife refuges where geese were safe from hunters, had resulted in a population explosion, with so many snow geese reaching Arctic breeding grounds that tundra habitats were being stripped bare, the vegetation unable to recover from year to year. Along 1,200 miles of coastline surrounding Hudson Bay and James Bay, scientists estimated that more than a third of the original tundra habitat had been destroyed, with another third seriously damaged.

  ‘We call them wavies, these snow geese,’ said Ken, adjusting his cap, ‘because, when they fly, they kind of wave up and down. I expect those birds in October, maybe November. They find a pond to roost on, a few thousand to a roost, and take off at sun-up for breakfast, you can set your clock by it. They leave the roost for the fields to have themselves a feed, and during the middle of the day they dawdle and rest up, and in the afternoon they get busy again, and then they go back to the roost at sundown. It’s like clockwork. In and out. So if you’re hunting geese, you’ll get out there when it’s dark in the morning, put out decoys and wait for them to fly over. You can call those birds in with a voice call or an electronic call, whichever you prefer. And normally they’ll be off again at the beginning of March, but this year a lot of geese have gone already because it’s so warm, we’ve got an early spring. We’ve got a few geese left on the land but those birds are laggards; those birds, shall we say, are bringing up the rear.’

  Ken suggested I meet him again at the Sportsman’s later that afternoon. He said I could follow him out to the farm. He’d show me the roosting pond; I could wait for sunset and watch the birds fly in. I was impatient for my first sight of snow geese.

  We met at five o’clock. Ken was stroking his beard between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘You ready to see some birds?’ he asked.

  His tan Dodge pickup had dents and blemishes all over its body, like a rally car. Driving the blue Cavalier, I followed the Dodge out of the Sportsman’s parking lot on to Boothe Drive. We drove slowly out of Eagle Lake, into the prairie, the sky arching from horizon to horizon, a vast inverted bowl of glass, clear blue but for two parallel bars of feathery cirrus. We turned off the blacktop on to a dirt farm track, dust billowing from the pickup’s back wheels. I kept looking to left and right, eager to see snow geese. The only vertical accents were the telegraph poles, rice bins and radio masts. The square fields were ploughed or left as pasture. The tracks made a grid between the fields and we worked our way along them in knight’s moves until we came to a small two-storey house, a box set down in the middle of the prairie, with a staircase running up the outside to a door on the upper floor. We parked our cars at the foot of the stairway.

  ‘My grandfather built this house for himself,’ Ken said. ‘It’s like a retirement place. He builds a house, and then he decides he wants to live by a lake. So he builds a lake right next to it. Raised dykes, pumped water into it, stocked it with bass for fishing – an actual lake, above ground level, right on top of the prairie. Come inside.’

  We walked up the stairway. Inside the front door was a welcome mat that said, Wow! Nice underwear! Coats hung from a rack of antlers. The living-room had an open-plan kitchenette at the back, and sliding glass doors that opened on to a wood deck with a view of the raised lake and surrounding rice fields, one of which had been flooded to make a roost for geese. The water was only a foot or two deep: a few ducks were floating on it; waders picked their way along the muddy edges. Ken slid back the glass doors and we walked out on to the deck. The sun was low; the air was cooling quickly. Inky Black Angus cattle were lounging in scrub grazing fields and shambling along levees. Ken’s electric blue eyes glowed more intensely in the dusk light. There was no wind to spin the tricolour slats of the windmills.

  Jack, Ken’s grandfather, had tailored the house to his exact specifications. He wanted a deck because he liked to sit and watch geese and ducks fly in to their roost at sunset. A boardwalk ran from the deck to the edge of the lake, with a wooden raft floating on pontoons at the end of it, furnished with chairs for fishermen. The house was dedicated to birds. Door handles were moulded and carved to resemble herons’ beaks; a miniature ceramic Canada goose glided on a knot at the bottom of the bathroom light-pull; and all over the walls were prints and watercolours of waterfowl and hunting scenes, along with photographs of hunters tricked out like militiamen, camouflaged from head to toe, toting rifles, holding out braces of dead geese, red daubs stark on the bodies of white-phase snows. Here were old wooden duck decoys displayed on varnished shelves; glass ashtrays engraved with Canada and snow geese; books on decoys, waterfowling and the sporting life standing upright between sturdy bookends, each bookend the head, neck and shoulders of a brass duck. A laminated map of the world was spread out on the floor, with stacks of glossy hardcover bird books placed at each corner to stop it curling or rolling up: the world kept in shape by the weight of all the birds in it.

  ‘Here’s Jack,’ said Ken. We watched a pickup tear between two fields, dragging a dust cloud. It pulled up beside the house, we heard footsteps on the stairs, a short man with trim white hair and stocky, bundled vigour muscled into the room, hung his bomber jacket on the antlers and strolled out on to the deck. Jack’s skin was deep brown, with a rough pimpling on his neck as though feathers had been plucked from it. He’d been repairing fences: dirt was grained in the creases of his hands; his palms showed maps of river deltas when he opened them in gesture. Before becoming a farmer he’d been a pilot in the US Air Force, and he pointed proudly to photographs of his younger self in uniform, sunlit, beside fighter planes – photographs that didn’t seem out of place among the pictures of birds, because all had to do with flight, skies, the genius of wings.

  ‘This guy’s come from England to watch geese,’ Ken said.

  ‘Is that so?’ Jack replied absently, smoothing his hair back, gazing out over the lake and flat fields.

  ‘He’s going to follow them from Eagle Lake to Canada, Hudson Bay, maybe even the Arctic Ocean.’

  ‘Each to his own,’ said Jack.

  ‘He just flew in. Hasn’t ever seen a snow goose.’

  ‘Is that right? Sometimes I wish I’d never seen a snow goose.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘Too many of the damn things. Stick here a while, you’ll see more of those birds than you can shake a stick at. May not look like it right now. Wait for that sun to go, all hell breaks loose.’

  Jack didn’t stay long. He retrieved his jacket from the antlers and paused at the door.

  ‘Sounds like a wild goose chase,’ he said with a smile, eyes twinkling. ‘OK, Kenny. I’m gone.’ He went.

  On the deck, in the fading light, Ken pointed to a track that ran along one side of the flooded field. I was still scanning the sky, checking the horizon, willing birds to appear.

  ‘All you have to do is park there and sit tight,’ Ken said. ‘The geese’ll fly right in on top of you. Just sit tight. Be patient.’

  I followed him back through the living-room and down the outdoor staircase. Ken locked up the house. We shook hands at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I’ll see you in town,’ he said.

&n
bsp; Ken drove off in the Dodge, leaving me alone on the prairie. It was just after six o’clock. I parked the Cavalier at the edge of the flooded field and waited, tense, eyes keen, vigilant for geese. I lifted my binoculars and panned across the water, finding ducks floating in twos and threes, waders tottering as if on stilts at the edge of the pond. In front of the sun the birds were silhouettes, and I was too much of an amateur to tell one species from another. But when I saw eight tall, slender birds with the long necks, legs and bills of herons, and shaggy tail bustles, and the dainty gait of ballerinas, I knew instantly that they were sandhill cranes, the oldest species of bird in existence, known to have lived in Nebraska in the Miocene, 9 million years ago – birds which, it was once believed, helped smaller birds migrate by carrying them on their backs. These sandhill cranes would themselves soon be leaving for Arctic Canada, staging in Nebraska’s Platte River on their way to breeding grounds between Alaska and Hudson Bay.

  The sun was close to the horizon now, not the source of light but the point to which all light was gathered, as if the day were going home. I leaned back against the car, on the brink of geese, my ears tuned, my eyes alive to the slightest movement. Ducks muttered on the shallow water. Red lights glimmered like cigarette tips on the radio masts. The mesquite trees had the bare, stony branchings of tree corals. I heard bells pinging in Eagle Lake, several miles to the north-east, and then the rumble of a freight train, the ground vibrating with its industrial repercussions. There was a pale streaked redness in the west, but the rest of the sky was a deep liquid Prussian blue, with a pair of bright stars appearing very close together in the south-west: Venus and Jupiter in conjunction.

  A bird approached the pond: a heron, a great blue, easy to distinguish from a crane because herons fly with a pleat in their necks, heads retracted on to shoulders, while cranes stretch their necks out straight, without a kink. Sometimes we came across solitary grey herons standing like baptists on the banks of the Sor Brook or at the edge of a pond, footed to their own reflections, and my mother had painted one – its yellow, scabbard-shaped bill and eye, the wispy black plumes at the back of its head – on a strip of old rollerblind that hung in the bathroom, the window looking out at trees with rooks cawing hoarsely in their heights, a kingfisher of smoky, chipped glass standing on the sill beside a tin tray of quartz, pumice and agate pieces, the white wall to the left of the door marked with initials, dates and horizontal dashes: children’s heights, measured year by year, heels to the skirting board. This great blue flew right over the holding pond, a ray ghosting through sea water, with five American white pelicans following behind, heads retracted like the heron’s, gular pouches sagging like jowls under their long bills. It was half past six. I leaned back against the blue car, waiting.