The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  *

  STREETLIGHT 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.

  Eleanor slid back the glass doors and stepped out on to the balcony.

  ‘What do you think about going to see the bats?’ she asked.

  She said that bats arrived from Mexico each spring to roost under a bridge downtown. You could see them at sunset, when they came out to forage for insects.

  I told her I loved the idea, but I’d been thinking about moving on.

  ‘You’re worrying about those birds. They’re leaving you behind, right?’

  ‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’

  ‘I guess those geese could be in North Dakota. I guess we better get you on the Greyhound. We better rush you up to Fargo!’

  *

  THAT EVENING, we drove to see bats. Eleanor parked the caramel Mercedes close to the river. She was wearing a navy blue anorak with a chunky white zip up the front, and her white hair seemed oddly contingent on the zip, like a bloom at the tip of a stalk. We walked out across the Colorado River on Congress Avenue Bridge, stopping at the midpoint of the span, looking north up the avenue to the domed capitol, and west downstream towards another bridge and the cedar-covered hills far beyond it. A small plane flew across the hills, trailing a banner whose commercial message or surprising essential truth wasn’t quite legible in this fading light.

  ‘This is a good spot, right here,’ Eleanor said. We stood at the balustrade, looking east over Town Lake. ‘We’ve got bats right under our feet.’

  In 1980, reconstruction work created expansion joints in the deck of the Congress Avenue Bridge – parallel inch-wide grooves, each more than a foot deep, which Mexican free-tailed bats soon took to roosting in, the temperature and humidity just right for raising pups. Four or five inches long, dark grey-brown, with big forward-pointing ears and wrinkles on their lips along the muzzle, the freetails winter in Mexican caves and return to Austin each spring. Like birds, bats have internal circadian and circannual clocks, entrained to the natural year by Zeitgebers, triggering migratory behaviour at appropriate times.

  ‘I haven’t come down here to watch bats for I don’t know how long,’ Eleanor said.

  People were gathering on the bridge and in the small public park on the south side of the river, sitting on rugs on the grass bank, taking up positions either side of us at the balustrade. A boy wearing a plastic black Batman cape argued with a girl in a bat’s ear hairband. Two women led Great Danes along the riverside path, the dogs attired like conscientious bicyclists in fluorescent yellow collars and sashes. An oarsman moved silently beneath us, sculling upstream, feathering the blades as if they were his own palms held above the water, his seat rolling back and forth on greased coasters and rails, the dips of the oars leaving a series of paired circles like a shoe’s eyelets in his wake. We felt the shudder of the asphalt panels as traffic crossed the river on Congress Avenue.

  ‘Those bats’ll be coming out any minute,’ Eleanor said.

  Spars of red and white shimmer lay across the water, thrown off the city lights. Everyone was waiting. A dark blue sedan pulled up behind us, pausing on the bridge just long enough for an old man to step gingerly on to the kerb, assisted by a male nurse dressed in a white, dog-collared hospital tunic. The old man wore a dressing-gown over a green hospital smock, and the thin shins visible below the hems of these robes were sleeved in the white compression stockings that prevent deep vein thrombosis in the bed-bound. He wore bright purple slippers with pineapples surprisingly embroidered on their topsides, and his face was gaunt, pared of all substance, with cheekbones showing like stanchions under pink, brittle-looking skin, and a tuft of white hair like a wisp of smoke off his scalp. He moved shakily with anxious inch-long steps to the edge of the bridge and took his place at the balustrade to my left.

  ‘How are you holding up, Mr Mitchell?’ asked the nurse, who had short black hair.

  ‘Pretty good, I guess,’ said the old man in a weak, high, trembling voice.

  He was just in time. Without warning, bats began dropping from the grooves under our feet, streaming past the live oaks and cypresses of the southern shore. People said ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ as if at fireworks as the freetails accelerated away from the bridge, a tube of shadow sloping upwards into blue-grey light, vibrant with points of agitated air – as if the bridge were sighing them out, a gasp of breath in which each atom was figured by a bat. Their wings made a papery flutter, the rapid soft flutter of banknotes hurrying through a counting machine, twenty-five notes per second, and I tried to imagine beneath the flutter the click-din of echolocation, the drumfire of ultrasound pulses that allowed bats hurtling at a cypress tree to hear the fact of it and bear away, upriver.

  During the Second World War, the US Armed Forces developed a scheme known as Project X-Ray, in which large numbers of Mexican free-tailed bats were fitted with small incendiary bombs, attached to their bellies by a short string and a surgical clip. The idea was that cages of bats would be parachuted over enemy territory and open at a particular altitude, releasing teams of explosive bats that would quickly disperse to buildings in the immediate vicinity. Once in their roosts, the bats would chew through the strings and rele
ase the bombs. But the scheme was dropped because the bats never dispersed; they stuck together, gathering at one or two roost sites. On one occasion hundreds of armed Mexican free-tailed bats escaped their test range in the south-western desert and blew up several military buildings and an elevated gas tank in a nearby town.

  The last bats dropped from the grooves beneath us, unencumbered.

  ‘There they go,’ said Mr Mitchell.

  ‘We didn’t get here a moment too soon,’ said the nurse.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?’ His bony pink hands gripped the balustrade; his whole body was shaking.

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  Eleanor didn’t take her eyes off the bats. The stream disappeared into dim light, a thick rope pulled by a stevedore. Mr Mitchell, truant from his ward, stood trembling at the balustrade. Eleanor’s white hair was faintly luminous. Red lights glimmered on radio masts in the hills. The statue of Saint Francis was in place beside the door, the limestone slab beside the cedar tree. Birds were flying north according to inherited programmes. Cars passed back and forth on Congress Avenue. The crowd began to disperse, heading home. The dark blue sedan appeared on the bridge for the second time, and the nurse placed his hand gently on Mr Mitchell’s head as the old man stooped into the open door.

  3 : GREYHOUND

  THE PROSPECT OF moving north across America as spring itself was moving north and millions of migrant birds were moving north with the warmth to their breeding grounds as the North Pole tilted gradually closer to the sun – this prospect was so exciting that when Eleanor knocked on the door before dawn, with the lines of the birdcage picked out by the streetlight, I almost jumped out of bed. Electric light jarred off the white-tiled kitchen floor and glinted off the piano magnets and off the corners and hinges of the fridge, and when Eleanor opened the fridge to get some milk I saw all the bowls with their tight foil skins like a range of drums – a set of small, tuned timpani on the white racks. We made tea, jigging the strings, and then I fetched my bag from the wood-dark bedroom, breezing through the slatted swinging doors, hearing them thwup thwup thwup to a halt behind me. Eleanor was waiting in the living-room, one hand on the table of tortoises, the other sprucing up her downy white hair. We drove through Austin to the Greyhound terminal, yawning in canon, and Eleanor parked the Mercedes at the entrance to the terminal building.

  ‘Have a good time,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks for everything.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Say hello to the geese for me.’

  I watched the old caramel Mercedes leave the parking lot, There’s No Place Like Narnia disappearing in the traffic stream.

  Buses were berthed on the far side of the terminal: a fleet of silver-styled Americruisers basking under arc lights, decked out in sprinting blue greyhounds with thin, tapering snouts you could clasp in your hand like ice-cream cones. Automatic doors opened on a waiting area with bare beige floors and the featureless walls of transit zones, and luggage heaps, sleeping figures, illuminated vending machines, and ranks of screwed-down seating units, some of them fitted with small, coin-fired televisions in moulded black plastic casings. Passengers were standing around, waiting for gates to be called, checking their watches, wandering from one spot to another, carrying tubes of Pringles potato snacks, portable stereos, transparent Ziploc bags of cookies or muffins, black refuse sacks bulging with laundry, rolled-up sleeping-bags, green Army Surplus kitbags, suit bags, duffel bags, rucksacks, pillows, cooler boxes, comfort blankets and swaddled, sleeping babies.

  The Greyhound left Austin at seven o’clock in the morning. The schedule that came with my ticket told me I would arrive in Fargo, North Dakota, at twenty to six the following afternoon, having changed coaches in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Fargo was about 1,000 miles due north of Austin; snow geese would be flying due north from Texas to North Dakota, as if along the lines of longitude. North – the word had amplitude now, as if all possible destinations and endings were gathered up in it. North trumped all other places. I wanted the front seat in the Greyhound for its widescreen view of the north, but it was taken, so I sat two rows back on the right-hand side, across the aisle from a young woman and her son, a boy of five or six with brown hair cut in a severe fringe, like a monk’s tonsure, and a book of join-the-dots pictures to which he applied himself with a monk’s diligence, working with felt-tip pens in the dim light, conjuring motorcycles, tennis racquets, kitchen blenders and giraffes from strews of black points while his mother, who had spiky blond hair and a thin, bony face, laid her head against the window and slept despite its shuddering.

  A storm broke as we left Austin. Thunder rolled; lightning lit the rooftops in quick, jagged brightnesses; water sluiced across the Greyhound’s windscreen, batted left and right by the long, jointed wipers. I thought about Matthew in his tent at the edge of the cedars, hard rain thrumming on the off-white canvas as bolts struck the tall mast. Then the storm passed, the sun rose somewhere beyond Baton Rouge, and the Greyhound surged towards Dallas on Interstate 35. I gazed blankly through the tinted window, lulled by the hum of wheels on even asphalt panels, with flat country skirting past on the far edge of my attention – a Texas bric-a-brac of motels, outlet malls, dancehalls, subcourthouses, pet-grooming salons, ministorages, swags of electric and telephone cables, a non-stop barrage of exclamatory hoardings and signs like heraldic shields raised high on steel masts, flashing the names of gas stations and franchise restaurants as the coach coasted past Georgetown, Temple, Waco and Italy, 200 miles north to Dallas.

  I boarded a new bus in Dallas, its driver a tall, lean, narrow man, like a cigarette dressed in the grey Greyhound uniform, with sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows and silver hair cut short at the back and sides, swept back on top and glossed with brilliantine. He wore a brown leather belt embossed with an eagle, laterally extended, and a dated-looking digital watch with a calculator keypad underneath its scratched display. He sucked on a toothpick, smoothed his hair back with both palms simultaneously, and addressed his passengers as ‘folks’.

  ‘Now please remember, folks,’ he said into his microphone, lips brushing the metal mesh as we proceeded through the Dallas suburbs, ‘that we do have ladies and children on board. So let me say, folks, that we do not want to say or do anything that would embarrass those good folks. No bad language. No lewdness of any kind. Now this may not pertain to you, but I’m saying it all the same. I’m deadly graveyard serious on this matter, folks.’

  The folks in my vicinity included, in the front seat, a frail, white-haired lady wearing a denim shirt adorned with homemade four-pointed appliqué stars and a smiling brown crescent moon. She tried repeatedly to engage the driver in conversation, but he didn’t respond; he was deadly graveyard serious on all matters of road safety. Behind me, a younger, dark-featured woman, dressed in an orange tracksuit, had immersed herself in a paperback entitled Blues for Silk Garcia, and across the aisle sat a burly man with a ponytail falling across his chest, black hair fanning out on a T-shirt that read, Since I Gave Up Hope, I Got Much Better. Behind him, through a gap between headrests, I glimpsed a woman in small, round, wire-framed spectacles, stroking the head of a sleeping baby.

  The toothpick clamped in the driver’s teeth pointed north up Interstate 35 like a compass needle. The coach hardly wavered from its cruising speed. Freightliner, Eagle and Kenworth rigs with sleeping cabins and gleaming silver chimneys drew level with the Greyhound, then accelerated past, hauling Utility, Stoughton and Great Dane freight containers. There were other Greyhound and Jefferson Lines coaches in the current of the highway; recreational vehicles with the names Jamboree, Chieftain, Prowler and Nomad splashed on their creamy white foreheads and mountain bikes lashed to their backs; state trooper cars with four trunk aerials bending backwards like grasses in the apparent wind; entire prefabricated houses proceeding with due caution along the inside lane; and station wagons, trailers, vans, jeeps, pickups, hatchbacks, sedans – the hard c sounds of America
n traffic: Mack, Cadillac, Pontiac, Camry, Buick – with mottoes (Grace Happens!) on rear fenders, and dogs leaning from open windows, nosing the windspeed. Stars and Stripes of immaculate parachute silk rippled at the gates of lots and salerooms. A great blue heron lifted from a marsh. A flock of ten or twelve ducks flew alongside us in compact formation, a tiny clutch of the millions of birds that were moving towards Canada with the spring, subject to circannual rhythms and Zugunruhe, far outnumbering the people in vehicles passing Denton, Gainesville, Marietta and Ardmore on their way to Oklahoma City and all points north.

  These birds possessed compasses as well as clocks. In 1949 the German ornithologist Gustav Kramer had observed young migrant starlings in an outdoor aviary. Kramer was interested in their ability to navigate. ‘Such a conspicuous phenomenon as the long-distance flights of birds,’ he wrote, ‘has profoundly penetrated into man’s consciousness, and it is a very simple further step to ask how they find their way.’ At the end of the summer, Kramer’s starlings, which came from the Baltic region, exhibited ‘a distinct tendency to migrate south-west’.

  The following year Kramer transferred these birds to circular pavilions in which vision was limited to six windows, distributed symmetrically round the compass, with landmarks carefully excluded from view. Mirrors were mounted at each of the windows, reflecting sunlight into the cages at ninety-degree angles. The drum-shaped pavilions rested on transparent Plexiglass bases: observers lay underneath, looking up at the birds, recording their behaviour.

  The starlings displayed Zugunruhe at the appropriate time, with a tendency to hop towards the north-east, the appropriate direction for spring migration. Then, by manipulating the mirrors, Kramer changed the apparent direction of the sunlight. The starlings changed direction accordingly: the birds were using a sun compass. Such a mechanism, Kramer noted, could not be effective without an internal clock. The sun’s position relative to a point on the Earth changes by 15 degrees every hour: the starlings must have some way of compensating for this apparent movement. ‘The migratory activity on some days lasted for six hours,’ Kramer wrote, ‘from the early morning until noon, which corresponds to a movement of the sun through about 90 degrees; yet the bird’s direction remained unaltered.’ He christened one of the starlings Heliotrope, like the flower, from the Greek for ‘tending towards the sun’.