The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  We drove on, in no particular direction, looking for flocks of geese. Monumental structures appeared on the level horizon to the west: sand-coloured, like half-completed pyramids.

  ‘I know what they are!’ the Viking declared.

  Bales of flax straw, stacked in massive ricks. The bales would be sent to Pennsylvania for processing into cigarette papers and high-grade writing paper.

  ‘Saw one of those damn things burning,’ the Viking said. ‘One summer. Lightning got it. Holy smoke, it blazed like a bonfire! Miles away, you’d see it, on the horizon. Column of black smoke like you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Jesus Christ!’

  ‘When did you get to know all the birds?’ I asked.

  ‘Used to hunt all the time as a boy. I had a shotgun. One day I went out on my own, brought down fifty-two mallard, the whole pack of cards.’

  ‘How did you get them home?’

  ‘Oh, there were straw bales lying around. Took some of the twine off the bales and tied all the ducks together. Tied the other end to the seat of my bicycle. Rode home dragging fifty-two mallard ducks behind me, and, Christ, they were heavier than carpets.’

  After his divorce, five years passed before the Viking spoke to his wife again. He saw her once during that period. He was on a shift, driving down Portage Avenue. He was waiting at a stoplight. He saw his wife in a car on the far side of the intersection.

  ‘Do you know how that affected me?’ he asked.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I actually had difficulty in breathing.’

  We had been driving across the plains for almost three hours when we found snow geese on the ground. The Viking pulled over; we got out of the pickup. Perhaps 10,000 birds were gleaning in wheat stubble. Some were alert, their heads raised, periscoping; others were nosing in the black soil for leftover grain. A few tundra swans walked among the snow geese like samurai: grander birds, with more shining, imposing figures, a purer white. The calls of the geese combined in an insistent drone, graced with individual yaps, topped by the descant keening of killdeer. A flock of the plovers took off and settled again on the stubble between the snow geese and the track where I stood with the Viking.

  ‘Hello, birds,’ he said.

  The Viking began to comb his hair. He kept two plastic combs in the back pocket of his jeans: a black comb, and a smaller pink comb with the fine tines of a lice comb. The way he drew, teased and flicked the combs through his tarnished-silver hair reminded me of his ambition to be a jeweller, his love for ‘little tools’. He used the black comb for outline and general form, then switched to the pink comb for precision work and ornament. His hands were heavy, rough and seasoned, but he handled the combs with the quick-fingered dexterity of an illusionist.

  Small parties of snow geese took off from the flock and flew away from the field; other parties flew in and took their places in the gaggle. The geese coasted down on bowed wings, dropping their legs like an undercarriage, their bodies tilting backwards, wings beating in reverse thrust, until at the last moment each bird’s weight seemed to drag forward through its body, the feet touched down, the goose folded its wings and set to feeding. Herring gulls hung on the wind, crying like oboes.

  The Viking returned the combs to their pocket. He was wearing his jeans and denim shirt. The shirt was buttoned up to the collar; the jeans were held up by braces and the black belt. The Viking was troubled by the attention of widows.

  ‘In my building alone there are eight widows,’ he said. ‘You have to fight them off, I tell you. They’re beating my door down. Holy Christ, these widows don’t take no for an answer. These widows terrorize you. A man’s not safe in his own home. Let your guard down for an instant and those widows leap upon you! Before you know what’s happened, you’re saddled with a widow. Holy Christ!’

  The afternoon was beautiful: unambiguously spring.

  ‘Look at that,’ the Viking said. ‘Wall-to-wall sky. My brother used to love those white fleecy clouds just sailing by. Look at that!’

  The flock was never still. The geese shuffled across the stubble, blue-phase and white-phase birds intermingled, gabbling constantly, feeding or watching for predators. This was the key advantage of living in a flock: the more birds were gathered together, the less time any one bird would have to spend looking out for danger, and the less time any bird had to spend looking out for danger, the more time it would have for feeding. I wondered if I’d seen any of these geese before: on the prairies outside Eagle Lake at sunset, high over Matthew’s half-built house in the hills, flying parallel to the Greyhound south of Minneapolis, or rising off the ice at Sand Lake, somewhere in those swirling crowds.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ the Viking asked.

  ‘I’m going to pick up some warm clothes in Winnipeg,’ I said. ‘Then take the train up to Churchill.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘That depends. When the geese start moving on from Churchill, I’m hoping to catch a plane up to Baffin Island. The biggest nesting grounds are said to be on Baffin Island.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I’ll go home.’

  We turned away from the flock of geese and went back to the pickup.

  ‘One thing,’ said the Viking. ‘When you’re in Winnipeg, watch out for the widows. You’re never too young.’

  ‘OK.’

  I slammed my door shut. The sound startled the geese. Their calls rose in pitch and volume, swelling to a metallic yammer. The flock lifted from the field as a single entity, 10,000 pairs of wings drumming the air, as if people were swatting the dust from rugs: white-phase and blue-phase geese jumbled together, tundra swans caught up in the confusion. We watched as the flock gained height, flashing when sun caught the backs and wings of white birds, then dispersing in straggling skeins and Vs, flying away to the north-west.

  ‘My God!’ the Viking exclaimed. ‘Those birds!’

  It was dark when we got to Winnipeg. The Viking dropped me at the hotel with the pink room. I thanked him; we shook hands. He warned me once more about the widows, wished me luck, and drove away.

  6 : MUSKEG EXPRESS

  THE WOMAN IN the large blue plastic-framed glasses, navy fleece jacket, jeans and brand-new running shoes leaned forward, placed a paper cup of coffee on the burnished marble floor, then sat up straight again, fluffing out her long, curling, pale brown hair with both hands. She was about forty, with a smattering of faint freckles and no perceptible corners to her shoulders, nothing for the straps of a tote bag to find adequate purchase on. A squat brown leather suitcase waited like a dog beside her feet. To her left, a short, almost spherical man, sixty-odd, in an olive anorak, neatly creased charcoal trousers and shiny black leather shoes, perched on the edge of another wood-slatted bench, his hands resting one on top of the other on the pommel of a stick – an orthopaedic stick, provided by a hospital, with a scuffed rubber hoof and apertures in its metal tubing like the fingerholes in a recorder or antique flute. He had thick, fleshy lips and the bulging, eager eyes of an infant. His hair was the same tarnished silver as the Viking’s, only longer and straighter, smoothed back like a bird’s conditioned feathers with wax or oil. His hair shone like his shoes (he sported badges of light at top and toe) and he sat with proprietorial confidence, as if he owned the entire building.

  The woman checked her watch. It was just before ten o’clock on the evening of 20 April, and we were sitting in the waiting area of Winnipeg’s Union Station.

  Our train was announced: the Hudson Bay. The spherical man was first up, grabbing the handles of a battered leatherette overnight bag with his left hand, wielding the orthopaedic stick in his right, and walking briskly with the rolling gait of a goose towards the uniformed VIA ticket collector at the gate. On the platform, he threaded his arm through the bag handles, hooked the stick on the crook of his elbow, reached up for both sides of the door-opening and hauled himself aboard with a blithe ‘Hup!’ I followed the brown-haired lady, her shoulders so self-effacing that her arms see
med joined directly to the base of her neck under the navy fleece jacket.

  We located our tiny roomettes in the accommodation car without speaking a word. Upper and lower roomettes, seven feet by three, were dovetailed along both sides of the car – cabinets for living, surfaces and upholstery painted or dyed jade-grey, furnishings and features packed in tight as if on a submarine: cushioned seat, miniature toilet, hanging hooks, reading light, a whirring fan encased in a grille, a pull-out bed unlocked by a lever marked Release/Déclencheur. Each roomette had a pile of folded white hand-towels, a tube of conical waxed-paper drinking-cups, and a wash unit that folded down from the wall – a stainless steel basin with concentric rings shimmering in its clean, unblemished concavity, and no plughole but a narrow maw just below its wallside brim through which water drained sensibly whenever the unit was stowed upright.

  The train jolted forward, had second thoughts, then eased slowly out of Union Station. I pushed the lever marked Release/Déclencheur and slid the narrow bed out like a morgue drawer across the toilet and cushioned seat. It locked into place: the roomette was all bed. The brown-haired woman and the spherical man were installed in jade-grey roomettes across the carpeted aisle, all three of us snug in our cubbyholes like whelks in their conches. I turned off the lights, released the blind and lay back as the Hudson Bay trundled across the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers and through the district of St Boniface, a cross of red bulbs glaring like a beacon from the roof of a tall building, the train rocking gently from side to side, couplings clanking and groaning as the carriages crossed points, getting the hang of the gauge. I heard these clankings through the chassis rumble and the roomette’s medley of high-frequency shakes: the clatter of the basin troubling its latch, the grille trembling on the reading light, the clitter of curtain hooks, the sliding door rattling on its castors. Once the city lights were behind us, the window was a panel of stars, and when the train swung eastwards a crescent moon hove into view, its curve matched precisely to the curve of the steel basin stowed in the wall, its full circle visible with earthshine. There was comfort in the surrounding, rhythmic sounds, the carriage’s gentle rocking motion, the cordial sensation of moving forward to a fixed end – proceeding mile by mile to the breeding grounds of the snow geese, with small towns passing through the night like proper nouns whispered in the ear: Plumas, Glenella, McCreary and Laurier; Dauphin, Roblin, Togo and Kamsack; Veregin, Mikado, Sturgis, Endeavour, Reserve.

  This was the wheat line. The idea of a railroad linking Winnipeg to Hudson Bay had been proposed as early as 1812. Such a track, it was suggested, would provide the wheat farmers of western Canada with a direct route to European markets, far cheaper and simpler than hauling grain by train to Thunder Bay, then shipping it via the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River out into the Atlantic through Cabot Strait. Although the water of Hudson Bay would only be ice-free for three months of each year, the port of Churchill was as near to Liverpool as Montreal, and 1,000 miles closer to the wheat fields of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Churchill was also 2,000 miles closer to the seaports of northern Russia than any other port on North America’s eastern seaboard. When the construction of the Hudson Bay Railway was announced in September 1886, the Manitoba Daily Free Press celebrated ‘the dawn of a glorious day. With an ocean outlet that will bring the prairie steppes and grain fields of this vast country as near to the British markets as the farmers of Eastern Canada and the seaports of the United States, the grand obstacle of distance will be swept away by a single stroke and the full granaries of this part will be placed on the thresholds of the British market.’

  The grand obstacle of distance was not swept away quite so easily. The Hudson Bay Railway would not be completed until 1929. But work began in earnest, roadbed material wheeled forward on plank tracks from a work train, with rails, ties, hoisting devices, spikes and fishplate clamps following in a second train. Hundreds of Austrian, Italian, Finnish, Polish, Russian and Galician navvies sought work at the End of Steel, some hiking for twenty-two days, 468 miles along the track from Winnipeg to The Pas, sleeping on the timber sleepers. Some found jobs as stationmen, raising the grade, using gravel, rocks and thick vegetation to bring the roadbed to an even level; some ballasted the line, bolstering the ties that anchored the rails; some built bridges, fixing steel spans to concrete substructures to bear the track across the Saskatchewan River, Limestone River, Weir River and Owl River, and twice across Nelson River, at Kettle Rapids and Manitou Rapids. They worked sixteen-hour days, dressed in denim overalls, woollen shirts, cumbersome boots, and tweed caps or floppy, low-grade fedoras. They worked through winter, forty degrees below, and through summer plagues of mosquito and blackfly, with liquor forbidden, and no women allowed past Mile 412, except for nurses, who were taken in when needed. Their only luxuries were the Copenhagen snuff known as ‘snoose’ and the books, magazines and gramophone records provided by the Reading Camp Association, which also held classes in reading, writing, spelling, algebra and Canadian history.

  After The Pas, the navvies had to deal with muskeg (an Algonquian word meaning peat bog) and also with permafrost, the permanently frozen ground beneath the muskeg. It was essential to keep a layer of muskeg moss between the tracks and the permafrost, because any contact between the ice and the grade gravel would cause the ice to melt, resulting in a surface depression or gulch, and a sagging in the lines known as a sinkhole. Engineers sank pipes called thermosyphons several metres down into the ground to conduct heat away from the permafrost that supported the track, and the navvies erected ungainly tripods to carry telegraph wires alongside the line, because poles planted in the muskeg were casually ejected by the frost heave.

  In some places the permafrost ran to a depth of 200 feet before it met the bedrock. One night, in the rain, a construction train working at the north end of the grade jumped the track and ploughed into the muskeg, dragging a string of eight flatcars behind it. The crew escaped unhurt, saw the train lying on its side, half-submerged in bog, and then walked to the nearest camp to send a telegraph message requesting the urgent dispatch of a repair train. When the wrecking train arrived, the crew accompanied it to the scene of the accident. But the locomotive and flatcars had disappeared. The crew stood dumbfounded. The derailed train had ploughed right down to the permafrost and proved such an excellent conductor of heat that it had melted the ice and sunk on its own warmth until completely swallowed by the ground. This was land that could eat things up.

  The track reached Churchill on 29 March, 1929. The last spike, wrapped in tinfoil ripped from a packet of tobacco, was hammered in to mark completion of the project: an iron spike in silver ceremonial trappings. The first shipment of grain followed later that year. A ton of prairie wheat, grown in southern Manitoba, packed in 1,000 two-pound canvas bags for distribution in England, was shipped by James Richardson & Sons Ltd on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the SS Ungava. In 1932, ten ships crossed the Atlantic to load wheat in Churchill. The tenth, the Bright Fan, with 253,000 bushels of wheat on board, struck an iceberg in Hudson Strait and sank. This disaster was a foretaste of decline. Shipments of wheat from Churchill have slumped since their peak in 1977. The Hudson Bay Railway runs at a loss and is heavily subsidized. There are frequent calls for the closure of the port.

  From Winnipeg the line ran west to Portage-la-Prairie, then turned northwards for The Pas, with Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis to the east, and to the west, outside my roomette’s window, the dense spruce forests of Riding Mountain, Duck Mountain and the Porcupine Hills. Lying back in the dark, I imagined snow geese passing overhead towards Churchill, coterminous with millions of bushels of prairie wheat.

  The Hudson Bay Railway wouldn’t exist without wheat. It ventures into the hinterland of northern Canada, a region known to early mapmakers as the Barren Grounds. Even on a modern map the line seems a line of enquiry, a speculative filament or strand, adrift in the wide open. Thirty-six hours away, 1,000 miles to the north-east, a vast grain el
evator waited at the mouth of the Churchill River, with holding room for 5 million bushels of wheat and the capacity to deliver 60,000 bushels an hour to ships moored in the deep-sea berths. But first the Hudson Bay had to make its way through boreal forest and across tundra, proceeding with due caution to negotiate sinkholes where the track had dipped or ‘wowed’ on the thawing of the ice below.

  *

  I WOKE TO FORESTS OF spruce and aspen, and a mallard drake, a greenhead, flying alongside the train, just outside my window, racing me northwards. I got dressed and walked through to the dining-car. The short, almost spherical man with the slicked-back hair had already eaten and had turned his chair to face the window across the aisle. Wearing neatly creased charcoal trousers, shiny black shoes, and a white short-sleeved button-up shirt with a plain white T-shirt as a vest beneath it, he was watching innumerable spruce trees drift by, the deep green of the conifers broken here and there by slender white aspen trunks. His hands were resting on the pommel of the orthopaedic stick, and he was leaning forward a little, trusting his weight to it, as an old wizard, a Merlin or Gandalf, would trust his weight to a magic staff.

  ‘So?’ he said. ‘How do you like the Muskeg Express?’

  A deep, husky, croaking voice, a bullfrog’s voice, the s sounds of Muskeg Express gathering a wet, lispy sibilance as they passed through his mouth.

  ‘It’s not exactly express.’