The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  Marshall drew breath. There was a roar from the gamblers: a full house, a flush, a daring bluff, a scam. Thick grey swirls of cigarette smoke hung over the baseball caps.

  ‘You had a twenty-eight-inch waist in those days?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right. Twenty-eight-inch waist, weighed ninety-eight pounds. Fifty-one years later it’s a fifty-four-inch waist and two hundred and forty-six pounds. When the good Lord created me, He just didn’t want to quit. But no cholesterol! Not a drop! As far as I’m concerned, Cholesterol’s a little mining town in Nova Scotia. My brother gets me this wild garlic. Once a year he goes hunting in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec for some of their wild garlic, and once a year I get a package of wild garlic in the mail. I pickle it in olive oil, keep it in the fridge, take one clove every morning for a month, wash it down with a glass of orange juice. When I go to my doctor for a check-up he can’t believe it. “It’s amazing!” he says. “This man has no cholesterol!” I tell him about the garlic, and the doctor listens hard, because here’s a man weighs close to two hundred and fifty pounds and he’s got the cholesterol of a baby girl! “The garlic!” I tell him. “It’s all in the garlic!” ’

  A rowdy cheer went up from the tables behind Marshall, as if to celebrate the miracle of garlic. Cree families were crowding the games, jostling for a sight of the cards, wearing quilted lumberjack jackets, bandying strategies, gambits, accusations, critiques. Marshall turned to look behind him, then faced me again, chuckling.

  ‘OK.’ he said. ‘That’s it. Time’s up.’

  He rubbed his eyes like a tired choirboy, then pushed his chair back and heaved himself up, pressing down on the table-edge. He slipped the plastic pill-tidy into his trouser pocket, grabbed the metal stick, and set off down the aisle between the tables. I followed him back through to the accommodation car. Marshall had to turn sideways to ease his girth through the narrow intercarriage doors. He paused at the entrance to his roomette.

  ‘Don’t forget!’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Garlic?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Dinner!’

  Marshall whipped back the door-curtain and stepped inside, wheezing.

  I sat back in my roomette. The train trundled on, wary of the heave and wow of muskeg and permafrost under the roadbed, and places kept passing like proper nouns murmured close to the ear: Pikwitonei, Wilde, Arnot, Boyd. The spruce trees began to thin out as we drew closer to the timberline, the transitional area or ecotone that separates boreal forest from open tundra. A bald eagle spiralled on a thermal; a few mallard, redhead and lesser scaup rested on patches of open water; pairs of Canada geese flew alongside the train, outside my window, white chinstraps gleaming in the sun, their long black necks stretched out like arms, with bills for index fingers, pointing north-east towards Hudson Bay. Each time I saw these birds I thought of snow geese. I checked for tell-tale shapes above the jagged spruce line: Vs, Ws, echelons, skeins. We crossed the Nelson River at Manitou Rapids and I looked down through the bridge spars at water surging in the narrow channel, fraught with eddies and spasms, such a volume of melted ice it seemed the gorge was the node of the thaw, with winter draining through it to the sea.

  It was almost two months since I’d flown from London to Houston. I remembered how keenly I had anticipated my first sight of snow geese, glancing up at the stuffed bird above Ken in the Sportsman’s Restaurant at Eagle Lake, then waiting on the prairies by the blue Cavalier at sunset, listening for the faint calls of returning flocks, the sound of halliards flicking on yacht masts, or terriers yapping. I remembered the flocks Jean had pointed out from the Greyhound, working north to Minneapolis. I pictured the wild, drumming blizzards of blue-phase and white-phase snows wheeling above Sand Lake, the waving strands of geese that had passed over Riding Mountain as fluff from cattail seedheads skiffed past the Viking on a spring breeze. I wondered if I had seen any of these birds more than once; if our progress north had been coincident.

  Marshall ate dinner alone at his table on the right-hand side of the train. Brenda and I sat at our usual places across the aisle, the dining-car full of smoke and poker sounds. We retired to our roomettes for the second night. I pressed the lever marked Release/Déclencheur, pulled the bed from beneath the mirror, turned off the lights and let the blind up as far as it would go. The sky was clear; the window framed an abundance of western stars: Orion, Gemini, Auriga, Perseus, Cassiopeia. The bed was warm, soft and snug, underbraced by the rattling four-syllable mantra of the rails, rocking gently as the Hudson Bay plied the uneven taiga grade. I kept hearing Marshall’s husky, croaking voice, textured with wheeze, the muffled beats as the stick’s pale grey scuffed hoof hit the floor in emphasis. Hoboes, rattlers, greenhorns, Sally-Anns. To the north, I could see Ursa Minor, the Little Bear or Dipper, with Polaris, the North Star, at the tip of its handle. Ursus is Latin for ‘bear’; ‘Arctic’ comes from the Greek word arktos, meaning ‘bear’: the Arctic was that precinct of the globe that lay beneath the jurisdiction of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

  I lay awake, thinking of home. Not just of the ironstone house – my mother’s evening viola scales coming up the stairs – but also of the London flat in which I’d been living, the streets around it, the faces and voices of friends, the things we laughed about. Such images had occupied my mind with increasing frequency ever since my stay in the white motel room in Aberdeen. In that room my curiosity, my appetite for the new, seemed to tire or slacken, perhaps because I was lonely, or because I felt for the first time that my journey north with the snow geese was not quite the shout of freedom I had presupposed. I was aware of another impulse that, if not the opposite of curiosity, was certainly resistant to the new or strange and sympathetic to everything I could remember and understand. This wasn’t the acute longing I remembered from hospital, that desperate nostalgic desire to return to the circumstances of childhood. Lying awake on the train, what I felt was no more than a mild ache, bittersweet, an awareness of separation from things I loved, an almost corporeal inclination towards familiar ground. It was as if I existed between two poles, the known and the new, and found myself drawn alternately from one to the other.

  For James Copland, whose Dictionary of Practical Medicine was published in 1858, nostalgia was a cause of disease rather than a disease itself. But Copland, drawing extensively on both Hofer and Larrey, took homesickness extremely seriously. ‘The suggestions of memory,’ he wrote, ‘in continually haunting the mind of him who has removed, for the first time, from the scenes of varied enjoyments and strong excitements, to places remote, not only from these but from all other attachments, particularly if he be doomed to different avocations from those to which he had become accustomed, are amongst the most distressing of the numerous ills that embitter the destiny of man.’ Copland reiterated the old belief that mountain-dwellers were particularly susceptible to nostalgia: ‘Numerous examples of the effects of continued longing for the scenes of early life occur to the medical practitioner; but they are most common amongst the natives of the high lands, as those of Switzerland and of Scotland, when they migrate to the low countries, where this feeling is heightened by the influence of a more depressing air upon constitutions formed in the pure and cold atmosphere of more elevated regions.’

  Copland characterized the first signs of nostalgia as ‘unusual reserve, sadness, distaste of amusement and of occupation, a continual recurrence to the various circumstances connected with home, and expression of regret at removal, with a desire of returning and of enjoying those pleasures which the imagination is constantly presenting in more glowing colours than are real’. Decline, pallor, emaciation and ‘painful rumination’ may follow. ‘The patient nurses his misery, augments it until it destroys his nightly repose and his daily peace, and ultimately devours, with more or less rapidity, his vital organs.’

  How should physicians endeavour to treat such attacks of return-suff
ering? ‘Nostalgia,’ Copland remarked, ‘requires more of moral than of medical intervention.’ He suggested that ‘kindness, encouragement, and exciting hopes of soon revisiting the scenes for which the patient longs, are generally of the greatest service’. Hofer had described the case of a young man from Bern who had left home to study in Basel. After a period of dejection, the student developed anxiety, palpitations and a continuous fever – symptoms that grew so severe that death appeared imminent. Prayers were recited on the student’s behalf. The apothecary, who had been summoned to deliver an enema, observed that the patient was suffering from homesickness and advised that he be sent home in a litter immediately. As soon as the student heard this and saw that preparations for his return were being made, he drew breath and became calmer, and after several miles on the road from Basel his complaints had abated significantly. Before arriving in Bern, he had already recovered. ‘What strikes one most in the sparse literature on help for the homesick,’ write the authors of a 1996 review, ‘is that often only returning to the old home environment brings real relief.’

  And there was relief, even as we left the hospital for home, after dark, in the new year: a feeling of inevitable movement, as if I were attached by lines of elastic to the ironstone house, elastic bungee cords that gave an illusion of freedom but exerted a pull, a return-pressure, as soon as they were stretched and tested. There was comfort even in the process of going back, seeing the lights of houses arranged in patterns as fixed as constellations, the road dipping or curving exactly as you remembered and expected, the shapes of signs, buildings, trees and spires appearing on cue, each one its own fulfilment. We pulled up at the house, and my mother and father helped me to the front door, over the stone floor of the hall, up the stairs, the landing floorboards creaking correctly underfoot, into the dressing-room, the curtains drawn, the rightness of things in their allotted places.

  The Hudson Bay made slow, fitful progress through the night: Nonsuch, Wivenhoe, Bird and Charlesbois; Herchmer, Kellet, O’Day and Back. I drifted in and out of sleep, constellations wheeling across the blue-black window on the hub of the North Star. Shooting stars, particles burning up as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere, streaked with lazy, casual brilliance, some moving so slowly you could track the transverse paths and knock off a wish while the glow still hung there. In the early morning a band of faint greenish white light appeared in the north, a shallow curve, with vertical bars of light rolling through it like billows through a bolt of silk, and for a moment I wondered if I were dreaming these northern lights. I’d read about spectacular nightshows – bold light streamers, clouds of red and blue fluorescence lurching from one side of the sky to another, accompanied by loud hisses and cracklings – but this was a modest display, a hanging soft-lit cirrus drape, swaying and undulating as if a wind disturbed it: silk sheers luffing in an open summer window. I felt the imminence of the far north. The breeding grounds of the snow geese were close now: thousands of geese would soon be settling to nest at La Pérouse Bay, just thirty miles east of Churchill.

  The term ‘aurora borealis’ was introduced by the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi in 1621, from the Latin aurora (‘dawn’) and borealis (‘north’). Boreas was the god of the north wind in Greek mythology; the original scientific name for a snow goose was Anser hyperborea: ‘goose from beyond the north wind’. Some thought the northern lights were old women dancing in white gloves, gods dancing, flames glimpsed through cracks in the firmament, the fire of volcanoes erupting close to the pole. Others understood them to be reflections off the shields of Valkyries, off vast flocks of greylag geese, off the turbulence of threshing whales or the wings of swans trapped in polar ice. They were spirits playing football with a walrus skull, the arc of a burning sky-bridge by which gods could pass from heaven to Earth, the glow given off by huge herring runs and other fish schools in northern seas, or the light glancing off a fox with glittering fur as it ran across the mountains of Lapland. Or they were caused by particles streaming from coronal holes in the surface of the sun – ionized hydrogen protons and electrons, and smaller quantities of helium, oxygen and other elements, discharged at velocities sufficient to escape solar gravity, travelling through space as the solar wind, entering the Earth’s atmosphere at the magnetic poles and colliding with atmospheric atoms and molecules, which absorbed energy from the impacts and emitted energy (including infrared, ultraviolet and visible light) as they settled back to their neutral state. I lay next to the window, watching the aurora, the faint light rippling like the hem of a gown. The curtain hooks clittered; the sliding door rattled on its castors; the stowed basin shook on the latch.

  I slept for three or four hours. Marshall woke me, rapping on the door.

  ‘Get up!’ he wheezed. ‘There are caribou!’

  I got dressed. Marshall and Brenda were in the dining-car, standing in the aisle, looking through the left-side windows. The Hudson Bay was travelling through tundra now. The land seemed laid open to the sky, flayed, with no tree cover but for the occasional haggard, stunted spruce. The tundra surface was rough, almost corrugated, blotched with greens, browns and sere yellows, finished with bristling sedge tussocks and glistening snow patches. Twelve Canada geese were flying alongside the dining-car in a short V, keeping pace, honking with ribald vigour. A few cumulus clouds floated like dirigibles above the clean horizon line.

  ‘Look!’ commanded Marshall, jabbing a stubby finger at the tundra.

  I looked. A herd of caribou, fur tones well matched to the tundra’s sere browns, were cantering away from the train, towards the white dirigibles. A small contingent of the Kaminuriak herd of barren-ground caribou, these reindeer were themselves migrants, wintering in the taiga forest, trekking northwards across the tundra towards calving grounds each spring. Their movements, like those of snow geese, free-tailed bats and common swifts, were tied to Earth’s yearly swing round the sun. Migration was their way of dealing with the tilt.

  We took our seats, Brenda and I opposite each other, Marshall at his usual table across the aisle.

  ‘I saw the northern lights,’ I told Brenda. When she turned towards the window I could see tundra moving across the lenses of her blue-framed glasses.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, smiling, and nodding, as if agreeing that I had indeed seen the northern lights.

  ‘Aurora borealis!’ Marshall declared, without explanation or commentary, as if he were a commissionaire, announcing the aurora’s arrival at a grand ball. He was looking away from us at the tundra outside the right-hand, eastward window.

  ‘I’d never seen the lights before,’ I said.

  ‘Yep. Aurora borealis,’ he repeated, still gazing at the flat barren grounds. ‘The northern lights.’

  ‘I guess we’re pretty close to Churchill,’ Brenda said.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Marshall said.

  It was already past eight o’clock. The Hudson Bay was more than an hour behind schedule. Brenda fluffed out her brown hair.

  ‘You packed?’ Marshall demanded.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘You should be.’ He checked his watch. ‘Five minutes.’ Marshall’s leatherette travel bag was ready at his feet; his olive anorak was draped over a chair.

  I followed Brenda back to the roomettes and packed my things. The Hudson Bay pulled into Churchill exactly as Marshall had predicted. The three of us stepped down to the platform. We followed the baseball caps and lumberjack shirts of the Cree families through the small terminal building. The grain elevator loomed at the end of the line, on the edge of Hudson Bay: grey, massive, brutal, conceived on a different scale to every surrounding structure. At the terminal the track frayed into six or seven spurs along which cars of grain could travel the last few hundred yards to the silos. Black-and-white snow buntings flitted from spur to spur, pecking at spilled wheat. A pair of Canada geese honked in the muskeg between the station and the frozen Churchill River. The cold was bracing. The light was silver and fierce. The sense of space was di
zzying. I scanned the sky, looking for snow geese, but there was only the elevator, rearing at the end of the line like a vast tomb. An emblematic design: the railroad, time; the elevator, doom.

  I shook hands with Brenda and Marshall. We were wearing gloves and our handshakes were clumsy. Marshall set off for Gypsy’s Bakery, where he intended to wait out the day before boarding the train again that evening. He carried the leatherette bag in his left hand, the orthopaedic stick in his right, and he walked away down Kelsey Boulevard with the brisk, rolling gait I had first seen in Union Station, Winnipeg, just thirty-six hours before. I watched him go, then lugged my bags to the bed and breakfast on Robie Street.

  7 : CHURCHILL