The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  IT TOOK ME BY SURPRISE, that I should feel so lost without geese. For several days it seemed I did nothing but walk, tramping from one end of Churchill to the other, establishing the beginnings of a home range, getting to know the axis of Kelsey Boulevard and the streets that led off it eastwards to La Verendrye Avenue, orientating myself first by prominent landmarks like the grain elevator, the Anglican church and the Northern Stores, and then by smaller points of reference: a pink garage door, a blue roof. It was the end of April, but on the front of one house silver tinsel and a string of gaudy lights still picked out the outline of a Christmas tree, and in a yard a handmade sign, bordered with green tinsel, read simply, Peace on Earth.

  There wasn’t much snow. Snowmobiles and rusting Bombardier snow vans were pulled up on the dirt shoulders of the roads, out of their element. Four-wheeler all-terrain vehicles sped past, most of them ridden by children in quilted parkas, hoods thrown back, hoops of fur trim bouncing on their shoulders, and there were more ATVs parked in Hudson Square, where wire netting defined the back corner of a baseball diamond and parallel lines of snow were set hard in the tier-angles of the timber bleachers.

  The elevator loomed at the end of the line: a central section for cleaning grain and an annexe on either side, like wings, for storage. I walked along the spurs towards it, the rails spattered with bunting guano, the elevator tomb-grey, derelict, its windows smashed in by frost. A long enclosed gantry of rusting corrugated iron led to a gallery eighty feet above the wharf, with red chutes that would swing out over the water when the ice cleared, grain schussing down them into ships’ holds. A harbour tug, the George Kydd, rested in dry dock; two yellow dredging cranes sat on caterpillar tracks; steel masts carried coronas of arc lights high above the wharf.

  The Churchill River was frozen, the ice buckled where it had driven into the quayside, crumpling on itself, heaving up boulders and sooty rubble. Behind a breakwater, ice clamped the hulls of a larger tug, the Keewatin, and the four grey barges that in summer would take fuel and machinery to Inuit communities further north: Arviat, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet. Men in hard hats and coveralls were working on the barges, preparing them for the season. A welding torch fired deep in a hold: the entire day seemed seeded in that dense, blue-white flare.

  *

  THE CURLING CLUB had a bar and lounge with finely-scratched Perspex windows overlooking the rink’s four sheets of ice. Finding a space at the orange Formica ledge that ran below the windows, I pulled up a plastic stacking chair beside a man in his mid-thirties – burly, pale, clean-shaven, wearing glasses in black plastic frames bound at one hinge by a skin-coloured plaster, the man’s skin paler than the plaster. Teams representing local businesses – the Port Authority, Hyska’s Insurance, R&V Yamaha – gathered below us on the ice.

  My neighbour leaned forward, elbows on the orange Formica ledge, chin resting on a plinth of laced fingers. He wore a cherry-coloured acrylic sweater and a blue wool hat, or toque. His features – narrow eyes, flat nose, thin lips – fought shy of making too big a splash in his wide face. We talked as curling got under way, the lounge filling up with supporters of one team or another, the air thickening with hubbub and the fug of crushed-in bodies and cigarettes. Sam had served as a mechanic with the Canadian Air Force; now he was a machinist at the port. He spoke with the diffidence of someone expecting a setback.

  ‘This isn’t the season for polar bears,’ he said. ‘You don’t see too many tourists in Churchill unless they come for polar bears. I don’t see why anyone would come to Churchill unless they wanted to see polar bears.’

  ‘I’m looking for snow geese,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the snow geese to come up on their spring migration. I started off in Texas and came north more or less with the geese.’

  ‘That’s pretty far, eh? How long did it take you?’

  ‘I’ve been travelling for a couple of months.’

  ‘I guess snow geese’ll be here soon. We’ve got Canadas here already, and snow geese come up soon after. So you like curling?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

  ‘Must look pretty strange. Rocks and brooms and such.’

  ‘Are you a curler?’

  ‘Me? No way. I don’t even like it. There’s not much to do round here. It’s just good to get out of the house.’

  A curling team, Sam explained, consists of four players, led by a skip. The game is played on a track or sheet of ice forty-six yards long from foot line to foot line. At each end of the sheet there’s a tee surrounded by two circles, one red, one blue; the area inside the circles is the house, twelve feet in diameter. The player has to slide the curling rock towards the house, aiming for the tee, letting go before he reaches the hog line. Two of his team-mates can use brooms to polish the ice in front of the stone, clearing away grit, straw or ice crystals, the friction of the brushes generating heat, melting the ice, keeping it smooth and fast, or ‘keen’.

  Players were testing grey curling rocks, feeling for the weight of a stone by easing it forward and back, each stone shaped like an Edam cheese, buffed to a shine, glinting in the bright lights. The bar was crowded, stifling, rowdy with laughter and argument.

  Sam and I went downstairs to the rinkside, pushing through a swing door, and I was instantly woken and pepped up by the chill off the ice, invigorated, as if I’d stepped out into the purged, clarion tone of high mountain air. We sat on a bench below a poster reminding players of the six ‘essential’ rules of curling, the top of Sam’s toque right under the words Each player must deliver when his turn comes. Skips were squatting in the houses, shouting instructions; stones were rumbling down the sheets; players were pulling on flat-soled Bauer and Asham curling shoes, or handling Duke 8-Ender and Lowry’s 100% Horse Hair brooms, or crouching, like runners in starting blocks, in the black rubber Marco hacks set in the ice behind each house. The chilled rink resounded with the tocks of stones caroming off other stones.

  ‘Have you ever been on a snowmachine?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s pretty fun, I guess.’

  He offered to take me out on to Hudson Bay; I accepted earnestly. He leaned forward, elbows on knees; he cupped his face in his hands, letting his chin rest on their heels. Now we gave all our attention to the curlers. Some used the strength in their arms to push the stone down the sheet; others tapped the power in their legs, kicking out from the hacks and sliding, stone in hand, eight, nine, ten yards up the ice, right up to the hog line. They slid until the friction on their gloves, shoes and jeans began to slow them down, and only then let go, eyes fixed on the stones as they sailed away towards the tees, plying the centreline or veering in sad, inexorable drifts to left or right. Sweepers kept pace with the rocks, scrubbing at the ice in front of their feet, skips shouting ‘Up! Up! Up!’ at them while players on neighbouring sheets scooted from house to house – one shoe slippered in a Teflon slider, the other with its tread exposed for traction – and waiting curlers knocked back bottles of Labatt Blue and Bacardi Breezer, rocks colliding musically with other rocks, in and around the houses.

  *

  FOR DAYS, GOOSELESS, without purpose, feeling increasingly lonely and foolish, I walked. People warned me not to walk along the coast, to watch out for polar bears: I never strayed far beyond the small woodframe houses. I walked to the elevator and Cape Merry, gazed out across the great white plain of Hudson Bay, then walked back down the railway line towards Winnipeg. I sat in Gypsy’s Bakery drinking tea, writing in my notebook, or installed myself in the library, leafing through books, staring at the fibreglass polar bear that stood on the shelves, stepping from Fiction D–F to Fiction J–M. Winds howled in from the north; temperatures dropped to ten below. My hopes fell with them. I knew better than to expect geese in such conditions.

  Solitary, adrift, craving familiar ritual, I ran through a white storm to the tiny Anglican church, its walls shipped to Churchill from England in 1890. North-easterly winds lashed in across the frozen bay throughout
the service of Morning Prayer, catching the church broadside with cuffs and buffetings. There were tin panels inscribed with the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments, a rectangular canvas painted with the glyphs of Cree script, and a wooden plaque engraved with a sentence from Ecclesiastes: ‘Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.’ The church shook whenever the wind gusted. A congregation of four, huddled beneath a pendant electric heater, sang hymns with no accompaniment in this precarious fastness by the sea.

  Ruth greeted me warmly in the anteroom. She was in her fifties, a few isolated white strands in her neat black hair, chips of red stained glass hanging from her ears. She wore a chunky hand-knitted zip-up sweater with a flopping collar. Two Canada geese were knitted into the front of the sweater, facing each other across the zip. Ruth zipped it up, bringing the bills of the two geese together in a tender kiss, then nuzzled her chin in the neck of the jersey.

  We sat down under black-and-white photographs of pioneer Anglicans. I said that I was from England; Ruth said that her parents had come to Canada from London in 1934. They had settled in Toronto, where her mother had found work as a chocolate dipper.

  ‘She’d sit down just like this,’ she said, ‘with a marble board in front of her and all the centres ready to her left. The centres might be, I don’t know, a nutty something or caramel or what have you. One of the servers would come by with a pail of fresh chocolate. There was one server for every five dippers. She’d ladle out some chocolate on the marble surface and my mother would swill it around a bit so it cooled down and she got it to just the right temperature. Then she’d pick up one of the centres and roll it once, twice, and whatever dripped off at the end would be that little peak you get on chocolates. Those liquid centres such as cherry would actually be hard before she dipped them, but the chocolate coating would be hot, which would melt the cherry centre. When she came home she smelled of chocolate. She always loved to eat chocolate, but later on she developed diabetes. She couldn’t eat it any more. That was always something missing from her life, that she couldn’t eat chocolate.’

  The anteroom smelled of chocolate.

  ‘What brings you to Churchill?’ Ruth asked.

  I told her about the snow geese.

  ‘I see.’ She didn’t seem surprised. ‘So you’re just waiting around. Where are you staying?’

  ‘In the bed and breakfast on Robie Street.’

  ‘Well, look, I’m thinking out loud, but maybe here’s an idea. My nephew’s getting married in Tobermory, Ontario. That’s on the Bruce Peninsula, between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay? I’m going to the wedding and I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks. I’ve been looking for someone to take care of my animals. You could stay in my house at Goose Creek on condition you looked after my dog and my cat. It’s a good place to see birds. It would be a nice place to wait for geese in.’

  My spirits lifted; I wanted to embrace her.

  *

  TWO DAYS LATER I drove Ruth to the airport in her pickup, a battered red Chevrolet Cheyenne. She was wearing a white sweatshirt printed with an English country cottage: a thatched roof; a garden brimming with roses and honeysuckle; a gate ajar. She said that the radio in the pickup was stuck on the country and western station, and I’d do best to switch it off and listen out for birds. Temperatures were above freezing now, the white storms all but forgotten. There were Canada geese in the thawing tundra ponds near the airport; the first herring gulls were up from the south. I left Ruth at the terminal and drove alone on the road to Goose Creek.

  The road ran south, alongside the railway, metalled for a few miles, then narrowing into a rutted dirt track that entered a forest of weak-looking, stunted spruce trees.

  The house was set in a clearing, a long, low cabin built of cedar trunks, planed flat and painted a pale matt red, with thermometers screwed into the doorframe, wind-cups spinning on the roof-angle: Ruth recorded their data in weather journals.

  Her animals, my charges, were lounging outside the cabin, at the foot of the four stairs that led up to the door. Saila was three-quarters wolf and a quarter husky, with the colouring of a wolf (white legs and chest, black and grey on top) and the figure of a Shetland pony: fourteen years old, lame, deaf, almost blind, her dark eyes swirled through with milkiness. The cat, Missy, was slim, silver-grey, a paragon of stealth. I said hello to both, but they paid me no attention as I carried my bags up the stairs into the cabin.

  Inside, like an old ship: very dark, with everything crowded in, shimmed cedar trunks varnished deep caramel brown, the shelves fitted with lips to prevent glasses and recipe books from falling should the house decide to pitch or keel. There was a heavy black Cummer wood-burning stove with a funnel running to the ceiling, a stack of spruce logs in the back porch. A black wrought-iron match-holder was screwed into the wood behind the stove, and all around it were paler scratches in the varnish where matches had been struck on the friction of the grain. Ruth had left me a note on a yellow Post-It saying, ‘House may creak. It sits on tundra.’

  Missy’s playthings hung on cords from the ceiling beams: a yellow Sesame Street Big Bird and a fluffy purple mouse, dangling on strings of baubles and bells. Framed prints of wildfowl and hunting scenes hung on the walls: American avocets lifting from a pond, following the lines of their own upturned bills; hunters rowing out in a small boat to place decoys in a marsh, the sun rising behind them; four wood duck standing at the edge of a stream, with curling maple leaves strewn across the mud and water, the drakes painted like harlequins, sumptuous as geishas with their bright red eyes, white face stripes, iridescent manes, and imperial purple chests, ‘wood duck’ a plain name indeed for such a glitzy show.

  Yes, the living-room had the character of a ship, with its shimmed logs, wood cabinets, lipped shelves, skillets and casseroles hanging on hooks, Aladdin mantle lamps with glass chimneys and fabric wicks, the brass ship’s clock manufactured by Hüger of West Germany, and the matching barometer, callibrated in millibars, conditions displayed in three languages: Schön Fair Beau; Veränderlich Change Variable. There was a gas cooker, a sink, and water in plastic drums by the spruce logs in the porch, and behind the cabin was a patch of sodden, mossy ground where squirrels and snowshoe hares ventured out from the trees and an old door was laid as a ramp to the outdoor privy. I unpacked my books and folders, piling them on the table, thanking Ruth out loud, as if her house would hear me.

  I was glad to have a base, somewhere to settle, establish myself, gather my thoughts. Ruth had mentioned that she was a crafter, a quilter and embroiderer, but I didn’t understand what this meant until I passed through into the corridor to look for my bedroom. Fabric, everywhere: frills and ruchings, pelmets and valances of pleated chintz, lace tablecloths, plush pull-through rugs, flouncy knitted holders for plant pots and fruit bowls, rag dolls slumped in corners, woolly ornamental swans with drooping necks, tea cosies resembling igloos and tuxedoes, bright-coloured furbelow in all directions – as if you’d stumbled into a nest feathered with soft things and could throw yourself anywhere you liked without fear, there would always be some heap of feather bolsters or folded eiderdowns to cushion the fall.

  The corridor, which Ruth used as her workspace, was almost impassable for ironing boards; vises and pine planks for quilting frames; heavy pinking shears; folders of stencils, templates and patterns; a dressmaker’s dummy with dials to swell or contract the bust, waist and hips; boxes of spools, reels, thimbles, and red party balloons to help grip needles as you pulled them through the heaviest fabrics. Here were three sewing machines – a White, a Singer, a Pfaff – and piles of gingham, flannel, calico and velveteen, and white Dacron batting and polyester fibrefill for the stuffing of quilts and cushions. And then gear for patchwork, piecework and crazy quilts; felt angels and roses for appliqué; hummocks of rag, lace, lint and old stockings; wicker trays of pine cones and blowzy artificial flowers; and reels and rolls of cotton, nylon cord, jute twine, raffia straw, twill tape, bia
s tape and worsted-weight acrylic wools. I was smiling even before my eyes came to rest on the jars of gaudy bobbles, pompoms, shiny doodads, fake feathers, sequins and glitters of silver and gold, and the upbeat embroidered proverbs that grinned out at me from scrolling frames: Happiness is a Warm Iron; Quilting Forever! Housework – Whenever!

  I reached my bedroom, the last room in the cabin. Ruth had put clean sheets on the bed and covered it with a sky-blue quilt, and on top of the quilt she’d placed a pair of homemade pillows shaped like angels’ wings – two wings of shining white velveteen, each feather a purse of fibrefill sewn shut with gold thread, arranged correctly, heel to heel, spread wide against the sky-blue, as if inviting me to lie back and feel their fit between my shoulderblades. There were billowy white sheers in the window, and generous pleated curtains of floral chintz. The walls were hung with tapestry pictures of mallard and Canada geese, and with silk scarves tied in cascading and butterfly bows, and on either side of the bed were luxuriant pull-though rugs in which my feet sank almost to the ankles. I put down my bags, rejoicing. Ruth’s cabin was more than a home. It was a world.

  *

  I WROTE AT THE TABLE in the living-room. Saila slept on the red carpet in front of the Cummer stove. Her chest heaved. She snored and twitched. Her legs no longer hinged at the knees: they were as stiff as crutches. Each step forward beat the odds, bucking a trend. She tottered. She moved one foot and waited before following its lead, as if to verify that the limb could still support her weight. She staggered into the bedroom every morning between four and five o’clock, nosing me awake. I’d open my eyes to her big wolf’s face, dawn light caught in the sheers. I’d get up to let her out, and we’d walk down the corridor together, one step at a time, blind Saila listing from side to side, slewing into stacks of boxes. One morning she knocked over a box marked ‘Christmas Decorations’ and stood confused in a spill of rosettes, pompoms and papertwist angels.

  I spooned tins of beef flavour TriV dog food into Saila’s dish at the foot of the steps and measured out biscuits in an old margarine bowl. Missy ate tins of Friskies. Her dish sat on the sideboard, next to the sink, on top of a back issue of Country Woman magazine, open at the Readers Are Wondering page. Victoria Soukup of Iowa had written: ‘My hobby is collecting turtle memorabilia. Does anyone have adages involving turtles to share?’ Pam Simakis of West Virginia wished to learn to make patio lights from plastic flowerpots and toy biplanes from empty soda cans. Charlotte Lovegrove of Indiana asked, ‘Any ideas where I might obtain a player piano roll of the song Back Home Again in Indiana?’