Each day seemed warmer than the last. The wind had turned: now it blew from the south and south-west, a wind for migrants. Herring gulls arrived in increasing numbers. The ice started to break up on the Churchill River, softened by warm water flowing from the south. I walked with Saila along the tracks of Goose Creek as the thaw set in. Rivulets and pools appeared in the open ground between the tracks and the spruce trees. Moss clumps and sedge tussocks glistened with moisture. The air was rife with clicks: the furious Morse of wood frogs and boreal chorus frogs emerging from hibernation. Saila yawed from one side of the track to the other. She stopped for minutes at a time while her strength welled up again and the frogs persisted with their Geiger din.
One day, as usual, Saila woke me up at dawn. I let her out and stood for a moment on the steps of the cabin. Dreams were spilling over. Frogs were clicking in the tundra pools. And from the direction of the river, faint but unmistakable, I heard the calls of snow geese: twenty-five or thirty birds, blues and whites in about equal proportions, yapping like terriers, flying in a waving oblique line over the spruce trees towards the cabin in the half-light. Saila was blind and deaf but she noticed the flock, lifting her head from the waterbowl as the geese passed low above us, their wings thrumming like voltage. The dog went back to her drink. I went back to bed.
*
SAM, WEARING HIS blue wool toque and brown Bollé sunglasses in place of his broken black spectacles, was standing on the ice at Cape Merry beside two Polaris skidoos, styled yellow and black, like wasps. The ice in the mouth of the Churchill River, from the Cape to Munck’s Haven and Fort Prince of Wales, was rough and creamy, ocean chop modelled in plaster-of-paris; close to the shore it was buckled and heaved up in messy ructions by the action of the tides.
‘This ice you got holding tight to the shore is shorefast ice,’ Sam said in his soft voice. ‘About a quarter mile offshore you’ve got a lead – a band of open water between the shorefast ice and the floe. Shorefast ice doesn’t move, except up and down on the tide. The floe ice moves in and out on the wind. We’re going to head out to the lead. That’ll be what we call the floe edge.’
The sky was a clear, deep, voluminous blue. The skidoos were easy to operate: brake and throttle, no gears. The handles were heated. To cut the engine you hit a red button marked with a zigzag lightning bolt. We yanked the starter pulls.
I followed Sam out of the Churchill River to the ice of Hudson Bay. The going was awkward close to shore, but once we’d passed the Cape the ice was smooth and flat, with shallow meltpools and patches of slush that sprayed from the runners of the skidoos in sparkling fantails. We accelerated out into the bay, outracing the fumes of the engines. I tried to keep to Sam’s tracks, skirting faultlines, guiding the runners round potholes in the crust. Sam raised his right hand, the signal for a stop.
‘There’s a smaller lead just ahead,’ he shouted, competing with the engines. ‘Two or three metres of open water. Keep your speed up and we’ll skip right across it. Just go straight at it. Don’t let your speed drop.’
We circled back to get a run at the lead. I watched Sam’s skidoo splash across. Then I thumbed the throttle hard against the handle; the skidoo bore down on the open water; the hull bounced once on Hudson Bay before the curved tips of the runners, upturned like avocets’ bills, found solid ice again. We sped on out to the belt of open water separating the fast ice from the floe. The strength of the silence stunned me when we cut the engines. The silence was all the more intense for the context of the engines, and it took time for the ear to make out subtler sounds, the delicate undermusic of drips and tricklings, like the chinking of fine broken glass, as sinuous meltwater rills ran through the crust and the corners of iceblocks yielded, drop by drop, to the thaw.
The floe had driven again and again into the fast ice: the edges of both had buckled, heaving up reefs, boulders, plates and menhirs of packed snow. We stood at the edge of the lead. Sam’s brown Bollé sunglasses had side panes to cut out the glare on the flanks. The ice forms on our side were glistening, with blues and blue-greens ghosting in the whites, sunlight glancing off wet edges and corners. The tide was going out, the ebb streaming underneath us, the open water turbulent with eddying and upsurge. Across the lead, ice ramparts on the edge of the floe were cut with the precise shadows of cornices, overhangs, abutments and scarps.
‘I was out here this winter,’ Sam said, speaking softly again. ‘Forty below. Strong winds blowing from the north. My god, you could see the floe driving into the fast ice, bulldozing right in with the wind. Parts of it reared up and buckled, but there were other parts where the plate of the floe was actually lifting and crawling up over the fast ice. It moved real slow, with a noise like tyres spinning in a snowbank. When the floe lifted over the fast ice, brine flooded up from under. Seawater swilled up and froze right in front of me. My god, I watched it turn white. The water rushed up and suddenly it was ice.’
A ringed seal surfaced in the lead, eyed us for a moment, then swam away, ducking and cresting, sleek and pliant, like liquorice. Six Canada geese flew over us towards Fort Prince of Wales, their black necks, white chinstraps and pale rumps showing clearly against the empty sky, and then a pintail drake passed in a fast, skeeting glide along the lead, its tailfeathers long and pointed, a white scimitar line curving up its neck and head. A flock of snow geese, ten white-phase and five blue-phase birds, followed the lead to the north in a loose chevron, with a lone sandhill crane behind them, legs trailing, neck stretched without a kink, distinct from the pleated neck of a heron. I saw the crane’s bill open wide a second before I heard its magnificent shriek. My senses were reeling with ice gleam: the heady, implacable grandeur of a frozen sea.
*
MORE AND MORE BIRDS were arriving from the south. Ducks gathered in the tundra pools around Goose Creek. They muttered while the frogs clicked: the background uproar had texture now. Ruth had collected waste grain from the elevator and left heaps of it on the mossy ground behind the cabin. I kept my bird books and binoculars by the sink and tried to identify the passerines: American tree sparrows with rust-coloured heads and a dark spot on their breasts; white-crowned sparrows with zebra-striped scalps; dark-eyed juncos remembered from David’s bird-table at Riding Mountain.
One morning a truck pulled up outside the cabin. I heard the door slam, feet on the four stairs, two knocks on the door. An elderly man was standing in the porch, holding up a purple string net bag containing three bulbs of elephant garlic, produce of Chile, purchased at Spice World in Orlando, Florida.
‘I’m looking for Ruth,’ he said.
George came from Nevada, Iowa. He had smart Polaroid glasses, a grey moustache, and a grey fedora, a shade darker than the moustache. He was devoted to birds. Since retiring from the US Navy, he’d made the trip to Churchill once a year to photograph migrants. I was explaining that Ruth was attending her nephew’s wedding when George spotted something in the yard and reached for the binoculars on the sideboard.
‘I’ll be darned!’ he exclaimed. ‘If it isn’t a cowbird! A goddamn cowbird! Can you believe that! Knock me down with a feather! A cowbird!’
A brown-headed cowbird – a kind of blackbird with a brownish hood and a bill like a finch’s. Like the European cuckoo, the cowbird is a brood parasite, laying its eggs in the nests of other birds and leaving these foster parents to rear the young cowbirds as their own. When we looked up the cowbird in the field guide, I understood George’s excitement. The guide showed the winter and summer ranges of each species by means of shaded bands on maps of North America no bigger than postage stamps, and though the cowbird’s breeding range broached southern Manitoba and extended quite far north in Saskatchewan, it never got close to Hudson Bay. This cowbird outside the cabin at Goose Creek was either a pioneer or it was lost: a vagrant, like Gallico’s snow goose.
‘So Ruth’s in Tobermory, huh? And you’re here to look after the animals?’
I told George about the snow geese and my idea of following
them from one home to another. He reacted just as he had reacted to the cowbird.
‘I’ll be darned!’ he exclaimed.
We went out to watch birds, driving slowly in the Cheyenne along the tracks of Goose Creek, binoculars round our necks, maintaining the vigilance of sentries. We wound down the windows, admitting the tremendous frogsong. The tundra between the tracks and spruce trees was sodden, mossy, bristling with tussocks, glittering with meltwater pools. There were ducks everywhere. George and I raced each other to call out the names.
‘Pintail!’
‘Shoveler!’
‘Scaup!’
But George was the expert. He identified a flock of five bufflehead from their swift, low flight; I remembered their white head-dresses from South Dakota. He pointed to a circling northern harrier and knew that up close you’d see it had the round face of an owl. He spotted a new gull, fresh from the south: Bonaparte’s gulls, much smaller than herring gulls, with thin straight black bills instead of the heavy down-curved yellow bills of herring gulls, and wings angled at the elbow like a tern’s. George knew that bonies were named after Charles Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon; that they wintered along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts of America, and bred in a wide band from Alaska across the Yukon to James Bay – these gulls may have flown north-west from New England, or straight up the Central and Mississippi Flyways with the snow geese and cranes, or on the long haul from Orlando, Florida, like the elephant garlic. We saw an American kestrel perched on the nib of a spruce, flocks of snow geese in familiar undulating skeins, the black necks of Canada geese poking above sedge tussocks.
We left the truck and walked, stopping now and again to raise binoculars and scan the tundra. I spotted a wader, and George recognized it immediately as a lesser yellowlegs, grey-speckled, slender and elegant, with a long thin bill like a pipette, its light body raised high on straw-yellow legs, up to the shins in meltwater. The calls of snow geese some distance away made a faint tinkling like wind chimes or marinas where the halliards are pinging on metal masts, and the honking calls of Canada geese seemed to sound on both in-breath and out-breath, like harmonicas or the rubber black-bubble klaxons of classic cars.
‘Wow,’ whispered George. His binoculars were trained on the tundra. ‘Look at that.’
I raised my binoculars. I tried to steady the lens, as a sniper would. In the open ground were sedges, heaths, moss clumps, rivulets, small pools, thickets of shrubby willow, the browns of single-malt whiskies and old sellotape.
‘Bitterns,’ whispered George.
There they were: two American bitterns, Botaurus lentiginosus, cryptic, secretive birds, a kind of egret, standing motionless, practically invisible in their brown, black-stippled plumage, their necks stretched, their bills, which had the scabbard shape of herons’ bills, thrust skywards. The bitterns had noticed us and were pretending to be reeds, trusting that the genius of their posture and colouring would conceal them from view.
‘Oh my,’ whispered George. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
The birds didn’t flinch. They might have been whittled from wood, or chanced upon in the thick of a bole. Birders call them thunder-pumpers on account of their booming territorial calls, but this pair were committed to a strategy and wouldn’t risk a whimper.
‘Wish I had my camera,’ whispered George.
Later, alone again in the cabin, with Saila sleeping by the Cummer stove, her body twitching, as if in the grip of last throes, I referred to field guides and found the bittern’s pumping call rendered in the peculiar phonetics of birdbooks. Oong-KA-chunk! one offered. Oonk-a-lunk! another transcribed. I tried to imagine the sound of a bittern. I concentrated on the phonetic renderings. But how did you convert the signs to actual song?
*
RUTH’S CABIN, Sam’s gentle friendliness, George’s passion for birds: these were gifts. Without them, I might easily have lost heart. In the last bitter days of April, trudging back and forth through Churchill, I’d passed the travel agent on Kelsey Boulevard again and again, thinking how easy it would be to go in, buy a ticket, fly home. In Gypsy’s Bakery I’d made lists of things I had to do in England, as if I were already there. I’d thought of friends I would see, haunts I would revisit, foods I would eat, pieces of music I would listen to. And I’d nursed resentments against the place I was in, with its white storms and frontier harshness, the elevator bearing down like a force of oppression.
Most of all it was the cabin that lifted me, that restored my energies and refreshed my enthusiasm for the journey with snow geese. I had somewhere of my own, a secure base. Forms were distributed in fixed, reliable patterns. My feet learned the width of rooms, my hands the location of handles and switches. I settled into routines, unchanging from one day to the next – getting up at dawn to follow Saila down the corridor; pouring water from the yellow plastic drums into the sink for washing-up; spooning Missy’s Friskies into her bowl on the sideboard, Mrs Amos King of Pennsylvania seeking Strawberry Corelle dishes and other strawberry-themed items. I dusted Ruth’s framed proverbs and family photographs. I confided in Saila. I cooked comforting, familiar dishes. I slept with the curtains open, just in case I woke in the middle of the night with an aurora right outside the window, diaphanous and spectral.
One night I dreamed of the ironstone house. But it was in the wrong place. It wasn’t in the middle of England, beside a wood, with farmland sloping upwards to the south and west, a spire poking the sky to the north. The house was on the edge of Hudson Bay, with caribou and polar bears wandering in the garden, the windows filled with dazzling white: pure floe.
How could I not think of home, when so many birds were homing overhead? When I’d set out, going back had been too far off to contemplate, beyond the horizon, not visible for the curve of the sphere. But now return seemed imminent, within reach, as if I’d gained a coign of vantage and saw my home range in the distance, a day’s walk. Only Foxe Land lay between me and that known world. I was restless again, restless for the known. I felt the draw of the familiar, as if I’d entered a field of gravity. I wanted deep attachments instead of fleeting encounters. I wanted the things I saw and heard to accord with the things I remembered. I wanted roots. And all these were waiting beyond the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak.
Homesickness and nostalgia no longer refer to the same condition. Both describe states of return-suffering, but while the homesick individual longs to go back to a particular place, to return in space, the nostalgist longs to go back to the past, to return in time. Both can be a medium of escape. You might dream of going back to some idealized place or time because you are frightened or unhappy in the here or now, as I had been frightened and unhappy in hospital. Then, it was as if illness were itself a foreign country, where nothing was recognized or understood; as if being ill were a kind of expatriation, a forced removal from conditions to which you had become habituated and attached. Going home was at least a kind of going back. Home was a reprieve from the unpredictable.
I wanted to guard against such fantasies of escape. I couldn’t rush back to the old ironstone house whenever circumstances outside it became inhospitable. Nowhere was my sense of belonging as complete or unambiguous as it was in my childhood home, but if I saw that sense of belonging as something exclusive to the ironstone house, then I would never really leave, never grow up, never look for my place in the world. Somehow I had to turn my nostalgia inside-out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging, that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.
One afternoon I drove the Cheyenne along the coast to see the wreck sitting just offshore near Bird Cove. The shorefast ice had yet to break up, but further out, beyond the lead, the ice was already in pieces, with shard
s of blue sea showing between the floe hunks. I took the metalled road towards Cape Churchill, turning off down a track, pulling up close to the edge of Hudson Bay. I didn’t walk far from the Cheyenne, scared of polar bears hidden in the tundra hollows. Snow geese flew high overhead in loose, flexing chevrons. In front of me, gripped by ice, was a ship, rusted all over, decaying, its sad-looking cranes and davits and broken funnel distinct against the blue and white. It had been driven aground, caught in a windstorm in September 1961 while carrying nickel ore from Rankin Inlet to Montreal. I stood by the Cheyenne, panning across the wreck with my binoculars, flocks bleating high overhead. But all I could think about was the ship’s name.
The Ithaca.
*
THE NUMBERS OF snow geese flying over the cabin at Goose Creek began to drop in the second half of May. Many had already settled at the nearby La Pérouse Bay breeding colony; many were flying further north, up the coast of Hudson Bay, then swinging east to Southampton Island and Baffin Island. After walking past it so many times, thinking about going home, I pushed open the door of the travel agent on Kelsey Boulevard and booked myself on a flight to Baffin. The next day I picked Ruth up from the airport and drove her back to the cabin. I’d already said goodbye to Saila. Ruth said she wanted to pay me for looking after her house and animals, and I said I wanted to pay her for letting me.
The Snow Geese Page 19