The Snow Geese Read online

  We emerged from the cloud. Gusts came at the pickup broadside: we were heading on a beam reach, a prairie schooner; we keeled a little in the strong winds. The dirt track, rising slightly, scored an impeccable line ahead of us to the horizon. Abandoned grain elevators stood by the track, tin panels hanging from cross-braced timber frames. Prairie rolled out on all sides. Clouds raced northwards with the geese, as if to cloud breeding grounds. Sometimes, through gaps in the cloud cover, sunlight flooded the open country. Winds were starting to break up the ice on pothole lakes, driving wreckage in thick crystal flotsams against the northern banks, raising whitecaps on the water. We caught whiffs of a pungent, rotten-egg smell: hydrogen sulphide produced by vegetation rotting under the ice, suddenly released by the thaw. It was the land’s exhalation, as if the prairies had held their breath all winter. Michael took deep breaths of it, filling his lungs.

  ‘I love this smell,’ he said. ‘It’s a sign of spring to me. That’s why I like this smell so much. I love this smell.’

  We crossed the Elm River. We passed the Leola Country Club, where a few incongruous dark green cedars betrayed the landscaping of a golf course.

  ‘Leola’s the Rhubarb Capital of the World,’ Michael said. ‘They have a three-day rhubarb festival here each June. You can get rhubarb fixed in more ways than you can imagine. There are a lot of abandoned farmsteads out here, and the only sign anyone was ever living there are rhubarb plants which just keep on growing.’

  Between Leola and Eureka we passed a hill: a prairie knob. On the side of the hill, white rocks had been arranged in the letters LHS, which stood for Leola High School.

  ‘Next week,’ Michael said, ‘it’ll be EHS, for Eureka High School. Kids drive out from one town or another and shift the rocks. Back and forth. They just rearrange the stones. I remember once the stones had been laid out to say BEER ME, and once they said 69 ME, which is when we thought enough’s enough, and rolled the rocks downhill. Came back a couple of days later and there they were again: LHS or EHS, the same old business.’

  The prairie was less flat now, billowing like a sheet thrown out across a mattress: low, rolling grassland hills all the way to the Missouri River. Dirt plumed from the pickup’s back wheels.

  ‘This is the coteau,’ Michael said. ‘Beautiful country. Most of what you’re seeing are grassland easements. That’s land the government has purchased with Duck Stamp dollars and set aside from farming. Hunters have to buy Duck Stamps before they get to shoot waterfowl, and that money’s used to protect breeding and staging areas for ducks and geese. Isn’t this beautiful? This is how I imagine it used to be. No trees. Just grasslands and wetlands from the James River to the Missouri River. Prairie fires, bison and wind to stop the trees from getting a hold. If we were driving out here three hundred years ago, there’d be bison, elk, antelope, grizzlies and wolves, and no raccoons, no white-tailed deer, no red fox, no pheasants. We’ve changed it. Everything is so different. I’d love to have seen this country three hundred years ago. Used to be a lot of spotted skunk, but they’re pretty much gone. One per cent of the original tallgrass prairie’s left in the United States, but in South Dakota we’ve got six or seven per cent so we’re doing pretty well. You can’t recreate prairie. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s gone for ever once it’s ploughed.’

  The coteau had stone colours in this heavy grey light: ash-white, dun, tan, fawn. In the grasslands were traces of Native American camps, spots where bands of Dakota Sioux had made temporary homes amongst the Indian grass, panic grass, switchgrass, wild rye, sprangletop, dropseed and needle-and-thread. Their tepees, like coffee mugs, had left rings.

  ‘The colours have bleached out over the winter,’ Michael said, ‘but in the fall I think the colours of the prairies, the golds, match any colour of woodland, even the fall shows of Vermont and the Appalachians. I’ve been over in New England when the maples are turning scarlet but I’ll take the prairies any day. Sunrise when light’s on the native grasses. The wind runs gold through the little bluestem. Isn’t this beautiful? All you can see is prairie. No trees. I love country like this.’

  I looked at Michael. He was looking from the road to the open prairie on both sides, his eyes fervent behind steel-framed glasses – a man in his element, inhabiting just the life that life intended. Close to the track, on our right, one hill rose above the hillocks, a distinct prairie knob, a prominence in the low, undulating land.

  ‘We could stop for a moment,’ Michael said. ‘Might be nice to take a walk up there.’

  He pulled over on to the shoulder of the track. He had to push hard to open his door into the wind. We put on coats and climbed barbed wire, one hand on the pommel of a fence-post. The wind ripped past our ears, gusting up to forty-five miles per hour. The grasses threshed and flailed. There was the roar of the wind in our ears, the flag-like snap and putter of our coats, the deep swishing of wind through stalks, leaves and seedheads across the coteau. We had to shout to make ourselves heard.

  ‘Bromegrass!’ Michael yelled, pointing at the grass around our feet. ‘Kentucky bluegrass! Little bluestem!’ I walked close to him, wanting to hear the names. He emphasised the names, pitching them against the wind. ‘Western wheatgrass! Echinacea! Leafy spurge!’

  We reached the slope of the prairie knob and made for the summit, wind driving at our backs. The wind hit the slope and accelerated, racing across the summit at sixty miles per hour, its force gathered on the long sweep of the Great Plains. All around us the prairie receded, falling away on the curve of the hemisphere. The wind was part vandal, smashing the ice in marshes and sloughs, and part thief, vanishing northwards with birds in its pockets. We leaned back into it, trusting our weight to the windspeed. Michael had spread his arms out wide, for balance, like a skydiver. He was lying back at close to forty-five degrees, and he was laughing, but I couldn’t hear it: the wind filched his laughter along with the birds. Still reclining on the wind, Michael pointed skywards. I looked up. Snow geese were flying high overhead, not arranged in orderly Vs and echelons, but tumbling in loose clusters and pairs, careening on the gale, not entirely in control of their own passage.

  The following day I would pack my bags in the white motel room and drive the Topaz north, first to Fargo, then on across the Canadian border to Winnipeg. A few miles out of Aberdeen I would see flocks of snow geese flying southwards, working hard into the wind – geese that had hurried into North Dakota, encountered storms and inclement temperatures, and were now undertaking retreat migrations, fighting their way south to stay inside the scope of spring. But when I stood on top of the prairie knob, with the glorious grassland swales of the Missouri coteau all around, everything airborne was travelling northwards: winds, clouds, geese. The sky itself seemed intent on Canada. Michael and I lay back as far as we dared and watched the snow geese go, each of us laughing inaudibly to the other.

  5 : RIDING MOUNTAIN

  IN 1763, JEROME GAUB, a Dutch professor of medicine and chemistry at the University of Leiden, related homesickness to unrequited love. ‘How the force and continuity of the functions slacken,’ he wrote; ‘how the condition of the body languishes and all powers of the economy weaken and collapse when an ardent wish for some desired object is too long drawn out! Do not even the sturdiest races exhibit men who are troubled by peculiar ailments when assailed by a yearning, to which they do not yield soon enough, to return home after having tarried overlong in foreign parts, ailments that may end fatally when all hope of return is lost? How often do beautiful maidens and handsome youths, caught in the toils of love, grow ghastly pale and waste away, consumed by melancholy, green-sickness, or erotomania, when delays occur or the hope of possession is lost?’

  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nostalgia was widely reported in the European armies, especially among soldiers who had been conscripted or impressed. Military physicians reported ‘epidemics’ of nostalgia. Most doctors believed that people from rural backgrounds were more susceptible to the con
dition than those who came from urban environments. Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, Inspector of Health of the French armies under Napoleon, discussed nostalgia at length in his surgical essays. Drawing on observations made during the catastrophic retreat from Moscow, Larrey divided the course of the disease into three stages. First, an exaggeration of the imaginative faculty: patients thought of their homes as enchanting and delightful, and expected to see relatives and friends advancing towards them. Second, the appearance of physical symptoms: fever, gastric disturbance, ‘wandering pains’. Finally, depression, listlessness, weeping, and sometimes suicide. Like Johannes Hofer, Larrey emphasized the importance of distraction to prevent the onset of nostalgia: music, recreation, regular exercise – anything to keep the mind occupied, to keep the patient’s thoughts away from home.

  Weir Mitchell, a doctor in the American Civil War, reported that ‘cases of nostalgia, homesickness, were serious additions to the peril of wounds and disease’. In 1943, David Flicker and Paul Weiss of the US Army Medical Corps published a paper entitled ‘Nostalgia and its Military Implications’ in the journal War Medicine. ‘The greatest single factor in waging successful warfare is morale,’ the authors began. ‘A most important factor in attaining morale among fighting men is the preventing or overcoming of nostalgia.’ Defining their terms, Flicker and Weiss quoted from The New International Encyclopedia of 1905: ‘Nostalgia is a feeling of melancholy caused by grief on account of absence from one’s home or country, of which the English equivalent is homesickness. Nostalgia represents a combination of psychic disturbances and must be regarded as a disease. It can lead to melancholia and even death. It is more apt to affect persons whose absence from home is forced rather than voluntary.’

  Writing during the Second World War, Flicker and Weiss reported many of the same features of nostalgia that had so intrigued military physicians during the Napoleonic Wars. They considered nostalgia to be ‘a contagious disorder which may spread with the speed of an epidemic through a company or camp’. They saw cases of homesickness increase as circumstances became more challenging, observing that ‘whenever a division is moved a great number of patients pour into the neuropsychiatric wards’. They were in no doubt as to the force of the condition: ‘Men in order to free themselves from nostalgia are capable of committing any sort of infraction or crime that is not sociologically or morally abhorrent. With this fact the military police are well acquainted; so when a soldier is absent without leave the police usually are certain that if they go to his home they can there apprehend him.’ And, like Larrey, Flicker and Weiss point to the tendency of the nostalgic patient to idealize his home environment. ‘As Freud has often indicated,’ they wrote, ‘distance lends enchantment, so that one forgets the many unpleasantnesses of his home or usual surroundings and can think only of the more desirable aspects.’

  Certainly, the acute nostalgia I had experienced in hospital was precipitated by challenging circumstances, and had taken hold when my mind, without the diversion of companionship, activity or amusement, had the opportunity to ruminate and linger. Recent studies have shown that homesick boarding-school children are more likely to report homesickness at night or first thing in the morning: the day’s events, by offering effective competition for the children’s attentions, ward off the longing for home. Hofer and Larrey were quite right to emphasize the importance of distraction. And certainly, my desire in hospital was to go back to a place of unequivocal comfort, characterized not by argument, difficulty or sadness but by a set of reassuring images: rooks, the Sor Brook, animals huddled together in curtain folds.

  *

  THE DARK PINK CARPET in my Winnipeg hotel room was blotted with black stains, and there was a threadbare patch one step in from the door where footfalls were concentrated. Shabby, skin-pink curtains, smelling of cigarettes, were not enlivened by floral motifs in different pinks, as rooms are not enlivened by vases of dead flowers. The wallpaper’s fuchsia and coral stripes had almost faded to a single tone; the dresser’s pink paint was peeling on the drawers. Exposed water pipes shivered in flimsy, half-screwed fittings. A broad window gave on to Ellice Avenue, and that night, when the storm swept in, snow blew across it in flakes as big and fluffy as goose down feathers. Winnipeg was white in the morning.

  Winter weather. No snow goose would fly north into conditions like these. No wonder I had seen geese fighting back into the south winds, retreating from the Canadian border. The birds were waiting for spring. As soon as conditions improved, snow geese migrating up the Mississippi, Missouri and Red River valleys would converge on the grain fields west of Winnipeg. The fields of the Portage Plains were the last major staging post on the journey from winter to breeding grounds. Geese would pause here to rest and replenish fat stores while the thaw worked northwards ahead of them. Hudson Bay and the first nesting areas lay another 1,000 miles to the north-east.

  I’d read about the great quantities of birds involved in what John Dewey Soper called ‘the spring bivouac in Manitoba’. In 1942 Soper wrote of ‘amassments’, ‘mobilizations’, ‘swarming legions of the air’: the war in Europe furnished such military figures. ‘Is it any wonder,’ Major Burt Gresham had asked in the Winnipeg Free Press in 1936, ‘that estimates of the numbers vary greatly; that observers meet with politely lifted eyebrows of doubt when they talk of geese in terms of six cipher figures? How many birds would you say you saw in telling someone of a flight where the leading birds were dropping into the lake while the tail of the flock was still out of sight? Then how many would there be in a series of such flights, say at about half hour intervals during the late afternoon to long after darkness had fallen?’

  Violence came with such numbers. Farmers launched skyrockets at night to frighten off the migrant hordes. ‘When one of these great flocks go up off a black, ploughed field,’ wrote one observer, ‘the effect is as if a volcanic eruption had blown the whole field into the air.’ Once, near Elgin, Manitoba, snow geese were seen flying north-east during an electrical storm. The flock, 300 yards wide and three-quarters of a mile long, was flying at about 180 feet. Witnesses described a flash of lightning, a thunderclap, an entire portion of the flock falling to the ground, struck dead. Other birds, temporarily stunned, dropped with them but revived just in time to soar away.

  I’d hoped to move north with the geese from the Dakota lakes to the Portage Plains. But I hadn’t guessed the extent to which the weather would determine the pace or fluency of the journey north. I’d seen the migration plotted as a clean, unbroken arc from Texas to Foxe Land, imagining the flight to be as easy and consistent as the line, a graceful curve from one point to another. But the arc’s grace was a fiction. The snow geese were improvising their way from winter to breeding grounds, stage by stage, according to the cue of the season. Now I felt foolish. I had no freedom. I was shackled to snow geese. If the snow geese were waiting, I would have to wait.

  *

  DAVID LIVED ON the edge of Riding Mountain National Park, 150 miles north-west of Winnipeg. A friend had given me his address, and we had corresponded before I left for Texas. David was an outdoorsman with a degree in biology, and he seemed to like my idea of following the snow geese from Eagle Lake to Foxe Land. I called him from the pink hotel room and explained my predicament.

  ‘You could come out to Riding Mountain,’ he said. ‘There’s a cabin. It’s pretty simple. But you could stay there until those geese get their act together.’

  ‘I don’t mind simple. How do I get there?’

  ‘There’s a bus. The Grey Goose.’

  I caught the Grey Goose on Easter Day, leaving Winnipeg for plains pieced out in mile-square sections, each section quilted with fresh snow. Here and there you could see farm buildings in horseshoe windbreaks, and cylindrical galvanized grain elevators standing in the wide open like Cape Canaveral launch towers, and when the faint outline of hills appeared to the north it was as if you were seeing land from the deck of a ship – as if the sea’s flatness had run its course. The hills
of Riding Mountain marked the extent of the prairies. From here it was boreal conifer forest all the way to the tundra of the far north. The sky was clear blue above the spruce trees. It was below freezing, but there was no snow.

  The bus stop was an isolated gas pump, out of order. I jumped up and down to keep my blood moving. I kept an eye on the clear blue sky, just in case there were geese. I could smell the trees. I’d waited for about twenty minutes when a brown Suburban drew up at the gas pump.

  ‘David?’

  ‘You look cold. Jump in.’

  He was past sixty, a retired teacher with grey, mussed, curly hair, and striking thick black eyebrows like two stripes of tar. He wore jeans, a pale blue Columbia fleece jersey, and white socks in Eddie Bauer galoshes. He kept a tin of Copenhagen chewing tobacco on the dashboard of the Suburban, and every few minutes he reached for the tin, unscrewed the lid with the fingers of the hand in which he held it, and tucked a fingertip of the fibrous paste inside his cheek. He spoke very slowly, with long pauses; he seemed to weigh each noun and verb like a small bag of sugar. Sometimes he used a little two-syllable cough to fill his pauses, and soon I began to hear the cough as a word, part of his vocabulary.

  ‘So. How are the geese?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve left them behind,’ I said. ‘I think they’ve dropped back with the bad weather.’

  ‘Geese can be sensitive that way.’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve had all the geese to the south of me.’

  ‘They’ll be up pretty soon. Everything’s still frozen up here. Soon as that ice starts shifting, you’ll see geese.’

  We were driving through forests of white spruce, dark and evergreen, and trembling aspens with slender white trunks – tall, straight, close-packed trees rising on both sides of the road like the walls of a canyon, with dogwood and shrubby willow growing in the understorey, perfect browse for moose and elk. Sometimes the trees made way for sumpy frozen ponds fringed with dun rushes, and sometimes mounds of branch, brush and mud rose up from the middle of the ponds – beaver lodges in which underwater entrances, nest dens, feeding chambers and access tunnels were excavated.