The Snow Geese Read online

  ‘Bought it at an antique sale,’ the Viking said. ‘Got it for peanuts, on account of the marks all down the side here.’ He pointed to an end panel. The wood was notched with short horizontal lines in blue ballpoint pen. Not one of the lines ran quite true, the ballpoint working across the grain. Each line was accompanied by a date. I recognized the marks: a child had stood against the bookcase to be measured. I thought, instantly, of home, the white wall in the bathroom, beside my mother’s grey heron, our heights inching their way towards the ceiling, heels to the skirting-board.

  That afternoon the storm reached Riding Mountain. After a couple of hours snow lay thick on Lake Timon and the forest tracks. In the evening, when I set out from the house up the hill towards the cabin, snow was still driving. There was no moonlight. The track was a faint white band between impenetrable black woods. I trudged through the snow, head tucked low, my body angled forward against the wind like a letter in italics. Snow had drifted against the cabin door. Once inside, I switched on the lamp. The cat appeared, the red shade’s trick of pinholes and slits. The whoof of the Protection’s gas igniting startled me. The cabin creaked and shook in the wind. It seemed the storm might wrest it loose and set it down in Oz.

  The grey plastic cat was still bursting from the drum on the window-sill. I tried to avoid its stare. At the back of the drum there was an old-fashioned clockwork key. I turned it; I heard it ratchet up a spring, click by click. When I let go, a mechanism inside the drum was set in motion, producing a quaint, pinging, musical-box melody, causing the cat’s body to sway and twist, its arms moving up and down, reconfiguring the shadows in the chintz gown. The melody slowed as the clockwork ran down; the pauses between pings got longer; the cat’s dancing became a sequence of dreamy throes, as though it were dancing in deep water, its eyes remaining wide, unblinking.

  The music stopped; the cat froze. Wind blustered through the trees, rocking the cabin in sudden surges. I imagined myself inside a tiny box of light in the middle of the forest. I thought about snow geese, still held up in the south by winter weather. I wondered how long I would have to wait until we were under way again. A gust caught the cabin, shaking it, tripping the drum’s clockwork. The mechanism played three last unexpected notes. I turned quickly, shuddering, the cat’s head moving through one last quarter-turn, snow driving across the window behind it, rose-lit by the lamp, the howls of wolves and coyotes no longer audible for the wind. I undressed and got into the narrow bed, shivering, curling up, thinking of home.

  *

  THE SWIFTS CAME BACK each year, in the last week of May. These were common swifts, Apus apus, sooty black all over save for a pale chin, known variously as skeer devils, swing devils, jack squealers, screech martins, shriek owls or screeks – names that alluded to the bird’s fiendish screaming flight and diabolic black appearance. Swifts like to nest in nooks in the stonework of high walls, under eaves, even among rafters, and show a high degree of philopatry (from the Greek words philein, ‘to love’, and patris, ‘homeland’), with generation after generation returning to favoured nesting sites. The advantages of this behaviour are clear: if a bird is familiar with its environment, it is likely to be less susceptible to predators and more efficient at finding food. Philopatry tends to develop in species that nest in stable, reliable sites such as cliffs or buildings, rather than in species that use unstable sites like river sandbars. There’s no point returning to a place if you can’t rely upon its qualities.

  Every year swifts returned from Africa to the medieval ironstone house in the middle of England, making a beeline for the eaves on the warmer south side, the stone slate roof tiles colonized by lichens in tie-dyed coronas of white, rust and pale green. My father would expect them like dinner guests on 3 May, and they would stay at the house through June and July, until at the beginning of August they set off for Africa, fledglings leaving for winter grounds several days before their parents. A juvenile swift, like a juvenile cuckoo, depends on its inherited, endogenous migratory programme and compasses to lead it south through Europe to western Africa. From there, common swifts filter gradually southwards with the inter-tropical weather front (a confluence of airstreams that draws up insects from sub-Saharan Africa and dissipates at the Gulf of Guinea in late autumn) before turning east across the continent. In the winter, swifts ringed in Britain are most often found in Malawi. One in six perishes on the way.

  Common swifts have long, thin, recurved wings, and short bills with wide gapes, evolved for catching airborne insects: they feed on the aerial plankton of aphids, beetles, spiders, hoverflies, leaf-hoppers, crane flies, spittle-bugs and thrips. David Lack, who studied swifts nesting in ventilation shafts in the tower of the University Museum in Oxford, found that a swift brings just over a gram of insects to its young in each meal. One pair brought forty-two meals to their brood in a single day – a load, Lack estimated, of around 20,000 insects. The warm, sheltered air on the south side of the ironstone house was full of insects, and in June and July, at dusk, parties of swifts exploited this abundance, breeding birds darting again and again to the eaves, delivering bugs to their nestlings.

  In the cabin on Riding Mountain, with the storm blowing outside, I thought about those displays. The little hut kept creaking and shaking. I was wearing thermals and socks, with my coat spread on the narrow bed as an extra blanket. Eyes closed, I remembered how I’d sit out at the back of the house after supper, watching swifts, not long after I’d found The Snow Goose in the hotel library and begun to pay some attention to birds. Two or three months had passed since my last spell in hospital, and my attitude to the house had started to change. I felt angry at my prolonged confinement, desperate to be back in the world, as if my childhood home were somehow separate from the world, a zone apart. I escaped myself when I watched the swifts. And now, with the storm swirling round the tiny cabin on Riding Mountain, the memory of those evenings was itself a kind of retreat or sanctuary from surrounding turbulence. Rooks were calling raucously. A light wind swished in the trees like crinoline dresses on a ballroom floor, the trespasses sibilance of the Sor Brook going on beneath the crinoline dresses. I heard the back door opening (the bars of three bolts slid with known weight and easiness into sockets on the jamb) and saw my father walk out on to the lawn, shirt-sleeves rolled up, holding a mug. He stood beside me, and we both looked up.

  Furious activity in the twilight. Eight, ten, twelve swifts were wheeling overhead, black birds racing round and round, their trajectories ornamented with swoops, tilts, rolls, dips, glides and zigzags, and rapid shimmies as individuals diverged from a straight course to take an insect seen to one side. The swifts feinted in one direction only to curve off in another, five or six birds appearing suddenly in formation, a squad, their stiff wings held fast in sickle arcs to carve a turn, then beating again to crest the roof-slope, tails opening in two-pronged forks for increased control when manoeuvring, then closing, streamlining the body for fast flight. The swifts flew like blades, birds slicing in and out of the paths of other birds, their shrill, sweet screams intensifying and fading in quick Doppler shifts as they passed overhead – accelerating, tipping, flirting with angles, leaning into banked turns that seemed to scour out the inside of a sphere. Sometimes one swift flew alongside another, their speeds, curves, shimmies and feints matched with unfailing exactitude, as if every movement were plotted by a common whim. Rooks flew west over the house in feeding sorties, heavy black rags adrift in the dim light, their flight sluggish and laboured next to that of the fleet, trim, screaming swifts.

  My father delighted in these aeronautics. ‘There’s joy in it,’ he said. To him, the return of the swifts was cordial and fortifying, a sign that the centre was holding, that orbits were regular and true. The arrival of migrants, like an eclipse, was a revelation of planetary motion. The Earth had travelled once more round the Sun. Seasons were respecting their sequence. Time could be relied upon.

  The day was going. We watched the swifts on their precipitate vespers fl
ights. The swift family has evolved almost exclusively for an aerial existence, and the needle-tailed swifts of Africa and Asia are the fastest of all birds in level flight, capable of attaining speeds of up to 105 miles per hour. Swifts have strong claws for clinging but aren’t well-fitted for perching or walking. They have small, inconspicuous legs; their name, Apus, comes from the Greek for ‘without feet’. A swift spends almost its entire life on the wing. Unless forced down by accident or storm, swifts stop flying only when they nest. They take nest materials from the air – the sky flotsam of leaf and chaff – and drink by descending in a shallow glide to open water, sipping as their heads touch the surface and shivering as they rise to shake any water from their feathers.

  Swifts bathe in the rain: they take showers. They mate on the wing and even sleep on the wing, the feathers on their lower leg bones keeping them warm at night. A French airman in the First World War, recalling a night reconnaissance mission on the Vosges front, described how he had climbed to 14,500 feet above French lines, then cut the engine and glided down over enemy territory. ‘As we came to about 10,000 feet,’ he wrote, ‘gliding in close spirals with a light wind against us, and with a full moon, we suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds which seemed to be motionless, or at least showed no noticeable reaction. They were widely scattered and only a few yards below the aircraft, showing up against a white sea of cloud underneath. None was visible above us. We were soon in the middle of the flock. In two instances birds were caught and on the following day I found one of them in the machine. It was an adult male swift.’

  At about nine o’clock, the screaming parties at the back of the house would start to gain height, rising gradually, disappearing just before dark, heading for the thinner air of high altitudes, where less energy was needed for flight.

  It was that time now. We couldn’t stop watching the swifts. My father was mesmerized by their flights, their courses twinkling with feints and shimmies. He held the mug close to his chest, without raising it to his lips, swifts whirling round and round above him, impelled by stiff, curved wings, fiendishly deft and spirited, tailed by screams like fine silver streamers. They began their night ascents, wheeling high above the roofline. The rooks stopped cawing. I got to my feet and leaned back against the house, surprised – thrilled – that the walls should be so warm, steeped in the hot day, remembering it. I stood with the warmth of the stone in my shoulders, pressing my palms against the house. I looked up, but the swifts had gone. ‘That’s it,’ my father said. He turned, pushed open the back door, and stepped inside.

  *

  THE STORM PASSED OVER Riding Mountain; the thaw came hard on its heels. Snow melted quickly, draining into the sloughs and marshes. Snow beds and banks lingered in shaded places. Every day I took the two dogs walking, hoping to see snow geese. Harley, well-bred, obedient, stayed close to me on the track, while Sitka, ash-whites and charcoals blended in her fur, rummaged wildly in the undergrowth or bounded far ahead, dashing up to vantage points and striking a pose, all instinct, sizing up the territory. About a mile from the cabin the track emerged from the forest to a rousing prospect of open, rolling country covered with wheat stubble and blond prairie grasses. Ice was breaking up on the sloughs: Canada geese, white chinstraps agleam on jet black necks, joined mallard and goldeneye on the open water. A red-tailed hawk glided low over the grass. A bald eagle perched on the point of a spruce. A great blue heron flew down in front of me to take up position at the edge of a pond, its wings making the whup-whup of someone walking in a sarong.

  Birds were coming in. I looked for snow geese every time I went outside. Migrants appeared on the birdtable outside David’s kitchen window, a new species every day: red-winged blackbirds, dark-eyed juncos, evening grosbeaks, purple finches. The Viking looked forward to later arrivals, especially the Baltimore orioles and ruby-throated hummingbirds. He raged at burdock, a weed growing in the sere grass around the house.

  ‘Burdock!’ he ranted. ‘It’s the curse of the world! It’s the bane of my existence! Holy Christ! This burdock!’

  Fluff from cattail seedheads skiffed past him on a breeze.

  There was still no sign of snow geese. Each morning I sat writing at the cabin’s rickety table, under the eye of the chintz-gowned cat, and in the afternoons I walked with the two dogs along tracks through the spruce forest or on long circuits around Lake Timon, often singing or whistling, wary of the black bears that would be emerging from hibernation as the days grew warmer. ‘Make a noise,’ David had advised. ‘Bears don’t like to be surprised.’

  One afternoon I walked up the track from the cabin with Sitka and Harley. We came out of the trees, and the dogs ran ahead, bounding through the wheatgrass. Cloud shadows roamed across the open country. We struck out through knee-high wheatgrass towards an old homesteaders’ cabin, tilted like a trapezoid, its logs chinked with mud, half the shingles missing from the roof, the floorboards rotten. Tatters of wallpaper fell to the floor when I went inside, the dogs already chasing rats in the root cellar. An old leather shoe rested on one of the few remaining floorboards, hardened and gnarled, like a twist of driftwood. Bedsprings were strewn about. The stove was intact: a Peninsula Monarch, made by Clare Bros. & Co. Ltd of Preston, Winnipeg and Vancouver, with a dial showing the baking heat, Warm to Very Hot, and a rusty spoon lying across the hob. The cabin was disintegrating, but the stove – the hearth – was resolute, unshiftable, apparently resistant to the processes of decay.

  On the way back to the house, the dogs caught a muskrat and tore it clean in half. They trotted along, holding their halves of the muskrat in their teeth. Harley had the head and chest, the rodent’s arms protruding from the corners of her mouth; Sitka had the haunches and rear, the muskrat’s tail swinging loosely below her chin. We found the Viking cleaning his pickup, swabbing the hood and windscreen with soapy water and a brick-shaped yellow sponge, dressed in a denim shirt buttoned right up to the collar, and jeans of the same light blue. His jeans were held up by braces in addition to the black leather belt with the silver buckle. One, it seemed, was a back-up system for the other.

  ‘You!’ he shouted as we approached. ‘Have you looked up lately?’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘Right here! Holy Christ! Look!’

  He pointed. I looked straight up at the sky. Snow geese were flying overhead, blue-phase and white-phase birds, three distinct Vs, coming from the south.

  ‘What took you so long?’ the Viking yelled at the geese, shaking his sponge at them. ‘You’re late! Jesus Christ! You got people waiting for you! Holy Christ!’

  The dogs put down their muskrat pieces and looked up.

  *

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of April. I’d planned to see the snow geese on the Portage Plains, then take the train from Winnipeg to Churchill on Hudson Bay. The Viking, who was due to go back to his apartment in Winnipeg, offered me a lift.

  ‘We’ll find geese on the way,’ he said.

  Harley and Sitka ran after the pickup, barking. We drove out of the spruce forest, back down off the hills of Riding Mountain to the open plain. The Viking had fitted a set of flip-up shades to his steel-framed glasses. He flipped the lenses up and down indecisively. He drove slowly but pressed himself right back in his seat, arms at full stretch, as though experiencing substantial g-force. I kept an eye on the fields and sky, looking for geese.

  Before the war, the Viking had worked for a year as a baker. He joined the army at nineteen and landed at Normandy the day after D-Day, a frontline signaller, carrying a radio on his back. After the war, he’d wanted to be a jeweller.

  ‘Why a jeweller?’

  ‘Because I’ve always loved tinkering with things and handling little tools.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘At that time the government was offering lots of training opportunities. So I said I wanted to be a jeweller. Government told me the jeweller’s courses were reserved for disabled veterans. End of my career as a jeweller. Joined the tr
ansit company in Toronto. Drove trolley buses and streetcars. Met my wife. Got married. She was a real box of tricks. We’d both grown up in Manitoba, so we moved back to Winnipeg. I’m divorced. Had my camera ready when she left the house with all her suitcases. Wanted a picture of her going out through that back door for the last time. She saw me standing there with the camera ready. Picked up a mop and hit me in the face. Holy Christ!’

  We were driving south across the flat land, the Viking pushed back into his seat like an astronaut. The plains were organized in mile-square sections of wheat, barley, corn, flax and canola stubble. Farm tracks and telegraph wires, crossing at right angles, ran along the edges of the sections. There were shelterbelts of green ash, and farm buildings just visible in windbreaks. We passed a cemetery.

  ‘All the people in there are dead,’ the Viking said. ‘Every one of them.’

  Sometimes we left the highway and pulled up beside lakes. All the ice had gone. I passed my binoculars to the Viking; he flipped up his shades and pressed his bifocal lenses to the eyepieces. We saw Canada geese, mallard and lesser scaup, and eight American white pelicans attended by double-crested cormorants and Franklin’s gulls – small freshwater gulls with black hoods. They may all have flown up from the Gulf of Mexico.

  Snow geese flew high overhead in undulating skeins and echelons. Flocks of killdeer – plovers with white underparts and two distinctive black breastbands – took off from stubble fields. I saw a V of long, lanky birds with heavy, slow-beating wings, necks stretched forward without a kink, legs trailing loosely behind them in bunches, and wondered if these sandhill cranes had flown from Texas – had even wintered on the prairies around Eagle Lake, stepping with the dainty gait of ballerinas along the edge of Jack’s holding pond. I spotted a flock of large white birds in a field of canola stubble and asked the Viking to pull over, thinking they might be snow geese. But the white birds were tundra swans, much larger than snow geese, with black legs and bills, and all-white plumage, without the geese’s black-tipped wings. Tundra swans winter in small pockets on the coasts of the United States and migrate to breeding areas from Alaska east to Baffin Island, across the far north of Canada. These swans in Manitoba were staging like the snow geese, gleaning for grain, replenishing fat stores, waiting for the thaw.