The Snow Geese Page 9

  Illness had taken me back, the first time since I was a schoolboy that I’d spent more than a few days, a week at most, at home. And it was home: the fact that I hadn’t lived there for years didn’t change that. Nowhere was my sense of belonging so unambiguous. I could still find my way around the ironstone house in the dark, or with my eyes closed, moving by reflex, habit, muscle memory, my hands knowing just where to reach for a handle, switch or rail, my feet ready for a step up or down, a loose board, a shift from carpet to stone. I knew the names of things, their details, histories, every surface burnished with memory and association. When I fell ill, feeling threatened, under attack, with all sense of control or mastery gone, I longed for the house, imagining a place of safety, without dangers or conflict, where all my needs would be provided for, a still point from which life’s unsteadiness could be viewed and measured. But the longing was a fantasy of escape. It was nostalgia.

  I opened my eyes. A grey morning, dull, pewter-toned, twenty-four hours since I’d left Austin. The Greyhound was cruising steadily. Jean was awake, rubbing her eyes, replacing her glasses.

  ‘Did you sleep?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I was out for the count. Oh my, I was bushwhacked.’

  And without warning she flung her right arm across me, pointing eastwards.

  ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Those are geese, right?’

  Yes, those were geese. Flocks of snow geese were flying in skeins and straggling Us of thirty or forty birds each, moving northwards over flat country, above the horizon, parallel to the Greyhound. Slow waves rode through the strands as leading birds deviated slightly from their straight course and birds behind them followed suit, one after another, passing the discrepancy like a rumour along the line until it reached the last bird and flicked out into open air. Even in the grey light I could distinguish blue-phase from white-phase birds – the morphs not jumbled randomly along each skein but grouped together in bands of three or four geese of the same colour. Each group of blue-phase or white-phase geese probably represented a family, two mates and their young: snow geese pair for life and forge strong family bonds, parents and offspring staying together on the first migration south, during the winter, and on the spring migration back to the breeding grounds, with the male usually leading his mate in flight – the opposite of ducks, where the female takes the lead. Jean leaned over me, getting her face close to the window, craning for a better look at the snow geese, and for a few minutes we kept level with the flocks, until the Greyhound pulled ahead, bent on Minneapolis. I was wide awake now, heading north with snow geese, complicit with birds.

  We arrived shortly after nine o’clock. Jean was anxious to see her sister. She got into the back seat of a taxi, looking surprisingly fresh, ablaze with red, yellow and blue, the black tote bag hanging from one shoulder, the badge still adamant on her fleece vest. She wound down the window.

  ‘I hope things are all right,’ I said.

  ‘I know. We’ll see. I hope those geese haven’t skipped town when you get there.’

  ‘Bye, Jean.’

  ‘Bye!’ She was calling it out; the taxi was already moving.

  There was a bird in the terminal at Minneapolis, a passerine, perhaps one of the sparrows, skittish in the roof girders. Exhausted, disorientated, porous with distance, I sat watching a tall, swarthy man keep a leather purse of beans up in the air, the little sack jumping from knee to knee, the arch or instep of one foot to the arch or instep of the other – a hypnotic, stringless yoyoing accompanied by rhythmic percussive beats as beans scrunched together in the impacts on leg or shoe. I boarded my last Greyhound at noon, limbs aching, the coach proceeding north-west on Interstate 94 towards Fargo, crossing from Minnesota into North Dakota. Farmed country ran flat in all directions, as if the land had conceded to the sky’s magnitude, and given ground. Intricate centre-pivot irrigation systems stood motionless in the ploughed black fields. Farm buildings hunkered down in horseshoe windbreaks. I looked for geese, black wing-tips flickering in smoky white sky. The coach passed St Cloud, Sauk Centre, Alexandria and Fergus Falls, and it was close to six o’clock when we arrived at Fargo. The temperature had fallen dramatically. Thirty-five hours had passed since the Americruiser had pulled out of Austin in the storm. Eleanor’s shining birdcage stood empty 1,000 miles due south as the crow flies.

  4 : SAND LAKE

  GIDEONS HAD LEFT A BIBLE on the bedside table of my motel room. The bible’s brown cover was embossed with the Gideon logo, a flame tufting like Tintin’s hair from the mouth of a gold amphora. In its introductory pages, before even Genesis began, one verse from St John’s Gospel (‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’) was translated into twenty-seven languages, and if you followed the word ‘son’ as it mutated through these tongues – son, søn, zoon, Sohn, sinn, sønn, seun – it was as if you were looking at an intimate’s face in different lights and moods. No pictures hung on the white walls. An enormous black television presided over the square room; a receiver dish hummed with frequencies outside the sliding windows. Between the bed and the windows, facing the television, was an old La-Z-Boy reclining chair upholstered in brown corduroy, its arms welted with cigarette burns. Glasses stood rims-down on a red tray. A band of paper girdled the toilet seat like a cummerbund to emphasize the motel’s attention to hygiene.

  From Fargo I’d driven a rented Mercury Topaz south and then west to Aberdeen, South Dakota. Midcontinent snow geese tend to set down on the lakes of North and South Dakota to rest and feed while the thaw advances northwards ahead of them, and the fact that Jean and I had seen flocks flying hard towards Minneapolis suggested that geese were already arriving in these latitudes. I drove in dense white fog, glimpsing fence-posts, barbed-wire reels, grain elevators, stands of cottonwoods, and prairies rolling away in mottled browns and greys. My expectations quickened whenever the fog thinned. I looked from side to side, or leaned forward over the wheel for a fuller view of the sky, hoping for the flicker of a black-tipped wing. The highway crossed frozen lakes on low causeways. Strong southerly winds carried snow and spiculae off the surface of the lakes in sheets that dragged across the asphalt or swept sudden granular hisses across the windscreen of the Topaz. The diesel stacks and radiator grilles of freight trucks loomed in my mirrors. Road signs emerged from the fog like things I was remembering. Many bore the names of English towns: Bath, Bristol, Andover, Stratford. Migrants had travelled with proper nouns as though they were personal effects. The names were tokens of home.

  *

  SNOW GEESE ARRIVE! The next morning, the front page of the Aberdeen American News reported that more than 340,000 snow geese had arrived at Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I couldn’t believe it: I’d reached South Dakota on the same day as the geese. Sand Lake was not quite thirty miles from Aberdeen, due north across the Dakota Plain on a quiet, empty road through flat country, with open, sere-looking grasslands and close-cropped stubble fields on both sides, and the roundels of small frozen pothole lakes like a strew of blue-white doubloons across the prairie: no greens, just tans, fawns, duns, greys and the blue-blotched white of the ice. American kestrels, the smallest of the North American falcons, perched on telegraph wires, compact and snug, tucked up in the bed of their own grey and rust-red feathers. Flocks of gleaning red-winged blackbirds rolled across stubble fields like giant, shadowy tumbleweeds. I’d never paid so much attention to birds. I kept a field guide and my birdwatcher’s binoculars within arm’s reach on the front passenger seat. I looked out for snow geese. I couldn’t stop thinking of snow geese. Three hundred and forty thousand snow geese.

  Sand Lake was a long swell in the James River, close to the border with North Dakota. I parked the Topaz next to two white pickups with the US Fish and Wildlife Service shield on their doors. I buttoned up my down-filled jacket and hung my binoculars round my neck. It was ver
y cold. There were stands of bare cottonwoods and elms, shelterbelts of green ash and Russian olive, shrubby willows in the marshy ground. The sky was deep blue, beyond dimension, appearing to curve away with the curve of the Earth at each extremity. Clouds resembling judges’ wigs drifted on the blue. I could hear, in the distance, a faint, familiar sound, a great crowd of terriers yapping at the limit of earshot.

  Excited, I began walking north along the track of dry dust and stones that ran the few miles from the refuge entrance to Houghton Dam. Thickets of cattail rushes and phragmites made a golden rind around the lake, stems clamped in ice at the shins or ankles, the cattail tipped with stiff brown seedheads like fat cigars. Sometimes pickups driven by hunters wearing camouflage cruised past me on the dirt track, each vehicle’s slipstream agitating the cattail and phrags. The yapping thickened to a drone. I passed a small farm, then rounded a headland, walking faster and faster towards the source of the noise. Snow geese came into view like a kept promise. Thousands of blue-phase and white-phase birds were huddled on the ice in the middle of the lake, a huge white almond-shaped spread tapering to a point at its north and south ends. The birds’ heads were raised high, their necks extended, perpendicular to the ice. Close to, the flock’s gabble was a wild encompassing din, the birds’ calls travelling through the ice like marbles rolling on metal. I stood still, breathing deeply, half-hidden by cattail.

  A Fish and Wildlife Service pickup pulled up beside me, and a man in the neat buff uniform of the wardens leaned from the window. He was about fifty; he wore steel-framed glasses; he had thick, emphatic eyebrows and pellucid grey-green eyes. His trim hair was greying: a mixed flock of blue-phase and white-phase strands.

  ‘Not bad, is it?’ he said.

  ‘It’s the biggest flock I’ve seen. How many?’

  ‘I’d say thirty thousand. They’re real early this year. Usually you can set your clock by snow geese getting to this latitude. It’s always the last week in March. They’ve taken us by surprise. We thought, maybe another ten days, a week at least.’

  ‘Why are they so early?’

  ‘Spring’s early. They come with the weather. These geese push up as far as they can. If they run into storms or it’s too cold for their liking, they just rest up. Some of them go north to take a look and come straight back if it’s too rough up there. I’m Michael, by the way. I’ve got a feeling you’re not from South Dakota.’

  Michael switched off the engine, and joined me on the rise overlooking the lake. He was tall, over six foot, his black boots buffed like a soldier’s, his belt sagging with professional things: revolver, cuffs, pepper spray, retractable baton. We looked at the geese, talking against the background of their din.

  ‘You have an interest in geese?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Snow geese. I’ve just come from Texas. I’m trying to follow snow geese from their winter grounds to breeding grounds. Just keep with them on the spring migration.’

  ‘You are? That’s something. How far north are you going?’

  ‘Hudson Bay. Maybe Baffin Island.’

  ‘That is something.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a sensible way to travel. I’m at the mercy of geese. I’m starting to wonder if that’s such a good thing to be.’

  ‘I’ve spent pretty much my whole life chasing ducks and geese one way or another, and don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same question.’

  ‘Did it surprise you, that they got here so early?’

  ‘I guess so. But patterns are always changing. I mean, look at the eagles. Before I came to Sand Lake they hadn’t had a documented eagle nest in South Dakota since 1885, which was four years before South Dakota even joined the United States. In 1991 a pair of bald eagles showed up and nested in Sand Lake Refuge. We cordoned off the area with a half-mile buffer zone. The eagles were incubating – if you looked through a scope you could see the male and female changing places. But this windstorm came through and frazzled the nest. The eagles folded their tent, and then these damned great blue herons moved in and threw an egg out, which we found underneath the tree. In 1992 another pair came and nested on Karl Mundt Refuge and raised one young. That pair has been successful every year. Now there are four or five nests in the Sand Lake vicinity. The population’s exploding. You’ve got bald eagles nesting pretty much everywhere.’

  I wondered if that had something to do with the supply of snow geese.

  ‘Sure. The eagles stick with the geese. They go for sick ones. Crippled geese gather in the last spots of open water. I’ve seen them diving to escape an eagle, and an eagle actually going in the water, like an osprey would, to grab them in the talons and drag them up on the ice. They can’t fly off because they’re waterlogged in the feathers. They shake themselves off on the ice, holding tight to the goose that’s flailing around, and preen themselves a little bit, and then get on with the business of eating goose. They’ve got fish, too. Eagles and herring gulls come up early for the fishkill. This ice is two feet thick, but a dead fish underneath it is a dark spot that absorbs more heat and melts its way up to the surface, and that’s where the gulls and eagles’ll have it – ’

  He stopped: there was a commotion in the flock. The calls of the geese grew louder, more urgent. Suddenly, as if detonated, the flock took wing. Thirty thousand geese lifted off the ice in front of us, wingbeats drumming the air, goose yelps gathering to a pounding, metallic yammer, the sound of steel being hammered on anvils, in caverns. The ice thrummed and sang with it. The exploded flock filled our fields of vision, a blizzard of birds. Most of the geese flew in low circles, but some settled back on the ice almost immediately, while others continued to gain height. Drifts of geese passed through, behind and across other drifts of geese; the flock kept wheeling round and round, swirling with eddies and countermotions, a salt-and-pepper chaos of blue-phase and white-phase birds lit by quick lamé sparklings of white wingbacks catching the sunlight. Whole swatches of the flock went dark when birds flew side-on, and swatches flashed white when they banked or veered, breasting the light. Then slowly, goose by goose, the flock settled again: the almond shape reformed; the extravagant din dwindled; the steady flock drone resumed. For a moment, I had forgotten to breathe.

  ‘Look at that,’ Michael said, pointing. ‘That’s the reason those geese are so uppity.’

  On the far side of the lake, a few yards in from the cattail, an eagle stood on the ice, steady as an urn, with a blackish body and distinguished white head: a bald eagle, looking for a sick or injured goose. The snow geese were anxious, vigilant, ready to fly. Small troupes were taking off from the flock and circling; others were coasting down, wings bowed, landing in the almond: an ongoing exchange and renewal of component cells. The eagle kept its vigil close to the cattail. Cloud shadows drifted on the ice.

  ‘I’ll see you again,’ Michael said. He got back into the pickup. Dust billowed from the heels of the truck as it pulled away. I walked all afternoon, right around Sand Lake on the dirt track.

  *

  EACH MORNING I drove out to the refuge to watch birds. I took lunch and stayed all day, walking the track to Mud Lake, crossing the James River at Houghton Dam, watching whitetailed deer venture from windbreaks of elms, the sun going down somewhere on the far side of the Missouri River, pronouncing ‘West!’ as it sank in the grasslands and buttes. Deer bounded along the stubble edge as geese returned to their roosts from grain fields: smudges and specks of geese above the low sun. Geese flew from the south in long skeins and echelons that crossed and undulated, or appeared, by a trick of angle and distance, to twirl in ropes and double helixes. Geese flew in their limited alphabet of Vs, Js and Ws, or in interlocking chevrons like the insignia on officers’ epaulettes, and the high raillery of snow geese in flight made a descant to the deeper, rougher honking of Canada geese roosting in the phragmites and cattail.

  More and more snow geese arrived at Sand Lake in the last days of March. Gulls appeared, scouting for fishkill; ducks settled on patches of open water by th
e dams. Seasoned birdwatchers, wearing sweatshirts in pastel colours with sandpipers or whooping cranes printed over the heart, drove out from Fargo and Minneapolis, parked Dodge and Mercury minivans and Jeep Cherokees on the shoulders of the track, and lugged Cullmann and Manfrotto tripods and Optolyth, Swarovski and Questar telescopes in padded green sleeves to vantage points on the lakeside. The appearance of the birdwatchers was itself a kind of migratory return.

  Michael invited me to join him on his bird counts. His uniform was neatly creased and spotless; his black boots were unimpeachable; his belt, with its ballast in black leather pouches, sagged low on his hips. Often he took off his steel-framed glasses with his left hand and rubbed both eyes with his right. Before replacing the glasses he would blink dramatically, as if he’d just been swimming underwater.

  Michael had trained as a limnologist: he knew the ins and outs of ponds. In his twenties, when he first came to Sand Lake, he’d made a floating hide by fixing plastic pipes in a domed frame, covering the frame with burlap bags, camouflaging the burlap with cattail and phrags (thatching the rushes so the hide resembled a muskrat house) and mounting this canopy on an inner tube from a tractor tyre. Wearing waders, hidden beneath the dome, he could move through rushes without scaring birds. He remembered the first time cattle egrets nested at Sand Lake, in 1977, and he liked to think of the egret gradually extending its range, crossing the Atlantic from Africa to South America in the nineteenth century, spreading north over the Caribbean to Florida, and working up through the United States until it was spotted in South Dakota, in 1961, at Sand Lake.

  We drove through the refuge in Michael’s white pickup. I had binoculars; Michael had an old Questar scope that fitted to his wound-down window. A label warned users not to look directly at the sun, making you think of daylight concentrated to a laser in the tube. Michael pointed out corn, wheat, barley and soybean stubble; switchgrass, bromegrass, wormwood sage and little red shoots of smartweed; nesting boxes for wood duck, kestrels and bluebirds; muskrat houses in open ponds. He said that sometimes Canada geese built their nests on top of muskrat houses: homes on homes. Richardson’s ground squirrels, which Michael called ‘flickertails’, slipped down holes in the tracks as we approached. A dog ran out from a farm, snapping at the pickup, and Michael laughed, saying, ‘There’ll be toothmarks on the fender!’ Whenever we came across a flock of snow geese on some part of the lake, he stopped the truck and fitted the telescope to the glass. He wrote down figures on a pad: 28,000; 16,000; 45,000. The flocks were growing. White-phase and blue-phase birds stood close-packed in islands on the ice.