Creation (14 page)

August, September, October, and Audubon stayed on with the Rathbones. He could not leave. He listened to advice on how he should proceed with his birds. He basked in home and family. He wooed Hannah when he might have been courting fame. But he had no choice: he must be loved.

To arrive in a new land. To step off a ship into unknown territories, meet strange faces, find warmth and shelter and food. This was his task over and over. As the birds find mates and nest at the end of each journey, so he must win his due, time and again.

His life he now recast; it became the Work whose birth he had come here to shepherd. He took Nolte’s introduction to the naturalist Thomas Traill. Thomas Traill introduced him to the bookseller Henry Bohn.

“The birds must be life size,” he said to Bohn.

Bohn replied that a large book was possible. “It is the taste of persons who entertain company these days to have a book laid out on a table as entertainment for visitors. But,” he said, “it cannot be so big that it makes the others look the worse, or clutter the table.”

These were not factors Audubon had considered.

“A book as large as you want would be beyond the means of ordinary people. You could hope for sales only of one hundred copies, for large public institutions.”

“There is so much competition,” said the bookseller. “You will need to find attention for yourself. But you are charismatic. Your tales are fascinating. And the birds, of course, are good. I believe you have the seeds of success.” Bohn said that if he wanted to know more he should go to London immediately to consult naturalists on the subjects of engravers, printers and papermakers.

But he did not go to London.

There followed a lost pocket of time. Two months when all the world was held off. Just as he courted Lucy in the caves where the phoebes nested, so he courted Hannah on the hillsides near Matlock.
All day they rambled through reddening leaves and flocks of migrating birds. Out of sight of houses and passersby they spread a blanket, and sat. While he sketched she fell asleep and when he was finished he lay alongside her, so still that the birds forgot them. In the evenings he wrote in his diary and to Lucy. To Lucy he did not lie. He shared all his passions with his wife, and Hannah was one of them.

Holding Hannah in his arms, as the imagined and now conceivable future took form in his head, he pondered Bohn’s advice. Finally in October he tore himself away and travelled to Edinburgh, again with his portfolio and dozens of letters of introduction. But something of Hannah’s love made an aura around him. When he walked into the tall, steep city with its enveloping fogs and soft grey stones, it was as a conquering woodsman. And Edinburgh too had to open its heart to him.

BAFFLED

L
ITTLE NATASHQUAN HARBOUR
,
JUNE
28, 1833

The
Ripley
barely weathered the East Pt and got out. We were less fortunate for the wind headed us just as we came to the Pt and obliged us to tack within 10 fathoms of it. The western channel appeared the widest and Mr. Owen thought he had found all the rocks in it but we soon added to his knowledge for on the second board to the Westw’d in the narrowest part of the channel we struck.

… I ordered the after sails to be taken in, the headyards thrown aback & head sheets over to windward keeping the foresail set to assist in paying her off more rapidly. Had this not been done she would have no sooner floated than she would have run stem on to the rocky Islet. As it was a man might have leaped from our flying jib boom to end upon the rocks. Having enough of it for one trial I ran back and moored again. No injury was done even to the rates of the Chronometers for Kelly instantly ran down to them & took them in his hands ’till we were afloat. I thought it proper to remain for the night.

—
Surveying Journals
, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, Captain, Royal Navy

H
aving failed to make his exit, Bayfield has no choice but to remain at Little Natashquan throughout the next day.

He searches out Kelly in the hold of the ship. The near grounding on the shoal at the harbour’s entrance made the doctor fly below to the chronometers. Each of the thirteen is swaddled in cotton and cradled in some niche he has found. One is in his arms. He is pink-faced as a nursery maid. Bayfield wants to talk about Audubon.

“Last night our dinner guest was vehement on the subject of killing birds. But he is a hunter.”

“I believe it is not killing but plundering that angers him,” says Kelly in his gently correcting voice.

“You used a word last night. I have consulted the dictionary.” Bayfield pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. On it is written:

Extinct:
middle English from Latin
exstinctus
past participle of
exstinguere
(fifteenth century) a) no longer burning b) no longer active c) no longer existing
.

“Is this what Audubon meant by ‘
disparu
’? The Dodo is extinct, can we say?”

“It has been proven with the Dodo, and other examples both before, and since. Species can disappear, never to return.” Kelly moves from clock to clock at a rather rough toss of the ship, tucking the padding around the ticking metal instruments.

Bayfield trails behind, wanting his attention.

“What is this ‘never’?” he challenges. “How do we know it will ‘never’ return?”

Kelly has the number 761 chronometer in his hands, careful not to tilt it. He bends his ear to listen for any irregularity of its ticking. “When there are no living individuals left, not a male, not a female, we assume the species cannot return,” he says.

“But then is it not ordained? Can we not say this is a result of natural violence — savagery, if you will? Could we see the natural world as ruling itself, if not God ruling nature?”

The doctor has an authority that comes from a sense of quiet goodness. And he is the only one on shipboard not under Bayfield’s direct command. “Animals never kill enough to extinguish a species.
Man may do so. If I understood the artist correctly, what he meant was that the greater danger we face is in man’s encroaching on the wild lands, which these birds and animals need to prosper.”

“So he means
I
am a danger?” Bayfield is not so much incredulous as fascinated by the idea of himself as villain, of his enterprise as being in any way sinister. “Because we open the frontier for people we close it for the wild creature?” That he is a danger has never before occurred to him. He is Bayfield of Bayfield Hall. He has taken the benevolence of his service to God and King for granted.

“Not you, yourself, Captain. Not personally.” Kelly keeps his eyes on number 761. There is definitely a tremor in the minute hand.

“And why not? If this is the truth then I must consider my part in it.”

Bayfield climbs the ladder to the deck and looks out at Labrador. Green and rocky wastes rise to distant plateaus, all empty save for the itinerant Montagnais, all shapeless, unknown country. He loves it, he knows that. But how does he love it? As a territory to be possessed? Claimed for a country? Yes. But he is dimly aware of another way he loves it, as a refuge to himself, a place apart. He has given no thought to the loss of that. And he will give no thought to it now. He reviews his mission: to chart the unknown. That Audubon would refute its value astonishes him.

An artist must allow his mind to run contrary to the thoughts of the day; otherwise, what news would he bring back to tempt his audience? And yet, in having these thoughts, in stepping beyond the conventions of his society, he risks offending. Audubon did offend, last evening, charming as he was; he offended perhaps as much by his ideas as by the strength of his passions.

T
HE
GULNARE
PASSES
one last night at Little Natashquan. The harbour feels empty without the
Ripley
. At daylight on the thirtieth the wind is moderate from the southwest and the sky cloudy, with not enough sun to make observations. The captain has every sail set, fore and aft, and the jibs half up, ready. Conditions are not ideal but he decides to risk it. He sends Bowen in the second gig to sit on the lee side
of the central reef to keep the
Gulnare
off it. The instant the men lift anchor they hove away and in a minute are standing out under full sail. They pass Bowen and get to the end of the reef, but the wind suddenly heads at them there, just as they are crossing into unsheltered water. He feels the swell under the bow pushing them for the shoal. Bowen prepares to fend off, though how to do so without crushing the gig, he does not know. Kelly dives for the hold, where he can be heard speaking in soothing tones to his clocks.

They stall. It looks, again, as if they won’t make it out. Bayfield nearly gives orders to tack to avoid hitting, but just at that moment the wind gives them a compass point, and there is no choice. Ten yards off the bow the surf is running up on the end of the point when they swing around and out into the wind. The sails are useless, baffled by the wind. The swell shakes the wind out of the sails, so that she moves more slowly than can be believed, but with several tacks they inch their way past and are suddenly clear of the reefs, into deep water.

The wind continues light all day. The tars put out their lines and jig for cod. They catch one that is three foot, six inches long and weighs twenty-one pounds. When, at seven in the evening, the
Gulnare
finally gets around Natashquan Point, Bayfield stays on deck. By one in the morning they only have eight or nine miles to go to Kégashka, where they moored the year before and where they have left a beacon. Bayfield goes below and sleeps three hours. At four Bowen calls him: they can see the beacon. At six, on a calm, cloudy morning, they pull into their old Kégashka berth. This was where he ended last summer and turned back.

Bayfield goes out to a little island in the harbour. The gulls retreat with raucous protests to the waves. There has been no sign of the
Ripley
. He wonders where the Americans are. Godwin will have them out beyond the islands. With good reason: the sailing near the shore is even trickier than Bayfield recalled. There are few harbours deep enough for a schooner. Ahead now is all uncharted territory. He wonders how he ought to proceed, himself. The only way is to use the smaller boats and leave the
Gulnare
moored. His plan is to stay with the ship and take his measurements, and at the same time to outfit the
Owen
, provision it for ten days and send Bowen in it up the coast to Ouapitagone.

Thinking with every step of Audubon’s prohibitions, he takes only one egg from every second or third nest. These will go well with breakfast.

T
UESDAY DAWNS A RARE,
marvellous, sunny day. The
Ripley
has anchored beside a large island miraculously clear of shoals on the lee-ward side. Audubon goes on land with the young gentlemen.

He makes it past rocks and around swamp and climbs over a ridge, finding himself in a small valley out of sight of the sea and out of reach of the wind. The country becomes an arbour of green of an alchemical vigour that he has never before seen, the closest being the slime of a North Carolina swamp. But this is crisp underfoot, with a close ground-cover in which berries and tiny unknown flowers grow. He stoops to examine them. White, yellow, blue, none taller than a few inches, each flower is exquisite. He puts several in his specimen basket for the flower press. He will send them to Maria. He commits to memory the exact blend of coral, red and pale green, and the gleam of each fine hair on the underside of the petals, the small black dot that stands out from the tip.

He hears a set of sweet, magical notes. He stops, captivated, the tiny flower and its root between his thumb and forefinger. He does not even expel his breath. If the bird sang once, it will sing again.

He hears it.
Jew-jew-jew-jew-je-eeeeeeee-do-je-e-e-e-to
.

It is the song of that new bird, but what is it? A wood lark? They are only known in Europe. It must be a new bird, a bird with an angel’s song.