Creation (36 page)

Audubon and the captain decide that it would be foolhardy to attempt to go overland to Hudson’s Bay. And they can go no farther by water at this time of year.

He is tired tonight, and tumbles into a hammock, sleeping without dreams.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, as he is taking his dawn walk on deck, Audubon notices Anonyme, silent and withdrawn, in a corner behind a windlass. He realizes that he has lost interest in his pet, and has ignored him for weeks. Perhaps the raven misses his attention. He is alternately hopping toward the railings and running away. In his corner he caws, pecks himself, tries to fly and gives up. Going closer, Audubon sees what has affected the bird. A raven flies over and around the schooner calling insistently. She lands in her clumsy way on the masts, flaps amongst the ropes, flies raggedly off, and returns. She is calling to Anonyme. The tame bird is disturbed by the call, hopping toward it, climbing the masts, perching on the bowsprit to hear her. Audubon speaks to his pet but the raven is past hearing a human voice and, finally, he answers the call. He jumps off the bowsprit and falls, with his clipped wings, to the water. By the time Audubon gets the whaleboat down to him, the bird has drowned.

He is grief-stricken.

“My raven has committed suicide,” Audubon writes to Maria. “It is an omen. He answered the call of another raven and jumped from the bow. But a tamed bird can neither fly nor swim. Down he sank freighted with my stories. Perhaps that will be the end of them.”

T
HEN, LIKE A GIFT
from the top of the world, it comes.

He sees the iceberg loom out of the mist. It is wet with sun melt, and gleaming in the early rays from the east. Unstable on its beam, its prisms shift and flash green. It is fugitive colour: he could not catch it if he wanted to. Before his eyes and as he ponders it, it begins to tilt and then, slowly, tumbles over itself, making a mad roar as it rips the water.

When, that afternoon, the fog clamps down on them, it is unnerving to know that the iceberg is out there drifting. But from far out comes again the sound of cannons firing. “There she is! The
Gulnare
, out in the Strait,” cries Audubon jubilantly.

Godwin listens. “Aye,” he says, “that’s her. That’s the Royal British Navy. Letting us know she’s out there so she don’t get hit in the fog.”

E
XULTANT
, Bayfield has been exploring the Strait, from L’Anse-aux-Morts back to Bras d’Or. L’Anse-au-Clair has sandy beaches ruled over by outraged gulls. He dares the icebergs, the storms, the fog. Each time he sees the ripple, feels the chill of Arctic air as he crosses it, he watches the colour, the texture and speed of the water change. He has discovered a seam in the ocean.

Now he is somewhere in the middle.

He stands on deck in the fog feeling no impatience to escape it. This absence is new and puzzles him. He thinks of Collins, the crunch of his chin when the launch drove into him, his body floating white and distended in this same huge body of water. He thinks of the cargo of brilliant watercolours in the dark hold of the
Ripley
. He is proud to have seen them before the rest of the world does.

I
N FLIGHT
the black hawk could almost be mistaken for the Peregrine Falcon, but with broader wings and a longer tail. It flies higher, and is more majestic. It halts itself directly over the crouching, chubby bird. Then, certain of victory, it catapults down, down, lethal, screaming, the talons so large they encircle, puncture, and carry off the little bird in one savage motion. Johnny has not had time to get it in his sights.

“We must have that hawk,” his father cries, furious. “How can you have let it go? It may be the Gyrfalcon.”

The next day Audubon walks with Johnny and Tom Lincoln down the coast near a waterfall. High on a cliff above them they see the black hawk again. It thunders down over their heads with a nasal, begging cry:
KHYa KHYa KHYa
. A second bird dives on them following its mate, but it too is gone.

Tom and Audubon wait, lying on the rocks until they seem to have become part of the landscape. Johnny climbs the waterfall to reach the top of the cliff. The rocks beside are wet with spray. He clings here and there, becoming smaller as he zigzags to the top. Audubon watches him. He does not call to him to get down from there, it’s dangerous. He wants the bird.

“He might slip,” says Tom Lincoln. “I’ll go after him.” He does not say,
No bird is worth
… That has been said before, to ill effect.

Audubon lies on the rocks. He is counting. He has twenty-two drawings of birds, done or partly done. He has collected seventy-three skins, although he is worried about their condition because of the relentless damp. He has not found the Labrador Duck, only that empty nest near Mr. Jones’s estate. And he has neither seen nor heard of a Great Auk.

The
Ripley
is costing $350 a month. The young gentlemen are paying three dollars week for board. He has had the vessel victualled for five months with potatoes, rice, beans, beef, pork, butter, cheese and coffee. They have been out so far forty-eight days between June 17 and August 5, the same number of days as there are years of his life. This seems to him significant. There has been rain, fog and storm on at least twenty-five of these days.

Counting, said Bayfield, is hope. Yet Audubon has never found it that way. To him, it is fidgeting, a kind of mental scratching of his sore places. He counts to reassure himself, and to keep track of his enterprise. He counts his debts and the money which is due him. Subscriptions lost and subscriptions gained. Counts his enemies and those close to him. Their deeds and misdeeds. Counts the people who are both friend and foe; Charles Bonaparte, of the royal connections and vinegar-soaked epistles; even Bachman, his dearest friend, who, although married to her sister, holds Maria in his grasp. While he, poor Audubon, similarly wived and yoked, cannot have her. Counts what he came into the world with: nothing. “
Obscene child, born of whoredom
.” And what he will leave when he goes.
The Birds of America
and all it will bring.

He thinks as he lies there of how much he has given his son. How fortunate Johnny is. His own father was selfish in siring children who
had no place in life. He, Jean Rabin, has had to invent himself. His own father gave him nothing but a worthless claim on property in two countries and several bogus names. Whereas Johnny will have the
Birds
.

The young man is high now, ascending the cliff, and Tom Lincoln is underneath him. The hawk, like a sorcerer, darts into view in the sky and makes one circle, then disappears. The young gentlemen do not see it, concerned as they are with where to put their hands and feet. Audubon watches without concern. Johnny is the best of his young men, fearless and footsure.

And then, just as Audubon’s scanning eyes sweep past him, Johnny slips and falls. He hits a rock some ten feet below him and slides, grasping for a ledge. His grip on the ledge fails and he falls again. Feet and feet. Forever he falls, until he is nearly at the foot of his friend Tom Lincoln.

Audubon watches this dumbshow, for no sound carries against the wind that is blowing off the water. Lincoln falls to his knees, lifts his friend’s head, then one foot, then another. He appears to be wiping his hands. Johnny has not moved. Audubon is on his feet and running, he has spat what remains of his lunch to one side. He is tearing the nails off his fingers as he leaps to the cliff and up the stages of rock. His breath comes hammering into his mouth; his ears ring, he cannot see and he is pulling himself up by creviced roots, into the splash water and out of it, on the slick tarry rockface. This is the man who rode the horse Barro for three days without stopping into Kentucky, fording rivers. This is he again, the stile-jumper, barrel-leaper, he who could do anything, the man of power and grace and fire. He offers a bargain to God. If Johnny is spared he will give up Maria. (Does this count if she has already given him up, which is what he also fears?) If you spare Johnny, I will shoot no more birds than are absolutely necessary.

Please God, do not do this to me.

Johnny is groaning when he reaches the spot. There is blood around his head. But his limbs lie straight. He moves.

“He’s not dead,” charges his father.

“No,” says gentle Tom. “He is not.” And he lies down on the rock and takes his friend in his arms and sobs while Audubon kneels as in a church.

Reprieve. All life flows back to him.

Barely injured, with a cut head and bruises, Johnny walks back to the ship between his friend and his father.

T
HEY RETURN
to the spot another day. The bird makes a fateful return circle. Johnny gets a shot and captures her. Half an hour later, he shoots the mate.

Audubon carries them, one in each hand, by the legs. They are not hawks at all, but falcons, and he is sure he has found a new species: the Labrador Falcon.

He sets the birds up in the usual way. He spreads the female’s wings, showing her fine breast with the complex mottling of white and dark feathers, the way they darken in the lower body between her thick feathered legs, and the inside of her fanned tail, with the rows of white dashes horizontally. Her talons are larger than her beak, the entire foot larger than her head, which he poses in profile with beak open and crimson mouth exposed. The male he poses perched above the female, looking down on her, his black back showing its white markings at the tips of the tail feathers. She is screaming, her lethal claws spread.

He sits up all night to sketch in the outline.

He spends the day after their death painting the pair. He dutifully notes all its particulars. He believes this to be a different species from the Icelandic Gyrfalcon, which is white with a great skein of black shapes spread all over its back.

“No one can doubt it now, the Labrador Falcon,” he exclaims.

He has forgotten already what it nearly cost.

A
T PERROQUET ISLAND
the air is filled with puffins, and the choppy waves littered with them. Audubon goes out in the skiff of a Jersey fisherman named Gilbert, who promises to land.

As Gilbert’s boat approaches, the birds fly boldly over it. They have a rounded shape in the air and spurt forward with sporadic wing
movements. Top-heavy and preceded by their large beak, they are comic in profile. But face on, each bird is sad, its white visage divided in two halves by the beak, which is a startling red with black and yellow outlines and a solemn white clerical collar below. Each and every one has one of the long silver fish called launce dangling from its beak. They croak as they go, but this does not make them drop their cargo.

“Do you see how greedy they are?” says Gilbert. “I suppose that’s why they get so fat. They’re pretty good stuffed and baked.” He smiles in a reminiscent way. “The young are still in the burrows. They won’t fly until September and then they will go north.”

The puffins circle the boat as the men approach, flying sometimes equidistant from each other in groups of four or more, maintaining formation. They settle on the water, from which they must dive or at least duck to get their prey, but they move so suddenly Audubon rarely catches them doing it; they sit on the water, and instantly are gone, then again there they are with a loaded bill where they were not before. On the rocky ledges thousands more line up, an army, regiment on regiment. As soon as one lot flies upward it is replaced by another.

Audubon laughs at their antics. They defend the island angrily and vigorously, but at the last moment, seeing the guns, they abandon their homes. The black-backed gulls that prey on them are not so easily frightened and stand at the top of the pile of rocks protesting vociferously.

The island is made of granite blocks pushed upward to make an unruly pile, leaving cracks and holes crested with soft grass. Audubon walks up the rocks, which are like steps. Higher up, the ground cover is spongy moss with a thick crop of ferns. Underneath, in burrows like rat holes, are the nests. He bends; sometimes the head of an adult bird is there in the opening. But the nest and the young are far down the tunnels. Putting his ear to the ground, he can hear their cries from the deep underground warrens. As he walks over the island their cries penetrate the mossy tents, eerily, like voices from the grave.

Audubon is tired of sadness. Tired of the death of nature, which he can feel, prickling under his skin. Foresight is painful. He would rather be blind. Standing on the rise of the granite island with its
sparse tufts of moss, he tries to forget what he has learned, that man will kill the beasts with his greed. It is too much for one man to know. This land is wide, the energy beating at it merciless. “You cannot make a dint in this plenty,” Bayfield said. Andubon forgets the promise he made to God when Johnny fell, the promise to shoot no more birds than necessary. He has forgotten God, now that he has no need for him.

This is what he does. What he did. Despite what he felt, what he wrote, what he has come to understand. He did, and he does it all over again.

He raises his rifle, loads and shoots into the flock of circling, frantic puffins. One falls. He laughs. He loads and shoots again. Another. He cannot miss. Faster now he raises his gun. Shoots another. And another. He is laughing and shooting all at once. He shoots twenty-seven times and kills twenty-seven birds. Gilbert stands by, watching respectfully. They take another dozen alive.

“Not bad,” says Johnny.

“How’s that, Bachman?” Audubon shouts into the wind to his shooting partner. “Not bad, wouldn’t you say?”

The Human
FASCINATION WITH BIRDS

I
t is the dog watch, and the tars are amusing themselves on deck. They have learned how to make the puffins race. They are crouched at the rope which serves as a finish line, laying bets. The little birds skid underfoot, and watch the humans, looking hard at their eyes. Audubon walks blindly through their midst.