Creation (6 page)

“She does not give herself up easily.”

By way of accepting this judgment, Audubon makes his sweeping bow.

“I will not argue, but think of you, if I may, as my guide to this land.”

On the point of saying farewell, he points upward. A little flock of a dozen small birds lands on the topyards of the
Gulnare
. Red with two white markings at the top of their black wings, they cling fiercely to the rigging in the gathering wind.

“These little ones led us here as we sailed across the Gulf,” says the artist tenderly. “White-winged crossbills. They’re heading to the pine forests. My gun —”

He gestures sideways, as if to his boy, never taking his eyes off the birds. “Do you see? Their crooked bills which look as if they could not get anything into their mouths? But they are perfectly made to cut
pinecones. They can grip anything. If I were to shoot and kill one now, the corpse would cling to the rigging.”

There is no boy and no gun. Bowen stares almost rudely at the painter’s outstretched hand until it is withdrawn. As suddenly as they arrived, the birds take flight. They circle high above the schooner.

“Do you see? They wait for us to follow.”

“I have often seen them thus,” says Bayfield. Bowen slides away. The captain and the artist are alone now, looking up. “Why would they do that? Do they have an affection for man?”

“It is a mystery,” says Audubon.

“I don’t know birds. I prefer rocks. Those I can name.”

In a parting gesture, the sun throws a beam under the low-hanging clouds and for a moment enlivens the deck. The faces of Bayfield and Audubon, their whiskers, their eyes, are suddenly lit.

The artist looks at the captain, and laughs. “Look how the sun fires the water to bronze. It has its wiles, this melancholy place, so far, so far from everywhere. Tell me Captain, what is your Greenwich time, if it is ten o’clock here? What is it in London now?”

Bayfield consults the timepiece in his palm.

“It is three o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr. Audubon.”

“Three o’clock? Is that not a wonder! Imagine! You hold tomorrow in your hand.”

The naval officer with his easy grasp of time and distance folds his fingers over the gold discus.

“Is it true then that if my eyes could penetrate that eastern horizon, I would be looking at London?”

“Well, you’d have to move Newfoundland, but in theory, yes —”

“I could see my engravers’ studio on Oxford Street! In — what, only four hours time, at seven o’clock — I could see my son Victor approaching with his briefcase in his hand and figures in his head! The flame will be lit under the copper plate which hangs from the ceiling. Havell himself will hold the tapers underneath to warm it. And Blake will be putting his colourists to work with their brushes on the prints that were made yesterday. Thirty painters, at last count, seated in rows, reproducing, for all the world to see, the colours of my simple birds.”

“I should like to see your pictures, if you would let me.” Bayfield is taken with this strange intense figure who has risen up out of the mist.

“I have some drawings on board the
Ripley
I can show you, if we’re forced to linger here at Little Natashquan.”

“Whether we keep company will depend on what the wind and the skies have in store for us,” the captain says as Audubon swings his long leg over the rail and puts his foot onto the rope ladder.

The
HOLD

T
here are light breezes SSW and the day — Sunday, 23 June 1833, Bayfield writes in his journal — is foggy but calm. He observes for latitude and records his findings. Then he decides to return Mr. Audubon’s visit.

When he steps aboard the
Ripley
, he enters a different nautical world, neither shipshape, clean, nor tidy. Hip boots made of sealskin in the Esquimaux style are draped over the railings. Even in the fresh air, the ship smells of wet wool and leather, of unwashed men. The railings are unspeakable, caked with bird dung. He keeps away from them for fear of soiling his sleeves, although excrement is smeared along the deck so thickly that walking is hazardous.

Birds of various order are underfoot. There is a raven poking in the satchels for leftover food. One giant black-backed gull, hopping like a rabbit. A few huddling puffins. Some guillemots and several young gannets, awkward things with pale eyes. A sailor tosses mackerel in their direction and they catch it in their beaks. A small thickset man who Bayfield assumes to be the pilot lounges against a barrel. He does not stand up on seeing the captain in full uniform, but seems in fact to slouch in a more pronounced way.

“If it’s Mr. Audubon you’re after you’ll find him down there.” Godwin points.

It is not much of a welcome.

Bayfield finds the ladder down to the hold. The raven jeers in his direction and he slips on the ordure, nearly losing his balance. When he looks down the steps, his eyes fall directly upon the mahogany head,
shot with silver, and the artist’s hand slowly circling over the paper like a compass needle finding its direction. Audubon appears less like a man drawing, than like an instrument rendering its impressions.

Bayfield puts his foot on the step.

“Good day, sir. Do I disturb you?”

“Not at all,” lies the artist.

So lies Bayfield himself when he is interrupted. “You are missing the chance to go on shore,” he says.

“Captain Emery has gone with the young gentlemen to collect specimens around the harbour. He’s taking a keen interest in my work.”

“I have seen him,” admits Bayfield. Nothing within the circumference of his gaze from his own deck escapes his attention. When he was taking his soundings, he watched the small black figures of Audubon’s shipmates moving over the shapeless landscape, up to the top of the rocks and down on the shore. They were visible wherever they wandered, because there was nothing upright to hide them.

As his eyes begin to adjust to the dimness of the hold, he picks out hammocks slung at one end, and a stack of rifles in the corner. Bottles with candle stubs stuck in the neck are pushed to the edges of the long deal table where the painter sits, and plants hang upside down, drying.

On the table, two gannets are posing for the artist. The huge mature bird, over three feet long, is behind, his back and tail sloping downward to the left, his back wing tips crossed, his long beak raised diagonally upward, in quest of wind, perhaps. The immature bird, in front, and at cross purposes, twists his beak backward and down to preen his wing feathers, his eye hooded. They are extra ordinarily still.

Bayfield peers, notices the wires that hold the raised beak, the spikes on which the birds are impaled. His heart thuds a little. “Good grief, are they dead?”

“Since this morning. We took several pair alive on the Bird Rocks five days ago; I sketched from the first and saved these for the colour,” says Audubon. “They fade, so I have to work quickly.”

Bayfield edges nearer the standing dead. They are self-conscious; they have died for a cause. They have a curious, sombre dignity, the paper reflecting back to them their flattened image.

Now he takes in the rest of the room. In large glass jars he can see the bodies of birds floating in oil. At the end of the table several deconstructed specimens lie on a tray, their stomachs and tracheae cut open, organs spilling out. Bayfield feels queasy, and trains his eyes directly on the models.

“Gannets,” he says. “An elegant creature on the wing. One of the first you see when you have crossed the Atlantic. Sometimes as far out as three hundred miles from land, they are suddenly above the ship, high over the water, gliding silently, fishing. But when they travel in earnest, they fly low over the water. Then they overtake us. They flap their wings several dozen times, quickly, and then they sail the same distance, wings flat.”

Audubon places his brush in a dish and his hands on the table, pushing himself upright and rolling his shoulders backward. He towers over Bayfield in the tiny space. His arms extend in imitation of the diver.

“You are right, they often travel low but they can fly high and even fish from that height. I saw one dive into a shoal of launces, from a hundred feet. He barely sank below the surface, but began to run on the water, striking out to right and left with his beak, eating fish after fish.” He swings his own head, with its prominent, high-bridged nose, from left to right as he speaks. The birds are mute and frozen, as if all their animation has been transferred to Audubon.

Bayfield finally looks directly at the painting. He has no idea what to say. Bowen’s words come back to him: Enormous, yes. Violent, no. There is violence in the room, but it is not the birds’. Slatternly? The schooner, but not the paintings. “It is — why, it is magnificent.” He surprises himself with the strength of his response.

Audubon puts a drop of water on the back of the mature bird he has drawn and rubs it with his thumb, softening the colour. He sighs. “I’ve spent all day on it,” he says with a degree of self-pity. “I haven’t got the shade of it exactly right.”

“Have you more?”

Audubon shows him the Arctic Tern, on which he is still working, and the completed Piping Plover.

“Very fine!” says Bayfield. “Exceedingly fine.” But he now feels he is in the presence of an alchemist of sorts and is glad when they climb back to the deck.

There he is confronted by an indignant live gannet, its head thrown backward, its bill open. It is not the creature he knows from the air. It hobbles, using its outspread wings to keep itself erect. It throws its head back and howls wolfishly
kerew
,
karow
. It cannot fly; its wings are clipped.

Audubon nudges the bird out of the way with his toe. “Having lived the better part of a week with these, as well as more than a few corpses in various states of decomposition, I can say that I am tired of the gannet. It is not a clever bird, it may even be stupid: it certainly looks it. It does not sing but croaks, and the flesh is inedible. I prefer my raven. Come, Anonyme.”

The raven jumps onto his wrist. The artist strokes its head with his right forefinger.

“I am teaching him to talk.”

This does not seem to fit with the artist’s reverence for the birds as they are in nature. “Why?” Bayfield asks.

The raven fixes him with its bead of an eye and caws.

Audubon’s own moist and rather sorrowful eyes wrinkle up at the sides as he smiles. “Because I would like to hear what he has to say. The raven is said to have the powers of prediction.”

“Is it not fanciful to think that once you give it words, the raven will confide its own thoughts? Do you expect Anonyme will tell you his purpose?”

“His purpose is to reproduce. That is what brings him here.”

“I’ve often wondered how they navigate,” says Bayfield.

“Like you, I imagine. By the stars.”

“Could it be so? That they know the stars?”

“I believe it.”

“Are they ever lost?”

“Rarely. I found a red-breasted nuthatch the other day; he seemed to be quite off track. A single bird may sometimes be found far off his range, and detached from his fellows, wounded or carried by a storm.”

“As we may be, without our maps.”

“I myself can think of nothing happier than to lose my maps, or your maps, as the case may be!”

Bayfield is taken aback. No one teases him. He is, after all, a captain with warior potential. He proved himself so while still a boy and his commendation is written into the navy records.

“You may say so, Mr. Audubon, but I do not wish it on you.”

“No,” Audubon concedes. His quicksilver mood appears to have changed. “Often, I seek to lose myself in the wilderness — not in this place. But you’ve come year after year to this comfortless land.”

“On intimate acquaintance I have come to appreciate her inaccessibility. And so perhaps shall you.”

Audubon looks skeptical.

“I wager it will change you. You will return to this place in dreams for the rest of your life.”

“God help me,” says the artist. He looks over the water, lit with the feeble rays of northern sun. “This land is too dark to monopolize my dreams. I long for sun and blossoms, for colour. It is so cold here, and lonely.”

Bayfield is taken aback at the openness of this confession. Yet he rises to it. “It is the long hours away from shore that make you lonely. Are you married?”

“Yes, to my dearest friend. She waits for me in New York. I have two sons. One of them, John, you saw scrambling on shore. Victor, as I mentioned, manages my affairs in London. And you?”

“No, I have not had time to marry. We seafarers pay little mind to emotion; solitude is part of the venturing life. Then, too, we are obstinate creatures.”

We
.

The word hangs between them.

Bayfield, attuned to slight and gaffe by birthright, hears the other man’s breath stop for a second and knows that he has erred. He sees a falling out of sympathy, a shutting of some door behind Audubon’s eyes. But the chance encounter, the long grey hours of half sun, the way they are dwarfed in the vastness of the bowl of land and sea that
holds them, his own restlessness, which has found a mirror in the artist, push him to go further.

“Certainly here on the water with my chains and my tripod, I dream of land. But I am at home in Quebec every winter, where I draw my charts and prepare for the next season on the water. There I dream in reverse. It is the sort of men we are.”

The sort of men we are
: again the captain has presumed.

Audubon’s eyes narrow in what might be anger.

Bayfield grows more clumsy. Yet on he goes.

“I want to know how you came to be here, and how you came to paint birds,” he says.

“If we meet again I will tell you my story,” says Audubon. “And you perhaps will tell me yours.”

“I have no story,” he says. “I joined the navy at eleven years of age. When I came to Quebec in 1815, I was disappointed that there was no war. Surveying became my life’s work.” He could have added that he has made his name by labouring beyond the call of duty in places monumentally inhospitable to man, that he surveyed Lake Superior and the archipelago of Georgian Bay in two small rowing boats. But, being modest, he does not.