The Snow Geese (18 page)

He’d gone to Iceland for the first time the previous year, on a tour, wanting to trace his relatives. The bellboy at the hotel in Reykjavik had turned out to be his second cousin, and when the Viking had asked the receptionist to look someone up in the telephone directory, the girl had said that wouldn’t be necessary, they were best friends, she knew the number by heart. What had struck him most was the greenness of the country.

‘Everyone thinks it’s all snow and ice and glaciers, but my god that place is so green!’ he said. ‘All that grass! Meadows! And cows grazing, everywhere!’

‘The cows wear brassières,’ said Bjornson.

‘That’s right!’ said Bjornsson. ‘They’ve got cows in these big leather brassières. Stops the udders and, what are they,
teats
from knocking on the rocks!’

The three men rocked back on their chairs, guffawing.

They began to talk about the Gimli parade. Each year, on Islendingadagurinn, or Icelanders’ Day, Gimli hosts a festival whose centrepiece is a parade of floats. A woman stands on the leading float, representing the Fjallkona, Maid of the Mountains, symbol of Iceland, dressed in a white gown, a green robe trimmed with ermine, a gold belt, and a high-crowned headdress of white veil falling down over her shoulders to the waist.

‘One hell of a beautiful lady,’ the Viking said.

‘She is indeed,’ said Bjornsson, sombrely.

‘That’s the truth,’ added Bjornson.

Once or twice, I learned, the Viking had ridden on the leading float next to the Fjallkona. Bjornson and Bjornsson encouraged him to bring out his costume. The Viking disappeared for a minute and came back wearing a bizarre helmet: a yellow microwave-compatible cooking bowl, with two curving cardboard horns attached to it with tape, and a red leather key fob taped to the rim of the bowl, hanging down over his nose.

‘See these?’ he asked, pointing to the two horns. ‘I’m the horniest Viking in Manitoba!’

The kitchen swelled with laughter. Bjornson and Bjornsson rocked back on their chairs. Bjornsson rocked back an inch past the balance point and only just managed to grab the corner of the sideboard to stop himself from falling. The room’s laughter took a breath, saw Bjornsson was safe, then surged again, with renewed force.

I noticed the Viking’s belt buckle. He was standing in front of us in the horned helmet. His buckle was a silver plaque embossed with the front ends of a trolley bus and streetcar. For ten years, after the war, he’d driven buses and streetcars in Toronto.

‘Drove the Long Branch routes,’ he said. ‘And Neville Park, Dundas, Humber, Spadina Station. Toronto was all busy, busy, busy. Crowds, crowds, crowds. Rush hour lasted three hours. Moved to Winnipeg in 1955. The streetcar service ended in Winnipeg in that year, 1955. Drove a brand-new fleet of trolley coaches from Canadian Car & Foundry. Drove Sargent, Notre Dame, Logan, Ellice, Salter, Polo Park. Then they replaced the trolley coaches with diesel buses. Killed the DC machine at Mill Street substation. First time that place had been quiet in I don’t know how many years.’

Behind him, against the wall, was an old wood bookcase with four painted duck decoys on its shelves. Remembering Michael, I identified the species: mallard, bufflehead, canvasback, pintail.

‘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.

*

T
HE 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 flights. 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.