The Snow Geese (19 page)

*

T
HE STORM PASSED OVER
Riding Mountain; the thaw came hard on its heels. Snow melted quickly, draining into the sloughs and marshes. Snow beds and banks lingered in shaded places. Every day I took the two dogs walking, hoping to see snow geese. Harley, well-bred, obedient, stayed close to me on the track, while Sitka, ash-whites and charcoals blended in her fur, rummaged wildly in the undergrowth or bounded far ahead, dashing up to vantage points and striking a pose, all instinct, sizing up the territory. About a mile from the cabin the track emerged from the forest to a rousing prospect of open, rolling country covered with wheat stubble and blond prairie grasses. Ice was breaking up on the sloughs: Canada geese, white chinstraps agleam on jet black necks, joined mallard and goldeneye on the open water. A red-tailed hawk glided low over the grass. A bald eagle perched on the point of a spruce. A great blue heron flew down in front of me to take up position at the edge of a pond, its wings making the
whup-whup
of someone walking in a sarong.

Birds were coming in. I looked for snow geese every time I went outside. Migrants appeared on the birdtable outside David’s kitchen window, a new species every day: red-winged blackbirds, dark-eyed juncos, evening grosbeaks, purple finches. The Viking looked forward to later arrivals, especially the Baltimore orioles and ruby-throated hummingbirds. He raged at burdock, a weed growing in the sere grass around the house.

‘Burdock!’ he ranted. ‘It’s the curse of the world! It’s the bane of my existence! Holy Christ! This burdock!’

Fluff from cattail seedheads skiffed past him on a breeze.

There was still no sign of snow geese. Each morning I sat writing at the cabin’s rickety table, under the eye of the chintz-gowned cat, and in the afternoons I walked with the two dogs along tracks through the spruce forest or on long circuits around Lake Timon, often singing or whistling, wary of the black bears that would be emerging from hibernation as the days grew warmer. ‘Make a noise,’ David had advised. ‘Bears don’t like to be surprised.’

One afternoon I walked up the track from the cabin with Sitka and Harley. We came out of the trees, and the dogs ran ahead, bounding through the wheatgrass. Cloud shadows roamed across the open country. We struck out through knee-high wheatgrass towards an old homesteaders’ cabin, tilted like a trapezoid, its logs chinked with mud, half the shingles missing from the roof, the floorboards rotten. Tatters of wallpaper fell to the floor when I went inside, the dogs already chasing rats in the root cellar. An old leather shoe rested on one of the few remaining floorboards, hardened and gnarled, like a twist of driftwood. Bedsprings were strewn about. The stove was intact: a Peninsula Monarch, made by Clare Bros. & Co. Ltd of Preston, Winnipeg and Vancouver, with a dial showing the baking heat,
Warm
to
Very Hot
, and a rusty spoon lying across the hob. The cabin was disintegrating, but the stove – the hearth – was resolute, unshiftable, apparently resistant to the processes of decay.

On the way back to the house, the dogs caught a muskrat and tore it clean in half. They trotted along, holding their halves of the muskrat in their teeth. Harley had the head and chest, the rodent’s arms protruding from the corners of her mouth; Sitka had the haunches and rear, the muskrat’s tail swinging loosely below her chin. We found the Viking cleaning his pickup, swabbing the hood and windscreen with soapy water and a brick-shaped yellow sponge, dressed in a denim shirt buttoned right up to the collar, and jeans of the same light blue. His jeans were held up by braces in addition to the black leather belt with the silver buckle. One, it seemed, was a back-up system for the other.

‘You!’ he shouted as we approached. ‘Have you looked up lately?’

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Right here! Holy Christ! Look!’

He pointed. I looked straight up at the sky. Snow geese were flying overhead, blue-phase and white-phase birds, three distinct Vs, coming from the south.

‘What took you so long?’ the Viking yelled at the geese, shaking his sponge at them. ‘You’re late! Jesus Christ! You got people waiting for you! Holy Christ!’

The dogs put down their muskrat pieces and looked up.

*

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE
of April. I’d planned to see the snow geese on the Portage Plains, then take the train from Winnipeg to Churchill on Hudson Bay. The Viking, who was due to go back to his apartment in Winnipeg, offered me a lift.

‘We’ll find geese on the way,’ he said.

Harley and Sitka ran after the pickup, barking. We drove out of the spruce forest, back down off the hills of Riding Mountain to the open plain. The Viking had fitted a set of flip-up shades to his steel-framed glasses. He flipped the lenses up and down indecisively. He drove slowly but pressed himself right back in his seat, arms at full stretch, as though experiencing substantial g-force. I kept an eye on the fields and sky, looking for geese.

Before the war, the Viking had worked for a year as a baker. He joined the army at nineteen and landed at Normandy the day after D-Day, a frontline signaller, carrying a radio on his back. After the war, he’d wanted to be a jeweller.

‘Why a jeweller?’

‘Because I’ve always loved tinkering with things and handling little tools.’

‘What happened?’

‘At that time the government was offering lots of training opportunities. So I said I wanted to be a jeweller. Government told me the jeweller’s courses were reserved for disabled veterans. End of my career as a jeweller. Joined the transit company in Toronto. Drove trolley buses and streetcars. Met my wife. Got married. She was a real box of tricks. We’d both grown up in Manitoba, so we moved back to Winnipeg. I’m divorced. Had my camera ready when she left the house with all her suitcases. Wanted a picture of her going out through that back door for the last time. She saw me standing there with the camera ready. Picked up a mop and hit me in the face. Holy Christ!’

We were driving south across the flat land, the Viking pushed back into his seat like an astronaut. The plains were organized in mile-square sections of wheat, barley, corn, flax and canola stubble. Farm tracks and telegraph wires, crossing at right angles, ran along the edges of the sections. There were shelterbelts of green ash, and farm buildings just visible in windbreaks. We passed a cemetery.

‘All the people in there are dead,’ the Viking said. ‘Every one of them.’

Sometimes we left the highway and pulled up beside lakes. All the ice had gone. I passed my binoculars to the Viking; he flipped up his shades and pressed his bifocal lenses to the eyepieces. We saw Canada geese, mallard and lesser scaup, and eight American white pelicans attended by double-crested cormorants and Franklin’s gulls – small freshwater gulls with black hoods. They may all have flown up from the Gulf of Mexico.

Snow geese flew high overhead in undulating skeins and echelons. Flocks of killdeer – plovers with white underparts and two distinctive black breastbands – took off from stubble fields. I saw a V of long, lanky birds with heavy, slow-beating wings, necks stretched forward without a kink, legs trailing loosely behind them in bunches, and wondered if these sandhill cranes had flown from Texas – had even wintered on the prairies around Eagle Lake, stepping with the dainty gait of ballerinas along the edge of Jack’s holding pond. I spotted a flock of large white birds in a field of canola stubble and asked the Viking to pull over, thinking they might be snow geese. But the white birds were tundra swans, much larger than snow geese, with black legs and bills, and all-white plumage, without the geese’s black-tipped wings. Tundra swans winter in small pockets on the coasts of the United States and migrate to breeding areas from Alaska east to Baffin Island, across the far north of Canada. These swans in Manitoba were staging like the snow geese, gleaning for grain, replenishing fat stores, waiting for the thaw.

We drove on, in no particular direction, looking for flocks of geese. Monumental structures appeared on the level horizon to the west: sand-coloured, like half-completed pyramids.

‘I know what they are!’ the Viking declared.

Bales of flax straw, stacked in massive ricks. The bales would be sent to Pennsylvania for processing into cigarette papers and high-grade writing paper.

‘Saw one of those damn things burning,’ the Viking said. ‘One summer. Lightning got it. Holy smoke, it blazed like a bonfire! Miles away, you’d see it, on the horizon. Column of black smoke like you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Jesus Christ!’

‘When did you get to know all the birds?’ I asked.

‘Used to hunt all the time as a boy. I had a shotgun. One day I went out on my own, brought down fifty-two mallard, the whole pack of cards.’

‘How did you get them home?’

‘Oh, there were straw bales lying around. Took some of the twine off the bales and tied all the ducks together. Tied the other end to the seat of my bicycle. Rode home dragging fifty-two mallard ducks behind me, and, Christ, they were heavier than carpets.’

After his divorce, five years passed before the Viking spoke to his wife again. He saw her once during that period. He was on a shift, driving down Portage Avenue. He was waiting at a stoplight. He saw his wife in a car on the far side of the intersection.

‘Do you know how that affected me?’ he asked.

‘How?’

‘I actually had difficulty in breathing.’

We had been driving across the plains for almost three hours when we found snow geese on the ground. The Viking pulled over; we got out of the pickup. Perhaps 10,000 birds were gleaning in wheat stubble. Some were alert, their heads raised, periscoping; others were nosing in the black soil for leftover grain. A few tundra swans walked among the snow geese like samurai: grander birds, with more shining, imposing figures, a purer white. The calls of the geese combined in an insistent drone, graced with individual yaps, topped by the descant keening of killdeer. A flock of the plovers took off and settled again on the stubble between the snow geese and the track where I stood with the Viking.

‘Hello, birds,’ he said.

The Viking began to comb his hair. He kept two plastic combs in the back pocket of his jeans: a black comb, and a smaller pink comb with the fine tines of a lice comb. The way he drew, teased and flicked the combs through his tarnished-silver hair reminded me of his ambition to be a jeweller, his love for ‘little tools’. He used the black comb for outline and general form, then switched to the pink comb for precision work and ornament. His hands were heavy, rough and seasoned, but he handled the combs with the quick-fingered dexterity of an illusionist.

Small parties of snow geese took off from the flock and flew away from the field; other parties flew in and took their places in the gaggle. The geese coasted down on bowed wings, dropping their legs like an undercarriage, their bodies tilting backwards, wings beating in reverse thrust, until at the last moment each bird’s weight seemed to drag forward through its body, the feet touched down, the goose folded its wings and set to feeding. Herring gulls hung on the wind, crying like oboes.

The Viking returned the combs to their pocket. He was wearing his jeans and denim shirt. The shirt was buttoned up to the collar; the jeans were held up by braces and the black belt. The Viking was troubled by the attention of widows.

‘In my building alone there are eight widows,’ he said. ‘You have to fight them off, I tell you. They’re beating my door down. Holy Christ, these widows don’t take no for an answer. These widows
terrorize
you. A man’s not safe in his own home. Let your guard down for an instant and those widows
leap
upon you! Before you know what’s happened, you’re saddled with a widow. Holy Christ!’

The afternoon was beautiful: unambiguously spring.

‘Look at that,’ the Viking said. ‘Wall-to-wall sky. My brother used to love those white fleecy clouds just sailing by. Look at that!’

The flock was never still. The geese shuffled across the stubble, blue-phase and white-phase birds intermingled, gabbling constantly, feeding or watching for predators. This was the key advantage of living in a flock: the more birds were gathered together, the less time any one bird would have to spend looking out for danger, and the less time any bird had to spend looking out for danger, the more time it would have for feeding. I wondered if I’d seen any of these geese before: on the prairies outside Eagle Lake at sunset, high over Matthew’s half-built house in the hills, flying parallel to the Greyhound south of Minneapolis, or rising off the ice at Sand Lake, somewhere in those swirling crowds.

‘So what are you going to do?’ the Viking asked.

‘I’m going to pick up some warm clothes in Winnipeg,’ I said. ‘Then take the train up to Churchill.’

‘Then what?’

‘That depends. When the geese start moving on from Churchill, I’m hoping to catch a plane up to Baffin Island. The biggest nesting grounds are said to be on Baffin Island.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I’ll go home.’

We turned away from the flock of geese and went back to the pickup.

‘One thing,’ said the Viking. ‘When you’re in Winnipeg, watch out for the widows. You’re never too young.’

‘OK.’

I slammed my door shut. The sound startled the geese. Their calls rose in pitch and volume, swelling to a metallic yammer. The flock lifted from the field as a single entity, 10,000 pairs of wings drumming the air, as if people were swatting the dust from rugs: white-phase and blue-phase geese jumbled together, tundra swans caught up in the confusion. We watched as the flock gained height, flashing when sun caught the backs and wings of white birds, then dispersing in straggling skeins and Vs, flying away to the north-west.

‘My God!’ the Viking exclaimed. ‘Those birds!’

It was dark when we got to Winnipeg. The Viking dropped me at the hotel with the pink room. I thanked him; we shook hands. He warned me once more about the widows, wished me luck, and drove away.

6 : MUSKEG EXPRESS