Under the Sea Wind (5 page)

Now Ookpik, as he came up the stream valley, saw among the willows the moving balls of shining black that were the ptarmigans' eyes. The white foe moved nearer, blending into the pale sky; the white prey moved, unfrightened, over the snow. There was a soft
whoosh
of wings—a scattering of feathers—and on the snow a red stain spread, red as a new-laid ptarmigan egg before the shell pigments have dried. Ookpik bore the ptarmigan in his talons over the ridge to the higher ground that was his lookout, where his mate awaited him. The two owls tore apart the warm flesh with their beaks, swallowing also the bones and feathers as was their custom, to cast them up later in neat pellets.

The gnawing pang of hunger was a sensation new to Silverbar. A week before, with the others of the sanderling flock, she had filled her stomach with shellfish gathered on the wide tidal flats of Hudson Bay. Days before that they had gorged on beach fleas on the coasts of New England, and on Hippa crabs on the sunny beaches of the south. In all the eight-thousand-mile journey northward from Patagonia there had been no lack of food.

The older sanderlings, patient in the acceptance of hardship, waited until the ebb tide, when they led Silverbar and the other year-old birds of the flock to the edge of the harbor ice. The beach was piled with irregular masses of ice and frozen spray, but the last tide had shifted the broken floe and on retreating had left a bare patch of mud flat. Already several hundred shore birds had gathered—all the early migrants from miles around who had escaped death in the snow. They were clustered so thickly that there was scarcely space for the sanderlings to alight, and every square inch of surface had been probed or dug by the bills of the waders. By deep probing in the stiff mud Silverbar found several shells coiled like snails, but they were empty. With Blackfoot and two of the yearling sanderlings, she flew up the beach for a mile, but snow carpeted the ground and the harbor ice and there was no food.

As the sanderlings hunted fruitlessly among the ice chunks, Tullugak the raven flew overhead and passed up the shore on deliberate wings.

Cr-r-r-uck! Cr-r-r-uck!
he croaked hoarsely.

Tullugak had been patrolling the beach and the nearby tundra for miles, on the lookout for food. All the known carcasses which the ravens had resorted to for months had been covered by snow or carried away by the shifting of the bay ice. Now he had located the remains of a caribou which the wolves had run down and killed that morning, and he was calling the other ravens to the feast. Three jet-black birds, among them Tullugak's mate, were walking briskly about over the bay ice hunting a whale carcass. The whale had come ashore months before, providing almost a winter's supply of food for Tullugak and his kin, who lived the year round in the vicinity of the bay. Now the storm had opened a channel into which the shifting ice masses had pushed the dead whale and closed over it. At the welcome food cry of Tullugak, the three ravens sprang into the air and followed him across the tundra to pick off the few shreds of meat that remained on the bones of the caribou.

The next night the wind shifted and the thaw began.

Day by day the blanket of snow grew thinner. Irregular holes rent the white covering—brown holes where the naked earth showed through, green holes where ponds that still held their hearts of ice were uncovered. Hillside trickles grew to rivulets and rivulets to rushing torrents as the Arctic sent its melted snows to the sea, to eat jagged cuts and gullies through the salt ice, to accumulate in pools along the shore. Lakes brimmed with the clear cold water and teemed with new life as the young of crane flies and May flies stirred in the bottom muds and the larvae of the northland's myriad mosquitoes squirmed in the water.

As the drifts melted away and the low-lying grasslands became flooded, the lemming burrows, which honeycombed the Arctic underworld with hundreds of miles of tunnels, became uninhabitable. The quiet runways, the peaceful grass-lined burrows that had been secure from even the fiercest blizzards of winter, now knew the terrors of rushing waters, of swirling floods. As many of the lemmings as could escape took refuge on high rocks and gravel ridges and sunned their plump gray bodies, quickly forgetting the dark horror from which they had lately fled.

Now hundreds of migrants arrived from the south each day and the tundra heard other noises besides the booming cries of the cock owls and the bark of the foxes. There were the voices of curlews and plovers and knots, of terns and gulls and ducks from the south. There were the braying cries of the stilt sandpipers and the tinkling song of the redbacks; there was the shrill bubbling of the Baird sandpiper, akin to the sleigh-bell chorus of spring peepers in the smoky twilight of a New England spring.

As the patches of earth spread over the snow fields, the sanderlings, plovers, and turnstones gathered in the cleared spots, finding abundant food. Only the knots resorted to the unthawed marshes and the protected hollows of the plains, where sedges and weeds lifted dry seed heads above the snow and rattled when the wind blew and dropped their seed for the birds.

Most of the sanderlings and the knots passed on to the distant islands scattered far over the Arctic sea, where they made their nests and brought forth their young. But Silverbar and Blackfoot and others of the sanderlings remained near the bay shaped like a leaping porpoise, along with turnstones, plovers, and many other shore birds. Hundreds of terns were preparing to nest on near-by islands, where they would be safe from the foxes; while most of the gulls retired inland to the shores of the small lakes which dotted the Arctic plains in summer.

In time Silverbar accepted Blackfoot as her mate and the pair withdrew to a stony plateau overlooking the sea. The rocks were clothed with mosses and soft gray lichens, first of all plants to cover the open and wind-swept places of the earth. There was a sparse growth of dwarf willow, with bursting leaf buds and ripe catkins. From scattered clumps of green the flowers of the wild betony lifted white faces to the sun, and over the south slope of the hill was a pool fed by melting snow and draining to the sea by way of an old stream bed.

Now Blackfoot grew more aggressive and fought bitterly with every cock who infringed upon his chosen territory. After such a combat he paraded before Silverbar, ruffling his feathers. While she watched in silence he leaped into the air and hovered on fluttering wings, uttering neighing cries. This he did most often in the evening as the shadows lay purple on the eastern slopes of the hills.

On the edge of a clump of betony Silverbar prepared the nest, a shallow depression which she molded to her body by turning round and round. She lined the bottom with last year's dried leaves from a willow that grew prostrate along the ground, bringing the leaves one at a time and arranging them in the nest along with some bits of lichen. Soon four eggs lay on the willow leaves, and now Silverbar began the long vigil during which she must keep all wild things of the tundra from discovering the place of her nest.

During her first night alone with the four eggs Silverbar heard a sound new to the tundra that year, a harsh scream that came again and again out of the shadows. At early dawn light she saw two birds, dark of body and wing, flying low over the tundra. The newcomers were jaegers, birds of the gull tribe turned hawk to rob and kill. From that time on, the cries, like weird laughter, rang every night on the barrens.

More and more jaegers arrived each day, some from the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic, where they had lived by stealing fish from the gulls and shearwaters, others from the warm oceans of half the globe. Now the jaegers became the scourge of all the tundra. Singly or in twos and threes they beat back and forth over the open places, on the watch for a solitary sandpiper or plover or phalarope who, being defenseless, would provide easy game. They whirled down in sudden attack on the flocks of shore birds feeding on the broad, weed-strewn mud flats, hoping to separate a single bird from its fellows for the swift pursuit that ends in death. They harried the gulls on the bay, tormenting them until they disgorged the fish they had caught. They hunted among the rock crevices and little mounds of stones, where they often surprised a lemming sunning himself at the mouth of his burrow or came upon a snow bunting brooding her eggs. They perched on rocky elevations or ridges from which they watched the pattern of the rolling tundra, mottled dark and light with moss and gravel, with lichen and shale. Even the fierce eyes of a jaeger could not distinguish at a distance the speckled eggs of the many birds that lay unconcealed on the open plain. So skillful was the camouflage of the tundra that only by sudden movement did a nesting bird or a foraging lemming betray its presence.

Now for twenty hours out of the twenty-four the tundra lay in sun and for four hours it slept in soft twilight. Arctic willow and saxifrage, wild betony and crowberry hastened to put forth new leaves to draw to themselves the strength of the sun. Into a few brief and sun-filled weeks the plants of the Arctic must crowd a lifetime of living. Only the kernel of life, fortified and protected, endures the months of darkness and cold.

Soon the cloak of the tundra was embroidered with many flowers: first, the white cups of the mountain avens; then the purple of saxifrage; then the yellow of the buttercup glades, loud with the drone of bees trampling the shiny golden petals and jostling the laden anthers, so that each bore away its load of pollen on the bristles of its body. The tundra was gay, too, with moving bits of color, for the midday sun coaxed out butterflies from the willow thickets where they drooped and hid when the colder airs blew or when clouds stole between earth and sun.

In temperate lands the birds sing their sweetest songs in the dim light that falls after sundown and comes before dawn. But in the Arctic barrens the June sun dips so briefly below the horizon that each of the night hours is an hour of twilight or song light, filled with the bubbling song of the longspur and the calls of the horned lark.

On a day in June a pair of phalaropes drifted, light as corks, on the glazed sheet of the sanderlings' pool. Now and then they spun in a circle by rapid thrusts of their lobed feet, then jabbed again and again with needlelike bills to capture the insects stirred up by their movements. The phalaropes had spent the winter on the open sea far to the southward, following the whales and the ever-drifting clouds of whale food. On their migration they had come northward by an ocean route as far as possible before striking inland. The phalaropes prepared a nest on the south slope of the ridge not far from the sanderling nest and lined it, as most of the tundra nests are lined, with willow leaves and catkins. Then the cock phalarope took charge of the nest, to sit for eighteen days, warming the eggs to life.

By day the soft
coo-a-hee, coo-a-hee,
of the knots came down flutelike from the hills, where on the plateaus the nests lay hidden amid the curling brown tufts of Arctic sedges and the leaves of the mountain avens. Every evening Silverbar watched a solitary knot tumbling and soaring in the still air over the low mounds of the hills. The song of Canutus, the knot, was heard by other knots along miles of hilltop and by the turn-stones and sandpipers on the tide flats of the bay. But another heard and responded to it most of all, his small dappled mate who was brooding their four eggs in the nest far below.

Then for a season many of the voices of the tundra were hushed, as all over the barren eggs were hatching and there were young to be fed and concealed from enemies.

When Silverbar had begun to brood her eggs, the moon had been at the full. Since then it had dwindled to a thin white rim in the sky and now had grown again to the quarter, so that once more the tides in the bay were slacker and milder. One morning when the shore birds gathered over the flats to feed on the ebb tide, Silverbar did not join them. Throughout the night there had been sounds in the eggs under her breast feathers, now worn and frayed. They were the peckings of the sanderling chicks, after twenty-three days made ready for life. Silverbar inclined her head and listened to the sounds; sometimes she withdrew a little from the eggs and watched them intently.

On the near-by ridge a Lapland longspur was singing his tinkling, many-syllabled song, mounting high into the air again and again and spilling out his song as he lowered himself on widespread wings to the grass. The little bird had a feather-lined nest on the edge of the phalarope pool, where his mate was brooding their six eggs. The longspur was glad of the brightness and warmth of noonday and unmindful of the shadow that dropped between him and the sun as Kigavik, the gyrfalcon, fell from the sky. Silverbar neither heard the song of the longspur nor was conscious of its sudden ceasing; nor did she notice when a single breast feather fluttered downward almost at her side. She was watching a hole that had appeared in one of the eggs. The only sound she heard was a thin, mouse-like squeak, the first cry of her young. By the time the gyrfalcon had reached his eyrie on a crag of rock facing northward to the sea and had fed the longspur to his nestlings, the first sanderling chick had emerged from its shell and two more of the eggs were cracked.

Now for the first time an abiding fear entered the heart of Silverbar—the fear of all wild things for the safety of their helpless young. With quickened senses she perceived the life of the tundra—with ears sharpened to hear the screams of the jaegers harrying the shore birds on the tide flats—with eyes quickened to note the white flicker of a gyrfalcon's wing.

After the fourth chick had hatched, Silverbar began to carry the shells, piece by piece, away from the nest. So countless generations of sanderlings had done before her, by their cunning outwitting the ravens and foxes. Not even the sharp-eyed falcon from his rock perch nor the jaegers watching for lemmings to come out of their holes saw the movement of the little brown-mottled bird as she worked her way, with infinite stealth, among the clumps of betony or pressed her body closely to the wiry tundra grass. Only the eyes of the lemmings who ran in and out among the sedges or sunned themselves on flat rocks near their burrows saw the mother sanderling until she reached the bottom of the ravine on the far side of the ridge. But the lemmings were gentle creatures who neither feared nor were feared by the sanderling.