Under the Sea Wind (6 page)

All through the brief night that followed the hatching of the fourth chick Silverbar worked, and when the sun had come around to the east again she was hiding the last shell in the gravel of the ravine. A polar fox passed near her, making no sound as he trotted with sure foot over the shales. His eye gleamed as he watched the mother bird, and he sniffed the air, believing she had young near by. Silverbar flew to the willows farther up the ravine and watched the fox uncover the shells and nose them. As he started up the slope of the ravine the sanderling fluttered toward him, tumbling to the ground as though hurt, flapping her wings, creeping over the gravel. All the while she uttered a high-pitched note like the cry of her own young. The fox rushed at her. Silverbar rose rapidly into the air and flew over the crest of the ridge, only to reappear from another quarter, tantalizing the fox into following her. So by degrees she led him over the ridge and southward into a marshy bottom fed by the overflow of upland streams.

As the fox trotted up the slope, the cock phalarope on the nest heard a low
Plip! Plip! Chiss-ick! Chiss-ick!
from the hen, who was on guard near by and had seen the fox coming up the slope. The cock crept silently from the nest, through the grassy tunnels he had fashioned as runways of escape, until he came to the waterside where his mate was awaiting him. The two birds sailed into the middle of the pool and swam anxiously in circles, preening their feathers, jabbing long bills into the water in a pretense of feeding until the air came clean again, untainted by the musky smell of fox. The cock's breast showed a worn spot where the feathers had frayed away, for the phalarope chicks were soon to hatch.

When Silverbar had led the fox far enough from her young she circled around by the bay flats, pausing to feed nervously for a few minutes at the edge of the salty tide. Then she flew swiftly to the betony clump and the four chicks on which the down was yet dark with the dampness of the egg, although soon it would dry to tones of buff and sand and chestnut.

Now the sanderling mother knew by instinct that the depression in the tundra, lined with dry leaves and lichens and molded to the shape of her breast, was no longer a safe place for her young. The gleaming eyes of the fox—the soft pad, pad of his feet on the shales— the twitch of his nostrils testing the air for scent of her chicks—became for her the symbols of a thousand dangers, formless and without name.

When the sun had rolled so low on the horizon that only the high cliff with the eyrie of the gyrfalcon caught and reflected its gleam, Silverbar led the four chicks away into the vast grayness of the tundra.

Throughout the long days the sanderling with her chicks wandered over the stony plains, gathering the young ones under her during the short chill nights or when sudden gusts of rain drove across the barrens. She led them by the shores of brimming fresh-water lakes into which loons dropped on whistling wings to feed their young. Strange new food was to be found on the shores of the lakes and in the swelling turbulence of feeder streams. The young sanderlings learned to catch insects or to find their larvae in the streams. They learned, too, to press themselves flat against the ground when they heard their mother's danger cry and to lie quite still among the stones until her signal brought them crowding about her with fine, high-pitched squeakings. So they escaped the jaegers, the owls, and the foxes.

By the seventh day after hatching, the chicks had quill feathers a third grown on their wings, although their bodies were still covered with down. After four more suns the wings and shoulders were fully clothed in feathers, and when they were two weeks old the fledgling sanderlings could fly with their mother from lake to lake.

Now the sun dipped farther below the horizon; the grayness of the nights deepened; the hours of twilight lengthened. The rains that came more often and lashed with sharper violence were matched by a gentler rain as the flowers of the tundra dropped their petals. The foodstuffs—the starches and the fats—had been stored away in the seeds to nourish the precious embryos, into which had passed the immortal substance of the parent plants. The summer's work was done. No more need of bright petals to lure the pollen-carrying bees; so cast them off. No more need of leaves spread to catch the sunshine and harness it to chlorophyll and air and water. Let the green pigments fade. Put on the reds and yellows, then let the leaves fall, too, and the stalks wither away. Summer is dying.

Soon the first white hairs appeared in the coats of the weasels, and the hair of the caribou began to lengthen. Many of the cock sanderlings, who had been gathering in flocks about the fresh-water lakes almost from the time the chicks had begun to hatch, had already left for the south. Among them was Blackfoot. On the mud flats of the bay young sandpipers gathered by the thousand and in the new-found joy of flight their flocks soared and swooped over a calm sea. The knots had brought their young down from the hills to the seacoast, and day by day more of the adults were leaving. On the pool near the place where Silverbar had brooded her eggs, a family of three young phalaropes now spun with lobed feet and jabbed for insects along the shore. The cock and the hen phalarope were already hundreds of miles to the east, setting a course southward over open ocean.

There came a day in August when Silverbar, who had been feeding with her grown young on the shores of the bay in company with other sanderlings, suddenly rose into the air with some twoscore of the older birds. The little flock wheeled out over the bay in a wide circle, flashing white wing bars; they returned, crying loudly as they passed over the flats where the young were still running and probing at the edge of the curling wavelets; they turned their heads to the south and were gone.

There was no need for the parent birds to remain longer in the Arctic. The nesting was done; the eggs had been faithfully brooded; the young had been taught to find food, to hide from enemies, to know the rules of the game of life and death. Later, when they were strong for the journey down the coast lines of two continents, the young birds would follow, finding the way by inherited memory. Meanwhile the older sanderlings felt the call of the warm south; they would follow the sun.

That evening about sunset Silverbar's four young, now wandering with a score of other fledgling sanderlings, came to an inland plain cut off from the sea by a coastwise ridge and rimmed to the south by higher hills. The floor of the plain was grassy and patched in many places with the softer, intense green of marsh. The sanderlings came into the plain along a meandering stream and settled on its banks for the night.

To the sanderlings' ears all the plain was alive with a kind of rustling—a soft murmur—a persistent stirring. It was like the sound of the wind when it moves through pine trees; but on the great barrens there are no trees. It was like the soft spilling of a stream over its bed, water striking stone, pebble rubbing against pebble. But tonight the stream was locked beneath the first thin ice of the summer's end.

The sound was the stirring of many wings, the passage of many feathered bodies through the low vegetation of the plain, the murmur of myriad bird voices. The flocks of the golden plover were gathering. From the wide beaches of the sea, from the shores of the bay shaped like a leaping porpoise, from all the tundras and uplands for miles around, the black-bellied birds with the golden-speckled backs were assembling on the plain.

The plovers were in a state of excitement that mounted as evening shadows cloaked the tundra and darkness spread over the Arctic world, save for a fiery glow on the horizon, as though the wind stirred the ashes of the sun's fires. The sound of the bird voices, constantly augmented by new arrivals and increasing in volume as the mass excitement grew, swept over the plain like a wind. Above the general murmur there arose at intervals the high, quavering cries of the leaders of the flock.

About midnight the flight began. The first flock of some threescore birds rose into the air, circled over the plain, and straightening out into flight formation headed south and east. Another and another flock found its wings and hurtled after the leaders, flying low over the tundra that rolled like a deep purple sea beneath them. There was strength and grace and beauty in every stroke of the pointed wings; there was power without end for the journey.

Que-e-e-e-ah! Que-e-e-e-ah!

High-pitched and quavering, the calls of the migrants came down clear from the sky.

Que-e-e-e-ah! Que-e-e-e-ah!

Every bird of the tundra heard the call and stirred in vague unrest at its urgency.

Among those who heard there must have been the young plovers, the birds of the year, scattered in little wandering groups over the tundra. But none among them joined the flight of the older birds. Not until weeks later, alone and with none to guide them, would they undertake the journey.

From the end of the first hour onward the flight was no longer divided into flocks but became continuous. Now a mighty river of birds poured through the sky, lengthening as it flowed south and east across the barrens, across the head of the northland bay, and on and on through skies that lightened to the coming of another day.

People said of it that it was the greatest golden plover flight of many years. Father Nicollet, the old priest in his mission on the west shore of Hudson Bay, declared it reminded him of the great flights he had seen in his youth, before the gunners had thinned the plover flocks to a remnant of their former size. Eskimos and trappers and traders along the Bay raised their eyes to the morning sky to watch the last of the flight crossing the Bay and fading into the east.

Somewhere in the mists beyond them lay the rocky shores of Labrador, carpeted with the bushes of the crowberry hung with purple fruit; beyond lay the tide flats of Nova Scotia. From Labrador to Nova Scotia the birds would slowly work their way, feeding on the ripening crowberries, on beetles and caterpillars and shellfish, growing fat and storing away energy to be burned by active muscles.

But soon there would come a day when again the flocks would spring into the air, this time to head southward into the misty horizon where sky met sea. Southward they would lay their course across more than two thousand miles of ocean from Nova Scotia to South America. They would be seen by men in boats far at sea, flying a swift, straight course low to the water, like those who know their destination and suffer nothing to deter them.

Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea. But no awareness of possible failure or disaster dwelt in the moving host, flying with sweet pipings through the northern sky. In them burned once more the fever of migration, consuming with its fires all other desires and passions.

4
Summer's End

IT WAS SEPTEMBER
before the sanderlings, now in whitening plumage, ran again on the island beach or hunted Hippa crabs in the ebbing tide at the point of land called Ship's Shoal. Their flight from the northern tundras had been broken by many feeding stops on the wide mud flats of Hudson Bay and James Bay and on the ocean beaches from New England southward. In their fall migration the birds were unhurried, the racial urge that drove them northward in the spring having been satisfied. As the winds and the sun dictated, they drifted southward, their flocks now growing as more birds from the north joined them, now dwindling as more and more of the migrants found their customary winter home and dropped behind. Only the fringe of the great southward wave of shore birds would push on and on to the southernmost part of South America.

As the cries of the returning shore birds rose once more from the frothy edge of the surf and the whistle of the curlews sounded again in the salt marshes, there were other signs of the summer's end. By September the eels of the sound country had begun to drop downstream to the sea. The eels came down from the hills and the upland grasslands. They came from cypress swamps where black-watered rivers had their beginnings; they moved across the tidal plain that dropped in six giant steps to the sea. In the river estuaries and in the sounds they joined their mates-to-be. Soon, in silvery wedding dress, they would follow the ebbing tides to the sea, to find—and lose— themselves in the black abysses of mid-ocean.

By September, the young shad, come from the eggs shed in river and stream by the spawning runs of spring, were moving with the river water to the sea. At first they moved slowly in the vaster currents as the sluggish rivers broadened toward their estuaries. Soon, however, the speed of the little fish, no longer than a man's finger, would quicken, when the fall rains came and the wind changed, chilling the water and driving the fish to the warmer sea.

By September the last of the season's hatch of young shrimp were coming into the sounds through the inlets from the open sea. The coming of the young was symbolic of another journey which no man had seen and no man could describe—a journey taken weeks before by the elder generation of shrimp. All through the spring and summer more and more of the grown shrimp, come to maturity at the age of a year, had been slipping away from the coastal waters, journeying out across the continental shelf, descending the blue slopes of undersea valleys. From this journey they never returned, but their young, after several weeks of ocean life, were brought by the sea into the protected inside waters. All through the summer and fall the baby shrimp were brought into the sounds and river mouths—seeking warm shallows where brackish water lay over muddy bottoms. Here they fed eagerly on the abundant food and found shelter from hungry fish in the carpeting eel grass. And as they grew rapidly, the young turned once more to the sea, seeking its bitter waters and its deeper rhythms. Even as the youngest shrimp from the last spawning of the season came through the inlets on each flood tide of September, the larger young were moving out through the sounds to the sea.