Tide, Feather, Snow

by Miranda Weiss

  At that point in the season, we each had a handful of nest dots on our maps. John had located one near camp, which gave us the first loon to trap that morning. We all trudged out to the tiny boomerang-shaped lake where we found the nest with one egg, the pair of red-throats long ago flushed and flown away. We watched from a tight circle while Joel unfolded the trap over the nest. It was a spring-loaded contraption about three feet in diameter, strung with cotton netting. He folded half of the trap back, against the push of the spring, and then kept the trap open with a stout nail threaded through the top of a plastic stake, which he hoped would hold in this waterlogged ground. Then he camouflaged the metal trap frame with sedge he tore up from the tundra around him. He unraveled string tied to the end of the nail which was wound on a kite spool, and then we all walked away from the nest, with the string unspooling behind us. We hoped the loons would return to the lake and the female would get back on the nest. Once she did, Joel would yank the string, triggering the trap to shut tight. Joel and one of the other biotechs waited behind a small mound for the birds to return; the rest of us walked back to the weatherport.

  There was so much waiting involved in this work: waiting in the morning until the day’s plan had been decided, waiting to find a loon nest among the dozens of goose, duck, and swan nests we passed as we worked. We waited out rainy days in the weatherport so that we wouldn’t flush birds off their nests, exposing sensitive eggs to a cold rain, and we waited for each other, after a day surveying study plots downriver, to take the skiff together back to camp. But the disappearance of these birds brought a particular urgency to our work. So much basic information about them was unknown. No one knew their wintering grounds, what they ate, or what was causing their decline. And no one knew how much time might be left to figure it out. We felt we were working in the moment that would decide whether the red-throats survived or failed. And if they failed, one piece of the region would be lost, one species gone that was connected to all the other species in ways no one could ever fully grasp. One strand of the Delta’s story would unravel: A Yup’ik tale tells of two loons helping a blind man regain sight.

  MUCH ABOUT THE life here was similar to what I had come to learn back home, but the Delta had its own parameters. Tides weren’t nearly as extreme here as in Homer, but you had to keep track of them, because a slough that cut a deep channel into your study plot might be a narrow trickle to cross at low tide, but would be a very cold swim when the water level rose almost a dozen feet later in the day and you wanted to get back to camp. I learned that running boats was a different thing in this muddy landscape than back home, where in the bay you had to be alert for submerged rocks. There were no rocks here, but the gray water masked mudflats that could trap even the most experienced boater. So you drove the skiff along the side of the river with the steep cut bank where the water was deeper, rather than closer to gently sloping mudflats. John gave me a lesson on a camp skiff one evening on the river, but when I accidentally opened the throttle when I meant to slow down, I vowed not to drive the boats anymore, and instead to sit in the bow and look out at the open country moving by.

  On the Delta, land was a tenuous seam binding sea and sky. A pile of dust scraped off inland mountains and splayed out by the rivers, the region was shifty and nothing was solid. Hundreds of rivers migrated across the tundra, carving new curves, shrugging off old ones, and dropping deep, slippery mud where they slowed. On an incoming tide, the Bering Sea fingered into tidal sloughs, overtaking the flat land with its fragrance, and carting off with earth when it left. Each summer, I learned, camp was moved back a dozen feet, as the river gnawed away at its bank.

  As soon as the snow broke into patches in spring, the Delta was thick with birds. Within a week of arriving, I had become familiar with the nearly three dozen species that nested around camp as if they were neighbors. The diversity spanned dainty songbirds to long-legged shorebirds, more than a dozen species of ducks and geese, raptors, cranes, and unwieldy swans. John helped me see the differences between all of the shorebirds—some of which I recognized from the thick flocks that stopped over at our bay back home. And he helped me hear the varied music of these birds: Savannah sparrows called in trills, black-bellied plovers sang from the highlands upriver, and willow ptarmigans burst with throaty laughs. The tundra extended as far as we could see, and each step revealed a vast thickness of birds. As we walked across our research plots, we parted flocks of brant geese whose prim black and white plumage made them look like a crowd of white-collar commuters waiting for the morning train. Inadvertently, we flushed countless shorebirds from their expertly concealed nests and scared mother geese into hunkering low on their nests. And a dunlin, a robin-sized shorebird with a black patch on its belly, perched atop our tent in the evenings and sang into the night.

  While birds dominated the soggy landscape, Arctic foxes slunk by from time to time sniffing out a meal, and mouse-sized voles streaked occasionally across the weatherport floor. But it seemed as if the birds, with their deliberately engineered nests, their careful tracks across the mud, were the only things that kept the Delta from washing completely away.

  I HAD SPENT a few summers on a trail crew and I loved living and working outside once again. I got used to the rhythm of chores: making dinner for everyone after a day in the field if you were among the first ones back to camp; hauling wash water in buckets from a nearby lake, brackish because it got inundated a few times a year by extremely high tides and swimming with tiny gray invertebrates. We took turns washing dishes after dinner at a table at the edge of the river, looking north as the sky turned pink. At that time of evening, loons flew downriver out to sea to feed, quacking loudly over our heads. It was the only time we used warm water for washing—heated on the propane stove—and as I soaked my hands, the dishwater melted away the chapping from wind and sun and the crescent moons of dirt beneath my fingernails. Our outhouse was a plywood shack standing at the edge of the river about a hundred yards from camp with a plastic toilet seat perched atop a five-gallon plastic bucket. Dumping the bucket in the river was a hated chore. When it wasn’t storming, I washed myself at the end of the day by dunking in the frigid wash water lake, where my toes sank deep into muck. As a pair of Arctic terns nesting on the lake dove at my head, I stood naked on the tundra to shampoo and soap up before dunking once more. I had never felt so clean in my life.

  Even though I had the familiar sense of life paring down to its most important components—eat, work, wash, sleep—there was much that surprised me about life on the Delta. The day the tree swallows showed up in camp, I was shocked by the covetousness that possessed me in the midst of this communal life where possessions—a good novel, sunscreen, a bottle of Glenlivet—were few and easily shared. I wanted to keep the birds around, to have them nest here and be our pets. These brilliant blue-green birds nest in tree cavities, and we watched the four birds flit around camp exploring every possible nesting site: the vacant circle in the battered weatherport door where a doorknob should have been, a hole in the metal cap on the top of a propane tank. We were surrounded by nesting birds, but that morning, nothing seemed more important than keeping the swallows at this stop on their migration farther north, where they would find trees. A couple of the other biotechs and I ran around camp looking for supplies to make a nesting box. We sloppily hammered together a few pieces of wood, knocked out a knot to create a perfect swallow-sized hole, and then attached the wooden box with duct tape to a metal pole pounded into the tundra. We waited. One swallow landed on the box and inspected it. I held my breath. Unsuitable. In a few minutes, they were gone.

  I was surprised, too, by the feeling that, although we all meant well and cared about the birds, just by being out here we were doing harm. As we walked across our plots, we flushed all kinds of birds from their nests, and sometimes gulls would fly in to take advantage of the unprotected eggs for a meal. Foxes scampered across the tundra and we suspected that they might be following our scents from nest to nest so they
, too, could find easy food.

  I had tried to prepare myself to once more be on John’s turf. But the more I depended on him to be my teacher, the more I shied away from him in every other way. So after dinner, I went to the tent and wrote in my journal to be alone. I described the varieties of mud—the deep stuff that had swallowed one of the other women’s hip waders one afternoon, setting us off into fits of laughter, and the drier mud, broken into continent-shaped fragments, which made the ground look like a gathering of maps. I recorded the strict hierarchy of water: the river, which was our road and drain; the wash water lake we returned to daily; and the blue plastic barrels of drinking water that had been hauled to camp by snowmachine in early spring by a couple of men from Chevak. I recorded small things I saw around me: a cold addled egg kicked out of a white-fronted goose’s nest; a dead shorebird stiff on the tundra; and groups of male common eiders in handsome black-and-white plumage with green on the backs of their heads who had left their mates to care for the eggs and hatchlings for the rest of the summer. Getting these sights down on paper became my own project.

  I QUICKLY BECAME sensitive to the Delta’s subtle beauty. Nothing was showy about its stark horizon nor the plants that hugged this windswept land. The gray rivers were slow and flat. There were no dangerous large mammals around. A layer of fine mud coated everything so that when the veterinarian arrived—stepping out of the plane in clean jeans and loafers—he sparkled, everything metallic and unmuddied on him flashing: his watch, his wedding ring, the frames of his glasses. There was, however, nothing subtle about the turn of this season. It was the fastest, fiercest summer I’d ever known—flaring the tundra from brown to green in a matter of days, erupting with hatching birds, and illuminated by constant sun. Months of dark cold kept the Delta silent; now its real self emerged: plain, radiant, full of life.

  In comparison to the Delta, Homer was a cluttered mess. Back home, electric lines intersected rooftops, roads crisscrossed creeks, and street signs pointed all over town. Having come to love a place bound by coastline and bluff, where the sky was interrupted by mountains and ragged stands of spruce, I was surprised at how fiercely I was drawn to the Delta’s clean divisions between river, bank, sky. An ancient landscape, the Delta was formed by the sloughing away of old mountains, yet the land renewed itself continually, refreshed with every influx of tide, scraped clean by the constancy of rivers. There was nearly continuous cacophony—the metallic melodies of Lapland longspurs, the coughing of tundra swans as they flew overhead, the barking of geese, the wailing and wailing of loons. Yet I had never known such silence.

  I was entranced by the emptiness, the lack of human-made boundaries. At once a big empty bed just made up with fresh sheets and a blank page, the Delta’s flawless plain calmed and invigorated me. In rubber raincoat and boots, I lay in an X on the tundra, the vectors of my limbs shooting out infinitely. This was what it feels like to be cocooned by open space.

  Often in the middle of the day I took a lunch break on one of the large pieces of driftwood that had washed downriver and been dropped far inland by the spring and fall high tides. Stripped of bark and washed smooth by months or years of sea and weather, the wood provided a dry place to sit with my back to the wind and pull out lunch from my pack. These pieces of driftwood were the largest things on the tundra, and with no other objects competing on the horizon, they loomed in the distance. Many were marked by an axe’s notch, signaling that they had been claimed by Native villagers and would be collected in winter when the Delta was frozen, when ice bridged the rivers and the terrain was easily navigable by snowmachine. Traditionally, the Yup’ik had used driftwood posts to support their semiburied sod homes and had stretched skins across driftwood frames for boats. Modern villagers lived in stick frame or prefabricated houses and owned skiffs with outboard engines; but in this treeless, shifty landscape, wood was still essential for sauna fires and to make racks for drying fish.

  For enough years to witness the great movements of rivers, Yup’ik people relied on the Delta’s resources, living off its fish and seals, berries and whales, the heat of sweatbaths and the spotless cold of winter. The Internet had come to Delta villages, and while digital delivery of the rest of the world was speeding up every year, subsistence was a way of life among most Yup’ik here, and schools taught classes in the Native language. In summer, cut banks near the villages were dotted with fish camps, where families combed salmon out of muddy rivers with wide gill nets and dried them on wooden racks. Fishermen pulled bottom-dwelling fish up with longlines and took freshwater fish with handheld nets. Yup’ik families fanned out into the tundra to harvest berries and gathered at the mouths of rivers to shoot seals. As the days shortened, hunters traveled upriver for moose and caribou and hooked fish through holes in the ice. After a winter of eating their stores of dried meat and fish, the villages celebrated spring as the start of the new season of fresh, wild food. The Yup’ik name for April means “bird place,” and the arrival of millions of birds meant an abundance of things to eat.

  You could call this the most remote region in the country. We were five hundred miles off the road system, in a region uninhabited for many miles. I loved being so far from communication; we were far from phone lines and the reach of the Internet, and had only a VHF radio to talk to other research camps and passing pilots as well as a suitcase-sized satellite phone for emergencies. There wouldn’t even be a way to send a letter once the vet flew out in a day or so. Still, evidence of the rest of the world was scattered everywhere. I found spent shotgun shells on the tundra, a plastic drink bottle from China, and a beautiful blue glass globe the size of an orange—a float from a Japanese fishing net. And this seemingly limitless landscape was not without limitations. Federal regulators restricted hunting on the Delta because of declining bird populations, limiting even subsistence harvests. Home, pantry, woodshed to a subsistence lifestyle, the Delta—much of it protected as the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge—was otherwise useless to the cash economy: not yet determined to be particularly valuable for mining, oil and gas development, or extended residential settlement. The Delta’s soggy landscape was similar to the Arctic refuge’s flat, bird-flecked tundra; but its uselessness was as yet its savior, and the Delta went largely unnoticed.

  A LITTLE OVER an hour after Joel had set the trap on the loon’s nest, he rushed in the weatherport door with the bird in a plastic pet carrier. Joel and the vet then went quickly to work. Joel took the loon out of the carrier and held the bird on the kitchen table, pinning its wings down under his hands. The loon looked terrified: its red eyes flared and its black bill darted at the vet like a dagger. Joel took it under one hand and used the other to still its head. The loon pushed its webbed feet madly against the flowered plastic tablecloth until the vet injected anesthesia into its leg and within a few seconds, the bird’s feet stilled and its head began to wobble. Then the loon went completely limp and its bill lay on its breast. The vet laid the animal—which at that point looked like a carcass—on a clean cloth on the kitchen table and inserted a tube into its mouth. The tube connected to a soft bulb that Joel pumped to deliver air into the loon’s lungs.

  Crowding the weatherport, we were all silent except for the few words exchanged between Joel and the vet. I was transfixed by how dead the bird looked, and how the vet seemed to keep this bird just above death. Lifeless, it had dulled. The pale gray of its head, which normally shimmered, lost its luster, and the darker gray of its neck, which was made up of fine, pinstriped feathers, looked messy. From a distance, through binoculars, these birds always looked perfect; they shone. Now it lay ringed by the tools and trash of our work: bottles, tubes, needles, blades, iodine-soaked cloths, and a beeping heart monitor.

  Then the vet began the work of inserting the matchbox-sized transmitter into the bird’s lower back. He parted the feathers to make an incision. I looked away then, feeling my head starting to swirl and sweat breaking out across my body. The bird suddenly flapped, surprising all of us, an
d the vet quickly delivered more anesthesia through the syringe attached to its leg. He inserted the transmitter into a sterile gauze pouch and then worked it into the animal’s body through the incision. I felt ill, easily sickened by the gore, but also lightheaded at the control we had over this bird, how easily we could take its life in our hands and splay it out on our kitchen table. I knew I was weak, but I had to dash out of the weatherport and sit outside with my head between my knees until the nausea subsided.

  The whole business seemed so cruel, but Joel had assured us that only a few birds needed to be outfitted with the transmitters in order to get useful data about the species. Gathering basic information about these birds was a necessary first step. But then what? Would a culprit ever be found? Could a cause of their decline be proven? Would action be taken? What if—as Joel wondered—these birds weren’t getting enough food to thrive and feed their young because the Bering Sea was changing? Then what? What changes could be made fast enough to make a difference?

  WHEN THE PROCEDURE was completed, the vet put the limp bird—which now had a six-inch-long, black rubberized antenna sticking out of her back—into the pet carrier and Joel brought it outside to a quiet spot in camp and put a tarp over it. We waited for the bird to regain consciousness, and then Joel carried the kennel and we all walked back to the boomerang lake, empty of the loon’s mate. He put the carrier down next to the nest, opened the door, and pulled out the bird, setting it down beside the nest. Still groggy, she stared out at us with red eyes atop a wobbling head. The antenna stuck alertly into the air.

  “Let’s go,” Joel said. We all retreated quickly from the nest and walked toward camp. We stopped from time to time, checking the bird through binoculars. The loon had already slid into the small lake and was paddling around with her wings flapping uselessly.