The sky turns, revolving towards us and over us: a dark granular sky, a fluid sky of particles pulsing and flowing, joining and parting. Frozen, they would look like an Escher woodcut of black and white shapes fitting into each other’s outlines, but in motion they become a flickering pixelated mass, as meaningless as static on a screen.
I wish it would stop.
I wish it would go on for ever.
The flock turns away. Ranks of shadows spin across the tilted screen of the ice, across our astonished upturned faces and our open mouths.
I cannot see what made them go. Not even an eagle would dare to fly through such a sky, so perhaps it was just the need to do as the others do, to belong and not be left behind: the urge to seek safety in numbers. Scattered across the lake they leave behind sad bundles of feathers, whipped by the wind. The gunfire begins as the geese cross the refuge boundary. White birds fold and fall from their constellations like spent stars. As the clamour of the survivors recedes into the north a single injured goose runs after them across the empty ice.
Snow geese are one of the few reminders of what wild America was once like. They prove that this continent can still support an unimaginable abundance of animals, beside ourselves. I am glad I did not fritter away my time with the most astounding assemblage of life I have ever seen by trying to count them.
Just one thing remains to complete our filming: we need a shot of a bald eagle taking off from a tree, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are still many eagles on the refuge but they are reluctant to fly without a good reason and it is against the law to disturb them, even if we wanted to.
We drive the dirt road until we find a loose group perched in a copse and pull up, so I can slip out on the blind side of the car. I set up the tripod in the road, hoping there will be less traffic now the geese have gone, then Mandi eases the car back until I can frame two of the eagles, perched side by side. They look back at me, eagle-eyed. They can probably make out the serial number on the lens so I do everything I can to avoid disturbing them: gloves cover the paleness of my hands and for fifteen minutes I barely move the camera, just kneeling there, as still as I can be. The eagles relax a bit too much: they are showing no sign of wanting to fly. One preens the feathers on its side while the other dozes.
I have begun to think that for once I could do with someone disturbing the birds I’m filming when a car pulls up beside me. The window opens and over the roar of the engine a photographer yells:
‘Good of them to give you two! What lens are you using?’
I shout-whisper back, as tersely as I can: ‘Great, aren’t they?’ trying to be polite without starting a conversation, while keeping my eye to the viewfinder in case they should go, but both eagles are asleep. The photographer yells again:
‘Oh, there’s another. There’s a bunch of them!’
In the trees ahead of us there are four more eagles, but that’s not a bunch. I know what a bunch is. I’ve seen a bunch of geese.
– EIGHT –
THE ELUSIVE LYNX
Compared to filming a million snow geese in the open spaces of Missouri, the forests of north-west Canada pose a very different challenge. After weeks of trying, it would be encouraging to have caught even a glimpse of the cats we’ve come here to film, but for the moment all we can see are ravens.
Four of them have landed in the middle of a frozen river and they are bathing in the snow. It’s the first time I have seen them do this. They open their wings and kick their feet in the air, rolling upside down to clean their feathers. Among so many trees there is a sense that you are always being watched by invisible eyes, which is perhaps why the ravens feel relaxed enough to snow-bathe only in the open expanse of the river. They are too far away to film but lovely to see: it’s a bonus of spending time in one place, just looking.
From the hill we can see far across the Dezadeash River, over the aspens and willows on its banks, to the blue spruce forest and the mountains beyond. In the snow in front of me there is a perfect footprint, as if a small child has stood here, barefoot. I can see the splayed toes and the impression of a heel. It was made by a hare. The enormous hind feet of snowshoe hares spread their weight, allowing them to run astonishingly quickly across soft snow. This one took such long strides that its hind feet left their prints ahead of its smaller front paws. It could still be close by but unless I can spot the black tips of its ears or the pupils of its eyes, its pure white fur will keep it hidden.
The lynx we are looking for are almost invisible too. These cats are wary, with superb senses of sight, smell and hearing and they spend most of their time in the forest, so it’s no surprise that they are rarely seen. Adam, the producer, and I are hoping to film them with the help of a local tracker called Lance, but after ten days of trying, our chances of even seeing one seem as bleak as the landscape. We do have one thing on our side: the lynxes’ fortunes depend on how well their prey are doing and last year the snowshoe hares had a bumper season, so this should be a good year for lynx.
Lance has a network of friends who are helping our search. One drives a snowplough and she called this morning to say she’d seen a lynx family by the roadside. As we drive to meet her I stare at the trees lining the route but I cannot picture how a lynx moves or what shadows it might cast. We are more likely to find their footprints in the snow than to see the cats themselves through the tree trunks, but at forty miles an hour I can barely separate their tracks from moose or coyotes’. Somehow, as he drives, Lance manages to scan for footprints and remember which ones were there yesterday, as well as noticing which are fresh. When we reach the snowplough driver’s spot the only signs that the lynx family was ever there are the tracks they’ve left in the snow. Lance shows us how to test whether they are fresh by sliding your foot across the edges. If you feel an icy ridge they are more than ten minutes old. These lynx are long gone.
We follow another set of tracks along a quiet road. A lynx walked here this morning as it was growing light. Its footprints are strikingly round and as large as my palm. I can see its toes but no claws because lynx can withdraw them, like almost all cats. The footprints start out well spaced but then the lynx abruptly changed gait, taking extremely small steps and placing its toes almost on top of the heel in front. Lance calls this ‘pussy footing’. The cat was hunting. Its prints end abruptly where it left the road and leapt more than two metres into the deeper snow, then again and then to a tree, where it caught a squirrel. The squirrel’s prints are paired and very shallow where it bounded towards the tree. The lynx must have intercepted it there because the squirrel’s tail is lying in the snow. That’s all that’s left, just the tail.
It is tantalising to know that the lynx was here earlier but that we’ve missed it. I look at the silent trees and wonder how many lynx have seen us as we have been looking for them.
Overhead a band of light pulsates, pale light without colour. It becomes a pyramid, flickering and dancing, the wisps of light drifting like curtains. I should be shivering, watching the Northern Lights under a clear sky in March, but this morning it’s only just below freezing. This time last year the temperature was −45°C (−49°F). The unseasonal warmth is melting the snow and taking the lynx tracks with it, making our task much harder.
A pattern of stars stands out in the sky before dawn. It’s Orion. I often saw him from my bedroom window in winter when I was a child. Orion is the hunter’s constellation, and now, after years of starting early to go filming while he is still in the sky, I think of him as the wildlife cameraman’s too. Perhaps he is a good sign. We have ten days left but we have not yet found a way to anticipate a lynx, to know where it’s going before it does.
Lance has tried every trick he can think of: he has hung sparkling CDs on strings to make the cats curious, he’s tried to lure them into the open with hares found dead on the road, he’s even smeared smelly stuff on twigs – castoreum from the anal glands of beavers and a special mixture called Cat Passion. He says some males are so fond of
these substances that they will rub their faces in them. Cat Passion looks like Marmite, but woe betide you if you spread it on your toast. So far nothing has worked.
We have walked for an hour through the quiet woods, between grey aspens, with snow falling gently all the time. There’s a house nearby, where for the last few days the owners have watched a lynx family from their windows. It would be a perfect place to film them but so far we have drawn a blank. Now Lance has found their tracks: a mother and three or four kittens have walked recently among these trees. Judging by the youngsters’ prints they are almost as large as she is.
We walk in a long curve, pulling the camera kit behind us on a sledge and drawing a circle with our tracks around theirs, so we can be sure the family is still somewhere to our right once we come back to the road. There we are disappointed again: they have crossed the road already and the area we have circled is empty. The family is at least an hour ahead of us and we will not be able to catch up in the dense spruce forest and boggy ground they’ve entered. Lance explains that lynx travel in large circuits: they will be back but we don’t know when. He says families often separate and come together as they move, calling to each other to keep in touch, so our best bet now is to find somewhere high and listen for their strange cat sounds. The males call too, to mark their territories, and if we hear one Lance may be able to call him in. He cups his hands and demonstrates a deep, two-note sound, unlike any cat I have ever heard. It would certainly draw my attention if I were a lynx.
The hill overlooking the river seems a good place to wait, with its hares among the willows. The cats will find walking easier along the riverbanks. Lance lights a small fire to thaw out his drinking water while, above us, courting ravens fly upside down, plunging inverted then rolling upright by shooting out their wings, like unfurling umbrellas.
Three weeks feels like a long time when every day brings another failure. Now it’s important to remember other times that seemed just as hard and that paid off eventually, times when the filming would not have worked if we had given up towards the end. To raise our morale Adam suggests a new policy. He will give a bonus of fifty Canadian dollars to the first person to see a filmable lynx. Lance says one hundred dollars and Adam agrees. I am the only one facing the river at that moment, just as a lynx walks out from among the willows on the far bank. He’s a burly male, long in the body, bow-legged and heavily furred: a powerful, muscular cat who looks completely at home. I tell the others I can see a lynx and, of course, they don’t believe me.
Lance cups his hands and calls. The lynx stops instantly, takes a few strides towards us and listens. Although he is far away, through the lens I can see his tufted ears and bobtail. Lance calls to him again. The lynx must sense that there’s something odd about the sound or where it is coming from because he turns back to his path and, without seeming to hurry, he vanishes into the willows. We have filmed a lynx at last, but on their own these shots will not be enough. We share the bonus to buy some beer and try to decide what to do next. So far tracking has failed, waiting and hoping has failed and even the Cat Passion has failed: poor Lance. He has another job to go to soon but he has a final suggestion. His friend Peter could tow me through the spruce forest behind a skidoo. If we cross a lynx trail we could follow it on snowshoes. It seems worth a try.
Where I wait for Peter the spruce trees are tall and pencil-thin. They muffle sound and no snow lies in their shade. A squirrel rattles an alarm and a grey jay flies past, as round-winged and silent as a moth. Overnight the temperature has dropped and minute rosettes of ice have sprouted from the tips of the needles, each with six crystal petals like a rose. There is one on every needle, on every tree: millions of beautiful ice flowers, almost too small to notice. A dusting of fresh snow has fallen too. It is the first snowfall in days and for tracking a lynx it might make all the difference.
Peter roars up, towing a wooden dog sled behind his skidoo. We strap the camera kit on top and I stand behind, balancing on the last few inches of sledge runner, protecting my eyes as I duck under branches and shifting my weight on the corners to stay aboard. It’s exhilarating and we cover plenty of ground. When we find our first set of tracks Peter and I head off through the trees on foot. The lynx is slim enough to have slipped through gaps too narrow for us. Its tracks cross a log, then the thin ice on a pond. We crash along behind, breaking through the crisp surface of the snow despite our snowshoes, then, beneath a tree where there is no snow, the track disappears. We circle it twice: lynx tracks go in but only a snowshoe hare’s tracks come out. We circle again, convincing ourselves that no lynx footprints leave. Peter says the cats sometimes climb into trees and jump between them, chasing squirrels, then drop to the ground twenty metres away, so we walk in a spiral, working outwards from the tree until we find a single print beside the hare’s trail. The lynx has saved energy by walking on the compacted snow of the hare’s footprints, placing its paws exactly on top of them. The prints lead us to another tree and when the snow runs out they disappear again. As Peter and I stand there, wondering what to do, a goshawk passes us, as silent as a ghost and just as pale.
A National Park ranger once told me: ‘If you follow tracks for long enough you are bound, eventually, to walk into the back end of whatever made them,’ and I believed him until now, but we are so slow and so noisy that, unless the lynx was deaf, our chance of finding and filming one like this seems vanishingly small.
With just a couple of days left, Peter takes us to meet his friend called Thomas Joe, a Southern Tshwane Indian. They often hunt together in the autumn and Thomas Joe has paid Peter the great compliment of calling him by his own elder brother’s name. In the village the local kids respectfully call Peter ‘Uncle’.
We find Thomas Joe on the steps of his cabin, looking out across a frozen lake, named after the huge pike he says live there. His family have been here for generations. He has high cheekbones in a face like mahogany and deep-set, thoughtful eyes. The crinkles around them are exactly as I remember my grandfather’s. I like him immediately but he is seventy-two years old and diabetic, so I feel sure he would prefer to stay at home in the warm. I tell him what we have been trying to do and how hard it has been.
‘You going to catch a bird, Monday?’
‘A plane? Yes, we are almost out of time.’
Thomas Joe rubs his chin and says the smell of ‘split pike’ might attract a lynx – he says ‘link’ – and he goes to fetch a sack of dried fish. I realise then how lucky we’ve been: he has decided to help us. We drive to a crossroads of two skidoo trails where Thomas Joe fixes the sack to a tree trunk. He suggests that I follow him on foot along one of the trails, saving energy by walking on the compacted snow like a lynx, moving quietly and looking for tracks.
‘Link hunt ’bout four o’clock,’ he says, explaining that in the afternoon the softer snow makes less noise: ‘Harder for rabbit to hear him coming. Link don’t like wind. Good now, good for listening. We’ll get you link today,’ and despite our many setbacks I already half believe him. Thomas Joe goes first and I follow, walking in his footsteps, matching mine to his to minimise the noise. I put the heavy tripod and camera on my shoulder, which I know will hurt before we have gone far, but this way there is no loud sledge to pull. He wears a thin quilted coat and carries a flask of tea. It is overcast and the light reflecting from the snow fills the shadows under the trees and lights Thomas Joe from underneath, making his eyes pale and exotic, as if he were a photograph in a magazine. He is proud of his strength: ‘Not many people my age walk so many miles.’
We point rather than break the silence. He shows me wolf prints almost as large as my hand, pacing the whole length of the two-mile trail. He notices the swoop of a snowshoe hare, which had run from the trees and crossed our path, and the bear-like prints of a wolverine, ploughing its own trench, indifferent to the effort it could have saved by walking on the track. It was dragging something edible, dropping titbits gleaned by ravens and jays, which have barely dented the su
rface with their stick-arrow feet and the sweep of their pinions as they flew away. A different set of footprints straddles a narrower drag mark, as if a stumpy predator had pulled a body towards a spruce tree.
‘Porcupine,’ says Thomas Joe and smiles as he waits for me to realise that it had been dragging its own heavy tail. ‘Wolverine eat them. Don’t get quills, turn ’em over. Split ’em,’ he says and we walk on again, in a comfortable silence, to where some blunt heart-shaped prints have been stamped deep into the snow.
‘Moose,’ he says, ‘looking for mushrooms in the trees.’ Squirrels had carried the fungi into the branches in the autumn, to dry, and the moose has come to sniff out this overhead larder. He shows me one shrivelled mushroom it has missed.
‘Squirrels, they smart for little guys,’ says Thomas Joe.
Their tracks are everywhere among the trees, so many that in places their toe prints dimple the snow to the texture of a golf ball. He shows me their middens, heaps of cones as big around as both his arms can encompass.
‘Link hunt here. Easy to catch squirrel.’
We come to our first lynx tracks and Thomas Joe examines them closely, scraping the edges with his finger, feeling for ice. They are old. The toe pads are neat and round, spaced like the petals on a pansy, with the largest at the base. The fur covers much more space than the paws, spreading the load and muffling the sound. He points out where the lynx left the skidoo tracks. I push my finger into the snow to see how much pressure it takes to break the crust: it’s almost none. Lynx step very lightly indeed.
We have come full circle and Thomas Joe tells me to set up the camera near the smelly bag of pike, looking back down the skidoo trail. It is just past three o’clock. He takes off one glove and kneels on it, watching me sideways to assess my stillness. Apparently I pass and we wait quietly among the silent trees.
The Shark and the Albatross Page 14
