The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  ‘My husband watched birds,’ Eleanor said. ‘I can tell you such and such is a grackle and such and such a hummingbird. I put out a feeder for the hummingbirds. But I wouldn’t call myself a birdwatcher in so many words.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call myself one either, not in so many words.’

  I told Eleanor about my illness, my long convalescence at home; how, after finding The Snow Goose, I’d paid attention to the birds around the house for the first time, asking my father their names.

  A breeze lifted; the wooden puck swung from chime to chime. We could hear the traffic on Lamar Boulevard.

  ‘I don’t mind the traffic,’ Eleanor said. ‘Sometimes you hear the car wrecks, which is the only thing I don’t like about this balcony. I sit out here all the time. It feels like a nest. You’re right in the trees.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘That’ll be my son, Matthew,’ Eleanor said. She got up, slid back the glass doors and slipped through into the living-room, returning with a man in his late thirties, much taller than his mother, dressed in shorts, a sun-faded red baseball cap and blue T-shirt, with a strong, tanned, outdoorsman’s face, brown eyes, and a pronounced brow like a girder running from temple to temple.

  ‘How are the geese?’ he asked me.

  ‘Fine, I think. They’re starting to move.’

  ‘I’ve been seeing them fly over the house. Sometimes I don’t see them, I hear them.’

  ‘Matthew’s building a house,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m doing a lot of the work myself. It’s pretty hard. I’ve got a couple of guys helping me. Right now, I don’t like to be away from the site for too long. I like to be around to keep an eye on things. I’m the only person who knows what this house is actually going to look like. It’s all in here.’

  He tapped his temple with his index finger.

  ‘My husband and I built this house together,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s quite an undertaking.’

  ‘It’s pretty hard,’ Matthew said again. ‘It’s exciting. I’ve lived all over the place. I got tired of moving around. I moved twenty times in the last eight years. I just thought, “Enough’s enough.” A piece of land came up for sale and I snapped it up. It’s in the hills, just outside the city, right under this radio mast. It was cheap at the price. It’s the radio mast: you can hear it zinging. People thought they’d get their heads fried.’

  ‘You don’t notice it for long,’ Eleanor said.

  We heard a siren approach and fade on Lamar Boulevard.

  ‘You should come up and see the house,’ Matthew suggested. ‘There’s really something there now that you can say, “That’s a house.” ’

  We agreed to visit his house the next morning.

  *

  MATTHEW DROVE A Jeep Cherokee; his mother drove an old caramel Mercedes with slippery leather seats and a sticker in the back window saying, There’s No Place Like Narnia. The road rose and wound through forests of cedars and small oak trees. We caught glimpses of a radio mast, footed in evergreens.

  ‘You can’t get lost,’ Eleanor declared. ‘You just head for the mast.’

  Matthew’s drive was marked by a mailbox.

  ‘He had an address before he had a house,’ Eleanor said.

  We turned off the road on to a rutted dirt track that led through cedars to a clearing: an oval of rough ground, razed by bulldozers, with earth, rubble, stumps and construction debris driven up in heaps and ridges, and a charge of fine dust in the air, tasting dry on the tongue. The sun was hot; there were few clouds. The bone structure of a neat two-storey house stood on a concrete foundation slab at the centre of the clearing – a frame of steel I-beams half-clad in grey concrete sections. No roof. Spaces left for windows and doors. The ends of threaded steel rods poked from the concrete, and timber gables were stacked on the rough ground at the near edge of the foundations, waiting to be hoisted to the top of the frame. It was the idea of a house, not quite transfigured into the thing itself.

  Matthew was standing by the stacked gables, a utility belt slung round his hips, laden with builder’s gear: hammer, measuring tape, pencils, a medley of nails and screws. Beyond the house, the mast drew your gaze upward like a spire. It was painted red and white, and stayed by taut steel hawsers. Two turkey vultures, wing-tip feathers spread like fingers, glided in wide, slow circles over the cedars, close to the hawsers. Eleanor and I walked over the rough ground towards the house, and as we approached, Matthew raised his right arm and pointed upward, as if he were another, smaller mast.

  ‘Check it out,’ he said casually.

  ‘What?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Take a look.’

  We all looked upwards. I didn’t see them immediately. The snow geese were flying high, each bird catching the light like a chip of glass, the chips moving in a broad, loose U. A separate skein of geese followed behind the U, and the lines undulated slowly, flickering on the clear sky. Migrating snow geese fly at an average speed of fifty miles an hour, usually at altitudes between 2,000 and 3,000 feet, though pilots have reported them at 11,000 and 12,000 feet and even once, over Louisiana, at 20,000 feet.

  ‘Are those them?’ Eleanor asked. ‘Are those your geese?’

  ‘Yeah, those are snow geese,’ Matthew said. ‘You see the way they’re waving? That kind of gives it away.’

  ‘Is that north?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s due north,’ Matthew said. ‘That’s Canada.’

  They were on their way, heading for breeding grounds. It thrilled me, seeing geese. We turned our attention back to the house, but I kept looking up, hoping to see more geese. But the only birds visible were the vultures.

  ‘This is it,’ Matthew said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It looks like a house,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Matthew enthused. ‘I think it does. It’s actually a house. I’ll show you around.’

  The driveway was covered with a mulch of shredded cedar bark. The air smelled resinous and biblical from the bark and crushed cedar needles. The mast gave off a low electric hum.

  ‘The mast doesn’t bother me,’ Matthew said.

  ‘But it sways,’ said Eleanor, as though finishing his sentence.

  ‘Yeah, it sways. It sways a lot in strong winds. It sounds like white water. It sounds like river rapids. In storms, lightning strikes it. I think of it as a lightning conductor. Lightning’s never going to hit the house; it’ll hit the mast.’

  We stepped up on to the squared-off concrete foundation and entered the house through the gap of a side door. Trestles, door jambs, window casements and miscellaneous beams were strewn about the bare concrete. Matthew walked us round the site, describing the layout, furnishing and atmosphere of rooms. He saw the finished home in his mind’s eye; he envisaged colours, materials, textures, designated zones, the workings of light, the logic of passage and enclosure; he understood how the house, his habitat, would accommodate his habits and inclinations. One bathroom would be left part open to the elements, with a free-standing clawfoot tub and a view of the mast’s red lights, and stars beyond them.

  ‘I’m the only one who knows what it’s going to look like,’ Matthew said. ‘Right here I’m like the tiny God.’

  ‘Have you been living in the tent?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘Just for the last few days. It’s been warm enough.’

  He’d pitched a tent at the edge of the clearing: rugged, off-white canvas on a pine frame. The tent had the character of a tabernacle next to the cedars. Inside, on a wooden platform, was a single bed covered with a charcoal-grey blanket and a green sleeping bag unzipped to the waist, a mantle lamp hanging overhead – a glass chimney with voluptuous throat and swell and a sooty streak up one side where the flame had licked. One end of a table-top rested on a crossbeam of the tent frame, the other on a twisted cedar branch, making a desk surface for Fine Homebuilding and Natural Home magazines, half-drunk mugs of coffee, rolls of string and masking tape, and sheets of
lined yellow paper filled with sketches, projections, floor plans and bullet-pointed lists. Two photographs were taped to the tent frame: a band of elephants strolling through lush Kenyan grass, and a young woman at the foot of a ski-slope, her teeth the same gleaming white as the snow, the photographer himself reflected in both lenses of her sunglasses.

  A path led from the tent to the front door of the house, and to the left of the door stood a small statue, carved in pink stone: a bearded man wearing a robe cinched at the waist by a cord, holding out a bowl that the sculptor intended to be a bird bath. Matthew had bought the statue from a finca in Mexico.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Saint Francis,’ he answered.

  Just then I felt Eleanor’s hand on my left shoulder. I turned round; she handed me a feather.

  ‘I want to give you this,’ she said. ‘I guess it’s a hawk’s.’

  A large feather, chestnut brown, crossed near the tip by a single black bar: a flight feather from the wing or tail of a redtailed hawk, much larger than the contour feathers that cover the body, and with a slight curve to its shaft, or rachis. Its vanes weren’t symmetrical – typical of flight feathers, which have a narrow outer vane to cut the air. Each vane was made up of hundreds of fine barbs, branching out from the long central rachis, the shaft that thickened to a hollow quill, or calamus which would have anchored the feather in a follicle under the bird’s skin. With my fingers I teased the barbs apart, opening up a section of the vane. Each barb itself resembled a feather, with rows of cilia called barbules branching from a hair-thin shaft, or ramus, and I knew that along each barbule, too small for the naked eye, there were tiny projecting hooklets called barbicels that hooked into the barbules and barbicels of adjacent barbs, meshing together, zipping one barb to the next, forming the flexible, continuous, almost-woven fabric of the vane. The feather’s rust-brown colour was produced by melanin pigments concentrated in the barbs. Close to the calamus, the barbs became white and fluffy, like down feathers.

  I held it in my right, writing hand, quill gripped between thumb and forefinger, resting on the groove of the middle finger, the rachis curving back over my wrist.

  ‘Keep it,’ Eleanor said.

  I put the hawk’s feather in my shirt pocket, quill first, and we stepped through the doorspace, across the concrete threshold, into the house. Matthew was holding a measuring tape against a piece of pine, marking off lengths with a pencil, sun glaring off the concrete planes.

  We all heard the belchy bass chugging of a digger approaching through the cedars.

  ‘Here’s Mr Harper,’ Matthew said. He thumbed a button – the metal tape rattled back into its palm-sized box – then dropped the tape and pencil into one of his belt pouches. Eleanor and I followed him out of the house as a yellow Caterpillar digger entered the clearing, its driver invisible behind tinted black windows. The driver lowered the loader and set to extending the driveway, pushing earth and rubble into ridges, dust rising around the machinery.

  ‘This guy’s the best dig-truck driver I’ve ever seen,’ Matthew shouted. ‘Those teeth at the front end? He uses them like fingers. Like his own fingers, it’s so delicate.’

  The two turkey vultures were still soaring overhead, hanging on updrafts created by wind deflecting off the hills, or on thermal columns rising off roads and clearings in the cedar forest. Their wings were held upwards in flat Vs, the slotted feathers at each wing-tip curving upwards. The vultures sometimes rolled from side to side, riding the gusts and currents, but I never saw them flap their wings. Their gliding was poised and effortless: weight, lift, drag and thrust – the forces essential for flight – were in perfect balance. Now and again the shadows of vultures slid across the concrete planes.

  The yellow Cat chugged up a track into the cedars, then reappeared with a smooth-sided limestone slab in its raised, toothed trough. Matthew wanted his driveway to loop around a cedar, the only tree left standing on the building site. Mr Harper drove towards the cedar, stopped the Cat and lowered the trough, and the limestone slab tumbled over the teeth like an old tomb, coming to rest on the rubble and shredded bark, raising a cloud of dust.

  Matthew wanted the stone to be in just the right place, and Eleanor and I stood a few steps back as he communicated with Mr Harper by means of an antic semaphore, a repertoire of pointing and waving gestures, and Mr Harper used the trough to nudge and coax the slab according to these instructions. Matthew devoted all his attention to the placing of the stone. He was building a house. Trees, windows, doorways, statues – these were to be his life’s fixed marks, unchanging and dependable, his points of reference. He had to get it right. Slowly, in line with Matthew’s signals, Mr Harper worked the stone over to its allotted place next to the cedar.

  ‘That’s it!’ Matthew shouted. ‘Right there!’

  The Cat drew back from the stone, tracks clanking. Matthew stood with his hands on his hips, nodding with approval. He looked at the stone, then at the house, the canvas tent, the red and white mast, as if contemplating the distribution of landmarks, registering just what was here and what wasn’t. The vultures kept gliding round and round, birds circling on a child’s mobile.

  ‘OK?’ Eleanor yelled at Matthew.

  ‘Yeah,’ he shouted. ‘Looks good.’

  We got back into the Mercedes. Eleanor drove across the clearing towards the opening in the cedars, and I looked back over my shoulder at the house, the mast towering above it, Matthew striding towards the Cat, towards Mr Harper. The cab’s door opened as Matthew approached, but cedars blocked my view from the car the instant before a figure emerged.

  *

  AFTER SUPPER, which we ate in the kitchen, sitting on stools at the sideboard, Eleanor filled the larger of the two skillets with water, and set it to boil on the glowing electric hob. She was wearing a pink sweatshirt pinned with a brooch: a gold harp with four short strings. She transferred leftovers to simple china bowls, covered the bowls with tinfoil and put them in the fridge, which was already full of such bowls, the fridge-light shining off their foil skins. She went back to the cooker and stared down at the water, searching it for bubbles.

  In the living-room she’d drawn the curtains across the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Brass wall fixtures held lights resembling candles: small, flame-shaped bulbs of opaque white glass. The deep, warm tones of the walnut were comforting. I sat on the mulberry sofa; Eleanor sat in her leather armchair. She rummaged in a cloth bag lying close to her feet and pulled out a piece of unfinished tapestry, wool-ends hanging loose off a square of white gauze. It was to be a cushion cover depicting two rabbits. She put on a pair of glasses with translucent, blue-tinged plastic frames, reached out for the Anglepoise lamp with her right hand, directed its light like a dentist, and set to work.

  ‘So what I want to know is, where is this all going to end up?’ she asked, not looking up from the tapestry.

  ‘On Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘Right up in the Canadian Arctic.’

  ‘Why Baffin Island?’

  ‘I read that the largest concentrations of geese nest on Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘There’s a train from Winnipeg to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. You can fly over Hudson Bay to Cape Dorset, at the south-west tip of Baffin. From Cape Dorset I’ll try to get out into Foxe Land to see snow geese.’

  Foxe Land was named for Captain Luke Foxe, who’d sailed from England in May 1631, hoping to discover the North-West Passage, a navigable sea route round the north coast of North America to Japan, China and India. His ship, the Charles, a pinnace of seventy or eighty tons burden, had a crew of twenty men, two boys and a dog. Foxe kept a journal of the voyage, later published as The North-West Fox, and I’d relished its descriptions of billows, races, overfalls and flood tides, and mild, calm days when pilot whales fluked and sounded just off the bow in a ‘sea so smooth as if it had been made ready to bowl upon’. Approaching Hudson Strait, the pinnace encountered drifts of floe fragments and freshwater bergs calved off glaciers, and in Hudson Bay Foxe sa
w white beluga whales, polar bears swimming from floe piece to floe piece, dramatic auroral displays, and a sea unicorn or narwhal, ‘his side dappled purely with white and black; his belly all milk-white; his shape, from his gills to his tail, fully like a mackerel; his head like to a lobster, whereout the forepart grew forth his twined horn, above six foot long, all black save the tip’. The Charles sailed round the south-west tip of Baffin before returning to England, and Foxe named Cape Dorset in honour of his sponsor, Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset.

  On 26 August 1631, he saw geese flying south over Hudson Bay: ‘A N.N.W. wind,’ he wrote, ‘hath conveyed away abundance of wild geese by us; they breed here towards the N. in those wildernesses. There are infinite numbers, and, when their young be fledged, they fly southwards to winter in a warmer country.’ Auroras, narwhals, wildernesses, infinite numbers: my restlessness, my appetite for snow geese, grew stronger line by line. In May 1929, almost 300 years after Foxe’s voyage, the Canadian ornithologist John Dewey Soper set out from Cape Dorset to search for the breeding grounds of the snow goose. With two Inuit assistants, Kavivow and Ashoona, Soper established a camp just north of Bowman Bay, and during the first half of June he watched waves of geese pass overhead, obeying their ‘furious northern urge’. On 26 June the three men found their first nests. ‘The long quest,’ Soper wrote, ‘had ended.’

  ‘In about three months’ time, I hope I’ll be in Foxe Land,’ I told Eleanor, who had been switching her attention between tapestry and visitor with impressive, quiet acuity.

  ‘Well, good luck to you,’ she said. She smiled; her crow’s feet deepened.