The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  ‘Never walk on the ice near a beaver lodge,’ David said. ‘Beavers swim around it, underneath the ice. It’ll always be thinner than you think.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Do you know what a beaver young is called?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A kit. A beaver kit. A bear cub, a seal pup, a beaver kit.’

  We turned off the metalled road on to a dirt track, passing through a gate at the top of a steep hill. The track led to a wide clearing in the forest, with a woodframe house, half-clad in cream-painted clapboard, standing at one end. Beyond the house, just visible through spruce trees, was a long lake, fringed with rushes, still frozen, the same hard, blue-blotched white as Sand Lake. Close-packed conifers grew right down to the edge of the lake near the house, while on the far side there was open country: gently sloping fields of amber-yellow grasses.

  ‘Lake Timon,’ David said.

  Two dogs had been dozing in the yard. They sprang to their feet as the Suburban approached – Harley, a black labrador, flush with pedigree, and Sitka, a mongrel, half coyote, charcoal and ash-grey, with the sharpened senses and dramatic startle responses of a wild dog. They jumped up at us as we got out of the Suburban, wagging their tails, emitting happy whines that broke now and again into melodious, full-throated croons. David greeted them, squatting down, holding their heads in his hands, letting them lick his mouth and chin.

  Harley and Sitka came with us into the house. David’s wife and father-in-law were sitting at a varnished pine table in the kitchen, drinking coffee. There was a pattern of brown fleurs-de-lys in the linoleum. A metal strip made a strandline between the linoleum and the deep-pile blue carpet of the living-room, where broad windows gave out on to the gleaming ice of Lake Timon. Karen was much younger than David; she was tall and rangy, with wavy auburn hair. She wore black leggings and a long, baggy red sweater with two daisies on the front; she was browsing a paperback cookery book entitled Hotter Than Hell. Her father, in contrast, was stocky and compact, in a lumberjack’s checked shirt, and bifocal spectacles in steel frames. He had stiff, tarnished-silver hair and a matching moustache that looked like a wire brush: it could have cleaned the verdigris from an old copper pan.

  David introduced his father-in-law as the Viking.

  ‘Why the Viking?’ I asked.

  ‘All my ancestors are from Iceland!’ the Viking said, as if he’d clinched an argument. He spoke in abrupt, gruff bursts. ‘Iceland was settled by Vikings,’ he said. ‘Came from Norway in 874. Icelanders came to Canada. It’s in the blood! Viking blood!’

  ‘Have a seat,’ said David. ‘Make yourself at home.’ He crossed the strandline into the living-room. I looked out of the window at Lake Timon.

  ‘So where are the geese?’ Karen asked.

  ‘They should be here soon,’ I said. ‘They got held up by bad weather.’

  ‘Geese!’ the Viking exclaimed, slapping the pine tabletop. ‘Jesus Christ! What the holy smoke are they up to, those geese? That’s a wild goose chase! Geese, geese, geese! So many damn geese! Holy Christ!’ He slapped the table again. ‘Those godforsaken geese!’

  ‘Hold on a second,’ David said, coming back into the kitchen, holding one palm out towards the Viking, as if to ward off whatever the Viking was about to say about geese. ‘I’m going to take you to the cabin,’ he told me. ‘You can get settled in. You can just walk down to the house whenever you want.’

  ‘OK.’ I said. ‘We can talk about geese later.’

  ‘Holy smoke!’

  We left Karen and the Viking in the kitchen and got back into the Suburban. Further up the hill, surrounded by thick forest, stood a tiny cabin: a prefabricated hut, just a few metres square, set on a swell of open ground, high above Lake Timon. Years before, when David had raised a small herd of German Gelbvieh cattle, he’d equipped the cabin with a desk and filing cabinet and used it as his office, so that buyers wouldn’t tramp mud into the house. The cabin walls were still hung with photographs of prize Gelbvieh heifers, polled and horned. These radiant, butterscotch cows stood in front of placards commemorating the 1982 Regina Agribition or 1986 Alberta Farm Fair, and David stood beside the heifers in each of the photographs, wearing a Stetson and tan leather jacket, pride clearly visible in his face despite the shadow of the broad-brimmed Stetson.

  He left me at the cabin and I took stock. This was where I would wait for the geese. The desk and filing cabinet had gone. There was a narrow bed against the far wall, a sink, a rickety round metal table, a wicker armchair whose back fanned out wide behind the shoulders, and a cramped, cupboardlike bathroom. The gas in the old Perfection heater ignited with a whoof whenever the thermostat deemed it time. On a sideboard next to the sink was a row of books, bookended by glass jars filled to the brim with plastic, metal, china and tortoiseshell buttons. The books referred to the construction of the cabin, such titles as Getting the Most out of your Lathe, Getting the Most out of your Drill Press, Getting the Most out of your Band Saw and Scroll Saw, and How to Do More with your Power Router. I selected The Wilderness Cabin by Calvin Rutstrum and sat down on the wicker chair. The chair winced: the slightest movement provoked the thin, plaintive wince of wicker weave flexing.

  There was a photograph of the author on the back cover. Wearing a checked shirt and a neat felt hat, he was sitting beside a lake fringed with spruce trees, a lake very like Lake Timon. He’d built his own cabin overlooking the valley of the Saint Croix River, an hour’s drive from Minneapolis, and lived there for six months of each year. His cabin was built of square timbers and quarried stone, each piece cut by his own hands. He’d incorporated pine panelling, plank flooring, and a fireplace with a stone chimney. Calvin Rutstrum was an evangelist for cabins. He celebrated the cabin’s ‘simple, elemental form in our complex modern civilization’. He loved pioneer cabins roofed with split shakes, their walls banked with dirt, their split-log doors held together by battens on the hewn flat side; he loved the tensile strength and rigidity of fir plywood; he loved squared timbers, dovetailed corners, flooring properly dressed and matched. He recommended fir plywood gussets as bonding plates, and liked to shim rather than plane down the uneven thickness of boards in order to preserve their original ruggedness. He usually built a small auxiliary cabin before starting work on the main dwelling. Once this was done, and after the first tattoo of rain sounded on the roof, he would get the feeling of ‘belonging’ to the particular country in which he found himself.

  Sometimes I leaned back in the chair just to hear the wicker wince. It was getting dark. There was only one light: a lamp with a red shade, and pricks and incisions in the shade that seemed randomly distributed until you switched the lamp on and light shone through them in the likeness of a cat, sitting upright, with a ribbon round its neck, tied in a bow. There was another cat in the cabin, sitting on the window-sill above the round table – a kind of jack-in-the-box, a grey plastic cat leaping from a drum sashed in chintz, a rope zigzagging from one rim to the other. This cat wore a chintz dress, a collar of lace, a pink ribbon, and a conical hat of lace and chintz, topped with a white pompom. It had the oversized blue eyes of a Barbie Doll, and a pert, pink nose.

  I went back to The Wilderness Cabin. ‘Mental and manual exercise together shape happy lives,’ Rutstrum argued. ‘Much of our thinking, we might say, is actually done with our hands.’ A few well-stocked shelves of food and equipment, a stove, a simple board table, some empty root-beer cases for stools, a cot or bunk bed, a supply of books, a portable galvanized bathtub, an all-band transistor radio – this was all you needed to feel at home, to belong to a place as it belonged to you. Reading The Wilderness Cabin, you understood there’d be difficulties (cabins settling with log shrinkage or keeling on the frost heave), but these seemed insignificant next to the music of tools and techniques: the bull points and scutches, the tin shears called snips, the augers and gimlets for boring holes in logs, the splines for window-frames, the lug hooks and peaveys for holding logs firm when sawing, the India oilstone for
honing an axe’s blade, the cleaving tools called froes for splitting rough shingles or shakes from billets of timber.

  It was a song of home-making. There was no shortage of logs, Rutstrum insisted: logs grow on trees. ‘Outside doors to bedrooms enable early risers to depart without disturbing the household,’ he observed. ‘Where separate cabins are the choice, small kitchenette areas enable your guests and you to enjoy those periods of privacy so important in prolonged human relationships.’ It was dark now. I read by the light of the lamp, a magic lantern, the cat cut into the red shade. ‘What is ever more important to us,’ I read, ‘is our closer awareness and our richer understanding of nature, of the flight of birds, the changes in the sky, the pattern of the stars. These wonders, contemplated from day to day, will bring us the peace from which we have been too long estranged.’

  The wicker chair winced. Wolves and coyotes were howling. The cabin was surrounded by Riding Mountain’s wilderness forest: black bears were hibernating in nooks and culverts; moose and elk were browsing willow shoots; beavers were weakening the ice around their lodges, preparing dens for the summer’s kits. David’s woodframe house was half a mile down the hill. I was grateful to him for this shelter. I had stolen a march on the snow geese and would sit tight for as long as it took. I returned The Wilderness Cabin to its place between the jars of buttons and turned off the lamp, extinguishing the cat.

  *

  IN MARCH 1875, the Dyngja Mountains of Iceland exploded in volcanic eruptions. Pumice covered an area of 2,500 square miles, two or three inches deep, devastating farms. Many Icelanders had no choice but to emigrate, and some chose Canada, following the lead of Sigtryggur Jonasson, who had left for Quebec in the summer of 1872. The settlers stopped first at Kinmount, Ontario, then pushed west, drawn by what they had heard of the Red River valley. Its soil (black mould over white clay) was rumoured to be extremely fertile, and the region was said to support an abundance of ducks, geese, moose, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and currants. Lake Winnipeg, an inland sea more than 300 miles long, promised a boundless supply of whitefish, sunfish, catfish, pickerel, sturgeon and pike.

  The journey from Iceland to New Iceland took six weeks. Almost 300 settlers travelled by steamer from Sarnia to Duluth with all their worldly goods, hogs included. They boarded a train at Duluth and rode in boxcars to Fisher’s Landing on the Red River, where they took an old stern-wheeler steamboat, the International, north to Winnipeg, transferring to flatboats to navigate the shallows, and transferring again at Stone Fort to a dilapidated Hudson’s Bay Company steamer, the Colville, for the last leg to Willow Point, which was right up near Lake Winnipeg.

  The first town built in New Iceland was named Gimli, which was the name of the home of the gods in Norse mythology. Gimli means ‘great dwelling’ or ‘great abode’.

  ‘They had trouble catching fish,’ the Viking told me. ‘They were deep-sea fishermen, most of them, and lake fishing’s a whole different can of beans.’

  We were sitting at the glossy pine table in the kitchen, feet on the fleurs-de-lys.

  The Viking’s grandparents had helped build Gimli. ‘My father was a stonemason,’ he said. ‘Loved music. Could pick up anything and find a tune in it. Played tuba in the Argyle Brass Band. Best band in the country, some say. Played concerts, sports meets, exhibitions. Played at Baldur, Glenboro, Cypress River, Holland, Greenway, Belmont. And I’m tone deaf. My father could knit, too. When I was young, in the evenings, my mother and father would knit. My mother could knit and play cards at the same time. My father was a good knitter. He could knit a pair of socks in a couple of days, but he had to give it his full attention.’

  Usually, when I walked down the hill to the house, David would be in his office, working on the computer, Karen would be teaching in Erickson, and the Viking would be fixing things. He’d have his head inside the drum of the tumble dryer because the belt was running awry on the idler pulley, or the hood up on his truck so that he could check the coolant level in the radiator or the condition of the drive belts. Or he’d be in the bathroom with the top off the flush tank, adjusting the float ball. He’d be brandishing hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, spanners or wrenches, with screws or nails held between his teeth. He’d be wearing a checked shirt, and jeans held up by braces and a black leather belt. Canadian folk tunes would be belting from a paint-spattered radio-cassette. The Viking loved to listen to a fiddle player named Mel Bedard.

  ‘I’ve heard Mel Bedard play in a dancehall for twelve hundred people,’ he said, raising his wrench for emphasis, ‘and the more he sees them dance, the more he bends that bow. He makes them dance: people who’ve never danced before, once they hear Mel Bedard they just can’t help themselves!’ He reached with his left hand for the neck of an imaginary violin, and played along with the tape using the wrench as a bow.

  One morning I walked down to the house and found the Viking holding court in the kitchen. Two other men of Icelandic descent, both in their sixties, were visiting. They were called Bjornson and Bjornsson.

  ‘We’re not related,’ Bjornson said. ‘He’s got one more “s” than I have.’

  The three men were drinking coffee at the pine table. Bjornson had taken off a blue baseball cap and placed it on the table beside his mug, peak folded inside the body of the cap. He had thin, light brown hair and a wide, flat face. He was soft-spoken. He’d been a farmer: a small herd, some wheat. Bjornsson was heavy and garrulous, with a fulsome three-ply chin and strong Icelandic accent. He wore the kind of sepia-brown Polaroid glasses favoured by anglers, and a stone-coloured multi-pocketed vest such as Rollin had worn at Sand Lake. Underneath the vest was a black T-shirt printed with the legend Be Staunch. Walk Tall.

  ‘I made butter for forty years,’ Bjornsson said, rocking back and forth on his chair, which seemed very small beneath him, his eyes indistinct behind the Polaroid lenses. ‘Government shut me down. Regulations! We bought the best cream from the dairy farms. Now they put all other kinds of things in butter, all kinds of milk products. This whipped butter, do you know what that is? Air! It’s just air! They whip a lot of air in it, so it’ll be softer, but you get less butter. It’s like ice-cream. You get good hard ice-cream and the soft-serve ice-cream all the young people are eating, and you know what makes it soft, the soft-serve? Air!’

  The Viking wasn’t listening to Bjornsson.

  ‘Iceland!’ he said. ‘There’s a place!’

  He’d gone to Iceland for the first time the previous year, on a tour, wanting to trace his relatives. The bellboy at the hotel in Reykjavik had turned out to be his second cousin, and when the Viking had asked the receptionist to look someone up in the telephone directory, the girl had said that wouldn’t be necessary, they were best friends, she knew the number by heart. What had struck him most was the greenness of the country.

  ‘Everyone thinks it’s all snow and ice and glaciers, but my god that place is so green!’ he said. ‘All that grass! Meadows! And cows grazing, everywhere!’

  ‘The cows wear brassières,’ said Bjornson.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Bjornsson. ‘They’ve got cows in these big leather brassières. Stops the udders and, what are they, teats from knocking on the rocks!’

  The three men rocked back on their chairs, guffawing.

  They began to talk about the Gimli parade. Each year, on Islendingadagurinn, or Icelanders’ Day, Gimli hosts a festival whose centrepiece is a parade of floats. A woman stands on the leading float, representing the Fjallkona, Maid of the Mountains, symbol of Iceland, dressed in a white gown, a green robe trimmed with ermine, a gold belt, and a high-crowned headdress of white veil falling down over her shoulders to the waist.

  ‘One hell of a beautiful lady,’ the Viking said.

  ‘She is indeed,’ said Bjornsson, sombrely.

  ‘That’s the truth,’ added Bjornson.

  Once or twice, I learned, the Viking had ridden on the leading float next to the Fjallkona. Bjornson and Bjornsson encouraged him to brin
g out his costume. The Viking disappeared for a minute and came back wearing a bizarre helmet: a yellow microwave-compatible cooking bowl, with two curving cardboard horns attached to it with tape, and a red leather key fob taped to the rim of the bowl, hanging down over his nose.

  ‘See these?’ he asked, pointing to the two horns. ‘I’m the horniest Viking in Manitoba!’

  The kitchen swelled with laughter. Bjornson and Bjornsson rocked back on their chairs. Bjornsson rocked back an inch past the balance point and only just managed to grab the corner of the sideboard to stop himself from falling. The room’s laughter took a breath, saw Bjornsson was safe, then surged again, with renewed force.

  I noticed the Viking’s belt buckle. He was standing in front of us in the horned helmet. His buckle was a silver plaque embossed with the front ends of a trolley bus and streetcar. For ten years, after the war, he’d driven buses and streetcars in Toronto.

  ‘Drove the Long Branch routes,’ he said. ‘And Neville Park, Dundas, Humber, Spadina Station. Toronto was all busy, busy, busy. Crowds, crowds, crowds. Rush hour lasted three hours. Moved to Winnipeg in 1955. The streetcar service ended in Winnipeg in that year, 1955. Drove a brand-new fleet of trolley coaches from Canadian Car & Foundry. Drove Sargent, Notre Dame, Logan, Ellice, Salter, Polo Park. Then they replaced the trolley coaches with diesel buses. Killed the DC machine at Mill Street substation. First time that place had been quiet in I don’t know how many years.’

  Behind him, against the wall, was an old wood bookcase with four painted duck decoys on its shelves. Remembering Michael, I identified the species: mallard, bufflehead, canvasback, pintail.