Creation (10 page)

He waited more hours and then opened the door again. The sulphur on the charcoal had made a terrible stench and had turned the air brown but it had made no impression on the eagle. Audubon was divided between his will to kill it and his admiration for its will to stay alive.

Lucy hovered. “You’ve met your match. You’ll do yourself in, Fougère, if you’re not careful.”

“Away with you!”

Again he stepped into the closet with the eagle. He hovered over the cage, fanning the poisonous smoke towards the bird. But before long he began to feel faint, though the eagle glittered with regal hostility, his talons firm on the perch. Prompted by Lucy, John Woodhouse poked his head in and pleaded that his father come out.

“I will not: I will honour the creature as it breathes its last.”

“Father, it has not breathed its last nor does it show any sign that it will. In a contest, you will succumb first.”

“Go away and shut the door!”

Audubon sat with the bird in silence until his eyes ran with tears and he could not see, until his throat burned and the breath backed up in his chest. Finally he opened the door and demanded a large sewing pin. Lucy found one in her basket. Locked again in the closet and out of sight of other humans he loomed over the cage. He felt faint. There was a fog in that closet, yes, a fog thick as today’s but yellow. He must have laid his hands on the bird somehow, though how he did without being torn by the beak he does not understand. He does not remember. He only knows that when it was done the bird was stabbed through the heart.

Lucy opened the door to find him wavering with the enormous fallen bird in his arms, tears from smoke, rage and grief striping his soot-stained cheeks.

But there was no time to mourn. Within twenty-four hours the plumage would fade by one quarter from its colour in life, he knew. He took the still-warm corpse and wired the wings up and back. He placed the bird in the position he knew so well from having seen eagles in the wild; he raised the throat and opened the beak to the air as if, triumphant, the bird were rising up from a kill, its talons buried in the flesh of its victim.

And he set about to paint, although he clearly was ill. He spent the whole night outlining it and then began to work. For two weeks he worked sixteen hours a day. He was too tired to sleep and too agitated to stop. The portrait was as grand as the creature that inspired it, the eagle in flight, the prey a rabbit whose black eye, like the eye of the
bird itself, was accusing and pitying and pierced directly in its centre by the frightful talon. When the painting was done, he found he had added his small self as a hunter with his gun, astride a log which bridged a chasm. The little human hunter was miniaturized by the great bird, on a perch himself.

When he was finished, he collapsed. A strange spell came over him; his heart palpitated, and he could not move his limbs. For three days he lay swooning. Lucy called the doctors from Harvard, who gave him medicine and told him not to tire himself. He went back to work, which was all he wanted, setting up his trip to Labrador.

N
OW, HE LIES ON
his back staring at an eagle in the sky, his boot stuck in a hole, confused and breathless, cold to the bone. Has he had another spell? Is he dreaming or merely numb?

The sea slaps the underside of his crust of rock and sends up a frigid spray, which wets his backside. The tide is coming in. How long has he lain here? He does not know. There is no sun to track across the sky. He must retrieve the boot. It may be floating now. He tries to force himself to move and cannot. And then there is a flash of dark blue above him.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Audubon.”

A hand slides under his back, and two legs brace him as he is lifted to his feet. One foot is bare, the sock gone with the boot. The naval officer reaches down and without effort, it seems, retrieves the trapped boot.

“I seem to have lost track of the time, Captain.”

“I’ve never succeeded in that myself. How did you manage?”

“By watching the eagle.”

“You saw how many clocks I have on the
Gulnare
,” says Bayfield ruefully. “In the fog they oppress me.” He hands the painter his boot.

“Clocks always oppress me,” says Audubon with as much vehemence as he can muster in his undignified posture. “It reminds me that practical tasks await when I only want to follow the birds.”

“But surely time is neutral. It simply exists, and we pass through it. I measure it to find my location. It is another scale, if you like.”

“It does not feel neutral when you wonder every day if you will die here!”

“Ah!” says Bayfield. “Then it is death that oppresses you, not time.”

Audubon scowls. He is not sure he wants to be understood so quickly.

But now he is righted, and booted, and solid on his feet. They make their way back to a smooth rock where the surveying launch is pulled up on shore, beside Audubon’s skiff.

“The
Owen
,” says Bayfield. “It is named after my superior and my teacher, Captain William FitzWilliam Owen. I revere him, although he worked us far too late into the night.” A thought occurs to the naval officer. “I suppose you too, Mr. Audubon, had a teacher or a guide?”

“I did not,” says Audubon. “It is said I studied with David, the king of France’s own drawing master but —” he pauses. “My system is my own.”

Tired of stories, especially his own
.

He never studied with David. And now, today, faint, cold, in the company of a sympathetic stranger, he is ready to abandon the pretence.

“Shall we sit in this rare sun, and talk a while? I will tell you something of how, since I was a child, the birds have beguiled me.”

I
T WAS SIMPLE,
at first. Birds were easy to find. Free for the taking. He was never happier than when watching for the rustle in the leaves overhead, listening to the song, and following a flying creature deeper into the forest.

They drew him to wild places, away from soldiers.

H
E WAS JUST NINE YEARS OLD.
It was 1794, the Reign of Terror. He was living in Nantes with his father and stepmother. The soldiers of the French Republic came. They emptied the jails of all the people the Commune had put there, men and women and children, clerks and priests and teachers, people who had been named as enemies. The soldiers didn’t shoot them. They had neither enough guns nor enough bullets. Instead, they herded these people into wire cages on barges in the Loire. They took the barges out to the centre of the river and
pushed the laden cages over the sides, so they sank in the freezing water. But the river was not deep. The cages were there, just under its surface. Jean Jacques, who had been renamed Fougère, thought he could see them, the drowned bodies floating up against the roofs of the cages, the water running carelessly and always over the heads of the dead.

His parents moved outside of Nantes, to a house by the marshes in Coueron. Now he did not want to be Fougère, either. He called himself LaForest, which was where the birds lived.

In Coueron there was a neighbour, a doctor, D’Orbigny. He saw the boy without a name running in the woods and called him Fifi, nature lover. D’Orbigny had a little laboratory at the back of his garden. There he and the boy examined the birds. D’Orbigny impressed on Fifi that if he was to appreciate the birds he must know what is inside them. Fifi had no thought yet of becoming an artist. He was simply obsessed with birds, because they flew. In the makeshift and amateur lab, they took the birds apart. Sliced their breasts, opened their rib cages. Examined the tiny bones, the structures inside, excised what would perish and tried to preserve it.

When he was eleven his father, who was an admiral —

“An admiral?” exclaims Bayfield.

— an admiral — tried to make him a naval man, but he was sent home from the school, hopeless at geometry. He returned to his birds, and the woods.

T
HE FOG IS
closing in again.

Bayfield pushes the
Owen
back into the water. Audubon stays behind. His young gentlemen are coming for him.

N
OW THEY ARE WAITING FOR WIND;
they cannot sail. The whole of Audubon’s party sets out in the whaleboat to search for specimens. Godwin has his eye on a high, cliffed island that is a breeding place for foolish guillemots. They approach from the lee side in the whaleboat; the male birds with their white breasts stand about in throngs. The females are on the nests in the grey, monumental rock.

“If we land there they’ll all fly off their nests,” says Audubon, and points the way to a smaller island nearby, where there is a set of rock ledges over the waves and the colony is smaller.

When they climb ashore, hundreds of birds come to their feet, walking erect with their legs apart, waving their short, paddle-like wings. They try to sense the men’s intent, and, finding no violence there, push each other out of the way with human-sounding complaints, to let the big boots pass. Audubon leads the party gingerly up from the shore, careful not to trample the clustering birds.

The guillemots try to run with him. They fall over and flap their wings; they sprawl head-first down the rocks. Their white shirtfronts are stained with the muck of the cormorant’s nests that are mingled with their own. Speaking soothingly, Audubon walks to the end of the point to look at the breeding island. Its cliffs appear deserted.

But Godwin has seen the shallop anchored behind some rocks by the nesting island. It is a poor excuse for a ship, with patched sails and unpainted sides themselves patched with seal skin on the seams.

“What on earth is that?” says Audubon.

“Eggers,” says Godwin grimly. “They’ve claimed it.” He points to a party of men skulling a skiff toward it. “We’ll go elsewhere. We don’t want to get in their way.”

“They’ll disturb the nests! I’ll warn them off,” says Audubon.

“You’ll stay back, if you have half a brain,” says Godwin. “I’ve seen honest fishermen killed for getting in the way of their take.”

“You know far too much about these Eggers,” Audubon says.

“I’ve been amongst them.”

“And a bodyguard too! A man of wide experience.”

“Gentlemen,” says Captain Emery.

“That I am not,” says Godwin. “But I’m bound to see that the one who is does not get shot.”

Johnny prevents Audubon from launching himself across the Eggers’ path.

“Listen to him, Father,” says Johnny. “Stay and watch from here.”

As the Eggers’ skiff approaches the rocks of the breeding island,
Godwin turns his back on the scene. “You’ll see for yourselves. They won’t hesitate to use their muskets.”

The party waits to watch the Eggers land, Audubon with his spyglass. He sees the ruffians clamber out of their boat and, shouting, march up the rock. Clouds of guillemots rise in the air but thousands more remain standing over their nests, each, Audubon knows, with its single egg. When the first birds fall dead on the rock, the rest of the flock rises up and hovers over the killers. This gives the men free reign over the nests, and on they plunge.

Johnny holds his father back as the men continue firing into the air to frighten off the birds. Some fly away, but thousands are forced downward by the wings of their fellows, and the men wade into heaps of them, beating them with clubs. The birds are thick on the ground, battered, broken-winged, easy prey. From where they stand, Audubon and the young gentlemen can hear shooting, shouting and the screams of birds. It takes only thirty minutes, and then, with baskets loaded with eggs, the bloodstained men climb back in their skiff.

By this time Audubon has turned his back on the grisly scene. His face has gone white; his voice is rough.

“Six men have destroyed hundreds of birds and their futures,” he says. As if he might add, “Are you satisfied?”

“Aye,” says Godwin.

“What will they do with them?”

“They’ll stash the eggs and rest now, and rip the feathered skin off the birds and cut the breast for bait. They’ll eat what they can and get drunk on the grog they keep in the hold and fall asleep in their dirt. Next day they’ll go to the next place, for they know them all, and begin again. There isn’t much left after the Eggers have been. They don’t care, for every year, there’s more where that came from. Makes a nasty scene though,” says Godwin, “all that waste. It smells frightful too.”

The instant they return to the
Ripley
, Audubon goes to his deal table. He paints the Foolish Guillemots on guard, large, stark, with a funereal dignity. A pair, their white breasts lined up to the left of picture, and their bills identically angled above the horizon. Black, blue and
white, male with a white tearline from its eye, female without. The female opens her bill to reveal a startling yellow mouth lining. But the picture is mute. The birds have presence without depth, their animation temporary and without meaning.

DOMINION

I
t is the night they have promised to dine on the
Gulnare
.

“I must dress for dinner? Quite a bore on the coast of Labrador,” Audubon quips.

There is no light below; he has to make his toilet on a barrel on deck. The sun that has threatened to emerge for the latter part of the afternoon is now beaming above the narrow band of dwarf trees on the mainland to the west. He splashes his face with the fresh water a sailor has carried from the stream that flows into the harbour. Brushes his hair with the ivory-handled brush Lucy gave him when they married. Johnny offers him a small, cloudy-looking glass in which he notices, with surprise, that the sheen of grey growing over his locks merges with the silver backing of the glass.

“Why have you brought this, Son?”

“So that you can see yourself to shave.”

“I am to shave as well?”

“You are.”

Audubon raises the glass. It catches the sun and sends a white beam across the deck. He turns the mirror in his hand, playing with the beam, flashing it on the floor, at his son’s feet, at his own feet. The beam cuts the air and can be seen, flickering, knifelike, at long distance. He sets it, a white circle, an interrogation, on the back of his hand. It reveals a delta lined and wrinkled, with raised sinews. An old hand. What is forty-eight? Far more than half a life, he thinks. And the Work is only half done. He still hears the birds screaming over their murdered eggs. There will be, tonight on the surveying
ship, the implacable ticking of Captain Bayfield’s chronometers.