Creation (17 page)

“You have known this before,” she said, in French. “How long does it last?”

Did she mean the feeling, or the picture?

“The sun has risen so high,” he said, “that I cannot see you.”

“Then come closer.”

L
ATER, IT WAS COOL
in the room with the deep-set windows under the presiding stuffed owl and the great globe. He could feel her breath on his face, sweetened by the scent of the rose petals that tumbled off the blooms that stood in vases on the window ledge.

“Mr. Audubon,” she said, “do the birds feel desire?”

“Oh yes,” he answered without ceasing the sure and careful movements of his pencil. “Oh yes, they do. Can you not see it in their flight? Hear it in their song? Feel it in their colour? Birds are the very embodiment of desire.”

“I can see that what you say is true,” she said. “Birds
embody
desire. But what I asked was different. Do they feel desire?”

He looked at her hard. She has checked him; it is as if she has quarrelled with him. She has not done that in all the time he has known her.

The Country
SO WILD AND GRAND

O
UAPITAGONE
,
JULY
2, 1833

Went on shore and was most pleased with what I saw. The country so wild and grand. Its mossy grey-clothed rocks heaped and thrown together as if by chance in the most fantastical groups imaginable, huge masses hanging on minor ones … bays without end sprinkled with rocky islands of all shapes and sizes where in every fissure a guillemot, a cormorant or some other wild bird retreats to secure its egg. The peculiar cast of the sky which never seems to be certain, butterflies flitting over snow banks probing beautiful dwarf flower-lets of many hues …

—
Journals
, J. J. Audubon

O
n a small island he discovers, half hidden by short grass, several dozen nests of the Eider Duck. The females are sitting; they pay no attention to him. They let him get to within ten feet of their nests and settle himself down on a damp patch of moss. He leans
against a granite boulder and watches the birds; alone with them, he is at peace.

But, too curious, he soon stands again, leaving his gun and satchel on the rock. He chooses one of the ducks and manages to get within two yards of her before she takes flight. Then he glides the last few feet and looks down inside the nest. It is deep, and tightly packed inside with mud, twigs, seaweed. Puffs of down cushion five eggs. Five! Beautiful oval eggs, of a pale olive green, perhaps three inches long and two inches wide.

He is tempted to take one for the cook. They are delicious. But he knows if he does, the duck may not return. He retreats to his seat.

The duck, which was sitting on the water a hundred yards away, flaps herself into the air. She lands a few feet from the nest; she has clearly decided that he is not dangerous. She walks directly to it and, backing, swiveling her tail, tipping forward and back, arranges herself on the eggs. He can almost feel under himself the hard, cooling shells. She plucks down from her hindquarters and tucks her eggs in.

Other females are near, on their nests, but the ducks sit without mates. He has seen the mature males out on the water, lines of a hundred or more of them flying a few feet above the waves, imitating the rise and fall of the water. These drakes accompanied their mates here, flying in great flocks of pairs, but since the eggs have been laid, appear to have no thought of the mates they courted so passionately a month ago. Even immature males forsake the nest, spending their time with the barren females. The female alone bears the responsibility of incubating and raising the young. Why? Simply because she can? Her down, which warms and hides her eggs when she needs to fly in search of food, makes it possible.

The duck sits on. Of what does she dream? Of her young, soon to hatch, their nestling bodies under her own? Or of the mate who, short weeks ago, she encouraged? And the drake, of what does he dream, now that his task, which was only to fertilize the egg, is complete? Of sea islands, and diving eight fathoms to capture small fish in the clear, cold water? Perhaps he rehearses his eventual migration southward, which he will undertake before his mate.

“
He discovers, half hidden by short grass,
several dozen nests of the Eider Duck
.”

Audubon tries, as he has tried before, to have the mind of a bird. He puts all thought away; the dream is in the body, not the head. His blood cools and his flesh livens to the air and the earth. He is alert but held in check, poised. He stays that way for a long time. Until his duck, or rather the duck that has either forgotten him or included him in her idea of security, gives signs that she must leave the nest. No doubt she has to feed herself. She cranes her neck backward. She lifts her body to expose the eggs. Down nearly covers them. But she pulls more and more soft fuzz until her tail is quite bare and she is satisfied that the eggs are under cover. Then she tips herself forward and waddles off the nest. She walks a little, and then takes to the wing, leaving him there, with her unborn.

As if to prove himself worthy of her extraordinary trust, he watches the nest for her. The duck is Lucy, the eggs his children. He himself is not away over the sea, but nearby. He is lulled by the sun. Suddenly the sky goes dark, and there is a great commotion in the air, a shrieking sound in his ears. Dark wings flap in his face, and a huge black-backed gull is hunched over the eggs, its sharp bill drilling downward.

“No!” he cries and scrambles to his feet, rifle up, shooting first high above the nest, and then down toward it. The gull continues its work.

Audubon leaps forward and jabs his rifle butt at the giant, its wingspan easily five and a half feet. Crushing the other eggs with its curved feet, the gull screams and flaps in his face. Then with a deep, hoarse
gawp gawp gawp
and a massive shudder, it departs upward.

The nest is destroyed. The artist retreats in horror. He sees his duck swimming in tight distraught circles at the shore. Her nest is defiled, and her brood, or dream of brood, is gone.

He watches her display of grief with fascination and guilt. He has not caused it, but then neither has he been able to prevent it, and it is as if he promised her. She turns, twists and pecks at the water. She opens her wings as if to fly and collapses. She watches her nest and she watches him. She hops a short distance off, and then hurries back, as if with hope that she might find the nest restored, the attack never to have occurred. He sits in agonies; he can do nothing. He waits half an hour, an hour. She appears calmer and finally she rests.

And here is the miracle. He knows that nature will give the duck a new set of instructions. She will not mourn for long. This evening she will go to where the sterile females and the drakes roost, and find a new mate. She will draw him away from his fellows for a week or ten days. They will preen one another, swim together. The drake will do his job and when she is sitting on a new nest of eggs, he will leave her to fend for herself.

Audubon’s mind clears. It is neither that of a bird nor that of a man. It is not really a mind at all but an eye, greedy, seizing the image. There is the nest, a mass of gluey yolk and broken shell, drying in the sun. There is the duck. Preening. Drawing her wing feathers one by one through her beak. After witnessing the destruction of all her hope, she has retreated from the future, the demolished future, to the moment.

I
T IS EVENING IN THE HOLD.
The young gentlemen have shot half a dozen eider ducks and as many drakes. They sling the bodies out of the bag and onto the table. Tom Lincoln sets out to skin them. The medical students take a carcass to dissect, talking in the candlelight about the bird’s esophagus, its fishy smell. Audubon takes three, a duck and two drakes and choreographs his scenario with wire. The duck has been roused from her nest, which is hidden in a clump of grasses. There is an intruder, a second drake to the left, threatening the nest. The mate of the duck lunges at him, defending.

He begins to paint. The birds are rendered from eye level: it is as if the painter lay in the grass three feet away, watching the drama. The pair of eiders, though opposites in colour and markings, are identically posed, identically angled, and on the offensive — wings back, tails tipped up, bills open. She is that gold red-brown, finely marked with darker brown and white. The snow-white back of the drake who is her mate fills the centre-right of the picture. Behind their tails the greenish-brown eggs are just visible, open and uncovered. The intruder has spread his wings, exposing his black underbody and the yellow patch at the neck. His black raccoon mask is displayed to advantage.

There is fury in the great swatches of white on the males, the fine
lines of light and dark brown of the female’s feathers. Intimacy is being defended here, the treasures of the nest protected. Audubon is writing a new story for the duck. The predator is successfully driven off; the nest and the eggs are saved. Instead of portraying the drake flying with the other drakes, and the duck left to fend for the family herself, he has turned the eider drake into a model husband.

This is what he means by “drawn from nature.”

T
HEY SAIL
beyond the islands, in the safe, deep water. Audubon feels let loose, untied. He hates to be away from land as much as he hates to be away from his loved ones. And this time is worse than others, because he cannot send letters.

He paints while there is light to do so, and if his eyes allow, he writes episodes for his letter press, stories which, like the paintings, have grown more theatrical with each year. When that is done he writes letters, letters that he will hold until he is home again, or until the
Ripley
encounters a ship that can take the letters back to civilization.

He writes to Robert Havell. “I must tell you your last engravings, the Whip-Poor-Will and the Screech-Owl, are superb.”

He writes to Victor. “You must keep an eye on Havell. You must ask him what is wrong with Blake. Carelessly coloured portraits sent to Selby and Jardine have them threatening to cancel. But do not be too rough with him.”

He writes to Lucy. “I have done six paintings so far in Labrador. Some of them will please thee, I think, dearest best beloved Friend, my own love and true consoler. Are you certain that you have soldered and insured the tins of drawings? I am worried about the bindings of the folios.”

He writes to John Bachman. Bachman, who has counselled him to quiet his enemies by stepping out of the debate on whether the vulture has a nose for his carrion or hunts by sight, and whether the rattlesnake climbs trees. “I cannot step away from scientific fights,” he tells John Bachman. “Because I am right. I know more about birds in the wild than any man alive. I have watched them for all the days of my life. Who are these parlour scientists to tell me how the creatures
behave? Besides, although I have enemies, I also have friends. Did not Baron Cuvier call my bird portraits ‘the greatest monument yet erected by Art to Nature’? And did the Duc d’Orléans not get down on his knees to call me king of bird painters? Even my compatriots are coming around, and may one day love me. The
Baltimore Courier
has written about the great Audubon: ‘his exploits as great as his genius.’ Did not the great actress Fanny Kemble say of me that I am ‘like all first-rate people, radiating simplicity and total lack of pretension’? I pray you do not think me boastful if I tell you this. Your friendship is the most important of all. Yours, and that of your sister-in-law. How is our sweetheart?”