Creation (27 page)

Once the jar of that feeling was opened, they could not keep it closed. Again and again there were words. She was spirited; she did not give in; she only appeared to, and then defied him again, clever and staunch and ready to go as far as he did while still, somehow, remaining
in that tight bodice, with that perfect little chin held high. How he longed to disturb her! He was spellbound by the beauty of her person and her work, and he could not allow her to have this power over him.

So, he has vanished into the Labrador wilderness, leaving her to Bachman.

H
E WORKS IN DRIVING RAIN
under the slanted glass roof that lets light into the hold. His neck aching, he is driven on deck to search the sky. There are birds in their millions, but only familiar ones. Where are the new species? He still hopes to see an Ivory Gull, the dainty, all-white bird that is reported to dye itself red with the blood of murdered seals. He has yet to lay eyes on a Labrador Duck. He must find the Great Auk.

“You want to see that bird, you should go to the Funks,” Godwin offers. The pilot spends his time astern, near the rudder, chewing tobacco, and the artist is still not used to his habit of materializing out of shadow.

“So I have heard. At this rate I doubt we’ll make it.”

“’Tis a barren spot.”

“You’ve been there, then?”

“Used to go with my Da round thirty year back,” he says. “You know why they’re called that? From the stinking smell that greets your nose when you land. Astonishing quantities of birds. You wouldna believe it. Unless,” he adds modestly, “of course, you’ve seen something similar in your peregrinations.” This nod to Audubon’s experience is in the nature of a peace offering.

“I don’t know that I have. Tell me.”

“Ah,” says Godwin, his voice saddening with the memory of it. “I were only a lad. Still, I knew there were a sin in it. Watching me Da and his friend, I’d feel right ill. You couldna step on the shore, the thousands of birds just stood so lazy there was no place for your feet and they wouldna move off. The men just tramped on them little pinguins, you know. Can’t fly. What did you call it?”

“The Great Auk,” says Audubon.

“Them days, if you came for their feathers you did not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but laid hold of one and pluck off all
his best. You then turn the poor bird adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.”

Audubon listens intently. “Do you take the eggs as well?”

“Oh, for sure you do. Still do. You go to the Funks for eggs. That’s one main reason you go. But you have to be certain to get them fresh. Here’s exactly how they do it. They drive, knock and shove the poor pinguins into heaps. Then they scrape all the eggs in tumps, in the same manner you would a heap of apples from an orchard down in New England, eh?

“Numbers of these eggs, from being laid days ago, are stale and useless. So you leave those and clear a space of ground about as big as the pile of eggs you want.”

Godwin has moved out of his corner into the centre space of the deck, stretching his arms and circling his feet to show the size of the circle in which the birds would lay.

“Then you retire for a day or two behind some rock. Drink your grog. Sing your songs and sleep it off. At the end of that time your circle will be full of eggs freshly laid.”

Audubon shakes his head at the strange connivance of creatures in their own destruction.

“These men,” Godwin says, “while they abide on the Funks, are in the constant practice of horrid cruelties. They not only skin the pinguins alive, but they burn them alive also, to cook their bodies with. You take a kettle with you into which you put a pinguin or two, you kindle a fire under it, and this fire is absolutely made of the unfortunate pinguins themselves. Their bodies, being oily, soon produce a flame: there is no wood on the island, you see.”

Dark dark dark. Tales of savagery. Audubon wraps his arms around his chest and thumps himself on the back to warm up. “What a land it is, what a land.”

“We have to stay alive,” says Godwin. “I suppose from the start it were a contest, us or them. Question I always asked myself, do the little birds feel the pain?”

“Ah,” says Audubon. “And what did you answer?”

There is a quiet moment while Godwin gets more tobacco out of
his pouch. “We can’t afford to know,” he says.

“I’d like to find ‘pinguins,’” Audubon says.

“We’d be lucky to find any now.”

“Why is that?” says Audubon.

“Ah, there’s not so many, are there? Not any more, not since them days. Stands to reason, don’t it? Well, they made it unlawful, taking the birds for feathers, didn’t they? I seen men whipped in the stocks in St. John’s for the crime of it. It’s only if you’re going to use them for bait they say you can kill the birds. But the Funks are a long way off, and who’s to know when the pirates and robbers come? It was still going on when I was a lad. I saw two fellows flogged at a Cart’s Tail in St. John’s for gettin’ caught,” he repeats.

Too late, too late, thinks Audubon, is he going to be too late for the birds?

“Think we’re a hard people, don’t you sir,” Godwin persists, coming closer in and proffering his tobacco tin.

“It’s a hard land.”

“Harder even than that.” Godwin laughs. “God made it, I suppose, and put us here.”

A
UDUBON TAKES HIS SEARCH
for new species to the inland marshes. He collects half a dozen boreal chickadees and draws them. But there is nothing more to be found. He speaks to Emery; together they decide to leave Ouapitagone and head up the coast to Petit Mécatina. Godwin insists on taking the outside route. The wind blasts like a November gale, and reluctantly Audubon agrees.

The
Ripley
sails up through the open water, away from the coast. Fourteen days. Fifty miles of islands. Audubon is frustrated, and both his anger and his curiosity return him to Godwin.

“Did you ever see a Labrador Duck?” he asks. “What about the large birds of prey? The White Gyrfalcon?”

Godwin has no answers. At length, questions about birds become questions about the past.

“What took you to New Orleans?”

“Sailing ships,” says Godwin. “One place leads to another.”

“And how did you come across Nolte?”

“Nolte?” says Godwin. “He come across me. He decided he needed a bodyguard after two gentlemen tried to take his life in a gaming club. That’s how I understood it. And he picked me for the job. He was walking in the port one night when I dragged on a sailor who was crazy drunk and would have missed our sailing. I just held the fellow still. He was lucky somebody didn’t kill ’em. He was asking for it.”

“So Nolte has enemies?”

“That time he had a lot of money. Got a lot of money, you got a lot of friends and some of them you’d just as soon not have. Later he didn’t have the money or the friends. Still, when the generals come to the country it’s him they want to see. He knew them all, the lords and ladies from France, and the ones who’d had their eye gouged out on the frontier, and the ones with the brand they put on you in prison. He has the knack, does Nolte, for walking through the filth and the glory. He keeps his own path.”

“He and I understood each other,” Audubon says. “We’ve both been high and low in society. And learned to prefer our own company.”

A
UDUBON BURIES HIMSELF
in the birds close to hand. He takes some white-crowned buntings and a black-capped warbler. He picks flowers for Maria, and discovers them to be Labrador tea, wild peas, and a catchfly called silene. One day he and the young gentlemen set out to row miles in the small boats to the mainland. He sees a flock of titmice. But the water becomes too rough for the whaleboats and they turn back. It is two days before Audubon sees the little birds again. He follows them into a clump of dwarf coniferous trees. They disappear but he discovers where they hide. The bird has dug its nest out of a rotten stump, leaving only a tiny round opening barely big enough to admit his thumb. The inside of its den is like a fur purse, of a softness he can only dream of on these days.

This bird has never been drawn before and Audubon is intrigued. He calls it a Hudson’s Bay Titmouse, a buff-coloured, round-bodied little bird with a black throat and yellow lining of the mouth. They cling to the underside of branches and show no fear of him. He paces
slowly, closer and closer to a trio, holding out his hand and murmuring. Curious and chatty, one little creature takes up a perch on his extended finger. Its claws cannot encircle his finger and nearly puncture his skin. But the creature is no heavier than breath.

LOST

S
aturday, July 20, 1833, is the finest day Bayfield and his men have had since leaving the
Gulnare
. It is also four years to the day since the captain began to survey this coast, at Rimouski. He marks the day with the observation in his journals that crisis has been averted; his hopes and even the spirits of the men are high. With good weather and feverish work, they advance the survey through a labyrinth of islands to within three miles of Gros Mécatina Point. When they make camp for the evening, they can see its magnificent cliffs, which soar a thousand feet above the sea.

On Sunday they set off early, five men at the oars with the officers in front in their caps, hoping for another day of such progress. They head to the third islet southwest off Gros Mécatina, but as Bayfield and Bowen observe for latitude, a fog descends, placing clammy hands up against their mouths: They can neither bat it away nor see through it.

The mood reverses quickly. The men see their hopes of finishing and getting back to the ship diminish. They lean over their oars to this side and that, spitting and muttering. The lame coxswain Morgan wears a new, ugly face of power, having gained three or four sympathizers. Collins gamely sings Irish songs to cheer the sailors. When a blow with heavy rain attacks them from the slant, they strike a camp. The sailors refuse to eat, and lie listless in their tents. They all hear Bowen’s cough in the night.

Bayfield paces. Paces in the rain, his gear leaking everywhere, his cheeks so cold he cannot feel the water running down them. But he will not let himself sit. If he does he too might be frozen into defeat.

“Bad weather, sir,” says Collins. “But it is only weather, and all weather must change.”

Bayfield is surprised to feel cheered by the simple man. He is full of doubt once more, and Bowen’s company does not satisfy his need.

Then the fog does lift. And, better still, a schooner arrives.

“Sails!” cries Collins, only seconds after Bayfield has spied them himself.

Bayfield and Collins watch from the pilot boat. The
Ripley
hauls in around the islands.

“Where is she going?” says Collins.

“Looks like she’s intending to anchor in Gros Mécatina but, not knowing the place, has run into Portage Bay instead.”

Bayfield is uncommonly glad to see the schooner.

Then fresh gales come on and the sails are hidden in darkness.

T
HE
RIPLEY
IS RUNNING FOR COVER
. After one fine day when Audubon found a white-throated sparrow and heard the beautiful song of a ruby-crowned wren over and over, the horrid weather has descended again.

“This is Petit Mécatina,” says Godwin.

“It is not. There is a settlement there. It might be Mutton Bay,” says Emery peering at the charts.

“No, it’s Petit Mécatina.”

They’re both wrong, but they are lucky; the water is fair and they pass. Inside the shoals, they slide past the point of a barren granite outcrop to find a tent and two launches hunkered down.

“What do you know? The Royal Navy’s come to grief. No other men would be fool enough to be out in two open boats,” growls Godwin.

Audubon clambers up the mizzen. A thinning of the fog allows him to glimpse his friend Bayfield and entourage. But he is nearly blown off by a gust. The
Ripley
retreats to anchor. Hours later the gale gives way a little. The
Ripley
is still sheltering when the surveying boat puts up a double-reefed sail and heads toward them. Lieutenant Bowen hails the Americans, his voice croaking so that he cannot be haughty.

“Marooned for five days! Injured coxswain! Impossible weather!”

Captain Emery produces a ham and some potatoes; Johnny and the young gentlemen set out after the surveying boat to deliver the rations to the
Gulnare’s
crew. They return with the offer of a cache of wood for a bonfire.

T
HAT NIGHT,
they camp side by side on the shore. The British have made the best of miserable conditions. Their camp looks almost snug, covered with canvas, tea things laid out on an iron-bound bed, with trunks serving as seats and sailcloth clothes bags as cushions. Audubon is quite envious of the domesticity it conveys. His own camp is haphazardly struck; every night ashore is a trial for the Americans.

Under a large tarred cloth rigged to keep out the rain, the sailors feast on the ham and potatoes. On the windward side of the fire, eyes streaming red from the smoke, but at least undisturbed by the moschettoes, the men shake hands and clap backs.

“My friend. I expected I would not see you again,” says Audubon.

“I too had that thought. This meeting is a pleasure.”

In truth, Bayfield is embarrassed. To be caught marooned on a granite island and running out of food! To discover the Audubon expedition sailing prettily in a little cove, albeit mistaken about which cove it is, with ham and potatoes to spare!

Pacing back and forth, they concur: it has been the most miserable stretch imaginable; how will they ever finish?

“The birds are nowhere to be found. I have discovered no new species.”

“I don’t understand you. We see flocks and flocks of birds.”

“But not the species I need. I need the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, the Gyrfalcon. And summer, such as it is, will soon begin to turn. The birds will leave.”

“Summer is short. You’ve said it yourself. You must not take it personally.”