The Snow Geese (6 page)

I took it all in, this new place: its colours and textures, its different lights, its things. Above the bed hung a drawing of a cowboy, riding a horse at a rodeo. The horse was executing a buck, poised on its hind legs, head and neck angling downwards, front legs about to hammer the ground. The cowboy was airborne, bounced a foot from the saddle. One hand held the reins; the other was held out over the horse’s head. You could see that when those front legs hit the ground, the cowboy would slam back into the saddle and lose his balance, jolted, but for now all was poised and beautiful – the rider’s flaring leather chaps, adorned with rosettes; his saddle’s horn, skirt, cantle and bucking rolls; the tapaderos on the stirrups; the leather fenders. A small patch of shadow on the rider’s Stetson indicated the depression where his fingers would grip to lift the hat to a lady.

‘Would you like some tea?’ Eleanor asked, peering into the room.

We passed back through the swinging saloon doors like gunslingers. I followed Eleanor into the kitchen, and watched as she put some water on to boil, a spiral glowing orange on the electric hob. She didn’t have a kettle. She had two cast-iron skillets, one six inches across and one nine and a half inches across, and used these to boil water for tea, the smaller skillet holding just enough water for a single mug, the larger just enough for two. She handled the skillets using one of two quilted oven pads, a black sheep and a white sheep, their fleeces browned and singed through by burns. Her birdlike lightness and the rugged iron heft of the pans seemed imagined by two radically different minds.

‘I’m so glad you’re doing this,’ she said, watching the water in the skillet. ‘I love being a part of this adventure.’

‘Good!’

‘I just read
The Snow Goose
. I wanted to have an idea of what set you off on this I don’t know what you’d call it. And it’s so sad!’

She was holding the skillet’s handle with the black sheep, watching the water.

‘Sometimes I think it’s amazing that water boils,’ she said. ‘All those little bubbles suddenly appear. What tea would you like?’

She opened a cupboard to the right of the cooker: it was crammed with boxes of loose leaf teas and tea bags – black teas, green teas, exotic herbal infusions and improving, medicinal tisanes, their bouquet wafting from the open cupboard.

‘There’s no shortage of teas,’ she said.

We both chose peppermint. Eleanor returned the black sheep to the cooker rail: the two sheep flopped over the rail like people touching their toes. Magnets held postcards, photographs and cartoons to the white fridge: pictures of pianos, virtuoso pianists, piano lessons, sheet music. The magnets themselves were treble clefs, bass clefs, quaver pairs and miniature grand pianos. In the middle of the fridge, held to the metal by two pianos, was a piece of card on which Eleanor had copied out a proverb:
It takes both rain and shine to make a rainbow.
Her handwriting took a vine’s delight in winding and spiralling tendrils.

I followed Eleanor out through the sliding glass doors on to a roofed balcony that jutted into crowns of elms, live oaks and pecans. A set of wind chimes hung in one corner – six metal tubes of different lengths, like tubular bells, with a wooden puck in the middle, attached to a square metal sail. The sail got wind of the faintest breeze and carried the puck from bell to bell, sounding low, hollow notes. Squirrels ran along the boughs; glossy, purplish-black grackles bungled noisily in the leaves.

We sat down at a glass-topped table and jigged our teabags by the strings.

‘So how about these geese?’ Eleanor asked.

I told her about the roost at Eagle Lake, the sunset returns of blue-phase and white-phase snow geese. Millions of birds, I said, were already coursing up the flyways, across the Great Plains, towards Manitoba. They were heading for traditional staging areas in Nebraska’s Platte River valley, the lakes of South Dakota and North Dakota, and the grainfields west of Winnipeg. After resting, and replenishing their fat stores, they would push north with the leading edge of spring towards nesting grounds along the edge of Hudson Bay, and, further north and east, on Southampton Island and Baffin Island. I mentioned the tilt of the Earth, circannual rhythms, the period of intensive feeding that precedes migration, the twice-yearly restlessness that prompts birds to undertake such ambitious flights.

In accordance with their inherited calendars, birds get an urge to move. When migratory birds are held in captivity, they hop about, flutter their wings and flit from perch to perch just as birds of the same species are migrating in the wild. The caged birds ‘know’ they should be travelling too. This migratory restlessness, or Zugunruhe, was first described by Johann Andreas Naumann, who studied golden orioles and pied flycatchers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Naumann interpreted Zugunruhe to be an expression of the migratory instinct in birds.

Circannual rhythms control the onset of Zugunruhe; restlessness prompts the birds to depart. Migrants do not need to rely on the example of parents or other experienced individuals. In some cases, birds do not even have such examples to follow. Eurasian cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, obliging surrogate parents to rear their chicks. As soon as they have laid their eggs, adult cuckoos are free to migrate: most fly south in July. Young cuckoos migrate about a month after their true parents. Rather than following their foster parents, these juveniles fly by their own instincts to join adult cuckoos in African and south-east Asian winter grounds.

Both the need to migrate and the route to be taken are at least partially coded in the genes. Caged birds do not only get restless, they get restless in a particular direction. Each autumn, populations of garden warblers migrate from Germany to Africa via Spain and Morocco. They fly south-west to the Strait of Gibraltar, then head south and south-east to their winter grounds. Garden warblers raised in cages under constant environmental conditions begin to exhibit Zugunruhe just as their counterparts in the wild are setting off on migration. The caged warblers show distinct directional tendencies. They hop towards the south-west while free warblers are flying south-west across France and Spain. The caged birds then change direction and hop south and south-east just as the free birds are turning south and south-east over Gibraltar. They seem to act out the entire course of the migration in the confinement of their cages.

Birds, it seems, are genetically programmed to fly in a certain direction for a certain period of time. If these inherited instructions are carried out, the bird will arrive in its breeding or winter grounds. But migrating birds must have a way to compensate for unpredictable environmental conditions: individuals flying with the wind behind them cover much greater distances than conspecifics flying into headwinds; storms may blow them off course.

The flexibility of a bird’s innate programme was demonstrated in the late 1950s by the Dutch ornithologist A.C. Perdeck, who captured more than 11,000 starlings near The Hague during their autumn migration from breeding grounds in north-west Europe, following the North Sea coast in a general south-west direction towards winter quarters in Holland, Belgium, north-west France, Ireland and southern England. He ringed every bird, having first identified its age and sex.

The starlings, loaded in bamboo cages, were immediately flown to Switzerland and released near Basel, Zürich and Geneva. Three hundred and fifty-four were recovered. Perdeck found that most adult birds had flown from Switzerland on north-westerly courses, and that some had actually reached their normal winter grounds. But the juveniles tended to fly south-west, ending up in southern France, or even Spain. Inexperienced starlings were not able to adjust to the displacement. In adult birds, the endogenous migratory programme was modified by experience, while juveniles flew on a fixed heading, with no regard to circumstance.

‘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.

*

M
ATTHEW 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.’