Creation (31 page)

Soon they enter the Strait of Belle Isle, between Newfoundland and Labrador, where so many ships have come to ruin. “Nine times out of ten,” Bayfield tells Bowen, “there is thick fog in the passage, the tenth time a violent storm. The current is so strong we have no choice but to keep the speed up even though we cannot see where we are going. To drop below eleven knots is to be blown off course. So it is a game of chance. We fly blind at high speed, or go slow and are sucked onto hazard.”

For the
Gulnare
, the Strait is calm and beautiful. She bravely sails in, the slave girl’s carved wooden back arched above the sway of frigid green water. Whales breach all around her, one after another, as if, now that they have entered the true north, an honour guard has come to escort them.

There are other wonders to be met: icebergs like ruined castles and every night the phosphorescent gleam of the aurora. At L’Anse-au-Clair, where brigantines come in from Jersey, the locals splash on the beach with hand-held nets, catching tiny fish called capelin. Bayfield picks up ammonites that look like snakes curled around themselves. At L’Anse-Aux-Morts there is a lighthouse and a shoreside graveyard of sailors with stories of ships that have come to ruin laboriously carved in stone. Here they could have put Collins to rest, though it would not be much drier. The graves are so close to the shore the corpses must be dissolved.

Graced with easy weather, the schooner skips across the Strait between Green Island, Newfoundland, and Bras d’Or. Here Bayfield discovers a great curiosity. In mid-strait, between Newfoundland
and Labrador, there is a ripple — a ridge, permanent and standing, in the water’s surface. On one side of the ripple, the water is light in colour, and forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in temperature, with no icebergs in it. On the other side, the water is darker and icebergs stand like pyramids one hundred and fifty feet above the sea. The darker water is thirty-three degrees in temperature. Bayfield concludes that the dark current comes down from the frozen Arctic, bringing the ice castles with it. When they cross over to the dark water the sailors shudder at the change. Caught in fog where the temperature changes, the
Gulnare
fires her cannons, half a dozen times, as a warning and a signal.

Bayfield wonders if he will encounter the
Ripley
again. He feels her out there, the restless spirit of Audubon. He wonders if he is finding his birds. He would tell him, if they met again, about Collins.

He finds himself searching for the
Ripley
at each place they stop.

O
N JULY 26
the
Ripley
leaves Portage Bay at dawn heading north. There is a good breeze blowing; Godwin and Emery propose to sail across the open water up to Chevalier’s settlement at the mouth of the Esquimaux River. Audubon agrees, reluctantly. He knows they will miss birds on the shore along the way, but hopes that the river mouth with its estuary and klatch of islands will be fertile territory.

There is a clear passage, all the way, a distance of forty-seven miles. They are over halfway there when the wind drops, turns, and begins to roar from the south carrying the full force of the Gulf of St. Lawrence with it. The masts shake as if they might snap, and the ship flies before the wind. In only three hours they are outside of the little settlement of Chevalier’s. They must wend their way through shoals and around rocky points in to shore.

Godwin balks.

“A man would be mad to ask me to do that,” he says.

“A man has come to see the birds, not the sea. You promised me the estuary.”

Godwin has heard it all before. “No bird is worth risking our lives.”

“Any bird is worth three bad pilots,” says Audubon. It is their joke now.

But Godwin is planted firmly before the wheel; only a physical struggle will displace him. Even Audubon can see that it is hazardous to head into uncharted channels in this gale. And so, they sail onward.

They fly past Chevalier’s settlement and draw ever nearer to the entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle.

“Captain Emery, I am captive in this cursed schooner!” Audubon shouts.

The captain smiles, and pulls his moustaches, and says that the weather has been even worse than usual, and what can they do?

By the end of the day they have arrived at Bras d’Or, where, because the harbour is clear and open, Godwin consents to stop.

To the painter’s great astonishment, the harbour is full; there are at least 150 sailing vessels, mostly fore-and-aft schooners, with a few pickaxes, all fishing for cod. Some are so loaded down with fish that the decks are awash with water. And the harbour is merry with songs of whalers from New England, codfishers from Italy and the West Indies, and from Newfoundland. Their voices ring across the night water.

He has come to the wilderness and found that throngs of people were here before him.

Audubon stands on deck and sees, again, the Arctic Tern, now with its young. It was only six weeks ago that he first spied it diving and soaring above the shores of Magdalen Island; now the bird has mated, laid, and nurtured its young.

I
N THE MORNING
, he walks the rim of a white sand beach. He sees eight redpolls, a harlequin drake and duck, which the locals call “Lords and Ladies” for their elaborate plumage, and a Washington eagle. In the nearby woods and ponds he finds a velvet duck, and the three-toed and downy woodpeckers. At the Hudson’s Bay post, he fingers the caribou skins the Esquimaux bring across the plateau from the Arctic. He asks for certain information, which he already knows.
The fish are smaller and more scarce, he hears a captain complain. The clerk tells him that in living memory, the whales were everywhere, and the whalers could take as many as they liked; now it was rare to come upon a pod.

Walking onshore near the little settlement, Audubon and Johnny come to the log home of an Englishman called Jones. The man cordially invites them inside for tea. He has four children and an appalling wife, although Mr. Jones himself seems more than content with her, regularly slapping her bottom as she passes by in the small, fire-warmed room. Mrs. Jones has a coarse voice and is full of pretensions. She tells Audubon that her husband has ordered from over the sea a wonderful musical instrument for her to play, because she is so talented. When he questions her, Audubon discovers that it is a player piano with scrolls for tunes.

Mr. Jones takes Audubon on a walk along the shore. He talks of a shortage of fish, of the diminishing herds, which in turn starve the Indians, of the necessity to stock up for winter or die.

“You have a difficult life. I believe this place is best left to the beasts and the native people, like the Esquimaux, who can survive.”

“But I love this life. I live here free of taxes, free of lawyers, free of government in all ways. I may do as I please and I owe nothing to another man. I am certain this is the best of all places to live. My neighbour — a mile away — passes no comment on what I do if I do not transgress against him.”

Audubon remembers Collins, and that night around the fire, and how he imagined a happy life for himself here with his bride. Perhaps the man was not so wrong. Perhaps he will live here yet.

“Besides,” says Jones, “it is not possible that God intended this majesty to go unobserved.”

T
HE WONDERS
of this country grow stranger by the day. The jellyfish arrive. Caught on the rocks and colliding with the green-tongued kelp are shining globes like great bubbles.

Audubon is transfixed by the glowing transparent spheres just under the surface. In great masses they have collected near the rocky
shores and clumps of kelp, fetching up against shallows, moving by instinct in their mass fertilization ritual. The jellyfish are stacked below into the depths like planets disappearing into space, each one luminous, the gleam of orb over orb diminishing into the deep.

Johnny meanwhile has been inquiring after the Labrador Duck, describing the bird — its pied back, the black ring around its neck and its grey and white wings.

“You don’t want that one. It tastes like fish,” say the Jones boys.

“Not for eating,” he explains. “To draw it.”

The youngest boy directs Johnny to a nest, which he claims belongs to the bird. But the nest is empty.

“If you stay awhile,” Jones says to Audubon, “you’ll see the curlew come. That is the bird you want to see. They call it the Esquimaux Curlew.”

Audubon has seen these birds only once before. He recalls, as if from another life, the August day he and Bachman waded on an island on the coast of South Carolina, in a soft, rosy dawn. A dense flock of the northern species flew over swiftly, on their route south.

“When the curlews come, then we have a time,” says Jones. His eyes and the eyes of his wife crinkle up with laughter. “In May, they pass here on their way up to their breeding grounds in the Arctic. Soon they will come down from the north. They stop here before they set off southward across the Gulf. They run so thickly underfoot that even my smallest boy can kill them with a club,” says Jones. “Hunters shoot two thousand a day and deliver them to the Hudson’s Bay store up the coast. They will come with the fog,” says Jones. “Soon now.”

I
N THE EAST
that evening there is a small piece of rainbow. Captain Emery calls it “the eye of the brick” and says it betokens wind from the same quarter in the morning. He is right. And the east wind brings fog.

B
RAS D
’O
R,
JULY 29, 1833

For more than a week we had been looking for them, as was every fisherman in the harbour, these birds being considered, there, great delicacies. The birds at length came … from the north … in such dense flocks as to remind me of the passenger pigeons. Flock after flock, passed close round our vessel, and directed their course toward the sterile mountainous tracts in the neighbourhood; and as soon as the sun’s rays had dispersed the fogs that hung over the land, our whole party went off in search of them.

—
Ornithological Biography
, J. J. Audubon

T
HE MORNING IS STIFLED
in dense mist with a wind that does nothing to clear the clouds. The waiting is over. The cry rings out, “The curlews are coming, the curlews are coming.”

When the birds emerge from the cloud banks, they seem bewildered, they are so suddenly over the little settlement. Of course in the fog any arrival, even that of a man walking toward you, first invisible, then upon you, is sudden. But almost instantly the sky is dark and the rush of wings echoes up from the rocks. The birds turn and venture toward the open water but cannot attempt it in the fog. They choose instead the land because it at least is visible and because there will be food there.

Their tumultuous appearance brings pain to Audubon’s chest; tears stand out from his eyes. The birds are exquisite in flight, swiftly circling around themselves and each other in groups of a dozen or
more, like saucers spun by a juggler’s hand. As they pass over his head he hears their sensual whistle.

But when they find the curlew berries, the birds go silent. They land, and run en masse this way and that, siphoning the berries off their tiny sprigs with their slim, curved beaks.

The birds are a wonder. When he runs after them, they cluster and squat, like partridge. Some lay their heads and necks flat on the ground until he is almost on top of them. They seem to be playing dead. But when he is in their midst, one whistles and the rest scream and fly upwards. They leap from the ground into the air as a snipe does. Overhead they turn and regroup, try to head outward but are defeated by the fog, turn and land again.

Johnny and the others chase the curlews from one berry patch to another. Each time, the birds play dead, then shriek and rise and circle out over the sea. Audubon watches the flock return, this time high over his head. He urges them to pass by, to attempt that foggy gulf and escape the certain death which his kind will mete out to them. But they come down to earth again.

It is the fated sense in this bird that moves Audubon. It is easy to shoot them; the settlers in Bras d’Or take hundreds. The birds do not fly from the guns, but continue to circle, mesmerized perhaps by the echoing of the shots over the rocks. The urgency to feed on berries and stay on their track has overcome their survival instinct.