The Snow Geese (24 page)

The anteroom smelled of chocolate.

‘What brings you to Churchill?’ Ruth asked.

I told her about the snow geese.

‘I see.’ She didn’t seem surprised. ‘So you’re just waiting around. Where are you staying?’

‘In the bed and breakfast on Robie Street.’

‘Well, look, I’m thinking out loud, but maybe here’s an idea. My nephew’s getting married in Tobermory, Ontario. That’s on the Bruce Peninsula, between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay? I’m going to the wedding and I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks. I’ve been looking for someone to take care of my animals. You could stay in my house at Goose Creek on condition you looked after my dog and my cat. It’s a good place to see birds. It would be a nice place to wait for geese in.’

My spirits lifted; I wanted to embrace her.

*

T
WO DAYS LATER
I drove Ruth to the airport in her pickup, a battered red Chevrolet Cheyenne. She was wearing a white sweatshirt printed with an English country cottage: a thatched roof; a garden brimming with roses and honeysuckle; a gate ajar. She said that the radio in the pickup was stuck on the country and western station, and I’d do best to switch it off and listen out for birds. Temperatures were above freezing now, the white storms all but forgotten. There were Canada geese in the thawing tundra ponds near the airport; the first herring gulls were up from the south. I left Ruth at the terminal and drove alone on the road to Goose Creek.

The road ran south, alongside the railway, metalled for a few miles, then narrowing into a rutted dirt track that entered a forest of weak-looking, stunted spruce trees.

The house was set in a clearing, a long, low cabin built of cedar trunks, planed flat and painted a pale matt red, with thermometers screwed into the doorframe, wind-cups spinning on the roof-angle: Ruth recorded their data in weather journals.

Her animals, my charges, were lounging outside the cabin, at the foot of the four stairs that led up to the door. Saila was three-quarters wolf and a quarter husky, with the colouring of a wolf (white legs and chest, black and grey on top) and the figure of a Shetland pony: fourteen years old, lame, deaf, almost blind, her dark eyes swirled through with milkiness. The cat, Missy, was slim, silver-grey, a paragon of stealth. I said hello to both, but they paid me no attention as I carried my bags up the stairs into the cabin.

Inside, like an old ship: very dark, with everything crowded in, shimmed cedar trunks varnished deep caramel brown, the shelves fitted with lips to prevent glasses and recipe books from falling should the house decide to pitch or keel. There was a heavy black Cummer wood-burning stove with a funnel running to the ceiling, a stack of spruce logs in the back porch. A black wrought-iron match-holder was screwed into the wood behind the stove, and all around it were paler scratches in the varnish where matches had been struck on the friction of the grain. Ruth had left me a note on a yellow Post-It saying, ‘House may creak. It sits on tundra.’

Missy’s playthings hung on cords from the ceiling beams: a yellow Sesame Street Big Bird and a fluffy purple mouse, dangling on strings of baubles and bells. Framed prints of wildfowl and hunting scenes hung on the walls: American avocets lifting from a pond, following the lines of their own upturned bills; hunters rowing out in a small boat to place decoys in a marsh, the sun rising behind them; four wood duck standing at the edge of a stream, with curling maple leaves strewn across the mud and water, the drakes painted like harlequins, sumptuous as geishas with their bright red eyes, white face stripes, iridescent manes, and imperial purple chests, ‘wood duck’ a plain name indeed for such a glitzy show.

Yes, the living-room had the character of a ship, with its shimmed logs, wood cabinets, lipped shelves, skillets and casseroles hanging on hooks, Aladdin mantle lamps with glass chimneys and fabric wicks, the brass ship’s clock manufactured by Hüger of West Germany, and the matching barometer, callibrated in millibars, conditions displayed in three languages:
Schön Fair Beau; Veränderlich Change Variable.
There was a gas cooker, a sink, and water in plastic drums by the spruce logs in the porch, and behind the cabin was a patch of sodden, mossy ground where squirrels and snowshoe hares ventured out from the trees and an old door was laid as a ramp to the outdoor privy. I unpacked my books and folders, piling them on the table, thanking Ruth out loud, as if her house would hear me.

I was glad to have a base, somewhere to settle, establish myself, gather my thoughts. Ruth had mentioned that she was a crafter, a quilter and embroiderer, but I didn’t understand what this meant until I passed through into the corridor to look for my bedroom. Fabric, everywhere: frills and ruchings, pelmets and valances of pleated chintz, lace tablecloths, plush pull-through rugs, flouncy knitted holders for plant pots and fruit bowls, rag dolls slumped in corners, woolly ornamental swans with drooping necks, tea cosies resembling igloos and tuxedoes, bright-coloured furbelow in all directions – as if you’d stumbled into a nest feathered with soft things and could throw yourself anywhere you liked without fear, there would always be some heap of feather bolsters or folded eiderdowns to cushion the fall.

The corridor, which Ruth used as her workspace, was almost impassable for ironing boards; vises and pine planks for quilting frames; heavy pinking shears; folders of stencils, templates and patterns; a dressmaker’s dummy with dials to swell or contract the bust, waist and hips; boxes of spools, reels, thimbles, and red party balloons to help grip needles as you pulled them through the heaviest fabrics. Here were three sewing machines – a White, a Singer, a Pfaff – and piles of gingham, flannel, calico and velveteen, and white Dacron batting and polyester fibrefill for the stuffing of quilts and cushions. And then gear for patchwork, piecework and crazy quilts; felt angels and roses for appliqué; hummocks of rag, lace, lint and old stockings; wicker trays of pine cones and blowzy artificial flowers; and reels and rolls of cotton, nylon cord, jute twine, raffia straw, twill tape, bias tape and worsted-weight acrylic wools. I was smiling even before my eyes came to rest on the jars of gaudy bobbles, pompoms, shiny doodads, fake feathers, sequins and glitters of silver and gold, and the upbeat embroidered proverbs that grinned out at me from scrolling frames:
Happiness is a Warm Iron; Quilting Forever! Housework – Whenever!

I reached my bedroom, the last room in the cabin. Ruth had put clean sheets on the bed and covered it with a sky-blue quilt, and on top of the quilt she’d placed a pair of homemade pillows shaped like angels’ wings – two wings of shining white velveteen, each feather a purse of fibrefill sewn shut with gold thread, arranged correctly, heel to heel, spread wide against the sky-blue, as if inviting me to lie back and feel their fit between my shoulderblades. There were billowy white sheers in the window, and generous pleated curtains of floral chintz. The walls were hung with tapestry pictures of mallard and Canada geese, and with silk scarves tied in cascading and butterfly bows, and on either side of the bed were luxuriant pull-though rugs in which my feet sank almost to the ankles. I put down my bags, rejoicing. Ruth’s cabin was more than a home. It was a world.

*

I
WROTE AT THE TABLE
in the living-room. Saila slept on the red carpet in front of the Cummer stove. Her chest heaved. She snored and twitched. Her legs no longer hinged at the knees: they were as stiff as crutches. Each step forward beat the odds, bucking a trend. She tottered. She moved one foot and waited before following its lead, as if to verify that the limb could still support her weight. She staggered into the bedroom every morning between four and five o’clock, nosing me awake. I’d open my eyes to her big wolf’s face, dawn light caught in the sheers. I’d get up to let her out, and we’d walk down the corridor together, one step at a time, blind Saila listing from side to side, slewing into stacks of boxes. One morning she knocked over a box marked ‘Christmas Decorations’ and stood confused in a spill of rosettes, pompoms and papertwist angels.

I spooned tins of beef flavour TriV dog food into Saila’s dish at the foot of the steps and measured out biscuits in an old margarine bowl. Missy ate tins of Friskies. Her dish sat on the sideboard, next to the sink, on top of a back issue of
Country Woman
magazine, open at the
Readers Are Wondering
page. Victoria Soukup of Iowa had written: ‘My hobby is collecting turtle memorabilia. Does anyone have adages involving turtles to share?’ Pam Simakis of West Virginia wished to learn to make patio lights from plastic flowerpots and toy biplanes from empty soda cans. Charlotte Lovegrove of Indiana asked, ‘Any ideas where I might obtain a player piano roll of the song
Back Home Again in Indiana
?’

Each day seemed warmer than the last. The wind had turned: now it blew from the south and south-west, a wind for migrants. Herring gulls arrived in increasing numbers. The ice started to break up on the Churchill River, softened by warm water flowing from the south. I walked with Saila along the tracks of Goose Creek as the thaw set in. Rivulets and pools appeared in the open ground between the tracks and the spruce trees. Moss clumps and sedge tussocks glistened with moisture. The air was rife with clicks: the furious Morse of wood frogs and boreal chorus frogs emerging from hibernation. Saila yawed from one side of the track to the other. She stopped for minutes at a time while her strength welled up again and the frogs persisted with their Geiger din.

One day, as usual, Saila woke me up at dawn. I let her out and stood for a moment on the steps of the cabin. Dreams were spilling over. Frogs were clicking in the tundra pools. And from the direction of the river, faint but unmistakable, I heard the calls of snow geese: twenty-five or thirty birds, blues and whites in about equal proportions, yapping like terriers, flying in a waving oblique line over the spruce trees towards the cabin in the half-light. Saila was blind and deaf but she noticed the flock, lifting her head from the waterbowl as the geese passed low above us, their wings thrumming like voltage. The dog went back to her drink. I went back to bed.

*

S
AM, WEARING HIS
blue wool toque and brown Bollé sunglasses in place of his broken black spectacles, was standing on the ice at Cape Merry beside two Polaris skidoos, styled yellow and black, like wasps. The ice in the mouth of the Churchill River, from the Cape to Munck’s Haven and Fort Prince of Wales, was rough and creamy, ocean chop modelled in plaster-of-paris; close to the shore it was buckled and heaved up in messy ructions by the action of the tides.

‘This ice you got holding tight to the shore is shorefast ice,’ Sam said in his soft voice. ‘About a quarter mile offshore you’ve got a lead – a band of open water between the shorefast ice and the floe. Shorefast ice doesn’t move, except up and down on the tide. The floe ice moves in and out on the wind. We’re going to head out to the lead. That’ll be what we call the floe edge.’

The sky was a clear, deep, voluminous blue. The skidoos were easy to operate: brake and throttle, no gears. The handles were heated. To cut the engine you hit a red button marked with a zigzag lightning bolt. We yanked the starter pulls.

I followed Sam out of the Churchill River to the ice of Hudson Bay. The going was awkward close to shore, but once we’d passed the Cape the ice was smooth and flat, with shallow meltpools and patches of slush that sprayed from the runners of the skidoos in sparkling fantails. We accelerated out into the bay, outracing the fumes of the engines. I tried to keep to Sam’s tracks, skirting faultlines, guiding the runners round potholes in the crust. Sam raised his right hand, the signal for a stop.

‘There’s a smaller lead just ahead,’ he shouted, competing with the engines. ‘Two or three metres of open water. Keep your speed up and we’ll skip right across it. Just go straight at it. Don’t let your speed drop.’

We circled back to get a run at the lead. I watched Sam’s skidoo splash across. Then I thumbed the throttle hard against the handle; the skidoo bore down on the open water; the hull bounced once on Hudson Bay before the curved tips of the runners, upturned like avocets’ bills, found solid ice again. We sped on out to the belt of open water separating the fast ice from the floe. The strength of the silence stunned me when we cut the engines. The silence was all the more intense for the context of the engines, and it took time for the ear to make out subtler sounds, the delicate undermusic of drips and tricklings, like the chinking of fine broken glass, as sinuous meltwater rills ran through the crust and the corners of iceblocks yielded, drop by drop, to the thaw.

The floe had driven again and again into the fast ice: the edges of both had buckled, heaving up reefs, boulders, plates and menhirs of packed snow. We stood at the edge of the lead. Sam’s brown Bollé sunglasses had side panes to cut out the glare on the flanks. The ice forms on our side were glistening, with blues and blue-greens ghosting in the whites, sunlight glancing off wet edges and corners. The tide was going out, the ebb streaming underneath us, the open water turbulent with eddying and upsurge. Across the lead, ice ramparts on the edge of the floe were cut with the precise shadows of cornices, overhangs, abutments and scarps.

‘I was out here this winter,’ Sam said, speaking softly again. ‘Forty below. Strong winds blowing from the north. My god, you could see the floe driving into the fast ice, bulldozing right in with the wind. Parts of it reared up and buckled, but there were other parts where the plate of the floe was actually lifting and crawling up over the fast ice. It moved real slow, with a noise like tyres spinning in a snowbank. When the floe lifted over the fast ice, brine flooded up from under. Seawater swilled up and froze right in front of me. My god, I watched it turn white. The water rushed up and suddenly it was ice.’

A ringed seal surfaced in the lead, eyed us for a moment, then swam away, ducking and cresting, sleek and pliant, like liquorice. Six Canada geese flew over us towards Fort Prince of Wales, their black necks, white chinstraps and pale rumps showing clearly against the empty sky, and then a pintail drake passed in a fast, skeeting glide along the lead, its tailfeathers long and pointed, a white scimitar line curving up its neck and head. A flock of snow geese, ten white-phase and five blue-phase birds, followed the lead to the north in a loose chevron, with a lone sandhill crane behind them, legs trailing, neck stretched without a kink, distinct from the pleated neck of a heron. I saw the crane’s bill open wide a second before I heard its magnificent shriek. My senses were reeling with ice gleam: the heady, implacable grandeur of a frozen sea.