Under the Sea Wind (4 page)

In the morning the sanderlings, moving down to the surf line to feed in the first light, found the inlet beach littered with dead squids. The sanderlings did not linger on this part of the beach, for although it was very early in the morning many large birds had gathered and were quarreling over the squids. They were herring gulls, bound from the Gulf Coast to Nova Scotia. They had been long delayed by stormy weather and they were ravenous. A dozen black-headed laughing gulls came and hovered, mewing, over the beach, dangling their feet as though to alight, but the herring gulls drove them away with fierce screaming and jabs of their bills.

By midday, with the rising tide, a strong wind was blowing in from the sea and storm clouds ran before it. The green ranks of the marsh grasses swayed and their tips bent to touch the rising water. After the first quarter of the tide rise all the marshes stood deep in water. The scattered sand shoals of the sound, favorite resting places of the gulls, were covered as the spring tide ran with the wind's weight behind it.

The sanderlings, along with flocks of other shore birds, took refuge close beneath the landward slopes of the dunes. There the forests of beach grass sheltered them. From their haven they saw the flock of herring gulls sweeping like a gray cloud over the vivid green of the marshes. The flock constantly changed shape and direction as it rolled, the leaders hesitating over a possible resting place, the laggards surging forward. Now they settled on a sand shoal, shrunk to a tenth the size it had been that morning. The water was rising. On they moved, to hover, fluttering and screaming, above a reef of oyster shell, where the water streamed neck-deep to a gull. At last the whole flock veered around and fought its way back into the face of the gale, coming to rest near the sanderlings in the shelter of the dunes.

Stormbound, all the migrants waited, unable to feed because of the heavy surf. At sea, out beyond the sheltering capes, a violent storm was raging. On the ocean beach two small birds, dazed and sick with buffeting, staggered over the sand, fell, and staggered on again. Land was to them a strange realm. Except for a short period each year when they visited small islands in the Antarctic Sea to rear their young, their world was of sky and rolling water. They were Wilson's petrels or Mother Carey's chickens, blown in by the storm from miles at sea. And once during the afternoon a dark-brown bird with slender wings and hawklike bill came beating its way over the dunes and across the sound. Blackfoot the sanderling and many of the other shore birds crouched in terror, recognizing an ancestral enemy, the scourge of the northern breeding grounds. Like the petrels, the jaeger had ridden in on the gale from the open sea.

Before sunset, the skies lightened and the wind abated. While it was yet light the sanderlings left the barrier island and set out across the sound. Beneath them as they wheeled over the inlet was the deep green ribbon of the channel that wound, with many curvings, across the lighter shallows of the sound. They followed the channel, passing between the leaning red spar buoys, past the tide rips where the water streamed, broken into swirls and eddies, over a sunken reef of oyster shell, and came at last to the island. There they joined a company of several hundred white-rumped sandpipers, least sandpipers, and ring-necked plovers that were resting on the sand.

While the tide was still ebbing, the sanderlings fed on the island beach, but settled to rest before the arrival, at dusk, of Rynchops the black skimmer. As they slept, and as the earth rolled from darkness toward light, birds from many feeding places along the coast were hurrying along the flyways that lead to the north. For with the passing of the storm the air currents came fresh again and the wind blew clean and steady from the southwest. All through the night the cries of curlews and plovers and knots, of sandpipers and turnstones and yellowlegs, drifted down from the sky. The mockingbirds who lived on the island listened to the cries. The next day they would have many new notes in their rippling, chuckling songs to charm their mates and delight themselves.

About an hour before dawn the sanderling flock gathered together on the island beach, where the gentle tide was shifting the windrows of shells. The little band of brown-mottled birds mounted into the darkness and, as the island grew small beneath them, set out toward the north.

3
Arctic Rendezvous

WINTER STILL GRIPPED
the northland when the sanderlings arrived on the shores of a bay shaped like a leaping porpoise, on the edge of the frozen tundras of the barren grounds. They were among the first to arrive of all the migrant shore birds. Snow lay on the hills and drifted deep in the stream valleys. The ice was yet unbroken in the bay, and on the ocean shore it was piled in green and jagged heaps that moved, straining and groaning, with the tides.

But the lengthening days filled with sun had already begun to melt the snow on the south slopes of the hills, and on the ridges the wind had helped wear the snow blanket thin. There the brown of earth and the silver gray of reindeer moss showed through, and now for the first time that season the sharp-hoofed caribou could feed without pawing away the snow. At noon the white owls beating across the tundra beheld their own reflections in many small pools among the rocks, but by midafternoon the water mirrors were clouded with frost.

Already the rusty feathers were showing about the necks of the willow ptarmigans and brown hairs had appeared on the white coats of the foxes and weasels. Snow buntings hopped about in flocks that grew day by day, and the buds on the willows swelled and showed the first awakening of color under the sunshine.

There was little food for the migrant birds— lovers of warm sun and green, tossing surf. The sanderlings gathered miserably under a few dwarf willows that were sheltered from the northwest winds by a glacial moraine. There they lived on the first green buds of the saxifrage and awaited the coming of thaws to release the rich animal food of the Arctic spring.

But winter was yet to die. The second sun after the sanderlings' return to the Arctic burned dimly in the murky air. The clouds thickened and rolled between the tundra and the sun, and by midday the sky was heavy with unfallen snow. Wind came in over the open sea and over the ice packs, carrying a bitter air that turned to mist as it moved, swirling, over the warmer plains.

Uhvinguk, the lemming mouse who yesterday had sunned himself with many of his fellows on the bare rocks, ran into the burrows, winding tunnels in the deep, hard drifts, and to the grass-lined chambers where the lemmings dwelt in warmth even in midwinter. In the twilight of that day a white fox paused above the lemming burrow and stood with lifted paw. In the silence his sharp ears caught the sound of small feet along the runways below. Many times that spring the fox had dug down through the snow into these burrows and seized as many lemmings as he could eat. Now he whined sharply and pawed a little at the snow. He was not hungry, having killed and eaten a ptarmigan an hour before when he had come upon it, in a willow thicket, snipping off twigs; so today he only listened, perhaps to reassure himself that the weasels had not raided the lemming colony since his last visit. Then he turned and ran on silent feet along the path made by many foxes, not even pausing to glance at the sanderlings huddled in the lee of the moraine, and passed over the hill to the distant ridge where a colony of thirty small white foxes had their burrows.

Late that night, about the time the sun must have been setting somewhere behind the thick cloud banks, the first snow fell. Soon the wind rose and poured across the tundra like a flood of icy water that penetrated the thickest feathers and the warmest fur. As the wind came down shrieking from the sea, the mists fled before it across the barrens, but the snow clouds were thicker and whiter than the mists had been.

Silverbar, the young hen sanderling, had not seen snow since she had left the Arctic nearly ten months before to follow the sun southward toward the limit of its orbit, to the grasslands of the Argentine and the shores of Patagonia. Almost her whole existence had been of sun and wide white beaches and rippling green pampas. Now, crouched under the dwarf willows, she could not see Blackfoot through the swirling whiteness, although she could have reached his side with a quick run of twenty paces. The sanderlings faced into the blizzard, as shore birds everywhere face into the wind. They huddled close together, wing to wing, and the warmth of their bodies kept the tender feet from freezing as they crouched on them.

If the snow had not drifted so, that night and all the next day, the loss of life would have been less. But the stream valleys filled up, inch by inch, throughout the night, and against the ridges the white softness piled deeper. Little by little, from the ice-strewn sea edge across miles of tundra, even far south to the fringe of the forests, the undulating hills and the ice-scoured valleys were flattening out, and a strange world, terrifying in its level whiteness, was building up. In the purple twilight of the second day the fall slackened, and the night was loud with the crying of the wind, but with no other voice, for no wild thing dared show itself.

The snow death had taken many lives. It had visited the nest of two snowy owls in a ravine that cut a deep scar in the hillside, near the willow copse that sheltered the sanderlings. The hen had been brooding the six eggs for more than a week. During the first night of wild storm the snow had drifted deep about her, leaving a round depression like a stream-bed pothole in which she sat. All through the night the owl remained on the nest, warming the eggs with her great body that was almost furry in its plumage. By morning the snow was filling in around the feather-shod talons and creeping up around her sides. The cold was numbing, even through the feathers. At noon, with flakes like cotton shreds still flying in the sky, only the owl's head and shoulders were free of the snow. Several times that day a great form, white and silent as the snowflakes, had drifted over the ridge and hovered above the place where the nest was. Now Ookpik, the cock owl, called to his mate with low, throaty cries. Numb and heavy-winged with cold, the hen roused and shook herself. It took many minutes to free herself from the snow and to climb, half fluttering, half stumbling, out of the nest, deep-walled with white. Ookpik clucked to her and made the sounds of a cock owl bringing a lemming or a baby ptarmigan to the nest, but neither owl had had food since the blizzard began. The hen tried to fly but her heavy body flopped awkwardly in the snow for stiffness. When at last the slow circulation had crept back into her muscles, she rose into the air and the two owls floated over the place where the sanderlings crouched and out across the tundra.

As the snow fell on the still-warm eggs and the hard, bitter cold of the night gripped them, the life fires of the tiny embryos burned low. The crimson streams ran slower in the vessels that carried the racing blood from the food yolks to the embryos. After a time there slackened and finally ceased the furious activity of cells that grew and divided, grew again and divided to make owl bone and muscle and sinew. The pulsating red sacs under the great oversized heads hesitated, beat spasmodically, and were stilled. The six little owls-to-be were dead in the snow, and by their death, perhaps, hundreds of unborn lemmings and ptarmigans and Arctic hares had the greater chance of escaping death from the feathered ones that strike from the sky.

Farther up the ravine, several willow ptarmigans had been buried in a drift, where they had bedded for the night. The ptarmigans had flown over the ridge on the evening of the storm, dropping into the soft drifts so that never a print of their feet—clad in feathered snowshoes—was left to guide the foxes to their resting place. This was a rule of the game of life and death which the weak play with the strong. But tonight there was no need to observe the rules, for the snow would have obliterated all footprints and would have outwitted the keenest enemy—even as it drifted, by slow degrees, so deeply over the sleeping ptarmigans that they could not dig themselves out.

Five of the sanderling flock had died of the cold, and snow buntings by the score were stumbling and fluttering over the snow crust, too weak to stand when they tried to alight.

Now, with the passing of the storm, hunger was abroad on the great barrens. Most of the willows, food of the ptarmigans, were buried under snow. The dried heads of last year's weeds, which released their seeds to the snow buntings and the longspurs, wore glittering sheaths of ice. The lemmings, food of the foxes and the owls, were safe in their runways, and nowhere in this silent world was there food for shore birds that live on the shellfish and insects and other creatures of the water's edge. Now many hunters, both furred and feathered, were abroad during the night, the short, gray night of the Arctic spring. And when night wore into day the hunters still padded over the snow or beat on strong wings across the tundra, for the night's kill had not satisfied their hunger.

Among the hunters was Ookpik, the snowy owl. The coldest months of every winter, the icebound months, Ookpik spent hundreds of miles south of the barren grounds, where it was easier to find the little gray lemming mice that were his favorite food. During the storm nothing living had showed itself to Ookpik as he sailed over the plains and along the ridges that overlooked the sea, but today many small creatures moved over the tundra.

Along the east bank of the stream a flock of ptarmigans had found a few twigs of willow showing above the snow, part of a shrubby growth that had been as high as the antlers of a barren-grounds caribou until the snow had covered it. Now the ptarmigans could easily reach the topmost branches, and they nipped off the twigs in their bills, content with this food until the tender new buds of spring should be put forth. The flock still wore the white plumage of winter except for one or two of the cocks whose few brown feathers told of approaching summer and the mating season. When a ptarmigan in winter dress feeds on the snow fields, all of color about him is the black of bill and roving eye, and of the under tail feathers when he flies. Even his ancient enemies, the foxes and the owls, are deceived from a distance; but they, too, wear the Arctic's protective colorings.