The Snow Geese (5 page)

I followed him back through the living-room and down the outdoor staircase. Ken locked up the house. We shook hands at the bottom of the stairs.

‘I’ll see you in town,’ he said.

Ken drove off in the Dodge, leaving me alone on the prairie. It was just after six o’clock. I parked the Cavalier at the edge of the flooded field and waited, tense, eyes keen, vigilant for geese. I lifted my binoculars and panned across the water, finding ducks floating in twos and threes, waders tottering as if on stilts at the edge of the pond. In front of the sun the birds were silhouettes, and I was too much of an amateur to tell one species from another. But when I saw eight tall, slender birds with the long necks, legs and bills of herons, and shaggy tail bustles, and the dainty gait of ballerinas, I knew instantly that they were sandhill cranes, the oldest species of bird in existence, known to have lived in Nebraska in the Miocene, 9 million years ago – birds which, it was once believed, helped smaller birds migrate by carrying them on their backs. These sandhill cranes would themselves soon be leaving for Arctic Canada, staging in Nebraska’s Platte River on their way to breeding grounds between Alaska and Hudson Bay.

The sun was close to the horizon now, not the source of light but the point to which all light was gathered, as if the day were going home. I leaned back against the car, on the brink of geese, my ears tuned, my eyes alive to the slightest movement. Ducks muttered on the shallow water. Red lights glimmered like cigarette tips on the radio masts. The mesquite trees had the bare, stony branchings of tree corals. I heard bells pinging in Eagle Lake, several miles to the north-east, and then the rumble of a freight train, the ground vibrating with its industrial repercussions. There was a pale streaked redness in the west, but the rest of the sky was a deep liquid Prussian blue, with a pair of bright stars appearing very close together in the south-west: Venus and Jupiter in conjunction.

A bird approached the pond: a heron, a great blue, easy to distinguish from a crane because herons fly with a pleat in their necks, heads retracted on to shoulders, while cranes stretch their necks out straight, without a kink. Sometimes we came across solitary grey herons standing like baptists on the banks of the Sor Brook or at the edge of a pond, footed to their own reflections, and my mother had painted one – its yellow, scabbard-shaped bill and eye, the wispy black plumes at the back of its head – on a strip of old rollerblind that hung in the bathroom, the window looking out at trees with rooks cawing hoarsely in their heights, a kingfisher of smoky, chipped glass standing on the sill beside a tin tray of quartz, pumice and agate pieces, the white wall to the left of the door marked with initials, dates and horizontal dashes: children’s heights, measured year by year, heels to the skirting board. This great blue flew right over the holding pond, a ray ghosting through sea water, with five American white pelicans following behind, heads retracted like the heron’s, gular pouches sagging like jowls under their long bills. It was half past six. I leaned back against the blue car, waiting.

The first sign was a faint tinkling in the distance, from no particular direction, the sound of a marina, of halliards flicking on metal masts. Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Each speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point, a diaspora in reverse, snow geese flying in loose Vs and Ws and long skeins that wavered like seaweed strands, each bird intent on the roost at the centre of the horizon’s circumference. Lines of geese broke up and then recombined in freehand ideograms: kites, chevrons, harpoons. I didn’t move. I just kept watching the geese, the halliard yammer growing louder and louder, until suddenly flocks were flying overhead, low over the shoulder, the snow geese yapping like small dogs, crews of terriers or dachshunds – urgent sharp yaps in the thrum and riffle of beating wings and the pitter-patter of goose droppings pelting down around me. They approached the roost on shallow glides, arching their wings and holding them steady, or flew until they were right above the pond and then tumbled straight down on the perpendicular. Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it. Nothing had prepared me for the sound, this dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at breaktime, a drone-thickness flecked with high-pitched yells, squeals, hollers and yawps – the entire prairie’s quota of noise concentrated in Jack’s holding pond by the two-storey house and the raised lake stocked with bass for fishing. I breathed it in. It was seven o’clock. There was a half moon. I waited until the birds were settled, then drove back slowly along the farm tracks, leaving the headlights off until I reached the highway.

2 : AUSTIN

F
OUR EVENINGS IN A ROW
I waited for geese at Jack’s roosting pond. I sat on the bonnet of the Cavalier, flicking through field guides or looking north, imagining the Great Plains stretching away to Canada, and all the snow geese already on the move, bound for traditional staging areas in Nebraska and the Dakotas. There were always a few ducks on the water, a few sandhill cranes foraging with lanky grace in the ploughed land at the edge of the pond, and herons and pelicans, and shambling longhorn cattle, and red lights glowing in strict, linear constellations on the radio masts. My pulse quickened as the same thousands of geese converged on the roost. I took shelter inside the car, wise to the turd squalls.

The snow geese had been gleaning for leftover grain and grubbing for the roots of sedges and grasses. They were about to depart on a migratory journey of around 3,000 miles: they had to have sufficient energy reserves for the flight ahead. Twice a year, before they migrate, birds go through a period of intensive eating, or hyperphagia, during which they lay down deposits of subcutaneous fat: essential fuel, providing twice as much energy per unit of weight as carbohydrate or protein. Some birds, like the blackpoll warblers which leave the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England on 2,000-mile non-stop flights over the Atlantic to the north-east coast of South America, almost double their weight before departing on migration.

Many birds winter close to the equator, where there are no reliable seasonal variations (shifts in day-length, temperature or the availability of resources) to provoke such changes in behaviour. Yet these birds fatten, and depart for their breeding grounds, at appropriate times. When Eberhard Gwinner kept willow warblers in temperature-controlled chambers with constant cycles of twelve-hour days and twelve-hour nights from the end of September, they still moulted and came into migratory condition in the spring at the same time as control birds kept in cages on their African winter grounds.

The warblers were not relying on environmental cues: the changes in their behaviour were prompted by an internal clock consisting of two fundamental rhythms. Circadian rhythms, corresponding to the twenty-four-hour cycle of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, regulate daily changes in metabolic rate, body temperature and level of alertness. Circannual rhythms, corresponding to the annual cycle of the Earth’s orbit round the sun, control changes in behaviour associated with reproduction, moult and migration. These rhythms are not exact, but are tied to the natural day and year by external indicators called Zeitgebers, from the German for ‘time-givers’. The most important Zeitgeber is photoperiod: the amount of daylight in a given day.

A snow goose, like all migratory birds, inherits a calendar, an endogenous programme for fattening, departure, breeding and moult. This schedule is essentially fixed, but it can be fine-tuned by environmental conditions. Due to the early spring, snow geese had been leaving the prairies around Eagle Lake a week or two sooner than Jack and Ken had come to expect. Millions of geese had already left their winter quarters for Arctic breeding grounds, and the flocks roosting by Jack’s house would soon be following them. Each evening, I’d driven back from the holding pond to the motel elated, songs blasting, the wild lung-top gabble of the flock still ringing in my ears. And I became restless too, eager to be on the move, to be covering ground, working north towards Foxe Land.

I found Ken in the Sportsman’s Restaurant, stroking his ginger beard like a sage. I thanked him for his help; he wished me luck.

Outside, heat haze rose off the asphalt like a version of water.

*

E
LEANOR WAS SIXTY
-
SEVEN
, a small woman with a bird’s light bones. Her soft white hair had the airy, fluffed-out quality of down feathers, and she raised her hands occasionally to pat at it with open palms, attending to the outline. Crow’s feet rayed out from the corners of her eyes, deepening when she smiled, and there was a red flourish in both her cheeks like the smudges left on bats by new cricket balls. When she greeted me at the door of her house she was wearing pastel-blue cotton trousers with an elastic waistband, and an old green sweatshirt that served as the plain setting for an elaborate brooch: a tin plate equipped with knife, fork and spoon.

‘Welcome!’ she said.

We hadn’t met before. Her nephew, whom I’d met in England, had put us in touch, and Eleanor had offered me a place to stay if I passed through Austin on my way north with snow geese. She lived in a residential district west of the centre of Austin, in a single-storey house of pink-tinged Arkansas ledge stone, with a neat shallow-gradient slate-tile roof and a basketball hoop still screwed into the wall, though her son had long since left home. She had been married to an architect; they had designed the house together. Nearby houses strained for peculiar grandeurs: mock, ivy-covered castles with turrets and arrow-slit windows; plantation-style villas with white Palladian porticoes; soft-cornered adobe bungalows complete with protruding pine roof beams and ristras of red jalapeño peppers. Young mothers pushed children in streamlined prams under the evergreen live oaks. Driving with the window down, I could hear the sibilance of lawn sprinklers and the harsh, cracked-whistle calls of grackles, and when the sprinklers came into view there were slips of rainbow caught in their ambits as if in the finest fishing nets.

‘Come inside,’ Eleanor said. ‘We’ll get you settled in.’

The walls were panelled with walnut: the living-room had the mild light and coolness of a glade. Dishevelled oriental rugs lay on polished bare wood floors. Sunlight, filtered by trees, entered through sliding glass doors. There was a sofa upholstered in faded mulberry cloth, and a well-worn leather armchair bearing Eleanor’s precise indentation, with an Anglepoise lamp on an end-table beside it. Black-and-white photographs hung in silver frames: tuxedos, evening gowns, brides and grooms, diploma scrolls. A black upright piano stood against the far wall, a volume of Bach open at a polonaise, and opposite the piano stood a threefold Chinese screen with trees, foliage and exotic birds in enamel and mother-of-pearl on a black background, and a column of Chinese calligraphy on each of the three panels.

‘It’s from a dynasty,’ Eleanor said. ‘Though search me which.’

Between the screen of birds and the sliding windows was a hip-height round wooden table covered with tortoises. Eleanor collected them on her travels, and she’d placed them carefully on the table, evenly spaced, all facing in the same direction, towards the piano at the far end of the room. Some had tails and some didn’t. There were delicate glazed grey, green and blue ceramic tortoises; chunkier, rough-clay tortoises; invertebrate fabric tortoises with beanbag fillings; dirty brass or steel tortoises, their shells inverted to make ashtray bowls; leather tortoises conceived as purses, with zips along the back or side; tiny glass tortoises, like raindrops with limbs; and tortoises carved from hard, dark woods, with grid patterns seared into their shells by red-hot pointed tools. One of the tortoises had a smaller, baby tortoise crawling up over its shell, and one was a jelly mould made of lightweight metal.

‘My mother gave me my first one,’ Eleanor said, taking a medium-sized grey ceramic tortoise from the middle of the parade. ‘After that I looked out for tortoises. Antique stores, markets, bazaars. If I go away, I always try to find a tortoise.’

To enter the walnut-panelled corridor that led from the living-room to the bedrooms, you had to pass through swinging walnut doors, slatted like Old West saloon doors.

‘This is you,’ Eleanor said, showing me into the small guest bedroom. ‘I’ll leave you for a minute.’

A birdcage on the chest-of-drawers: an elegant antique birdcage of thick brass wires that curved together at the top, forming a dome, with a rod for perching and a brass ring for hanging the cage at the zenith, and everything in the room subordinate to the cage, the clean, bright wires enclosing the not-here of the bird inside it. I put my bags down and contemplated the room: the same glade atmosphere, with wood on the walls and underfoot, the floorboards part-covered by a needlepoint rug in bold dahlia colours, Eleanor’s handiwork. I unzipped my bag, took out my bird books and binoculars, and put them on the chest-of-drawers, next to the empty birdcage.