Read Online The Snow Geese by William Fiennes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: William Fiennes
Ads: Link
water, and set it to boil on the glowing electric hob. She was wearing a pink sweatshirt pinned with a brooch: a gold harp with four short strings. She transferred leftovers to simple china bowls, covered the bowls with tinfoil and put them in the fridge, which was already full of such bowls, the fridge-light shining off their foil skins. She went back to the cooker and stared down at the water, searching it for bubbles.
In the living-room she’d drawn the curtains across the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Brass wall fixtures held lights resembling candles: small, flame-shaped bulbs of opaque white glass. The deep, warm tones of the walnut were comforting. I sat on the mulberry sofa; Eleanor sat in her leather armchair. She rummaged in a cloth bag lying close to her feet and pulled out a piece of unfinished tapestry, wool-ends hanging loose off a square of white gauze. It was to be a cushion cover depicting two rabbits. She put on a pair of glasses with translucent, blue-tinged plastic frames, reached out for the Anglepoise lamp with her right hand, directed its light like a dentist, and set to work.
‘So what I want to know is, where is this all going to end up?’ she asked, not looking up from the tapestry.
‘On Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘Right up in the Canadian Arctic.’
‘Why Baffin Island?’
‘I read that the largest concentrations of geese nest on Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘There’s a train from Winnipeg to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. You can fly over Hudson Bay to Cape Dorset, at the south-west tip of Baffin. From Cape Dorset I’ll try to get out into Foxe Land to see snow geese.’
Foxe Land was named for Captain Luke Foxe, who’d sailed from England in May 1631, hoping to discover the North-West Passage, a navigable sea route round the north coast of North America to Japan, China and India. His ship, the
Charles
, a pinnace of seventy or eighty tons burden, had a crew of twenty men, two boys and a dog. Foxe kept a journal of the voyage, later published as
The North-West Fox
, and I’d relished its descriptions of billows, races, overfalls and flood tides, and mild, calm days when pilot whales fluked and sounded just off the bow in a ‘sea so smooth as if it had been made ready to bowl upon’. Approaching Hudson Strait, the pinnace encountered drifts of floe fragments and freshwater bergs calved off glaciers, and in Hudson Bay Foxe saw white beluga whales, polar bears swimming from floe piece to floe piece, dramatic auroral displays, and a sea unicorn or narwhal, ‘his side dappled purely with white and black; his belly all milk-white; his shape, from his gills to his tail, fully like a mackerel; his head like to a lobster, whereout the forepart grew forth his twined horn, above six foot long, all black save the tip’. The
Charles
sailed round the south-west tip of Baffin before returning to England, and Foxe named Cape Dorset in honour of his sponsor, Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset.
On 26 August 1631, he saw geese flying south over Hudson Bay: ‘A N.N.W. wind,’ he wrote, ‘hath conveyed away abundance of wild geese by us; they breed here towards the N. in those wildernesses. There are infinite numbers, and, when their young be fledged, they fly southwards to winter in a warmer country.’ Auroras, narwhals, wildernesses, infinite numbers: my restlessness, my appetite for snow geese, grew stronger line by line. In May 1929, almost 300 years after Foxe’s voyage, the Canadian ornithologist John Dewey Soper set out from Cape Dorset to search for the breeding grounds of the snow goose. With two Inuit assistants, Kavivow and Ashoona, Soper established a camp just north of Bowman Bay, and during the first half of June he watched waves of geese pass overhead, obeying their ‘furious northern urge’. On 26 June the three men found their first nests. ‘The long quest,’ Soper wrote, ‘had ended.’
‘In about three months’ time, I hope I’ll be in Foxe Land,’ I told Eleanor,
In the living-room she’d drawn the curtains across the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Brass wall fixtures held lights resembling candles: small, flame-shaped bulbs of opaque white glass. The deep, warm tones of the walnut were comforting. I sat on the mulberry sofa; Eleanor sat in her leather armchair. She rummaged in a cloth bag lying close to her feet and pulled out a piece of unfinished tapestry, wool-ends hanging loose off a square of white gauze. It was to be a cushion cover depicting two rabbits. She put on a pair of glasses with translucent, blue-tinged plastic frames, reached out for the Anglepoise lamp with her right hand, directed its light like a dentist, and set to work.
‘So what I want to know is, where is this all going to end up?’ she asked, not looking up from the tapestry.
‘On Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘Right up in the Canadian Arctic.’
‘Why Baffin Island?’
‘I read that the largest concentrations of geese nest on Baffin Island,’ I said. ‘There’s a train from Winnipeg to Churchill, on Hudson Bay. You can fly over Hudson Bay to Cape Dorset, at the south-west tip of Baffin. From Cape Dorset I’ll try to get out into Foxe Land to see snow geese.’
Foxe Land was named for Captain Luke Foxe, who’d sailed from England in May 1631, hoping to discover the North-West Passage, a navigable sea route round the north coast of North America to Japan, China and India. His ship, the
Charles
, a pinnace of seventy or eighty tons burden, had a crew of twenty men, two boys and a dog. Foxe kept a journal of the voyage, later published as
The North-West Fox
, and I’d relished its descriptions of billows, races, overfalls and flood tides, and mild, calm days when pilot whales fluked and sounded just off the bow in a ‘sea so smooth as if it had been made ready to bowl upon’. Approaching Hudson Strait, the pinnace encountered drifts of floe fragments and freshwater bergs calved off glaciers, and in Hudson Bay Foxe saw white beluga whales, polar bears swimming from floe piece to floe piece, dramatic auroral displays, and a sea unicorn or narwhal, ‘his side dappled purely with white and black; his belly all milk-white; his shape, from his gills to his tail, fully like a mackerel; his head like to a lobster, whereout the forepart grew forth his twined horn, above six foot long, all black save the tip’. The
Charles
sailed round the south-west tip of Baffin before returning to England, and Foxe named Cape Dorset in honour of his sponsor, Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset.
On 26 August 1631, he saw geese flying south over Hudson Bay: ‘A N.N.W. wind,’ he wrote, ‘hath conveyed away abundance of wild geese by us; they breed here towards the N. in those wildernesses. There are infinite numbers, and, when their young be fledged, they fly southwards to winter in a warmer country.’ Auroras, narwhals, wildernesses, infinite numbers: my restlessness, my appetite for snow geese, grew stronger line by line. In May 1929, almost 300 years after Foxe’s voyage, the Canadian ornithologist John Dewey Soper set out from Cape Dorset to search for the breeding grounds of the snow goose. With two Inuit assistants, Kavivow and Ashoona, Soper established a camp just north of Bowman Bay, and during the first half of June he watched waves of geese pass overhead, obeying their ‘furious northern urge’. On 26 June the three men found their first nests. ‘The long quest,’ Soper wrote, ‘had ended.’
‘In about three months’ time, I hope I’ll be in Foxe Land,’ I told Eleanor,
Similar Books
