The Snow Geese Read Online Free Page A

flocks. Both have orange-pink bills, narrower than the black bills of Canada geese, with tough, serrated edges for tearing the roots of marshland plants. A conspicuous lozenge-shaped black patch along each side of the bill gives them a grinning or leering expression.
    Six million lesser snows breed right across the Arctic, from Wrangel Island off Siberia in the west, to Hudson Bay, Southampton Island and Baffin Island in the east, and at the end of summer they migrate to wintering grounds in the southern United States and northern Mexico. These are demanding, hazardous journeys of two or three or even four thousand miles, but the advantages of migration outweigh the risks. In the high Arctic latitudes, snow geese find large areas of suitable nesting habitat, relatively few predators, an abundance of food during the short, intense summers, and twenty-four hours of daylight in which to feed. And before the Arctic winter sets in, before their food supplies are frozen or buried deep under snow, they can fly south to exploit the resources and hospitable conditions of their winter grounds.
    As I read, sitting in the eyrie, I kept thinking back to Gallico’s story, Frith arriving at Rhayader’s lighthouse with a wounded goose in her arms, either a greater snow goose or a white-phase lesser snow, knocked from its course by a storm as it flew south in its family group. I sought out photographs of snow geese: the wintry, laundered freshness of white plumage immediately after moult; the dense, lacquer-black eyes that glinted like china beads; the wing bedlam of flocks rising from marshland roosts. I was drawn to these images. I felt shackled, cooped-up. It was as if I’d glimpsed birds through the high, barred window of a cell. Day by day, my restlessness intensified.
    Then my father found an old map and left it on my bed in the dressing-room – a map of the Americas, rumpled and stained, worn through wherever foldlines intersected, with the flights of migrant birds streaking across it from one end of the continent to the other, Cape Horn to the Chukchi Sea. And the first thing to catch my eye was the long curve of watercolour green that represented the flight of midcontinent lesser snows, perhaps 5 million birds, from the Gulf coast of Texas north across the Great Plains towards Winnipeg; over boreal conifer forest and open tundra to Hudson Bay; and then on across the bay towards Southampton Island and a peninsula at the southern tip of Baffin Island called the Foxe Peninsula, or Foxe Land. I traced this route again and again across the map, dreaming of escape. Huge numbers of lesser snows nested in Foxe Land. One area, the Great Plains of the Koukdjuak, was said to support more than a million geese. What would they
sound
like, a million geese? What would it be like, I wondered, to see those flocks with my own eyes, coming into Foxe Land on the south winds?
    I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with snow geese to the Arctic. The pang of nostalgia, the intense longing to go home I had experienced in hospital, had now been supplanted by an equally intense longing for adventure, for strange horizons. I was as desperate to get away from home as I had been to return to it. I went back to the university at the end of the summer, but my heart was no longer in my work. I kept thinking of snow geese. I had been immersed in everything that was most familiar to me, that reeked most strongly of my past, and I was hungry for the new, for uncharted country. I wanted to celebrate my return from the state of being ill, find some way of putting the experiences of hospital behind me, the fear and shock of those weeks, the sense of imprisonment. I wanted to declare my freedom to move.
    I booked a flight to Houston for the end of February, intending to find snow geese on the Texas prairies and follow them north with the spring.
    *
    T HE DAY BEFORE I left for Texas, I took the train home from London. In the afternoon, my father and I went for a walk.