Creation by Katherine Govier Read Free Book Online

Esquimaux style are draped over the railings. Even in the fresh air, the ship smells of wet wool and leather, of unwashed men. The railings are unspeakable, caked with bird dung. He keeps away from them for fear of soiling his sleeves, although excrement is smeared along the deck so thickly that walking is hazardous.
    Birds of various order are underfoot. There is a raven poking in the satchels for leftover food. One giant black-backed gull, hopping like a rabbit. A few huddling puffins. Some guillemots and several young gannets, awkward things with pale eyes. A sailor tosses mackerel in their direction and they catch it in their beaks. A small thickset man who Bayfield assumes to be the pilot lounges against a barrel. He does not stand up on seeing the captain in full uniform, but seems in fact to slouch in a more pronounced way.
    “If it’s Mr. Audubon you’re after you’ll find him down there.” Godwin points.
    It is not much of a welcome.
    Bayfield finds the ladder down to the hold. The raven jeers in his direction and he slips on the ordure, nearly losing his balance. When he looks down the steps, his eyes fall directly upon the mahogany head,shot with silver, and the artist’s hand slowly circling over the paper like a compass needle finding its direction. Audubon appears less like a man drawing, than like an instrument rendering its impressions.
    Bayfield puts his foot on the step.
    “Good day, sir. Do I disturb you?”
    “Not at all,” lies the artist.
    So lies Bayfield himself when he is interrupted. “You are missing the chance to go on shore,” he says.
    “Captain Emery has gone with the young gentlemen to collect specimens around the harbour. He’s taking a keen interest in my work.”
    “I have seen him,” admits Bayfield. Nothing within the circumference of his gaze from his own deck escapes his attention. When he was taking his soundings, he watched the small black figures of Audubon’s shipmates moving over the shapeless landscape, up to the top of the rocks and down on the shore. They were visible wherever they wandered, because there was nothing upright to hide them.
    As his eyes begin to adjust to the dimness of the hold, he picks out hammocks slung at one end, and a stack of rifles in the corner. Bottles with candle stubs stuck in the neck are pushed to the edges of the long deal table where the painter sits, and plants hang upside down, drying.
    On the table, two gannets are posing for the artist. The huge mature bird, over three feet long, is behind, his back and tail sloping downward to the left, his back wing tips crossed, his long beak raised diagonally upward, in quest of wind, perhaps. The immature bird, in front, and at cross purposes, twists his beak backward and down to preen his wing feathers, his eye hooded. They are extra ordinarily still.
    Bayfield peers, notices the wires that hold the raised beak, the spikes on which the birds are impaled. His heart thuds a little. “Good grief, are they dead?”
    “Since this morning. We took several pair alive on the Bird Rocks five days ago; I sketched from the first and saved these for the colour,” says Audubon. “They fade, so I have to work quickly.”
    Bayfield edges nearer the standing dead. They are self-conscious; they have died for a cause. They have a curious, sombre dignity, the paper reflecting back to them their flattened image.

    Now he takes in the rest of the room. In large glass jars he can see the bodies of birds floating in oil. At the end of the table several deconstructed specimens lie on a tray, their stomachs and tracheae cut open, organs spilling out. Bayfield feels queasy, and trains his eyes directly on the models.
    “Gannets,” he says. “An elegant creature on the wing. One of the first you see when you have crossed the Atlantic. Sometimes as far out as three hundred miles from land, they are suddenly above the ship, high over the water, gliding silently, fishing. But when they travel in earnest, they fly