Creation by Katherine Govier Read Free Book Online Page A

low over the water. Then they overtake us. They flap their wings several dozen times, quickly, and then they sail the same distance, wings flat.”
    Audubon places his brush in a dish and his hands on the table, pushing himself upright and rolling his shoulders backward. He towers over Bayfield in the tiny space. His arms extend in imitation of the diver.
    “You are right, they often travel low but they can fly high and even fish from that height. I saw one dive into a shoal of launces, from a hundred feet. He barely sank below the surface, but began to run on the water, striking out to right and left with his beak, eating fish after fish.” He swings his own head, with its prominent, high-bridged nose, from left to right as he speaks. The birds are mute and frozen, as if all their animation has been transferred to Audubon.
    Bayfield finally looks directly at the painting. He has no idea what to say. Bowen’s words come back to him: Enormous, yes. Violent, no. There is violence in the room, but it is not the birds’. Slatternly? The schooner, but not the paintings. “It is — why, it is magnificent.” He surprises himself with the strength of his response.
    Audubon puts a drop of water on the back of the mature bird he has drawn and rubs it with his thumb, softening the colour. He sighs. “I’ve spent all day on it,” he says with a degree of self-pity. “I haven’t got the shade of it exactly right.”
    “Have you more?”
    Audubon shows him the Arctic Tern, on which he is still working, and the completed Piping Plover.

    “Very fine!” says Bayfield. “Exceedingly fine.” But he now feels he is in the presence of an alchemist of sorts and is glad when they climb back to the deck.
    There he is confronted by an indignant live gannet, its head thrown backward, its bill open. It is not the creature he knows from the air. It hobbles, using its outspread wings to keep itself erect. It throws its head back and howls wolfishly kerew , karow . It cannot fly; its wings are clipped.
    Audubon nudges the bird out of the way with his toe. “Having lived the better part of a week with these, as well as more than a few corpses in various states of decomposition, I can say that I am tired of the gannet. It is not a clever bird, it may even be stupid: it certainly looks it. It does not sing but croaks, and the flesh is inedible. I prefer my raven. Come, Anonyme.”
    The raven jumps onto his wrist. The artist strokes its head with his right forefinger.
    “I am teaching him to talk.”
    This does not seem to fit with the artist’s reverence for the birds as they are in nature. “Why?” Bayfield asks.
    The raven fixes him with its bead of an eye and caws.
    Audubon’s own moist and rather sorrowful eyes wrinkle up at the sides as he smiles. “Because I would like to hear what he has to say. The raven is said to have the powers of prediction.”
    “Is it not fanciful to think that once you give it words, the raven will confide its own thoughts? Do you expect Anonyme will tell you his purpose?”
    “His purpose is to reproduce. That is what brings him here.”
    “I’ve often wondered how they navigate,” says Bayfield.
    “Like you, I imagine. By the stars.”
    “Could it be so? That they know the stars?”
    “I believe it.”
    “Are they ever lost?”
    “Rarely. I found a red-breasted nuthatch the other day; he seemed to be quite off track. A single bird may sometimes be found far off his range, and detached from his fellows, wounded or carried by a storm.”

    “As we may be, without our maps.”
    “I myself can think of nothing happier than to lose my maps, or your maps, as the case may be!”
    Bayfield is taken aback. No one teases him. He is, after all, a captain with warior potential. He proved himself so while still a boy and his commendation is written into the navy records.
    “You may say so, Mr. Audubon, but I do not wish it on you.”
    “No,” Audubon concedes. His quicksilver mood appears to have