Creation by Katherine Govier Read Free Book Online Page B

changed. “Often, I seek to lose myself in the wilderness — not in this place. But you’ve come year after year to this comfortless land.”
    “On intimate acquaintance I have come to appreciate her inaccessibility. And so perhaps shall you.”
    Audubon looks skeptical.
    “I wager it will change you. You will return to this place in dreams for the rest of your life.”
    “God help me,” says the artist. He looks over the water, lit with the feeble rays of northern sun. “This land is too dark to monopolize my dreams. I long for sun and blossoms, for colour. It is so cold here, and lonely.”
    Bayfield is taken aback at the openness of this confession. Yet he rises to it. “It is the long hours away from shore that make you lonely. Are you married?”
    “Yes, to my dearest friend. She waits for me in New York. I have two sons. One of them, John, you saw scrambling on shore. Victor, as I mentioned, manages my affairs in London. And you?”
    “No, I have not had time to marry. We seafarers pay little mind to emotion; solitude is part of the venturing life. Then, too, we are obstinate creatures.”
    We .
    The word hangs between them.
    Bayfield, attuned to slight and gaffe by birthright, hears the other man’s breath stop for a second and knows that he has erred. He sees a falling out of sympathy, a shutting of some door behind Audubon’s eyes. But the chance encounter, the long grey hours of half sun, the way they are dwarfed in the vastness of the bowl of land and sea thatholds them, his own restlessness, which has found a mirror in the artist, push him to go further.
    “Certainly here on the water with my chains and my tripod, I dream of land. But I am at home in Quebec every winter, where I draw my charts and prepare for the next season on the water. There I dream in reverse. It is the sort of men we are.”
    The sort of men we are : again the captain has presumed.
    Audubon’s eyes narrow in what might be anger.
    Bayfield grows more clumsy. Yet on he goes.
    “I want to know how you came to be here, and how you came to paint birds,” he says.
    “If we meet again I will tell you my story,” says Audubon. “And you perhaps will tell me yours.”
    “I have no story,” he says. “I joined the navy at eleven years of age. When I came to Quebec in 1815, I was disappointed that there was no war. Surveying became my life’s work.” He could have added that he has made his name by labouring beyond the call of duty in places monumentally inhospitable to man, that he surveyed Lake Superior and the archipelago of Georgian Bay in two small rowing boats. But, being modest, he does not.
    It is time to take his leave. Bayfield steps carefully over the slimy deck, toward the ladder over the side. “Thank you for showing me your drawings,” he says in his formal way. “I did not imagine your Birds would be the same size as when alive, and so beautifully painted. I am delighted to have seen them.”
    The painter gives his queer bow again. Like a dancing master, Bayfield thinks.
    “We’ll be here in Natashquan at least another day. Perhaps, if lack of wind detains you too, you would come to dinner on the Gulnare .”
    “Another day? Why must we wait? The birds won’t wait for me,” says Audubon. But then he appears to resign himself. “I should like your escort up this perilous coast. If it is another day, we’ll wait.”
    He glances at the sky again and, giving Bayfield a nod, turns to take the ladder down into the hold. “I must get back to my birds.”

    P.M. observed for Time and diff’e Longitude, also for true bearing. Variation & angles for the Survey of this small anchorage. At night the wind hauled more towards the SE with fog and drizzling rain.
    — Surveying Journals , Henry Wolsey Bayfield, Captain, Royal Navy

Obstinate
CREATURES
    T he sort of men we are . What sort of man does Bayfield imagine Audubon to be? A sea-farer? A pedigreed hero? A warrior who spurns the passions and domestic life?
    If