The Snow Geese by William Fiennes Read Free Book Online

quarters for Arctic breeding grounds, and the flocks roosting by Jack’s house would soon be following them. Each evening, I’d driven back from the holding pond to the motel elated, songs blasting, the wild lung-top gabble of the flock still ringing in my ears. And I became restless too, eager to be on the move, to be covering ground, working north towards Foxe Land.
    I found Ken in the Sportsman’s Restaurant, stroking his ginger beard like a sage. I thanked him for his help; he wished me luck.
    Outside, heat haze rose off the asphalt like a version of water.
    *
    E LEANOR WAS SIXTY - SEVEN , a small woman with a bird’s light bones. Her soft white hair had the airy, fluffed-out quality of down feathers, and she raised her hands occasionally to pat at it with open palms, attending to the outline. Crow’s feet rayed out from the corners of her eyes, deepening when she smiled, and there was a red flourish in both her cheeks like the smudges left on bats by new cricket balls. When she greeted me at the door of her house she was wearing pastel-blue cotton trousers with an elastic waistband, and an old green sweatshirt that served as the plain setting for an elaborate brooch: a tin plate equipped with knife, fork and spoon.
    ‘Welcome!’ she said.
    We hadn’t met before. Her nephew, whom I’d met in England, had put us in touch, and Eleanor had offered me a place to stay if I passed through Austin on my way north with snow geese. She lived in a residential district west of the centre of Austin, in a single-storey house of pink-tinged Arkansas ledge stone, with a neat shallow-gradient slate-tile roof and a basketball hoop still screwed into the wall, though her son had long since left home. She had been married to an architect; they had designed the house together. Nearby houses strained for peculiar grandeurs: mock, ivy-covered castles with turrets and arrow-slit windows; plantation-style villas with white Palladian porticoes; soft-cornered adobe bungalows complete with protruding pine roof beams and ristras of red jalapeño peppers. Young mothers pushed children in streamlined prams under the evergreen live oaks. Driving with the window down, I could hear the sibilance of lawn sprinklers and the harsh, cracked-whistle calls of grackles, and when the sprinklers came into view there were slips of rainbow caught in their ambits as if in the finest fishing nets.
    ‘Come inside,’ Eleanor said. ‘We’ll get you settled in.’
    The walls were panelled with walnut: the living-room had the mild light and coolness of a glade. Dishevelled oriental rugs lay on polished bare wood floors. Sunlight, filtered by trees, entered through sliding glass doors. There was a sofa upholstered in faded mulberry cloth, and a well-worn leather armchair bearing Eleanor’s precise indentation, with an Anglepoise lamp on an end-table beside it. Black-and-white photographs hung in silver frames: tuxedos, evening gowns, brides and grooms, diploma scrolls. A black upright piano stood against the far wall, a volume of Bach open at a polonaise, and opposite the piano stood a threefold Chinese screen with trees, foliage and exotic birds in enamel and mother-of-pearl on a black background, and a column of Chinese calligraphy on each of the three panels.
    ‘It’s from a dynasty,’ Eleanor said. ‘Though search me which.’
    Between the screen of birds and the sliding windows was a hip-height round wooden table covered with tortoises. Eleanor collected them on her travels, and she’d placed them carefully on the table, evenly spaced, all facing in the same direction, towards the piano at the far end of the room. Some had tails and some didn’t. There were delicate glazed grey, green and blue ceramic tortoises; chunkier, rough-clay tortoises; invertebrate fabric tortoises with beanbag fillings; dirty brass or steel tortoises, their shells inverted to make ashtray bowls; leather tortoises conceived as purses, with zips along the back or side; tiny