The Shark and the Albatross by John Aitchison

Author:John Aitchison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Under a bright sun and the warm wind, the ice is thawing. It will all be gone in a few days but I doubt the snow geese will be here to see it. To them melting ice means it’s time to go. The sound of more than a million goose conversations is very loud, so when the hush falls it’s as if the lake is holding its breath. All their necks come up. Every goose is alert. Then comes a sound like a demolition charge, a sharp crump, muffled by the distance, then a tower block thundering down in ruin. The geese are taking flight. Away to the right a roar builds like surf pounding a beach, a jet engine spinning up and gaining power, the passion of a football crowd: all of these, merged into an overwhelming noise, white noise, which drowns the thunder of a 10,000-ton train on the railroad beyond the lake. I feel my ears clamping down in self-defence. Do I speak? If so, I cannot hear my voice.

A wedge of black and white drives from the edge of the flock into its heart, a reverse blizzard rises from the ice: more and more and more geese rising. Others catch their panic and spiral upwards in a vortex, a tornado of bodies, of individuals subsumed by the flock. A force of nature, the goose wind, is beaten down by their wings, under a dark goose ceiling. They live in that wind and sometimes they die in it too.

The sky turns, revolving towards us and over us: a dark granular sky, a fluid sky of particles pulsing and flowing, joining and parting. Frozen, they would look like an Escher woodcut of black and white shapes fitting into each other’s outlines, but in motion they become a flickering pixelated mass, as meaningless as static on a screen.

I wish it would stop.

I wish it would go on for ever.

The flock turns away. Ranks of shadows spin across the tilted screen of the ice, across our astonished upturned faces and our open mouths.

I cannot see what made them go. Not even an eagle would dare to fly through such a sky, so perhaps it was just the need to do as the others do, to belong and not be left behind: the urge to seek safety in numbers. Scattered across the lake they leave behind sad bundles of feathers, whipped by the wind. The gunfire begins as the geese cross the refuge boundary. White birds fold and fall from their constellations like spent stars. As the clamour of the survivors recedes into the north a single injured goose runs after them across the empty ice.

Snow geese are one of the few reminders of what wild America was once like. They prove that this continent can still support an unimaginable abundance of animals, beside ourselves. I am glad I did not fritter away my time with the most astounding assemblage of life I have ever seen by trying to count them.

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