Stories From Under The Sky

The Grand Passage

the grand passage AN OLD GANDER raised his head from a meal of three-square grass and stretched his wings in the warm Louisiana sun. Nearby, other blue geese were launching themselves into the air, and the gander rose to join them. For nearly an hour they wheeled together over the wet pastures of paille des oies before they settled down again to resume feeding. For a week a restlessness had been growing among them and they rose more often on short flights. It was nearly the last of February. Songbirds were building nests and the days were becoming longer and hotter. Still the geese remained, as if they knew that their distant summering grounds were locked by winter and that spring blizzards still raged on Baffin Island. Then, one day in early March, the blue gander rose from the marshes of the Sabine Refuge and joined a large band of geese near the Bayou Constance. Two other huge Louisiana flocks also were forming, one above the flats east of the Mississippi's mouth and another near the Chenier du Tigre. r03 These three great flocks, with an honor guard of snow geese, rose a thousand feet above the Louisiana tidal marshes and swung into the north - to be joined by more flocks of sparkling snow geese coming up from the wintering grounds on the gulf coast of Texas and western Louisiana. In a steady, direct course up the face of a continent and up the great chute of the Mississippi Valley the birds flew, overtaking early pintails, mallards and a few Canada geese. Through western Arkansas they flew, and over western Missouri where they found and followed the coffee-colored bends of the Missouri River. And now their momentum was checked for they struck the barrier of the thirty-degree isotherm . They had left Louisiana in summer, had flown through spring, and as they reached southwestern Iowa they caught up with the last of winter. They rested there, the countless geese piling up on the threshold of winter. Around Forney's Lake, Kellogg Slough, the Green Bottoms and Lake Manawa south of Council Bluffs there were single flocks of a hundred thousand blue and snow geese. In fields near Percival and McPaul there were geese almost beyond number by the seventeenth of March, feeding on shattered com left last autumn by the cornpickers, and on the gumbo fields washed with the first greens of winter wheat. Men tried futilely to estimate their number and gave up, shaking their heads in wonder at eighty-acre fields solid with birds. I walked out on a sandspit of the Plum Creek Washout late one night, and the sounds of the geese settling down to sleep were like standing on the shore of an ocean. I clapped my hands, commanding silence for a brief, blank instant, and then a clap of thunder replied. A vast wall of geese eclipsed the moon and sky. First there was the windy roar of a quarter-million wings and then the bedlam din of barking geese flying in the night. In river towns, street lights attracting newly-arrived flocks were turned off to end the ceaseless clamor of circling geese and give the townsmen some sleep. Nearly every snow and blue goose in the New World was crammed into a strip of Missouri River valley sixty miles long and twenty miles wide. But by late March the last barriers of midwestern winter were collapsing, and by the first of April the geese were nearly gone from Iowa and Nebraska. Northward, through April, the Dakotas and Manitoba. For nearly a week the great, broken lines stitched the sky over Winnipeg and vanished into the northeast. Then, for seven hundred miles, no more was known of them. No man saw them again until a Cree trapper north of James Bay looked up late one May morning and made out a skein of blue geese flying over the pack ice of Hudson's Bay, making for the reeking mud flats and barren tundra of Baffin and Southampton Islands. The blue geese nested there in the chilling rains of midJune , a little more than three months since their departure from the Bayou Constance nearly three thousand miles to the south. The greater mass of snow geese split off and went "beyond the north wind" - the place that named them - to the arctic coast of Canada within fifteen degrees of...