Creation Read Online Free

closer you smell them. You want to do anything but breathe it in, even in the sea wind. And there is an immense, rhythmic squawking filling the sky. There are birds moving everywhere your eye lights; it’s like an army massing. The nests are orderlyin themselves. But the birds are raucous! We saw pairs together, one bird sitting on the nest, the other defending. They squawk and squabble and sometimes one takes to the air, only to return in half a minute. We would have fallen over laughing if we hadn’t been so busy trying to stay upright.
    “There is only one way to climb up but Tom and I found it. The birds occupy the rock in a hierarchy — lowest down are the guillemots, then the razorbills, and higher still the kittiwakes. The gannets are on top, the kings, and they lord it over the others, making such a din. We made our way almost to them. They are comical as they begin to worry — they jab their bills at the others’ head; sometimes two will lock bills and each try to push the other off the edge. But they’re also loving. They seem constantly to know where their mate is. I saw, when the one bird is sitting on the nest, and the other of the pair in the air, the sitting bird pointing skyward with her bill to call him back down.”
    “Aaaah,” says his father. “Yes.”
    “The sailors were hollering for us to get back before the boat smashed on the rocks. I shot two pairs, both mature and young. On top of that we got half a dozen of the birds alive.”
    “You’re a good boy,” says his father. “And a great help to me.”
    “Look,” says Johnny, reaching under the blanket into his pocket. “I brought you an egg too.”
    B Y NIGHTFALL THE SQUALL is behind them and Ripley is on its way to the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador. The artist takes a turn on the deck, wrapping his buffalo robe around his shoulders to warm him as if it were love. He cups the gannet egg in his right hand. He turns the egg and taps the shell lightly with the tip of his forefinger, then places it against his cheek. He adores its oval smoothness, its weight, its hardness; above all, the way it takes warmth from his hand, and the sense he has that life is forming inside it.
    The Ripley hides in the small bay of an island, beyond the reach of the surging water, inside a set of shoals. The sky is vast, reaching around the schooner in all directions, cradling it in its cold arm. Thewind is foul, the fog malicious, the rocks studded beneath the waves like waiting tombstones. Clouds obscure the moon. And yet the night is white, somehow, padded, even benign. The nests are out there, the eggs tucked inside, emitting their strange light, visible perhaps only to him. There are millions and millions of laying birds, countless eggs — oval and marbled, or pure white dotted with red, eggs hidden on sea stacks, cliffs, in crevices and reeds of this immense nesting ground — a veritable Milky Way of egg-light.
    He holds his gift from Johnny tighter, encircling it with his fingers. He wishes on it. That they all should return safely. That he should complete his master work. He has been a failure at everything else.
    He fears, always, the bailiff who pursues him, the critics who have set out to ruin him and even the crowds who hail him, for it is them, more than anyone else, he has fooled. He fears losing his wits. Perhaps because he has lived so hard by them he senses their revenge coming on. He fears the loss of his eyesight. The loss of the strength in his legs. He prays to the god he scarcely believes in that his wits, his vision and his legs last a little longer. He has nothing else to lose, nothing of value in this world, save Lucy and the boys. He must finish.
    He wishes that the Work will bring him wealth enough to provide for his family, and the respect of all those who have scorned him. Wishes that he, John James Audubon, will be known as the greatest living bird artist.
    I T IS A SIMPLE THING, A NAME. We are given one,