Not this time. Too bad.
You raise your binoculars against these thoughts and this conversation. The Bushnells channel vision and attention away from dangerous places. Something-two somethings- swimming at the far end of the pool. Your right index finger slides to the center-focusing knob. "Ducks," you say, and then, nailing them, "Harlequin ducks."
"Where?" your daughter asks.
"Scan along the far bank till you see it poke out. They’re just in front of that, a little to the left."
"I’ve got ‘em," she says a moment later. "The male is nice."
"He is," you say. His head, blank and cinnamon with bold white spots, gives the ducks their name. "Everything’s in breeding plumage up here."
"One more for the list," your daughter says. Harlequin ducks are life birds for both of you. Even in their duller winter feathers, they don’t come down the Pacific coast as far as L.A. Your daughter’s list is longer than yours. Not a lot, but it is. You’ve been birding since before she was born, but she goes at it with a passionate dedication you never found.
"Anything else?" you say. "Shall we go on?"
She’s checking the south edge of the pool. When she spots something, she freezes. Then she laughs and lowers the binoculars. "Couple of white-crowns hopping around under the willows."
"Oh, boy." You’ve come 3,000 miles to see more of the cheeky little sparrows that mob your backyard feeders every winter.
Back into the car, then. You glance at the side-view mirror before pulling out. It’s a big-city habit, more useful here than a third leg or a fifth wheel, but not much. Nothing coming either way as far as the eye can see. You’re the only two people for miles.
"Pot-" your daughter starts. Too late. Thump. Your front teeth click together. "-hole."
Patches of snow-or is it ice?-lie on the hillsides. A little creek that runs down by the side of the road starts from one of them. Farther on, you come to a bridge over a real river. NO FISHING FROM BRIDGE, a sign in front of it says. You can barely make out the words. Plinkers have colandered the sign and chipped away a lot of enamel. What better place to plink than somewhere like this?
North and north again. You can’t go faster than forty, not if you want to have any kidneys left at the end of the day. No hurry any which way. You stop every few miles to bird. Your daughter says she sees a hawk on some lichen-spattered rocks. You stop the car. You both get out.
"I think it’s just another rock," you say. You raise the binoculars. It still looks like a rock. A dapper Lapland longspur hops near the bottom of the rockpile. He doesn’t notice anything dangerous, either.
"It’s a hawk," your daughter insists. The two of you walk towards it. It takes wing and flies off across the tundra. Your daughter grins. "Too small to be a peregrine or a gyrfalcon."
"Female merlin, I think," you say.
Her lips purse. She weighs size, color, shape. "Sounds right. That’s another lifer for you, isn’t it? I saw one up in Santa Barbara last year."
"One more checkmark in the Sibley," you say. A birder without a guide is like a minister without a Bible. "You’ve got mosquitoes on your hat."
"Damn!" She taps the brim. Some of them fly off. Some stay put. She looks your way. "So do you, Dad."
You go through the same routine. Chances are it does the same amount of good-some, but not enough. You both try it again before you get back into the rental. You still have buzzing company after you close the doors. Your daughter squashes one mosquito after another against the inside of the windshield with a kleenex.
"There you go," you say.
She nails another one-maybe the last. Then she says, "Mom wouldn’t have liked this part. She never could stand bugs."
"No." Your hands tighten on the wheel. Joints in palms and fingers twinge. Driving doesn’t bother you most of the time, but you have to hold on tight here. You could let your daughter drive, but she makes a better spotter and navigator than you would. And you’re used to driving when the two of you go somewhere together; you’ve been doing it since before she knew how.
Another river, wider than the last. You stop just beyond it. With running water, with trees and bushes on the banks, with mosquitoes and other insects buzzing above the stream and fish in it, rivers are great places for birds, and for birders. The scrubby willows here are trees, or almost; they’re twelve, sometimes even fifteen, feet tall.
Something perches in the top of a distant one. Dark back, rusty belly… You swing your binoculars towards it as if they were a nineteenth-century naturalist’s shotgun. "Varied thrush!"
"Where?" Your daughter’s voice rises. This is another bird you both want.
You point it out to her. "You can see the black band across its breast."
She scans till she finds it. "I don’t see that," she says slowly, and then, "Dad… it’s got a yellow beak."
"No way!" But you look again. It does-and it doesn’t have the black breastband you were sure it did. You saw what you wanted to see, not what was there. "Well, hell. I keep wanting varied thrushes, and I keep getting robins."
Till you got here, you hadn’t thought they came to the tundra. They do, though. If anything, they’re commoner here in the summertime than in Los Angeles. "Sorry, Dad," your daughter says.
"You were right. Don’t be sorry for being right."
"Why not? Fat lot of good it’s ever done me."
You can’t find anything to say to that, so you look out over the river instead. An American golden plover in fancy black-and-white breeding plumage tiptoeing across a drift of pebbles makes a poor consolation prize. Your heart was set on a varied thrush, the way your stomach sometimes gets set on lamb chops. If the only thing in the freezer is ground round, you’ll be disappointed no matter how good it turns out.
More mosquitoes get into the car with you. Your daughter commits insecticide as you drive north.
Off to the west rise the Kigluaik Mountains, purple streaked with white. More snow lingers on the northern slopes than the sunnier southern ones. The road winds by the north shore of Salmon Lake. You’re forty miles out of Nome. There’s a landing strip here, and a few cabins people use during the summer. You seem to have the place to yourselves now.
The rental car bumps across the dirt airstrip to the lakeshore. Two orange plastic cones mark the end of the strip. You stop just past them and get off. A breeze off the water keeps the mosquitoes down. Ducks swim in pairs: greater scaup, red-breasted mergansers.
Then something screeches furiously, about two feet above the crown of your hat. You can’t help flinching. Graceful as a jet fighter, a black-capped bird with a red bill and feet rises and makes another pass at the two of you. Screech! You flinch again.
"Arctic tern." Your daughter does her best to sound matter-of-fact.
You manage a nod. "Sure is. We must be close to its nest."
Another furious dive-bomb, another skrawk from the tern. It doesn’t hit either one of you, but it does its damnedest to drive you away. When you don’t leave, it tries again and again. Other terns also screech, but only the one strafes you.
Your daughter is crying. You didn’t see her start. "Hey," you say uselessly-tears always leave you helpless. "Hey. What is it?"
"Stupid bird." She tries to pretend this isn’t happening, a losing proposition with wet streaks shining on her face. Almost too low for you to hear, she adds, "Families."
She and Dave had talked about starting one. They ended up talking to lawyers instead. It’s a shame; you would have enjoyed grandchildren. But what can you do? Not much, not when she’s so fragile that a bird defending its nest can set her off.
"Let’s get out of here," she says roughly.
"Okay." You were married to her mother for almost forty years. Sometimes arguing only makes it worse.
The tern makes two more passes at the car as you drive away. You fear it will slam into the windshield, but it doesn’t. You jounce across the airstrip to the road, which isn’t much smoother. The Arctic tern has the lakeside to itself again.