The Snow Geese
A Story of Home
By William Fiennes
Random House, $24.95
ISBN 0375507299

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A road trip of discovery

Sometimes a writer needs to leave familiar environs and travel to exotic landscapes in order to compose a story about home. This is how Englishman William Fiennes (cousin of the actor Ralph) went about rebuilding the architecture of his life following a long, undisclosed illness. While enduring an extended convalescence at his childhood home, Fiennes gained comfort and healing from a re-reading of Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose. This tale of a wounded bird knocked off its migratory course became the spark that raised the author from his sickbed and propelled him outdoors to the open road.

"I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with snow geese to the Arctic. The pang of nostalgia, the intense longing to go home that I had experienced in hospital, had now been supplanted by an equally intense longing for adventure, for strange horizons." So begins Fiennes' journey following huge flocks of lesser snow geese along their 3,000-mile spring migration north, from southeastern Texas to their Arctic nesting grounds. Traveling by car, Greyhound bus, small plane and a Canadian train called the "Muskeg Express," Fiennes makes extended stops to observe the geese -- sometimes hundreds of thousands at once -- at Texas' Eagle Lake; South Dakota's Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge; Canada's Riding Mountain National Park; Hudson Bay; and finally, Foxe Peninsula on Baffin Island. In his first sighting, the author is unprepared for the incredible vision and sound of an undulating body of geese lighting on a pond, a "dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at break time, a drone thickness flecked with high-pitched yells, squeals, hollers, and yawps."

Fiennes' colorful companions include biologists, seasoned birders, eccentrics and non-English speaking Inuits. The latter take him along on a wilderness hunting trip for the bird. "It had never occurred to me that I might have to eat a snow goose. I took small mouthfuls, chewing solemnly," Fiennes writes.

The Snow Geese is a quiet, contemplative road trip of discovery, of a new orientation toward life and home, recounted without irony or sarcasm. Fiennes sees our American landscape with a refreshing awe that should compel readers to rediscover the brilliant magic beckoning just beyond their doors.

Stephen J. Lyons writes from Monticello, Illinois.