Free Creation by Katherine Govier Page B

evil-smelling mixture of drowned grasses and black mulch.
    Audubon tries the muck. It is deeper than he thinks. The instant he steps in it, it swallows his leg up to and above the rim of his hob-nailed boot. Dragging it out (suck suck suck pop), then placing it ahead, where it sinks again (with a sound like a fart), he feels he walks with ball and chain. As he would in debtor’s prison. He drags up his foot, nearly losing the boot, and wades toward the rock, which seems to shoot up at him as if with intent to injure. Once out of the muck, he springs light-footed from jagged head to jagged head. Rejoicing in his nimbleness he leaps onward until his foot slides into a crevice and the boot is caught. The same boot that sank in the mud. This is the land that eats boots.
    He sits and pulls. His muck-slippered foot pops out but the boot remains firmly wedged three feet down. Below it, the fissure opens to a window of red sand over which the sea sucks and foams, then disappears with a hollow thump. He contemplates abandoning the boot but he needs it. He has no other footwear except thigh-high moccasins made of sealskin, and their soles are not hard enough for this punishing surface.
    He lies on his stomach, exposing his gut to a rough fist of rock. He reaches down with a long arm. Long but not long enough. The boot beckons another six inches below. A surge of sea comes up to ruffle its sole.

    He shifts to his side, the aggressive fist pushing now into his kidney. He grasps the upper of the boot. He pulls. Nothing happens.
    He rolls on his back. The clouds are scudding quickly; the fog may blow off. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and he already put in ten hours at the deal table in the hold. His eyes ache. His back is tired. His brain is fevered. The stuck boot seems an insurmountable problem.
    The black rock on which he lies is rough and porous. Under its carapace the sea expands and retreats with hollow, percussive sighs. He closes his eyes. Peace, he admonishes himself, peace. He thinks of Maria. Bachman’s last letter reverberates in his mind, the one he received in Boston just before he left. “Our sweetheart … willing as ever to do backgrounds. To gratify you will always afford her pleasure.”
    The man does not know what he is saying.
    He sees an eagle above him, soaring. It plunges from the sky. He turns his head to watch as it emerges from the water triumphant with a fish in its claws. It rises into the blanket of fog, then reappears like a ghost gliding in circles. How does the eye of the eagle penetrate this grey mist? Does the eagle see him, a little X on the rock?
    He realizes with a shock that he has painted himself from an eagle’s-eye view. It was the last painting he finished before coming to Labrador. He was a little X then too, insignificant, and caught straddling a log over a chasm.
    That golden eagle was magnificent, a male that had been caught in a fox trap in the White Mountains. A man from the Boston Museum came to Audubon’s rooms with the cage in his arms. “This is an emperor of birds,” said the man. “There is a story that it seized a human child in its bunting and flew off with it to its aerie. The mother of the child ran after it and climbed where no man had dared to climb before, found the nest, and took back the child unharmed. Then the people trapped it.”
    “That is not a story about an eagle,” said Lucy. “It is a story about a mother.”
    “That it should even come into my house is a sad thing,” said Audubon to the donor, “for this bird more than any is meant to soar.”
    But he took it anyway.

    The eagle was majestic, even when caged. His talons gleamed and his black eye glinted. He knew there was no escape, and was too dignified to beat his wings against the bars.
    Audubon sank into a chair opposite the cage. Eye to eye and beak to beak they sat for hours. He did not know whether to kill it or keep it.
    He stood and paced and his eyes filled with tears. The bird sat,