Inspired by a sense of adventure and memories of a story titled The Snow Goose, the author decides to follow snow geese from their wintering grounds in Texas to their breeding grounds on Baffin Island. He rents a car, rides a Greyhound, takes the train to Churchill, Manitoba, and finally a plane to Iqaluit, Baffin Island. He has wonderful smaller stories about the people he meets who help him on his way, and he ruminates about them, as well as about birds. He notices all the details of his surroundings, wherever he stays, while anticipating the arrival of the geese, and describes the ordinariness so that it is familiar and somehow sweet, thus making this narrative also a travelogue by an Englishman on an American/Canadian journey.
The final stage in his goose quest has him riding on skidoos with an Inuktitut mother and her son as they hunt geese. "I tried not to look at the dead birds, not to think about the dead weight in my hands. But I kept shaking as we tramped back up the valley to the cabin, carrying six geese between us, flocks still passing overhead on the south winds."
And then he returns to England. This is a birding adventure but more. I found it a delightful account of a whimsical journey.
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