Saving sparrows in Antartica

Saving sparrows in Antarctica

My little sparrow keeps score of how many dolphins she sees, slicing through the waves, guiding us like sentinels on our mission through the worst seas. She keeps score of how many albatrosses sweep around the bridge of the ship, tracing halos in the sky. She keeps score of how many sparrows hitch a ride on board, singing blessings of relief. But a sailor tells us they will never make it this far away from land.

So each day, the count becomes less.

Each day, the numbers fall.

We see land without the sun: a strip of dark, toothy mountains on the horizon. My daughter runs out into the minuses without her coat zipped up, reminding me of when she was five, and my heartbeats echo, collapsing like a glacier.

I wish she was five again. Things were simpler. She was such a happy kid, and she hates it when I remind her of that. In the mornings, she’d jump and jump, crying out to be let outside to see if the fairies had come and eaten her offerings. She’d left piles of seeds and nuts out in the forest out back. Clumps by tree trunks. I knew it was the sparrows who’d taken them and wondered whether fairies were much different.  

Hope is a thing with feathers. Emily Dickinson’s poem may as well be tattooed to my chest. I had hoped Antarctica would give my little sparrow something; to keep her here, hiding in the shadows of polar night to trick the gods that want to take her.

‘Show me nothing,’ my little sparrow had said. ‘Show me where there's nothing but space and ice, snow, and skies.’ She said that when we were sitting in a bar at the end of the world. Sat right where Shackleton left for the Drake Passage, even when sailors told him the ice was too thick. All journeys south are a fool's hope. We drank frothy pisco sours, which tied up our lips. And I remember how she used to get seasick just looking at a boat, let alone travelling the roughest seas in the world. But her cheeks billowed like sails when she said Antarctica. She inflated. A rare crescent moon of teeth emerged. I felt a flutter under my ribs.

It had cost me an arm and a leg to get her on this ship, and it doesn't make sense to me why she'd go for nothing. But that's what mothers do for their daughters. They try whatever they need to keep them alive, to give them something to live for even when they don’t understand it.

I run out onto the deck, calling to her. I do up her coat while she searches the deck for sparrows. 

‘Do you think they’re all gone, mum?’

‘What?’

‘The sparrows.’

‘I’m sure they found a ship going back the other way.’

She glares at me because she knows I am spinning fairy tales again, giving magic when there are only birds.

Our ship has to wait in the harbour overnight. The sun is forever stuck in sunrise and sunset. It never breaks over the horizon. I pray it never does. We watch the seals snort, listen to the ice cleave off the sides and collapse into the sea. We watch people work the harbour in twilight, creating a slush of dirty snow that circles the station like tired, baggy eyes. 

It reminds me of nurses and doctors flying around in the hospital. Around and around my sparrow’s bed in flocks; the cleaners, the nurses, the visitors. All on a cycle, rotating, day in and day out, tired and exhausted. My sparrow was just one of many. I wondered if their migration changed at all when they found out why she was there; if they knew she was choosing to be there. Do they spend less time on her? Does their murmuration change? I never sat away from her clipboard. I wanted to guard it, hide it.

‘Get rid of the tourists, all the people and seals and the base camps. There is too much of something, of life, of people, here in the middle of nowhere.’ 

She wants it to be just us here in the darkness at the bottom of the world. For me, there’s not enough life. Not enough light. And I worry that I have indulged her darkness rather than liberated it. Maybe taking her here wasn’t a good idea. In the night kept only by watches, snow swept in, sprinkling the nothingness all around us, tucking into the corners of our dreams. It is a fresh idea, a blank slate, as if nobody ever existed. 

My little sparrow insists on being the first to make it out. She wants to be the first to stamp her feet into the snow, compressing the layers under her. It reminds me of her first steps as a baby; the first day she walked away from me. She had on a fluffy onesie from my mother, and soft brown wispy hair. How happy she used to be! Those chubby cheeks. Those gappy teeth. She squawked with delight and life and everything that was good. 

And now as she twirls around, free for a moment from whatever sparrows are leaving her, I can't stop staring at the past tense in the snow; the footprint that won't last, and the sun that will one day break over the horizon.

She stops. Turns to me. ‘Did you hear that, Mum?’

‘What?’ I bring my coat in around me, looking to see what others are doing to keep out the cold.

‘I found one.’ 

‘Found what?’

My daughter unzips her jacket, tucks her hand into her coat. She peels open one side to show me something and her smile sings at me. There is a little chirp, and I see in the darkness of her coat two little eyes twinkle back at me, and a fluff of feathers down in her inside pocket. 

‘A sparrow made it.’