Some travellers set out for such distant, unknown destinations that finding home again means pilgrimage to an almost mythical place. On January 14, 2004, a tropical frigate bird staggering in cold air at an unknown height--others of its kind have been clocked two kilometres up on the way to heaven--aimed itself at the only hard surface afloat in wind-whipped Hecate Strait. Environment Canada says most West Coast winter storms stir up halfway between North America and Japan, blowing across the Pacific until the southwest gusts collide with coastal winds and swirl north into the waters between Haida Gwaii and British Columbia's mainland. The winds that had held the frigate bird on a flight path to starvation and exhaustion for days reached at least Beaufort scale Force 8, a 34-to-40-knot "fresh gale" over Hecate Strait's 45 sea miles of open water. As mariners know, a knot is an hour's worth of wind speed across a sea mile equal to 1.852 kilometres. A 40-knot gale cracks along at almost 75 kilometres an hour.

Capt. Edward Raynor on BC Ferries' Queen of Prince Rupert ("Leave Skidegate 11 a.m. Arrive Prince Rupert 5:30 p.m. Crossing time: Varies") said the wind might have come up near Beaufort 9 while he stood out on the bridge wing, minding the vessel against broaching--falling into the trough of a wave--in a following sea midway across the strait on January 14. Beaufort scale 9 sea conditions are high waves, dense streaks of foam, crests roll over. The Queen of Prince Rupert's tilting foredeck was the last chance for a cold, tired frigate bird blown north from Hawaii or Mexico or some other warm-water/blue-sky place. These birds feed on the wing, gliding above the surface of smooth seas to pluck fish and squid, but their small, almost webless feet and low-oil feathers soon drenched to deadweight mean they do not land on water.

Imagine this bird weeping while the known world disappeared under its almost two-metre wing span, while its long hollow bones stretched into ceaseless winds with never a resting current, and its useless feet trembled, untucked, their minute weight only unneeded ballast dragging against lift.

The wind-taken frigate bird seemed sentenced to fly over the sea forever, or at least until death, much as the Flying Dutchman, a 17th-century schooner last seen by a WWII German submarine crew, must round the Cape of Good Hope until doomsday. Capt. Vanderdecken is said to have earned his fate by cursing the gale that had overtaken his East India trader, then swearing he would make Table Bay in spite of God's wrath. The frigate bird's innocence had only blessed the warm air and waters of its home until a storm forced the chaotic journey.

Although birds have flown across thousands of years of human spirituality, bringing messages from the gods or bearing souls in transit to the next world, the osprey and sea birds "after his kind" are named as unclean along with other birds of prey listed in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 14: 11-18; Leviticus 11: 13-19). In legend, sea birds often prophesy sailors' sorrows. Shooting an albatross is fatal because the bird who sleeps in mid-ocean air holds the souls of drowned seafarers. In Canada's Pacific Ocean waters beyond Hecate Strait, albatrosses are halibut fishermen lost at sea. The petrel, named from Italian petrello , "little Peter", because it seems to patter across stormy seas as St. Peter once walked on the Lake of Gennesareth, foretells heavy weather for ships and sometimes other troubles. Fregatidae pelecaniformes, though, bears no ill omens and is only a frigate or man-of-war bird because its ability to swoop out of the sky and snatch food from slower sea birds, or from the ocean, resembles the intentions of naval frigate-class vessels from sailing days to diesel.

Like the pigeons the oldest Arab storytellers tossed into the air, some frigate birds may carry story as freight. The pigeons always brought down a tale from the sky when they returned to the storyteller waiting in the marketplace. The only Hecate Strait tropical-bird tale humans can translate began when a creature of the air plummeted from a rainy sky, glanced through the Queen of Prince Rupert's bridge window, and "came to rest", Capt. Raynor said, on the foredeck near the ship's bell.

CAPT. RAYNOR AND his crew think the bird with a hooked bill longer and paler than its white head, speckled breast feathers continuing partway along wings that darken as they lengthen, and a long, sharply forked, aerodynamic tail, was too weary to show them any sign of fear. It folded the huge wings to fit itself into a cardboard box lined with a white towel. The box was covered with a deckhand's jacket and placed in the radio room. Capt. Raynor radioed a request for advice from a bird-wise friend back in Masset on Haida Gwaii, and had a few canned sardines and some water placed in the box. One of the sardines was later found to have been very slightly nibbled. The frigate bird passed its bridge watch in silence.

The Queen of Prince Rupert, delayed more than 24 hours by heavy weather, made port in Prince Rupert about 1900 hours on January 14. Gunther and Nancy Golinia, whose Prince Rupert Wildlife Rehab Shelter is supported with their own funds, and who had been alerted by Capt. Raynor's friend, made their way to the ferry's bridge to pick up the boxed frigate bird.

The most aerial of the sea birds became a bird in the hand at the clinic down a small lane in Prince Rupert, where there is still some bush behind the home and wildlife sanctuary at the end of 11th Avenue. In the clinic room, Nancy Golinia gently rolled up the bird's eyelid. The thin, dry skin remained rigid rather than returning to flexibility, meaning the traveller was dehydrated enough to die soon. But neither the Golinias nor the frigate bird were creatures who easily let go of a life. After Nancy Golinia's first all-night vigil, followed by days of subcutaneous Lactated Ringers injections of the same enriched nutrition solution used in human hospitals, the bird repeatedly clacked its beak with what may have been joy, or yearning, or relief when Gunther Golinia took it outside to see the sky. Clattering the mandible (lower bill) against the upper bill is frigate-bird speech.

The bird, thought to be young, sex unknown, and identified only as one of five species in the Fregatidae pantropical genus, was still weak, and underweight, and still had a bruised wing. Besides, it lacked a passport or other travel documents necessary for the organization of a journey to any southern place that might resemble home.

The "How to Rear Wild Birds" chapter of The American Boys Handy Book, first published 1890, advises against capturing sea birds because they are "strange creatures" who need too much room. Still, crouched in a plastic and wire-mesh cage, seemingly resigned to more adventure travel arranged by outside forces a few days after its Prince Rupert arrival, the frigate bird boarded Hawkair's turbo-prop Dash 8 for a free flight to Vancouver.

At the Wildlife Rescue Association of B.C. on Burnaby Lake, veterinarians found the bird bearing with parasites and anemia, as well as a sore on the right side of its beak, and weighing only 800 grams. Normal weight for a young animal still growing toward two-kilogram adulthood would have been about 1,500 grams.

A WRA spokesperson said that squid and anchovy were offered by hand, and accepted. A slightly more rounded bird moodily regarding a pink plastic bowl appeared in a February 20, 2004, WRA press release. Daily, a flap test was performed by workers who carefully lifted the bird's body until the great wings began to spread. To keep the long muscles needed for flight limber and strong, the frigate bird was raised again and again to a height where the yearning to fly unfurled its wings.

The bird gained weight and strength in the facility beside Burnaby Lake, but there could be no release into cool British Columbia air for a creature unable to say whether the January storm had swept it away from home in Hawaii or Mexico or south of the Panama Canal. For a lost sea bird already familiar with a 5,864-gross-ton BC Ferry, and whose Field Guide to Seabirds of the World description includes "gregarious; follows ships", passage aboard a Neptune Orient APL container ship crossing the Pacific out of the port of Vancouver would have worked: Seattle--Los Angeles--Yokohama--Hong Kong, with the possibility of Jakarta or Surabaya and liftoff from a warm deck available anytime the ocean and sky looked right.

But the International Bird Rescue Research Center at San Pedro, California, was to be the bird's next stop. The Wildlife Rescue Association struggled through U.S. and Canadian customs regulations to obtain avian customs permits, and Alaska Airlines agreed to fly a frigate bird passenger to Los Angeles in March.

IBRRC's huge Southern California bird centre cares for as many as 1,000 oiled or injured aquatic birds at a time, trains oil-spill response teams, and offers educational programs. Here, in a flight cage 30 metres long and about six metres high, sometimes accompanied by pelican and gull cage mates, the frigate bird proved it could still fly. Joyful beak clattering, if any, was not recorded, but a definite species identification was made: immature Fregata magnificens : magnificent frigate bird.

The frigate bird's last motor transport took it to the Tijuana Estuary on the California-Mexico border. The Tijuana River drains a watershed on both sides of the international line, then spreads into estuarine shallows, salt- and freshwater marshes, and tideland before it reaches the Pacific on the American side. In this bright, watery bird land, the carrying cage was opened and the magnificent frigate bird immediately soared into the sky. If the Baja California coast of Mexico was not the bird's starting place, warm winds, blue waters, and the presence of other sea birds must have offered enough almost forgotten familiarity to make home seem possible again. The Hecate Strait frigate bird was last seen flying south, looking like a young one who had never been blown into the far north or landed on a BC Ferry or been hand-fed.

If the bird is male, a year or so from now his shoulder feathers will show a purple iridescent sheen and he will be able to perform a mating display by inflating a tiny sac at his throat into a scarlet balloon and turning up the underside of his wings. If the frigate bird is female, she will regard such displays with interest and, in time, produce a single white egg in a nest near the sea. Either way, the bird may live as long as 30 years.

In many spiritual traditions, wings on animals or figures have been sacred symbols, and sometimes signs meaning travel or encircling protection. The travel and protection were provided by human beings this time, so that a tropical sea bird's lost home could be recovered from the confusion of great distance, fear, and physical distress. The tale of the long-travelling frigate bird who returned from the northern unknown continues in a language not spoken on Earth. The speech of birds has only ever been understood by Cassandra, the Trojan seer sometimes called Daughter of Hecate, and by King Solomon, as well as Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (the Master of the Good Name), and one or two others of legend.

Joan Skogan is the author of Mary of Canada: The Virgin Mary in Canadian Culture, Spirituality, History and Geography (Banff Centre Press, $29.95).