There seems no end to his problems. He must rescue thecolony’s economy, and he must do it soon. He can no longer waste a single evening listening to the women’s bickering, but neither can he send his infirm sister away – how dreadful that would look – so he must find a way of getting rid of Constance without sending her into exile. A thud wakes him from his thoughts. A bird has flown against the windowpane, leaving blood and feathers smeared across the glass as it falls to the ground. Hampus stands up from his desk and looks down at the winged creature lying in the flowerbed below the window. This is not a species he recognises, but it is beautiful and yellow, its wings twitch for a moment, then it lies still. Now he knows what to do; the answer flew right at him.
Hampus places his cards on the table. He apologises for interrupting such an agreeable game but says he has a suggestion. He understands that housekeeping is a hard job that requires all possible help, but could Anna imagine letting Constance go, as he has a job for his sister. Anna lowers her head and considers this. The housekeeping certainly is hard work, but if her dear Hampus needs his sister, she will make sure she can survive with a little less help, and they smile at each other like accomplices. Constance is not asked: she will now take responsibility for the governate’s zoological collections.
Constance is rather afraid of animals, and they are afraid of her. Dogs, cats and horses can smell her nervousness, and they become unpredictable in her presence, and at first the thought of the zoological collections fills her with dread. But she knowsnot how to refuse, so she dutifully follows her brother to the room downstairs.
Two corridors run through the lobby: one leading to the family’s bedrooms, the other to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. However, Hampus and Constance do not step into either one but open a door right at the back of the lobby. Behind the door is a room containing the colony’s natural world in all its awe-inspiring glory. The room is large, but it is so full that Constance feels almost as though she will not fit inside. The shelves running along the walls are stacked with stuffed birds and mammals. Rows of shelves run across all four walls, displaying animals’ heads and antlers alongside the natives’ handicrafts, headdresses carved from wood, embroidered shawls, baskets woven from seagrass, harpoons, and a translucent garment sewn from otter gut. Hanging from the ceiling are stuffed fish and kayaks, the Aleuts’ one-seaterbaidarka, a Tlingit canoe decorated with images of whales, and a Yupikumiakbuilt from whale bones and skin, and in the corner of the room, standing ten feet tall, is the imposing figure of a grizzly bear.
Hampus presents the room to his sister, but Constance does not listen and instead concentrates on the odour of the collection. Dust, arsenic and the smell of animals, the stench of furs, feathers and the grease protecting them, and she begins to understand: these animals’ fear ended with a snare and a bullet long before she arrived. She can take a puffin from the shelf without worrying that it might squawk and flap its wings, and she runs her fingers across its leathery feet. What a silly, clumsycreature this is, and all of a sudden she giggles – what suitable company for her!
Constance’s job is to keep the materials in order and to make sure the labels and the animals match up. The collection has been maintained quite carelessly, the shelves contain birds that have not been properly labelled and the lists feature animals that the collection does not hold, and she knows nothing about these creatures. She understands that her brother did not give her this task because of her skills but because of her very lack of skills, but she is not upset, because the job gives her an excuse to spend her days in a darkened room with nobody to disturb her. She cannot imagine anything better. In the presence of these dead animals, she does not have to behave herself or control her body when it starts to twitch, flap and ache, and she touches, strokes and caresses the skulls and feathers, takes the birds and mammals from the shelves, gently blows on them and breathes in the dust.
She goes through the collection, one animal at a time, always in the same order. First the water birds, the seagulls, the swans and geese, and on mornings when she cannot get up but lies in bed, her body awash with strange sensations, she goes through the collection in her head. The water birds, the seagulls, the swans and geese, the surf scoter and the blue-winged teal, then the birds of prey, the hawks and eagles, and after them the smaller birds, the scissor-tailed flycatcher and the blue feathers of Steller’s jay. Then the mammals. The seals, the deer and pine martens, the lithe body of the sea otter, and finally the grizzlybear standing on its hind legs. If she gets to the bear, it has been a good day, and she gratefully wipes its paws and polishes its glass eyes.
In the company of dead animals, Constance notices that her father was wrong. He believed there was no point educating a half-wit, that knowledge would run off the girl like water off a sea bird’s feathers without so much as dampening the skin, and Constance was never afforded any learning beyond her sister teaching her to read and write. But now she has a silent school all of her own, and she goes through the catalogues of animals, deciphers the names one letter at a time and learns to associate them with the creature waiting on the shelf. She reads about the animals and Alaskan nature. Reading is hard work for her, the lines jump up and down before her eyes, and some days she believes her father might have been right, but her animals are patient.
She reads slowly but diligently, uses the excuse of a headache to decline dinner, and instead reads the second edition of Lamarck’s natural history of invertebrates. She reads about the parasites of the gut and smiles – if only Anna knew everything that humans and nature can hold inside them. She reads and gradually becomes familiar with these animals, she goes through the descriptions beneath their names and tries to find a unique sound for each animal, thepwit pwit pwit pit pittrrrrrof the wren tit, but her song does not sound like a bird’s. Anna listens to these noises through the door but dares not step inside. She would rather not know anything about it.
Constance compiles a list of birds missing from the collections.This is an easy task, for John Cassin, curator of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, had taken it upon himself to describe every bird known in North America. He discovered almost two hundred species previously unknown to science, classified the green hylia and Hartlaub’s duck and put all his discoveries together in a book, and all Constance has to do is compare his list to the collection catalogue.Illustrations of the Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian Americais an impressive work. Cassin has painted each bird by hand and situated them in their own habitats, the shearwaters on cliffs covered with lichen, the Gambel’s quail in the sands of Arizona, though in fact he has only imagined these habitats; he paints the birds from stuffed models in his cramped study and eventually dies of arsenic poisoning from touching the birds with his bare hands.
Hampus has not forgotten the promise he made to the professor and allows word to spread: anyone who brings him the skeleton of a Steller’s Sea Cow will be generously rewarded. He is not hopeful, but enthusiastic sailors and merchants note his request, and before long a pile of discoloured remains begins to accumulate on the desk of the governate’s taxidermist – whale, porpoise and walrus bones and a mammoth’s tooth, which the governor buys for a handsome price. But the taxidermist Martin Wolff shakes his head: none of the items brought before him belongs to the famedmorskaya korova.
A table presents an estimate of the number of sea cows hunted on Bering Island and describes how their bodies were used.
There are four categories:
Killed and consumed immediately.
Killed for immediate consumption but wasted.
Killed and carried on board as provisions.
Killed for provisions but wasted.
The column for the year 1742 tells a familiar story. Bering’s expedition kills around forty sea cows. Of the animals they slaughtered, they eat only about a fifth, between five and eight animals, and the rest sink into the depths, but even five animals is plenty for them. Then humans leave the island. TheSt Petersails off, and for a while the sea cow can return to its gentle rhythm, regulated by the weather, its mating cycles, and the changing of the seasons. It takes time for word to spread, and in 1743 not a single ship comes ashore on the sea cows’ island.
Then fur hunters set off. They come for the otters and the foxes, hungry for Alaska’s soft gold; however, it is not its hide that seals the sea cow’s fate but what lies beneath its rough skin. Contemporary accounts suggest that reports of the tastiness of the sea cow’s flesh reach almost mythical proportions. Sailors often claim that the giant tortoise is the most delicious creature on earth. In fact, it isso tasty that its scientific classification took three hundred years, for in all that time not a single specimen survived the journey from its native island back to the academies of Europe without being eaten, including those loaded aboard Darwin’s ship, HMSBeagle. Furthermore, the tortoises’ flavour is said to have played a part in one of the most famous of all extinctions. You will have heard of the dodo, that fabled, stumpy bird that was not afraid of humans, but which had a habit of gathering around the bodies of fallen conspecifics, meaning that a hunter simply had to fire his weapon and wait. But the hunters were in for a disappointment. The dodo’s flesh tasted terrible. It was tough and bitter. Then a clever seaman came up with a solution: when the dodo’s meat is spread with fat from the giant tortoise it becomes soft and tender, and in this way one creature helps us to swallow another. One lucky apprentice claimed to have tasted both these famous giants and swore that the sea cow was the tastier. Its flesh was like butter and manna, and its fat burned in blubber lamps without smoking, letting a sweet, delicate aroma fill the room.
In their first year on the island, fur hunters kill two hundred sea cows. Their technique is not very refined, and of the animals they kill they eat only a few dozen. After this, a steady stream of ships begins to arrive. A determined hunter can quickly clear an island of its furs, but there is always the next island, and beyond that a whole continent brimming with otters and foxes. Merchants leaving Kamchatka take to stopping at Bering Island, where they fill their barrels with the flesh of the sea cow, though they are less interested in learning the art of harpooning. They are happy to shoot into the water at random, in the hope that the waves will wash at least oneof the dead animals ashore. They are only interested in preserving the otters and the foxes; for them, the sea cow is merely a sumptuous sport.
The columns begin to grow in size. The year 1754 shows an ominous statistical spike. That year, the fur hunters claim around five hundred sea cows, five hundred marine mammals each weighing several tonnes, of which only a fifth are used for food. This means that four hundred sea cows, four hundred corpses, are left to rot in the island’s shallow coastal waters, four thousand four hundred tonnes of meat, fourteen thousand ribs, nineteen thousand vertebrae slowly buried under layers of sediment, generations of well-nourished crabs and sea urchins climbing through an ever expanding bone garden at the bottom of the sea.
Ships set sail from Bering Island, their holds full of pelts, and when one predator removes another, at the bottom of the food chain the banquet can begin. The mouth of the sea urchin is a bizarre contraption. Also known as Aristotle’s lantern, this creature has five jaws and a fleshy, tongue-like lump, and it sucks up algae, tonnes of algae. By now the otters have been hunted to the brink of extinction, meaning that the sea urchins are no longer caught in their nimble paws and cracked open, and the echinoderms can now stand up on their suctioned legs and eat their fill. The sea urchins reproduce unimpeded, and before long the clusters of kelp that were once almost impenetrable now let in the light.
Now, to add to their other woes, the sea cows have to cope with hunger too. The stricken mammals are beset with disease, and the sailors look on as the young suckle at their mothers’ already empty teats. The herds grow smaller and thinner, and merely twenty-sevenyears after Steller first made out a dark shape moving under the water’s surface, the fur hunters find only a single sea cow in the shallow waters along the island’s coast.
In English and French, a species is extinguished, life dwindles, smoulders and is eventually snuffed out, while in Swedish a species is pulled up by the roots, eradicated from the earth like weeds from a garden, but the Finnish “sukupuutto” does not mean the death of all individuals. In Finnish, even the last sea cow floating in the water has experienced “sukupuutto”, the lack of a mate. Blood still flows through its veins, its nerves still send neurological impulses to its limbs, but as it swims from one cove to the next looking for one of its own kind, it has already encountered the greatest, most profound loneliness of all, the lack of its kin, and its species reaches an end long before a bullet pierces its eye.
The fur hunters load their rifles. The final mammal, the final column, after this there is nothing left to hunt. Steller died in the belief that the species he had discovered would feed the whole of Siberia, but he had underestimated human greed and hunger.
Its flesh and blubber are now a thing of the past, but scientists and the academies have renewed interest in the sea cow’s remains. Hunters scavenge the shorelines for pieces of the animal and sell them for a hefty price. On his expedition through the North-east Passage, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld collects many sea-cow bones and presents his findings in a composite skeleton put on display at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. For a while, the sea cow is Stockholm’s foremost attraction, but after this the shores are cleared, the bones gone, and the sea cow lost. Nobody has seen one for around a century, and some scientists claim that it is a mythical creature, theravings of starving seamen, that Steller lost his mind and concocted the creature in order to bolster his reputation. Some researchers claim that the sea cow has been hunted to extinction, but such claims are met with scorn and derision. Extinction is something that affects dinosaurs and mammoths, the great, terrifying beasts of the past, but a similar catastrophe has not befallen the Bering Sea. The sea cow has not experienced a flood or an earthquake, and the world around the island is the same as it always was. This means that the sea cow must still be out there, that somewhere there is a cold and quiet place that humans have not discovered, and in that place the sea cow’s calf can turn its stomach towards the sky and drift into sleep without fear.
Constance spends her days with the collections, and in the evenings she is too tired to join the others. She is barely seen at all, and Anna and Hampus finally have the chance to be alone. Anna gets her husband back, but Alaska has left its mark on him. He has lost weight and has started to see danger and adversity everywhere; he is afraid of shipwrecks and running out of money. Anna is not wasting their allowance, is she? She hands over the account books for her husband to inspect, shows him how frugally she has been using their funds, and even makes Ida Höerle haggle over the price of eggs. She only ever buys the most modest fabrics. Why dress up smartly in a place where there is nobody to see it? She sees her bonnet on the dresser and smiles – Sitka truly is no Paris. If they wish to save money, Hampus should turn his attention to his sisters. Ludmila is constantly writing to him, demanding money for dresses and tours, and Constance eats like a horse.
They do not know how Constance spends her time, but it doesn’t matter, for Hampus employs a real curator too, a man whose job it is to acquire new species for the collection and to exchange the worn old samples for new ones, for skins preserved using the newest methods. Anna doubts the need for a new employee, but Hampus puts her right: a taxidermist is essential. The governate’s collection must be brought up todate, so that he can present the Company’s scientific achievements to those visiting the colony. The English and the French have chastised Russia for its brutality and its expansionist policies, so now it is all the more important to demonstrate that, alongside the trade in furs, the empire has higher objectives too.
Martin Wolff was on his way to South America. He was planning to compile a study of the birds of the Tierra del Fuego, but crossing the Atlantic ate into his savings more quickly than he had calculated, and his father no longer wished to support his proposed project. He had hoped his son would become a soldier; but Wolff is uninterested in species classification and frontier lands, and now he is on his own. However, in Panama he meets an official from the Russian-American Company who tells him that the governor of Alaska is looking for a taxidermist. Back in Hesse, Wolff has been supporting himself by stuffing hunting trophies, the heads of elks, deer and wild boar, along with hazel hens and other grouse to be displayed on shelves and mantelpieces, and now he follows his instinct and heads north. He arrives in Sitka and loathes every minute of it, the endless rain, the algae growing up the walls of his dorm, but to his relief the official was not lying: the governor pays well, and though every evening Wolff resolves to leave, every morning he decides to stay until the next payday.
Hampus imagined his sister would be thrilled at the new taxidermist, but Wolff arrives in the collection as if he owns it, opening the cupboards and running his fingers across the labels. Constance feels the urge to tell him to disappear butrestrains herself, for Wolff is a useful creature who will acquire new samples for her.
