When first she saw the collection, Constance had thought the room full, but now she sees the gaps where various birds and animals once stood. She has gone through the catalogues of animals, the lists of species native to the colony, and a new passion has lit up within her. She dreams of collecting in this room all the wildlife in Alaska, a freeze frame of all the life that she will never see but can gather here, within arm’s reach. But in order to make this dream a reality, she needs help, and for this reason she decides to tolerate Martin Wolff.
Still, Constance cannot help but cause a little mischief, and in the taxidermist’s presence she behaves even more gauchely than usual, she talks to herself, watches him as he examines the shelves, and lets out small, hiccoughing sounds. Martin Wolff – even his name amuses her! The taxidermist is more a rabbit than a wolf, he has long limbs and goggle eyes, warily staring here and there as Constance potters behind his back.
Wolff opens a box and lifts out a goose, a round-headed, short-necked bird whose white plumage is marked by two magnificent black tail feathers. This is Ross’s goose,anser rossii, the newest addition to the governate’s collection. Constance watches the taxidermist at work. She has examined the animals in the collection, scrutinised their seams, run her fingers along the stitching and gone through the birds, catalogue in hand. The great grey shrike appears in the catalogue twice, and Bonaparte’s gull is missing altogether.
Constance examines the paperwork, looking for any notethat might tell her when the bird was added to the collection, but she finds nothing and decides to try and guess. This is not impossible, as she has learned to recognise certain taxidermists’ handiwork. Some of the animals added to the collection at the beginning of the century have been stuffed immaculately. In the hands of this craftsman the creatures look vibrant and alive: the mink raises its head, disturbed while eating, the raven looks as if it is about to take flight, and Constance believes that Bonaparte’s gull must be the work of the same man, so lively are its eyes as it stares at her.
She examines the Ross’s goose. She knows that this irritates Wolff, and she turns the bird deliberately slowly, feeling the weight of its skin stuffed with rags. Its eyes have been skilfully attached, the edges of the eyelids preserved intact, the feathers are pristine, and she cannot even find the bullet hole, though she touches the skin beneath the feathers too. Wolff’s work is clean, but he is no artist. Standing on its plinth, the goose looks stiff. Wolff has not considered how the bird stands and moves; he spends more time in the tavern than out in the wilds, and it shows: he has found a form and settled for it. But the seams are smooth, and Constance lifts the goose into her arms, places it between the northern shoveler and the king eider, and experiences the slow, solemn fulfilment of a true collector.
On evenings when Constance feels up to joining the rest of her family, Anna marvels at the change in her. Her usually quiet sister-in-law now babbles endlessly about birds and mammals, and there is a spark in her eyes that makes Anna concerned. If one did not know better, one might imagine she was smitten.
Anna asks her husband into the salon. Is it seemly for the taxidermist and the governor’s sister to spend so much time together in that dim room without a chaperone – Constance, a girl so unaware of the ways of the world – but Hampus gives the briefest of smiles. This is Sitka, and Constance is Constance: two exceptions to the rule. What would be unimaginable in Dresden or St Petersburg is banal here, commonplace even – or would Anna prefer to have Constance back to assist her? Anna hurriedly shakes her head and tries to explain that it is not so much a question of what might happen but of what it looks like, that out here the officers’ wives watch one another as closely as anywhere else, perhaps more so, because here they need something to pass the time, and a scandal can form at the drop of a hat. And when they finally uncover a sin great enough, it will sustain them for a long while.
Anna had barely stepped off the ship when she heard the first stories about the former pastor in Novo-Arkhangelsk, of how Uno Cygnaeus had hurriedly given his housekeeper’s pretty daughter a gold ring, and before long everybody knew exactly why a promising man of the cloth had been sent away to the furthest corner of the earth. The wordsmaidandlovechildstarted to spread around the town, and if Cygnaeus had imagined that the disapproval would not follow him to Novo-Arkhangelsk, he was soon to find out how wrong he was, for as a result he was forbidden to teach at the girls’ school. Eventually, Cygnaeus judged that enough water had passed under the bridge, and he returned to Finland. Back home, he was finally able to put into practice certain thoughts on education that the people of Alaskawere not yet ready to hear, but though the pastor is gone, the whispers will not abate, and Anna orders Ida Höerle to take Constance a cup of tea at unpredictable hours and to step into the room without knocking, just in case.
For a moment, Martin Wolff even wonders whether it might be beneficial to induce the governor’s sister to fall in love with him. Normally, he would not even entertain the idea of such a thoroughly odd union, but for a sickly spinster he could make an exception. Constance notices that he has started combing his hair, and as he presents a harlequin duck that he has recently stuffed, he leans over towards her and brushes her hand so clumsily that there is no mistaking the gesture. Constance bursts into laughter. She chortles so much that spittle flies from her mouth, and for a brief moment she pities him. The things he has to do to keep himself afloat! Wolff decides it would be ignoble of him to try to woo such a simpleton – why would he be interested in an ugly, twitching woman when the town is full of Creoles who laugh so prettily?
Anna has got her Hampus back, and before long she is expecting again. The decidua and the villus begin to form inside her, and as she notices the first tell-tale signs, she slumps into bed once more. Children are a blessing, but do they have to come so soon? Annie is barely walking, and Anna again finds herself with child. She blames the doctor who did not have the good sense to tell her and Hampus to abstain from relations, but what can one expect of a man like that? Nothing, and now she no longer goes into the town even in Hampus’s company. The stairs leading down the hill make her feel faint, and beingso short of breath is dangerous in her condition. She does not go into the town and moves out of the blue salon. Her new room is small and dingy, but it is situated right beneath the governor’s office, so she can hear when Hampus leaves his study. Otherwise, they might not see each other all day, and Anna only seldom leaves her own room, she never goes upstairs, blaming the stairs themselves, and declines to take luncheon with the officials. She must take care of herself, and to this end she maintains a strict diet: no raw vegetables at all, only soup, meat and some light puddings. She lies in bed and listens to her husband’s footsteps on the office floor above as he paces around his desk. She learns to foretell bad news by the way his shoes touch the boards, and when the door creaks on its hinges, she rushes to the foot of the stairs. If she can catch Hampus before he disappears into his room, she might be able to lure him into the salon for a moment.
Then the worst happens, again. Hampus is drawn away on a new mission. He intends to open a mine and plans to oversee the initial work in person. It is naturally unfortunate that yet again he will miss the birth of his child, but his duty is clear, and he informs Anna of his decision, only this time she does not follow the advice of her books but opens her mouth and shrieks. Never before has she challenged her husband , but this time she has no choice. She must think about the child floating inside her, and if she remains here, she will surely die. This she knows with as much certainty as she knows that the sun will rise again in the morning. Hampus tries to reprimand his wife and remind her of her place, but Anna startles everyone by having such a fitthat she has to spend several days in bed, and the doctor fears she may lose the child. Upon hearing this, Hampus relents. He cannot take Anna with him into the wilds, but he can take her to Kodiak Island.
It was on this island that the former governor had a villa constructed. In size and splendour, it bears no comparison with Kekoor Castle, but still Anna feels like a schoolgirl on holiday. She takes walks, goes outdoors for the first time in months and picks flowers on the hillsides in all imaginable colours. In addition to their own entourage, there are only a handful of fishermen on the island at most. Here there is no need to fear the Indians and she has no social duties, so she can spend long, perfect sunny days with Hampus and take little Annie out into the meadows. The girl examines the moss, the pebbles, and Anna watches Hampus scoop his daughter into his arms. He seems to like the girl more with every passing day.
They take Constance with them too. She seems peeved, reluctant to leave the collection behind, but when have they ever asked her opinion before, and she packs her few belongings and steps aboard the ship with a scowl. The island has its benefits, however. There are no social circles from which she needs to be hidden away, and she can wander outdoors to her heart’s content, as long as she takes one of the servants with her in case she has a seizure. She goes out into the woods and tries to identify different species but finds it hard to see any similarity between her birds and the restless creatures fluttering in the trees.
Hampus spends a few happy days with them on the island, but then it is time for him to leave, and Anna notices that it iseasier to cope with their separation here than at home. In a place like this, even longing assumes a romantic glow, and her sadness is tinged with a wistful pleasure. She is like the protagonist in a novel, pining for her beloved in the wilderness, surrounded by flowers, only now she has a child in tow. Annie is learning to speak, starting to call her mother, and Anna tries to believe that she might mean it after all.
On the island, even Constance seems a little easier to tolerate. In the evenings, they drink tea together on the veranda, the wind blowing in across the sea keeps the gnats away, and Anna chats to her sister-in-law. Constance’s mind is damaged, sensible conversation is beyond her, but she certainly knows how to listen, and Anna can speak without having to guard her words – for who could a mute girl who only talks of skins and dead animals possibly tell about what she has heard? And on the evenings when Constance is in pain and does not join her, Anna feels surprisingly upset and lashes out at the servants.
The child in Anna’s womb is growing, and Constance watches her changing body with fascination. In her room, she reads about mammals, she imagines the placenta and the two separate blood flows inside Anna, and when the time finally comes, she asks to be present at the birth. To her surprise, Anna agrees. As the contractions come and go, Anna grips Constance’s hand and asks her to pray with her, and Constance prays and thanks the Lord that she has never known a man. Mammals have a tough lot: ruptured membranes, torn muscles, and blood. If she could decide, she would choose rhizomes, spores and pollination, but their lot is tough too, and she looks on as Anna pushes thechild from inside her. The midwife swaddles the tiny, bloodied creature and hands it to Constance; she looks at Anna, startled, but Anna does not forbid her, just nods and drifts into sleep.
Soon after the boy’s birth, Hampus returns from his excursion and takes the women home. Constance is happy to get back to her collections, but Anna feels like a prisoner stepping into a cell to resume a sentence. On the island, everything had gone as she had planned. This time the milk comes naturally and she feeds her son by herself, happy and proud. Otto Edvin is a lively, chubby baby, but Anna is worried that the fumes of Sitka may yet ruin her happiness, and she shuts herself away in the nursery and feeds her son until her nipples bleed.
Hampus summons Anna and Constance into his study. This is not out of the ordinary, sometimes he is keen to show them the items he has brought back from his trips – skins and Indian handicrafts, animals carved from bones that he brings as gifts for the children – but invitations to the study have been less frequent of late. Hampus has many things on his mind. British troops are massing in Canada, and the memory of their losses in the Crimea is still fresh. If the British decide to invade Alaska, it is far from certain that they will be able to defend the territory, and in St Petersburg there is even talk of selling off some of the empire’s overseas colonies. Would it not be better to extract payment for them than to lose them by force? But Hampus isreluctant. Is his fate really to become the last governor of Alaska, the man after whose tenure the colony ceased to exist? He is keen to avoid such a humiliation, and to this end he pens letters beseeching his superiors, he will open mines and harbours, anything to turn their finances around.
Hampus invites his brother to head up the mining project, but this proves to be a grave mistake. Hjalmar takes after their father. He has grand notions and ideas, he writes clumsy poems exalting the natives and the majestic Alaskan landscape, he visits Indian villages and criticises the colony’s activities – the Company has stolen this land from the savages, put them to work, then taken their innocence too, plundered their beautiful, Edenic environment. The natives refuse to work underground, and Hjalmar is forced to pay them a very handsome wage, yet when the first cart of coal is hauled up to the earth’s surface, the disappointment is immense. The coal is of such low quality that they end up selling it at a loss, and eventually word reaches the governor: a delegation has been sent from St Petersburg to draw up an impartial assessment of the state of the colony. Hampus had hoped to be able to show his superiors a flourishing mining industry, but now he is terrified. What can he show them but ice and the gradually depleting forests?
In his sheer gawkishness, Hjalmar almost rivals Constance. To Anna’s horror, her brother-in-law returns from one of his trips with a child, a small Yupik girl that he says he has adopted. Hjalmar claims to have saved the girl, explains that the tribe was planning to sacrifice her to their ancient gods, but it later transpires that he bought her from her parents in exchangefor alcohol and gunpowder. Hampus is furious. Selling liquor and weapons to the Indians is strictly forbidden on pain of exile – how can he tell the others to obey the rules if his own brother cares not a jot for them? But Hjalmar simply laughs. He names the girl Aino Giulyanima, a double-barrelled moniker combining names from the Finnish and the Yupik traditions, for alongside his admiration of the Yupik, he has national-romantic stirrings in his breast, he admires the humble, resilient Finnish people and their ancient, sinewy language. Hjalmar parades around Kekoor Castle with the girl in tow, just as Anna has finally got rid of Annie’s wetnurse – and not a moment too soon. Annie had started talking about spirits living in rocks and trees, and using soft, foreign words, though Anna had stressed that the wetnurse should not speak her own language to the girl. The woman simply had to go, but Annie has already picked up bad influences, and now she cries after her wetnurse, wails and sputters until her cheeks are covered in snot, and she is indifferent to her mother’s arms but throws her toys around instead. Day after day, the wetnurse appears at their door, begging to see the child, until eventually they have to instruct the guards to keep her away from the town. Anna decides not to tell Hampus about any of this but instead proudly informs him that Annie has learned to locate Paris on the map.
Hjalmar suggests that Annie and Aino Giulyanima might play together, and Anna is at a loss. She does not want Annie to play with a heathen, and wicked tongues are already whispering that the native girl is in fact Hjalmar’s bastard child, a half-caste brat born out of wedlock, here under their very roof. Anna takesto marvelling at how good-hearted Hjalmar is to take in this unknown girl and raise her as his own, though she knows very well what people are saying around the town.
Weeks have passed since their last invitation to the study, but today Hampus asks the women to join him. As they step inside, he can hardly conceal his glee. Several boxes stand piled up on the floor. Hampus asks Anna to choose one of them, which she does, then he tells her to open the lid. The room is filled with the smell of sawdust and seaweed. Hampus takes a bone out of the box, a triangular chunk of an animal, half a cubit wide. It is so heavy that he has to lift it with both hands, and he asks Anna and Constance to guess which animal it is from, then sets it to rest and picks up the skull without waiting for an answer. It is a peculiar head, one that does not resemble any of the other skulls in their collections, it is not long like that of a seal, a whale or a porpoise; this one is sturdy and has a wide brow. Its muzzle resembles a bird’s beak, and right in the middle there is wide, smooth-edged hole. Hampus holds the skull in his hands as gently as if it were his own child, and suddenly Constance realises what it is.
The sea cow’s skeleton was discovered by two Aleuts. We know nothing more about them because nobody thought to write down their names. The governor sent men to look for gold and coal, and in the hope of uncovering precious minerals he tellsthem to begin mining on the Aleutians’ own islands too. Now seal hunters can earn an extra income by bringing back rock samples, and the men set off. They row out to the furthest tip of the chain of islands and come ashore on the same island as Steller and his comrades did over a century earlier. In their language, they had a name for this island long before anyone in Russia had ever thought of locating the remote coast of America, but that name is nowhere to be found on maps or in the annals of history, so let us simply note that these two mineral hunters arrived at Bering Island.
They come ashore on the same island as Bering and Steller, but the island they discover is no longer the same as it once was. The species living there have changed altogether. The shores and hillsides have been purged of mammals, and what was once the blue foxes’ island is now the birds’ island. And of those, the largest is gone too, the fifteen-pound spectacled cormorant – an impressive, black bird that had given up its ability to fly and concentrated instead on developing hydrodynamics suited to life at sea. It was a large and irascible creature that the foxes left well alone – why fight with a giant when the gull and ptarmigan fledglings made easy pickings on the hillsides – and when theSt Peterfirst arrived, the spectacled cormorants, with their wingspan of more than three feet, dotted the craggy rock faces like ominous seamarks.
To its great misfortune, the spectacled cormorant was also delicious. Steller mentioned that some of his crew members were particularly partial to its meat. They would fight most ferociously over nesting grounds on the crags, and the moreinexperienced birds were forced to build their nests on the shore, and if one could get between the cormorant and the sea, it was easy prey. In the water, the creature moved with exceptional speed, but on the ground, this nimble bird became slow and clumsy and quickly found itself roasting above an open fire. Their flesh was palatable to the fur hunters too, and they had no need to spare their bullets, and before long the penguin of the Bering Sea had been eaten to extinction.
Now different birds populate these same crags. As the mineral hunters row closer to the shore, the emperor goose, the northern shoveler and Steller’s eider flap up into the air, and as the men pull their kayaks from the water, they happen upon the pits dug by Bering’s expedition. Rain has collapsed their walls, grass has sprung up at the bottom, and soon afterwards, the wind and the sea will fill them with sand and gravel, but as these men arrive, they can still make out the deep, grave-like depressions in the shoreline. However, these men are not interested in the pits but in the cliffs, and they gaze up at the hillsides and look for any points where the rock changes colour.
Closer to the mainland, seals too are now few and far between, but here they laze along the shoreline in large herds. The cream-coloured hide of the northern fur seal makes beautiful shoes and clothes, and the men spend their time hunting them, skinning them, and chiselling samples from the rocks. In aniqyaxmade from stretched seal hide, they can canoe into coves that previous fur hunters could not reach in vessels with deeper draughts, and in the shallow waters of one of the bays a promising sight awaits them. A long, red-brown streak runs thelength of the dark grey rockface. Red can be a sign of iron, so they haul their kayaks out of the water, but a surprise is waiting for them on the shore. At the foot of the hillside is a large rock, a boulder dislodged by an earthquake, and behind that they make out the shape of a boat. The vessel was clearly dragged behind the boulder to protect it from the elements, but it is apparent that it has rested here for a very long time. Its upturned hull has given way, and the rain has left its frame full of holes. A strange sight in a strange place – why would anyone leave a boat on a shore covered in gull droppings? – but as they come closer, they realise that the shape they see is not the work of human hands.
They make out the curve of a rib cage protruding from the rocky ground. The ribs form a vault rising out of the sand, but the spine, limbs and skull have long been buried underground. It is a curious sight. The men have skinned a walrus and cut a whale to pieces, but the creature lying before them is neither a walrus nor a whale. Hope flickers to life. Could this be the kelp-eater that the governor is looking for? They know about the sea cow, for though no living man has ever seen one with his own eyes, they have heard their grandparents’ old stories. Hunting the sea cow was so easy that the creature was even dubbed “women’s prey”. The Aleuts did not need harpoons because they knew the sea cow’s behaviour, they knew that in stormy weather it moved into shallower waters, and when the winds whipped up, all the hunters had to do was pick up their spears and wade out to the creatures huddling against the rocks.
Not only was it easy to kill, the sea cow made an excellent catch. Its hide was big enough to make a kayak twenty feet longand seven and a half feet wide, with enough room for twelve men, and all those who ate its liver gained incredible powers. This particular specimen could no longer be eaten, but with the bounty the governor had promised, they would be able to buy all the delicacies they could ever dream of. The men fall to their knees and start digging.
The sand retreats to reveal the large, thick bones and the sea cow’s rugged skull. Yes, this is indeed the kelp-eater, the king of all marine animals, which the governor is so keen to get his hands on. And now the slow, painstaking work begins. They must dig up the bones, but the ground is hard and rocky. They dig at the earth, the sand eats into their fingers and cracks their nails, and they have to soak their aching hands in a stream running down the hillside, but they do not complain, just continue working. They know how an animal is constructed, how to look for bones that have been buried under the sand and mud. After pulling back the sand to reveal the animal in all its splendour, they cannot believe their luck. Everything is intact, every piece of the sea cow, just waiting to be discovered, there among the rocks.
