Or rather, almost everything. The only bones they cannot find are the palms and the fingers, but otherwise it’s all there, the whole creature there on the rocky shore, and they begin their journey back to Sitka. Their progress is slow. The sea cow’s bones are large and long, and they cannot carry all of them at once, but have to row back and forth, one island at a time, slowly transporting the bones along the narrow chain of outcrops, until eventually they catch sight of the town squashed between thesea and the mountains. They seek out an official and ask him to inform the governor that they have what he has asked for.
The official instructs them to leave the bones at the harbour offices. The governor is busy, but he will be informed of this find. However, the men know the Company too well and have brought only the skull. The rest they will deliver only upon receipt of payment, and in this they were very wise indeed. Money and the natives, two concepts that in the minds of the officials do not belong together, but the governor has given explicit instructions regarding the matter: anyone claiming to be in possession of the bones of a sea cow is to be taken directly to the taxidermist. Eventually, the official relents and tells them to speak to Wolff.
The men knock on the taxidermist’s door, but it is early in the morning. The sun has just risen across the bay, Wolff is still asleep, and the men must knock for a long while before he wrenches the door open and tells them to go to hell. But when he sees what these men have brought him, his slumber vanishes in an instant.
Wolff examines the skeleton and writes up his findings: forty-seven vertebrae, nineteen pairs of ribs, a sternum and a set of shoulder blades, but his hands are trembling, as the governor has been at pains to stress this creature’s immeasurable value. Wolff is used to handling birds and deer, but now he has before him abeing of whose form he has only a faint understanding, a vague idea of a large, rotund marine animal. He has been ordered to clean the bones and number them. Von Nordmann will have his sea cow, but before that the governor intends to present this rarity to the delegation arriving from St Petersburg, to demonstrate the kind of wonders that this corner of the world still holds.
The delegation will be here soon, leaving Wolff too little time to reconstruct the skeleton in full, but perhaps they can present only the skull, and Wolff gives a decisive nod, though in truth he is hesitant. He knows how to remove a hide from around a body, to stuff it with rags and sawdust to simulate real muscles, but skeletons are not his forte. The remains of the sea cow are old and fragile, this is a very different proposition from bones pulled still moist from a stag. Seagulls, crabs and insects have eaten away the flesh and broken down the cartilage and tendons, while algae, time and the weather have darkened the bones’ surface. He must clean them, but he is afraid that they might not survive boiling, and he does not have enough phosphoric acid to bleach them all. He is at a loss, but he knows that if he were to make a single mistake, his wages would not be enough to cover the damage. Here there is no university whose library he can turn to for advice, no master from whom to learn the proper techniques, and he turns the bones in his hands and curses. Never has he longed for the Tierra del Fuego as much as he does right now.
Wolff scrubs the bones with a small brush dipped in water, going over them an inch at a time. He scrapes grains of sand and flecks of algae from the nooks and furrows worn into thebones’ surface and cleans them as best he can, but his skills are limited. He knows how to make a deer’s bones as white as Greek statues, but these remain darkened though he rubs them until his muscles ache. And his woes do not end there. Usually, he puts the animals together in his workshop on the outskirts of the town, but the governor will not allow the sea cow to leave Kekoor Castle. Many people would like to get their hands on its bones; Wolff too could use the skeleton to finance his next expedition, he could hire an assistant and still have enough money for a life of luxury. The governor trusts no-one, and suspects that the officials and servants will steal from him the minute he looks away, so Wolff is forced to work in Kekoor Castle, where, on top of everything else, he must put up with the governor’s sister.
Wolff had imagined that Constance would make way for him, would leave the collection to his care and retire to her room the way a respectable spinster should, but in this he realises he was mistaken. Constance makes sure that he is unable to spend a single moment in the collection without her. She makes sure that she’s there to meet him, no matter how early or late he arrives, and has instructed the servants to inform her every time the taxidermist’s dishevelled figure begins walking up the steps to the castle. At first, she thought she would be able to continue her work regardless of him, dusting off the animals as though she were still alone, but she finds the sea cow an alluring distraction. If she must put up with Wolff from one day to the next, she might as well make the most of the inconvenience, and she sets her duster and pieces of paper aside and crouchesdown, picks up a shoulder blade and caresses its surface. She can tell that Wolff would dearly love to forbid her from doing so, but he does not.
Constance runs her fingers along the edge of the bone. She tries to imagine what this creature might have looked like while it was still breathing, but she finds it hard to form an image of a living being from the pile of bones on the floor, so she asks Wolff to find her a picture. But there is only one clumsy sketch of the sea cow in existence, hidden in the pages of Peter Simon Pallas’sZoographia Rosso-Asiatica. Pallas is remembered as the first to depict the notion of one creature descending from another as a tree of all known life, and his works presented the world with a total of 220 new species of plant, forty-five previously unseen mammals and seventy-eight new birds, the marvels of the Russian Empire, but Constance flicks impatiently through its pages; today she has no interest in birds or shrews.
Pallas’s illustrator is talented indeed. He has drawn the animals skilfully, coloured them in clear, bright shades, but the drawing of the sea cow is very different from the rest. In fact, the difference is so great that it is clear it was drawn by someone else entirely – someone who was not accustomed to producing anatomical drawings. The sea cow has been sketched in nothing but a few trembling lines. The image does not even attempt to conjure up the idea of a creature in its natural habitat, the artist has not tried to create a sense of motion and spirit but has simply depicted his subject objectively in profile and left the sketch uncoloured so that the animal’s contours are filled only with the cream of the parchment.
It has been suggested that the image reproduced in Pallas’s book is by none other than Plenisner, a topographer on Bering’s expedition. Perhaps he sketched the animal in the margins of his report for his own amusement, to remind himself of the creature, but his life-drawing was destined to become the one and only eyewitness sketch of the sea cow to survive to this day. The others were abandoned on the island and lost, left to rot along with Steller’s samples, but the topographer’s reports were packed for the return journey. It is in among these papers that the image of the sea cow finds its way to St Petersburg, and a century later Pallas, now elevated to the role of professor, publishes it in his own opus.
After this, a great many images of the sea cow are sketched, painted and modelled, images whose artistic merit exceeds Plenisner’s jittery pencil strokes, but these have all been completed after the fact, without seeing the creature in the flesh, compiled using only skeletons and the imagination. The fur hunters did not have an artist with them, so the only immortalisation of the sea cow is the topographer’s simple drawing in which it resembles a confused potato with a fish’s tail.
Constance has at her disposal a figure sketched with a few pencil lines and a set of bones, and she must imagine the rest, but she needs more information to guide her imagination. She wants to learn, and she is thrilled at how thoroughly shocking Wolff finds the idea. She wants to learn the bones’ names, to understand the strictures and structures hidden beneath feathers and skin, she wants to hear how guts are removed from a body, eyes from a skull. She wants to know how the seacow is put together. Wolff is forced to introduce the governor’s sister to an animal about which he knows nothing, and all the while she uses him like a dictionary. What is this bone, and that one, and Wolff sighs and thinks of the statue he once saw in a museum when such diversions were within easy reach. He does not usually care for the arts, but that sculpture spoke to him. He stood in front of it and looked on as demure, bare-chested creation revealed itself to the watchful eyes of science, undressing humbly but without shame. Nature’s cloak was fashioned from beige marble, her fulsome breasts from even whiter stone, and as he gazed upon it, Wolff understood his calling: the slow, thrilling unveiling of nature’s secrets. And now this imbecilic woman wants to unveil it with him! There is something untoward about it, something lewd, a woman undressing another woman, but he cannot refuse, she might complain to her brother the governor, and so Wolff meekly obeys but makes his displeasure plain for all to see.
The sea cow briefly cheers Hampus up. The bones that the Aleuts brought back are a rare piece of good news, and in the evening he joins his family for the first time in a long while. He asks Anna to report on the children: has Annie been behaving, is Otto Edvin’s cough improving? Constance comes down to the salon too, and Anna notices how pleased she is to see her sister-in-law. She hardly sees Constance in Sitka, and if it weren’t impossible she might imagine herself actually missing her company. She is worried about Hampus. He has begun to suffer from headaches, terrible migraines that make his eyeswater and banish sleep and badly needed rest, and at nights Anna lies in bed listening to her husband dragging himself around his study, pacing in a circle like a restless animal. Meanwhile, Constance simply hides herself away with her collection and would rather stare at the bones of a marine mammal than support Anna in her tribulations.
Today, Hampus reads to his family. There are rumours that gold ore has been located in the north, and now he is obsessed with minerals and rocks. He reads from Chambers’ geological treatise and enlightens his family regarding the structure and history of the Earth’s crust. Anna cannot remember the last time she lost herself in a book. Before coming to Alaska, she used to spend her days reading, but nowadays she can manage no more than a few lines from the Bible or a recipe in a cookbook. As lady of the house, she has no time for novels, and she prays that the children will not inherit her love of music and poetry. A constant, practical mind would be best: a person with such a mind will not suffer upon ending up in a place like this.
Anna has never considered rocks. To her they are dead objects, they are already fully formed and, as such, unchanging, but Hampus reads aloud, Anna listens to Chambers’ words, and the geologist shows them how even the smallest pebble in the garden reveals a story of great change. The minerals layered one upon another inside the stone tell of upheavals and cooling magma, of continents pushing against one another and of periods whose sheer length shrinks a human life into insignificance. Anna listens and pictures the animals and plants in their rocky graves, wing bones and the ribs of leaves preservedin layers of sediment as they are pressed deeper and deeper into the earth. She thinks of the dinosaurs she saw at the Crystal Palace, and for the first time she senses why Constance enjoys spending her time surrounded by dead animals, consumed with her catalogues. If so much can be contained within a mere rock, imagine how much must be hidden within a once living creature, a deer or a duck.
Hampus cannot remember the last time he succeeded in anything, but now the bones of the sea cow have found their way to him, and he is filled with a renewed sense of energy and purpose. He has found a lost animal, succeeded in an endeavour many had thought was doomed to failure, so why should he not succeed again? Perhaps the colony can yet be saved, if only he tries hard enough, works hard enough. He intends to present the sea cow to the delegation, for is its discovery not an indication that, given enough time and resources, he is capable of even the most demanding tasks?
He summons Wolff. He needs proper scientific evidence to enhance his presentation, and to this end he has asked the taxidermist to gather information about the sea cow. Wolff steps hesitantly into the study. He can tell that what he knows will not please the governor, but he does as he is told and puts together everything he has learned.
The illustrious Peter Simon Pallas added his description of the sea cow to the list of species found within the empire, though he hesitated to do so. The sea cow had not been seen for almost a century, so Pallas sent his young colleague Martin Sauer in search of these lost mammals. Sauer sailed the northern seasfor almost a decade, but even he could not find the sea cows’ famed island. Eventually, Sauer reached a grim conclusion: the fur hunters have brought the sea cow to an end. Upon hearing this, the governor is taken aback. Wolff is silent and glances furtively around, but Furuhjelm implores him to continue, and Wolff hurriedly adds how ludicrous he thinks such a claim to be. The governor may take comfort in the fact that Pallas did not believe his assistant either. The scope of hisZoographiareflects the scope of the empire, its list of species the empire’s grandeur, therefore how could he possibly suggest that the greatest of the animals depicted in his work has been eradicated by the actions of the empire itself? This is a story that Pallas did not wish to tell, so he added the sea cow to the pages of his work and told Sauer to hold his tongue.
However, Sauer did not hold his tongue but published an account of his travels, and inspired by this, theEncyclopaedia Britannicadared to print the contested hypothesis that the sea cow had indeed become extinct. It is an extraordinary assertion – that man could be to other species as great a threat as an asteroid or a flood – and when he sees the governor’s expression, Wolff stresses that researchers are far from agreed on the matter. In fact, the eminent dinosaur scholar Richard Owens himself refutes the claim as utter nonsense: the account of one incompetent assistant is not enough to upend our understanding of life and death, of man and beast. The governor nods: hardly a coincidence that it was the British who came up with such a claim, they are always more than eager to cast our colony in a bad light, and Wolff laughs along with him.
Furuhjelm thanks the taxidermist for his report, but Wolff does not yet take his leave and remains standing in the study, nervously fidgeting. Furuhjelm is filled with an ominous foreboding. Is there still something he should know about the matter? Wolff curses to himself. Why is he the one who must bring the governor such bad tidings? Why is he not leading an expedition in the Tierra del Fuego, but instead standing in this stuffy study like a schoolboy brought before his master? He pulls himself together and spits it out: Sauer did not hold his tongue, and now he is suggesting that the next creature to meet the fate of the sea cow will be the otter.
Furuhjelm waits until the taxidermist’s footsteps have faded down the stairs and holds his head in his hands. As Wolff was speaking, that familiar tingling returned to his temples. Now the pain is throbbing behind his eyes and for a moment he gasps for air like a dying fish. He has sent men to seek out the otters, forced them to scour ever more distant coastlines, ever more inhospitable wilderness, but they have always returned empty-handed, and now he no longer knows where to search, what to do. All he can do is pray that Sauer is mistaken. Did not Linnaeus himself once write that animals are like the tide, at times in short supply in any given place, at others plentiful, but that ultimately the population is stable? This must be true, for if the otters and the walruses do not return, their colony will be doomed.
Wolff eventually completes his work. The sea cow’s bones have all been measured, cleaned and catalogued. Finally, he can return to his workshop, his birds and pine martens, their familiar bones and hides, forms that he knows and understands. Wolff asks Constance to inform her brother that his wishes have been fulfilled, then he rushes off. He wants to get as far away from Constance and the beast she guards so closely as he can, and heads to the tavern for a well-earned drink.
Constance slumps. She was keen not to show Wolff quite how exhausted she was or how great an effort it required to come to the workshop on bad days when her body was crying out for darkness and sleep, but now she has finally got her collection back, finer than ever before. Von Nordmann will get his sea cow, but until the arrival of the delegation, it will remain here for their amusement. Hampus has asked the carpenter to construct a plinth, and Constance arranges the bones on top of it. The plinth is positioned in the middle of the room so that the other animals look as though they have gathered round the sea cow to admire it, and Constance fetches the collection catalogue and adds the great mammal to the list, writing its name in Swedish, Russian and Latin, careful not to smudge the ink, and in doing so she experiences something warm and heavy, something for which she does not have a name.
She opens the glass cabinets, takes the birds and mammals from their shelves one at a time, first the water birds, the gulls, swans and geese, and only then notices her cold sweat. She is not even close to the mammals. Bad days, one after the other. She closes her eyes and continues, the surf scoter and theblue-winged teal, then the birds of prey, but then she senses a metallic taste on her tongue. She leaves the birds and heads straight for the sea cow, wipes the pock marks gathering dust on the skull.
A servant wakes Anna in the night. One word, Constance, and Anna knows. A massive fit has befallen her, and Anna wraps a shawl around her shoulders and hurries to her sister-in-law’s side. The sight is every bit as horrific as she had feared. The spasms seem almost to rip her limbs from their sockets, her mouth is frothing, but Anna holds her sister-in-law’s head, and her hands are neither sweating nor trembling. She does not know where her fear has gone, but there’s no trace of it; when Constance loses consciousness, Anna drops water into her mouth with a spoon, and as the terrified doctor prepares to perform the bloodletting, Anna rolls up her sleeves. She keeps watch over Constance, but Hampus cannot bear to see his sister like this and heads into town, telling them that he will not return until later that evening or perhaps even the following morning. Anna kisses Constance’s sweaty brow, sings and prays and feels the girl’s racing pulse in her fingertips. The doctor lets her blood again. Constance’s lips turn blue, her hands become cold, and in the early morning her life comes to an end.
Anna does not abandon Constance to Sitka’s austere, sodden graveyard and the stink of rotting crosses riddled with mould.No, Constance will be buried somewhere beautiful, lowered into a rich, green grove in the shade of the willows. It is so early in the spring that they cannot find any flowers for the grave, but Anna fills the vases with branches, and when given water they sprout tiny leaves, and they place the branches under Constance’s head.
Two weeks have passed, but Anna still sees her sister-in-law, still hears her footsteps behind the closed door of the collection, and she orders a wrought-iron fence to be erected around the grave. At first, she plans to lock the gate – she does not want the Indians to visit the grave and incant their godless words, sing of a raven that flies between the realms of the living and the dead, but she begins to wonder whether the thought of a soul bird might please Constance, her strange, wondrous sister-in-law. She leaves the gate open and weeps for the woman who was always in her way, but who leaves behind an endless grief now that she is gone.
Though it is midday, the sky is dim. The sun only barely squeezes between the cloud curtain, and they have had to light the lamps first thing in the morning. Twelve days of unrelenting rain, and Governor Johan Hampus Furuhjelm is standing amid his zoological collection. He has just bidden farewell to the delegation, and all he was able to show the inspectors was a crumbling village in decline and forests devoid of animals. Their reportwill be damning. He spoke truthfully, presented all the correct figures, though he knows this will not give a favourable impression of his tenure. He also explained that there are rumours that gold has been discovered in the north and says that he believes the earth still contains unknown riches, that one can learn to live alongside the natives. He even suggested that they could commandeer Alaska’s great woodlands, start foresting and shipping timber to America, but in St Petersburg people are tired of the colony’s constant demands and dwindling returns. The governor stands amid his collection and looks at the sea cow. In the yellow light of the lamp, the creature appears to shimmer quietly, and he places a hand on its forehead and strokes it. So much promise – a creature that was supposed to feed Siberia, a colony that was supposed to produce endless riches – and all that is left of both are some tall tales and a skeleton.
Anna has already ordered clothes for the children for their return journey. She is finally going home where she can live the life she has always dreamed of: five children, a beautiful manor house, and an enviable societal position.
She dies at the respectable age of fifty-eight, surrounded by family and friends, and in that same year Kekoor Castle burns to the ground, taking the governate’s collection with it.
