It is clear there is no way Steller can preserve the sea cow’s hide intact. This would require many barrels of strong preserving solution, and he has neither arsenic nor lye, but he can preserve the skeleton. He gets to work. Now he must make do without his assistants, he has run out of tobacco, and the men decline his requests for help, politely but firmly. The work progresses more slowly by himself, and Waxell berates him. Steller should be helping the crew in their shared endeavours, but instead he spends his days scraping the sea cow’s bones clean. No matter: there is no longer any discussion to be had. Khitrov gives Waxell a knowing glance, but the lieutenant lets the naturalist be. Steller helped when they were ill, taught them how to dig pits in the ground to provide shelter, and when all hope seemed lost, he sang for them around the fire. Now that the threat of imminent death has passed, he can be afforded a certain level of eccentricity, and though the men scoff at Steller’s work, their taunts are mild, and they chide him the way they would a child or an unruly dog.
Cleaning the sea cow’s bones is slow, arduous work, and in an attempt to forget about the impudent seagulls and his aching limbs, Steller starts talking. He begins by explaining the process for preparing arsenic soap. He severs the tendons and recitesLinnaeus’s system, scoops out the contents of the skull and cleans it, all the while describing the species he has discovered, and as he cleans the bones of their cartilage with an infuriatingly blunt knife, he tells the sea cow all about the different seaweeds and minerals, the anatomy of seals, the migratory routes of whales, about the seeding of hay and how Arctic cisco swim upstream to lay their eggs. He tells the sea cow about their journey, about the drinking water that turned murky and their comrades decomposing in the hold, about his childhood in Windsheim and his wife, the ravens, and everything he would like to say to Toma Lepekhin. He explains to the sea cow why it had to sacrifice its life and assures it that one day it will be the greatest attraction at the imperial Academy. The sea cow listens, and some days it even answers him.
Steller makes several mistakes. He forgets to number the vertebrae, and now ordering them correctly proves a slow, vexing task. The foxes and seagulls scavenge around the carcass, trying to pinch the smaller bones, and these Steller decides to store at the camp, a decision that is not met with universal approval by the crew. The bones remind them of the men shedding their flesh under makeshift crosses only a few hundred feet from the camp. They would rather not think about the dead, and they are worried about the bodies they threw overboard on the night of the shipwreck too. If such a thing does not bring about restless souls, then surely nothing will, and though Waxell has forbidden all ghost stories, he cannot stop the men whispering around the campfire, cannot stop them making the sign of thecross when the foxes howl in heat further up the hillside. Steller is instructed to keep the bones out of sight, and duly hides them under a tarpaulin, he mutters his objections but obeys all the same, and while the others are asleep, he gropes in the dark for the sea cow’s skull and runs his hand along the slanted curvature of its crown.
He falls asleep with the skull in his arms, then snaps wide awake. For a moment, he flails in terror, fumbles through the air until he finds the skull wrapped under his shirt, and his eyes meet Toma Lepekhin’s disapproving gaze. Surely Adjunct Steller doesn’t want the others to see him caressing the dead? Steller nods, quietly thanks him.
The vertebrae of the neck, the breast, the hip and the tail lie on the beach in a neat line. He has taken the sea cow apart, and by now he has long since forgotten his birds destroyed by the seawater. Now he has this beguiling, miraculous specimen, and when they see it, the learned men of the Academy will surely grant him a bursary for another expedition. Next time, he will do everything correctly, he will be properly prepared and will lead the expedition himself, he will take Toma Lepekhin with him and all the best scientific minds from the Academy.
Lepekhin asks Steller to join him hunting birds, and Steller agrees. On the hillside, he can collect plants and minerals, and the two spend the day wandering across the hills and gathering ptarmigans’ eggs. The white-breasted males waddle, honking, infront of them, trying to attract the men’s attention, but Lepekhin knows their tactics, knows how to find the females hiding in their nests of moss with the dappled eggs they are protecting.
The two light a fire and eat ptarmigan eggs fried in sea-cow blubber. The grass rustles in the wind, and everything smells of smoke and the sea. At moments like this, they even wonder whether it would be so bad after all if they were to be forgotten here on this shore and never make their way back to the mainland, where responsibilities and the rule of man await them. Neither says this out loud, but it is there in their movements, the way they raise their cups, as if they long for nothing.
They row enough wood back from the shipwreck to build several boats, but their main obstacle is not a lack of materials but of expertise. They piece together their ship by guesswork, one plank at a time, and as they work, the fledglings hatch from their shells, in the coves the sea cows give birth to new, chubby young, and Waxell urges his men to hurry. They snap the old mast of theSt Peterand shorten it to make it suitable for the new vessel, they burn off the tar from the old ropes and sew new, smaller sails. The prospect of home inches closer, but the lieutenant is afraid they will run out of time. He believes he can smell the approach of autumnal storms in the air, and with worry in his heart he looks on as the fledglings take flight and begin circling the island.
By August, the new ship is ready. A hooker measuring approximately forty-two feet, with no guarantee that it is even seaworthy.The time has come to give it a name. An unnamed ship is a bad omen, and on this journey they will need all the luck and good fortune they can muster. Someone suggests they name the ship after the Tzarina, then after the captain commander, but eventually it is named theHooker St Peter. As St Peter brought them to this island in the first place, perhaps he can help them leave it too, and the men lower their heads and pray to the guardian of the keys of Heaven to protect their ramshackle vessel.
At first they had envisaged themselves sailing home with all their pelts, rising from the dead as rich men, but they have only forty-two feet to accommodate forty-six men. They can only take absolute essentials with them, and none of them is as shocked to hear this as Steller. He has been pressing flowers, collecting seeds, bones and rocks, he has cleaned the invaluable skeleton of the sea cow; surely, they must make an exception for him! But Waxell asks Steller to look at the vessel, to imagine how it will fit forty-six men, as well as the provisions and water they will need, then to tell him where exactly he thinks they will be able to store a skeleton the length of three men and the width of a rowing boat and which, furthermore, they cannot eat. Steller knows he is in the wrong, but he cannot help complaining, and spends a full day and night sulking on the rocks by the shore, but Waxell’s mind is made up. Steller will be allowed to take only his notes and the pipe he fashioned from a bird’s bone.
On the morning of the eleventh day of August, the wind is gentle and the sea calm. They cook all the leftover food andprepare for the meagre days at sea by eating their fill. They light a large fire, eat sea cow and ptarmigan, and sing together. Nobody speaks of tomorrow. It is every bit as likely that they will not reach land as it is that they will be saved, but tonight none of that matters. Tonight they will play cards, feast on sea cow and worry only about the here and now.
The others are wolfing down their food and celebrating, but Steller leaves the group. Toma Lepekhin looks at him with quizzical eyes, but the naturalist shakes his head, and the Cossack sits back down and takes another portion of dried peas and sea cow. Steller approaches the skeleton, pulls back the tarpaulin and assesses his handiwork. His most significant discovery, a creature of which no-one has ever seen the like, that even the wildest bestiaries could never have imagined, and all he will have to show for it are the words in his notebook. He stomps off, without even bothering to cover the bones again. What use would it be? Once they have left, the foxes will pull them out, scatter them across the sands and take them back to their dens for their young to gnaw upon, and when he returns to the camp, Steller sits quietly and refuses to sing, though they implore him.
On the morning of the thirteenth day of August, they put their ship out to sea. Only now do they realise quite how cramped it is. They have to sit and lie in shifts, and on top of this, their ship leaks, not enough to sink it but enough to make their conditions miserable. When they see water gathering at the bottom of the ship, some of the men take fright and wish to remain onthe shore, ask the rest of the crew to send a rescue party if they survive the journey, but Khitrov bellows at them to hold their tongues. On the island, he took a step back, but at sea the old rules apply once again. The Tzarina’s law is in force, and all those who oppose him will be guilty of mutiny.
The ship leaves the shore, and the foxes come down from the hillside. At first they skulk around, cautiously, then more brazenly, as they notice that not a single weapon is fired at them, and the men watch as the foxes occupy their camp. They play with one another, running around with otter skins in their jaws and digging in the ashes of the fire, but the men no longer pay them any attention. Let the foxes have their island back, and they hoist the sails and glide along the edge of the island, and as they gaze upon the now familiar rocks, streams and beaches, they are overcome with a curious melancholy. This was their home for a full eleven months. They leave the foxes’ island in good health and bid it farewell sincerely, without bitterness.
On the eastern side of the island, they see a herd of sea cows floating in the grey waters. The adults are grazing and the young, plump from the summer months, are playing in among their parents, suckling milk from their mothers’ teats. The men sail past the herd and bid farewell to their mermaids, raise their arms and wave until the tip of the island hides the creatures from view, leaving them surrounded by nothing but open water, whipped by the rain.
On the twenty-seventh day of August, theHooker St Petersails into the harbour at Avacha Bay, where it is met by a crowd of bewildered onlookers. The crew has been away for sixteen months, but now these men, who had already been declared dead, have returned and are demanding their unpaid wages, causing the utmost administrative chaos. They plan to mend their ship in the harbour, fix the leaks, then sail across the Sea of Okhotsk to the mouth of the Okhota River, and from there they will continue to the capital on horseback. Waxell asks Steller to join him, but the naturalist refuses. He may have left his invaluable samples behind on the island, the foxes may have taken his bones, the rain pummelled his plants and the mud covered his minerals, but he can still make good use of the journey home. He plans to walk back through Siberia, all the way to St Petersburg.
He wishes to visit the delta of the Kolyma River, because there are rumours that explorers there have unearthed the bones of the great northern elephant. He once saw a tusk found in Siberia at the Academy. The older professors believe that it must have come from the body of the Behemoth described in the Book of Job, a creature whose tail is like a cedar, its bones like pipes of brass, yes, this must surely be the first of the ways of God.
Their discovery is not the only evidence of this beast. In Sicily, a group of villagers stumble upon the head of Polyphemus the Cyclops, an enormous skull with a giant hole in the middle of its forehead where once the monster’s one and only eye had been,and at Gray’s Inn Lane in London workmen strike their spades into the ground and dig up a puzzling, rough-edged tooth.
The tooth is bought by a naturalist by the name of Hans Sloane. His world-famous collections contain 71,000 artefacts, and it is from these that both the British Museum and London’s Natural History Museum are born. Sloane is fascinated by these wondrous discoveries and in time acquires more parts of this unknown creature for his collections. As he examines them, he gradually realises that the monstrous skull did not belong to a cyclops but to an enormous elephant: the great hole in the front of the head is not an eye socket but the point at which a nimble, fleshy trunk protruded, though this explanation is no less strange than if the Sicilians had indeed discovered the earthly remains of Poseidon’s son.
The bones of this curious elephant present naturalists with an unprecedented conundrum. Namely, the bones are in altogether the wrong places, smoggy London and the cold steppes of Siberia, though the present-day elephant prefers warmer climes. However, of these bones there can be no doubt whatsoever: this is a species of elephant unknown to science, one that can withstand the harsh Arctic conditions. It soon transpires that in Siberia the locals are very familiar with the bones of the giant northern elephant. The Mansi call this creaturema an’t, the earth horn, and in the mouths of the Russians this developed into the formmamant, mammoth. The peoples living along the banks of the Yenisey River do not believe that the bonesare bones at all but that they sprout from the earth like plants or mushrooms, whereas the Mansi know that the creature to which these bones once belonged lives deep within the earth, far beneath the human world, burrowing its way through the peat and soil and never coming to the surface. How else can we explain that far away on the steppes lives a giant animal that no-one wandering the plains has ever seen?
Every now and then, curiosity gets the better of these subterranean elephants, and they plough their way up to the surface. They yearn to sniff the fresh air and see the sun, but their curiosity is their undoing. Their slow, cold bodies cannot withstand the light and the warmth. Not one mammoth ever sees the tundra grasses swaying in the wind, for they die beneath the earth as they strive towards the surface that remains just out of reach, and on occasion the spade of a lucky peasant reveals the bones of an elephant that perished just below the surface. Spring is the best time to find these remains, when meltwaters swell the rivers until they breach their tall embankments. Then the earth may give up the frozen bones of the mammoth, and in one embankment a local merchant even uncovers an entire skeleton. It has been so well preserved that, as it thaws out, the animal starts to ooze blood, and the merchant cuts off the animal’s tongue and front leg and takes them with him. He claims that the giant northern elephant was covered in thick reddish fur, but researchers meet this suggestion with scepticism, and the merchant has no proof to back up his claim. His treasure cannot withstand the world above the surface: after cominginto contact with the light and the warmth, themamantrots and decomposes.
Siberian folklore has an ethnographic value of its own, but Steller dismisses the idea that an elephant could live underground; only worms live in the earth. However, an elephant might be able to dig a tunnel, to burrow its way into the embankment and make a den, but what would it live on deep inside the earth? No, the elephant is a creature living on the earth’s surface, out on the savannahs; there are no herds of subterranean elephants wandering around in tunnels the size of a cathedral. Furthermore, the bones found in different locations across the northern hemisphere prove that the Arctic elephant wandered far and wide across these open plains.
Perhaps Noah forgot about this animal, neglecting to take it on his ark, and its fate was to drown in the waters that covered the earth, or perhaps God undid His own creation and allowed the animal to fade into history, but Steller remains unconvinced by other naturalists’ explanations. He cannot believe that God would change His mind and break asunder an order that was supposed to be eternal. The animal world is a perfect, unbroken chain, from an arthropod hiding in the mud by the shore to the crown of all Creation; it is a stable, carefully designed system, and the thought that one of these creatures could simply disappear is unthinkable and godless. Steller knows that the Arctic elephant must still be out there somewhere. Is not his sea cow irrefutable proof that, if one travels far enough, there are stillnew, unknown beasts waiting to be discovered? That the world remains boundless and open?
On the journey home through Siberia, Steller plans to complete his account of the island and to search for the giant northern elephant. He asks the Cossack to accompany him, but Toma Lepekhin is keen to return to the Bolshaya River, where his wife and child await him. Upon hearing this, Steller is taken aback. He finds it hard to imagine Lepekhin having a past, a time in which their expedition plays no part, but he swallows this disappointment, and the two embrace. And with that, the Cossack is gone. Steller gees his dogs into motion and tries not to think about the ravens.
However, Steller’s journey begins slowly for he has run out of money. He must remain where he is and wait for his unpaid wages, so he decides to spend the winter in Kamchatka and settles in the village of Bolsheretsk to organise his notes. While residing there, he becomes embroiled in a curious piece of theatre. The natives have been getting rowdy and many have been imprisoned for treason and resisting Russian officials. But this leaves the officials with a problem: they cannot investigate cases in which they themselves are involved. Luckily for them, Steller, a young adjunct from the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, arrives in the village, and the task of interrogating and convicting the Itelmens falls to him.
Steller accepts this duty and interviews the prisoners. He notes that they are honest and good men, and he can feel his bloodboiling. If the indigenous people were treated with sense and common decency, the empire would be able to carry out its business in Siberia without shedding a single drop of blood, but the officials’ behaviour leaves the natives with no option but to raise up a rebellion. He acquits the Itelmens of all charges.
Steller’s wages finally arrive, and he rides off leaving the infuriated officials behind him. He does not find any mammoths, but he does however identify a new tree and a new fish, he puts together a considerable collection of plants and loads his sled with all manner of seeds and saplings which he intends to plant in the soft soils of the botanical garden at the Academy. He spends the following winter in Solikamsk, where one Major Grigorii Demidov, the owner of a salt mine, lives in a manor house surrounded by verdant gardens, a veritable oasis in the middle of Siberia. Lemon trees and palms flourish in the confines of his greenhouses. The garden is Demidov’s pride and joy, and he is only too happy to welcome the naturalist to his home, especially as Steller undertakes to train his gardeners. He is given permission to plant his saplings on Demidov’s land over the winter, and though this too is a delay, it is one that Steller is prepared to endure. After months on his sled, life at the manor house does not feel like a punishment.
However, the Russian officials have not forgetten the affront he caused them, and a military envoy appears in Solikamsk bringing terrible news: the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller is to be charged. An informant sent word all the way to StPetersburg that Steller was an enemy of the Tzarslovo i delo, in word and deed, a traitor of the worst kind, and he is to present himself to the court in Irkutsk without delay.
What a baseless, shameless lie! The informant is anonymous, but Steller does not need a name to find an object for his rage – to hell with these Siberian officials! What madness, to retreat three thousand kilometres back through Siberia to the east! He will need at least two weeks just to prepare for the journey. First he must catalogue all his plants and bird skins, then write to St Petersburg, to the Senate and the Academy, send word that nobody must dig up his plants without his consent. Steller is so furious he bursts into tears. He sobs and curses, leaving the messenger at a loss, not knowing what to do, where to look, as the naturalist pours out his anger: he could have remained in the beautiful cities of Europe, risen to the role of professor and lived a comfortable life, he could have fallen in love, brought children into the world, but he has sacrificed the best years of his life to science. He has tolerated hunger, cold and poverty, risked his life, time and time again, and in return gets nothing but scorn and condescension, charges of treason – a man who has dedicated his life to the Academy! Why do they seek to frustrate his work time after time? He beholds the chaos in his office, the tables and boxes piled high with samples whose names and origins are recorded only in his head. But the messenger has had advance warning of the prisoner’s querulous character, and they set off that same evening. Steller is allowed to take his coat and the pages of his manuscript, which he hastily gathers up.
They travel quickly and uncomfortably, stopping only to eat and sleep. At first Steller thought he might be able to make good use of the time, but the humiliation of imprisonment gnaws at his mind. The days pass, his notebook rests in his lap, and he stares out at the passing landscape with unseeing eyes.
