Chapter 12
The men dig a grave. They have to make sure it is good and deep, because the foxes are good at digging too.
The ground is in the grip of frost, and the men are tired, but they dig, strike their spades into the sand and slog without a care for their aching limbs.
They dig until the pit is deep enough, then gather round and hold a simple funeral.
They erect a small wooden cross on top of the grave and mourn their captain and their misery.
Their captain is dead, and there is still no sign of the horses, but today they celebrate Christmas, collect what damp flour they have left and fry pancakes in seal blubber, raise their tea cups as if they were sipping an exquisite wine, give speeches exalting the captain and make a toast to the Tzarina, unaware that during the course of their journey she too has left this world behind.
Steller, the cantor’s son, sings Christmas carols, and for a brief moment they are somewhere else.
On St Stephen’s Day, an exhausted trio appears on the horizon. Their scouts have not died after all, neither have they fled, but worse still, they come bearing bad news: the St Peter has been shipwrecked off the shores of an unknown, uninhabited island.
In the beginning, there is a single progenote, compounds gathered within a vesicle.
Archaea and bacteria divide in two, again and again, and fill the waters, and there is light, and algae start to suck in the light, and oxygen seeps into the atmosphere, banishing the poisonous gases and creating a layer of protective ozone in the firmament around the earth.
The air changes and there is a wave of extinctions, but the cells that remain embrace the oxygen and start to breathe.
At first, this single cell enjoys its solitude.
It remains alive by dividing itself in two, until more solitary cells join together; they share responsibilities, and these lifeforms slowly begin to grow in size.
The first multicellular organism is the sponge, a soft mass with no limbs, no nervous system or digestive tract, but over time the waters bring forth living creatures abundantly and begin to fill with bilaterians, beings whose bodies are formed of two symmetrical halves, and before long the world’s very first set of eyes appear on the face of the flatworm.
This is only the first of the worms’ innovations.
Their descendants devise a digestive tract running through the body with separate orifices for nutrients and waste.
The development enables them to eat without pausing, and soon the seas are brimming with life.
Molluscs appear beneath the waves, echinoderms, invertebrates and jawless fish.
These creatures in turn devise the gamete, and soon afterwards the secluded depths of the primordial seas form the backdrop to the first sex act in history.
Lifeforms multiply, filling the waters of the seas, and the plants and sponges begin to seek out less crowded habitats, they creep up and out of the water, and wolf’s foot, horsetails and ferns cover the face of all the earth.
Fish living in marshland and shallow waters learn to breathe the air – a useful skill indeed, allowing them to crawl from one pond to another, to move into pools left by the retreating tide and to safety from the great armoured beasts of the sea.
In shallower waters, they learn to use their fins, to walk along the seabed in alternate steps, and their limbs become muscular, their wrists and elbows stronger.
Their gill covers move to their necks, and eventually they develop lungs, elbows, knees, wrists, fingers, a neck and nostrils – everything they will need for life above the surface – and with that the fish are ready to haul themselves up onto the dry land.
The fish rise up from their ponds. They learn how to drag themselves along the ground, but they never venture far from the sea, as they must still lay their eggs in the water.
The shallow pools abound with tadpoles. In fact, this humble larva is the distillation of millions of years of development: first there is the protoplasm, the jelly from which this tiny, spritely aquatic lifeform wriggles forth, then the tadpole grows itself limbs, sheds its tail and swaps its gills for lungs, the water for land, feels the earth beneath its flippers and pushes.
The tadpoles develop into snake-like, frog- and salamander-like creatures, and they devise the egg, a watertight, calcium shell, and lo, now they can abandon the seas altogether.
They inch their way further inland, disappear into the tangle of ferns, and there the amphibians gradually turn into reptiles and replace their moist skin with scales that can withstand the heat.
Animals appear upon the earth, but there is one memory of the sea that remains with us: the hiccough, the reflex that salamander larvae used to change the manner of their breathing, to shift from lungs to gills, from gills to lungs.
In Siberia, a column of lava rises up through the earth.
It pushes its way through the crust, setting off a series of volcanic eruptions across the Northern hemisphere.
For two million years, the earth belches up carbon and methane; the air is thick with a sulphuric fug, the waters of the seas become warmer, and all living creatures gasp for breath.
The populations of the seas and the earth are decimated, but the reptiles stoically struggle on.
Now they have enough space to experiment, and thus winged fowl and dinosaurs appear upon the earth, mammals too, small, furry creatures with a four-chambered heart and heightened senses.
They scurry between the legs of much larger beasts, until one day it is time for the great lizards to depart the earth forever.
Now it is the mammals who are in experimental mood.
The forests and savannahs are filled with new mammalians – monotremes, marsupials and placentalia, the latter being a most curious development whereby the animals gestate their young in a protective membrane inside their body, beneath their very skin.
In the boughs of the trees lives the furry, long-tailed progenitor of all placentalia, barely the size of a swallow, munching on insects high up in the canopy.
Soon, the placental mammals divide into two separate orders, and it is at this point that the sea cow and humankind bid each other farewell.
Sirenians and primates go their separate ways, and Homo sapiens and the sea cow await their respective births on branches pointing in two different directions.
One of these orders are the Boreoeutheria, the northern true beasts, which develop into giraffes, dogs, mice, bats, humans and great whales.
One might imagine that the sea cow is related to the whale, but no.
Independently of each other, two different clades of mammals hit upon the same idea and return to the ocean: one a small creature, the size of a wolf, that grows into the largest mammal in history, the other a prehistoric proto-elephant whose descendants give rise to the sirenians.
The ancient seas are also home to great ground sloths adapted for life in the water, but their sluggish story ends long before ours begins, while the whales and the sea cows remain.
The other clade of placental mammals is given the name Atlantogenata.
This group includes the superorders of Xenarthra and Afrotheria, and it is from the latter group that the elephants and sirenians arise.
One of them chooses the sea, the other the earth, and forty million years ago, the shores are graced with Prorastomus, the first known ancestor of the sirenians – a clumsy creature the size of a pig and consumed with a lingering yearning for the oceans.
New, terrifying predators are creeping and galloping upon the earth, but this creature is drawn to the sea by the aquatic plants and the gently bobbing waves.
Prorastomus spends increasing amounts of time in the water, crawling only seldom onto dry land.
Its legs become shorter, its toes turn to fins and its narrow tail becomes wider.
In the water, its joints no longer need to bear its weight, and it starts to grow and develop a form perfectly suited to life underwater.
And it is at this moment that our protagonist appears, Steller’s Sea Cow, though at this point using such a name feels a little out of place.
We are still a long way away from the moment when Steller himself emerges from his mother’s belly, and indeed, it is another two million years until Homo sapiens appear on the stage at all, but this order of the sirenians is now alive and abundant.
In years to come, fossils pushed up from the earth and the seabed will reveal a full twenty-eight genera of portly sea cows.
These gentle beings float in the warm coves of ancient seas, but one of their number heads north, gradually moving into cooler latitudes, increasing the thickness of its blubber layer as it makes its way into colder waters.
It develops a body that will protect it against the chill, and eventually it is closer in size to an elephant than to other sea cows.
Steller’s Sea Cow becomes a giant within its own order, an exception after its kind.
In the north, snow starts to gather on the mountaintops.
It snows on the rocks, so much so that the already cool summers barely have enough time to reveal the earth at all, and the snow gathers, layer upon layer, and forms ice.
Then, very slowly, the ice begins to move, it rolls down the mountainsides, grinding the earth and rock as it goes.
Snow continues to fall, ice continues to build up, until eventually it covers the mountains and the valleys, pushing water and mud out of its way, and all around the arrival of the glacier is heralded by decimated forests and the skeletons of dead animals, as far as the eye can see.
The land turns from green to grey, then everything is covered in white, the sea fuses with the ice, the shoreline retreats far out to sea, and where once there was water now there is land.
Ungulates dig their hooves into the newly revealed seabeds in bewilderment.
This new world order creates the perfect conditions for Steller’s Sea Cow.
The ocean’s once deep trenches become shallow bays that are soon home to thriving forests of kelp.
At this point, many of the sea cow’s relatives fade into history, and of the twenty-eight genera there are soon only a handful left, because although the sirenians are plump, their blubber layer is all but non-existent.
They require warm water and temperate bays, and thus the genera that long for warmer climes perish one after another.
But Steller’s Sea Cow is unperturbed by the colder winds, undisturbed by the frozen weather and the lowering temperatures, and the species thrives.
Herds of Steller’s Sea Cows fill the Pacific shores from Japan to the Californian peninsula, and they spread wherever the forests of kelp reach up from the seabed towards the light.
But the ice does not last forever. At first, the changes are small.
The sea cow slumbers, turns its belly towards the sky, allowing milder winds to caress its hide.
The streams running into the sea become heavier, fuller, the glaciers retreat to reveal the churned earth underneath.
In the winter, the edge of the sea ice creeps back a little, but the winter is not long enough to compensate for the destruction wrought by the summer months, and soon the ice retreats more than it returns, and the earth that it reveals starts to turn green.
Moss appears on the gravel, the earth brings forth grass, and with the grass come the grass-eaters, and with the grass-eaters the predators.
Roots intertwine under the newly formed soil.
The tundra turns into plains, bringing forth hay and wild wormwood, then come the trees, the pines, the larches, white spruce and birches, bald cypresses standing two hundred feet tall.
Forests push the plains aside, and water runs into the sea, the bays become deeper, the shores steeper, making the tangles of nourishing kelp harder to reach.
In the past, the sea cow was able to roam these shores as it pleased, but now the chain of banks brimming with kelp is broken.
The plants reach up towards the light, but the continents keep shrugging off water, and the kelp sinks into the deepening bays.
It is replaced by species that prefer the darkness of deeper waters, but the sea cow’s body is like a buoy that always bounces back to the surface.
It cannot dive more than a few feet, and the undergrowth on the seabed is soon beyond its reach.
It lives on kelp that reaches up to the surface, but now the shallow waters have become deep trenches once again, and the herds become separated from one another, left stranded, scrambling for scant ever deeper scraps of seaweed.
Eventually, a new, terrifying predator appears on the shores.
In the past, the sea cow has never had to worry about hunters, but wherever humans go, great species soon disappear: the cave bear, the woolly rhinoceros, the dire wolf, the ground sloth, the pouch lion and the moa.
A large, bulbous animal with neither eyeteeth nor claws, the sea cow is no match for man’s dominion, and today archaeologists dig up their bones from the ashes of ancient campfires.
In the end there is only one herd left, a single group of sea cows at the furthest tip of the archipelago known as the Aleutian Islands.
Rising water levels have separated these outcrops from the mainland, leaving the sea cows trapped.
Here at least they are safe, for the barren, remotest tip of this chain of islands it too far from civilisation to attract man.
And while its brethren slowly disappear elsewhere, the sea cows continue their lazy life by their island, grazing and multiplying, with the foxes, otters and fowls of the air to keep them company, until fate and the winds bring them into contact with humans one final time.