Chapter 13 #2
A young female is munching a clump of kelp between her rows of teeth, grinding the tough seaweed into a finer and finer mass and fumbling for more.
The forest of kelp sways in the waves, and the female’s lips grope at its rippled surface, hunting for another strip.
Suddenly, pain radiates through its flank, an incandescent light flashes through its nerves, and a warm liquid fills its mouth.
Midshipman Johann Sind tugs at the rope to make sure the metal is caught fast. The men have come up with a plan.
Sind has seen the way the Greenlanders hunt whales with iron spears, and they have prepared a harpoon, stretched a seal skin between two oars and practised, first on land, then at sea, harpooning seals and improving their aim until the steel tip hits its target, and the men gather together: now they will claim their first sea cow.
Sind gives a sign, and the men assembled on the shore grip the rope and begin to pull.
The rope brings the sea cow into the hands of the hungry men, and they do not give in but pull, haul, until the skin is torn from their hands.
The sea retreats from around the sea cow.
It feels the breeze against its hide and cries out, letting out a sound that startles the rest of the herd into motion.
It turns its head, calls its comrades, and Steller listens to its lament.
The sound is curiously small; it could be from a child or a bird, and it is hard to conceive that such a sound could come from such a gigantic body.
Steller looks on as the sea cow rises out of the sea and becomes wedged against the rocks.
They have succeeded. They have hauled a sea monster from its kingdom, and the men behold their catch, raise their eyes and howl like ecstatic dogs.
The sea cow sees something approaching. It distinguishes the shadow from the water but doesn’t understand what it sees.
With its tiny eyes it can make out the edge of the forest of kelp and identify those of its own kind, and usually it has no need to see any more than this.
It has made do with its other senses, the whiskers around its snout that it uses to sense food and other sea cows, to suckle from its mother and to seek out the soft, thick hide of a mate, and with its hearing it perceives the boundaries of its herd, listening to the others’ clicks and moans.
Now it tries to save itself using all its senses, but nothing it has ever experienced has prepared it for this.
The sea cow has spent millennia doing very little besides grazing.
It has grown too large to make sensible prey for any of the oceans’ many predators, it has had no need for heightened senses, for claws or teeth, but rather it has been able to think of its surroundings with a tranquil curiosity.
Now a faint image of jaws and teeth flickers through its mind, but it abandoned fear so long ago that it does not know how to fight or flee.
It tries to wrench itself back into the water, but the rocks along the shoreline press into its hide, the rope pulls it out of the waves, and with every yank the harpoon digs deeper into its flesh.
It does not know what to do and freezes on the spot, lets out a small, miserable whimper and listens to the sound of approaching footsteps, stares at the black leather boot, pupils wide, until Sind brings down his axe, and the sea cow’s basin-sized heart twitches one last time.
Now the men forget all about their weak and aching limbs and rush into the sea, heedless of the icy waves.
They climb on the back of their catch, help one another up and cheer as though they have conquered a mountain.
They rejoice as they slit the beast’s side open, gouge the sea cow as though they had struck gold, and their clothes change colour.
Brown and grey become red, and the shore around them turns into an iron-smelling mud.
The seagulls smell the blood and call one another to join the banquet, and there on the blood-soaked beach the men laugh and embrace one another.
They drop lumps of lard into the pot, add wood to the fire and look on as the sea cow’s blubber melts into a translucent, aromatic liquid.
They pour the fat into their cups, raise a toast and drink.
Hot fat fills their mouths, and a shiver runs through the whole crew.
At first their expression is one of confusion, then of joy, and they drink their fill in silence, swallow, gasp and scoop up some more.
If the fat is like this, what will its flesh taste like, and they grab the roasting flesh on the fire, fight over the best cuts of meat, and Waxell is forced to restore order many times.
Then the moment is upon them. They sink their teeth into the flesh of the sea cow, the creature they had so longed for, and it melts in their mouths like the finest veal.
It is almost overwhelming. Their starved, emaciated bodies, the sudden, unbearable bliss.
Tears well in their eyes, and they savour it, swallow it so hungrily that they almost dislocate their jaws, they tear at it, cut and bite it, devour the sea cow with tears running down their cheeks, swallow its loin, its liver, its kidneys, its flank and tongue, they drink its warm, intoxicating blood, they eat so much that it hurts, but they do not complain.
Weeks of nothing but thin broth and seaweed, but tonight they shall feast on a sea cow.
For the first time in weeks, Steller does not wake to a nagging hunger.
He lies in his berth for a moment, enjoying the sensation.
The camp around him is still sleeping off the gluttony of the night before,, and Steller listens to his steady breathing, looks at the Cossack’s face, calm from sleep, then sits up, work waits for no man, and he gets up and walks to the cove where they left the remains of the sea cow.
He drives the seagulls and the lurking foxes away, and the morning light brings their handiwork into sharp relief.
He had hoped to use this specimen for his research, but in their frenzy the men have hacked the creature to pieces, struck it at will, leaving it full of holes, broken its bones, severed its tendons.
The cadaver is half submerged in the water.
The tide has risen, and inquisitive fish dart here and there in the opened stomach, nibbling the blubber, and it is clear that this individual will be no use for research; for that purpose, he needs a specimen that he can take apart meticulously, one piece at a time.
Swallowing the seal’s flesh was a mistake, but the sea cow melts in their stomachs with ease.
Its meat is perfectly suited to preservation, and they eat sea cow for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and over time their teeth re-emerge from within their gums. These men, who by rights should have died long ago, stand up and learn to walk again, gingerly at first, waddling like toddlers.
They have already lost thirty-two souls, but eventually there comes a day when Waxell no longer asks to be informed of those who died during the night. The mermaids have come to their rescue.
First comes the sea cow, then the spring.
The long-tailed ducks, the sandpipers and eiders head down to the water, and the hillsides are filled with the sounds of screeching and mating birds.
Steller hears a wren, and for a moment he imagines he is once again in the friendly, verdant woods of his childhood home in Windsheim.
Lepekhin looks at him enquiringly: does the naturalist want him to hunt down this bird?
It is so small that it cannot easily be shot, but he could put up a net.
Steller shakes his head. He knows this bird; there is no need to snare one.
Steller sits down on a rock and watches the sea cows’ mating rituals, their playful frolicking.
The female allows the male to approach her, then prances further away, and it makes Steller think of the Koryak women.
Unlike the officials and soldiers, he did not order them into his bed, but sometimes they appeared all the same, and he tried to talk to them, to write down the curious words they used.
They laughed at his desire to talk, laughed at his pronunciation and whispered strange, passionate words into his ears.
He thinks of Brigitta-Helena, of the way his wife succumbed to him like a beautiful, noble animal, and he watches as the female sea cow allows the male to mount her, pulls a pencil out of his pocket and writes: penis ca. 32 inches.
Reading Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, Brigitta-Helena learns that animals can be divided into six classes: mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms. The amphibians are her favourites, but something interrupts her train of thought and she puts the book down.
Someone has left the window ajar. It is a cold, bright day in St Petersburg, and she gets up to close the window, but her mind conjures up an image, and she stops midway.
She sees her husband, Georg Wilhelm, standing on a dark shore, gazing out to sea, looking right at her, and it makes her shiver.
She would rather not think about Siberia, or Georg Wilhelm, all the cold she declined to experience.