Chapter 15 #2
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 on the 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, the Hooker St Peter sails 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 creature mā ān’t, the earth horn, and in the mouths of the Russians this developed into the form mamant, mammoth.
The peoples living along the banks of the Yenisey River do not believe that the bones are 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 coming into contact with the light and the warmth, the mamant rots 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 still new, 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.