57°03”N, 135°19”W #2
The governor’s workload is endless. Hampus intends to show his superiors that he is worthy of their trust. The officers must not think he is more interested in social engagements and the perks of his new position, and he heads to London.
He wishes to travel quickly and easily. Such an excursion is unsuitable for women, so Anna follows him later and makes her way through Europe by herself.
She sits in the carriage, wistfully writing Hampus one letter after another.
On the outskirts of Warsaw, the road leads through a great forest, and through the carriage window Anna sees a wolf.
Its wily figure is hunched at the edge of a clearing, and as it notices them it scarpers back into the woods.
Anna has seen wolves at the zoos in London and Stockholm, but standing between the trees, the creature looked different; oh Hampus, it was like looking at another creature altogether!
She writes to her love daily, sharing her thoughts and opening her heart, but Hampus is a busy man, and only rarely does she receive a reply.
It seems it is hard to find skilled people in Alaska, and fine fabrics are always in short supply, so Anna stops at Dresden, buys a collection of bedlinen and hires a housekeeper.
Ida Hoerle is an industrious, forty-year-old woman who has been looking after her own sister’s household and children, but now she has begun to think of the future, of an income that she can save for her old age, and to her sister’s disappointment she takes up the offer of a position with the governor’s family.
Anna could not be happier. What a stroke of luck to find a housekeeper who knows her way around the pantry and the children’s rooms, for Anna senses that it will not be long before she is blessed with a child.
They may not have had time to be together during the daytime, but in St Petersburg Hampus visited her chamber every night.
Her inkling is correct. Unbeknownst to her, their gametes fuse together inside her, the cells divide and begin to replicate themselves once every twenty hours.
As Anna crosses Europe, a process first developed by her insect-eating ancestors begins to play out in her womb.
The placenta takes shape, the spiral arteries open, and a fine filament reaches out from the tissue, binding Anna and the embryo together, and the life inside her starts to grow.
Anna arrives in England. Dear old London!
She has family and friends in the city, and she’s keen to introduce her fine new husband, the great ruler of the colony of Alaska.
She has missed him terribly, written to him three times a day, but she will save the most important news until they meet again.
Her bleeding has stopped, and she recognises all the signs she read about in the books her mother gave her.
But by the time she arrives in London, Hampus has already left.
He is touring harbours and manor houses, meeting all the right people.
Anna has to call a doctor. Her heart lurches in her chest, beats so frantically that she cannot sleep, but the doctor can find nothing wrong with her and assures her it must be her nerves, apparently such a thing is not uncommon in newly-weds, and he orders her to rest and to find pleasant things with which to amuse herself.
There is certainly no shortage of amusements in London, and Anna does as she is told.
She meets her friends, who are all terribly envious of her.
How frightfully lucky to be able to tour the known world, to travel in the finest cabins and visit the great cities of America!
Anna sips champagne and distracts herself with some shopping, buying only the bare essentials and a grand piano.
The merchant packs the instrument in a tin coffer and sends it to Plymouth, where it will travel to Alaska on board a cargo ship.
Now she will be able to hold musical soirées in Novo-Arkhangelsk, and she can barely remember where her woes came from. Her life is a perfect fairy tale.
The new attractions in London include an exhibition of ferocious lizards – surely Anna has already seen the knobbly skull of the Triceratops?
Prince Albert himself is fanatical about these ancient bones dug up from the earth, and people throng to the Natural History Museum to see them.
Distant islands, shores and mountains have revealed very curious creatures indeed, and explorers are keen to present these strange new discoveries to the public: the newspapers abound with stories of long-tailed birds of paradise and sea cows the size of a whale, but the wonders do not stop there.
Now scientists have decided to turn their attention to the depths of the earth, to dig their way back through history, and from deep within the crust of the earth, layers of rock reveal a world billions of years old, a world of strange plants, cartilaginous fish, and monsters whose size and ferocity defy even the wildest imagination.
In America, the bones of strange elephants are uncovered, and a young congressman by the name of Thomas Jefferson resolves to disprove an especially pernicious claim: Georges-Louis Leclerc, the greatest naturalist of his generation, has had the gall to suggest that the climate in the Americas has made both people and animals alike small and weak.
But America is a land full of beautiful and impressive creatures, and what could better prove this than the discovery of a living, breathing mammoth?
To that end, Jefferson funds an expedition, hires a group of fearless men and sends them westwards to seek out the habitat of these hairy elephants, for they must be lurking somewhere, and what better hiding place than America’s vast, unexplored plains?
Jefferson arranges for the tooth of an American mammoth to be sent across the Atlantic.
The specimen is received by one Prof. Georges Cuvier, founder of La Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée in Paris.
He compares it to the teeth of the European and Siberian mammoths, and as he places the rostral pads alongside one another, he understands that Jefferson’s animal is not a mammoth at all, and that what lies on the table in front of him must belong to a new species of elephant, one hitherto unknown to science.
Cuvier sits at his desk, the ossified tooth in his hands, and thinks of names.
The discoverer always has the right to name his discovery, and he considers various options, savours different phrases from the languages of Antiquity.
Evening is drawing in, he has already enjoyed a glass or two of fine wine and runs his fingers across the rippled surface of the tooth.
Its curves conjure up a lewd image, and suddenly the name comes to him: this animal shall be called mastodon, “the nipple tooth”.
Cuvier chuckles to himself, stands up and stretches his shoulders, stiff from his chair.
He wants to share the joke with his friends and decides to go to the restaurant where all the scientists in Paris convene for dinner, but before leaving he walks down into the museum to admire the collections filling his gallery.
The exhibition begins with a man on a plinth, staring into the distance, his arm raised into the air.
His posture makes him look like some sort of commander rousing his troops for a battle unknown to us, but instead of a uniform, he stands in front of his regiment without clothes and leathers, the tendons criss-crossing between his bare muscles.
Following behind him is a legion of the flayed.
The man has lost his skin, but the animals behind him have been stripped of their flesh too.
The bony animals follow mankind in order of size: first the small mammals, the apes and dogs, then the horses and other ungulates, and after them the camels, rhinoceroses, elephants and giraffes, and right at the back, arching above the rest, are the greatest, most majestic creatures of them all, the whales and their calves.
Cuvier beholds this parade of the dead, this solemn march of Creation’s plenitude through the great hall, and he considers the mastodon, an animal that no-one has ever seen in the flesh.
The thought takes form quite innocently.
How curious that such an animal could go unnoticed.
The greatest scientific minds of our age have travelled to far-off atolls and to the furthest reaches of the oceans, but not one of these explorers has encountered the Stegosaurus or the cave lion.
As it retreats, the permafrost does not reveal a subterranean city of mammoths, nor are vast plains inhabited by dinosaurs discovered in the heart of the jungle, and suddenly the realisation hits him like a bullet: these creatures no longer exist. It must be so.
There is no longer any remote location where the Irish elk wanders proudly with a crown of antlers more than ten feet across, no cave where the sabre-toothed tiger lies waiting to be discovered.
That evening, Cuvier does not head to the bistro after all but hurries instead to the room in the museum housing all the bones dug up from the ground, the strange and magnificent creatures, the great sloths, the cave bears and dinosaurs, the skeleton of a pterodactyl that the Germans pulled out of a chalk quarry and that local researchers initially thought to be a fish, before Cuvier recognised the bones as characteristic of a reptile.
Now he examines these ancient remains again, wandering from one fantastical creature to the next, and a bleak certainty fills his mind: Jefferson will never find his mastodon.
Cuvier catalogues twenty-three species that he believes may be lost, gathers the learned men of science together, and with this his theory becomes a reality.