57°03”N, 135°19”W #9
Two corridors run through the lobby: one leading to the family’s bedrooms, the other to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters.
However, Hampus and Constance do not step into either one but open a door right at the back of the lobby.
Behind the door is a room containing the colony’s natural world in all its awe-inspiring glory.
The room is large, but it is so full that Constance feels almost as though she will not fit inside.
The shelves running along the walls are stacked with stuffed birds and mammals.
Rows of shelves run across all four walls, displaying animals’ heads and antlers alongside the natives’ handicrafts, headdresses carved from wood, embroidered shawls, baskets woven from seagrass, harpoons, and a translucent garment sewn from otter gut.
Hanging from the ceiling are stuffed fish and kayaks, the Aleuts’ one-seater baidarka, a Tlingit canoe decorated with images of whales, and a Yupik umiak built from whale bones and skin, and in the corner of the room, standing ten feet tall, is the imposing figure of a grizzly bear.
Hampus presents the room to his sister, but Constance does not listen and instead concentrates on the odour of the collection.
Dust, arsenic and the smell of animals, the stench of furs, feathers and the grease protecting them, and she begins to understand: these animals’ fear ended with a snare and a bullet long before she arrived.
She can take a puffin from the shelf without worrying that it might squawk and flap its wings, and she runs her fingers across its leathery feet.
What a silly, clumsy creature this is, and all of a sudden she giggles – what suitable company for her!
Constance’s job is to keep the materials in order and to make sure the labels and the animals match up.
The collection has been maintained quite carelessly, the shelves contain birds that have not been properly labelled and the lists feature animals that the collection does not hold, and she knows nothing about these creatures.
She understands that her brother did not give her this task because of her skills but because of her very lack of skills, but she is not upset, because the job gives her an excuse to spend her days in a darkened room with nobody to disturb her.
She cannot imagine anything better. In the presence of these dead animals, she does not have to behave herself or control her body when it starts to twitch, flap and ache, and she touches, strokes and caresses the skulls and feathers, takes the birds and mammals from the shelves, gently blows on them and breathes in the dust.
She goes through the collection, one animal at a time, always in the same order.
First the water birds, the seagulls, the swans and geese, and on mornings when she cannot get up but lies in bed, her body awash with strange sensations, she goes through the collection in her head.
The water birds, the seagulls, the swans and geese, the surf scoter and the blue-winged teal, then the birds of prey, the hawks and eagles, and after them the smaller birds, the scissor-tailed flycatcher and the blue feathers of Steller’s jay.
Then the mammals. The seals, the deer and pine martens, the lithe body of the sea otter, and finally the grizzly bear standing on its hind legs.
If she gets to the bear, it has been a good day, and she gratefully wipes its paws and polishes its glass eyes.
In the company of dead animals, Constance notices that her father was wrong.
He believed there was no point educating a half-wit, that knowledge would run off the girl like water off a sea bird’s feathers without so much as dampening the skin, and Constance was never afforded any learning beyond her sister teaching her to read and write.
But now she has a silent school all of her own, and she goes through the catalogues of animals, deciphers the names one letter at a time and learns to associate them with the creature waiting on the shelf.
She reads about the animals and Alaskan nature.
Reading is hard work for her, the lines jump up and down before her eyes, and some days she believes her father might have been right, but her animals are patient.
She reads slowly but diligently, uses the excuse of a headache to decline dinner, and instead reads the second edition of Lamarck’s natural history of invertebrates.
She reads about the parasites of the gut and smiles – if only Anna knew everything that humans and nature can hold inside them.
She reads and gradually becomes familiar with these animals, she goes through the descriptions beneath their names and tries to find a unique sound for each animal, the pwit pwit pwit pit pittrrrrr of the wren tit, but her song does not sound like a bird’s.
Anna listens to these noises through the door but dares not step inside.
She would rather not know anything about it.
Constance compiles a list of birds missing from the collections.
This is an easy task, for John Cassin, curator of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, had taken it upon himself to describe every bird known in North America.
He discovered almost two hundred species previously unknown to science, classified the green hylia and Hartlaub’s duck and put all his discoveries together in a book, and all Constance has to do is compare his list to the collection catalogue.
Illustrations of the Birds of California, Texas, Oregon, British and Russian America is an impressive work.
Cassin has painted each bird by hand and situated them in their own habitats, the shearwaters on cliffs covered with lichen, the Gambel’s quail in the sands of Arizona, though in fact he has only imagined these habitats; he paints the birds from stuffed models in his cramped study and eventually dies of arsenic poisoning from touching the birds with his bare hands.
Hampus has not forgotten the promise he made to the professor and allows word to spread: anyone who brings him the skeleton of a Steller’s Sea Cow will be generously rewarded.
He is not hopeful, but enthusiastic sailors and merchants note his request, and before long a pile of discoloured remains begins to accumulate on the desk of the governate’s taxidermist – whale, porpoise and walrus bones and a mammoth’s tooth, which the governor buys for a handsome price.
But the taxidermist Martin Wolff shakes his head: none of the items brought before him belongs to the famed morskaya korova.