Beasts of the Sea A Novel #3
In his sheer gawkishness, Hjalmar almost rivals Constance.
To Anna’s horror, her brother-in-law returns from one of his trips with a child, a small Yupik girl that he says he has adopted.
Hjalmar claims to have saved the girl, explains that the tribe was planning to sacrifice her to their ancient gods, but it later transpires that he bought her from her parents in exchange for alcohol and gunpowder.
Hampus is furious. Selling liquor and weapons to the Indians is strictly forbidden on pain of exile – how can he tell the others to obey the rules if his own brother cares not a jot for them?
But Hjalmar simply laughs. He names the girl Aino Giulyanima, a double-barrelled moniker combining names from the Finnish and the Yupik traditions, for alongside his admiration of the Yupik, he has national-romantic stirrings in his breast, he admires the humble, resilient Finnish people and their ancient, sinewy language.
Hjalmar parades around Kekoor Castle with the girl in tow, just as Anna has finally got rid of Annie’s wetnurse – and not a moment too soon.
Annie had started talking about spirits living in rocks and trees, and using soft, foreign words, though Anna had stressed that the wetnurse should not speak her own language to the girl.
The woman simply had to go, but Annie has already picked up bad influences, and now she cries after her wetnurse, wails and sputters until her cheeks are covered in snot, and she is indifferent to her mother’s arms but throws her toys around instead.
Day after day, the wetnurse appears at their door, begging to see the child, until eventually they have to instruct the guards to keep her away from the town.
Anna decides not to tell Hampus about any of this but instead proudly informs him that Annie has learned to locate Paris on the map.
Hjalmar suggests that Annie and Aino Giulyanima might play together, and Anna is at a loss.
She does not want Annie to play with a heathen, and wicked tongues are already whispering that the native girl is in fact Hjalmar’s bastard child, a half-caste brat born out of wedlock, here under their very roof.
Anna takes to marvelling at how good-hearted Hjalmar is to take in this unknown girl and raise her as his own, though she knows very well what people are saying around the town.
Weeks have passed since their last invitation to the study, but today Hampus asks the women to join him.
As they step inside, he can hardly conceal his glee.
Several boxes stand piled up on the floor.
Hampus asks Anna to choose one of them, which she does, then he tells her to open the lid.
The room is filled with the smell of sawdust and seaweed.
Hampus takes a bone out of the box, a triangular chunk of an animal, half a cubit wide.
It is so heavy that he has to lift it with both hands, and he asks Anna and Constance to guess which animal it is from, then sets it to rest and picks up the skull without waiting for an answer.
It is a peculiar head, one that does not resemble any of the other skulls in their collections, it is not long like that of a seal, a whale or a porpoise; this one is sturdy and has a wide brow.
Its muzzle resembles a bird’s beak, and right in the middle there is wide, smooth-edged hole.
Hampus holds the skull in his hands as gently as if it were his own child, and suddenly Constance realises what it is.
The sea cow’s skeleton was discovered by two Aleuts.
We know nothing more about them because nobody thought to write down their names.
The governor sent men to look for gold and coal, and in the hope of uncovering precious minerals he tells them to begin mining on the Aleutians’ own islands too.
Now seal hunters can earn an extra income by bringing back rock samples, and the men set off.
They row out to the furthest tip of the chain of islands and come ashore on the same island as Steller and his comrades did over a century earlier.
In their language, they had a name for this island long before anyone in Russia had ever thought of locating the remote coast of America, but that name is nowhere to be found on maps or in the annals of history, so let us simply note that these two mineral hunters arrived at Bering Island.
They come ashore on the same island as Bering and Steller, but the island they discover is no longer the same as it once was.
The species living there have changed altogether.
The shores and hillsides have been purged of mammals, and what was once the blue foxes’ island is now the birds’ island.
And of those, the largest is gone too, the fifteen-pound spectacled cormorant – an impressive, black bird that had given up its ability to fly and concentrated instead on developing hydrodynamics suited to life at sea.
It was a large and irascible creature that the foxes left well alone – why fight with a giant when the gull and ptarmigan fledglings made easy pickings on the hillsides – and when the St Peter first arrived, the spectacled cormorants, with their wingspan of more than three feet, dotted the craggy rock faces like ominous seamarks.
To its great misfortune, the spectacled cormorant was also delicious.
Steller mentioned that some of his crew members were particularly partial to its meat.
They would fight most ferociously over nesting grounds on the crags, and the more inexperienced birds were forced to build their nests on the shore, and if one could get between the cormorant and the sea, it was easy prey.
In the water, the creature moved with exceptional speed, but on the ground, this nimble bird became slow and clumsy and quickly found itself roasting above an open fire.
Their flesh was palatable to the fur hunters too, and they had no need to spare their bullets, and before long the penguin of the Bering Sea had been eaten to extinction.
Now different birds populate these same crags.
As the mineral hunters row closer to the shore, the emperor goose, the northern shoveler and Steller’s eider flap up into the air, and as the men pull their kayaks from the water, they happen upon the pits dug by Bering’s expedition.
Rain has collapsed their walls, grass has sprung up at the bottom, and soon afterwards, the wind and the sea will fill them with sand and gravel, but as these men arrive, they can still make out the deep, grave-like depressions in the shoreline.
However, these men are not interested in the pits but in the cliffs, and they gaze up at the hillsides and look for any points where the rock changes colour.
Closer to the mainland, seals too are now few and far between, but here they laze along the shoreline in large herds.
The cream-coloured hide of the northern fur seal makes beautiful shoes and clothes, and the men spend their time hunting them, skinning them, and chiselling samples from the rocks.
In an iqyax made from stretched seal hide, they can canoe into coves that previous fur hunters could not reach in vessels with deeper draughts, and in the shallow waters of one of the bays a promising sight awaits them.
A long, red-brown streak runs the length of the dark grey rockface.
Red can be a sign of iron, so they haul their kayaks out of the water, but a surprise is waiting for them on the shore.
At the foot of the hillside is a large rock, a boulder dislodged by an earthquake, and behind that they make out the shape of a boat.
The vessel was clearly dragged behind the boulder to protect it from the elements, but it is apparent that it has rested here for a very long time.
Its upturned hull has given way, and the rain has left its frame full of holes.
A strange sight in a strange place – why would anyone leave a boat on a shore covered in gull droppings?
– but as they come closer, they realise that the shape they see is not the work of human hands.
They make out the curve of a rib cage protruding from the rocky ground.
The ribs form a vault rising out of the sand, but the spine, limbs and skull have long been buried underground.
It is a curious sight. The men have skinned a walrus and cut a whale to pieces, but the creature lying before them is neither a walrus nor a whale.
Hope flickers to life. Could this be the kelp-eater that the governor is looking for?
They know about the sea cow, for though no living man has ever seen one with his own eyes, they have heard their grandparents’ old stories.
Hunting the sea cow was so easy that the creature was even dubbed “women’s prey”.
The Aleuts did not need harpoons because they knew the sea cow’s behaviour, they knew that in stormy weather it moved into shallower waters, and when the winds whipped up, all the hunters had to do was pick up their spears and wade out to the creatures huddling against the rocks.
Not only was it easy to kill, the sea cow made an excellent catch.
Its hide was big enough to make a kayak twenty feet long and seven and a half feet wide, with enough room for twelve men, and all those who ate its liver gained incredible powers.
This particular specimen could no longer be eaten, but with the bounty the governor had promised, they would be able to buy all the delicacies they could ever dream of.
The men fall to their knees and start digging.