Beasts of the Sea A Novel #4
The sand retreats to reveal the large, thick bones and the sea cow’s rugged skull.
Yes, this is indeed the kelp-eater, the king of all marine animals, which the governor is so keen to get his hands on.
And now the slow, painstaking work begins.
They must dig up the bones, but the ground is hard and rocky.
They dig at the earth, the sand eats into their fingers and cracks their nails, and they have to soak their aching hands in a stream running down the hillside, but they do not complain, just continue working.
They know how an animal is constructed, how to look for bones that have been buried under the sand and mud.
After pulling back the sand to reveal the animal in all its splendour, they cannot believe their luck.
Everything is intact, every piece of the sea cow, just waiting to be discovered, there among the rocks.
Or rather, almost everything. The only bones they cannot find are the palms and the fingers, but otherwise it’s all there, the whole creature there on the rocky shore, and they begin their journey back to Sitka.
Their progress is slow. The sea cow’s bones are large and long, and they cannot carry all of them at once, but have to row back and forth, one island at a time, slowly transporting the bones along the narrow chain of outcrops, until eventually they catch sight of the town squashed between the sea and the mountains.
They seek out an official and ask him to inform the governor that they have what he has asked for.
The official instructs them to leave the bones at the harbour offices.
The governor is busy, but he will be informed of this find.
However, the men know the Company too well and have brought only the skull.
The rest they will deliver only upon receipt of payment, and in this they were very wise indeed.
Money and the natives, two concepts that in the minds of the officials do not belong together, but the governor has given explicit instructions regarding the matter: anyone claiming to be in possession of the bones of a sea cow is to be taken directly to the taxidermist. Eventually, the official relents and tells them to speak to Wolff.
The men knock on the taxidermist’s door, but it is early in the morning.
The sun has just risen across the bay, Wolff is still asleep, and the men must knock for a long while before he wrenches the door open and tells them to go to hell.
But when he sees what these men have brought him, his slumber vanishes in an instant.
Wolff examines the skeleton and writes up his findings: forty-seven vertebrae, nineteen pairs of ribs, a sternum and a set of shoulder blades, but his hands are trembling, as the governor has been at pains to stress this creature’s immeasurable value.
Wolff is used to handling birds and deer, but now he has before him a being of whose form he has only a faint understanding, a vague idea of a large, rotund marine animal.
He has been ordered to clean the bones and number them.
Von Nordmann will have his sea cow, but before that the governor intends to present this rarity to the delegation arriving from St Petersburg, to demonstrate the kind of wonders that this corner of the world still holds.
The delegation will be here soon, leaving Wolff too little time to reconstruct the skeleton in full, but perhaps they can present only the skull, and Wolff gives a decisive nod, though in truth he is hesitant.
He knows how to remove a hide from around a body, to stuff it with rags and sawdust to simulate real muscles, but skeletons are not his forte.
The remains of the sea cow are old and fragile, this is a very different proposition from bones pulled still moist from a stag.
Seagulls, crabs and insects have eaten away the flesh and broken down the cartilage and tendons, while algae, time and the weather have darkened the bones’ surface.
He must clean them, but he is afraid that they might not survive boiling, and he does not have enough phosphoric acid to bleach them all.
He is at a loss, but he knows that if he were to make a single mistake, his wages would not be enough to cover the damage.
Here there is no university whose library he can turn to for advice, no master from whom to learn the proper techniques, and he turns the bones in his hands and curses.
Never has he longed for the Tierra del Fuego as much as he does right now.
Wolff scrubs the bones with a small brush dipped in water, going over them an inch at a time.
He scrapes grains of sand and flecks of algae from the nooks and furrows worn into the bones’ surface and cleans them as best he can, but his skills are limited.
He knows how to make a deer’s bones as white as Greek statues, but these remain darkened though he rubs them until his muscles ache.
And his woes do not end there. Usually, he puts the animals together in his workshop on the outskirts of the town, but the governor will not allow the sea cow to leave Kekoor Castle.
Many people would like to get their hands on its bones; Wolff too could use the skeleton to finance his next expedition, he could hire an assistant and still have enough money for a life of luxury.
The governor trusts no-one, and suspects that the officials and servants will steal from him the minute he looks away, so Wolff is forced to work in Kekoor Castle, where, on top of everything else, he must put up with the governor’s sister.
Wolff had imagined that Constance would make way for him, would leave the collection to his care and retire to her room the way a respectable spinster should, but in this he realises he was mistaken.
Constance makes sure that he is unable to spend a single moment in the collection without her.
She makes sure that she’s there to meet him, no matter how early or late he arrives, and has instructed the servants to inform her every time the taxidermist’s dishevelled figure begins walking up the steps to the castle.
At first, she thought she would be able to continue her work regardless of him, dusting off the animals as though she were still alone, but she finds the sea cow an alluring distraction.
If she must put up with Wolff from one day to the next, she might as well make the most of the inconvenience, and she sets her duster and pieces of paper aside and crouches down, picks up a shoulder blade and caresses its surface.
She can tell that Wolff would dearly love to forbid her from doing so, but he does not.
Constance runs her fingers along the edge of the bone.
She tries to imagine what this creature might have looked like while it was still breathing, but she finds it hard to form an image of a living being from the pile of bones on the floor, so she asks Wolff to find her a picture.
But there is only one clumsy sketch of the sea cow in existence, hidden in the pages of Peter Simon Pallas’s Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica.
Pallas is remembered as the first to depict the notion of one creature descending from another as a tree of all known life, and his works presented the world with a total of 220 new species of plant, forty-five previously unseen mammals and seventy-eight new birds, the marvels of the Russian Empire, but Constance flicks impatiently through its pages; today she has no interest in birds or shrews.
Pallas’s illustrator is talented indeed.
He has drawn the animals skilfully, coloured them in clear, bright shades, but the drawing of the sea cow is very different from the rest. In fact, the difference is so great that it is clear it was drawn by someone else entirely – someone who was not accustomed to producing anatomical drawings.
The sea cow has been sketched in nothing but a few trembling lines.
The image does not even attempt to conjure up the idea of a creature in its natural habitat, the artist has not tried to create a sense of motion and spirit but has simply depicted his subject objectively in profile and left the sketch uncoloured so that the animal’s contours are filled only with the cream of the parchment.
It has been suggested that the image reproduced in Pallas’s book is by none other than Plenisner, a topographer on Bering’s expedition.
Perhaps he sketched the animal in the margins of his report for his own amusement, to remind himself of the creature, but his life-drawing was destined to become the one and only eyewitness sketch of the sea cow to survive to this day.
The others were abandoned on the island and lost, left to rot along with Steller’s samples, but the topographer’s reports were packed for the return journey.
It is in among these papers that the image of the sea cow finds its way to St Petersburg, and a century later Pallas, now elevated to the role of professor, publishes it in his own opus.
After this, a great many images of the sea cow are sketched, painted and modelled, images whose artistic merit exceeds Plenisner’s jittery pencil strokes, but these have all been completed after the fact, without seeing the creature in the flesh, compiled using only skeletons and the imagination.
The fur hunters did not have an artist with them, so the only immortalisation of the sea cow is the topographer’s simple drawing in which it resembles a confused potato with a fish’s tail.