60°10”N, 24°55”E #6
Gronvall has been experimenting with different stencils, cutting different-shaped holes in pieces of cardboard and blowing ink through them to reproduce the patterns of the eggs he is restoring.
He has spent his evening developing just the right paint, making one version after another, and continuing only once he has made a stencil that will leave brown speckles on the peregrine falcon’s egg.
He has forgotten to turn off his desk lamp; Kreuger flicks the switch, and the light disappears.
For a moment he can’t see anything, but gradually the forms of the trees in the garden begin to take shape, the last leaves clinging to their branches.
The next gust of wind will separate them from their moorings and send them shimmering down to the withered lawn, but for now the air is still and the leaves remain where they are, the garden and the workshop, both so motionless that the magnate’s heartbeat is the only sign that time is marching onwards.
He steps from the workshop through into the museum hall.
He doesn’t switch on the lights but allows his eyes to become accustomed to the dark in the windowless room, walks to one of the display cases and places his hand against the glass.
On their velvet cushions, the eggs appear as distinct blotches in the darkness, but he doesn’t need light to see their shapes and patterns, or the porous surface of an elephant bird’s egg.
He spends his nights watching over his treasures, and the agony of those sleepless hours turns to a silent euphoria.
Egg collecting is eventually made illegal, but John Gronvall continues his work.
He repairs shells and restores colours, carefully and precisely, and when it’s ready his work is hidden away in a cabinet to protect it from light and dust, in a museum that nobody is allowed to visit.
Very few people ever see his work, but that doesn’t stop his reputation from spreading, because he has become the last of his kind.
One country after another outlaws the collection of birds’ eggs.
From now on, researchers and responsible enthusiasts no longer gather eggs but fill out a form where they log the number of eggs, the location of the nest and any other relevant information, and over time paper records replace physical eggshells.
Birding books no longer teach readers how to blow an egg or stuff a bird’s skin, and teachers stop showing children how to find nests.
The delicate and curious skill of egg restoration gradually wanes, and museums including the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institute turn to Gronvall, sending their most precious eggs to the son of a Loviisa sea captain for restoration.
Stepping into the museum has begun to feel like stepping into the past, a time when a collector might pluck the eggs right from their nest, imagining he is recording one tiny piece of an unchanging world in the belief that a scientist cannot possibly affect his subject, but beyond the walls of the egg museum, such a world is already gone.
Now John Gronvall has been given the task of putting together the first of the disappeared species that forced humans to look at themselves in the mirror.
The skeleton of Steller’s Sea Cow was first assembled ninety years earlier.
Now it is being examined by the eyes of researchers a century younger, and in its construction they see a number of incorrect assumptions and outdated notions.
The people who first assembled the sea cow weren’t very familiar with its evolutionary family – and how could they be?
Professors and illustrators from a country on the Baltic coastline, they were acquainted with different types of seals, the skeletons of the various whales and porpoises on display in local collections, but they had only a superficial understanding of sirenians, and though von Nordmann had seen the Paris sea cow, all he had at his disposal was his imagination and a general idea of how this mammal fits together.
The sea cow they built is beautiful and impressive.
They did painstaking work, but mistakes were made nonetheless: the skeleton’s posture is strange, the head is too elevated and the wooden cartilages holding the ribs together too broad – and then there is the matter of the sea cow’s hands.
At first, they assumed that the men who had recovered the skeleton must have been careless, that the small bones of the palm had simply gone unnoticed, but since then a lot of effort has gone into trying to locate the sea cow’s fingers.
Nordenskiold offered a handsome reward for anyone who could find them, and on Bering Island the Aleutians dug up all manner of finger bones belonging to foxes and seals, but they couldn’t find the sea cow’s hands.
Additionally, there is Steller’s testimony that the sea cow’s flippers contained shrivelled, hoof-like structures that it used to wander along the ocean floor like a bull in a paddock.
The sea cow’s hands are never found, and the skeleton loses its pianist’s fingers, for a researcher should not complete nature based on assumptions alone, should not make the image more perfect than it already is, and Gronvall dismantles the professors’ old joins, separates the bone from the wood and places the prostheses on his bookshelf as a reminder that science is about knowledge, not imagination.
Gronvall removes the screws and metal wires.
He organises the bones and numbers them, his handwriting like a palimpsest above the professors’ already faded numbers.
The sea cow’s bones are old and weather-beaten.
Nobody knows how long the skeleton lay on the island before it was found, whether it had been waiting, hidden in the sands, for decades, centuries or even millennia, buried by the wind and the water in layers of silt and sediment, so slowly that its sinking motion evaded the beady eye of birds and humans, but sure enough it was buried, one grain of sand at a time.
The vertebrae and the skull disappeared from view, and before long the sea cow would have disappeared completely, slipping into the sand where it could continue to decompose in peace.
An egg is designed to break, to endure only those few short days that the embryo needs to develop into a bird in the warmth underneath its mother.
After this, its purpose is to allow the fledgling to tap its way through the shell.
An egg exists only for a moment, while bones are designed to persist beneath muscles and tendons for years, decades, but ultimately the difference is negligible.
Bone and eggshell are made of the same material, and over time a bone too will degrade and disappear, but that is not the fate of this skeleton.
The sea cow was exhumed from its grave, and now it is here, halfway around the world from its island, in a small northern museum in a small northern capital, having its bones examined by the preparator John Gronvall.
He scrutinises the sea cow one bone at a time, cleans them, repairs their surfaces, but some are in poor condition, particularly one pair of ribs and the vertebrae of the lower spine and tail.
To protect them, John casts replacements out of gypsum and reads up on methods for how best to make the material resemble the animal’s porous bones, striving for just the right colour, faded by time and the sea.
He tries to acquaint himself with the creature he is reconstructing, but there is only scant information available.
The bones reveal that this was a young sea cow that was still growing; its growth plates were yet to reach full epiphyseal closure.
Its age and sex, however, remain a mystery.
We don’t know how quickly or slowly the sea cow grew or how long it took to reach the majestic dimensions of adulthood.
Nobody was able to observe them long enough to watch the young achieve their full stature.
The encounter between man and sea cow was brief and brutal, and none of the calves that Steller saw had the chance to die of old age.
Gronvall constructs the sea cow during the day, and in the evenings he turns his attention to restoring the great auk’s egg.
It is slow work. Restoring an egg that has already been repaired once before is harder than repairing it for the first time, just as a skeleton that has already been reconstructed requires a very different approach from an animal freshly skinned and gutted.
This time, he has to dismantle someone else’s handiwork, assess its traits, the qualities of its materials and joins, he must learn how hard or softly to tap a seam for the glue to give way without further damaging the shell.