Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

  She thinks about how exits are inherently complicated when they should be simple, and how a full stop can only truly be used once in a life.

  The Museum of Extinct Animals

  The Museum of Extinct Animals is many things. It is a labyrinth of dusty secrets. It is a fortress of fallen totems from another time. It is a symposium of ghosts.

  The Museum of Extinct Animals is a cathedral-sized capsule containing stuffed creatures of rare distinction.

  A macabre zoo of man’s making. A cemetery of memory.

  Here they are corralled and curated. They sit on shelves or in cabinets, stuffed and stitched, framed and mounted, perfectly pinned.

  These are creatures in perpetual stasis, immortalised in repose, never to stalk the meadows, swim the deepest briny oceans or fly across great fields of blood-red poppies in spring again.

  The Museum of Extinct Animals is a maudlin place. Dust gathers in knee-deep drifts and thousands of dead flies and moths litter the surfaces of the glass cases as if they too are clamouring to be part of this grotesque menagerie. The silence is so deep and sorrowful it sounds like a gassed orchestra and the only light is that which finds a way through the tiniest gap in the old blinds that have been left unopened for decades.

  The building houses a collection of the world’s hunted, neglected, fetishised, collected, colonised, coveted, repressed, dissected. The tortured and the eaten. It is a monument to human greed and stupidity. A vulgar cenotaph to ignorance.

  No one ever enters the Museum of Extinct Animals, except for the caretaker. He is too afraid to tell anyone about it in case the last remaining samples of once-glorious animals are stolen or destroyed. He lives in constant fear.

  Little is known of the caretaker, other than that he is very old and has never married. Some believe him to be Austrian, though this has never been confirmed. He is paid a small monthly stipend for his minimal duties by an organisation discreetly registered to an address in France, which when visited proved to be a charcuterie in a small Alpine village. Its owner claimed to know nothing about the museum or the caretaker and appeared more concerned with a late delivery of duck rillettes.

  To explore the Museum of Extinct Animals is to undertake time travel. To enter it is to step into an alternative earth, a living map of different countries and eras and regions and climate changes and hunting patterns and food chains and urban growth and rainforest destruction and centuries of regress, all collated into one three-dimensional monument to misfortune.

  The creatures are weird and wonderful, ugly and beautiful. Looking at them evokes first a fear of the unknown, as many of these species are unrecognisable, some having not been seen alive by human eyes for hundreds of years. Then comes a crushing sense of melancholy that follows the realisation that time only ever moves forward, and that you can never reverse death. It is just not possible.

  But it is not time that has slain these creatures, it is man, and for that perhaps it is he who should be gathering dust on a shelf in a pose that best represents his species: poised, perhaps, with a rifle tucked under one arm and the other hand shading his brow as he squints off into the distance with a hint of bloodlust in his eyes. That is the human stance. The killer’s posture.

  In many ways the Museum of Extinct Animals is an inverse graveyard. The corpses have been unearthed from the soil of the past and exhibited, each with a name tag and a plaque bearing a date of final extinction. Some of the great losses are alarmingly recent, like that of the Pyrenean ibex, a wild horned mountain goat (rendered extinct on 6 January 2000, Spain). This suggests that the collection is continually being added to, though no one knows when or by whom because the Museum of Extinct Animals mainly exists in academic papers and rumours, in urban mythology and internet forums, in the imaginations of those who fall asleep at night dreaming of great plains and savannah clearings inhabited by all the species that ever lived.

  There are those who might even be able to remember what it was they were doing the very day that the last Pyrenean ibex’s little heart stopped beating. Could anyone have done anything to help anyway? It’s difficult to say.

  Elsewhere in the museum there sit creatures whose extinctions stretch back through less ecologically enlightened times. Creatures such as the great auk (3 June 1844, Iceland), an animal superficially similar to the penguin, ‘an excellent swimmer’ whose wings doubled up as fins underwater but who, unlike other auks, could not fly, which made it more vulnerable to humans and other predators.

  According to the small engraved description exhibited in the Museum of Extinct Animals, ‘the great auk laid only one egg each year and was hunted for food and down for mattresses’.

  So perhaps even now someone, somewhere, is sleeping atop extinction each night.

  Or what of the aurochs (Poland, 1627), whose name translates as ‘primeval ox’, or ‘proto-ox’, and of whom no photographs exist, only cave paintings, for the horned aurochs was an animal worshipped by humans and sacrificed to the gods accordingly. The mammal survived the Iron Age, changing weather systems and threatened food supplies and indeed flourished across Europe, but what it did not survive was continual encounters with humans.

  The aurochs population dwindled and its movements became restricted to Poland, Lithuania and parts of Prussia. In 1564, according to a royal survey, Polish gamekeepers knew of only thirty-eight such animals. The last recorded aurochs was a female who, without a male with which to procreate, lost her entire reason to exist and curled up and died amongst the dead leaves and the comforting wet smell of woodland fecundity and decay. Location: Jaktorów Forest. Date: 1627. Exact day unknown. The laws of probability suggest it was a weekday.

  Perhaps you are now beginning to understand that the Museum of Extinct Animals is no showpiece, no tawdry end-of-the-pier cheap thrill. No. It is a giant filing cabinet of human error. It is simply too sad a place to enter without due preparation.

  Of course, were visitors ever to wander its vast and sorrowful galleries, after a short time of reflection most would straighten up, dab at their eyes and become indignant, saying, ‘It’s nothing to do with me’, and then go about their business as if extinction itself were extinct.

  What is equally difficult to reconcile is why someone would go to the trouble of recording the execution of the last remaining animal of a specific species – the aforementioned great auk, 3 June 1844, for example – but not actually stop and do something about its preservation. When sailors speared that last auk on the island of Eldey, ten miles off the south-west coast of Iceland, they carefully documented the minutiae of its demise. To do so they may have had to remove their fur-lined mittens in order to dig out a piece of paper and a gnarled stub of a pencil in those sub-zero, frostbitten conditions.

  But that’s as far as their commitment went. After all, you sleep much better on a down mattress than on a bed made from a glacier.

  The exhibits are arranged by species and continent. The North American Fish section alone is nothing short of a roll-call of senseless slaughter and greedy plunder, once-poetic names now nothing more than dried-out relics: the Snake River sucker (Wyoming, 1928), the Alvord cutthroat (Nevada and Oregon, 1940), the Pahrump Ranch killifish (Nevada, 1958), the thicktail chub (California, 1957), the blackfin cisco (Great Lakes, 1960s), the longjaw cisco (Great Lakes, 1970s).

  Beyond that is the vast section that houses the mammals, then a short airless corridor leads into the cavernous hall in which the hundreds of extinct birds are mounted and framed. The ceiling in this room is so high that it appears one inch square when viewed from below.

  Naturally the room of ex-birds features perhaps the most famously non-existent creature of them all, the doomed breed made famous by Lewis Carroll and visualised by schoolchildren everywhere when they hear the word extinction: the dodo (Mauritius, 1693).

  The corridors seem endless. Rooms lead to other rooms. Drifts of dust gather. The silence is external, a vortex of auditory nothingness into which the occasional shaft of light permeates t
o illuminate a small plaque screwed into the wall:

  Reptiles, Asia, 1820–1840.

  One unavoidable question arises, one you might already have asked yourself: Why does the Museum of Extinct Animals even exist?

  The answer is simple: it exists for the same reason anything exists. Because it does.

  For now it is safe, as so few know about it, yet even the museum is not impervious to threat. Once its precise whereabouts and purpose are made public, humans will in time destroy it too, and then someone will have to open up a Museum of Extinct Museums.

  And then that too, of course, will be vulnerable to elimination.

  And so the cycle goes.

  POSTSCRIPT TO ‘THE MUSEUM OF EXTINCT ANIMALS’

  January 2002. The research party had been wandering the forests, swamps and bayous of Louisiana Pearl River Wildlife Management Area for many days. They had been camping under the stars and eating frugally. No one complained about the humidity and the mosquito bites, nor the rashes, for they had come equipped with nets and an arsenal of sprays, creams and repellents. Modern-day explorers and conservationists don’t have to suffer like their forefathers did, and that’s one thing they could thank the chemical industry for.

  There was a shared common goal to the expedition, something of far greater importance than a few itchy bites and a good eight hours’ sleep: sighting the ivory-billed woodpecker.

  This strange and mysterious creature had been declared an endangered species on 11 March 1967, after hundreds of years of logging and hunting had destroyed its habitats and drastically reduced breeding numbers.

  It had been officially declared extinct in 1994, though there were some who disputed this. There were just enough vocal voices of dissent to instil hope for the birdwatchers, conservationists, academics and students who had a vested interest – whether scientific, ornithological or emotional – in the ivory-billed woodpecker.

  Unconfirmed sightings had been on the increase when the party entered the bayou armed with maps and binoculars, camouflage and oh-so-silent cameras, plus all the sundry items needed to survive comfortably on an expedition into these unforgiving, barely penetrable wetlands of the South.

  The first week or so passed without a sighting. There was much to see and do, so many creatures of many varieties to observe and a few million mosquitoes to evade, but the ivory-billed woodpecker remained something their minds had only ever imagined; a vision of a brilliant bird, elevated now to near-mythical status.

  Then on the tenth day came the familiar ‘double-knock’ noise of a beak on bark, a sound familiar to the expedition party members only from recordings. It travelled through the heavy, wet air: thock thock thock. . .

  No one moved.

  They heard it again: thock thock thock. . .

  Could it be. . . No? Surely not. They dared not utter its name.

  As nervous fingers reached for sound recorder buttons, a dozen pairs of eyes scanned the dense swampland, the fetid mangroves and the shifting shades where the undergrowth met the water. All they saw was a tangle, a tussle between life and death, a never-ending war of species on species. Nature operating at maximum productivity.

  And in amongst it all, its creator hidden from the well-trained eyes of the research party, the thock thock thock of its industry rising up from the past.

  Was it? Yes, it was. Whisper the words: the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was alive, praise be, alive.

  That simple sound of beak and bark was the sound of hope. Suddenly all was not lost. Man’s cruel cycle of death had been defeated; the odds had been smashed.

  The ivory-billed woodpecker, this late lamented creature, was back and in fine health: proud, glorious, free – and oblivious to its near miss as a late entrant into the Museum of Extinct Animals, about which the party members had attended seminars and read long, academic essays, yet of whose existence they had no clear evidence.

  Or at least, confided the party and their two academic leaders, we think it’s the sound of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

  It certainly sounded like Old IB, as they had taken to calling it. But they had been up the river and into the swamps for some days now, and the isolated and ever-shifting environment had a strange effect on people. Could anyone see it? No. No, they could not.

  Was it even the right call?

  With blanket silence on the bird front once again, now the seeds of hope grew into shoots of doubt. Perhaps, suggested one student, it was distant gunfire. After all, the area was rife with hunters and trappers, and hadn’t they run into that party of men yesterday who everyone had made Deliverance jokes about as soon as they were out of earshot?

  A couple of the other students offered murmurs of agreement: yes, it could be those crazy hunters firing their old-time Civil War guns, their echoes returning like lost postcards from the past.

  Quick, they decided. Split up into groups. Get organised. Search the undergrowth, explore the trees, scour the groves. The old spread-and-circle routine. There’s no time to lose. Let’s undertake a clockwise sweep, they said.

  The entire expedition felt galvanised into action, all of them certain they should be doing something in the search for the thock thock thock of the ivory-billed woodpecker.

  They found nothing. The sighting was recorded as unconfirmed because it wasn’t even a sighting. It was a noise, a suggestion of Old IB, a symbol of a creature that no longer exists.

  Maybe thock thock thock was a ghost of the last-known ivory-billed woodpecker, forever trapped in the hinterlands of the bayou, wandering the dark corridors of Louisiana, its ghost beak pecking ghost trees and destined to drive men mad for generations to come.

  POST-POSTSCRIPT TO ‘THE MUSEUM OF EXTINCT ANIMALS’

  Monroe County, Arkansas, 11 February 2004. Over 697 million cameras in the world and only one of them captures an ivory-billed woodpecker in flight – or the ghost of one at the very least, for who can tell the difference anyway?

  First one, then another, then another. Seven sightings over the next fourteen months of ghost birds or otherwise, each with a distinctive blood-red plumage.

  POST-POST-POSTSCRIPT TO ‘THE MUSEUM OF EXTINCT ANIMALS’

  ‘I have heard the summer dust crying to be born.’ —Robinson Jeffers

  An English Ending

  At six it was a black mirror capturing and framing the first settled shapes of the rising sun, but by seven the reservoir held ten thousand triangles of light that reconfigured themselves across the surface like a shoal of rising herring.

  There was a light breeze too, and birdsong from the curlews and house martins as they rode the unseen currents of air. They were joined by a scattering of late-arriving swallows who settled to dip their beaks and ruffle their feathers after their long journey across the Sahara and up through Morocco, Spain, France and the length of England. Their flight was nearly complete. In the surrounding dells and copses they would make their nests, replenish their energy levels and breed. They would rest for three months until summer’s end, then take flight once more before the winter’s frost tightened across the skin of the north once again.

  The woman was out of breath when she reached the crest of the hill as it flattened out on to the open vastness of the moor. She felt a cold crescent of sweat across her lower back. Damp, her blouse clung to her flesh.

  She turned to take in the view of the town down below, snaking its way along the narrow valley’s floor, and surrounding it the scattering of hamlets and houses that worked their way up the opposite hillside, their mullion windows and stout lintels suggesting a permanence at odds with the changing landscape that grew around them. Closer by she saw seasonal whin, moorland moss and the wild grasses that sounded like shale and pebbles shifting in the shallows of a shore when the wind shook their tussocks. Beyond them, reaching off into the distance, the slow-turning blades of the turbines and the strung cables linking pylons that stretched ominously like automatons; they always made her think of the Ted Hughes story they’d read at school that told
of a giant metal man careering through the landscape.

  This was her valley; it was all she had known or might ever know. For the first time, this realisation that the valley represented the limit of her life struck her as a concrete fact rather than circumstantial supposition.

  The reservoir had been sunk by labourers armed with winches and ropes and pickaxes a hundred years ago or more. She had read about it. There had been a book about its origins in the local library, one of the few places where she felt she could lose herself for several hours.

  They were Irishmen, mainly. Two thousand of them at one point, living in prefabricated huts up here at the top of the world, in a makeshift township in which there was also a store and a recreation room. Alcohol, the book had reported, was strictly prohibited on the site, so to drink the men had to take the walk down into the town – the same hike she had just done in reverse. Only the most committed alcoholics would do that after a twelve-hour shift breaking rocks tipped from mine carts at ten-minute intervals.

  The woman walked to the water’s edge. She shivered at the sight of it, though not from the cold. It was the hostility of this place that had always excited her. It scared her too, and this fear and excitement combined to evince a strange sensation within. A curious sense of awe, perhaps.

  Even now, after a lifetime of visiting it, the portentous power of the black water was magnetic. She was drawn to it, continually. She returned again and again, whenever the noise in her head reached deafening levels or her body felt the pull of gravity too strongly, stomping up the hill in winter to watch snowflakes settle on the icy skin that formed on its shallow corners, then picking her way back down in evening darkness. The lights of the town below her only guide.