What made you laugh even more was to see the rail pull up short and swerve to one side if it happened to spy a fly or moth. Never passing up an opportunity to eat—another thing the men could sympathize with. Afterward, cocky with its full belly, the bird forgot any former cause for alarm and would saunter off, or right back toward you. Maybe the men felt reassured by this, the tiny creature’s quick vanquishing of fear, its sassy reestablishment of poise. The possibility of forgetting.
To tell the story of the rail, you had to start with the guano traders of the North Pacific Fertilizer and Phosphate Company who rented the small island of Laysan from Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaii, before those islands were annexed by the United States. After fourteen years of excavating bird shit, one misguided ship captain devised an alternative scheme to raise rabbits on the island: English white rabbits and Belgian hares. The result was ecological disaster. The rabbits quickly set to work commandeering the ground nests of petrels and shearwaters, driving them off, then eating everything in sight. Things were worse for the rail, which couldn’t fly away. Soon there was nothing left except a handful of half-starved rabbits. Shot by visiting naturalists.
As luck would have it, a pair of rails had been introduced to Midway, where they’d flourished. Managing to live in happy coexistence first with the workers of the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, who having little else to do, set about planting trees and turning the grassy atoll into a mini tropical paradise. Then with wealthy American tourists, who flew out on Pan American’s China Clipper and stayed overnight at the Gooneybird Lodge, named for yet another endangered bird, the albatross.
And here’s a piece of history—twenty-one marines sent to Midway by President Theodore Roosevelt, not only to guard the cable station but to protect the birds. Especially the albatross, as unscrupulous feather hunters would walk right up to their nests and bludgeon them to death.
The albatross survived, barely. The rails did not. By 1943 or 1944, some sailors who’d delighted at the tiny birds’ antics might have noticed there wasn’t a pair left. For the Battle of Midway, while marking the beginning of the U.S. Navy’s victory at sea, also signaled the beginning of the end for the rail.
Rats, so often to blame, were the main culprits, brought in on navy landing craft that pulled right up to naval pontoons. Habitat destruction was a secondary cause, as the Seabees cut down the Norfolk pines and she-oaks planted by the cable workers, and leveled the ground to build their runways and docks. Even worse for the rail, the navy cut back the grass for mosquito control. Grass provided shelter for the small birds, and without it, they cooked to death as ground temperatures reached 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Laysan rail was just one small, generally unnoticed, casualty of the war, caught between the hatreds of the Americans and the Japanese, Jim had written in his book Extinct and Vanishing Birds of Oceania. Its case was particularly tragic as the bird had been extirpated twice. First from Laysan, then from Midway.
Some of their deaths were horrible, and some plain lonely.
Jim’s not sure what makes him think of the rail now. Must be the girl reminding him of the place, or reminding him of the bird itself, with her forward, easy manner that might make you worry. More likely, it’s a way of not thinking. He pours himself a gin and tonic.
A Cabinet of Auks,
American Museum of Natural History,
New York, July 1973
Bad news about Jim’s leg,” Mann, the chairman of the Ornithology Department says, coming up behind Michael and laying a thick hand on his shoulder.
It’s hot and stuffy in the sixth-floor lecture room, where the department’s monthly meeting has just drawn to a close. Michael had spaced out as Americans like to say. Sometime after a presentation on Sichuan hill partridges, and before the inevitable budgetary bickering. It’s incredible really how these men, who climb far-off mountains and trek deep into thick forests to locate rare birds, have difficulty securing lightbulbs and paper clips.
“Yes, very,” Michael agrees, dissembling. Baffled as to why Mann mentions Jim now—half a year after his abrupt departure. Unsticking himself from the leather chair, smoothing out his linen trousers, he remembers clearly how his heart leapt when he heard the news Jim might not be coming back. Not that he’d wish an amputation on anyone, of course not. Nor any other infirmity. But at Jim’s age, and with the old man’s drinking problem, wasn’t it was high time for him to go? The leg was just the final blow. Hadn’t they practically assigned him a minder with Farrell, their Central American expert?
“I stop him biting,” Farrell had said, grinning.
“Now that Jim’s retiring, I’m wondering if you might write up one of your esteemed profiles,” Mann continues. “Well, not officially retiring of course, but in practice.”
Mann, an elder statesmen of evolutionary biology, is white-haired but jowly with the thick set of a boxer, a good six foot four. And Michael feels at a disadvantage standing so close. At least, he’s well dressed, in his pressed linen suit and polished shoes. It’s a thing he takes prides in: adding a touch of English class to this nest of khaki-trousered, tweedy birdmen. The other exception being Laina, the department’s first and only female curator, an Australian who wears jeans and ties up her hair in a jaunty scarf.
He clears his throat, not sure whether to point out that the profiles he’d written for the ornithological journal the Auk were in fact a series of obituaries.
“Maybe you could get Laina to help you with the legwork,” Mann suggests. “She’s close to Jim.”
Michael weighs the tastefulness of a wry retort, then decides against it. Mann must be Jim’s age or a little older. Instead, he finds himself nodding banally. His nostrils flare at the trace of human sweat which hangs in the room, overlaying the academic smells he loves: the aroma of old leather, musty books, the sharp mothball scent of dichlorobenzene used to keep insects out of the skins—smells that tie him to his career. Two black oscillating wall fans strain to stir the stultifying heat. He listens to the desultory twittering of caged meadowlarks from the sound lab next door and wonders if it’s possible to accurately study the songs of captive birds.
It’s another thing that bothered him about Jim—the way the older man had begun to monopolize Laina’s time. He blushes to think now how he’d lectured her on women’s equality and her responsibility as a role model. Warning that she risked sidelining her own important work on New Caledonian birds; that she shouldn’t allow herself to become an older man’s uncredited dogsbody, which had been the fate of some brilliant female ornithologists before her. Just why she’d agreed to help Jim with the onerous task of cataloging the department’s type specimens, he couldn’t understand.
He blinks, smooths his mustache down with a thumb and index finger.
Retreating to his office, Michael sees Laina’s door invitingly open. Unsure whether to approach, he pauses a moment, running his hands along the top of a cool glass cabinet. It’s a display case he passes many time a day, hardly taking note. But now, flustered and put out by Mann’s assignment, he finds himself peering down at some yellowed news clippings and a large stuffed auk.
Rothschild’s Birds to Be Brought Here, a headline from the New York Times gloats. Famous British Collection Acquired by the Museum of Natural History.
March 13, 1932, he reads on. Over a quarter of a million skins to be sent in some 200 crates from England. Including the extinct great auk, the Labrador duck, the Solomon Islands blue-crested pigeon—a specimen so rare that none is known to exist in any other museum.
It was a coup for the department, securing its reputation as one of the best, but a huge loss for Britain, Michael thinks with a rare twinge of patriotism. And a tragedy for the tall, shy Lord Walter Rothschild, who’d spent his life collecting. Rothschild had more than fifty birds named for him, hundreds of butterflies, as well as a giraffe. There were photos of Rothschil
d driving a carriage to Buckingham Palace behind a pair of zebras, to prove the animals could be trained. Of the top-hatted lord sitting astride a giant tortoise.
The 1930s—when Jim came of age. Surely those were the department’s golden years. Its collectors, dispatched across the globe, led the way in a frenzied transatlantic race to acquire as complete an inventory as possible of all the world’s birds. It was imperial in scope.
Jim had been part of that, if at the tail end—entering the profession at a time when science, exploration, and hunting went hand in hand; when ornithologists sought birds through the sights of their guns rather than by looking at cells through microscopes. He was one of the old guard. One of the last of a dying breed of gentlemen collectors: Rothschild; the French textile heir Jean Delacour; even Theodore Roosevelt might be counted among them if he hadn’t become president. Men who didn’t have to work for a living, Michael thinks with envy. Instead, they lavished their family money and sometimes their friends’ fortunes on birding. The way museum trustee Leonard Sanford persuaded his philanthropist pal Harry Whitney to build a new wing at the museum, then to fund the ambitious Whitney South Sea Expedition.
As the department’s self-appointed historian, Michael usually enjoys writing about these men. He’d have had some fun with Mann’s assignment—if the focus wasn’t on Jim. It worries him that Mann doesn’t think he has better things to do.
Jim’s largesse was on a lesser scale. Still, hadn’t he financed the museum’s bird-banding project on Great Gull Island? Hadn’t he paid for all the back copies of the Auk to be bound in rich Morocco? It had become departmental lore, the night Jim lifted all the cracked leather chairs from the library and had them reupholstered after the union refused funds. He’d paid for Farrell to study parrots in Guatemala and for Laina’s salary before she was appointed curator, which is perhaps why she remained so loyal.
It was part of the problem too. Jim was a benefactor, not an employee. No one had the right to tell him to go. It’s why he was allowed to linger so long, stalking the hallways, slapping schoolchildren’s fingers when they pushed the buttons in the elevator and slapping just a bit too hard, insulting people. Insulting Michael. It had taken a medical surgery to get rid of him.
Glancing once more toward Laina’s door, Michael taps the top of the glass case decisively, then withdraws to his own office. He feels resentful, discouraged. A monkey’s ass, Jim had called him. The memory still smarts.
The truth is, there’s no one he’d less like to write about than Jim.
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973
Damned considerate of her to keep out of the way, Jim thinks, happy not to be watched stumping down the stairs. Some mornings he can manage, negotiating each step with the crutch. Other times, he’s reduced to going down on his ass. Bump. Bump. Bump. Like goddamn Winnie-the-Pooh.
Good, she’s not here in the kitchen either.
Swinging across the wide, painted floorboards, he kicks the door open with his foot and stands for a moment in a pool of sunlight, letting it warm the bare skin of his hands and face. This is the time of day he likes most to be alone. Even as a boy, he’d felt cheated if his brother or sister Ann woke before him. He remembers jealously hoarding the early hours: the long day stretching itself languorously out before him, offering the promise of sailing and exploration, and jumping into the cold sea.
Summer, best time of year—bringing with it the tattered vestiges of childhood pleasure.
Hobbling across to the kitchen sink, he leans in against the counter to fill a blackened kettle. Listens to the buzz of a cicada warming up, a lone trill that will become a deafening chorus later in the day. The fish hawk’s high-pitched whistle as it patrols the flat sea.
He lights the gas stove, then takes a battered tin mug and measures out two spoonfuls of instant coffee. There are other cups in the cupboards, proper teacups with saucers, shelves full of them, but he prefers this mug with its chipped blue enamel, part of a set he used to take sailing and camping. Perhaps it’s a statement that he’s been camping out, all these years without his wife. Damn that.
The water steams and he pours, watching the coffee granules spin and dissolve. He has to wait for the tin to cool so he won’t burn his lips. He’s not particularly hungry but he’ll make breakfast anyhow and leave the girl’s on the counter. It’s too bad if it gets cold.
He’s eager to get back to his work on the museum piece he’s been writing; his routine thrown off during the past week by the anticipation of her arrival. He’ll start anew, try to steer clear of diversions and confusions that have beset his past attempts. The effects of hangover. He has until noon or one at the most, he reckons, before the gloom and bad temper set in. The black dog, Churchill called it. For Jim, there are physical symptoms, bouts of shaking in his hands, cramps and spasms in the stump. Best way to deal with those—a stiff drink, or two.
Isla de Providencia. Province of Pirates, Jim types at the top of a fresh sheet of paper, then rips it out and begins afresh. He sits at a heavy wood card table he’s shoved up against one of the big bay windows in the sitting room, with a good view over the cove and out to the end of the point. His chair positioned where he can watch the ferry gliding past, half past the hour at seven, twelve, and three, and set his watch by it. So that he can keep an eye on the fish hawks in their large, ungainly nest lodged at the top of a dead pine. The pair successfully hatching chicks this summer after years when their eggs had been too thinned by DDT.
Old Providence. The True Treasure Island—clearer and more to the point. He scrolls down. Old Providence, an island in the western Caribbean Sea, is the true Treasure Island. And you may “lay to that,” he types—employing the turn of phrase Stevenson’s pirates use when they swear to tell the truth. He sips the bitter coffee, tugs thoughtfully at his left earlobe.
The idea for the article had come to him many years ago when he sailed to the Caribbean on the research yacht Utowana. Maybe someone had even suggested the likeness of the islands to him then; he can’t remember.
He does remember his first sight of Old Providence with its volcanic-shaped hills rising from the sea: fore, main, and mizzen, Stevenson playfully named them. All three seemed sharp and conical in figure. The distinctive split hill with the two peaks: the place the marooned pirate Ben Gunn stowed his treasure in a cave. The snug, perfectly round harbor—this pond, Stevenson wrote—protected from the ocean by an off-lying islet.
Jim had rowed a small skiff across from the main island to Catalina. The distance fit Stevenson’s estimate: about a third of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and Skeleton Island on the other. Skeleton being Stevenson’s name for Catalina.
Birds rose from the green trees, just as they did when the Hispaniola dropped anchor, wheeling and crying over the woods. In the small trees and thickets along a path, he’d found a golden warbler he later named for Helen, Dendroica petechia helenai. Its yellow crown and the small chestnut patch on its breast, distinguishing it, just as he suspected, from the brown-capped warbler on nearby Saint Andrew’s.
Any recent visitor will see how much the anchorage resembles Treasure Island’s, he types.
Cadillac walks across the wet grass of the early morning, ambles along the rocky coast until she comes upon a small beach. The sand had been submerged at high tide the day before so that she hadn’t noticed it. But at low tide, there’s a tiny fan-shaped cove. She clambers down eagerly. The fine pale sand is strewn with mussel shells. She picks up the sun-bleached exoskeleton of a sea urchin, an orange crab shell.
Looking back, she sees how the small drop hides her from the house, making this a private place she can lay claim to. The way Solomon Islands women stake out a certain beach for bathing—a place that’s taboo for men. This shouldn’t be a problem, as she doubts Mr. Jim could make it down the rocks on his one leg or in his wheelchair.
It had
surprised her to find Jim was an amputee. Tosca hadn’t mentioned it, but perhaps he lost his leg after the fighting in New Georgia, when the war moved on to Bougainville and to the Philippines. That would explain why Tosca hadn’t known. This in itself is a new concept, as up to now it seemed her father knew just about everything.
Here’s something else: the size of Jim’s house—big as Mendana’s or Bloom’s Hometel, bigger than the Point Cruz Yacht Club. The way the old man lives in it all alone. In the Solomons, if you had a house even a small fraction of this size, it’d be filled with wantoks, relatives or people who come from the same island or who speak the same language. And children would be everywhere—running up and down the stairs, spilling out along the upstairs balcony, dangling their legs over the porch steps, trying out their balance on its flat balustrade.
She walks down to the sea, steps into it. Owee. The water’s like ice, so cold it burns. She manages to put both feet in, then forces herself to wade up to her calves, the chill shuddering up her legs. What would her brothers say and the other boys, always teasing the girls who didn’t dive right in? Suggesting they were bush people. They’d never felt this water. The shock spreads to a numbness so she has to rub her shins vigorously to get some feeling back.
Stevenson, it must be acknowledged, never traveled to the Caribbean. He had yet to sail to the South Seas when he wrote Treasure Island. He’d once described the flora of his island as part California, part chic.
It’s Jim’s contention though that the author used Old Providence as a template. He believes Stevenson read of the island, first in a highly popular, if slightly suspect, account of an eighteenth-century shipwreck, penned by Sir Edward Seaward and discovered posthumously by one Miss Jane Porter. Also that Stevenson would have read the far more discerning survey conducted by Mr. C. F. Collett of the Royal Navy and presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1837. The survey attracted public notice as it persuasively identified Seaward’s island as Old Providence.
Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 3