by Jeremy Page
We sat, rocking in our seats, enjoying the marvels of the spectacle. A fish jumped clear into the thwarts, landing on the wood with panic, thrashing and flicking its flanks until one of the men threw it back in. More fish leapt against the side of the boat and dropped back in a daze.
When the hunt calmed down, the dolphins raised their heads from the water, as if receiving applause. They nodded and lifted their beaks, clucking and singing with curiosity. Then, almost as quickly as they had appeared, the dolphins submerged and vanished.
After a complete circumnavigation of the isle, spying the rock ledges for any evidence of great auks, we landed at the low reef. The rocks were smeared with white guano, pellets, feathers and fish scales. It stank horribly. Several pools had collected, and they reeked with a fetid ammonia smell; in one I saw a drowned kittiwake which had been there a long time. One of the sailors referred to it as a haglet. The cliffs overhung us with a sense of precariousness that affected us all. I felt overwhelmed with bleakness, that this rock smelt of nothing but waste and death. Foolishly, some part of me, some residual ill-judged belief, had made me think that we might have found a great auk. It had felt possible, although I had never voiced this possibility. But to stand on the island, I felt chastened. I had dragged a whole ship to this spot. For nothing. It was a place of great absence. This damp forgotten rock in the middle of the sea was the last spot in the world, and yet man had still not let them be. And at that moment I felt ashamed to be part of the species that had done this. The previous year, three Icelandic fishermen had stood here and strangled the last two great auks. They had smashed the one egg that had been laid. And although the winter waves had swept any remnant of this species from the rock, the spectre of the violence that had finished them remained. This was the site of an atrocity.
The Herlihy brothers had climbed out of Sykes’ boat and were standing with the look of the recently shipwrecked, not quite knowing what duties they now had to perform. I had no answers. Why had I directed a ship and its crew across the Atlantic to land at this inhospitable place, only to be greeted by the undeniable proof of man’s murderousness? This was folly indeed! Sykes, spotting my uncertainty and wanting to salvage something from a purposeless visit, pointed to a breach in the cliffs.
‘Well, Mr Saxby, my only idea is that you, Martin and Connor might climb that gully over there—if you wished, that is—to see the top of the isle. There may be sights of interest to a naturalist?’ I was thankful for his sympathy. A man used to salvaging situations, he seemed, at heart, equally disappointed. ‘I shall be perfectly content,’ he said, ‘to sit here on this wretched boulder.’
‘Thank you, captain. I appreciate your suggestion.’
The Herlihy brothers climbed swiftly, and several times we gathered to help each other onto the ledges, while below us I heard the distorted sound of the sea rising in false currents. I dared not look down. The rock felt harsh, with a mineral scent of saltpetre, and the streaks of guano resembled dry waterfalls spilling from ledge to ledge. In the cracks of the rock, what had appeared to be vegetation turned out to be bones and pellets that had formed mats.
Our relief on reaching the top was fleeting, for we quickly emerged onto a stage of dizzying and confusing sound that was diabolic in its feel. In front of us, largely free of the mist, was a perfectly flat field of bare rock, covered by a seething colony of ten or twenty thousand fully grown gannets, their white bodies forming what appeared to be an impossible covering of snow. They made a dreadful and insane noise, of barking and grumbling, formed from a restless sea of throats, most noticeable nearest to us, inflaming with vibration as we stood to watch. The egg yolk coloration of their napes, by the thousand, gave the colony a sunset shine, as if it had managed to emit its own light.
‘I can’t move,’ Martin said, his boots placed awkwardly between the ragged territories of three nests.
‘Me neither,’ his brother replied, braving his fear. ‘What’s your orders, sir?’
The closest birds eyed us warily, falling from their nests and aiming at our legs as we passed. Their beaks opened wide and their throats were vivid with a bright pink anger. Their eyes were startlingly clear and empty.
‘They’s gutless, Marti,’ Connor decided, setting off at a healthy stride to kick out a path. The air seemed to rise around us, full of black-tipped scythes, as birds took to the wing.
‘Hah! Hah!’ Martin shouted. ‘Off you go, bastards!’ The brothers began to enjoy the sport, giving heavy kicks to the gannets and swiftly pocketing eggs in canvas bags. I followed the path they created, as if we brought with us a rising wind, scattering the birds and causing a panic that spread far beyond.
‘Watch the gulls,’ I warned, noticing several glaucous gulls sitting among the gannets. They were large and ghostly white in plumage, and were considerably more vicious than the gannets. They would wade towards us, hissing, their wings unhinged and their necks low and strained. The colony was overwhelming. There was such noise, such a squalor of smell and scrabbling and unpredictable pecking, that our nerves were very quickly shot through.
‘I’ll not stand much more o’ this, sir!’ Connor whined.
‘Me neither!’ I shouted, stopping abruptly, all three of us standing as one does in a crowd, shoulder to shoulder. The gannets closed around us, a flowing mass acting as water does, filling gaps and rising unstoppably. I felt engulfed by a sense of drowning, that somehow an acre of the ocean had risen to the top of this rock and we would soon be overrun. I stood, in awe of nature’s sheer abundance. Its noise. Its restless and unquenched activity.
‘Would either of you have any complaint if we climbed down again, as quickly as we might?’ I said.
The brothers laughed, relieved.
‘We have us some eggs, anyhows,’ Martin said, immediately turning back.
‘Look at yous, Marti,’ his brother jeered. ‘Quick as a new bride on her weddin’ day!’
‘That I don’t mind. You’ll just be sitting down an’ makin’ friends with these winged bitches, eh?’
Connor prodded me with a finger. ‘Was a cry-baby, that one was.’
‘I heard that, Connor,’ his brother said, laughing. He kicked a gannet as hard as he could. ‘Whoa, that feels good!’ he shouted.
The sound of his voice suddenly lingered, unnaturally, as silence swept through the colony. It had arrived like a wave, rushing across the tops of the gannets. For a second not one of them made a noise. The birds looked up, as startled as we were, daunted by the stillness. It was as if the world had ended, a pause in which I felt I had a true and complete understanding of the infinite. A second later, with the resumption of the gannets’ endless moaning, the world began again, and this time the combined sound of the birds had the unmistakable tone of grief.
By the time we had climbed down, French’s party had joined us. He had found the outlying rocks, but no traces of any birds.
‘Same here,’ Sykes confirmed, looking disheartened.
Some of the men had collected feathers and other debris and had placed them on a large boulder for me to inspect. It was evident, from a brief examination, that there was nothing more than guillemot and razorbill feathers, alongside various fish bones.
‘There is nothing here,’ I said.
Sykes gave me a sympathetic look. ‘We tried, Mr Saxby. Do not be discouraged.’
‘Thank you.’ I looked at the others. ‘Sorry,’ I said.
As we pulled away from the island, I gazed at the mottled seabed as it vanished below us, thinking once more how the dolphins had appeared out of that mysterious shadow, rising, smooth and flint-coloured until they had breached the surface.
I turned to the captain: ‘Do you think we might see that patch of water again, where the dolphins appeared?’
‘What on earth for?’
I insisted. ‘Where was it?’
He gave me a shrewd look, narrowing his eyes, before shrugging. ‘It makes little odds. We can go that way.’
He directed
both boats to row in that direction, while he continued to regard me with a curious scrutiny.
‘This search of yours is affecting you,’ he said, rather more to the men than to me.
‘Perhaps so.’
We rowed on, surrounded by the mist. There was a sound of dripping coming from the tips of the oars. The sea was calm, almost with a lake’s character. We could just as easily have been on a punt during a duck shoot on the Norfolk Broads. To close my eyes was all it took, to conjure the ghostly calls of the coot, the quiet dip of the paddle, the distant splash of a pike, and I remembered how I used to find birds almost by instinct, uncannily understanding them, where they would shelter, where they would feel most secure. Among the damp, exposed roots that grew from the banks. Under the willows in early summer. In the dark gaps between the lily pads. In the shallows of the lake. Birds know their own fragility, and are born hiding.
‘It was about here,’ Sykes said, the hint of a challenge in his tone. ‘Lie on your oars, men.’
The men stopped rowing, and began to look beneath them, into the blackened water, as if expecting the dolphins to emerge once more.
I smiled and, unable to control myself, started to laugh. I held my hand to my mouth, incredulous.
‘For God’s sake man, what’s entered you!’ Sykes said.
I shook my head. ‘Those dolphins,’ I explained. ‘They were such a marvellous sight. We were all transfixed by them, weren’t we? Look!’ I pointed thirty feet away to a bare platform of the rock where, calm sentinels, the distinct silhouettes of a group of great auks stood, half shrouded in mist, as if they were merely a sketch on paper.
12
THERE ARE MANY DAYS when I have sat here and wished to God that I had never seen those birds. I have wished that the mist had remained thick, rather than parting briefly. Just a little further out to sea, or at a different minute, and we would never have found them. Yet through my persistence, my sheer obsession with finding what was lost, it seemed as if I had conjured them from beyond the impossible divide that separates the living from the extinct. It was all down to me, and to no one else.
Sykes was transformed by the discovery. He directed both boats to return to the place where we had previously landed, and he personally leant over the side to grab the rocks to guide the boat in. When he looked at me, it was with an expression of simple congratulation.
‘Well done, Eliot,’ he said. ‘You are a marvellous naturalist. You have a nose for it!’
All at once the mood of the excursion had changed. The men in both boats were unduly happy. I remember French, when he brought his boat alongside, actually stood up and leapt to shore. He leapt, as he had done when I had first met him, jumping the hatch as if he was playing games with his shadow, or trying to escape it. But this time, I felt it was a leap of excitement. I felt vindicated, not just for the day, but for the whole journey. Against all the odds, a group of these birds had survived! Seventy feet or so away through the mist, were the last half-dozen great auks in the world. They had appeared so mysteriously, their bodies made almost glass-like by the mist. Yet they were real! On that single bare rock stood the future of a species. The thought was dizzying.
This discovery would be the making of my career. It was the reversal of an extinction that had readily been believed. And as I crossed the slippery surface of the reef, underneath the towering cliff of the island, I thought of Clara, back on the ship; how this simple discovery might transform her life, too. Fill it with a joyousness and hope and belief that had been missing.
To reach them we had to round a sheer boulder while clinging to a ledge above a small deep inlet. Essentially, this was the reason our search on the island had not found them, before. On the other side, all seven of our party—the four sailors, Sykes, French and myself—collected on an edge of the reef. About twenty feet away, still standing on their low platform of rock, the great auks eyed us curiously. They mirrored our number exactly—seven. They were larger than any of the other birds we had seen. Dark, goose shaped, with stout necks and prominent hook-nosed beaks, as if a child had designed them with little regard for grace and elegance. They sat low to the rock, on stubby legs with wide paddled feet, the skin there bluer than the rest of their plumage.
‘These are your birds?’ French whispered.
‘Yes. Absolutely no mistake.’
‘Then this is a miracle,’ Sykes said.
A low murmuring sound emerged intermittently from the group, alongside a deep growl, far deeper than I have heard from any bird. It had the resounding thump of a bittern’s call, even several dozen yards away, but was as rough as a bull’s cough. It was an astonishing sound. I felt it reverberate in the pit of my stomach. Standing on the reef, I noticed we were among the detritus of a nesting area. Rafts of dried weed and fish bones adorned the rocks, alongside the glistening marks of guano and the soft sheen of fish scales. An hour earlier, I would have been overjoyed to find even these—a feather beneath my feet that I bent down to pick up—the feather of a great auk! This would have been prize enough, yet the riches of seeing seven adult birds, living, continuing, was an honour I found difficult to accept.
Captain Sykes instructed his men to sit. ‘We must not scare them from the rock,’ he urged. ‘Mr Saxby, have you listened to the rasping sound they make?’
‘It is quite incredible,’ I replied.
‘I have heard it said the great emperor penguins of the southern sea make a similar sound. But I have never heard anything like this.’
‘Rather like the bittern,’ I suggested, ‘the bull-of-the-bog.’
He was almost childishly happy. French had said the captain was an enthusiast for nature. I was glad to have brought him here.
‘Go,’ Sykes said, gesturing eagerly with his hand, ‘you must sit among them, to make your studies. We shall wait for as long as you wish.’
‘It’s strange, but I feel nervous,’ I replied. I had waited for this day for so long. ‘I don’t want to scare them.’
‘Look how their heads are sinking on their necks,’ he pointed out. ‘They are as docile as a Christmas goose! I suspect they have their bellies full of fish, and are intending to sleep it off.’
For the rest of my life I will remember the surge of feeling I had approaching their platform, almost in a trance, acutely aware that this moment, this experience, should not be occurring at all. These birds had vanished from the world, and yet here I was privileged beyond my comprehension.
The great auks stirred as I stepped onto their rock. Each one watched me, closely, but none of them made any sign of alarm. Unlike the gannets earlier in the day, these birds were peaceful and apparently without fear. The sound of their chatter and growls was remarkable, as it reverberated through their chests and rasped through their beaks. But it also felt unnerving, to be among them, because their size was so similar to that of young children, perhaps three years old; it was as if I was treading through a nursery. I felt naturally protective.
Their eyes were tiny pebbles of glistening black, with a smoky hue I’d never seen before, set in a flat-sided head covered with rows of miniature oiled feathers. When one turned to face me, a subtle iridescence curled across its crown, like the reflected gleam from a polished helmet. Their wings were long and paddle shaped, noticeably missing any form of flight feathers, with front edges that were as bare and hard as wooden rails.
I sat down among them, perceiving a strong smell of fish and a musky odour of wet plumage as I began to draw them in my notebook. My fingers trembled as I tried to hold the charcoal. I still have this sketch. It is a sketch, I now consider, of innocence itself. They were perfect sitters. Quite still and tranquil, sometimes adjusting their fleshy webbed feet but otherwise showing little interest in me or each other. Occasionally one would raise a neck to its full height and gaze into the fog.
I drew them carefully, first as a group, and then individual studies. There seemed little difference between the sexes, or none that was strikingly apparent, but there
were subtle alterations in their markings, a wider flash of white behind one’s eye, a more prominent beak on another, that suggested a mixed group. In my Compendium the auk had been drawn as a noble and fierce dweller on inaccessible rocks, rather than the placid and communal birds I witnessed. I drew details—the sharp deep outline of the nostrils on either side of the beak, shaped like apple pips, the solid scaly leg as woven as a riding crop, and the curve of the wing which, even folded, had at its tip an oar’s blade.
Every so often I looked back at the party of men sitting on the reef, at the base of the cliff. The sailors appeared aimless, but French and Sykes were in animated discussion. Sykes still had the eager expression he’d had since the birds’ discovery. He was explaining something very thoroughly to his first mate who, even at that distance, looked uncomfortable sitting on the rock. French liked to stand. Like all tall men, he preferred to be elevated.
I turned back to the birds. ‘Each one of you is a miracle,’ I whispered.
When I felt I had drawn enough, and recorded as many aspects of their grouping and postures as I could, I walked back to join the others.
‘I told you,’ Sykes said, smiling, ‘these birds are notoriously sleepy and quite trusting.’
‘It appears so,’ I replied. ‘And considerably smelly.’
‘This whole rock has a tremendous stink,’ he said. ‘Our clothes will not be rid of it for days. May I see your observations?’
I passed him the book. He looked carefully at the sketches, nodding and complimenting the accuracy. ‘Most impressive. I shall probably begin an embroidery based on these, if I may?’
‘I will make some further measurements,’ I said.
Returning to the rock, I placed a yardstick next to one of the birds. It eyed me curiously, but allowed me to take detailed recordings of its beak and feet, its neck and wing. I felt a tingle the length of my spine when I touched the bird for the first time. How cold and slick it felt, how the front blade of its wing had a prickly, almost plucked aspect to it, and how the feathers on its neck were as smooth and polished as glass. I was absorbed in my observations, and needed to concentrate, and made gentle movements that would not disturb them.