Translation by the poster.
Îðèãèíàë äîñòóïåí ïî àäðåñó: litrus.net/book/read/74533/Iskatel_1969_Vypusk_?p=35
No hunches, no worries. My only preoccupation is my synthetic overcoat. Green and slick, it feels cold and scummy. It`s falling apart at the seams, too. Otherwise, I am at ease: I am no stranger to Commander Bay, have been there before. I know my way around. Besides, keeping me company there is a young Aleut Gena Badayev.
- We`ll be all right – he said about my coat. – Here`s the thing about the weather here. If the wind shifts about counter-clockwise, the weather will be fine. Clockwise – you are in for some mud. It`s going counter now.
We make it over the island before dark. The tundra is soggy early in July, and there are patches of snow still visible in the lowlands. We climb our way around these areas over the ridges. Though heavily packed to last six days of walk or so, the sight of the mighty Bering Sea, blue in the distance, takes away from the weight of our loads.
Here, the shore. The heady iodic smell of seaweeds affects you as does a medication promising you cure. The smell of iodine has always roused me pleasantly - not the hospital kind of smell, the other - the water-borne scent of the oceanic depths materialized into edgy crystals settling on the grass. There is a feeling of liberation in the air, steeped in meadow herbs, pine, and fathomless waters.
And so, we breathe in the freshness and vastness of the air, and with it a promise of some sort of small personal discoveries. Perhaps, not so small, if you think about it – you can never know. The beach is a wealth of all sorts of stuff, for the most part worthless, but still it captures your imagination.
Among other things that I am after, I want to make some additions to my collection of teeth of the cetacean.
Here and there I find myself bending over for a skein of nylon rope, a synthetic mutant of a vial, a tooth of a sea lion. A lemon-styled vial of citric acid – very lifelike - screams flaming yellow up ahead. Apply a little pressure, and out will come a few pellets of the concentrated sun. A fitting inscription says: “A kiss of the Sun”.
This is how a day goes by, then – a night spent in an abandoned little yurt on the River Booyan, then another day. Then another night, that we also spend in a yurt this time downright dismal. It was long ago that hunters of polar foxes last lived here, for in their drive to maintain the population of the furry islanders, they take care to not hunt them annually.
So as to get the stove burning we set up a rusty scrap of a pipe in the loft and carefully line it with brick rubble.
Commander Bay is now only a little way off. We will be going tomorrow, light.
The bay was once home to Bering`s shipwrecked crew – they lived in dugouts enwrapped with skins of the incautious polar foxes – and even though two hundred odd years have passed since then, you can still find tiny beads of glass which the crew had brought as a commodity to trade with natives. These beads are one of the most sought souvenir items.
But the story of the Bay is not the story I am telling here.
On our way back, we walk into a herd of deer. Slow in noticing, they then stare at us silently, straining to make out our intent.
- Get the camera out, quick! – Gena breathes.
I take several shots from my hide and then break in pursuit of the now fleeing deer for more. I slip the camera back in the bag and as I am turning towards the sea, I set my eyes on a carcass, more than halfway washed into the sand. It is right there within the tideline, waves rolling over it. It is the color of the sand and its bleak felted hair is…. Yes…the hair. This is puzzling. And the puzzle is all the more complex given the bizarre shape of the carcass, clearly no whale`s - streamlined and solid. Besides, whales don`t even come with hair. Not until now at least. Nor is it a northern sea lion covered with the yellowish-red fur. I should be the one to know – I used to hunt them. No, definitely not a sea lion. This is something that is two or even three times the length of that. And at that - hairy! And this backbone… jutting out sharply, clearly outlined, like a cow`s…
- Hey, what`s this here?
Gena turns towards the monster.
- A whale? – he ventures a habitual guess. – A goose-beaked whale?
- Nah, - I shake my head. – Whales all have smooth skin.
We approach the carcass a little cautiously, silently reflecting for a space of about two minutes. Holes are gaping on either side of the hairy beast, and polar foxes reach in them as deeply as to leave only their tails sticking out.
.
No, this is positively no whale`s carcass: there is no streamlined transition of the torso into the head, and there is fringe on the horizontally branched blades where flukes should be. Gena`s small-caliber rifle fits seven times in the length of the torso, which makes the carcass at least six and a half meters long. The idea of this being a sea cow is unthinkable. Even more so, considering that, if I remember the description correctly, like whales sea cows also have smooth skin.
But then…could this be a sea cow after all? An adapted variety of it with hair to help withstand harsher conditions? Washed up here from afar?
I should confess, at this point, that I was prepared for making a discovery of this sort not without a reason. There was a back story to it all, a family tree, of sorts, tracing its roots to copious facts, exciting, if frequently dubious. Just as to many those days, so to me, the reported sightings of sea serpents, the Loch-Ness monster in Scotland had come as a disturbing, and yet a thrilling possibility.
Then a few years ago, there was an article authored by three associates of a research institute, that read that one of our whalers had encountered a group of six mysterious sea animals; they were sedate and matched closely the profile of Steller`s sea cow extinct since the 18th century. Witnesses specifically mentioned the small head which steeply transitioned into a torso, the tail that had on it what looked like fringe, then the length - estimated at six to eight meters, and finally the sighting locality – near a mouth of a river in a sandy bay amid tangles of laminaria, so loved by Steller`s sea cow. Whether true or not, one thing remains unarguable – our planet and its waters are not fully explored yet, every new year seeing more discoveries in the realm of Earth`s inexhaustible fauna.
When I read the article, of speculation on further searches, I remember, a thought occurred to me that indeed someone might get a really lucky break. And I figured, what the heck, I could use that break myself, now that I was leaving for those parts soon, home of the sea cow – the Commander Islands!
So, Gena and I are standing by the sea cow, the name that I`ll stick to for convenience, of which we – WE! – are the discoverers. I said “standing”, but this changes presently, and there we are, rather, I am: hopping around, laughing and patting befuddled Gena on the shoulder as he smiles. I am a discoverer! That is, two of us are! And there he goes too, poking about at the head of the carcass. I hold him back: let`s not go out on a limb here, what if we damage something, God forbid!
- Could there be a tusk?
- No chance, it`s vegetarian – I answer. – It`s not called a cow for nothing, some sort of teeth would be expected, sure. Baleen plates maybe. Oh, leave the thing alone, will you? Let go of that stick now!
However, myself, I am reaching for now one stick, now another. I poke around in the sand with it trying to release the sponge-like fluke (or is it a tail?). What if it`s not a sea cow at all? If it has not been extinct all these years, why is it that its corpse has never been seen beached until now? But then maybe it has, but people went past it ignorantly and disregarded it completely? And then in the wake of storms there simply were no bones left to collect?
Suddenly, and as if out of nowhere a storm blows in. Could wash the carcass away, you never know. Have to be quick now! As bad luck would have it, the camera won`t roll on the film. Excellent timing! No one will take just my honest word for it! With difficulty, I manage a few shots of film. Barely enough!
But we have to return to the slanted wind-beaten yurt we have chosen as our camp.
We leave the stove idle in the morning what with the wood being damp and no draft. Get us a little coffee boiling over sugar-cube-like heat tablets. We snack quickly on our bread and soft cheese to go with our strong beverage, and then we are off - back to the bay.
The cow is there. The same old song starts with the camera – the film rolls hard, hardly rolls at all. While I am stuck repeatedly with the camera`s insides, Gena makes sure no light gets through the holes in my coat blocking it with his body. Then there is me tearing something out angrily and putting it back in…
Humph…If what we have found is indeed a sea cow, then I can see how there is a pattern in its sticking to the same locality – Bering Island. The first sightings here were made by Steller – the restless naturalist, one of Bering`s crew. It was summer and the beach was vacant of seals then at sea, of whales with beaching season still away, and there were no rookeries nearby of either seals or northern sea lions. Meanwhile as the shipwrecked packet boat “St.Peter” was being pieced together into a new smaller boat, provisions had to be made for an upcoming, who knew how lengthy, voyage to Kamchatka. With interest Steller regarded the bizarre hulking animals grazing in the shallow waters near the shore. They opened their mouths widely as they chewed on seaweed. At times they would submerge under water for several minutes and then surface for air – which indicated they were not some sort of gargantuan fish, but rather something in the lines of whales. Yes, they were positively mammals, however, Steller had never seen any such thing in any of zoological atlases before. He dubbed the animal a “sea cow” for it was vegetarian and hulking.
The long and the short of it being Bering`s men set about hunting those wondrous creatures – and not only for their meat, but also their fat which would then go towards caulking cracks in the ship`s hull. Because the sea cows grazed near the shore, it only called for as long as 20 meters of rope tied to a harpoon. One end would remain on the beach held by some 40 men; the harpoon end would go with a hunting boat and be discharged into an animal almost point-blank. The creature would wriggle violently “and – witnesses the navigator Sven Waxel, – not infrequently the men found themselves in the water to their shoulders”. Talk about 40 men now! Eventually, armed with sabers and bayonets the men in a boat nailed their kill.
In taste the meat exceeded all expectations of the crew – it was tender as veal; the fat was good too, better than that of whales`. This rare animal was exterminated off the Commander Islands within 30 years. The general belief is that the herd was sparse numbering 2000 animals at the most. However, even then cautioning voices were heard calling for the killing of the sea cows to stop. Much to the world`s regret those voices were never listened to.
We must waste not a minute. We must hurry back to the village and come up with something soon (back then I had no idea we were dealing with a cow that had been lying around there for months washed up by the winter storms). We cover our first 20 kilometers in 4 hours at one go. I am ready to press on. I can`t wait to tell the world of my unprecedented discovery. Gena is exhausted (I too, for that matter) – that, and he`s worked up a blister on his foot – marathon has been discontinued for today. We settle down for the night. Upstream of the river near the mouth there`s a flock of harlequin ducks struggling occasionally against the current. Gena swings his gun. A shot follows of Munchhausen implausibility – three ducks are current-borne single-file our way.
Plucking is a lot of time and effort, so we save us that by first making slits in their skin of which we then strip the ducks at one stroke - fat makes them easily come off. It`s known as “taking off a jacket”. Failing to do so will give a fishy smell to all sea-water ducks when cooked. The narrow army pot of mine – the entire trio fits in it with only stumps out. Buckwheat makes the soup taste incredibly delicious. Small wonder: it is a potful of meat. We mix ourselves three to four spoonfuls of Kubanskaya Lyubitelskaya with raspberry extract, and proceed to drinking solemnly, officiating – nothing less.
- Here`s to the cow! – comes my sacramental toast that Gena eagerly supports. We bundle into the village absolutely prostrate – on our final stretch, going for a shortcut, we got into the marsh.
Leaving me to my glory, Gena heads home. As for me, my rest will have to wait. I am carrying the weight of great responsibility, if agreeable, on my shoulders.
The first thing, I have to find N., a research associate studying seals on the island. For which reason I make my way for the head of raispolkom [district executive committee]. I find him busy setting up a picket fence around his place. The news of the leviathan does not elicit a lot of reaction.
- All right, we`ll get word to N. somehow – he says. – On second thought, he`ll be coming around soon anyway. They have an ATV there over at the northern rookery. The day after tomorrow is Saturday, then there`s banya, then Election – they are all sure to show up, all right.
In the interim I get the head physician to help - a big photography fan, always with a “Start” or a “Kiev” strapped over the shoulder, wherever he goes. We work late into the night. Up until five in the morning, developing and fixing the film. The wait is unbearable. Then finally a fuzzy image of my cow fades in. It strikes as odd. Those first to look at it feel convinced – yeah, this is a kind of…well…a kind of…in short, some kind of an animal not seen before, even if not a sea cow. Most probably this is a whale, a hairy whale never encountered before.
With photographs now developed, I feel fully armed. I have a FACT in my hands.
I come across Putyatin in the afternoon, he`s in charge of the cash dairy farm. So I start: there`s this discovery, you know… Matvey Georgiyevich, motionless, as if I didn`t say anything, peers into the distance over the river. My words seem to be entirely lost on him. There are other things on his mind, you can see that.
- A cow`s run away to the tundra – he starts slowly. – Must have felt like getting away from people what with the labor coming…stupid thing. Just where am I supposed to look for it now? Such a shame about the calf…
I`ve been meaning to have him take a look at the absolutely unique tooth of a sperm whale that we have found, but I think better of it. The man has got his own life to live and daily cares to worry over. Of all kinds of cows a sea one appears the least foremost on his mind.
Saturday evening the young biologist N. gets in and with him a young man, pleasantly looking, blond – a colleague. Following graduation N. spent several years working here after which he moved to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. But the Islands attract him as much as ever.
He takes my story incredulously, says something to the effect:
- Oh my! But this is huge, your discovering a real sea cow. - He is not exactly laughing, but you can feel the sarcasm.
– A northern sea lion, perhaps?
I take offence:
- You don`t really think I can`t tell the difference? But let`s cut through the extra talk. I can show you the photographs. Should I get them?
This has his attention.
- Photographs, you say? How about that? That`s pretty quick for the Commanders…Well, get them then! Okay, let`s see now…
On seeing the photographs the old N. is gone:
- Indeed, something like a sea cow – he says, baffled. And then these two men go running their fingers through the pictures, talk specifics: why there are no pectoral flippers, what the head could be like. - Okay…Let`s hit banya now and then we`ll go talk to the higher-ups about arranging transportation. We`ll have to set out tomorrow. Well, I am very grateful to you for making this so complete.
- Oh, please, don`t be – I laugh. – I am in it for myself, really. – Damn, do I want to see how it all ends.
Time, it feels, is going so slowly. So slowly we might miss out on the whole world, let alone the cow. But I am being unfair: there`s hardly anyone in the village who has not shown interest in our find. Everyone is looking forward to the payoff. So much stir we, or rather - I have made here, it almost feels inappropriate.
Though with lateness – the Election day being the holiday – the ATV is supplied; the director of the animal factory himself calls on the driver: can you believe the trip we are going on?
Finally, all the pre-departure drudgery is over.
The marshy part of the route tells roughly on the ATV, we call stops every twenty minutes to let the engine cool down. But from then on we, sort of, fall into the rhythm. The only occasional stops we make are on account of the caterpillar tracks: when pins, that fasten them, sling out we find ourselves what is called “barefooted”. Luckily, there are a lot of us coming, too (the curious are coming along): together we heave the track back on and knock the pin in…
The evening comes. We steer the ATV along the coast edge. The rare calm. The sea gives the impression of a rolled spread of foil, glistening crimson, capturing and reflecting the colors of the dimming sunset. The headlights crush through the darkness. The infernal machine!
I am sitting on the top of the driver`s cab (it`s stuffy inside) and I can see splashes from under the tracks flying every which way, and I can see flat fish streaking away – either in little schools or singly. I squint tensely at the dark coastline afraid we might ram through the cow, iron it out with the tracks: its color is just like the colour of sand.
It now comes into view: the curved – the strangely and thrillingly curved backbone. I shout down below to take it easier from here.
The ATV swerves to a hard stop not far from the carcass, its headlights illuminating the monster to the minutest detail, to a last hair. The crowd files down the flatbed, pea-like, clustering tightly around the carcass. Mysterious in the light, its outline is reminiscent of a fossil reptile. No one has a shred of doubt left.
- Folks, this is it! – N. says excitedly. At this the load lifts – for until now I`ve had doubts, could in my reasoning see myself a victim of my own amateurishness, or an evil trick of mind.
The next morning we dig around the carcass; the ATV hauls it out with utmost caution higher up the shore and leaves for the village to return in two days` time or so. The curious folks leave too. Three of us remain: I, N. and Valya – the curly blond fellow – the colleague of the biologist.
N. ruminates aloud, leaning now more towards the discovered animal being, arguably, no sea cow whatever, belonging more likely to the Ziphidae family of the Cetacean order. The hair thing, however, is uncanny. And the hair is not just ordinary – it`s like tow. With a northern sea lion, it`s just a few days before its hair starts coming out of itself, yet with this thing it won`t even yield to force. A pig`s sort of hairiness – sparse and thickly stringed. The flippers, too, sport some hair. Wouldn`t this suggest the extremely low mobility of the animal? Could be. Joints and bones are massive, but shoulder blades to articulate the front flippers to the torso are nowhere to be found (in fact so are a lot of things, among which are the insides – they have either been washed out or long since helped to by foxes. N. assigns me a part in the butchery of the hairy whale – that`s what we call it now; if indeed there is glory to be had, it would be only fair if I got my hands dirty just as anyone else.
- I wonder about the lack of subcutaneous fat though – N. mumbles. – This fellow must be damn freezing.
We are working our knives and axes into the carcass to free the spinal cord. The progress is slow. Removing the skin all at once is impossible – the carcass is enormous, the tools are dull. We sample enough for a test.
There are barrels aplenty on the beach, and things we will need taken away – the bones, patches of skin, flippers – the lot, are now salted thoroughly and stuffed into them. Each dismembered section of the backbone receives from the biologist a tag reading: “ÊÎ ÒÈÍÐÎ, 14.6.66”.
Valya advises:
- You, sure, want to add a “please, do not touch” there.
- Do I really? – N. laughs. – They`ll be touching all over it then.
Settle down for the night at Commander Bay. The quiet night, the nice memories, and the rice with canned meat is delicious, and when that is finished, I pour everyone a thimbleful of Bulgarian cognac (I`ve had a parcel delivered). The flat glass canteen with “Ocean” inscribed on it, now holding the treasured liquid, was found on the beach, and the convergence of such small things is a thrill in itself. Beautiful!
The heat of the stove, the seclusion, the forsakenness, the hairy whale, Bering`s grave…
Valya is playing around with a handful of colored beads – so he did find some in the sand pits after all; there will be no end to them, it seems. I say, you only get so many nights such as this in a lifetime, ones you think back to with heart-touching details.
I am telling about my collection of teeth of the cetacean, which reminds N. of a saddening episode back in 1964 when a rare species of a beaked whale washed up around Nikolskoye, but biologists then failed to put it to use.
- So, we got that whale all treated and crated, you know, head and bones – such a rarity! – and there is very little that we know about it, too. So, there were these boys fooling around outside the village, they accidentally set those crates on fire. We`d “camouflaged” them – piled on all sorts of trash. Well, and they all got burned.
- Teeth too? There had to be teeth, right?
- Yeah, I, sort of, had a bad feeling about it, so I took two of its teeth. Two teeth! So much for the entire whale.
Now I have one more thing to take care of while I am on the Commanders – obtain a tooth of such a rare whale. I can`t say I`d mind finding that beaked whale myself!
At last the butchery draws to an end – now the remaining days of my stay on the islands are colored by the fame I`ve found as a discoverer of a sea monster, that people simply keep calling a sea cow. There`s now no referring to me as the writer who`s the author of this and that (instead a list of my books would follow), but I am now the writer who has discovered a sea cow. I am not sure whether I should be happy or sad about it. I am now visited by people I`m little or not at all familiar with asking for a photograph of the hairy whale. I was once approached with such a request by a captain of a search voyage with a seal catching schooner “Megre”. How could I refuse that? When, plainly, it was for scientific purposes.
And there I was almost seeing my name in Latin going down into the world`s renowned reference books and zoology atlases. And there would be articles in the world`s press, of course, and photographs of the hairy whale.
It was much later that N. had inquired of his curator, who generally had been distrustfully disposed to the whole hairy whale affair.
- Isn`t it like we are knocking at the open door?
-You`d be well advised to look this up, my boy – suggested the elderly scholar grumpily, - either it`s all in the books or it`s nowhere.
In the books, however, be they thick volumes of luminaries` authorship or skinny periodicals, there was nothing said of a hairy whale. For mine was an unprecedented discovery.
The answer, no doubt, lay with the whale, not with the books. Not even in the context of the whale as such, but of its environmental relations. It was through an accident that I stumbled upon the answer. An accident made possible through my unflagging curiosity for all beached whales alike. I was compelled to regard them closely, photograph and feel them, see if some of the teeth were loose – should this be a toothed whale. The point being, I had gone as a discoverer under two months, so what little fame I had, I should confess, had not yet tired me and even had crossed the sea and reached Kamchatka.
Meanwhile the time neared for a very sad and prosaic ending indeed. In the middle of August shortly before my departure from the Commanders I was travelling alone rather far from the scene of my find. The thoughts of a mysterious beaked whale would come up now and then: what if I find that too? Can`t a man find happiness as complete as he dares dream of? Here he makes a discovery of an earlier unencountered hairy whale, here he finds himself a beaked whale into the bargain. Well, what do you think? Either my eyes were playing tricks, or indeed there was in the distance on a reef some sort of a whale – a goose-beaked one or a berardius. It had been here a while and the carcass assumed a yellowish color, clearly signs of decay were showing. But the nearer I came, the more I wondered about what was jarringly white in its mouth.
“Must have had its head bashed on a reef and its jaw broken off – hence the white of the bone” – I reasoned.
However, it looked hardly like a jaw broken off. No, oh no, sticking out of the mouth was an actual placoid tooth of a beaked whale!
First records of this species are credited to a naturalist named Leonard Steineger who discovered a beached beaked whale here in the last century. Besides the beaked whale, Steineger found on Bering Island until then the unencountered whale species – a berardius. It was also him that was fortunate to walk into a carcass of a polar unicorn whale (narval), despite it having been nonexistent in this water area. This Steineger must have been one all-or-nothing fellow.
In their tongue, Aleuts refer to a goose-beaked whale as “kigan-agaluzah”, while its equivalent as uttered by the Indians of the Makah tribe attains the utmost melodiousness: “kwow-kwow-ah-arkht-le”. In point of fact, the American Indians were the only ones to sight these whales in areas of high salmon density.
“The Guide to Mammals of the USSR” says very little of a beaked whale of the Commanders. Body length – about 5 meters. Habitat – the Pacific Ocean. 13 known finds of which 3 – on Bering Island. Living habits unresearched. Presumably feeds on squid. That is all there is.
I know of the fourth find here (the bones of which were burned by the kids). This makes mine the fifth here and the 15th worldwide. Well, that is not bad. Perhaps, I really have it in me… a flair?
Now, all vain thoughts aside, I have reached into my backpack for a hunting knife and got down to planing and filing the foul jaws in order to recover at least one tooth (there are only as many as two, and they jut out of the lower jaw the way a hog`s fangs do; it seems as though they also help secure in place the upper jaw – narrow and not particularly strong. Having struggled through one, I start at the other. Indeed, why leave it here? The whale has decayed almost completely, it`s a shame, really, but no one will be coming for it: that`s a long way to go from the village and the biologist team, for that matter, is off hunting seals. While, surely, the next storm to come will tear the carcass off the slab and butcher the already mushy flesh.
On completion of this operation (which would be even more of a challenge if I hadn`t been involved with the butchering of the stenchy flesh of the hairy whale) I thoroughly rub my hands and knife with Troynoy Cologne. To provide for contingencies, I always carry it all – cologne, scissors – the lot. As heavy as it is.
I`ve made the best of my night`s sleep, and in the morning continue scouring the beach, my spirits at their highest. Now, this is where the Fate thus far so gracious to me thought better of indulging my fooling around with the fairy tale of the hairy whale: enough is enough. And so it guided me to another whale – either a berardius or some other – I couldn`t tell exactly from what little was left of it. Only raised shreds of skin were loosely sticking out on its skull. It`s under these shreds that to my amazement I revealed the same kind of “hairiness”, if I may, seen on the now infamous whale over at Commander Bay. And I didn`t spend much time racking my brains over this puzzle either.
The similar “hairiness” is intrinsic to all whales – concealed under a layer of subcutaneous fat. The hairy whale had undergone a rare, if perfectly explainable, natural metamorphosis, of sorts. The storms bared the whale to its meat, which in conditions of winter storms withstood decay – only defatted subcutaneous tissues became frayed so as to cover the entire carcass with a semblance of long yellow fur. The illusion of furriness was so complete that it was accepted by all who saw it there on the beach. I should add, at this point, that the general impression was greatly contributed to by the misleading position of the carcass, the uncommon picture its appearance presented: as if sprawling there lay a real cow with slightly sunken sides.
This begs a reasonable question: how come that no one had ever dealt with such a phenomenon before? And that -given the continuous presence of biology teams on the Commander Islands in summer? This is where the hitch is – the research teams are here in summer when the destructive intensity of the Sun is so high, that before long there`s no trace left of hairiness, let alone the whale – staring at you there remains but a fox-gnawed backbone.
Three culpable forces – the winter colds, the wear inflicted by the ebb and flow, and the time – had conspired to play a disastrous joke on me. A dirty trick, so to speak.
On returning to the village, I took a patch of skin of the infamous “hairy” and tried to work my way to a bulb of an individual hair. There was no bulb, the hair as seen in the vertical section, went the entire depth of what we, in our innocence, believed was skin. Without any regret I got rid of what had only recently been a priceless souvenir. Now all doubt vanished: there was no such thing in Nature as a hairy whale. Later I ran into Valya, who was in the village for mail and food, and I shared my doubts. Valya replied they`d arrived at the same lamentable conclusion: when set fire to, there is no smell of fur burning.
This is how it ends. Not exactly a happy end, sure. But clarity has prevailed. The last page is turned, where usually answers are to problems, riddles and conundrums. I gave life to my sensation and I took it. Luckily, I took it, too – not anyone else. Now, that would be a real shame. At least, this way, I come out of it with a genuine beaked whale tooth – the 15th find ever.
I think I owe Fate a “thank-you” for this much anyway – for showing where it hurts less to land when falling from the heights of glory.