Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  Sheets of shallow water fringed by reeds and teeming with ducks lay upon the landscape. Here and there stood a flamingo, eyeing Covington with trusting stillness, and he never shot one, feeling himself ennobled by such stately presences, and besides, not wanting to carry anything so large. His trays measured thirty by eighteen inches, were four inches deep, and held three hundred and fifty birds six inches long. As a tray filled the drier birds put in first could be submitted to more pressure. A skin originally dried in good shape could later be pressed perfectly flat without damage. The only thing to avoid was contortion. It was like the work he did on the ship, he told Mrs FitzGerald— on the domestic side of his service, looking after his master in the fashion of a wife, the whole knack of packing birds corresponding to filling a sea-trunk solidly full of clothes, as could easily be done without damage even to an immaculate shirt-front.

  The worst he did that day was shoot a heron, but it was from necessity, as he had resisted taking one before, and had an order for it. He was in love with the crazed crest of feathers above the creature’s eyes that bristled when he took aim as if the bird by its stillness said, ‘Dare.’

  When Mrs FitzGerald wanted to know what all the taking was for, he explained about comparative anatomy and the men who made it their trade. They were Englishmen in London, in Cambridge, and in the countryside around where some were parsons with time for natural history. A few were Continentals, and the ship’s library was heavy with books in French. But a man named Henslow was the chief of them at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. He was the leading bone man, and the target of all their digging. They had been prodigious diggers in the south before Covington was sent after birds. They had found the bones of a giant rhinoceros at Punta Alta, on the Patagonia coast. She did not believe him at all. Nay, he said, but it seemed that animals now living in Africa once roamed the pampas, and Mrs FitzGerald shivered when he said so, being delighted in her imagination for she had a fancy, one day, to ride pillion on an elephant under the tutelage of a maharaja.

  At noon they stopped and spread lunch, and she had never, she said, ‘had a finer, stronger, or handsomer young man at her disposal’. They ate salt beef, pickled onions, apples and pears, and tipped macaroons from a canister. He watched how she peeled her gloves from her fingers and put them aside. She saw him watching and smiled. She tossed sugar-almonds to him and he caught them in his teeth. She laughed, and every time she laughed she was prettier than before. A little plump, he thought, and too short by a half head, but desire mended deficiencies, and her emerald eyes hooked his hopes. Those eyes were hooded like a hawk’s and she kept still watching him, till he asked what it was, and she said, with a pang, ‘The ghosts of the past.’ She had been widowed young, and was childless, and was tired of living in small rooms in other people’s houses, always at the call of ignorant badly bred half-English children and finding herself regarded as little better than a kitchen slut. She had spanked a Thompson child and received her acquittal from service. They were not a civilised family. ‘You saw the way they lived.’ They boasted a glass window, a cushion, a fork and a spoon, and had a kitchen separate from the rest of the house instead of just an open fire in a smoky recess. That was their height of dash! She was half a mind determined to ask her Colonel to requisition their stock. That would show ’em. Mrs FitzGerald had not wanted to marry a countryman but Colonel de las Carreras wanted her very much, and would take her on her terms, and so she was going to make her life with him.

  Mrs FitzGerald rested after lunch, lying on a blanket laid on a tarpaulin, a forearm over her eyes and her ankles crossed. Covington walked a short distance away, set traps, spread nets, and sat in the damp grass with a sack over his head watching plovers take worms. When the plovers came close enough for him to thread a finger into their feathers (or so it seemed, just by reaching out) he gave them a dusting of small shot and one of them fell down—only raising a wing when the breeze caught it—while the others scooped the pasture with their feet and took to the air.

  He saw that Mrs FitzGerald was watching him, sitting up, her arms around her knees.

  After another ten minutes he took the heron.

  Then he was back to her and told her it was not a pretty sight to see gutted a bird of good size. She said she had seen worse and minded little. So he began his work on the heron, donning his apron, squatting on his heels, and taking the bird in his lap. Before she realised what the blade was doing an incision was made, and Covington was at his skinning. Worms and green slimy material came spilling from the innards, and lice from feathers crawled up his arms, disappearing into his hairs like an army on the run. He boasted he was able to make good small skins at the rate of fourteen an hour, a pace that impressed his Don, who had learned the art from a black man in Edinburgh. The quickest work Darwin ever did was eight an hour, or an average of seven and a half minutes apiece, and fairly good skins.

  Mrs FitzGerald watched the skin coming off, the feathers tucking under and being hidden by gore. She was taken by Covington’s boasting, and said with amusement in her voice: ‘Do you improve on him in everything?’

  ‘In practical matters if I can,’ he replied, sniffing with a certain pride. ‘Which is what he wants me for.’

  He made a deft action with his hands, taking warm skin in his fingers and rolling it up.

  ‘Oh, that is how you do it!’

  He told her yes, it was the same way she ungloved her hands from the wrist, by turning the gloves inside-out to the fingertips.

  She was pleased that he noticed what she did with her gloves. (They had pretty pearl buttons and were her pride.)

  ‘Some people say, pull off the skin,’ he said. ‘I say never pull a bird’s skin; push it off.’

  ‘Push it off,’ she repeated, and gave a low laugh.

  Before she knew it the eyes were out, and she exclaimed that the eyeballs were much larger than they looked from the outside. She leaned on him to get a closer look.

  ‘Are you faint?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I am interested.’

  Next he cut out a squarish-shaped mass of bone and muscle. Pulling the neck back he brought the brains out, leaving the entire roof of the skull supported by a scaffolding of jaw-bone.

  He had a mere pulpy mess in his hands. Or so it looked. The next motion was to bring the inverted skin back the right way.

  They heard a distant whooping shout, and turned their heads.

  Three cut-throats broke from trailing their cattle. They splashed over the plain with absurd curiosity and reared up, staring at Covington with his meagre, simple kit— women’s embroidery equipo, it must have seemed to them—not knowing it was what the best taxidermists worked with. They eyed Mrs FitzGerald, debating whether her throat was white and succulent enough to slit and how much bother would be involved if they had to get down from their saddles to do it. Meantime Covington held the mess of pulp in his hand, and they giggled and speculated obscenities, stalking their horses around in a circle. Mrs FitzGerald said nothing, barely acknowledging their cat-calls, just showing haughtiness of eye, and then Covington saw that she had a hammer pistol under her shawl.

  Holding the long bill in his right hand, he made a cylinder of his left and coaxed the skin backward with a sort of milking motion. It came easily enough until the final stage of getting the head back into the skull-cap; this required a bit of juggling; the watchers hissed; but he could not fail to get the head in, because after all he’d got it out. When this was fairly accomplished he had the pleasure of holding up something that looked like a bird. It was slack and billowy and yet still vivid. It was the white heron, or rather the poor ghost of it.

  The chief of their callers, a toothy gentleman, oozed friendliness and courtesy, and issued an invitation for them to stay at his estancia that night, it being well placed for hospitality. His confreres grinned from their rotten gums and stepped their horses back. Giving their crass farewells they performed slashing motions like Turks, though they had no swords and only t
heir scarecrow fingers to indicate what they would do to the gentleman and lady’s enemies if anyone harmed them before they took meat under their roof.

  It was hardly to be credited they were the same people who gave out their hospitality that night, in courtly denial of their murderousness. Yet the three welcomed them to their hovel with waxed moustaches and low, craven bows, and later, after they had fed them as guests, made a grand production of parading their daughters. Then they looked serious and clicked their heels to the strains of a jig from Covington’s Polly Pochette. In the dance the three came over and pinched his cheeks and giggled and kissed him. It was all the same blessed difference to them whether they loved him or not. Now they loved him. Now they loved him not. All was a whim, depending on absurd flashes of pride, supposed injury, false generosity, and woeful ignorance. They ushered their daughters forward but warned Covington if he impugned their honour by the merest flicker of interest it would mean the knife. So he praised the daughters’ beauty and virtue but barely glanced at them as persons.

  Around Mrs FitzGerald the men were fantastically fearful: they would not harm a stray hair in her exalted flaming head through knowledge of Colonel de las Carreras and his battalion, despite their adherence to a different faction of politics. This allegiance they greatly regretted, and might change sides if she spoke to him of their honour. They argued among themselves: ‘No es justo juzgarla con tanto prejuicio.’ (It would be wrong to judge her harshly.) She promised that she would do what she could with her Colonel. It was a country of cheap life, each taking his share according to his own estimation of what was due, knifing each other for little or nothing and killing Indians for the joy of the blade. They assured Covington of their protection of him. The women ushered Mrs FitzGerald through to bed. Now the men passed the bottle and called him compañero. With a spinning head he went to lie down.

  At some time in the night, propped on his saddle for a pillow, Covington found himself facing an intruder. A hopeful face grinned and lisped, asking if it was true that he carried a lion’s tongue in his birdskin purse. He admitted it was true. He showed what he had by candlelight. It was like an enlarged chestnut, or the seed of a bean tree, with purple stippled roughness. The fellow, whose nose had its tip cut off, sniffed but dared not touch it, and crept away. Covington returned the object to a canvas sack he kept between his legs when he slept.

  In the sack was his pistol and his letters from home, his coin bag, and a briarwood pipe bequeathed by his dead shipmate, Charlie Musters. The pipe had a silver band decorated with a pattern of oak leaves and acorns. When they sailed from Brazil they had left Musters behind on a rocky headland—dead of a fever caught snipe shooting. He had used the lightweight muzzle-loader of Darwin’s that day and the next person to carry it out of all the ship’s grieving company was Covington. ‘I shall not spoil myself with mourning,’ Covington had determined, ‘as I did before.’ In his death-fever Musters had raved himself into glorious battle, believing himself on the deck of a man-of-war splintering and burning. So he died in glory it might be said, and like a boy captain raised himself on a shaky thin elbow and appointed his belongings to various men. Covington did not know why the pipe came his way, except that he had once taken a puff from it, and judged it excellent, while Musters turned himself blue. Musters joined Joey Middleton among those never quite finished with life, never quite dead as they travelled the world with Covington, never quite alive either but cased in an ice-cold column of water that always needed warming. The pipe had a briarwood bowl like a roughened furnace where the tobacco smouldered and warmed his fingers. He smoked it on first waking and thought about Mrs FitzGerald in the next room. Then he tapped the bowl on his heel and gave a deep sigh, and thought of Mrs FitzGerald some more, and wondered if what he wanted with her would be the best thing in the world as he thought it might be, or if it would be even more, a nibble of heaven.

  He had the cut-throats around him again in the dawn light. They said they loved him as a brother, but really they wanted his boots. They were made by a cobbler in Monte Video to a pattern copied from a famous Spaniard’s pair. He splayed his fingers inside them from pure pride, fitting them to his arm, giving them a buff of leather-soap, twirling them in the air and admiring the stitching, that was neat and regular, with a flourish of fleur-de-lis on the toecaps (that was supreme in the originals). Usually he kept the boots in a sack. But today he wore them, and his best shirt besides.

  Covington and Mrs FitzGerald splashed over the edge of the green world. He had his killing to do, making deft work of stopping the hearts of small life. But he tried not to get his clothes too dirty. Mrs FitzGerald noticed the change in him. She teased him, and said he was un grande galopeador away from his ship. She didn’t mind if he got himself dirty—wasn’t that what men did? She went on in a vein of flirting and he boasted to her some more of what he did— grubbing up old bones and captivating new animals, smiling at the idea of himself so far removed from the lanes and fields of Bedfordshire. She made admissions of herself in return, being from a town in County Cork, Marlow by name, which she had left as a youngster riding pillion on a bay gelding with the son of an Irish lord, Mr Barry, who wished to marry her most devoutly but was forced home. So she was stranded, for a time, in Jamaica, until rescued, abandoned, then rescued again by Mr FitzGerald (who died), and found herself in Monte Video. When she spoke of her girlhood she removed her hat and loosened her hair, and in the heat of the day placed her jacket across the saddle and joined Covington in his shooting and preparation of specimens, taking an interest quite emphatic and useful.

  ‘What is he like, your Mr Darwin?’

  ‘He has more energy than me, and I have plenty for ten,’ said Covington. ‘If there is something he wants he will go to the ends of the earth to find it. He is clever, but you would not think so.’

  ‘Then he is not like you,’ she flattered.

  ‘I am not clever, but I am better than him in ways.’

  ‘I am sure of that. You keep telling me,’ she smiled.

  ‘You have heard me boasting. But see us together and you would have another impression. I seem quick beside him on some days. I have seen him stand while his shadow moves around him. He is all the time thinking, and he declares by a great authority that genius is patience.’

  ‘Are you patient?’

  ‘I cannot wait too long for what I want.’

  ‘Does he rate himself so high?’

  ‘No. You could say he tries to make himself invisible at times. But his effect is always strong.’

  And then Covington let out an annoyed word, and said that he always ended feeling confused around Darwin when he expounded his science, as if his brain was stuffed like the insides of a specimen, with nothing but bark, leaves or cotton waste. Even FitzRoy their captain did not always keep up with him, either, though he tried, especially when the finds were special and exciting, and then he baited and mocked his ship’s naturalist in the way these gentlemen used, that was foreign to the ordinary ship’s company: ‘I do not rejoice at your extraordinary and outrageous peregrinations, Darwin rarissimus, because I am envious— jealous—and extremely full of all uncharitableness. What will they think at home of Master Charles—“I do think he be gone mad”,’ etcetera, and words to that effect.

  ‘One day I was jumping to understand what was behind what he did,’ said Covington, ‘because there is always that feeling, that he knows what it is and won’t say. And I said to him, “Is it like those things that are seen are temporal, as the books say; but there is something even more invisible, and we might see that too, if we find enough,” and Darwin was pleased with me, and said, “That is exactly right, Covington, full marks. The things that are not seen are eternal.”’

  ‘You make him sound like one of your English parsons with an answer to everything, and going about the countryside exposing the blessed mysteries.’

  ‘He plans on getting a parish right enough, I’ve heard him say,’ said Covington, ‘you know, with a
“good living” and “a thousand a year”, it would suit him very well. And he longs to get his oats that way too.’

  ‘His “oats”?’ she smiled.

  ‘Aye, cockeyed, ain’t it?’

  Mrs FitzGerald leaned across and placed her hand on Covington’s wrist, and looked him in the eye. It was a way of reacting that made Covington feel important whatever he said, and he knew he could be boastful with her, or complaining, or saucy, and it was all the same. ‘He wants a pretty wife on a couch in a vicarage, as he puts it, and I think that is where he beams his lusty thoughts,’ he added.

  ‘He has lusty thoughts?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t he, being a man?’

  ‘If he had been to the same school of advancement as you, Mr Sleepy-Eyes, I would say so.’

  He thought it a pity she wasn’t free, otherwise he would make his confession to her right off, that they might make a go of it, ride away, and be adventurers together. They went to their horses and started getting them ready.

  ‘What is it like, going on pillion?’ he asked.

  ‘I was never so free,’ she said, and without too much ceremony got up behind him, letting her saddle-horse follow, and he felt the grip of her arms around his waist and the pressure of her cheek against his back.