The Disposition of the Garefowl

by Mary Shelley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Directorate for Engineered Organisms (Scotland). Field Assessment under Schedule 3. Site: Hether Holm, Orkney. Organism: one bird, Pinguinus impennis (reconstructed), company designation GF-02. Assessing officer: E. Garriock. Dates of visit: 14 to 17 October 2034.

I. Circumstances

The form allows me eleven lines under Circumstances, and I have gone past them. I ask the Directorate to bear with me. I find that I cannot state the circumstances truly in eleven lines, and a disposition made on a false statement of circumstances would be worse than none, because it would look like a judgement and be only a convenience.

Hether Holm lies a mile and a quarter off the north end of Westray. It is a low green back of an island, with a roofless chapel at its southern end and at its northern end the sheds of the salmon hatchery which Eldey Biologics Ltd bought in 2029, and which the liquidators have now half taken to pieces. I crossed from Pierowall on the morning of the fourteenth in a creel boat hired from a Mr David Rendall. He would not wait for me. He would come back at four, he said, if the sea allowed it; and if the sea did not allow it, I was to understand that this was the sea's decision and not his.

The sea that morning was the colour of slate, and heaved without breaking, as if something very large were breathing underneath it. The holm came up out of the haze grey first, then green, and the sheds stood on it like a set of boxes left out in the rain. A gannet went past us very low. I record these things because I noticed them, and because I have since come to think that a person sent to decide the fate of a living thing ought to set down the state of her own mind on the way there. Mine was impatient. I had three other files open, and this was the smallest of them: one bird and one liquidation, and a matter which the Directorate's lawyers had already called routine in substance, unusual in species.

The hatchery buildings have been stripped of everything that would sell. The copper is gone from the pipe runs. The circulating pumps are gone and their bolts are left standing in the concrete like teeth. In the long shed the smolt tanks are dry, all but one, and on the wall above them the company's display boards are still up, laminated against the damp: a photograph of a speckled egg the size of a man's fist, held in a gloved palm, and under it in white capitals the words EXTINCTION IS A DRAFT.

Mrs Ingrid Flett met me at the slip. She is a woman of about fifty, broad in the shoulder, in a fisherman's smock and a woollen hat. She was the hatchery's senior husbandry technician, and she has not been paid since March. She carried a bucket of sprats. Behind her, at a distance of perhaps two yards, and stopping when she stopped, came the bird.

I had seen photographs, as everyone has. They do not prepare one. It stands a little below the height of my hip, upright, black above and white below, with a white oval patch before each eye and a great deep bill grooved across like a ploughed field. Its wings are absurd: short flat paddles, held a little out from the body as a child holds its arms when it is learning to walk. It came down the slip with a rolling and deliberate gait and stopped, and looked at me, first with one eye and then with the other.

It did not run. I had read, in preparing the file, that the garefowl never ran from men, and that this was why there are none. I had read it as a fact of natural history. Standing on the slip, I understood it as a fact about the men.

II. The account of Mrs Flett

What follows is Mrs Flett's account, as she gave it to me over two evenings in the hatchery office, which is now the only heated room on the island. I have kept her words wherever I could. She asked me to note that she knew I was writing them down, and that she was therefore not to be taken as having said anything carelessly.

"There were three eggs. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, there were three, and they were laid by geese, which was the part Dr Hesketh liked to tell at dinners. Big white Embden geese in a shed in Fife, carrying the cells. You'd think it was a miracle, the way he told it. It was a lot of geese and a lot of needles and a lot of eggs that came to nothing, and three that came to something.

"The first one died in the shell at thirty-eight days. We never knew why. The second one hatched here, in that incubator, on the first of June, two years ago last June. Dr Hesketh announced it on the third. He wanted the third. That was the date the last pair were killed on Eldey, in 1844, and he said a story has to have a shape or nobody remembers it. So the bird was two days old before the world was allowed to know it was born.

"I was there when it came out. He wasn't. He was in London. It came out wet and grey and it looked at me, and that was that. You know about imprinting. Everybody knows about imprinting now. I knew about it then, and I let it happen anyway, because there was nobody else in the room and I wasn't going to walk out and leave it alone with a heat lamp.

"He came up for the cameras the week after. He held it in his gloves and it wouldn't settle for him. It kept turning its head round to find me. I could see him minding. He's not a cruel man, I want that written down too. He minded the way a man minds when a dog won't come to him in front of company.

"The third egg was a female. They can tell from the membrane now, a swab and a machine, it takes an hour. She was at twenty-six days when the money went. You'll have it in your file, the second round fell through in the October. Dr Hesketh came up on the boat on the eleventh of October, and he sat in this room, in that chair you're in, and he explained it to me.

"He said one bird is an exhibit. He said two birds are a population. He said that under your Act a breeding pair of an engineered species needs a perpetual licence and a conservation plan and a bond, and that the company could not give an undertaking in perpetuity, because a company is not a person and does not live in perpetuity, and that it would be wrong, he said wrong, to bring a second animal into a situation that could not support it.

"I said, then what about the one that's here?

"He said that was a different situation.

"I wouldn't do it. He did it himself, I'll give him that. He went into the incubator room in the night and switched it off at the wall, and in the morning there was a sticky note on the door in his handwriting. Please do not restart. E.H. Please. I've kept the note. You can have it for your file.

"He left after Christmas. He's chief scientific officer now for a company that's going to put aurochs back on an estate in Castile. I saw him on the news. He looked well."

On the second evening she told me something else, which I give here although it is not evidence of anything the form asks about.

"Do you know how the last one in Scotland died? On Stac an Armin, at St Kilda, in 1840. Three men caught a garefowl on the rock and tied it up and kept it alive three days. Then a storm came on, a terrible storm, and they decided the bird had brought it, that it was a witch, and they beat it to death with sticks. I used to think that was the worst thing I'd ever heard." She was quiet for a while. "They were frightened of it, though. I'll say that for them. They thought it had power. He never once thought it had power over him."

III. Observations of the officer

I observed the bird over three days. I set down what I saw.

It feeds well, from the bucket and also on its own. The company built a sea pen off the end of the slip, a square of net on floating collars about twenty yards across, open beneath to the tide, and the bird goes into it every morning and dives. I timed one dive at a minute and fifty seconds. It comes up with sprats and sand eels and swallows most of them. It does not swallow all. Several times a day it carries a fish up the slip in its bill and lays it on the concrete at Mrs Flett's feet, and stands back, and waits. She told me she had never taught it this. I watched her pick up the fish each time and put it in her pocket, and thank the bird, and I watched the bird go back down the slip.

At dusk it calls. I had not been told of this, and the first time I heard it I did not know what it was. It is a low, harsh, rising sound, something between a groan and a bray, repeated four or five times, with the head thrown up and the bill a little open. It faces north-west when it does it, out towards the open Atlantic. Mrs Flett said that for some months she had played it recordings of razorbills, which are its nearest living relation, through a speaker on the slip. For a week the bird answered them. Then it stopped answering, and she stopped playing them.

It occurred to me, listening on the second evening, that this was a voice no one had heard for a hundred and ninety years. There is no recording of a great auk and no description of its call good enough to tell one whether this bird is saying it right. It is calling in a language that has no other speaker, and there is nobody to correct its grammar.

At night it goes into the long shed, into the one smolt tank that still holds water, and floats there. There is a lamp on a post outside the window, and with it the glass of the tank gives back a reflection. On the second night I went in quietly, with my torch off, and found the bird standing on the lip of the tank with its face close to the glass, perfectly still, looking at the other bird. It turned when it heard me, and came down off the lip, and followed me out.

IV. Representations of the former director

I spoke to Dr Edmund Hesketh by video call on the afternoon of the sixteenth. He was in a bright room with a pale wooden wall behind him, and he wore a cream jumper, and he thanked me before I had asked him anything.

"I want to say first that I'm grateful, Ms Garriock. Genuinely. Someone has to be the conscience in these things, and it's very rarely the people building them. I've always said that."

I asked him whether he accepted any continuing responsibility for GF-02.

"I'd put it differently, if I may. That bird exists. For a hundred and ninety years nothing on this earth could say that. I gave it two years and four months of life it would never otherwise have had, which is two years and four months more than the men on Eldey gave its kind. I don't think that's a small thing, and I don't think it's a thing a person should be punished for. As to the legal position, the bird is an asset of the company, and the company is in the hands of the liquidator. I hold no shares. You'll have seen that."

I asked him about the third egg.

"That was a welfare decision, and I stand by it. A second animal would have been born into a project that could not support it. I'd make the same decision tomorrow. I'd make it with a heavier heart, perhaps, but I'd make it."

I asked him whether that reasoning did not apply equally to the animal already living.

He was silent for some seconds. Then he said that the connection was breaking up, and it may have been, for the picture froze on him with his mouth a little open and his hand half raised, and stayed like that for a long while before the call ended.

V. Declarations

The Directorate will want to weigh these accounts, and I should say how I think they ought to be weighed.

Mrs Flett has every reason to want the bird kept. She loves it, she has nowhere else to be, and she has not been paid in seven months. I believe what she told me, but I have tried to remember that she was telling it to someone who could take the bird away.

Dr Hesketh has every reason to want this matter treated as a question of company law. His account of himself is eloquent and contains, as far as I can find, no false statement. I have checked the dates. I do not think that makes it a true account.

I have my own reasons too, and I should declare them. I want this file closed. And I was a junior officer on the working group that drafted the guidance to Schedule 3, and the clause prohibiting the release into the wild of any engineered organism is in part my own wording. We had in mind bacteria, and edited fish escaping from pens, and mosquitoes. I do not remember anyone in that room imagining a single bird.

VI. Options

The options under Schedule 3 are four.

(a) Transfer to a licensed collection. I approached four. Three declined: a single animal which cannot breed has, in their phrase, no conservation value, and they could not justify the space. The fourth offered to take it on loan for exhibition, if the company's estate paid for its keep. The liquidator declined.

(b) Humane destruction. This is the liquidator's preference. The site is under offer to a seaweed company and must be cleared by the end of the month. The procedure would take about ten minutes and could be done by the vet from Kirkwall on the Tuesday boat.

(c) Release. This is prohibited. See Section V.

(d) Continued keeping at the present site. Nobody will pay for it.

VII. Conduct of the officer on 17 October

I record what I did on the last morning. The Directorate will hear of it from Mrs Flett in any case. And a report that leaves out the actions of its own author would be the kind of account I have spent these pages distrusting.

I went down to the slip before it was light, while Mrs Flett was still asleep in the office. The bird was in the sea pen, and when it heard me it came to the edge of the net and climbed out on to the slip, and followed me, as it now follows anyone who walks as if they know where they are going. The wind had dropped in the night. The sound between the holm and Westray was flat and dark, and in the east over Papa Westray there was a long line of yellow under the cloud.

The sea pen is closed on its seaward side by a panel of net on a frame, which is lifted by a winch when the pen is cleaned. I worked the winch. It took me some minutes, because I did not know how it went, and the handle was stiff with salt. Then the seaward side stood open, and there was nothing between the pen and the Atlantic but a hundred yards of water and the dawn.

The bird went in. It swam across the pen without hurrying and out through the gap, and I watched its back going away, low in the water, until it dived. I counted. At a minute and a half I began to think that it was gone, and I will not pretend to the Directorate that what I felt was only relief. At two minutes it came up, well out in the sound, a small dark shape on the flat water. It shook its head. Then it turned about, and swam back through the gap and across the pen, and climbed the slip with that rolling and deliberate walk, and came up to me.

It had a sprat in its bill. It laid the fish on the concrete at my feet, and stepped back, and looked at me, first with one eye and then with the other, and waited.

I have not picked it up. Mr Rendall's boat is coming round the point. The bird is standing beside me on the slip, and the fish is still lying on the stone.

Recommended disposition:

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Mariā Shelleiā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Mary Shelley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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