She thought at first it was a fur coat. But it was simply a fur—beautiful, striped—or maybe more like a hide, not as thick as a fur, coarser and more like horsehair. Striped horsehair, golden-blond and white.
She pulled it out gently—it was fastened inside somehow, maybe hanging from a hook or something—and saw it had a mane, and even the mane was striped. Moving up from the mane, it had ears, eyelashes and eyelids. It had a face. It was a whole skin, maybe—a whole beast, minus the architecture. On the inside of the door a sticker bore careful notations in ballpoint block letters: Africa Mammals 2.1.6.11. Damaged. Equus quagga quagga. South Africa native. Collection. Zoological specimen, Artis Magistra, Amsterdam. @ 1883. In wild, @ 1870s.
She let the hide fall back into its closet. You couldn’t mount it, she thought, at this point—she suspected it was too late for that, though she was no expert. Maybe her uncle had kept it because of its monetary value. An antique skin had to be worth something—possibly even for DNA study, if he had known about that, although he’d never struck her as much of a scholar.
She counted the doors, moving back through the room—dozens of separate compartments, hundreds even. She would open a couple more before she went upstairs. Possibly these were the spillovers from his collection, the skins that were substandard and therefore not fit to mount.
She was near the back, standing in front of one of the larger compartments; it had double doors, two metal handles that met in the middle. She took one in each hand and wrenched them downward. It took a minute, but then the seal broke, they too came open and she stood back.
It was a wolf, already mounted. A gray wolf, it looked like to her. It stood with its front paws close together, its head raised, as if listening. The mouth was shut; it did not look fierce at all, merely attentive, even faithful.
She turned to look at the right-hand door, where another white sticker read North America Mammals 1.1.7.01. Newfoundland wolf, Canis lupus beothucus. Canada native. Extermination. Wild specimen, @ 1911. It was a kind of wolf she hadn’t heard of, she thought. But she couldn’t leave it here: she would have it moved upstairs. The next cabinet took her by surprise: a huge penguin-like bird, black on its back and white on its stomach, standing on a fake rock. It was almost three feet tall, and had big, webbed feet and atrophied-looking wings. North America, Europe Birds. 1.2.1.02. Great auk, Pinguinus impennis. Iceland native. Collection. Zoo specimen, @ 1844.
The great auks were extinct—had been for a long time. She had read about it in one of the old man’s natural history books, a thick one in the library with lithographs or pen-and-ink drawings, she didn’t know which. She’d trailed her fingers over them for their minute details and the fineness of the lines. She found it while she was looking up another bird, looking up albatross. She’d wanted to know what kind of scenery an albatross would need, to order a fix on an albatross mount, and then she came to auk and read the auks’ story and it was impossible to forget. Auks mated for life; they did not know how to fly and walked very slowly, so they were easily taken. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the last known pair in existence was found incubating a single egg on a rock in Iceland. Both the adults were quickly dispatched by strangling and their only egg was crushed beneath a boot.
The auks had been known to be on their way out, down to that one last, isolated colony, and collectors had wanted them for the skins.
Had the wolf and the quagga also vanished?
She crossed the room and opened another cabinet at random—a small, square one at eye level. She saw what looked like a mouse. South America Mammals. 3.1.8.06. Darwin’s rice rat, Nesoryzomys darwini. Galápagos native. Competition by nonnatives. @ 1929.
Beside it, in another square compartment, was a brown frog with yellow spots sitting on a large plastic leaf, which looked, like most of the amphibian mounts in the old man’s collection, as though it had been shellacked. South America Amphibians. 3.3.7.14. Long-snouted jambato, Atelopus longirostris. Ecuador native. Uncertain; disease, weather warming. @ 1989.
She turned and went to another wall, opened another small locker and this time found a bird: Asia Birds. 5.2.2.08. Bonin Islands grosbeak, Chaunoproctus ferreorostris. Japan native. Habitat destruction by nonnatives. Zoo specimen, @ 1827.
She stopped and looked around her—the many closed doors beneath the fluorescent tubes, the few she’d left standing open with their mounts visible within. The bags of silica gel must be to keep them from molding, though it wouldn’t work forever. Maybe they were already gathering mildew, breeding the larvae of beetles and moths beneath their wings or claws… they should be moved, she should move them as soon as she could. She wondered what T. would say, with his interest in rare animal species. All of these were extinct, obviously; the dates would have to be when they disappeared.
In a dark back alcove off the main room, past what looked like a disused furnace, she saw a big glass case. There were no fluorescents on that section of ceiling and it was too dim to see; but maybe the case had its own light. She walked over and looked around on the wall for a switch, but couldn’t find one and impatiently turned on her flashlight instead.
Inside the case there was no backdrop—no diorama at all, only a bare plywood floor and an oversized bird skeleton. It was brown and ancient, not the usual clean white of bones, and its bill had a bulbous, rounded end. From head to foot the skeleton was easily the size of the great auk and looked like a dinosaur to her, maybe a kind of bird dinosaur, but the sticker on the side read Raphus cucullatus. Dodo. Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715.
That was all.
It had to be: the old man’s legacy.
Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen—Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.
“It’s just a regular basement with a lot of closet space,” she told them. “And more skins for taxidermy.”
“Good lord,” said Portia.
“Talk about overkill,” said the gray lady, in a small chirp of a voice.
“I think these might be valuable, though,” said Susan. “I think maybe a university or something might even want them. Maybe they could be donated.”
“Dear, aren’t you late for the meeting with your lawyer friend?” asked Angela—as though Jim didn’t, for all intents and purposes, live in the same house with them. With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again. She moved a cube of carrot around with her fork.
Susan had almost forgotten, she realized, after the basement. It was late but she could still go to meet him.
“Thanks for everything,” she told Portia, and took the back stairs up to her bedroom to change her clothes.
In fact she felt cut off and subdued. She couldn’t say anything to the old women, she was not qualified to tell them about the basement’s contents. She was marginal in all this and they were even further away from the matter: they had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing about it, disturb the truth with a false statement. She didn’t know what the legacy was, if it was important or run-of-the-mill, whether its specimens were real or reconstructed, contraband or legal. For all she knew they had been stolen in the first place. Best to move on, best to close off the subject of the mounts in the rooms beneath to casual discussion and quietly bring in her own natural history expert.