Excerpted: The Last of Its Kind

As the rowboat from whence Auguste had observed the scene headed back to the vessel, he saw a black shape in the water near the boat. It looked a little like the mop Mrs. Bridge used to wash the floors. He bent over, grabbed the bird, and felt its panic, its strength, compromised as it was—or else it would have swum away—and when he pulled it onto the boat, the creature, with a stumpy broken wing hung at its belly, let out a cry. It tried to bite Gus, its one good wing stretched out as straight as possible, its body, the height of Gus’s waist, slid between his hands, solid as muscle. But like the rest of its kind, it was helpless out of water. Someone grabbed a net from the bottom of the boat and threw it onto the bird, and it found itself trapped, struggling in vain, emitting repeated squawks that, according to one of the men, sounded like the cries of a witch.  

On the boat they put the great auk in a cage. It stopped crying once inside. They brought over a fish, but the auk refused it. From behind the bars, it stared at Gus, furious or hateful even, and Gus’s hand shook as he dropped another fish at its feet. Until that second he hadn’t noticed the penguin-like creature’s expression. He imagined himself telling the naturalist who had employed him that a great auk was capable of an accusatory stare. In truth, Auguste had never believed he would have the chance to capture one. He had rather pictured sending a dead specimen to Lille, to be stuffed. He’d gotten on the fishing boat expressly because the mariners were passing the island of Eldey, the nesting spot of the last-known great auk colony of the region. But it had never occurred to him to bring back a living creature, an animal he could then study in depth before it died, wretchedly, in captivity, as likely it would.  

Later the bird slept, or pretended to. Gus watched it closely through the bars. He noted that, while he had always known a great auk to be feathered, its down was surprising; until then he had imagined the great auk to be an oily creature, akin to a seal. At dinner, swallowing a bite of auk meat, he felt that a seal must taste similar too. The meat was nauseating and fatty. He didn’t take a second helping. 
 

The journey back to the Orkney Islands took nearly two days. The auk kept its head turned toward the railing when it paced past them, to the point that neither Gus, who took an interest, nor the sailors, who didn’t, could see anything but the bird’s back and its motionless tail, its neck stooped so low that it appeared headless. No one questioned whether the cage was too narrow, except for one fisherman who suggested they fasten a cord to one leg and let it out on the water, but Gus refused, fearing the bird would break free. Luckily the sea spray, the humid sea air, and the rain kept the creature drenched.  

Back in Stromness, the largest town in the Orkneys, where he’d settled six months earlier in January of 1834 to study the fauna, Gus found a slightly larger cage than the one on the ship, which he placed, with the bird shut inside, in a room of the house he was renting. Mrs. Bridge, who cooked his meals and cleaned the house, was scandalized by the presence of this ghastly, terrifying beast that had no business being indoors. Gus had to promise that she would never be asked to go near it. After two days he moved the cage to a fairly large room on the main floor—where he decided he would work from then on, far from her mop and bucket—and instructed the old woman never to enter.  

Every day Gus poured pitchers of water over the cage. The bird would spread its wings, crane its neck, pass its beak across its belly then across its back for minutes at a time. It was the only time it moved, except, of course, to swallow the fish Gus left at its feet. The auk would hop back feebly, then lower its beak between its closed feet and snap it up. The rest of the time it stood perfectly still, beak nestled in its chest, body slumped over as though its feet were lashed down. When the bird stood in profile, Gus could sometimes see its black or very deep brown eye staring out at him, strikingly hostile. Gus felt almost afraid. He told himself Mrs. Bridge must be right, the creature must be dangerous; the seaman had said as much, after all: It looks like a witch, with its hooked beak and hoarse cry.  

That beak was a true wonder. Gus had already remarked on the single engraving of a great auk he had seen in Buffon’s Natural History, an engraving based on a description and not, as he would be the first to do, observed in nature—at that thought alone, he flushed hot and his heart began to race. Up close the beak proved more bizarre than anything he could have imagined. Nothing like a parrot’s beak, for instance. It was longer, closer—in terms of drawing it, that is—to a crab’s pincer in the space where a nose would be. It was black, of course, shiny too, but with thick stripes across it, neither pretty nor ugly, as impressive as the markings painted on faces in villages in Africa or near Australia. 

Excerpted in part from “The Last of Its Kind” by Sibylle Grimbert. Original text © 2022 by S.N. Édiions Anne Carrière, Paris. English translation © 2025 by Aleshia Jensen. Used with permission of Book*hug Press. Published by Book*hug Press. https://bookhugpress.ca/

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