Mr Darwin's Shooter (25 page)

It was October and spring. His work was killing small birds. He made his way through grasslands to the south and west of Buenos Ayres travelling like a pilgrim with everything on a packhorse and equipped with his gent's best gun and bird-baskets. For each green paroquet and misto finch he took—every lapwing, cow-bird, tyrant-bird, humming-bird and swallow—he took another: making two collections, the larger for his gent, the smaller for himself. Using mustard-shot and dust-shot that barely parted feathers and peppered skins, creating little damage except for a heart-stopping dunt, his long-tapered bird gun resembled a blowpipe with its elegant stock. When fired it cast a smoky breath in destruction—and more protracted than any breath came the report in Covington's ears, a ringing echo lasting long afterwards.

His Spanish came out like a barking dog's, and although he dressed as a horseman in the fashion of the country, in poncho and loose pantaloons, he climbed from his mount and walked more often than he rode. His packhorse followed carrying gear and extra guns, shot-pouches, powder-flasks, caps, flints, wadding and balls. His destination was an Estancia Thompson where there was rumoured English hospitality, a family of boys, and a governess by the name of Mrs Bonnie FitzGerald. A family of boys was as good as a wide net spread over a countryside—what they
did not bring in, blinking in their handkerchiefs or peering from their shirtpockets, was not there to be found. Covington carried a sketch-map in his pocket and letters of introduction. Darwin rode a separate route hundreds of miles distant. They were well away from each other after being too much together. They were to meet in Buenos Ayres in a month's time, when the
Beagle
would come for them. So Covington was free to collect what he chose under broad instructions.

He was happy as never before. Falls of rain hung in curtains across the horizon. Sheens of water lay in plates and narrows, and putting his horses to the jog he splashed through them. It was a countryside of rolling green, but threadbare, like a cloth left out in the sun too long. Everything was budding and fresh but there was a roughness, a patchiness under the green compared with spring in England. Mr Thompson's name was given by the Buenos Ayres merchant Lumb in a letter of introduction: ‘
His estate is the longest settled, and I believe handsome and large
.' ‘And I believe you have never been there, Merchant Lumb,' thought Covington with a grin. There was
large
in that country but
handsome
was choice. He would see what it was when he found it and know its style when he reached there. There were too many hovels and too many betrayals in South America for anyone to be impressed in advance. Lumb had failed to supply Darwin his shot and powder as ordered because of a prohibition under law. It was due to the war against Indians that was running. They were being killed, each man, woman and child, by General Rosas and his murdering henchmen—chased from their shelters and cut down to save ammunition and left to die in the open. In that district the war was already over and bones were under every tree. There was a saying that when the Indians came the vultures would have a feast. In one place a corpse hung with its skin dried. It had bird-scarers, pendants and mirrors hanging off it and making a sharp
unpleasant sound. It was agreed by landholders that the extermination was needed. Proof of it was there were no arguments over cattle any more, they had the free range, and Rosas was the greatest cattle man of all, owning four hundred thousand.

Covington was not so shy of soldiers' rules as Merchant Lumb and got his powder by bribery and persuasive charm. So maybe it was that a poor savage lived another day through the loss of some favoured bird,
avis rarissima
, as the gentry said. It was what Covington told himself as he went along in his work, carrying mail in his letter-pouch including a missive from a Rosas man, one Colonel de las Carreras, to Mrs Bonnie FitzGerald.

Covington had bettered Lumb on a small matter by obtaining a box of shipping tags ideal for labelling birds, and not paying a single
reale
for them. It was done by a wink to the chief of clerks who minded the storeroom, and who promised to forward his birds to Leadbeater's. With a string on the left-end the tags could be tied to swing clear of a dead bird's legs, but not be loose enough to tangle with others when the birds were laid away. The tag did well for anything, from a hawk to a humming-bird. In no way were the birds he prepared for Leadbeater's given preference over Darwin's; except the satisfaction Covington felt was greater. It paid to attend to such things as tags and so win praise, one small perfection on the part of a servant counting for many in the eyes of a master. In this the young Darwin was no different from all the masters of England— a good part blind, another part hopeful, and a last part condescending. Also somewhat deceived.

It was Covington's caution, in company with his gent, to stow away his best accoutrements—embroidered shirts, showy boots, silver-buckled belts and daggers—and not play the exquisite too much. In this he followed the mood and manner of his master, whose vanity resided within— except for a bashfulness over showing his profile, owing to
a nose like a lump of pear-wood nailed to a door. For his Don was a plain-faced man with little interest in wearables, save they were sturdy and cheap, such as the black duck trowsers he bought Covington on his account, and the nankeen cotton shirts they wore at sea, that itched and rubbed with dust on the trail. Once they took a bag of sweepings from a granary and Covington crawled around a splintery wooden floor with a brush and pan. They sent seeds home to England to be sprouted, to discover if they were changed since they first came from Europe. Darwin said: ‘
We
shall be a Botanical Problem when we reach England, Covington, it will be curious to find if we are changed to be like the men here, if so, I will answer for it we shan't be much improved.'

 

It was good being trusted to go shooting on his own. Covington's faith was strong in the day. Birds sprang up before him as he went along. They flickered along the trackside, mazed through trees, and ran along twigs to get a better view of him. It took fine skill to drop a warbler skipping about a tree-top. To stop a pit-pit rising from the grass was even better. Most of his targets held still when taken, though. They were God's innocents and not gun-shy at all. With his muzzle-loaders always ready there was no hesitation in him. After his early greed he aimed to one side and risked losing the bird rather than blast it to perdition in a flurry of feathers. After downing a specimen he basketed it away, reloaded, and went on. How could he say what it was, that he thought, or rather had no need to think, in the spirit of how he was? A perfect gratitude warmed him as good as the sun. He marvelled at daily wonders.

Birds were scarcer on the plain, prolific in shelter, thick in places where men never ventured at all. He'd been at it long enough to know their ways. Birds lived in poisonous
swamps, on icy peaks in the southern winds of the Horn, where sails were stripped but not feathers. They inhabited every station of existence, some of them scuttling through leaves like rats, others ringing the world on narrow wings and never alighting on earth. Birds outrode storms at sea that sent strong men to their last account.

When hawks flew in Covington's way—and other birds of prey—he learned it was best to wait for them to find him. Their shadows steadied, and he looked up, and that was their end.

Owls he scared from bushes in daytime, and at dusk potted by rubbing wet lucifer matches on the foresight to make a pinpoint glow, tracing them in their utter silence until the quiet was shattered. To gather owls' corpses in his fingers was to feel a spirit sift through them. There were no softer feathers known.

At his prayers he asked God's forgiveness for harming his creatures, and knew, as sure as if the answer came back to him in person—like it did to the old prophets—that God was pleased with his labours.

The birds he prepared were stuffed into sleek bullet-like shapes and narrowed towards the tail and feet. There was no need to pretty them up. They were not made as objects for a show case, but for a naturalist's examination cabinet. Yet was there anything more beautiful than a simple feather overlain with another, so detailed and tough as a rasp? Covington mused half-sleeping that birds' column-shapes were expressions of music—tubes for wind that he could hear through his beginning deafness—the sweet and the loud in rows with their heads tilted slightly over, their beaks aligned and their feet twiglike and tied with shipping tags. He stroked the dead birds feeling their unearthly lightness. He made a final settling of feathers as he put them down, using a palm-up action of the hand rather like cupping water. There was a text that ran:
Death is not
welcome to nature, though by it we pass out of this world into glory
. It underscored him.

With every specimen he ever packed away in its bed of cotton he hung over it this moment of saying farewell; he dressed the feathers that were well dressed before; perfected every curve; finished caressingly and put his bird tenderly down, as he hoped to be shriven himself when his time came.

Rumour went ahead of him that he was English and strange, because he killed what others left alone, walked and led his horses more often than he rode. The country people, the gauchos whose paths he crossed—and who gave him their hospitality at night—expressed their pride in never walking at all. They used their feet only in hobbling to their saddle-beds, hopping to their fires of dry thistles for roasting meats and brewing their yerba mattee teas. They used legs for jumping from thistle-clumps, cutting throats of Indians or each other as it pleased them. Covington's safety was up to their whims. He sensed their dangerous humours but left such decisions to God, and laughed in their faces. They were like cripples or were bred to be centaurs, you might think, living on horseback in their fresh-cut cowhide boots crusted with blood, with silver spurs and spaces leaving the first two toes dirty and bare. Such toes were made for gripping in stirrups, not dirt.

The watery October season gave him ducks, waders and water-fowl aplenty. Their differences of paddling and coping with water were always of interest. The knack of shooting loons and grebes was to aim at the water in front of them, because they did not go under just where they floated; as Darwin had observed when teaching Covington to shoot, they kicked up behind like jumping jacks and plunged forward. It was a keen pleasure for Darwin to see cleverness in nature, and Covington learned the habit from him. The steamer goose used its wings to flapper along the water; the ostrich raised its wings like sails, and went up
with its helm. Mostly it was the small and the overlooked that Darwin wanted collecting—except for bones, which might be huge, heavy and petrified.

So Covington with his boxes, spirit bottles, fly-nets and guns was after a year the match of his master in this regard—a meticulous plunderer.

Coming to a river, wide and overflowing its banks onto grass, Covington stripped and washed in the chilly current. Then, stepping naked from the water, he was surprised by boys throwing stones from a stand of willows. When he was cleaned and dressed in his dry clothes he sneaked round behind them through bulrushes and bailed them up with his fists. They were defiant and spoke English. He said that he was English too—at which they were all over him as if they had been awaiting a signal, looking into his bags and whistling in admiration over his knife and gun and his shrivelled talisman of puma tongue. They said they had heard of a traveller coming along that might be him, ‘A man who knows everything,' and so they yabbered between themselves in Spanish, coming back at Covington calling him ‘
Il naturalista
', at which Covington smiled and shook his head: ‘Nay, that is someone else. My master, you mean.' The boys chorused their offers: Did he want birds' eggs and frogs? Lizards? Skunks? Owls?
Anything
in that line? Covington said yea, he wanted an armadillo brought to him live so as to have the joy of sticking it through.

The boys ran ahead of him sending their spotted dog in wide circles scaring up game, and in quick motion disappeared over the horizon. Covington forded the stream—and three miles distant on the other side, across
the green plain like an enchanted island, he gained sight of the Estancia Thompson. It stood at the end of a long muddy track in a field of poplars. A flash of window-glass gleamed as he came closer. The boys rose from a hollow and looked back to be sure Covington followed and understood he was to link himself to their play. They were like small birds darting and swooping and then diving between a gap in the trees and disappearing. Covington longed for company and followed at the jog. His saddlebags flapped, his packhorse scented clover and lolloped out to one side and ahead. A sack of tin dishes and cutlery made a racket, but his specimens were well secured and he gave his saddle-horse a jab with the spurs to get him cantering, too.

A short time later Covington pulled the horses up to the trees and stood on an embankment. A double row of poplars blocked his view farther in. Their balsamic odour came as clean as any sea smell. At the edge of his hearing came a sound of a surf running up a shingle: leaves shivered; and looking up at the clouds moving he had the sensation of standing on a deck. It piqued him with a memory of danger and a starless night when their bark rode without anchor and close to a Tierra del Fuego shore. There had been a great whispering of surf on shingle and a booming of swell on cliffs. They believed their Capt went close to mad that night with giving his orders, contradicting them every time the wind changed.

Then Covington scanned the foreground and noted that someone was moving through the trees towards him and trying to stay undetected while aiming for the best possible view back at him. He thought it was the boys again. But it was Mrs FitzGerald, as he would soon learn, on one of her wild walks. And he would soon find himself captivated by her and bound to her in a way that resembled his own taking of game, in that it was a kind of death she dealt him, and through her he went to another kind of life.

Then he saw, sauntering towards him, a brown rat. It
had a piece of offal between its teeth. Recall, thought Covington, his gent and his catechism: ‘Look for variations among common types.' Here was one plain to see in the form of a common pelted rodent almost gingery in hue. It crept from the broad ditch running along the front of the poplars. Such ditches were dug to hold water for a dry season, and in defence against Indians. This one was a haven of burrows and a dump for bones, and a muddy obstacle for visitors to the estancia.

A sharp squeal and the rat found itself wriggling under Covington's boot. He bent down and twisted its neck with a ready jolt. Then he knelt and skinned the rodent with his narrowest boning knife and rolled the pelt around a stick. The action was leisurely-seeming but swift. A green eye, that he was acutely aware of, but scarcely knew watched, considered him the whole time with an iris narrowing and widening as clouds crossed the sun.