Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Not on this one, mate.”
The woman mutters something under her breath and even though she is not dead, there is something unnatural about it. A corpse reanimated. Her hand, the long fingers of it, clench once into a fist, then relax.
“Don’t get too tied up in it,” I tell Orly.
“In what?”
“In her surviving. She might not. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.” He studies her face, I study his. “It’s just?… why isn’t she waking up?”
“I don’t know, mate. She swam a long way. She might still be swimming.”
The Shearwater Global Seed Vault was built to withstand anything the world could throw at it; it was meant to outlast humanity, to live on into the future in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us. Specks, most of them. Tiny little black dots. That’s all they are. These treasures we keep buried in boxes below ground, down here in the arse-end of the world. The last hope of their kinds, but also of our kind.
The idea is a big one: to save humankind. But in all honesty that’s not why we came here. I needed a job, and I needed it to be far away.
The purpose of it came later; in truth it came when my youngest recognized its magnitude.
While the seed vault is owned by the United Nations, the management of it has been allocated to the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, which also manages the nature reserve on the island as well as the research station-Shearwater Island belonging to Australia by virtue of its location. I was hired as caretaker of every building on this island, including the enormous frozen vault at its far south, and so in the beginning, when we first arrived, I was making the trip across island often. Because he was so little, I had no option but to take Orly with me, and I resented these regular hikes, when I could have been attending to the maintenance of the research base or the lighthouse. But as Orly got older, he would explore as we walked, touching and smelling and picking, and as he learned to talk he spoke the names of the plants we saw, and then the seeds we were there to visit, and I began to see, through his eyes, that in fact this job was
important. I started imagining the use of these seeds, I imagined the world that would require them. I felt better about being here, on the island that was protecting this last floundering hope, rather than back on a mainland that would need rescuing. And with every danger that came upon Shearwater, every struggle, I would think, at least we’re not back there, dealing with fires and floods and food scarcity and all the rest of it.
At least we are here, in a place that seems hostile until you look more closely. Until you begin to see its beauty and its tenderness. Until you see the hidden abundance of it.
I never loved a place before we came here.
And now it’s over. The seed vault is closing. It was meant to last forever, and now we are sorting and packing the seeds for transport, and in just under two months we, too, will be leaving, with all the lucky little specks important enough to be chosen for relocation.
The tunnel is dry, always. It must be: it’s part of the design. Except that today, when I step into the mouth of the long descent, my boots splash.
I stop and peer into the darkness. The wrongness of it stands the hairs on my arms. The impossibility of it.
I splash down into the earth, to the underground chamber, to its vacuum-sealed door. Like the door of a fridge. If the water has gone beneath it, we will be in real trouble, but it hasn’t, and I remember to breathe. Just the tunnel then, that’s alright. It will be alright. Within the vault it’s still dry. But as I check the temperature gauge my fears are confirmed. The lights are working but the cooling system has shorted out. It’s already a degree warmer than it should be in here.
It has been made very clear to us that keeping the seeds safe is more important than keeping ourselves safe. Quietly, down in the corners of me, I consider whether I could let thousands of species go extinct in order to save the lives of my three children. If I were to reroute the energy we use for heating the lighthouse I might buy the seeds a little extra time. But the answer is easy, and I don’t think they should have sent a man out here who has kids. That man would never make the choice they want him to.
I set up a pump in the tunnel, uncoiling the long dark tube until it snakes out the opening into daylight. If the water level reaches a certain height, the pump will turn on automatically. Next I walk each of the thirty aisles of the vault. They are dry, so I don’t hang around. Despite it all, despite the importance of this place and these specks, I don’t enjoy being down here. I’m not sure why, really, it’s a mystery even to myself. Something, maybe, about the pre-life-ness of it, which in a way is death, though Orly would tell me I’m mad, that this place is the opposite of death. Maybe it’s the stasis of it then, the way that life is being kept dormant. Maybe it has nothing to do with the seeds at all, and is simply the underground of it, or the deep, deep cold. Whatever the reason, the place unnerves me, so I let my boots splash their way back up to the surface.
I climb to the crest of the hill, where the shrubs give way to the long tussock grass, and I turn and look out at the horizon. It is like gazing off the edge of the world. Way down there sits Antarctica but mostly
what lies before me is a boundless ocean and this edge is sharp. If I take one step in the wrong direction I will fall, and I am never, for a single moment, able to forget it.
The field huts sit among mossy hills on the shoreline, accessible only via a crooked set of metal steps built into the rocks. It takes me the rest of the day to reach them. I will sleep here tonight; we don’t travel after dark and usually we don’t travel at all unless in pairs. I am breaking a rule, but I can’t bring my children to see what’s waiting. The huts are pods, delivered here fully furnished on the back of a freight ship many years ago. The blue hut (so named because of its blue door) is closest, while the red hut is a little farther along and closer to the water. Once there were four scientists living within them. Now the huts sit empty. Once there was a third, its door green.
The blue hut is the last place I want to set foot inside. The unconscious woman isn’t going anywhere fast, but if she wakes she could eventually find her way down here, which means I can’t put this off any longer. I push inside. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. The smell is a shuddering kind of bad.
There are two single bedrooms, and I move past them to the kitchen.
It’s not as grim as I remember it, but it is pretty grim.
In the backpack I’ve brought a scrubbing brush, cloths and towels, and bleach. I get to my hands and knees and start cleaning up the blood.
Fen
It’s about calm. She has learned this over years spent in the water, and it’s something she’s good at, a skill she has cultivated. It started because she didn’t want to leave the seals beneath the surface-she wanted her body to be capable of more, to be like theirs, so she worked at it. She learned about making her exhales longer than her inhales to decrease her heart rate. She learned about reducing her oxygen consumption. She learned about enduring the pressure that turns to pain, she understands that there is nothing to fear from pain. She is very good at calm.
Except, of course, where her dad is concerned.
He is stubborn and strict and unbendable. He refuses to talk about anything. He frustrates her. And maybe that’s normal for a seventeen-year-old, but Fen’s willing to bet most seventeen-year-olds don’t have to deal with their dads talking to their dead mothers and refusing to admit there’s a problem with that.
Fen loves her dad. And she loves Shearwater, maybe more than any of them do, but she can see that, little by little, the island is killing them.
She doesn’t sleep much; it’s hard to sleep without walls or curtains over windows, and there aren’t many hours of true darkness on Shearwater at this time of year. She rises and swims with the males and the females who aren’t soon to give birth, she stretches her lungs and her muscles, she kicks and arches and follows the paths of their flippers as they move with so much more power and grace than she will ever have. King Brown, as Alex named him, does a showy loop and finishes
by brushing his whiskers against her cheek, as if to say
beat that, and she laughs beneath the surface. Silver, a young female, circles her once, twice, then trails her hind flippers through Fen’s hair, daring her. She kicks after the sleek pale seal, trying her best to keep up-they want to race her but she will never win, she is all too human and has to break for the surface. Silver’s face pops up beside her and Fen can almost imagine a grin there, it’s in her eyes, the amusement, the triumph. “You win then,” Fen says. “For the millionth time.”
She means to go and check on the woman in the lighthouse; she can’t stop thinking of her, of this body washed in that is somehow still alive. But on the beach she can hear a kerfuffle and she knows what it means.
She swims to shore and picks her way among the colony, trying to find the female who is first. She’s in one of the larger harems-this is King Brown’s group-so there are lots of females clustered around. It’s Freckles, Fen sees, named for the smattering of dark spots on her face. She is flapping and moving awkwardly, tilting her head back and forth, and a couple of other females keep trying to duck their faces to her bottom, to where there is a dark little shape emerging.
Fen stays back, giving them space, but she will be ready in case she needs to help. When she sees the placenta break and the head push out, she is worried because the pups are usually born flippers first-this baby’s eyes and mouth are shut and it doesn’t look to be breathing. But Freckles flaps and moves, she pushes. She turns her head back and reaches her snout down to the motionless pup, licking its face. She turns in circles to try to work it free, she pushes and pushes. Fen grows more worried by the second-the pup is showing no signs of life and the birth is taking too long. She isn’t sure if she should try to help but something makes her wait.
And soon the dark little body comes free, it tumbles onto the sand and it moves, it lifts its head. Smiling, Fen watches the mother seal nuzzle and lick this wet furry creature. The other babies will come now, all the females will start to give birth and the beach will be covered in bleating seal pups. It is Fen’s favorite time of year. It’s what she will miss most when they leave. She has always come down to the beach for
pup season. Even before this inhospitable stretch of coast became her home. Her escape. Even before she learned that there is a different kind of fear from the one you feel when you hold your breath.
The air of Shearwater is thick with the spirits of the dead. Fen knows this and isn’t bothered by it. Raff doesn’t believe her, but in the hours of true night she has seen them. The specters, flickering green lights out at sea or in the mountains above her, and even once quite close on the beach. She wonders if this means she is marked for a different kind of life, if it is yet another oddity that will ensure she doesn’t fit in back on the mainland. But she isn’t frightened of the dead. It is only the living who have the power to harm.
Orly
Let’s start with the greatest traveler among them, shall we?
In aisle E, row 34, sits the
Taraxacum officinale. Otherwise known as the common dandelion. The dandelion is found all over the world in pretty much any habitat. It’s a survivor. It can grow in lawns or fields, in rocky hillsides or woodlands. It might be the first to sprout up in a new ecosystem, or the longest standing in an old one.