Dear Orven,
Please do not use the first drawing.
I know you have already paid for it. I know the page has been laid out. I remember your views on late alterations; you expressed them very clearly beside a biscuit I never got to eat. Nevertheless, the animal has made changes.
When I arrived at the reserve on Monday, the slateback was exactly as your picture researcher described it: the last known specimen, old, solitary, and unwilling to stand where it could be drawn. Ada, who looks after it, called it Mrs. Bunt. Nobody knows whether it is female. Ada said she had needed a name to put on the feed orders.
It has six low legs, a blunt pale face and overlapping plates along its back. In the rain those plates can lift into shallow cups. The original seed-distribution companies expected whole herds of them to cross bare ground, carrying seeds in the damp hollows. Your chapter explains why this turned out more expensive than a person with a sack. I leave that part to you.
Mrs. Bunt lives in a former demonstration garden behind the reserve office. There is a pond, a concrete shelter and a slope planted with trees which have outlived both the company and its naming scheme. Three different species are still labelled UPWARD 4.
I asked Ada to bring the animal into the open.
“I’ll ask,” she said.
She rattled its food scoop. Mrs. Bunt looked at her, considered the scoop, and lay down behind the water tank.
“That’s an answer,” Ada told me.
I spent the morning drawing the tank. It was very cooperative.
At lunchtime Mrs. Bunt came out and walked directly beneath my stool. The stool rose. I had one foot in the air and one on its back before I understood what was happening. Ada took my sketchbook. I stepped off onto a stone. The slateback carried my seat uphill until it caught on a branch and fell sideways.
“Was that deliberate?” I asked.
“It walks there.”
“There wasn’t a path.”
“There is to her.”
You will understand why I did not begin with the sorrow of extinction. My first feeling was more particular.
By afternoon I had a good drawing of the head. The animal’s eyes are set so low that I had to lie on the paving to meet them. Its mouth has a little tucked corner which makes it appear doubtful. I have not exaggerated that in the plate. I resisted exaggerating it several times.
Ada sat on the tank’s low wall, mending the handle of a feed bucket with cord. She has worked there eleven years. Before that she cleaned the offices while the company still occupied them. Mrs. Bunt arrived only three weeks ago, with several crates of soil and bedding from the closing facility where it had lived. There had been no rain since. Ada remembers rooms full of sketches by people like me, showing slatebacks with flowers growing from their shoulders.
“Did they ever grow flowers?” I asked.
“Things grew. They’d rub them off under the benches.”
She showed me a narrow gap in one of the plates, where the rim had worn smooth. It looks decorative from above. From the side you can see where another animal, or a stout branch, might have fitted beneath it.
There were small grey shapes in the drainage trench behind her. I took them for the garden’s other inhabitants, which the reserve leaflet calls paving skitters. You have probably seen them: little jointed things under wet pots, another of the company’s attempts to improve upon worms. These were broader than the leaflet picture, but I had a slateback to draw and did not pursue it.
On Tuesday I arranged the last pose.
You asked for a profile on a raised stone, with empty ground behind it. A good silhouette, room for the caption, something suitable for the last page before the bibliography. I could see the page as I worked. I shifted three loose stones from the edge of the trench to make a level place for my board. Then I sat behind the camera and waited.
Mrs. Bunt went to the shelter.
I asked whether we could move the food bowl.
Ada said we could move it as far as we liked, provided we were willing to carry it back when the animal ignored it. We tried the raised stone. We tried the paving. We did not try starving it, in case anyone at the editorial meeting suggests that.
By four the sky had become a flat grey lid. Ada brought my bag under the shelter roof. She offered to take me back to the station before the rain.
I said I would wait. I thought the dark sky might give me the outline you wanted.
Mrs. Bunt emerged from the shelter and went down toward the trench.
She stopped at my three stones.
The first sound was like a chair being pulled across a floor above your head. A short scrape, a pause, another scrape. She had lowered the plates near her tail and was drawing their rims across the paving.
I was at the camera. Through the lens I could see the whole body in profile. Finally. I took a picture. She scraped again. I took another.
Ada came to stand beside me.
“Does she do that often?” I asked.
“First time I’ve heard it.”
“Is it a warning?”
“I don’t know.”
She went closer to the trench, keeping to one side of the animal.
Mrs. Bunt pushed her nose against one of my stones. It moved a little. She turned, backed down and scraped her plates again. Something answered from the trench, a much smaller sound, like grit beneath a fingernail.
Ada crouched. I stayed at the camera. The last specimen was giving me precisely the air of loneliness you had commissioned.
“Tem,” Ada said. “Move your board.”
“I’ve almost got it.”
“Move it.”
I lowered the camera. The animal had pushed the stone against the leg of my board stand. In the gap below it, a small grey face looked out. It had two visible eyes and a tucked corner to its mouth.
I said something which, had you been there, you would have asked me to make less ordinary.
Ada held the stand while I lifted away the stones. There were five small animals in the trench. Then there were seven. I could not tell whether more had come forward or whether I had counted the same one twice; they did not hold positions for my convenience.
The rain began before I finished moving the third stone.
Mrs. Bunt’s back opened.
I had watched the old company film. I expected cups, each holding its useful portion of water. Instead I saw the spaces beneath the raised plates: long dark chambers, dry at the center, accessible through the worn gaps along the sides.
The little animals came out of the trench.
They were poor climbers. The first slipped twice. Mrs. Bunt lowered herself until her belly touched the paving. One of them reached a front leg, crossed the joint, and disappeared beneath a plate. The others followed by different routes. A small one tried the blunt head and was gently removed by a motion I had not thought that jaw could make.
It came around and tried again from the side.
Ada did not touch them. Neither did I. Water was running down my sleeve and collecting in the crook of my elbow. I held the camera under my coat, brought it out, took a picture, put it back. You may see the coat in the corner of several frames.
The last little animal stayed on the paving. It scraped its own back against a stone. Mrs. Bunt answered. It went beneath the nearest plate, and the plate settled over it, leaving a narrow space at the edge.
Then Mrs. Bunt stood up.
She was not appreciably larger. A reader looking only at my first drawing would see the same old animal carrying an unnecessary amount of rain.
She walked uphill past the shelter and went under the trees. For a moment the plates along her spine held the sky in separate pieces. Then the branches closed behind her.
Ada and I stood in the rain long enough to become uncomfortable about it.
“How many?” she asked.
I said seven.
She said eight.
We went inside to look at the pictures.
There are at least seven. I will defend that number. I will not yet defend the word offspring. Ada has sent the recordings to the reserve’s zoologist, who has asked for better views of their legs. The company’s surviving records mention a juvenile phase without illustrating it. They also call the adults cooperative, so we are being cautious.
We have kept the garden shut to visitors. This is not a declaration of a thriving wild population. It is one old animal with small animals beneath it, in a fenced garden. Ada has a damp notebook full of questions and has refused my suggestion that we lure them out for measurements. They come out on their own in the mornings. We can wait.
I know the effect this has on the last page of your book. I have tried to give you space for a caption. There is less than before.
The revised plate shows the slope, the open back and the small animal trying the wrong end. I have included the three stones at the edge of the trench. They are my contribution to the event, and it seems dishonest to omit them merely because they spoil the composition.
Please change “last specimen” to “last known adult,” pending the zoologist’s report. Please also remove the sentence about its indifference to the future. I understand you admired that sentence. I admired the silhouette.
Ada says I may stay until Friday. There is a spare bed in the office, and the animal has taken my stool again. I can draw standing up.
The enclosed invoice is for one adult and seven smaller subjects. If the eighth appears, I shall include it without charge.
Tem
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