During what remained of the summer
Steller collects botanical specimens,
fills little bags with dried seed,
describes, classifies, draws,
sits in his black travelling tent,
happy for the first time in his life.
Thoma Lepekhin catches salmon,
brings mushrooms, berries and leaves,
makes fire and tea.
Throughout the winter
the German doctor teaches
Koryak children in a tiny
wooden school, writes
when the ice breaks
memoranda in defence
of the indigenous people maltreated
and deprived of their rights by
the Naval Command at Bolsheretsk—
with the consequence that a letter against him
is despatched, that interrogations take place,
that misunderstandings arise,
that arrests follow and that Steller
now wholly grasps the difference
between nature and society.
Westward, stage after stage he covers
fleeing back, and it seems as though
everything now were going downhill.
Only in Tara does the message reach him
that by any route possible
he may now set out for his home.
Steller hires three horses,
drives to Tobolsk,
and there he,
who never drank, drinks
for three whole days.
Then comes the fever,
he creeps into the sledge,
tells the Tatar to drive on southward,
the hundred and seventy miles to Tyumen.
This is infirmitas, the breaking
of time from day to day
and from hour to hour,
it is rust and fire
and the salt of the planets
darkness even at noon and
luminaries absent from heaven.