Listing to Port

1. The minotaur was sick again today. Could there be a more miserable sight? Crouched on the deck, heaving its guts up. Truly it was never meant to be at sea. But these are the things we are driven to, in order that we might have a future. Of course, the minotaur itself doesn’t have a future any more. It is stupid, has no sea legs and is ludicrously top-heavy; all factors, I suspect, in the disappearance of its mate in the last storm. Does it realise this, somewhere at the back of its tiny brain? Maybe that is why it is so sad today.  
2. I am sad to say it is far from the only doomed beast on this ship. We are a mess. I don’t know how we thought we could ever do this. There has been storm after storm after storm. We are barely watertight. There is never enough food, and too often these days it is soaked in salt water or rotting. Maybe N. had a plan for this stage. I trusted him so much, and he was right about so much; about the rising of the waters, about what we needed to do. But he died on the second day at sea. We feed the cockatrice more carefully now.
3. Enough of this misery! The wind is rising, but it is fresh and curiously sweet. Perhaps the waters are receding, who knows.
4. Another storm. Good lord, at least I am still alive. But our losses are almost too hard to bear. There is a compartment at the back of the ship, one where we keep the creatures that do not mind getting too wet; the hippocampus and the merlion and the like. Some crates came loose at the height of the storm. The female hippocampus was impaled on a pickaxe and the male one trapped in the debris. The wives of S., H. and J. went in to free it. Something shifted, I don’t know. But they became trapped too, and when the swell broke over the ship they were drowned. If I thought too hard about what this meant for the world I would despair. Why did I not think? Why did I not tell them to stay apart? So I am clearing up. It keeps the mind busy.  
5. That fresher breeze again. J. says he has heard birds. Whatever may become of the world in the future, at least it will have birds.
6. There is land! I was almost out of hope, but no: here we are, stranded on a mud-bank, and every hour it gets a little larger, a little more populated with salt-poisoned trees and stranded shellfish. H. and J. have walked on it. The minotaur, even. I could hardly have imagined that it would survive, but here it is: squelching about on the new mud, mooing with joy.
7. The waters are still receding. I looked out of the window this morning and could not even see them. We are eating kelp and seawater and the fish the waters were kind enough to leave behind. But what a bind we are in! I am not sure how we will feed ourselves in the longer term. And maybe we will not need to. There is barely a pair of breeding animals left. All our work, for nothing! The male centaur lasted until landfall but was dead by the first morning. The manticore tore the female serpopard apart and ate it. Of course, we are done for as well. I am too old to bear children and in any case N. is dead. There are no other females among us.
8. I see that I have not written here in some time. Cautiously, carefully, I may have good news to report. Although our breeding pairs were wiped out, some of the beasts have been able to interbreed. The female centaur surprised us in May with a birth; sired, it seems, by the hippocampus. It is a little like both. A warm brown beast with four legs and the long, solemn head of its father. J. has been asking what I should call it. My reply? ‘A hippocampus-centaur, of course’. But I think that I could shorten that to 'horse’. It seems to fit.
9. The griffin and the merlion, too (J. shortens this to 'Lion’; he has been looking after the cubs, now in the second generation). I have high hopes for the union of the hippalectryon and the cockatrice. H. has been going through the lists of surviving beasts, one by one, and he claims there are several hundred potential crossbreeds. It seems we will be populating the world after all, just not quite with the creatures that we thought we were going to. And there are things growing now, and the sea is far away, and we only dream of it from time to time and do not have to see it when we wake.
10. S. asks who will write this history. We cannot cross-breed. Our days are numbered. But I think we will still have intelligent life to succeed us. I have had some success with the offspring of the centaur and the minotaur. They are scrawny little hairless things, but I have been teaching them language and they are quick to learn.
11. Of course, I will not quite tell them what happened. Let them forget the old animals, or at least put them to the back of their minds. Let N. be one of them, and let him have saved them as he saved all the new beasts. Let the new beasts have existed since the dawn of time. N. was a good soul. History deserves him to be bathed in uncomplicated glory. And so he shall be.