The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  They finally got away on the twenty-first; the dogs had been stranded six full days. Bage, Hurley and Mertz had set off in early morning twilight; a mere zephyr, Hurley, dismissing the sixty-mile-an-hour wind. A bank of heavy cloud was blowing in from the north.

  August 24 and no sign of them. Douglas had spent the day scraping the build-up of ice from the roof of his cabin, imagining the worst. He would go tomorrow himself. Drift poured into the store and outhouses. It took a group with shovels all day to clear it.

  25 August: Sunday: Service 10.30. Weather better today but drift fair; strong wind. We clear up outside. Rather expect the return of Bage’s party. At 2 pm they appear, all well, but Grandmother dead.

  Hurley had come into his cabin breathless and weatherworn and sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Castor must have got wind of us,’ he said. ‘We saw her jumping about when we got within sight of the cave.’

  ‘Had they broken into the provisions?’

  ‘Not one. They’d curled up in the snow as if they were waiting for us. Basilisk and Castor were the only two not frozen down. All the dogs were listless and wouldn’t eat a mouthful until we cut them free and took them into the cave. Pavlova was in the best nick, Grandmother was as good as dead. X said Grandmother had missed out on a meal the day before you left the hut.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Douglas recalled, ‘and we rewarded Pavlova with extra food. She was the only dog that stayed with us after we unharnessed them.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘Seven days in wind and drift without a scrap of food.’

  ‘I doubt they’d have lasted another day. All gone in the hind legs. Could barely hold themselves up.’

  Hurley’s voice quietened when he told how Mertz handfed pieces of pemmican to the weakest dogs.

  ‘Grandmother took only a few mouthfuls before he fitted, pawing at the air like the dogs on the ship coming down. Poor old X was beside himself,’ Hurley said. ‘For more than an hour he held Grandmother in his arms, murmuring to him in German, trying to warm him, and all the while Grandmother was barely breathing, just staring ahead with glassy eyes.’

  HERE IT WAS THE END of August 1912 and their knowledge of Adélie Land extended a princely eight miles, two hundred yards magnetic south. Another dog had died and the rest had come dangerously close to death for no greater cause than that he wanted to assert authority over Madigan. On the opposite side of his cabin wall, Ninnis, Mertz and Madigan would be sitting on their bunks in Hyde Park Corner as sombre as mourners.

  When Douglas closed his journal it occurred to him, not as a new concern but as the twisting of a knife, that the Australasian Antarctic Expedition could easily finish up an unremarkable failure. He pictured the ignomy of bringing home only meteorological and magnetic recordings, as well as a few caseloads of skins, birds and geological specimens. He cringed at the prospect of facing sponsors, government officials, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, who had collectively vested forty thousand pounds in his ability to explore new tracts of land in the name of science. He thought of those he’d be letting down: particularly John King Davis, captain of the Aurora, his second-in-command— his friend—who had believed in his vision from the start. They had stood on a London street corner and gripped hands in a compact before they had even ten pounds to put towards a ship—We’ll sail to Antarctica come what may, Davis had said.

  In a cutter, Douglas had seconded, without a scrap of equipment if it comes to it. He could hear his father in those words, a scholar with no head for business, soliciting investors for his latest get-rich-quick scheme.

  Would Paquita think less of him if he failed, as he did his father?

  You and your little hutful of men have done your utmost, he could hear her say, sounding, at times, a lifetime older than her twenty years.

  He wished he could enwrap himself with Paquita’s warmth, just for an hour, touch the lace of her dress, rest his head upon her lap and hear—without properly listening to her talk of homely things—the lilt of her voice, the lingering trace of Holland in the clip of her words.

  A twig of memory, a snap of remembrance; he turned back the page of his journal, ashamed to realise he had let the date slip by unnoticed.

  19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in a bad way.

  20 August: Thick drift, heavy wind—poor dogs …

  He took up his pencil and, as if to make amends, crammed another line under 19 August, recording Paquita’s twenty-first birthday—the day he had pledged her all of his thoughts: Angel, it will be you all day long—between two miserable entries devoted to the dogs.

  ROOKERY

  LAKE

  CHAD SEES FREYA CROUCH DOWN over her handlebars as intently as a rally-car driver, the headland in her sights, anxious to reach Rookery Lake in time for the best of the afternoon light. Without her GPS to hold her back, she bounds across the surface—fearless or feckless, Chad can’t decide which. Either way, she pays precious little heed as she crosses a series of leads—thin channels of water where sea ice has split and eased apart.

  Other than these rifts, the stretch of blue ice forms a perfect highway, smooth as a newly sealed road. Chad is mindful of the variations in cycles of freeze and thaw. Some years he has watched ice choke Prydz Bay through January; in others it has blown out of the harbour before summer begins. These stretches of sea ice and frozen fjords are fragile bridges linking islands and shores. He is reminded, with each open seam they cross, of their vulnerability on these frangible roads. Each fracture merits inspection, each rift a caution to those who cross.

  Many rivers to cross is the title of the CD that Elisia Hood, fellow winterer, has put together and presented him this morning for his forty-second birthday. Lis, who has a phenomenal number of songs in her collection, has gone all out with his birthday compilation, including not only the Toni Childs version of the title song he always sings along to, but that of every other artist who’s performed it.

  Freya suddenly appears beside him with her head tilted quizzically, wondering, he supposes, what the lunatic alongside is mouthing. He gives her a nod and she pushes ahead, wheels reeling, engine drumming. The music in his earphones pulls his thoughts away. Chad is drawn towards wistful songs and this, with its rivers and crossings and wanderings lost, swamps him with melancholy, dredging up a memory so palpable that even now his leg feels dull and sluggish, heavy with pain.

  Sunday, 5 January 1975, the night the Tasman Bridge was felled by a ship, was the Sunday his bedroom at the bay came alive with the crazy-making drone of mozzies enraged by each squirt of the can his father brandished above his bedhead. Too preoccupied with pain to cover his face with his pillow, to care about the rain of pyrethrum falling about, Chad lay on his sheet, venom spreading from his blackening calf to glands tender as a bruise in the pit of his groin. He has never since experienced pain so engulfing as that inflicted by the razor-sharp tail of a stingray thrashing to free itself from a net. The discomfort of the six blue stitches threaded up his leg by the neighbouring veterinarian were nothing compared to the throb of poison coursing through his veins.

  It was not until the following day that he first heard news of the bridge. Outside, the sunless sky matched his mood. Still shaky and weak, Chad had fallen into a sulk listening to splashes rising from the rocks where other boys were doing bombies off the breakwater. All morning he was confined to bed, impatient for Ma’s return from Hobart. Was she still at home watering the lawn, fussing over her hanging baskets that lined the porch? From there, you could look straight out at the bridge. Perhaps she’d been held up at Nan and Pop’s, yakking non-stop as usual. Ma had promised to return with apricots ripe from Pop’s tree, along with the antibiotics the vet had prescribed—on the off-chance of infection, old Mr Macey had said, scratching Chad behind the ears.

  He remembers his father scoffing at the prescription: For Chrissakes, Sal, Knowles Macey is a vet who should have retired ten years ago. They give these warnings as a matter of course, to cover t
hemselves—words even Chad knew were guaranteed to needle a will like Ma’s; a woman with plenty of spongy cushioning but innards packed tight as a fist.

  AT ROOKERY LAKE CHAD HAULS the esky and a large tub of provisions into the Apple field hut, so named for its red domed fibreglass structure. Freya has brought enough food from the station kitchen for a club of skuas to feast on for a week, never mind two people on a two-night stay.

  If Chad were here with another man he wouldn’t bother with a toilet tent, but as things stand he quietly pieces together aluminium poles and collects large stones to weigh down the tent’s valance in case the weather turns bad. The polar pyramid has hardly changed design since the early explorer days, except that Goretex has replaced burberry, and aluminium poles are used instead of bamboo. He gives Freya a hoy to lend a hand. Try getting one of these forty-kilo babies up on your own.

  CHAD POINTS OUT THE LOCATIONS of the three adélie colonies in the vicinity, the furthest an easy thirty-minute walk ordinarily, but something of an ordeal, he fears, if they have to lug her heavy camera gear. He gives a silent yes! when she chooses the closest colony to photograph; its feathered residents are visible from the Apple, close enough to pick up their acrid odour.

  They trundle over snow-covered rock laden with her cases and packs. She carries more than her fair share and he’s surprised at the weight she manages; but how she thought she would do this project alone is beyond him—with her swag of cameras—digital, 35-millimetre, large and panoramic format—as well as lenses, film and tripod, she has more in her kit than any one person can carry.

  The rookery is all brays and bustle, the to-ing and fro-ing as frenetic as any mainland city rush hour.

  ‘If you’re sure you don’t need my help,’ he says, ‘I thought I’d take a wander across the rocks, check out the other two colonies. You still have your VH F?’

  Freya pats the radio in her pocket. ‘I’ll leave it on channel eight, same as last time.’

  ‘Call me if you need a hand?’

  ‘Promise.’ She shouts after him above the din: ‘What time do you want to meet for dinner?’

  ‘Eight-thirty at the Apple give you enough time?’

  ‘Eight-thirty it is.’ She gives a businesslike nod.

  The middle colony Chad treks to is a hurly-burly of nest building, stone-stealing, dustups and full-on flipper-smacking, beak-battering brawls. At the same time, however, first-time couples, and new arrivals reunited after a winter apart stand together in a swoon, displaying the distinctive adélie breeding ritual: chests swelling, necks extending like concertinas, eyes rolled down and a hypnotic swaying of heads as they bray. Established pairs take turns at egg sitting, one mate taking custody of the nest until the other returns from foraging at sea.

  Stones may be gold to an adélie, but to a south polar skua the bounty of a penguin’s nest lies within. Chad sees two skuas strategically positioned on the perimeter of the rookery. A third does a flyover, scrutinising the colony. The skuas bide their time, waiting for a squabble to break out and a tasty penguin egg to lie exposed or inadvertently tumble from a nest. Sure enough, within minutes the skua in the air swoops down amid the throng and rises again with an egg clutched in its beak. The area directly under siege shrieks; neighbouring penguins hunker down.

  Chad ambles over the rocky hill towards the third and furthest colony, skirting around a fresh scrape of rocks when he hears the kek, kek, kek warning from a skua hovering overhead. Most people hold skuas in low esteem, repulsed by their practice of snatching live penguin chicks as well as eggs to feed their young. But Chad regards the feisty birds with quiet admiration. Skua parents will tackle any intruder— feathered or human—who encroaches on their territory. They will dive bomb the unwary, or fly straight at you, a formidable beak and a murderous glint in their eyes, dropping their feet in readiness to thwack your skull and unhinge your frontal lobe. They’ll hammer you with their beak while you cringe and cower, shadowing you even as you run for dear life. Only then, once you have reached a respectable distance and found a place to recover while your heart stops pounding, will they settle down two metres away to let you admire the view. They’ll plump their coffee-coloured feathers, tuck in their wings and blink at you adoringly, as docile as doves.

  An adélie versus a skua? Give him a skua any day. Such vehement protectiveness could measure up to that of any doting matriarch; could even rival Ma’s.

  Chad remembers counting the hours until her expected return. His father had initially proven a poor second in fulfilling his requests for special treats. Dad couldn’t whip up a plate of chocolate crackles festive in paper patty cases; nor could he produce, as Ma would magically have done, a brand-new comic book or even a choo-choo bar set aside for just such a crisis. His stitches aching, Chad had lain in bed bored and morose, his stack of Richie Rich, Phantom and Casper comics reread too many times.

  But his father’s one startling effort was compensation for any lack of matriarchal wizardry: he had given Chad the transistor radio to put next to his bed. The reception, his father warned, twisting the aerial this way and that, would be weaker during the day than at night. Chad would have to settle—I don’t want any grizzling—for whatever they could raise on the dial. Still, to be entrusted with his father’s prized possession had made an eleven-year-old feel grown up, almost a teenager.

  Yet the glow soon wore off. No matter how he wound the dial or wiggled the aerial, Chad failed to pick up above the static anything more audible than the ABC’s agricultural report. Not a single cricket test, no songs, no serials, just the announcer’s posh and proper voice droning away about Tasmania’s fruit export industry being on the verge of extinction.

  The rhythmic monotony of the report was suddenly interrupted by an important news bulletin. The reporter’s voice had a new edge to it:

  Repeating earlier headlines of the Tasman Bridge disaster. At nine-thirty last night, the Lake Illawarra, an 11,000-tonne bulk ore carrier transporting a load of zinc concentrates from Port Pirie, lost steerage in the Derwent River and struck the Tasman Bridge. The ship collided with two sets of pylons near the eastern end of the bridge, causing the collapse of three deck spans. At first light, divers …

  A collapse of the bridge? The Tasman Bridge. Their bridge. Dad!

  A hail of roadway above the impact point guaranteed the same fate for the ship as the ship brought to the bridge: tonnes of concrete and girders of steel rained down upon the Lake Illawarra along with a brief cascade of cars that plunged through the blackened chasm, carrying motorists to watery tombs. Within minutes the blighted ship had sounded like a whale, straight down to the river bed with its cargo of Broken Hill zinc and seven crewmen mustered in the smoke room with no prospect of escape.

  IT IS CLOSE TO DINNER time when Chad approaches the Apple, its red dome aglow in evening light. He sees no sign of Freya returning; she must still be lingering at the rookery with her camera, soaking up the light. He walks by the shallow tarn and sits down on a rock. For as long as he’s visited the area this lake has been the venue of a skua club: dozens of birds congregate here to bathe and socialise. Their gregariousness is a little-known endearing side of an otherwise maligned disposition. Outside their individual territories, neighbouring birds will sit together at the edge of the tarn, preening their feathers and clucking like old pals kicking back at the baths.

  Freya’s camera gear sits heaped on the hidden side of the Apple and it strikes Chad that she would have made two trips to ferry it back on her own. Three adélies confer around the assorted gear, their pea-sized brains entranced by the array of shapes and stone-like shades. When Chad tries the hut door he finds the handle locked; he can hear Freya rustling about inside.

  ‘Who is it?’ she answers his knock.

  He shakes his head, looks around wryly. ‘Who were you expecting?’ There is a discord of squawks from the three musketeers.

  It takes him a moment to register that the girlish laugh from within the Apple is hers. ‘Just a minu
te,’ she calls.

  The door soon opens to a billow of steam and a delectable aroma wafting from the stove. The inside of the Apple is adorned with party balloons and a birthday banner. There’s beer, wine, cake, candles to blow out, even fancy Swiss chocolates sent down by her husband, Marcus, to tide me over. There’s a birthday gift wrapped in paper serviettes and tied with twine— two chocolate cherry bars and a packet of his favourite gingernuts.

  He cradles his plate on his knees, sipping wine from an insulated mug, assailed by balloons; the gas heater is glowing, door ajar, penguins pad past. He feels ten years old again, indulged and special, a birthday boy as tipsy with pleasure as he’s growing from wine.

  After dinner he reclines on his bunk beneath the Apple’s porthole window, completing his journal entry.

  November 25. Rookery Lake. 42nd birthday (you old bugger). Clear sky, wind nil. Assistant to Freya. Adélies on eggs. Plenty of skua action at middle and northern rookery. Slap-up dinner.

  Curled in her sleeping bag opposite, Freya turns the pages of her book, her elbow propped on a pillow.

  ‘How’s Mawson’s diary coming along?’

  ‘Okay,’ she says half-heartedly. ‘He can be a little dull.’

  ‘Dull?’ Chad bellows, past caring that he’s three sheets to the wind. ‘I heard you and Malcolm singing his praises the other day. Now you don’t like him.’

  ‘Oh, stop.’ She laughs. ‘It isn’t that I don’t like him. He’s just a hard person to know; there’s so much he doesn’t say.’

  She should talk. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, now Captain Davis, he tells it straight, no holds barred. But with Mawson, there’s so little emotion. It’s all so rational and stoic. It’s hard to imagine there’s a real person with feelings beneath the words.’ She responds to Chad’s puzzled expression. ‘Like this,’ she says, leafing back through the pages. ‘Since we’re onto birthdays.’

  19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in a bad way. This is Paquita’s birthday.