The Nature of Ice

by Robyn Mundy

  One hundred and fifty-eight miles from Christmas camp back to winter quarters as the crow flies. If, and only if, they could keep up a daily march of eight, ten miles, continue supplementing the remaining food bags—the nine days’ rations that were on Douglas’s sledge—then it was an even race. Non-essential articles had been jettisoned to reduce the load: hypsometer, rifle, thermometers, camera and film discarded at the start of the stretch he had silently dubbed Ninnis Glacier.

  26 December: I promised to do all I could for Xavier for him to see Australia and New Zealand.

  Douglas had started out from winter quarters weighing two hundred and ten pounds, Xavier, one hundred and sixty. Even on full daily rations of thirty four and three-quarter ounces, they had dropped a substantial amount of weight. Now, with fourteen ounces allocated for each day, their strength was so reduced that the task of breaking camp took an inordinate length of time.

  Cold and laborious the process of lacing the tent cover into a sail, one edge bound to Mertz’s ski and lashed vertically as a mast, an adjacent edge secured to a second ski and lashed across the sledge as a boom. Even in fur mitts their fingers remained constantly numb.

  The wild sky augured badly for the coming days. Douglas and Mertz flanked Ginger, their last, faithful dog, the troupe panting in unison as they hauled the sledge up a seemingly endless gradient.

  When Ginger gave in Mertz carried her to the sledge as he had the others and gently strapped her on. They made a mournful procession through five uphill miles of ankle-deep snow.

  GINGER RAISED HER HEAD when Xavier took up the shovel. She laid back her ears when he knelt in the snow and stroked her head.

  Giving to the end, she closed her eyes.

  THE PAIN OF HUNGER GNAWED on the gut so violently that they were perpetually stooped with it. On Saturday evenings back at winter quarters—these images a poignant reminder of better days—Douglas had seen weekly rations of chocolate won and lost at a furious rate on the Huntoylette Wheel, a spinning jenny devised by Hurley and Johnny Hunter, whose cooperative had been dubbed ‘the Chocolate Bank’ for the spoils it amassed.

  When the rest of the men ran their own auction of goods, a bidding frenzy had erupted over one of Mertz’s ornate pipes, the article fetching an outrageous one hundred and fifty squares of chocolate—five weeks’ rations. Few things stopped Douglas in his tracks, but X had humbled them all by presenting the pipe to the successful bidder free of charge.

  Xavier sat before him now, the tent raining condensation from the heat of the primus, offering him the bone receptacle. ‘I eat when you finish.’

  ‘We eat together, X.’

  The roughly carved spoon felt thick and coarse inside his mouth. They passed the skull back and forth between them, taking turns at scooping out Ginger’s boiled brain, each eating to the middle line.

  PIONEER

  CROSSING

  PIONEER CROSSING, A FINGER OF land bridging two fjords, will cut hours off their trip to the northern reaches of the Vestfolds. But along the edge of Long Fjord, jammed against the shoreline of the Crossing, lies the tide crack, a collision of ice compressed and crunched by tidal forces. These frozen waves and fractured troughs act as an obstacle course, making slow work of ma–noeuvering the bikes across the fjord to the bridge of land.

  Chad heaves his weight against the back of Freya’s bike. The chains on her tyres crunch into ice made slick by the midday sun. She leans alongside him, pushing hard, one arm outstretched, hand hovering over the brake, her other pumping the throttle. Finally the wheels grip and the bike stutters forward.

  ‘Hard to the left.’ He catches his breath as she walks the bike up the slippery blue ice.

  He sees her quad round the crest and teeter. Undaunted, she springs to the seat of the bike as it starts to slide. It looks set to slip sideways, but Freya straightens the wheels and leans her weight back. How adept she has become, he thinks, watching her negotiate the last fissure of ice to bring the bike safely onto solid ground.

  Chad’s shoulders and arms throb from exertion. He returns her wave as he feels himself unravel. How easily it undoes him, this woman’s smile.

  Small wonder, Chad thinks when he tallies up the outings he’s had with Freya, that the rumour mill on station has begun to grind. Even Tommo the chef threw him a nod this morning when he came to the kitchen to cut some sandwiches. Another overnighter, McGonigal?

  Not a work trip but a jolly, says Adam Singer; since they reached a stand-off over who will leave for Mawson Station, Adam has been grousing to the others as staunchly as a unionist. Chad works to make up lost hours but still it grates on his sense of self-worth when he hears of Adam’s remarks: dead wood around the station; those who rest upon their laurels.

  Chad brings his own bike across the tide crack. ‘Up for another detour?’ he shouts above the engine.

  ‘Do you really need to ask?’ She smiles. ‘Lead the way.’

  THEY PARK ON THE ICE and tramp through a snowy gully to the lake. Freya stops to study flame-orange lichen smattered among the rock, minuscule beads of growth crusted along seams and crevices. The brilliant hue of the lichen belies its tenuous hold on life. Freya’s wonderment brings back his own first summer, his surprise that vegetation could grow down here.

  A graveyard of white disembodied wings litters their path. She collects a feather and runs it between her fingers. ‘Angel wings.’

  ‘Snow petrels,’ he says. ‘Sadly, no match for our skua friends.’

  Lichen Lake sits frozen in a bowl-shaped valley girded by snow banks and rocky bluffs. He doubts the lake has seen a footprint since he came by last. On a clear day this has to be his favourite place among the Vestfolds—and today is an absolute pearler, a record nine degrees Celsius, not a hint of wind. Chad feels a boyish thrill in showing off the lake, as if it were his very own. Freya wheels in lazy circles, her arms held out, absorbing—he can see it mirrored in her glasses—the silhouette of surrounding hills, the shimmering rink that seals the lake, the stark contrast between snowline and thick blue sky. Her eyes follow a trail of snow petrels that dart from shadows in the rocks, a blink of white across the sky.

  Chad takes time to pick with his axe through the lake’s frozen seal, ascertaining the thickness and strength of ice, while Freya gives the frozen surface a few cursory whacks with the tip of her adze before striding out onto it. She beckons him across to where she kneels.

  ‘Take a look through the viewfinder.’

  Countless bubbles of oxygen are trapped in the lake ice amid crazes of starbursts and hairlines. ‘Capsules of frozen time,’ she says, wide-eyed. ‘Who knows how long they’ve been here?’ How long indeed: Chad has never seen the lake thaw.

  He rests on his pack and adds to his journal the day’s locations under a special section, List of sites. Chad McGonigal could look back through twenty years of note-taking and pinpoint the weather conditions of any trip, list the birds and mammals sighted, settle a debate with dates and names and times. He prides himself on being a dependable source of facts and shuns the notion of combing through his feelings to record sentiment. Why would he ever need reminding of how he feels today, with Freya on his favourite lake?

  ‘Well, how about this?’ he chimes. ‘January second: it’s a year to the day since I came here last. That was a far cry from today’s heatwave.’ He leafs through the pages. ‘Half the month clapped out with bad weather.’ He proceeds to report, line by line, the poor conditions, wind speed and temperature, his voice halting when he catches Freya lift her eyes from the camera and roll them at the sky.

  Chad finds a fresh page in his journal and begins to sketch the outline of a snow petrel. He adds texture, shades the beak and eyes, smudges the curve of the feathers, imagining, as he draws, how it might be worked from wood.

  Freya stands behind her tripod, her focus fixed on the viewfinder. ‘Do you think about the summer finishing?’ she asks. ‘About going home?’

  ‘Can’t say I give comings and goings much tho
ught.’

  He’s lying. The who-will-go-to-Mawson stalemate lingers in his mind. ‘You? Counting the days already?’

  Freya replaces her lens cap and collapses her tripod. Bird cries echo through the amphitheatre.

  ‘Do you find it hard to settle down again?’ she asks, her words clipped with the trace of a faraway land. ‘After so long away?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ He stops short of confessing that some years he feels at the whim of a great tide, a vessel adrift, sustained only for a time by the familial memories his place on the beach holds. Not that he’s unhappy at the bay. But he’s never once known the anticipation—that sense of promise—homecoming brings others. ‘I suppose home is what you make it,’ he tells her, recognising it as the same quaint saying his grandparents would once have said to him.

  ‘Does anyone ever get tired of Antarctica? This.’ She holds out her arms. ‘Do you ever think, been there, seen that, now I can give it all away?’

  She’s a font of unanswerable questions today. ‘Some seasons are better than others. That’s the nature of living at a station. For me, personally, the draw of the place never wanes.’

  She waits for more and he struggles to explain. ‘I feel different when I’m out here, Freya, away from the station. It’s the one place I can be completely alone and feel no sense of loneliness. People say the size of Antarctica makes them feel small. It’s never been that way for me.’ He feels expanded by the place, as if he’s breathed in everything around him. ‘Look at it.’ He scans the ice. ‘The sheer power of all this. It’s nature who’s in charge here—at least until we fuck the planet up for good. I doubt I could ever grow tired of this.’

  She scrutinises his face so intently he replays his words in his head. ‘Am I talking gibberish?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I understand exactly what you mean.’

  Chad slings Freya’s camera pack over his free shoulder, surprised afresh at the weight she carries.

  They retrace their steps across the frozen lake. ‘What will Chad McGonigal do with his time when he gets home?’

  ‘If he has any sense left he’ll finish off a dinghy he should have delivered before he came south. Then he’ll start on a new one, an eighteen-footer—his grandfather’s design—for a family up the coast. He’s rarely short of things to occupy his time.’

  Her voice softens. ‘One day I’d like to photograph a Chad McGonigal clinker dinghy. See the artisan at work.’

  ‘Would you now?’, his imagination careering off and playing silly buggers. ‘Play your cards right and I’ll let you row me around the bay.’

  They scuff through a powdering of snow at the rim of the lake. The treads of her boots meander across his outbound tracks.

  ‘I’m trying not to count,’ she states, in that inscrutable way women chop and change a conversation.

  ‘Count what?’

  ‘The days we have left. Do you think anyone would notice if I stayed on for winter?’

  ‘You have to go home sometime.’

  ‘What if you don’t want to?’ she says. ‘What if you’ve outgrown your home?’

  ‘Then don’t,’ he says matter-of-factly, wishing he had the gumption to say, Come home with me, struck mute at the prospect of being shot down in flames. He waits, but she offers nothing more.

  Chad unfolds the map and spreads it across the bike. ‘We’re here.’ He points. ‘Walkabout Rocks is up here. We’ll do a dogleg at the top of Tryne Fjord, refuel at Bandits Hut and dump some of our gear, then head out to the ocean side of the coast. So long as the sea ice is in good condition we’ll have a couple more hours of driving.’

  To the east, gilded streaks are beginning to line the sky. He checks his watch: already gone five; at the rate they’re progressing it’s set to be their longest day on record. ‘Still happy to press on?’ he asks, knowing full well that nothing short of a sixty-knot gale could entice her to stop.

  She gestures at the sky. ‘It would be a monumental shame to miss out on that sunset.’

  A trumpeting resonates through the fjord. The call of an emperor penguin is instantly recognisable, yet the closest emperor rookery is at Amanda Bay, miles further west along the coast.

  ‘Wayward travellers. Now and again a small group without chicks to rear drops by over summer.’ Chad cranes his neck and hoots his best emperor rendition. A call warbles in response.

  Freya throws back her head and laughs. When she turns to face him he feels powerless to refuse the question in her eyes. ‘Last detour, Freya. Last.’ Their umpteenth for the day.

  Three emperor penguins lie slumped on the ice, as barrel-shaped and listless as a poolside of corpulent bathers, the pads of their lizard-like feet turned skyward. By penguin standards today is a scorcher. A fourth emperor stands separate from the group, its head curved to one side, flippers held out in hopes of catching a whisper of cool air.

  Twice the height of an adélie and a good thirty kilos, the emperor stands thigh-high to Freya. She crouches low as it waddles near, meeting it eye to eye. If she makes a sudden move or reaches out, the penguin will retreat. But she stays statue-still as the bird sidles close; when the emperor pecks her bootlace she turns and smiles up at Chad. He eases his point-and-shoot camera from his pocket. The trouble is he can’t help how he feels: he’s reduced to a starry-eyed teenager in the wash of her joy.

  THE FROZEN HIGHWAY STRETCHES BEFORE him. The low-lit ice of Tryne Fjord feels strong and sound beneath his wheels, a welcome contrast to the conditions this morning. Before the station was awake, he and Freya had forged out onto the ice, picking their way through rotten ice and patches of slush—a slalom course to reach a safer footing on firmer ice to the north. He should have rethought this trip—Malcolm will close the sea ice for travel the minute he gets wind of how dodgy it is. Chad pushes back his visor and opens the throttle, losing himself to the rush of air and for once leaving his roving companion to dawdle in his wake.

  If Chad were brought here blindfolded he would know with his first glance at these worn hills crisscrossed with igneous dykes where on the planet he was. The only thing to better tooling along on quads on such a summer’s day would be to slide across the plateau on a sledge, the whine of motorbikes replaced by the slobbery panting of a trace of Greenland dogs.

  The dogs were all called boys, he remembers, never mind their sex. Ready boys. Mush! to get them away. An angled haul up the Gwamm from Mawson Station, dogs snorting and farting like nobody’s business, then the gradual uphill slog, sledging past the Russian aircraft wreck, hugging the bamboo canes that mark the route lest you or your dogs stray too close to the network of crevasses. The sheen of the plateau rising to a cobalt sky, the Masson Ranges and Rumdoodle Peak to your left, Fang Peak dead ahead. The solid thud of the sledge sliding over blue ice, teflon on the runners resonating through the wood, pinching yourself, you lucky, lucky bastard. Then as now.

  The thought of time passing—evanescent, fleeting as a breath—jolts him at the very instant he swerves to miss an open seam running the breadth of the fjord, the rift in the ice invisible in the early evening light. He runs alongside the inky band of water until it narrows, then turns his bike to face the open lead straight on. He guns it over the break and raises his arm to caution behind.

  Chad questions whether his first seasons in Antarctica offered an escape from the muddle of his twenties: Nan and Pop gone within a year of one another, any contact from the old man—never more than a Christmas card and twenty-dollar note at best—long since petered out; a time when his best mate had settled on a girl and was staking out his future like a bush block to be pegged. Now, at forty-two, Chad is as much an Antarctic veteran as the dogmen who taught the new boys how to drive—old, bold and can’t be told, he’d thought of them then.

  Even those who had never set foot in Antarctica mourned the departure of the sledging teams. The working dogs— deemed an introduced species by the 1990s Environmental Protocol—were the vestige of an age begun at a time when Antarctica stood
as a frozen frontier, untrodden territory prime for enterprising heroes.

  When the last Mawson dogs returned from their commemorative run out to Entrance Island and back into Horseshoe Harbour, the Mawson winterers of’93, waiting on the sea ice, must have looked as bereft as a funeral gathering. Chad held Morrie in a collar of arms, the dog’s wet tongue lapping at his face; Morrie was no oil painting, one ear in pieces and the other torn off in a brawl, the greatest collar escape artist and harness chewer that ever was, but still Chad’s favourite dog of all time. True to form, he evaded his leash and bolted back up the road like the young pup he imagined he was, pausing only long enough to leave his mark on each vehicle tyre and equipment box he chanced upon, ecstatic at the attention lavished on him by those in pursuit, and none the wiser that his sledging days on the great Antarctic trail had finally run their course.

  The low-angle sun turns the fjord into a golden rink. As Chad rounds the corner towards Bandits Hut he lets the bike slide in a weightless arc of motion. He fans his bike across the ice in a great slithering curl and cuts the engine to wait for Freya.

  The sudden silence of the fjord disquiets him. Minutes pass and still Freya fails to appear. Chad turns over the engine. He retraces his course, puttering at first, his gut tightening as the straight stretch of fjord eases into view. He pulls binoculars from his pack but can see nothing more than his own set of tyre tracks. His eyes smart from the glare but still he scans the breadth of the fjord until he catches a steely glint far away. He steadies his sights on the black curl of tyre hovering like a mirage above the ice, the chassis of an upturned bike. He waits, fruitlessly, for a sign of movement.

  Before he closes the distance, he reasons that the open lead is where Freya’s bike has come to grief. His mind refuses to remember if he turned around to check on her. Did she cross? Did he look back? They’d successfully negotiated a dozen such leads that day.