Dog Training The American Male

by L. A. Knight

  “A Tasmanian team apparently discovered a fossil or something frozen in a fissure and needed an opinion.”

  “Field work? In this weather? It’s gotta be fifty below outside. You know me, Paul, I’m a city mouse. Ask the Russians stationed at Progress or Vostok to send one of their beakers, those guys have anti-freeze in their veins.”

  “The Aussies don’t want to involve the Russians on this one. You’d score me serious points with Scripps if you manned up and took the job. Won’t cost you any time on your homeward bound; I’ll have the Chalet director fly you out of Davis as soon as you’re through.”

  ***

  THE FLIGHT HAD been a rough one. For four hours the C-130 transport had been buffeted by Katabatic head winds, along with its flight crew and lone passenger who was strapped in back with the cargo. Their trek had taken them east over the Trans-Antarctic mountains, then northeast over the East Antarctic dome circle – the coldest, most desolate region on the planet until the plane had mercifully set down on an ice field along the coastline of Princess Elizabeth Land.

  Davis Station was located on Vestfold Hills, an ice-free stretch of geology facing Prydz Bay located just south of the Amery Ice Field. Two other stations shared this gravel-covered rise; Progress Base, operated by the Russians and Zhongshan Station which was run by the Chinese. The Australian base functioned as both a scientific research center and a staging area; its primary focus – to study the effects of global warming on the Amery Ice Field.

  Thomas Nilsson disembarked from the rear of the massive C-130 aircraft on wobbly legs, stepping from the relative warmth of the cargo hold into an ice box, the predawn temperature a snot-freezing minus forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The scientist was bundled in loose-fitting multiple layers of clothing that covered every inch of his flesh, from his battery-heated thermal long-johns to his fleece trousers, sweater, jumpsuit, and parka. Two pairs of socks, two pairs of boots, a pair of skin-tight gloves covered in elbow-high mittens, scarves, head gear, and tinted goggles – and still Thomas Nilsson felt the icy wind penetrating his bones.

  It was just after seven in the morning, the night sky conceding a sliver of gray light on the cloud-dense eastern horizon. To the north, Prydz Bay remained frozen as far as the eye could see, its surface reflecting the emerald-green Aurora Australis that danced across the charged heavens like a slithering ethereal serpent.

  The lights of Davis station beckoned to the west.

  Nilsson slung his duffle bag over his right shoulder and double-timed it across the runway, targeting the nearest building. Like other Antarctic bases, Davis was a community of color-coated rectangular metal buildings linked by generator lines, antiquated sewage systems, and roads crushed into the snow by four-wheel drive vehicles – the difference here being the snow had receded to a brown gravel-covered earth.

  A relentless gale whipped across Prydz Bay, pelting the marine biologist with crawlies – powdery snow particles. Snow blew across Antarctica far more than it fell from the sky, the frigid temperatures keeping it dry and loose, the wind moving it back and forth like a neurotic decorator. By the time Nilsson reached the drab olive building, every nook and cranny of his clothing was packed with the stuff, forcing him to degomble – a term defined as the act of rigorously brushing off before entering a building, thus preventing a future meltdown and sorry mess inside.

  Nilsson tugged open the door, passed through an anteroom that helped prevent the loss of heat, then entered the facility. After stripping off his headgear, goggles, gloves and parka, he set out to locate his contact – a Dr. Soto.

  The research center appeared empty. With winter nearly upon them, Davis’s population dropped from a hundred scientists and support personnel to about a dozen. Nilsson was about to give up his search and move on to the next building when he heard music coming from behind closed double doors situated at the end of a corridor.

  A sign read:

  COLD LAB. KEEP DOORS CLOSED.

  Nilsson entered a heavily air conditioned chamber connected to a freezer vault. There were four stations set up with long tables to accommodate ice cores, a cutting tool to shave samples, and a microscope. The lab was deserted, save for a female scientist in a white lab coat and gloves was reloading an ice core into a tubular plastic zip-lock bag.

  When Thomas saw the woman, his first thought was that he had mistakenly crossed the wrong air field and wandered over to Zhongshan Station. She was Chinese and quite stunning – a legitimate ten, not an Antarctic-10, which was really a five anywhere else in the world. She was in her late twenties, perhaps her early thirties – it was hard to tell with Asians – her long hair brown and wavy, her skin more tan than pale from having spent the summer months “bronzing” out on the ice.

  “Dr. Soto?”

  “Ming Soto, yes. You are the marine biologist?”

  “Thomas Nilsson. What’s the emergency? You find the Abominable Snowman or something?”

  “Sorry. What is Abominable . . .?”

  “The Yeti. It was a joke . . . never mind.”

  “Joke? Ah . . . very funny. No, not Yeti. Tell me Thomas Nilsson, what do you study in Antarctica?”

  “Emperor penguins.”

  “I see. Nothing larger?”

  “You mean like whales?”

  “Yes, like whales.”

  “Sorry. Just the penguins.”

  “What about Loose Tooth? You know about this?”

  “Your whale has a loose tooth?”

  Her expression soured. “You make ‘nother joke?”

  “What? No– ”

  “Loose Tooth is an ice rift.” She shook her head repeatedly as if to erase the conversation from her brain. “We have a chopper waiting; I will explain on the way.”

  ***

  THOMAS NILSSON HELD on to the seat in front of him as the AS-350BA “Squirrel” flew with its nose down against the wind, the single-engine five passenger helicopter’s soaring over Prydz Bay en route to the Amery Ice Shelf.

  Seated in back next to Nilsson, Ming nevertheless had to use her headset to be heard over the thunderous rotors. “For the record, Doctor, I am with Zhongshan station. Australia and China are working together on this discovery.”

  “But not the Russians?”

  “The Russians control Vostok. There may be a conflict of interest.”

  “I’m sorry . . . what does Vostok have to do with the Amery Ice Shelf? The lake’s a good eight hundred miles away.”

  “True, but what lies beneath the ice are interconnecting rivers and lakes . . . let us start at the beginning. Antarctica’s land mass is covered by a dome-shaped glacier. Gravity is actually pulling the ice into the ocean by way of the continent’s ice shelves. As these ice shelves reach the coastline their bottom sections hit seawater and melt faster, causing sections of the flow to crack – a natural process known as rifting. Global warming has accelerated rifting. Last year, Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 355 gigatonnes. A gigatonne is a billion metric tons. Three hundred and fifty-five gigatonnes is enough to raise global sea levels by 1.3 millimeters. That may not seem like a lot, but add Greenland’s ice sheet, mountain glaciers, and the melting polar caps – all multiplied by the present rate of acceleration and your winter home in sunny Florida may be underwater by the time you are ready to retire.”

  “My winter home is in Scottsdale, Arizona. And just so there’s no misunderstanding, I have no intention of remaining on the ice through the winter. Where are we headed?”

  She removed a folder from a mesh pocket behind the pilot’s seat in front of her and opened it, handing him a satellite photo.

  “This the Avery Ice Shelf. It is over four hundred kilometers long . . . about two-hundred and fifty miles. We’ve been studying this highlighted area – a twenty-nine kilometer-long rift nicknamed ‘Loose Tooth.’ The first rift appeared seventeen years ago and consists of two longitudinal-to-flow crevasses. Two transverse-to-flow rifts formed years later. The fissures were opening at a rate of three to f
our meters a day but the rift has recently accelerated. We anticipate Loose Tooth will calve into Prydz Bay within the next five to seven years.”

  “I’ll alert the Tooth Fairy. Again, why am I– ”

  Thomas hugged the seat in front of him as the helicopter suddenly climbed to a higher altitude. Stealing a glimpse out the cockpit window he saw the sheer white cliffs of the Amery Ice Shelf rising a thousand feet above the frozen bay.

  Moments later they were flying over the top of the ice shelf – a flat white plateau of ice violated by an immense jagged crevasse. The fissure was as wide as an eight lane highway, its sunken crack filled with loose blocks of collapsed snow and blue ice originating from below. The rift seemed to run endless to the southern horizon, splitting open the ice desert like the San Andreas fault.

  “It’s huge. How deep is the crevasse?”

  “It drops four hundred meters to the sea – about a quarter of a mile down, but it will thicken four times that amount as we move away from the bay. Our destination is up on the left.”

  The chopper slowed to hover, the pilot attempting to stabilize the aircraft for a landing. Below was a hastily assembled base camp. Nilsson counted three four-wheel-drive vehicles, each possessing skis for front tires and traction belts rigged to their rear axles. There were also six skidoos – small transports that resembled motor bikes on skis.

  Dominating the scene was a crane that towered three stories over the eastern edge of the rift, its cable attached to something hidden beneath a white tent large enough to conceal two eighteen wheel trucks.

  The pilot targeted his landing area, adjusted his pitch and dropped the helicopter quickly, Nilsson’s teeth rattling upon the strut’s impact with the ice.

  Ming dressed, speaking quickly. “You are here, Dr. Nilsson because we found something in the crevasse that is beyond explanation. We need you to identify the species.”

  Suddenly more curious than irritated, Nilsson followed her out of the swaying cabin onto the ice sheet. By now the sun was up, the wind maintaining temperatures of minus forty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Steam rose from beneath the hoods of the running vehicles, their built-in electric heaters preventing the engine blocks from cracking.

  Ming led him to the tent. She unzipped a door flap and he ducked inside.

  The air was heavy with musk and exhaust from the gasoline generators that powered the lights and hot-air blowers. Perhaps a dozen men – Asians and Aussies and a few members of the Scripps Institute were busy snapping photos. One researcher hacked at the melting ice with a bog chisel, impatient to reach the coveted tissue samples.

  Thomas Nilsson staggered toward the object, wide-eyed as he stripped goggles and gear from his head. “My God. You say you found this in the crevasse?”

  “Yes. The water pressure pushed it up from the bottom. One of the Tasmanian researchers spotted it three days ago while en route to a GPS station.”

  The object was not the remains of one species but two – a prehistoric battle preserved in a block of ice. The creature that had been doing the eating was serpent-like and immense; Nilsson estimated its length at perhaps forty to sixty feet. The monster was lead-gray in color where flaky, leather patches of skin were visible over its exposed skeleton, its girth impossible to gauge accurately as it was coiled around the crushed, squeezed-to-death unconsumed remains of the second monster – its meal. The tail of this second creature extended out of the terminally open fangs of the first – along with part of its left rear leg which was a skeletal mess, the exposed bones having been damaged long ago by the relentlessly shifting ice. The rest of the second animal’s body was concealed within the serpent’s belly, the cartilage of which had expanded to the size of a Sperm Whale to accommodate its undigested, life-choking supper – which had been the attacker’s demise.

  “Can you identify either of these two species, Dr. Nilsson?”

  “No. But I know someone who can.”

  1

  “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold, and seven for a secret that must never be told.”–Scottish saying.

  Drumnadrochit, Scottish Highlands Scotland

  The village of Drumnadrochit lies on the west bank of Loch Ness, a sleepy Highland hamlet of nine hundred nestled between Urquhart Bay, the Caledonian Forest, and two thousand years of history. I was born in Drumnadrochit; in fact I died here and was resurrected – twice. I suppose that last rebirth was more of a metaphor, but when your existence is haunted by demons and you exorcize them by staring death in the face, that’s what us Templars call a resurrection.

  More about that later.

  Drumnadrochit achieved its modern-day fame by proclaiming itself the Loch Ness Monster capital of the world. Two hokey museums, a few smiling plesiosaur statues, hourly tours by boat, and enough souvenir shops to shake a stick at was all it took – that and Castle Urquhart.

  No doubt you’ve seen photos of Urquhart, its ruins perched high on a rocky promontory like a medieval memory, the loch’s tea-colored swells roiling against its steep cliff face – the surrounding mountains drifting in and out of fog. Perhaps the photographer caught an unexpected wake or a mysterious ripple, or better still something that resembled humps violating the surface. Such are the sightings that once enticed a quarter of a million tourists to Drumnadrochit each spring and summer – everyone hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendary monster.

  My name is Zachary Wallace and I’m the marine biologist that resolved the legend. Using science, I brought light to seventy years of darkness, separating a contrived myth from the presence of a very real, very large amphibious fish that had become a serious threat to locals and tourists alike. In the end, I not only identified the predator, I also baited it, stared into its eyes, and vanquished the miserable beast from its purgatory.

  In doing so, I turned a thriving cottage industry into a bunch of vacant bed and breakfasts, rendered two local museums obsolete, and brought ruin to a brand-new five-star resort. If you’re curious, it’s all there in my telltale biographical thriller, aptly titled, The Loch.

  This is the story of what followed, the tale I leave by audio diary to my young son, William in case I don’t survive this latest act of insanity. It’s a journey that my wife, Brandy warned me not to take, and as usual, it began when I was manipulated into accepting the mission by the most diabolical creature known to inhabit the Great Glen . . . my father.

  In his youth, Angus Wallace was a brute of a man who possessed the piercing blue eyes of the Gael, the wile of a Scot, the temperament of a Viking, and the drinking habits of the Irish. Now in his seventies, he’s less temperamental, just as wily, and abuses Viagra with his whiskey.

  In his younger days, it was yours truly that he abused with his drink.

  Angus met my mother, the former Andrea McKnown when she was on holiday. It didn’t take long for the older dark-haired rogue to sweep the naive American beauty off her feet. I was born a year later – heir to the Wallace history. I was small compared to my big-boned Highlander peers, leaving my father to right his namesake’s “bad genes” the only way he knew how – by intimidating the runt out of me.

  I won’t bore you with the details, other than to mention one pivotal event which transpired on my ninth birthday. Angus had promised to take me fishing on Loch Ness so I could try out my new invention – an acoustic fishing lure. Those plans changed when I caught my inebriated sperm donor balls-deep in a local waitress.

  Allowing a childhood’s worth of anger to get the best of me, I returned to the loch and launched the boat myself. As fog and night rolled in, my reverberating device attracted a school of fish . . . and with it a very real creature that rarely left its bottom dwelling. Without warning my boat flipped and I found myself treading in forty-two degree Fahrenheit water . . . and then something closed around my lower body and dragged me with it into the depths.

  Terrifying darkness surrounded me; the growling gurgles of the creature accompanying me into the
abyss. I saw a flash of white light . . . and then the fire in my aching lungs was quenched by those tea-colored waters . . . and I drowned.

  When I next opened my eyes it was to hellish pain, a veterinarian’s needle, and the frightening face of my rescuer – my best-friend’s father, Alban MacDonald. At the time, Alban served as water bailiff and it was lucky for me that the man I disrespectfully called “the Crabbit” had happened upon the scene to rescue my sorry, pulseless arse.

  When my mother learned what had happened (the Crabbit and vet claimed I had become entangled in barbed wire that was wrapped around a tree, thus the bloody markings), she saw to my recovery, divorced my no-good father, and moved us to the good ole U.S. of A.

  America. Land of the free, home of the brave – only I was neither brave nor free. In an attempt to escape the mental abuse associated with my near-drowning, my traumatized brain had isolated and compartmentalized the incident. Buried in denial, the unfiltered memory remained dormant, waiting for just the right moment to return.

  That moment occurred fourteen years later . . .

  By the age of twenty-five, I had already earned a Bachelors and Masters degree from Princeton and a doctorate from Scripps, and my research into deep-sea acoustic lures had been featured in several prominent journals. As a budding “Jacques Cousteau” I had been asked to lead a National Geographic-sponsored expedition to the Sargasso Sea in search of the elusive giant squid. To attract the legendary colossus, our three-man submersible was armed with a lure I had designed which emulated the sounds and vibrations of salmon.

  We descended into the blackness of the depths and waited . . . our patience rewarded with what would be the first visual documentation of Architeuthis dux – the Giant Squid. Unfortunately, once more the lure worked a bit too well, summoning not only a curious squid but a swarm of unexpected and unknown predatory fish. The squid panicked and tore loose our ballast tank, sending us sinking into oblivion. The acrylic cockpit cracked, threatening to burst as we waited desperately for a drone to secure a tow-line – the underwater robot finally reaching us in four thousand feet of water.