by Justin D'Ath
I looked round just in time to see a big slimy head squeeze up through the gap on the other side of the floe. It was only three metres away. I could see the dark, leopard-like spots on the killer seal’s throat. I could hear its snorting breath. The sea leopard got its flippers onto the ice, then began to heave its massive, rubbery body up through the narrow gap like toothpaste oozing out of a tube.
Its weight caused the floe to tip, lifting our side up at a steep angle. Harry and I started sliding down the slope on our backsides. Straight towards the sea leopard.
We clawed at the floe with our gloves, but it was too slippery. Centimetre by centimetre, we slid down the ice. The sea leopard opened its oversized mouth and seemed to smile. Its body might have looked like rubber, but there was nothing rubbery about those long, nail-like teeth.
‘Stand up,’ I hissed, struggling to my feet and dragging Harry upright, too. Our gloves had no grip on the ice, but our snow boots had rubber cleats on the soles. They stopped our slide.
When we stood up, the sea leopard raised its head, neck and shoulders. Its honey-coloured eyes were nearly level with ours. They had a hungry look. Less than two metres separated us. Holding hands, Harry and I started backing away from it, taking tiny steps so we wouldn’t slip on the tilting ice. One slip and we’d be cactus.
Without warning, the huge predator flung itself forward.
Seals are lightning fast underwater, but on land they’re out of their natural element. It takes a lot of energy to move all that blubber. And if you weigh half a tonne, you’ve got to move cautiously on icefloes.
The sea leopard lunged forward a second time, crossing the centre point of the floe. Suddenly our side of the ‘seesaw’ was heavier. The ice tipped down and our ungainly attacker fell flat on its face.
Harry and I jumped for our lives. Onto the next ice-floe, then the next one, then the one after that.
I heard a splash and looked over my shoulder. The sea leopard had disappeared. It was back in the water. Harry and I stopped in the middle of a small, wobbling floe. Our eyes searched the rippling avenues of water that crisscrossed the broken iceshelf all around us. The miniature icebergs rocked gently on the waves. Every now and then, two would bump together with a loud clunk.
But there was no sign of the sea leopard.
‘Where is it?’ whispered Harry.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, also whispering.
It was somewhere under the ice, looking up at us from the aqua-blue depths. Planning its next attack.
‘Let’s get onto that big piece of ice over there,’ I pointed.
Holding hands for safety, Harry and I hopped from one floe to the next until we’d made it to the big one. It was roughly the size of a tennis court, but instead of service lines it was covered with fine blue cracks. Huddled in the middle of it, we felt reasonably safe.
‘Sam … arry … ide!’
Ross was yelling at us again. His voice sounded faint. The wind made it impossible to hear what he was saying. Something about the tide? He and Dad were dwarfed by the massive icy escarpment that towered over them. And dwarfed by distance. How did they get to be so far away?
Suddenly I realised what Ross was trying to tell us. We’d gone in the wrong direction. Away from the peninsula, instead of towards it. We were two hundred metres offshore. If we didn’t get back in a hurry, the wind and the outgoing tide would carry us off into the Southern ocean.
We’d be lost forever.
4
JAWS
‘Harry, we’ve got to get to shore!’ I cried.
But we got no further than the edge of our icefloe. In the two minutes since we’d arrived, the gap between it and the next one had stretched from half a metre to five.
Not even Captain Amazing could jump five metres.
We were stranded.
‘Check out all the fish,’ said Harry.
Deep below the surface, a wave of small, streamlined shapes went sweeping past our icefloe. They had long pointy fins and seemed almost to be flying underwater. That’s how I recognised them.
‘They’re not fish,’ I said. ‘They’re penguins.’
Suddenly a dark shadow shot up out of the depths. The penguins scattered in all directions. But most of them disappeared under our icefloe, with the shadow in hot pursuit.
‘It’s the mean seal,’ Harry said. ‘Will it eat the penguins?’
‘It probably won’t catch them,’ I replied. But I was pretty sure it would. The sea leopard wasn’t fooling around. one or more of those penguins was about to become dead meat.
Better them than us, I thought.
‘Yikes!’ said Harry, grabbing my arm.
I turned and saw a sight that sent a tingle down my spine. The sea leopard was hauling itself out of the sea on the other side of our icefloe. It must have given up on the speedy penguins in favour of slower prey – Harry and me.
This time there were no nearby floes to escape to. The closest one was six metres away. The gap was growing wider every moment. Swimming for it wasn’t an option. The freezing Antarctic water would kill us just as surely as the sea leopard.
The big grey seal came lumbering towards us, making the ice tremble under our feet. With nowhere to retreat, Harry and I skirted around the edge of the floe, trying to keep as much distance as possible between us and the sea leopard. The sea leopard didn’t follow us. It kept going in a straight line until it reached the very middle of the floe, where it stopped and peered back over its shoulder. Not at Harry and me, but at the sea behind it.
I could swear it looked nervous.
Then something really weird happened. A penguin came catapulting out of the sea and landed nimbly on the edge of the ice. It was followed by another, and another, and another. Then a whole bunch of them burst out of the water simultaneously. They kept coming, until the edge of the icefloe was crowded with small black-and-white penguins. There must have been fifty of them. I recognised them as chinstrap penguins – there was a colony near Casey Station where we were staying. Like a platoon of little soldiers, the chinstraps marched resolutely towards the sea leopard.
‘Wicked!’ whispered Harry. ‘They’re going to kill the mean seal.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. The sea leopard was much too big and powerful. When it saw the penguins coming, it snorted and bared its huge, leopard-like teeth.
But the silly little birds didn’t falter. They continued waddling towards it. Towards their doom. Even more strange, many of the penguins – especially those at the rear – kept glancing back over their shoulders. As if the danger lay in that direction, not in front.
Suddenly there was a loud hiss behind us and a shower of big raindrops splattered on the ice. The whistling wind blew one across my cheek and into my mouth. It tasted salty. Salty rain?
‘Look!’ Harry pointed.
Fifteen metres from the floe, a circle of water roughly the size of a backyard pool bulged upwards like a giant bubble, then burst open in a spray of foam as an enormous black-and-white shape pushed up and out of the sea.
A killer whale.
For three or four seconds the huge head remained motionless, its rounded nose pointed straight up at the sky. Only its eye moved as the whale swept its gaze back and forth over the icefloe, then it sank back under the waves.
For a moment nothing moved. Every pair of eyes on the icefloe was focused on the spot where the killer whale had been.
Now I understood why the sea leopard wasn’t interested in us. And why the penguins had jumped up onto the icefloe even though their deadly enemy was already there. Both the sea leopard and the penguins were trying to escape the killer whale.
At least they’re safe now, I thought.
But I was wrong.
THUMP!
My feet shot out from under me as the far side of the icefloe rose three metres into the air. Holy guacamole! A huge, blurry shape pressed against the underside of the ice, lifting it up.
The killer whale was trying to tip us into
the sea!
And it was succeeding. Everything on the ice – Harry, me, the sea leopard, the penguins – began sliding down the slope towards the dark, spiky waves.
’What’s happening?’ Harry gasped.
Before I could answer, another killer whale burst out of the sea on the low side of the floe. There were two of them. They were working as a team. The second giant predator flung itself onto the ice and came sliding up the slope on its belly with its mouth wide open. Straight towards Harry and me.
I had never seen so many teeth.
Harry and I started madly back-pedalling to stop ourselves from sliding into the whale’s gaping jaws, but the weight of the huge animal tipped the floe even further and our boots couldn’t grip.
‘Shishkebab!’ I cried, as we slid helplessly towards the enormous, tooth-lined cave of the killer whale’s mouth.
5
NO ESCAPE
But the penguins slid faster. About ten of the little flightless birds went skidding past Harry and me, their stumpy wings flapping in panic, their orange feet clawing uselessly at the ice. The first eight or nine shot past the killer whale on both sides and made it safely into the sea before the huge predator had time to react. But it saw the next one coming. Rolling onto its side so the tip of its shiny black nose pushed flat against the ice, the whale opened its giant maw, then slammed it shut like a bank vault closing.
CLUNK!
I didn’t see if it got the penguin. Harry and I were locked together in a bear hug, doing a tandem roll across the tilt of the ice at right angles to the whale’s line of attack. I knew we couldn’t stop our slide; our only chance was to roll sideways.
It worked. Instead of going into the whale’s mouth, we bumped into its head, just above the blowhole, and stopped sliding. For a moment I was looking directly into the whale’s eye. It was as big as a light bulb.
I was staring death in the eye.
Then the eye began to grow smaller. The whale had begun sliding backwards down the slope, wriggling itself from side to side to get off the ice. Finally it turned almost all the way around and rolled into the waves with a five-metre-high splash.
As soon as the whale was gone, the floe tipped level again.
‘You’re squashing me!’ squeaked a muffled voice.
I rolled off Harry and dragged him to his feet, nervously scanning the sea in all directions for killer whales. A tall black fin went cruising past.
‘Quick, Harry,’ I whispered. ‘We have to get to the middle of the ice.’
‘But the mean seal’s there.’
Somehow the sea leopard had maintained its position in the centre of the icefloe. About twenty penguins – all that remained of the original fifty – crowded around it, huddled down on the ice like earthquake survivors expecting an aftershock.
‘I don’t think it’ll hurt us,’ I said. ‘It’s just as scared as we are.’
Hoping I was right, I cautiously led Harry towards it.
But we didn’t get there.
THUMP!
It was a repeat performance. Harry and I landed flat on our backsides as the far side of the icefloe rose high into the air. All twenty remaining penguins – and the sea leopard – came sliding down the slope towards us. But they weren’t getting any closer because Harry and I were sliding, too. I cast a panicked look over my shoulder. The sea came closer, closer, closer …
Something else came closer, too. Just below the water’s surface, a huge black-and-white shape came powering towards the low side of the icefloe like a nuclear submarine at full throttle.
This time there was no escape.
6
LOOK OUT!
BANG! CRUNCH!
I have never been in a car crash, but now I know what it must be like: being T-boned by a rampaging killer whale when you’re on an icefloe.
Everything happens so fast your brain can’t keep up. But here’s what I think happened. Moments before the second whale hit, the icefloe broke in half. The first whale had lifted one side so high out of the water that the ice snapped across the middle like a sheet of glass.
That’s what made the loud BANG.
The CRUNCH was the second whale smashing into the ice.
Moments earlier there had been a sloping ramp for it to toboggan up, but when the floe broke in half, the ice settled flat on the water again. Instead of sliding smoothly up a tilting plane of ice, the charging whale slammed headfirst into its hard, vertical edge like a seven-tonne battering ram. And smashed the floe into about ten pieces.
I found myself on one of the pieces. Lying flat on my back. Looking up at the sky.
Where was Harry?
I sat up quickly. Too quickly. The sudden movement caused the ice to tip alarmingly, nearly rolling me into the sea. A wave sloshed up onto the ice next to my hip. I shied away from it and nearly fell into the sea on the other side. Holy guacamole! I was sitting on a finger of ice barely wider than a kayak.
‘Sam?’
My heart jumped. Harry was right behind me. Only three metres away. Crouched on the edge of another piece of ice that was much larger than the one I was on.
But he was sharing it with the sea leopard.
‘Will I jump?’ asked Harry, rising shakily to his feet.
‘No! Stay where you are!’ I said quickly. My floe was much too small to support us both. It barely supported me. Anyway, the gap was too wide to jump. Even for Captain Amazing.
‘Sit down, Harry. I’ll come to you.’
I pulled off my gloves and shoved them into my pockets. Then I lay on my belly and began paddling towards him.
Hooley dooley! The water was so cold it burned! It was like dipping my hands into liquid fire.
Ten times would have done it. I only had to dip my hands into the freezing water ten times and I would have paddled across to Harry. But I only got halfway before the sea erupted right in front of me.
WHOOSH!
A killer whale’s head rose out of the water, so close I could smell its warm, fishy breath. I was a sitting duck. All it had to do was open its mouth a bit wider and I’d go straight in. But instead of eating me, the whale shot a column of vapour out of its blowhole and sank back into the sea.
‘Holy torpedo, it nearly got you!’ gasped Harry.
He was further away now. The turbulence caused by the breaching whale had turned my piece of ice side-on to Harry’s and pushed us four metres apart. Four metres might not sound far, but when you’re on a narrow sliver of ice and there’s a pack of killer whales after you, it feels like four kilometres.
Trying not to splash too much, I slowly turned my ice kayak around. My skin prickled, and not from the cold. It was cold, of course, but not quite as cold as it had been five minutes earlier. The katabatic wind had died down completely, leaving the sea eerily flat and calm. A pale mist had fallen across the water. Except for my splashing hands and my wildly thumping heart, the scene was almost peaceful. Then Harry broke the quiet.
‘LOOK OUT!’
7
WHAP! CRUNCH! SMACK!
I looked over my shoulder. Thirty metres away, a tall black fin came knifing through the water, dragging a V-shaped wave behind it.
I started paddling flat out. But I knew it was hopeless. How could I outrun a killer whale?
I was cactus.
But I wasn’t dead yet. As the saying goes: While there’s life, there’s hope.
And there’s another saying, one that my karate teacher told me: Attack is the best means of defence.
I stopped paddling and fumbled in my pocket, looking over my shoulder again to see how close the whale was.
It was very close. But – amazingly – it wasn’t coming straight for me. If it held its present course, it would miss my narrow icefloe by a couple of metres. Then the realisation hit.
It was going for Harry!
‘oh no you don’t!’ I muttered through clenched teeth.
I waited until the huge predator was almost level with me, then hurled my glov
e.
one medium-sized, wool-lined Gore-Tex glove versus one seven-tonne killer whale. It doesn’t take a genius to come up with a no contest result.
But tell the genius that the glove had just been dipped in seawater, so instead of weighing two hundred grams, it now weighed two kilos. And that it had been aimed at the whale’s most vulnerable spot – its eye.
WHAP!
I don’t think I hurt it, but I did give the whale a fright. It flinched. And when it flinched, it veered off course – only by a few degrees, but enough to spoil its aim.
Instead of hitting Harry’s icefloe dead-centre and spilling him and the sea leopard into the water, the whale struck the floe a glancing blow on one side. The icefloe rocked sideways and spun in a circle, nearly throwing Harry off. He slid all the way to the edge, only saving himself by grabbing one of the sea leopard’s rear flippers. The big grey seal whirled around with its mouth wide open, but before it could close its terrible jaws around Harry’s arm, another mouth – ten times bigger than the sea leopard’s – exploded out of the sea.
The sea leopard might have looked slow and clumsy out of the water, but its reflexes were fast. Rearing up like a striking cobra, it bit the attacking whale on the point of its nose.
CRUNCH!
I didn’t see what happened next. The whale’s huge black-and-white tail rose out of the sea in front of me, blocking my view. Then it slammed down on the surface with a loud SMACK, sending up a curtain of water that nearly blew me off my ice kayak. By the time the spray had cleared, both the whale and the sea leopard had gone. Only Harry remained, lying white-faced on the edge of his icefloe.
‘How cool was that!’ he cried.
8
PIRATES
I paddled over to Harry’s icefloe. The water was bone-crackingly cold. Every time I dipped my hands in, it felt like my fingers were about to drop off. But I was more worried about them being bitten off. And not just my fingers, my hands, arms and probably the rest of me as well. I’d seen up close how big a killer whale’s mouth was.