In Cold Pursuit (40 page)

Ice surrounded them on every side.

“Anything else you need to ask me?” asked Dave.

“Yeah,” said Valena. “Why did you come here?”

Dave pondered her question a moment, then, with his usual easy smile, said, “Well, I was at something of a cross-roads,” and left it at that.

They reached another point of land, one less shrouded with snow or ice. Black volcanic rock protruded everywhere through shallow drifts of snow. The Haaglund drove a short distance up the rocky slope and pulled to a stop. Dave parked the Pisten Bully next to it.

The landscape was humpy and confusing, a maze of lava flows. They unloaded Valena’s gear and started up a steep hill over knobs of black volcanic rock all knotty with dark crystals the size of Valena’s fingernails. Far away to the left, she could hear a strange chattering noise. “What’s that sound?” she asked.

“Penguins,” said Matt. “Come on, let’s get your gear stowed, and then if it’s okay with Nat, we can go see the birds.”

“You need a permit?”

“You most definitely need a permit,” said Matt. “Nat Lanthrope’s your man, so you’d better smile prettily and convince him you’re not out to mess with his birds.”

At the top of the rise, a small valley opened out among the naked rocks, facing north toward the Ross Sea and the Southern Ocean. Endless ice rolled out before them, for the winter’s pack ice had yet to break. It was a landscape of contrasts:
white on black, snow and ice on darkest rock. To the south, the slopes of Mount Erebus rose toward a steaming summit, their own private Fujiyama.

Tucked into the lee of a curl of crumbling rock stood a large tent with a wooden frame. To one side of the entrance stood a large solar collector mounted on a staff with cables running off it into the tent.

“Ahoy, Nat!” called Matt.

A young woman stepped out to greet them. “Hey there. Nat’s out taking his afternoon constitutional. I’m Jeannie Powers, Nat’s assistant. I know important things, like where the chocolate bars are hidden.”

Matt returned to the Pisten Bully to unload the drill. Dave and Jeannie helped Valena pitch her tent on a broad patch of disintegrating lava, fighting a nattering wind that wanted to take it off the cliff onto the pack ice. Jeannie showed them how to scout first the least abrasive rocks to use as dead men inside the tent and, next, rocks of just the right size to hold down the guylines and secure the rain fly.

“It doesn’t rain here,” said Jeannie, “but you’ll need the fly for the warmth, and to make it just a little bit less bright inside, so you can hope to sleep. The latrine is that drum-and-bucket arrangement up against the side of Nat’s tent. Dry Valley Protocols here, which means liquids in the fifty-five-gallon drum and you-know-what in the bucket. They gave you a pee bottle?”

Valena produced the quart Nalgene bottle Nancy had given her that morning. It had
PEE
written in several places around the sides of the bottle and a large letter
P
boldly emblazoned on its cap. “I guess they want to make sure I don’t confuse it with my water bottle.”

Jeannie nodded. “You’ll get the hang of it. Superior bladder control is the key to Antarctic survival. That, and good aim.”

Valena stared at the latrine with concern. The right side of the bucket was up against the bank of lava and the back was to the tent, but the front and left sides faced the view.

“We don’t get many visitors,” said Jeannie dismissively,
turning her attention to Valena’s sleep kit. “It really hasn’t been that cold out at night, only down to about ten Fahrenheit.”

“Downright balmy,” said Valena. She knelt down and unrolled the mats and sleeping bag into the tent, then shoved her personal duffel over into the windward side to supply additional deadman weight. She then gathered up her camera and climbed out of the tent. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. I’m going to get back to my work,” said Jeannie. She headed back into the frame tent, leaving Valena and Dave alone together.

Valena faced into the wind that was blowing off the frozen ocean. “Lovely day.”

“Care to take a walk?” said Dave. “Maybe visit another archaeological treasure?”

Valena nodded, and they began their stroll down among the odd volcanic rocks of Cape Royds. “It’s weird walking between lava flows,” said Valena.

“Is that what this is? Lava flows? Why are these so black? They’re darker than the rocks over by McMurdo.”

“Different flows. The darker lavas have more minerals that are rich in iron and magnesium—olivine, amphibole, pyroxene. The lighter-colored ones, like you’d get in the Andes, or the Cascades, have more feldspar and even quartz, which lack the iron and magnesium.”

Dave laughed. “Really? It minds me of double-chocolate cookie dough. What are those big crystals sticking out all over the place? The chocolate chips.”

Valena leaned down and picked up a handful. “You mean the phenocrysts.”

“That’s a pretty big word. What’s it mean? Big crystal?”

“Pretty much. It means, ‘crystal big enough to see with the naked eye.’ So much for trying to boggle the imaginations of wandering tractor drivers. But they’re nice phenocrysts, eh? And it’s interesting…they seem to crumble out to an even size, about like peas.”

Dave gave her a saucy grin. “It’s cute the way you scientists get all wound up about grit and critter glue and things.”

Valena took a playful swipe at him. He dodged.

They continued down the narrow pathway between the knots and lumps of rock, now following the increasing sound of birds as much as footprints. The trail zigged and zagged and finally opened up into a natural amphitheater. Beyond it, along the sea cliffs, the rocks were peppered with black birds with white bellies. The few who were standing upright were less than two feet tall. The other birds all lay on their nests, bellies down, beaks pointing south into the wind.

They stopped and watched the birds for a while at a line of do-not-pass signs that announced the boundary of the penguin colony. Dave said, “They look like two-tone rugby balls.”

“And how about that ruckus they’re making,” said Valena.

“Like a couple thousand squirrels screaming at someone who’s trying to steal their nuts.”

“There you are,” said Matt, striding up from their left. “Let’s check out the hut.”

Valena had been so taken by the birds that she had hardly noticed Shackleton’s hut. It was smaller than Scott’s, a humble gray structure nestled against a particularly large snow drift. Unlike Scott’s hut, the ground downwind from it was naked of snow, revealing a heap of broken bottles and twisted strips of rusted iron.

Dave’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Matt likes Scott, but Shackleton was my man.”

“Why?”

“He always got his people home alive.” Dave walked over to the entrance to the hut and followed Matt inside.

Valena took a moment by herself to absorb the panorama of black rock and its towering mother, Mount Erebus. The hut looked inconsequential by comparison, a pale afterthought of human habitation. At last she stepped inside and was once again lost in a world of men who sailed on tiny ships across wild oceans in search of dreams.

It was soon time for Matt and Dave to leave. Valena followed them to the Pisten Bully to say good-bye. To her surprise, she found herself fighting off tears. She didn’t want them to leave, especially Dave.
What’s happening to me?
she wondered.
I’m not used to caring this much.

“Are you okay?” Dave asked. He waited, a hand resting lightly against the back of her neck.

She could feel his hand even through her parka. She no longer tried to choke the tears but let them slide down her cheeks.

“Isn’t it amazing,” said Dave, his voice soft and soothing, “to be in a place where all day long, the sun goes from east to west but in the northern sky, and all night long, it goes back west to east in the southern? I can’t get over that. I really like it, but it’s kind of confusing, just the same.”

Valena began to smile through her tears. “Everything about this place is different from everywhere else.”

He pulled her closer and nuzzled his lips into her hair. “That’s why I come here,” he said. “That’s why really.”

V
ALENA FOUND IT HARD TO WATCH THE
P
ISTEN
B
ULLY
dwindle away across the ice carrying the gentle man whom she was, against all caution, beginning to trust. She watched it go until it was a just tiny speck on the giant white landscape. It rounded the corner at Barne Glacier and was gone. A soft welcome from the cold wilderness engulfed her.

Still she watched the place where the tracked vehicle had disappeared, unable to tear herself away. She was stuck to the spot, stuck inside, just plain stuck.

The wind shifted, bringing the chattering calls of the penguins to her ears. At last she turned and hiked back up over the hill toward their nesting grounds. She stopped politely ten feet outside the line of barrier signs.

She heard footsteps behind her and turned. It was Nathaniel Lanthrope, the penguin guy, approaching from the direction of Shackleton’s hut. For a moment, she thought she had slipped back a hundred years in time and that this was someone from that great man’s party coming to invite her to tea. It was something in his ice-blue gaze that threw her off, a broader reckoning, a deeper vision.

“Welcome,” he said, mapping her face with those thousand-mile eyes.

“Thanks for letting me come to your camp,” said Valena.

“You’re welcome. And you’re welcome to enter the colony on my permit, but you have to stay with either Jeannie or me at all times. Do not approach the birds, and do not move quickly around them. Be smart. They’re stressed enough without humans looming over them. Recently, the sea ice didn’t break up for over five years, so this colony has had to march sixty kilometers over the ice to get a meal. It’s been hard on their reproductive success.”

“Then the ice usually breaks up here?”

“Certainly. Shackleton anchored the
Nimrod
just down there. Scott sailed the
Discovery
all the way to Hut Point, and the
Terra Nova
to Cape Evans. You’ve seen the photographs, I’m sure.”

“Yes, I have, come to think of it.”

“In the meantime, these birds are stressed. A lot of them have moved quite a distance to other colonies.” Nat abruptly changed the subject. “I hear you’re investigating the murder at Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp.”

“So much for trying to be discreet,” said Valena.

“Word gets around,” he said. “Well, if you’re good at the puzzles criminals leave, I have one for you here.”

“The missing eggs?”

“Come,” he said, crooking a finger.

She followed the biologist like a duck following its parent across a lake. The sound of the penguins grew louder, and louder, a surging
krr-uk-uk-uk-uk, arr-kuh-kuh-uk.
Their nests were in groups of twenty or more, little piles of angular pebbles arranged and coated with guano right on the naked, ice-cold rock. Nat led her to a low plastic fence that had been constructed around two groups of nests.

“I hear the skuas steal their eggs,” said Valena. “Am I going to hate seeing that?”

Nat thought about that. “I’d feel sorrier for the skuas. The penguins hit them with their flippers. I’m here to tell you, it’s like getting hit with the edge of a ping-pong paddle about thirty times a second. But what I wanted to talk to you about is this,” he said, pointing to a footprint just inside the fence in a small patch of snow.

“Not yours, I take it,” said Valena.

“Nor Jeannie’s, nor any of the archaeologists, nor the biologists. Nobody crosses this fence but Jeannie and me, and we cross over there.” He pointed to a place where the plastic sagged a little.

Nat pointed to another footprint on their side of the fence, and another, and another. “They lead off to the far side of that tall lava flow south of Shackleton’s hut,” he said. “Or more accurately, they come from there. Nobody goes that way. It’s too much work. You’d have to be sneaking around, trying to avoid being seen. That, or ignorant of the best ways to walk around here.”

“You seem to have this all figured out,” said Valena, pulling a small photographic scale out of one of her multitude of pockets. “Could you lay that next to that footprint? I want to take a photograph of it.”

“Here, give your camera to me. I can get a better angle.” He took several exposures. “And like hell I have this all figured out. Who would do this? Six eggs are gone, and a few things from near the hut as well. The archaeologists had some packing cases waiting for removal to Scott Base, where they’re conserving all the artifacts.”

Valena considered the puzzle for a while. “Ask it this way: what would anyone need a penguin egg for?”

“Need?” said Nat, his tone rising in anger. “No one
needs
a penguin egg. People may
want
a penguin egg, but no one
needs
one. No one starves to death around here anymore. And these eggs
aie protected!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

Nat’s face writhed with barely controlled emotion. “It had to be someone from McMurdo,” he said finally.

“Is there nowhere else a person could come from?”

Nat threw out an arm. “Do you see anywhere? Anyone? McMurdo is the only place that people can come from or go to for a hundred miles.”

Valena stared out across the ice toward the continent. “The Dry Valleys are over there,” she said.

“That doesn’t make sense. If you want to come here from
there, you go by air. People have gone from Mac Town to the Valleys over the ice, but it’s a big undertaking. Traversing is no laughing matter. There are considerable hazards. When the ice breaks up, the tourist ships come in and invade the Valleys a short distance, but do you see any ships out there just now? None. The only ways in here are over the ice or by helicopter, and we know nobody’s landed here—the pilots have logs to fill out, and schedules to keep, they aren’t stupid enough to have done it—so whoever did this came in over the ice from Mac Town, just as you did.”

“And you know it wasn’t one of the New Zealanders.”