In Cold Pursuit (41 page)

“What self-respecting Kiwi would do that? These men are archaeologists, not egg-stealing morons!”

“I understand that. I’m just checking all the angles. Being systematic. We are scientists,” she said, trying to calm him down.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yelling at you won’t help.”

“I understand,” she said. “Or I think I do. You’re working to understand these birds, and—”

“This
ecosystem,”
he said. “The Ross Sea is the last unbroken marine ecosystem in the world, or at least it is until the Japanese ‘harvest’ all the beluga whales. I come here to study these birds because they are part of that ecosystem. I treasure them. It’s simple rape to mess with this colony of birds.”

“Okay, let’s start from another angle. When did you notice that the eggs were missing?”

“Wednesday. Two days ago.”

“So they were there Tuesday?”

“I wasn’t here Tuesday, so I don’t know. I had been in town for a couple of days.”

“That’s right, I spoke with you in the galley that evening.”

“Yes. I had meant to return here Monday but was delayed by the storm. I came out Wednesday and they were gone. And this footprint was there.”

“It certainly doesn’t have any fresh snow in it, so that suggests that the print was made after the snow stopped on Tuesday.”

“Good point.”

“And the eggs were on the nests before you left for town. When was that?”

“Jeannie and I went to town Saturday with the New Zealanders. And the answer is yes, they were on the nests. Each bird lays two eggs. They might lose one to skuas, and maybe both, but seldom at the same time, and not in inner nests all in a group. The skuas attack from the edges. For three nests in a tight cluster to lose both eggs … well, I’ve never seen it before. And there is the matter that the shells are not here.”

“The skuas don’t carry them away?”

“No. They have trouble lifting a whole egg, so they knock it away and then peck it open and eat it right there, and very quickly.” He swung both of his hands with fingers bunched together to look like beaks pecking at a rolling egg.

“And the archaeologists said they have something missing, too.”

“Yes, some old bottles. Artifacts.”

“Where were they located?”

“They were under tarps in boxes in their layout yard, over by where they park their Haaglund.”

“Do the errant footprints lead there?”

“No. But you can cross to there without walking through any snowdrifts.”

Valena thought for a moment. “And were there any Kiwis here Tuesday?”

“They came back Tuesday night. They had gone to Scott Base for the skirt party Saturday night and to take Sunday off. The weather looked bad enough Monday morning that they stayed put. They were just down at Cape Evans today to see if anything was missing from Scott’s hut.”

“Skirt party?”

“The men dress in drag and drink and dance about. It’s a time-honored custom that dates to before the tender sex joined us on this God-forsaken rock.”

“I see. They have dresses? Really?”

“Togas made of old sheets and packing materials and mops for wigs. You’re getting off the subject.”

“Indeed I am. Packing materials?”

“Think bubble wrap.”

“Bubble
wrap?”

“Yes! Okay, so the situation is that someone was here between Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening, otherwise the archaeologists would have seen or heard him.”

“Ah. And that footprint says after the storm abated, so Tuesday morning at the earliest.”

“Yes.”

“Then it must have been the guy the dive tender saw zooming by on the snow machine.”

“Which divers? Where?”

“The dive shack by Cape Evans.” She explained.

Nathaniel Lanthrope’s mouth sagged open. He pulled it shut. Thought. Said, “What a damned crazy thing to do! He could have been killed! Is anyone missing up there? I mean, aside from that… oh, no.”

Valena nodded. “You’re thinking like I’m thinking,” she said. “Steve was found right next to the Cape Evans flag route, a few miles north of Hut Point. The man who drove me out here found him.”

Nat turned and stared out across the ice, arms folded. “Those eggs would be worth a lot of money to some monster somewhere who wants to raise his own little colony on his swank estate. That is, if you could get them back to McMurdo fast enough and somehow smuggle them north without their freezing, but that’s not the only reason a man would bludgeon anyone who spotted him returning from stealing. The Antarctic Treaty protects the huts and those eggs. Anyone caught even crossing into the colony is subject to prosecution, but actually absconding with the wildlife? We’re talking huge fines, and
years
in prison.”

A
LONE IN HER TENT, WRAPPED IN THE LUXURIOUSLY
thick embrace of her Arctic Storm sleeping bag, with the constant winds buffeting the tent, Valena slept long and hard. She slept to digest the wonderful tuna, cheese, carrot, and mashed potato casserole that the Kiwi archaeologists had fed her for dinner. She slept to metabolize the wine that Nathaniel Lanthrope had contributed to the feast, and the berry and granola cobbler Jeannie Powers had invented. She slept to make up for all the nights in the past ten days that she had not slept enough. She slept to let all the jumbled facts that she had amassed begin to knit together in her head. And she slept because her soul was finally, deep in this wilderness, away from the longings and madness of humanity, at peace.

She did not awake until almost 9:00 a.m., and even then, she did not look at her watch and did not hasten to rise from her tent. She instead lay on her back with her hands folded under her neck, watching the wind ruffle the fabric of the tent, soaking up the joy of simply existing on this remote point of land in the last unbroken marine ecosystem on Earth.

Finally, her full bladder drove her to wriggle out of her sleeping bag and pee into the quart bottle. After carefully screwing the bottle cap on tightly, she pulled up her various layers of long underwear and wind pants, shrugged her way into her parka, opened the front flap of the tent, put on her boots, slid her hands into her gloves, picked up the still-warm bottle of urine, and wandered over toward the latrine to empty the bottle into the drum. Once finished, she put the
bottle into the secret pocket of her parka and stumbled up onto the front porch of Nat’s hard-framed tent.

“Nat?” she called. “Is it time for breakfast?”

He opened the wooden door to the tent. “I’ve been up for three hours. Come on in. I’ve got some hot water on the stove.”

“You’re a prince.” She began to knock the grit from the path off her boots so that she would not track it inside the tent.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Nat.

Valena stared at the wooden floor of Nat’s tent. “But these boots pick up so much of this disintegrating lava.”

“I just sweep it all down through the gaps between the floorboards.”

A thought occurred to Valena. She lifted a foot and examined the sole of her boot. “Nat, look.” She pointed at the fragments of mineral crystals that were stuck between the treads.

“What’s so amazing about that?”

“It’s stuck,” she said, picking at one of the crystals with an index finger. “Really, really stuck.”

“I fail to see the significance of this phenomenon,” said Nat.

“You don’t? Well then, you’ve forgotten your one bit of evidence that will tell you who stole those eggs.”

“The footprint?”

“Exactly. That man—or large woman—wore FDX boots, just like these. Glorified couch cushions with Vibram soles, but if you’re interested in riding a snow machine around in a blizzard over the sea ice, you’d want to stay warm, right?”

“I follow you so far.”

“The rock here is different than the rock around McMurdo. Here it has these huge phenocrysts, and they crumble out of the rock at exactly the size that sticks in the treads of these boots. Now, how many people from McMurdo get to come here?”

“Almost none. You’ve already met everyone authorized to come here this season: me, Jeannie, the three Kiwis, Kathy Juneau’s group, the two men who brought you out here
yesterday. I count ten. Two men who helped set up my tent and so forth, that’s twelve.”

“Thirteen, counting me. How many pilots have landed here?”

“Three. No, all four of the helo pilots have landed here, though they don’t tend to get out of the aircraft, and they don’t wear FDXs.”

“So that’s seventeen people out of thirteen hundred who have an excuse to have these crystals at this diameter stuck in their boots, and maybe half of them even have a pair of FDXs, let alone that size. Now, name me two other things that might get caught in a boot here that wouldn’t show up anywhere else on the island. Or would not be likely, at least.”

“Why two?”

“Three’s a good number. One is happenstance, because these crystals might show up in at least one other lava flow between here and McMurdo. Two is coincidence. Three begins to be a trend.”

“Well, there’s the penguin guano. I’ve sure picked a lot of that out of my boots.”

Valena said, “Let’s try bottle glass. Shackleton group liked to break bottles, or perhaps they were just lousy shots when they pitched empties out the door of that hut, trying to hit their dump.”

“Let’s go take a look,” said Nat.

Down at the hut, they picked through the loose gravel, picking up shards of bottle glass. One of the archaeologists sauntered over to look at what they were doing. “I realize this looks like trash,” he said, “but it’s actually part of this archaeological site. Kindly do not remove it.”

Valena handed him the shards. “Are these all from the
Nimrod
expedition?”

The archaeologist raised his palm and examined them. “Looks like it. The pale violet started out clear. This green is common, as you can see in the dump, and this rust red is as well. It was all brought from England in 1907. There were not yet as yet any glass manufacturers in New Zealand.”

“And the impurities that made these colors? Would they be diagnostic?”

“Certainly,” he said. “The colors are various iron oxides, except the bright blue, which is cobalt oxide. And this pale purplish one might have fluorite.”

“Could you possibly make a formal loan of some shards? For the investigation of this case?”

The archaeologist thought a moment, and then said, “If it would get those unbroken bottles back, I would loan you my right arm. But I have a selection of tiny bits. Let me get them for you.” He strode away to the depot where they were storing the carefully cataloged artifacts.

Valena smiled. “That’s three. But I’d say that simply finding these phenocrysts and a little penguin guano on the boots of someone who was not supposed to be here would be fairly conclusive.”

“Right,” said Nat. “And finding six penguin eggs and antique bottles in his foot locker wouldn’t hurt, either.”

V
ALENA WALKED SLOWLY THROUGH THE PENGUIN
colony, trading stares with the birds.
I am a detective now
, she realized.
Shorn of the role I came down here to play, I have stepped into another. What do I need to accomplish here? Only to walk through the colony, then clean my boots into a sample bag. How strange …

She crouched to line up a photograph, zooming in on one individual who had stood up to stretch. The bird stared back at her through eyes that revealed no warmth or emotion. She clicked the shutter, then panned down the bird’s shoulder to examine its wing. The tips of its short, thick feathers were not black but blue, the same shade as the sky.

Valena lowered the camera and watched the bird as it flipped its head about, looking to its grooming.
How clever you are
, she thought.
I sure couldn’t make it, trying to live out here on this rock. I wish you best of luck.

Valena followed Jeannie as she wove a route up and over and around the penguin-dotted lava flows, mimicking the pace
and languid motions of the biologist as she turned her head slowly this way and that, peering to see who still had eggs.

“How long do they sit on the nests?” Valena asked.

“Until the job is done,” answered Jeannie. “Egg-laying occurs over a three-week period, ending about now … hatching begins mid-December … they’re off the nests by February. Off to a life on the ice floes: swimming, eating, wandering around, just being penguins.”

“You come here every year?”

“This is my first year. I think this is Nat’s twenty-sixth time on the ice. He knows these birds personally, maybe better than he knows most humans.”

“Is that true about the marine ecosystems?”

“Being broken? Too true, sorry to say. You take out the apex predator, you throw the whole game off. Take out the krill or fish, again it’s out of whack. And things don’t regenerate as fast as they do in warmer waters. When you buy Chilean sea bass at your market, sometimes it’s actually Antarctic cod. The Antarctic cod takes years to grow to breeding maturity in these waters. They are delicious, I don’t argue that, but when a fishing boat comes in, the captain is thinking return on investment, not, ‘Am I taking too many?’”

“I get you. Like too many other resources we consume, we harvest faster than the resource can regenerate.”

“The word isn’t ‘harvest.’ When we take faster than it can regenerate, it’s ‘mine.’ We are mining the edible populations of the ocean.”

“So we should eat farmed fish?”

“Farmed fish tend to be carnivorous species, such as trout. That means that some other edible species is being mined to feed the farmed species. I think the answer is to make fewer humans, not more fish.”

“I agree.”

“You and I are at that age when we have to decide these things. Do we have babies? How many? I come from a big family. I’m one of five. It will be strange to limit myself to two children. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh?”

“I’m adopted.”

“Oh.” Jeannie was quiet for a while, continuing her slow, rhythmic search through the colony. “What was it like, being adopted? I suppose that’s an option I should consider.”

“Depends on how important it is to you to be genetically close to your children.”