Pecked to death by ducks (19 page)

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A I 54

Antarctica, this glittering wilderness that encircles the South Pole: 5,500,000 square miles, most of it capped by ice so thick that the land beneath may never be seen until some future cataclysm heats up the entire earth. The Antarctic, we soon learned, is a savage place, as soul-stirring as it is unforgiving.

We had not embarked, strictly speaking, on a pleasure cruise. Oh, no. Despite the regal saloon, complete with piano, despite the gourmet meals and well-equipped lecture hall, this trip was billed as an "expedition cruise," suggesting physical discovery and intellectual enrichment. Such a cruise necessarily requires a measure of flexibility and hardiness in its passengers, embracing, as it does, a small degree of physical discomfort and an uncertain schedule dictated by the weather. In this case, on this trip, there were also twenty bad minutes of real life-and-death drama.

It was the expedition's coleader, Mike Dunn, who told the passengers in an orientation lecture that the twelve Zodiacs carried by the Frontier Spirit made the difference between a cruise and an expedition. There is no place to dock a large ship along Antarctica's icy shores. The Zodiacs, inflated rubber boats with outboard motors, were our ticket into the continent, ensuring some kind of communion with the awesome land and whatever life we could find there. It would be, Mike explained, no small thing to step from the ship's boat deck into the Zodiacs as they bobbed on swells that were often four and five feet high.

Mike told us all this soon after we set sail from Bluff, New Zealand, and headed south toward the Ross Sea through some of the world's stormiest latitudes—the ones sailors call the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, the Screaming Sixties. We encountered three or four major storms, one after the other, boom-boom-boom, just like that. The Southern Ocean generates the worst weather on earth for navigation, according to Heinz Aye, our captain. He ought to know. This was Captain Aye's sixty-second trip to the frozen continent.

Instead of indulging in conventional shipboard diversions like shuffleboard, we spent our days at sea attending lectures about the history, wildlife, and politics of Antarctica. At the same time

the storms raging outside quickly got our attention, lending our studies a surreal quality.

One day I went to the well-stocked library, on the fifth deck, and read a book about penguins. The wind was howling bitterly, and the waves were running about thirty feet, hitting us from the starboard side, where I sat, next to one of the enormous windows that I never could call portholes. For a moment, as we crested another wave, I was staring up into a troubled gray sky—there was a now familiar "top of the roller coaster" sensation in the pit of my stomach—and then the ship began its slow slide into a mammoth trough of water. In that instant the sun, which was low in the sky, bullied its way through the clouds and fell across the tops of waves that ran all the way to the horizon. The sea was a savage morass of gold and gray, both terrifying and beautiful. Then, as the Frontier Spirit dropped into the depth of the trough, a great, upwelling mass of gray water filled the entire window.

The radiant and illuminated sea was dazzling, and that was a surprise, something I hadn't imagined in my dreams of Antarctica. It was, in fact, only one of a number of astonishments I was to encounter on the cruise. I had, for instance, been uninterested in the sub-Antarctic islands we would visit on the way down and back from the frozen continent. But our first landfall, on Campbell Island, two days out of Bluff, was a revelation.

The temperature hovered around 50 degrees, and our Zodiac churned through a kelp bed dotted with perfectly round, perfectly purple, pizza-size jellyfish. An escort of Hooker's sea lions, the rarest in the world, frolicked alongside, keeping pace with the Zodiac and staring at us with large dark eyes set in smiling, doglike heads. The island is volcanic in origin, and directly ahead a silver waterfall fell against an ebony wall of rock. Campbell is a New Zealand meteorological base and nature-conservancy area. A boardwalk winds through a boggy stretch of land, replete with ferns and thick vegetation of all kinds. The single tree on the island is distinguished by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the loneliest tree on earth."

The boardwalk emerged onto a marshy hillside of green, tus-socky grass and low shrubs. Above were black rocky spires and

specks of white dotting the treeless hillsides below. The specks were nesting royal albatross, dozens of them, separated from one another by twenty to twenty-five yards. I sat about twenty-five yards from one of the great birds and examined it through binoculars. It was huge, the size of a bald eagle at least, and a brisk wind ruffled its white feathers. The bird had a hooked beak, a dark filigree on the back of its wings, and tubular nostrils, and it stared back at me with a kind of serene awareness.

A heavy mist, driven by the wind, blew off the spires above. One of the albatross stood, spread its wings, caught the wind, and disappeared into the vaporous sky. The bird I had been watching stood for a moment, as if to reveal its rather large chick, and then squatted again with a comfortable back-and-forth motion, like a fat man settling into a soft sofa.

These birds, or birds very like them, circled the Frontier Spirit all the way to Antarctica. They rarely flapped their wings but soared on unseen currents of air. We counted them good omens, in the manner of ancient mariners.

Several humpback whales, the most acrobatic and playful of the species, kept pace with the Frontier Spirit, swimming only yards off the starboard bow, then crisscrossing in front of the ship. There was a mother with her calf, and when the young one breached, I could see the underside of its scalloped flukes, as white as the good omens sailing overhead.

Far in the distance I saw strange, coffin-shaped icebergs that had calved off the continent and swirled in a slow-motion outward spiral. The Frontier Spirit, Captain Aye pointed out, was not an icebreaker, but it did have the next-to-highest ice classification that can be given to a passenger ship.

Dawn the next day was brilliant, and the sea appeared somehow sluggish under a cold golden sun. The water glittered strangely, and it seemed gelatinous, viscous. The entire surface was now covered over with closely spaced shards of forming ice the size and shape of knitting needles. The sea rolled slowly, thickly, and for the first time in days there were no whitecaps, even though a wind of perhaps twenty miles an hour was hitting us from starboard.

And then, later in the day—just that much farther south—the world changed again, from horizon to horizon. The sea was covered over with perfectly round medallions of ice, some of them the size of pancakes, of phonograph records, of coffee tables. There are names for the various kinds of ice encountered in the Southern Ocean: names for slushy water and fast-moving pack ice, and a name for the ice I had seen earlier in the day: frazzle ice, the spiky crystals that formed on the surface of the sea. This lily-pad arrangement was called pancake ice. The edges of each frozen, shimmering plate of ice were turned up neatly, and the sun lay across the icy medallions in a long, glittering golden tail.

Antarctica is governed by an international agreement, signed in 1959, making the land at the bottom of the world a demilitarized zone preserved for scientific research. Twelve nations—including the United States and Soviet Union—originally signed the treaty, which was renewed in 1989. It was the overwhelming feeling among passengers and crew that the treaty should be made permanent but that no more scientific bases are needed.

There is a Greenpeace station at Cape Evans, and a representative of that organization was invited aboard to lecture. He said that the organization favors ship-based tourism in Antarctica compared with the alternative, a land-based hotel and landing strip. Passengers aboard vessels like the Frontier Spirit learn about the continent and leave with a desire to preserve it.

It was the expedition leaders themselves who flipped their Zodiac. They were on a scouting trip, assessing the safety of a landing site, when they plunged into ice-clogged waters no more than a thousand miles from the South Pole. In such conditions, passengers had been repeatedly told, a person has about two minutes to live. I stood on the fifth deck of the Frontier Spirit and watched, powerless, as Mike Dunn floated farther and farther from the luxurious ship, carried away on the current. He was in the water for five minutes, for ten, for twelve. Every half minute or so, one of the five-foot swells washed over his head. It was 25 degrees

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS 4 I58

below zero, and a twenty-mile-an-hour wind was driving snow before it on a horizontal slant.

About the twelfth minute, Mike managed to get a hand up out of the water and salute the 140 horrified passengers who were shouting for him to hold on. Help was coming. It had to be coming. Mike dropped his arm back into the water, and skuas circled over his head. Skuas are the wolves of the Antarctic, and they prey on the vast penguin colonies there, pecking the eyes out of the sockets of infant birds, of the sick and dying. Mike Dunn was dying, and the skuas were circling.

The Zodiacs are lowered by crane from the top deck of the Frontier Spirit. The drivers ride the boats to the water and then unsnap a simple hook when the Zodiacs are afloat. The Frontier Spirit was brand new, and the hooks that fasten Zodiacs to the crane had been equipped with a new "safety" clasp. The intent was to keep the Zodiacs from accidentally dropping off the crane. In fact, these safety clasps had frozen shut, so when Dunn's Zodiac hit the swell, it held fast. The combination of a tight line and a five-foot swell had dumped Dunn and another man into the water.

The same thing happened to the first rescue crew that went after them, and there were now four people in the water. Steve Dawson, among others, was finally able to get a third Zodiac into the water. He could not see the drowning men, because of the high seas, and allowed passengers on the fifth deck, twenty feet above, to direct him. Nothing could be heard above the howl of the wind, and we simply pointed at the man nearest Dawson's Zodiac. We pointed all at once, in the same direction, like a drill team composed of stunned and horrified marchers.

Dunn was rescued from the water after eighteen minutes. So were the others, all of them barely conscious and unable to move. Some time later, while they were being treated by the ship's doctor, Steve Dawson and I had dinner in the elegant dining room. We were pushing roast pheasant around on our plates, contemplating, in silence, this contrast of luxury and deadly apprehension. Then came an announcement. All four men were fine.

Steve Dawson, who had done himself proud during the rescue, burst into tears.

In the fifth-floor bar later that evening, loud applause rang out when Mike Dunn and the three other men appeared, walking a bit stiffly and ready for a snifter or two of Remy Martin. Several of us took a break from the festivities and walked around the fifth deck. Curtains of green smoke swept across the sky above. Dozens of passengers stood out on the decks, in 30-below weather, to watch the aurora australis color the star-strewn sky.

It had been, I realized, a dazzling and savage trip. The first Antarctic landfall, in Cape Evans, had featured mortality and spectacle in about even measure: a cross on the hill and a watermelon snowfall. Not now. I looked at the luminous sky and tried to see it through Mike Dunn's eyes.

keep these larvae warm and apparently succulent, the accomplished ice fisherman places them between the cheek and gum, like a plug of tobacco.

It is this sort of thing, I believe, that has skewed Jim Harrison's attitude toward the sport. The novelist is a renowned gourmand.

Or maybe it's the people who drive their vehicles right out onto the ice and fish who amuse Harrison. Every year, in the late fall and early spring, someone sinks his Blazer. Others tow small icehouses out onto the lake, complete with wood-burning stoves, and they sit on wooden benches, inside, and stare into small holes where very nearly somnolent perch drift listlessly by succulent maggots. You need to "jig" the perch, which is to say, lift the bait up and down in front of them. Sometimes the perch take the maggot.

Ice fishermen, dressed like winos in layer upon layer of jackets and slacks, drink schnapps, play pinochle, watch football on battery-operated TVs, and fail to notice when the red flags snap up on the tip-ups they've installed outside the shack. Tip-ups are fish-ambush devices, small wooden contraptions attached to a line through the ice. The bait, a minnow, swims about, and when a big fish hits it—a northern pike or a muskie—a red flag pops up. In theory, an ice fisherman sees this through the fluttering plastic window of the shack, dashes outside, and hauls in the fish of a lifetime, hand over hand.

In practice, of course, the fishermen never notice the tip-up flags. They are playing pinochle, or dangling spittle-soaked larvae in front of a mesmerized four-inch perch. Some of them are out engaged in political campaigning: On certain lakes, hundreds of fishing shacks are set out side by side, in a kind of town grid, and a mayor is elected. Other men may be engaged in more distracting activities: It is said that an incredibly hardy band of hookers work the frozen ice cities.

In Montana a cross-country skier may drill a hole in a frozen lake and catch a good-sized lake trout on a piece of canned corn. That's what I'd always heard. On the morning of the day I was to have dinner with Jim Harrison, my friend John Olson and I strapped snowshoes on our boots and made for Hidden Lake,

which was nestled in the peaks, at nine thousand feet, about three thousand feet above the trailhead. We traded off carrying the ice auger, a fairly light plastic drill three and a half feet long and edged in surgical steel.

Snowshoes are not my favorite form of winter locomotion. They're okay on the flats and all right if the path goes directly up or downhill. On steep side hills it is hard to set an edge with snowshoes. A man tends to fall; he rolls up in a big snowball, with the blades of the auger bouncing erratically, now over there, now inches from his eyes. This process suggests certain unpleasant headlines:

MORON, SLASHED BY OWN AUGER, BLEEDS TO DEATH.

Finally, at three in the afternoon, we hit the lake, which was a frozen expanse just below a series of jagged spires that formed the top of the range. The sun was hidden behind a peak, and the sky was gray. The temperature stood at 20 below zero, and the wind was blowing about forty miles an hour.

John and I stood on the ice, hunched over in misery, staring at a hole it had taken us twenty minutes to drill. The gray water was the same color as the sky above.

"Has the lake been stocked?" I asked through gritted teeth. Sometimes the Forest Service stocks the high lakes with rare golden trout. Sometimes they are stocked with rainbow or brown or brook trout.

"Don't know," John said.

"Just cuts then?"

Cuts are cutthroat trout, our native species.

"Don't know."

Sometimes the high lakes do not contain fish.

"You don't know if there are any fish here?"

"Came here to find out."

The wind was picking up the powdery snow, and it swirled around us in a waist-high ground blizzard.

What we discovered, on this day, was that there seemed to be no fish of any kind in the lake. (This perception may have been caused by frozen maggots.)

163 A THE NATURAL WORLD

It was dark by the time we got back to the truck, and late by the time we got home. A quick shower and I was on the road. The hosts for the dinner with Harrison, longtime friends, said that the milelong road to their home had not been plowed. I was to bring my four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Now, over the years, I have been to this house dozens of times, perhaps hundreds, but in the dark and snow, I missed the turn and drove two miles overland, through crusty drifts, when it occurred to me that the truck was behaving badly. I stopped, with the engine running, and steam erupted from under the hood. It was coming from a rupture in one of the radiator hoses. The wind was howling at sixty miles an hour.

I climbed on top of the cab of the truck and took my bearings. The lights of the house I wanted were off in the distance, about five miles through the snow. I was out in the middle of a field owned by a local rancher who was notoriously inflexible about trespassing. The wind was blowing the steam in such a way that an inch of ice had already formed on the windshield. There was ice in my beard and ice coating the entire front of my body.

One of the many things I thought at that moment was that I was going to miss dinner with Jim Harrison and would not be able to defend the intelligence of ice fishermen.

Instead, I planned to stand there in the freezing steam for another few hours and mold myself into a noble ice sculpture, a heroic figure atop a disabled vehicle, a seasonal tourist attraction: the Moronic Sportsman.

165 A THE NATURAL WORLD

The tarpon's epic journey into one of the most dense and isolated jungles on the face of the earth takes them past the silent ruins of the ancient Mayas, past the massive stone palaces and ball courts of this most advanced pre-Colombian culture. The tarpon spawn in the heart of the low-lying jungles of El Peten, where, in the first thousand years after Christ, the Mayan culture soared to its greatest heights.

Only in the past few years have sport fishermen discovered Lake Petexbatun and the tarpon it contains. Only in the last few years have professional archaeologists penetrated the depths of the nearby jungles and begun excavation of the Mayan ruins.

I jumped at the chance to visit a lodge on Petexbatun Lake and sample both the tarpon and the ruins. A good part of my eagerness had to do with the fact that while others have caught tarpon on spinning rods or casting rigs, no one, as far as I knew, had ever caught a Petexbatun tarpon on fly-fishing gear. With a little luck, and some scientific angling, I would be the first. Fly-fishing is a snobbish affair; a true fly-fisherman, a purist, would rather not catch fish at all if he can't catch them on a fly.

I packed my rods and reels, my collection of saddle hackle flies from Dan Bailey's, my jungle boots, my books about the Maya— The Maya by Michael D. Coe is probably the best introductory text—and caught the flight to Guatemala City. Aviateca, the Guatemalan national airline, runs a series of remarkably informal flights to the city of Flores in the center of the state of El Peten. There was a curious amalgam of passengers on the flight: prosperous-looking Guatemalan businessmen on their way to make lumber or oil deals in Flores, elderly tourists and hippie backpackers on their way to the great Mayan temple complex at Tikal, and a number of Indians in sandals, some of whom carried turkeys in wooden crates.

At the Flores airport I was met by representatives of Panamundo, the Guatemalan travel service that owns the lodge at Lake Petexbatun. We stowed the gear in the back of a four-wheel-drive Scout and headed south for Sayaxche. The map said it was forty miles, over an all-weather road, but the drive took two and a half hours. The road was a cruel joke, a rutted wash-

board, insidiously studded with small, kidney-jolting rocks. A fine, drizzling mist splattered the windshield, and the rain intensified the odor of the jungle, which rose like an endless green wall on both sides of the road. It was not an unpleasant odor; it was, in fact, rather sweet, like syrup and day-old cut flowers combined with a certain distant muskiness.

At Sayaxche, on the Rio Pasion, we transferred the gear into a large, canoelike vessel dug out from a single immense mahogany log. The boatman was named Conrado, and he was joined by Liko, a representative of Panamundo. Conrado yanked the twenty-horsepower outboard into life, and we set off up the Pasion and into the Rio Petexbatun. The water was dark, black, almost like oil, but with no hint of thickness. The river flowed so slowly that it seemed almost still, and the black water glittered with a metallic sheen. Sometimes, the reflection of thick, low clouds loomed up out of those dark, gleaming waters and, near shore, the river shone with the myriad shades of green in the jungle wall. The odor here was more intense—Liko pointed out orchids growing in absurd profusion—and this heavy greenhouse fragrance was combined with a new smell, something a touch brackish and bracing, like a saltwater marsh. The river was a pleasure after the torture of the road. Tiny deer drank from the river, turtles slipped into the river before us, and snowy egrets rose ahead of the boat. The air was thick, warm, and floral, and we were accompanied by a constant symphony of unfamiliar birdsong.

The sun began to set, unseen behind a dark layer of clouds. Conrado steered the dugout through a small wall of reeds, and suddenly we were on Lake Petexbatun, a small body of water, still and black as onyx against the overhanging greenery of the jungle wall. There were a few thatched-roof huts set in clearings along the shore, and the flickering light of kerosene lanterns shone through the glassless open windows. The sun sank below the clouds, and its light set them aflame so that their color glistened, in the stillness of the lake, and Petexbatun seemed, for a moment, like a great, blood-warm reservoir of light and color in the darkness of the jungle.

Presently, Conrado pulled into a break in the jungle wall. Two

dogs erupted into a furious crescendo of barking and yelping as we tied the boat to a tree. A thin, elderly black man stood behind the dogs. His name was Albert, and he escorted us along the stone path to the Petexbatun Lodge.

It was a thatched-roof affair, very much like the huts we had passed—same style, same materials, same workmanship—except that it had two stories and seemed much sturdier. Albert took us up to the second story. My room had a bed, a foam mattress, and a kerosene lantern.

Albert noticed two bottles of rum among my gear—we had been advised that the old caretaker took an occasional dram— and escorted us downstairs for dinner and a drink. He fried some catfish he had caught on fixed lines. The fillets were perfect: Albert is an open-fire gourmet.

He was also something of a raconteur. Originally from Belize (formerly British Honduras), Albert spoke an eloquent nineteenth-century English with a Caribbean lilt. "We has some heavy fishes in this lake, mon. Ah, they come in on first flood, in September." Albert spoke with the wisdom of age, and, as the night progressed, with the animation of rum. He introduced us to the dogs, Lassie and Jet, and to the parrots, Marie and Lorenzo. Albert declared that Lorenzo spoke perfect Spanish. "He says, 'Lorenzo, lorito bonito.' " The words mean "Lorenzo, pretty little parrot," and when, after an eternity of coaxing, Lorenzo finally squawked, "Loreeko loreeko loreeko," Albert smiled like a proud parent. Lorenzo would take your finger along with a cracker, and he had a voice like a buzz saw tearing through a pine knot. Albert, of course, spent most of his time at the lodge alone with this cantankerous bird.

Albert has been caretaker, cook, and resident fishing guru at the lodge for ten years. The place was built by archaeologists who used it as a base during their study of nearby and recently discovered ruins. Albert said he had enjoyed the company of the archaeologists. "Ah, they brought wines of the finest variety from the land of France," he informed me grandly. I felt a bit shabby with my two bottles of local rum. "Whisky from Scotland," Albert went on. "Oh, we had some fine times. . . ."

The night was cool—incredibly, there were almost no mos-

quitoes or other noxious stinging insects—and it was pleasant to listen to the whisper of rain on the thatched roof and on the jungle canopy. It sounded like sustained applause, like an ovation heard faintly from a distance. Albert held forth on the proper method for catching tarpon, on the Mayan ruins, on the foolishness of civilized man. There was something almost unbearably romantic about sitting there with my glass of rum, quite comfortable in the midst of one of the thickest and most remote jungles on the face of the earth.

The days were alternately sodden and bright. Heavy tropical clouds formed and reformed over the water. They were dark, operatic, even Wagnerian, these clouds, quite beautiful in their own way. For several hours each afternoon the clouds gave way to blue skies and welcome sunshine that glittered off beaded rainwater on the vegetation. Occasionally, drifting near shore in Con-rado's dugout, we'd spot large tarpon, rolling indolently. The fish are air-breathers, and they surface much like dolphins, their silver scales stark against the darkness of the water.