Surviving Antarctica (16 page)

“Those floes may not be stable,” Robert replied. Didn’t Andrew realize that if he fell into the water, he’d probably die? Robert had made a pact with himself not to consider the viewers, but now he could feel their eyes on him. The viewers wouldn’t want Andrew to risk his life.

“I’ve got to,” Andrew said stubbornly.

Don’t worry about those dumb viewers, Robert chided himself. Think for yourself. You know it will be safer if you save those ponies. What if the mutts never cooperate? The motors can’t pull much stuff. How are you going to haul all the gear to the Pole? “Go for it,” Robert said to Andrew.

Andrew could hear the creaks and groans of ice splitting in the distance. He stood up and cautiously tried the first floe. It seemed stable. He walked across it to the next one. There was only about a yard separating the two floes. He
jumped and skidded onto the second floe.

The next floe was farther away, but he jumped the watery divide easily. Of course, if the floe moved before he started back with the ponies, his return trip might be harder. But he couldn’t let himself think about that. All he could think about right now was that Milky and Cookie were drifting out to sea.

He jumped again, and then a fourth and a fifth time, but the space between him and the next floe, the one with the ponies, was too far for him to jump. He pulled out his ice pick, tied it to a rope, and threw it toward the floe. It caught the ice, and he pulled on the rope with all his might. Slowly the floe inched toward him. When it was close enough, Andrew jumped. The tip of his boot touched the icy water.

He wouldn’t let himself think about what would happen to him if he fell in. He picked up each pony’s rope. Holding the ends in one hand, he jumped across to the nearest floe. Then he faced the ponies. “This is it, girls,” he said. He pulled on Milky’s rope. The pony dug her hooves into the ice and wouldn’t budge.

“Please, Milky. Please, pony. Just jump.”

No, she seemed to say.

Andrew looked into Cookie’s eyes. Maybe,
she seemed to answer.

He put Milky’s rope on the ground and stood on it. Then he pulled on Cookie’s rope with both his hands.

The short, squat pony sailed across the water and landed so close to him that he almost fell back.

“It’s safer to try to bring one back! Just leave the other one!” Robert called.

Andrew acted as if he hadn’t heard. With Cookie next to him, he knew, Milky would come. He took hold of Milky’s rope and yanked it, and this time Milky jumped. It was a powerful leap. She looked like she was going to clear the water, but she changed her mind midway and faltered. Her forelegs struck the ice floe, but her back legs landed in the ocean. Her forelegs slipped backward.

The splash of water hit Cookie, and she reared back. The ice floe tilted, and Andrew almost slipped into the water. He dropped Milky’s rope, caught hold of Cookie’s tail, and pulled himself to her.

“Let the pony go!” Robert shouted. “Come on back.”

Milky was thrashing around in the cold water. Andrew had never felt so sorry for any animal in his life. He reached down, grabbed
her wet rope, and pulled. She lifted her head out of the water. Her eyes rolled back until Robert was staring at big white globes.

He let the rope drop to his side.

She sank back down. He wasn’t strong enough to pull her out alone.

“Robert, come help me!” Andrew called.

“No, we can’t risk it!” Robert yelled. “Come on back!”

Andrew tied the end of Milky’s rope to Cookie’s halter and tried to get Cookie to step forward. She took a few steps, but the ice floe was small. This time Milky’s head didn’t even come up out of the water, only a cloud of blood.

Andrew stared into the water. He saw a dark shape dart from under the floe. More blood gurgled up, so dark that it was almost brown.

“What is it, Andrew?” Robert called.

“Just a fish!” Andrew yelled. Poor Milky.

“It could be dangerous!” Robert warned. “Watch out!” He imagined that Polly was there, scolding him as he argued with her: What am I supposed to say to Andrew? “Watch out for killer whales?” The poor guy is on a tiny floe and still has to lead the other pony back. I don’t want him to panic.

Andrew looked closely into the water. Milky’s guts were floating up to the surface like
a string of blood sausages. He turned his eyes away.

“What are you staring at?” Robert called to him.

“Looks like sharks!” Andrew called back. The churning water reminded him of a scene from a horror movie.

He sounds amazingly calm, Robert thought.

Robert, Andrew, and Cookie didn’t make it to shore until four hours later.

Polly hugged Andrew.

Grace patted him on the back.

Billy shook his hand and said, “Good job.”

“You’re a hero,” Polly said.

“But I lost Milky,” Andrew replied.

“You’re a hero anyway,” Polly said.

In all his life, Andrew had never once thought that anyone would call him a hero. He was sorry that he had lost Milky, but he couldn’t help beaming. Then he remembered the floating guts. “Sharks got her.”

Polly looked sharply at Robert.

“Hey, I know. But don’t make too much of the coincidence,” Robert said to her.

“It proves that the dangers Scott and his men faced are the same dangers we face today,” Polly said.

“Polly, Scott and his men didn’t make it. We’re going to,” Robert said. He couldn’t put his anger into words. But he sensed that Polly believed getting to the Pole was impossible.

“What are you guys talking about?” Andrew asked.

“Scott lost a couple of ponies to killer whales. Polly warned me before you left. I didn’t want you to panic,” Robert explained.

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Andrew said, and then wondered if he would have been more scared returning over that open water if he had thought about the fact that the killers were real, not props in a horror movie.

“See,” Robert lectured Polly, “we have to be optimistic.”

Polly almost laughed. If only Robert knew how hard that was. Besides everything else, it was cold, so cold here. She shivered. The shivers made her do a little dance in the soft light.

“We need to go,” Robert said. With the morning gone, they’d be lucky if they made ten miles instead of the fifteen he had counted on.

WHEN STEVE WOKE
up, he immediately sensed that something was wrong. He glanced at his clock on the table beside him. It said 7
P.M.
He was over an hour late for work, and it was the day that the kids were setting out for the Pole. He hadn’t watched that afternoon’s episode of
Historical Survivor.
He felt completely out of touch. Anything could have happened to the kids!

I must have forgotten to set my alarm, he thought as he threw on a T-shirt and pants. He grabbed a few slices of bread and ran out the door.

Steve started jogging down the narrow path
through Shanty Town. The homes were a hodgepodge of corrugated metal, plasterboard, plastic, wood, and other recycled materials. There were no sidewalks, but every so often a huge orange trash can with
CLEAN STREETS, CLEAN MINDS
written on it in bold black letters dominated a front yard. Laundry flapped in the breeze, and everywhere he looked he saw a maze of antennas and the blue glow of television screens.

Steve left Shanty Town behind and started through the high-end district, full of expensive town houses and restaurants. Since most businesses were open twenty-four hours, the street was full of people coming from and going to work, shopping, and running errands.

As he passed a row of fancy town houses, a loudspeaker blared out a Fair Society commercial:
“Life’s a game. Each person gets a Toss. Winners are winners. Losers are losers. But it’s not like the old days, when life wasn’t fair. Now everybody gets a chance.”

A light went off in a window of one of the elegant homes. A coworker had told him that the Secretary lived somewhere on this street, in a luxury town house with a mood room, three fireplaces, and a heart-shaped Jacuzzi in her bathroom.

The Secretary was going to sleep in a bed with silk sheets while five kids were facing their first day trekking in subzero weather. Steve didn’t care what the government wanted him to believe. Life wasn’t fair.

When Steve finally made it through the door of the production room, several members of the night shift were standing around in front of the screens. “What happened?” he cried.

Chad turned around and looked at him. “Why are you late?” he said.

Steve felt himself flush. “I forgot to set my alarm.”

“Did you watch the program today?” Chad asked.

“No.”

“The ponies got caught on an ice floe, and Andrew tried to rescue them,” Chad said.

“Andrew was a hero,” John Matthews said.

“Andrew got Cookie back,” Jacob explained. “But Milky didn’t make it.”

“He took a horrible risk,” Chad said, looking into Steve’s eyes.

Steve hung his head. “I should have been here.”

“It happened this morning. The Secretary broadcast the scene live,” Chad said. “You
couldn’t have helped anyway.”

“We watched the episode earlier tonight than usual. We just got back from the screening room,” Raymond Chiles explained.

“You’ll be so proud of the kids,” Jacob said.

Steve felt the eyes of the whole crew on him.

“Is he the Voice?” Raymond muttered.

“Yes,” Chad said.

“But we barely know him,” John objected.

“I knew his father,” Chad explained. “We can trust him.”

“Excitement’s over.” John turned toward the basement.

“He’d better keep our secret.” Raymond’s tone was stern.

But Steve hardly heard Raymond’s warning, because he had just noticed that the screens weren’t all dark. The kids were still traveling. He hadn’t missed the whole day!

“Let’s go play cards!” John called to the group.

“So tell me exactly what happened,” Steve said to Jacob, but his eyes were on the live screens.

Robert, riding one snowcycle, with Billy and Polly on the other, blazed the trail. Andrew followed, riding Cookie. Driving the dogsled, Grace
brought up the rear. The sun, still hanging unnaturally low in the sky, looked as discouraged as Grace felt.

Although Grace’s grandfather had a house in Alaska, he spent hunting season moving from place to place. He had felt stuck in Arizona and had hated living on a reservation. “Life should be lived on the move,” he used to say.

But so far dogsledding hadn’t been the smooth ride across ice that her grandfather had so lovingly described. It had been a series of jerky lurches. And Grace didn’t feel like a fearless Eskimo on a hunt, but like a frustrated American on a vacation gone wrong.

Even the analogies that popped into her head were American, not Iñupiat. Dogsledding was like riding in a car that was alive. What was the car going to do next? Which way was it going to turn? She had to stay attuned to every twitch of dog muscle, every howl and every growl.

Apatosaurus nipped Diplodocus; Diplodocus halted. The dogs in the back line toppled over those in the front line. Grace got out of the dogsled, straightened the traces, cuffed Apatosaurus and Diplodocus, and then climbed back into the sled. Her dogs didn’t understand that they needed to maintain a steady pace on
the trail. What was she doing wrong?

They had been traveling for a while, but the mountains appeared no closer. After spending the morning rescuing the ponies, they had spent the afternoon adjusting the sled contents and hooking up the sleds. Robert seemed determined to make up the lost time.

The other kids were so far ahead now that they were only specks, but Grace wanted the dogs to move slowly. They made fewer mistakes that way. She let the whip dip beside her and watched the swirling pattern it made in the snow.

Grace could no longer hear the roar of the motors, only the growling of the dogs. The warmth of the sun on her face reaffirmed her sense of the timelessness of this land. For the moment, the dogs were moving forward in rhythm. She wondered if any foot, either human or dog, had ever touched the ground that she was crossing now. If Grace got her wish, she and her dogs would experience the seasons on this plain, more expansive than any she had ever imagined.

Looking around her, Grace compared Antarctica to her home at Pueblo Village. Life on the snow was so different. For one thing, she had never gone so many hours without seeing
trash. For another, if she moved her family to Antarctica, their home would be an igloo.

Her grandfather had told her how to fashion a home out of blocks of ice. How to cut the ice into smaller and smaller blocks, how to lay the largest blocks in a circle and step inside it to put the rest of the blocks up, how to fashion a low arch for an entrance and build a long passageway to break the wind, and how to leave a hole in the top block to let the warm air escape.

She realized that her grandfather had told her many times how to build an igloo, but except for his description of the smell, she had no idea what it was like to stay in one. During hunting season, no one bathed, and together with the grease and smoke, the smell was unique in this world. It was up to her to build her own igloo and find out what it was like to live in one.

T-Rex jerked to the right, and Polacanthus tripped over his traces. The forward motion of the sled dragged him along until Grace stopped it and scolded him. Would she ever get these dogs to run smoothly? She cracked the whip over the dogs until they cringed. She was ashamed of herself as the team started off slowly again. Frustrated as a dog driver, she felt like crying. Grandfather, if you didn’t mean for
me to live here, why did you tell me stories about the woman who adopted a seal and the hunter who became a bear? Why did you describe the taste of seal ribs? Why did you show me how to hunt a whale with a harpoon? Why did you bother to make me want to be part of a tradition six thousand years old? If I’ll never be able to manage the dogs, why did you tease me with a vision of the northern life?

The wind changed, and Brontosaurus howled.

Suddenly the right runner caught in deep snow. The sled edged sideways, and Grace frantically shifted her weight to steady it. But she wasn’t quick enough, because the dogs in the rear stampeded into another pile. You need to pay more attention, she lectured herself as she hopped off.