Deep Ice

One

Henry’s watch alarm nagged at him for fifteen seconds. Then silence, except for the sound of windblown ice crystals testing the orange-and-blue nylon of the tent. But Henry Scott Gibbs had reset his internal clock. He knew there would be no aurora tonight, and probably not for a couple of nights.

September on the Ross Ice Shelf. This time of year the Antarctic winds herald the coming of summer with relentless squalls that rise from nowhere and linger or disappear seemingly with a will of their own.

Sometimes he’d try to be invisible from the wind after he’d set his automatic cameras to monitor the ice-fire rings of blue and green that hung overhead, painting the snow with eerie undulating light and shadow. He had to make sure the cameras were working. Couldn’t afford to waste film if they weren’t. So he had to wait and sleep in short shifts, waking every hour until the sun’s slow rise, and then moving on to a different location.

The wind had been nagging at him lately. It almost seemed nervous. He had the notion it might subside if it couldn’t find him; if it didn’t know he was there; if he hid from it like his dogs did, lying low and letting the snow drift over them as they slept. Once, as an experiment, he’d piled snow over himself; it had seemed to work, but then he’d remembered that snow is ideal insulation. The wind was unaffected.

He didn’t mind the cold. And he’d always been a loner. That’s why he was here, on his own with just a pack of dogs for company, smack in the middle of the largest, deepest and most massive block of ice in the world – the Ross Ice Shelf.

Somewhere in the back of Henry’s brain an automatic switch brought him halfway to consciousness. He did his best to suppress it. His left eye opened briefly and he surveyed the darkness around him. He could sleep. From the sound of the snow on the tent he knew the winds were hitting fifty miles per hour. He heard one of his dogs howl a soft complaint. Was it his favourite, Sadie?

“Spoiled brat,” he mumbled.

It would be nice, he thought, to have his two best friends, Sadie and Shep, curled up next to him, but he knew that to roust the dogs out of their slumber was pointless – it would just stir them up and make them all colder. Best to leave them alone.

Rolling over in his Arctic Blast sleeping bag, he started drifting off. In a few hours, he promised himself, he’d try the radio again. Maybe this time he’d get a weather report. He pulled an arm free of the heavy bag to cool off a little. He was getting hot. His friends used to laugh at him for walking around in the dead of winter in upstate New York wearing only a T-shirt. He would put on a vest when it got
really
cold.

#

When he opened his eyes again it wasn’t his watch but his dogs that were sounding the alarm.

The sun was barely up. He cocked his head to listen, and smiled devilishly. The wind had stopped tugging at his tent.

“Fooled ya. . . bitch,” he muttered to the wind.

“Thought I’d bought it. Thought I was dead, didn’t you?”

His dogs continued the incessant barking. He interrupted his own musings with a sudden burst of impatience. “What the hell are you crappin’ about?” he yelled. “Shep! Shut those bastards up!”

Sadie was whimpering outside the tent. She was the older of his two favourite malamutes, and he admitted openly to coddling her. But now she was at work and had to deal with the elements like the other dogs. Besides, if he let her into the tent when it got cold he’d have to let Shep in too; then the whole team would want in. Shep was Sadie’s son and had taken over her role as lead dog. He was fierce and independent but obeyed Henry’s every whim.

Henry had owned many dogs in his ten years on the Antarctic ice, but none of them outshone Shep. He’d almost lost Sadie a year earlier when they crossed a hidden fissure in the ice. Luckily she had been tied to the rest of the team. She had dangled helplessly, twisted in the nylon cords. He remembered her yelps echoing in that bottomless green chasm for the better part of a half hour before he was able to secure the sled and haul her up. A strap had broken her left front leg and rendered her slightly but permanently disabled. By that time Shep had been experienced enough to take over the role as leader of the team. What amazed Henry was Sadie’s willingness to step down as leader. As soon as he had made the switch, she had immediately assumed a different role. She would run ahead scouting for danger, always seeming to know exactly where Henry wanted to go.

Sadie, Shep and the other seven dogs were Henry’s only family. Every human who had ever been close to him had died, and now, at forty-five, he had one mission in life: his career. The yacht accident in the Bahamas that had taken the lives of his mom and dad, his wife and two kids had left a scar on his soul he knew would never heal. It had been five years since the news had come over the radio, the cold impersonal voice of a coastguardsman saying that the
Felice
was last reported floundering in a storm, radioing a mayday. He had been halfway around the world studying the deep ice when it happened, and somehow the distance had made it harder. By the time he got back, two weeks had passed and all he could do was identify bodies. Everyone he loved was gone. It was as though he was being punished by an angry god for ignoring his family.

He hadn’t lingered, even for the funeral.

Henry unzipped the tent and squinted into the daylight. Shep and Sadie were standing near the tent facing the west. All he could see were their backsides and their wagging tails. He had to force his way through the snow that had drifted around the tent during the night. He looked at his thermometer. Flat on the zero mark.

“Downright balmy,” said Henry as he stood up to scan the horizon. The vastness of the Ross Ice Shelf always astonished him. It was easy to imagine himself alone in the world, and the idea didn’t bother him at all. Maybe he deserved to be alone. He’d be the first to admit he didn’t really like people all that much. And now his dogs were telling him someone or something was out there on the ice.

He lifted his binoculars and examined a dark patch far off on the horizon.

Something was moving out there, but it didn’t seem to be moving towards him.

The dogs continued to bark.

“Shut up, you fuckin’ furbags! I can’t hear myself think!”

Sadie, at his side, wagged her tail and, as always, ignored his complaints and curses.

He focused the binoculars and studied the dark dots silhouetted on the white edge of the world. It was a large team, maybe two. A sizeable group. He watched as they slowly disappeared over the horizon.

Putting down his field glasses, he walked slowly around the tent, checking the lines and testing the flaps, pausing every so often to scan the horizon.

His team was hungry, so he began the chore of feeding them and himself. But before he did that he had to pee. Usually his pee would tell him how cold it was. If it froze before it hit the ground, the cold was a challenge even for him. His college roommate at Minnesota University had called him the man with antifreeze for blood.

“Today’s a wet snow day. Summer’s comin’ soon,” said Henry, studying the yellow-green mark his vitamin- stained urine had made in the snow. He pulled his radio out of his chest pocket, lifted its antenna and punched in a code.

“Now for the morning report,” he said. “Unless you really
are
broken.”

He listened to the static for a minute. He could tel the batteries were strong and that the sound was just electronic static, not a garbled broadcast.

“Fuck it!” He smacked the unit a few times with his gloved hand.

No use. He cursed himself for having thought a smaller radio would be an improvement over his old Stromberg-Carlson. Now he regretted trading it to Doc Swede at McMurdo for the piece of technological crap he was holding. Disgusted, he lowered the antenna and, resisting the urge to throw the radio away, stashed it in his vest pocket and headed back to the tent.

“Time for chow, guys,” he called.

The dogs answered with a chorus of barks and whines.

#

After breakfast he cleaned his cookware with snow and stowed it in its place on the sled packs. He took down the tent and packed it too on the sled. In another twenty minutes he’d hitched up the dogs and mushed them in the direction of home.

McMurdo Base, located on solid ground at the edge of the great ice shelf, was at least fifty miles away. Relatively close by Henry’s standards, but without a radio he knew he was at risk. He wasn’t worried much about his own safety but he didn’t want his dogs to get hurt. Not on his watch. They were innocents, and they were in his care. He’d let his own family down once and it had cost him everything. Even if his only family in the world was now a pack of dogs, he wasn’t going to let
them
down.

Shep leapt forward to lead the pack. He barked smartly at the other dogs, who responded with a unified lurch that snapped Henry’s head back. His hands lightened on the bar and he kicked the ground with three or four thrusts of his right leg. The sled broke free of the ice and moved towards the north. Sensing their accomplishment, the dogs yelped with delight.

“Shut your wet gobs! I’m tired of your shit this morning.”

After they had travelled a mile or so he stopped the team and tried his radio again. Still nothing but static. He remembered the group he’d seen that morning off in the distance. It occurred to him he might be able to get a radio from them and avoid his long trek back to McMurdo.

“Splendid idea,” he said, turning the sled slightly towards the east. “Henry Scott Gibbs of the Antarctic – meteorologist, explorer, now diplomat – you’re a
pisser
!”

Suddenly Shep stopped running, moved off to the right, and started barking. Sadie ran to the front to see what was happening. Henry stopped the sled, thinking Shep might have found a deep crack in the ice.

It proved to be a trail left in the snow by a large party, no doubt the same group he’d seen that morning. As he examined the marks in the snow, his experience told him he was looking at the trail of three dog teams and as many as thirty people. Tread marks indicated the party had a tractor hauling a heavy cargo sled.

“What’s this?” snapped Henry as he examined the tracks. “Shit, this place is getting too crowded. Next they’ll be holding the Winter Olympics here. And you can bet they won’t tell me about it. Always the last to know. Well, Shep and Sadie,” he added, “I guess we got some socializing to do if we want to get our hands on a damned radio.”

Sadie ran alongside the sled as they followed the trail, her grey-and-white mottled coat rippling as she ran. Henry loved to watch her run, and now she seemed full y healed of her injury. Only once in a while did she lose a step to her old war wound. “Atta girl,” he called to her, and he smiled as he caught her taking a quick look at him at him while pretending to ignore his praise. Shep barked, looking ahead and sniffing the snow.

Henry wondered why McMurdo hadn’t told him there was such a large party out on the ice. For a bureaucracy, they were generally on top of things. Nobody wanted to be part of a rescue mission in this part of the world. The Ross Ice Shelf had gobbled up whole dog teams with sudden storms, blasts of bitter cold, and deep fathomless cracks in its skin. You don’t sneak around in Antarctica. Not if you want to live. Everybody learns the two cardinal rules: communication and cooperation. Even Henry followed these rules. He always checked in. He wanted nothing more than to head south and continue his photography of the aurora. He’d been out only a week or so and wasn’t due back for at least a month.

Henry cursed as he saw the tower loom above the snow drifts in the distance. Off to the right was an ice hill – an upheaval caused by some anomaly in the ice. He deduced he was approaching a team of researchers.

He stopped the dogs and examined the group in the distance through his binoculars.

He’d slightly overestimated the size of the group he was following. There were about twenty men setting up a camp and raising a drilling rig from the back of the tractor. As he watched, he had to admire the efficiency of their movements. Each person was moving with a purpose.

It was still morning. They had all day to set up camp. Henry wondered why they were in such a hurry. He could see the tower was a drilling rig and had already begun boring into the ice. Then he saw the flag unfurl from a mast at the top of the drill rig.

“Norwegian,” he said.

#

When they saw him they didn’t wave, but cordialities weren’t always the rule in Antarctica. You generally had your hands full of something out on the ice. Except for the tourists, most people on this continent were either stuck here and wanted off or were reclusive scientific souls who didn’t care if anyone else was around or not. Unwelcome visitors could be on either end of that line. But scientists at least had their work to talk about, and everybody wanted to know about the weather. Once Henry had seen a fistfight suddenly stop because one of the combatants had said something about a coming storm and the other felt compelled to get more information. Most of the time people got along because they simply had to.

Henry waved at the Norwegians. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the three men watching him approach raised their arms to wave back. Then he noticed they had weapons strapped to their backs.

He revised his guess: this must be a group from the Norwegian military on a training mission.

“Hellooooo!” he bellowed as loudly as he could.

One of the strangers reached for his weapon, but the man next to him seemed to tell him to put it away.

As he neared the group, Henry got a strange feeling about them. He decided to stop his team and walk over to say hello. Perhaps if he talked to them for a while they might not be so jumpy. He remembered his rifle was broken down and stowed somewhere in with his tent gear. Why it occurred to him to think this he couldn’t say. He decided to unhitch the dogs. They’d pulled hard to gain on the party they’d been following and deserved a rest. He reached into the canvas sack on the rear of the sled and counted out nine large bone-shaped treats.