In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “I’ve got survival training tomorrow.”

  “Happy Camp. Have a party. They’ll put a five-gallon plastic bucket on your head to simulate a whiteout, like that’s going to really learn you.” She shook her head. “It’s not their fault. There’s just entirely too much to absorb. I’ve been down here seven seasons, and some days I feel like I’m only just getting the hang of it.”

  Five minutes’ additional brisk hike brought them to the end of the point. There, the ground dropped off precipitously on three sides, plunging fifty feet to the frozen sea below. The ice met the land in a jumble of heaved-up slabs where the winds and tides had worked it, like puckered waves stilled by a snapshot in the act of slapping the shore.

  Someone had erected a cross at the summit of a small rise at the very end of the point, and just below it, Valena could see a gently sloping roof made of wood and built in the shape of a shallow pyramid. It was supported by posts. Valena assumed that this must be a protective canopy erected to preserve the original structure, which must exist as ruins underneath; after all, she reckoned, more than one hundred years of fierce Antarctic weather had thrashed it since Scott’s men had built it.

  One hundred years, thought Valena. Not much more than the average human lifetime. In all the lifetimes of the human species, great civilizations had arisen and fallen and been built again on all six other continents, but here in Antarctica, the touch of humanity was this new, a tiny foothold on an unimaginably large expanse of ice. This had been the last continent to be located, the hardest to reach, and by far the most difficult on which to maintain even this fragile encampment. Less than two hundred years ago, there was no southern continent on world maps. In the 1770s, Cook sailed around a southern sea choked with ice but could only hypothesize that land lay beyond it. So obscuring was its veil of ice that land wasn’t sighted until 1820, tantalizing yet unapproachable through a ship captain’s spyglass.

  Valena moved closer to the cliff to look off toward the Transantarctic Mountains, drawn simultaneously by emptiness and fulfillment and the fear that she would not make it to the continent itself but instead be sent home in an agony of frustration.

  “Don’t wander too close to the edge,” said Cupcake. “That cross there? It’s for this guy Vince somebody, who was the first man to die in McMurdo Sound. He fell off this cliff in the middle of a blizzard. They never found his body.”

  “I shall proceed with respect, then.”

  Cupcake pointed at the hut. “When you’re done ogling the scenery, join me in there.”

  The sun was high in the northern sky, throwing shadows to the south, the reverse of what she had grown to consider normal back home in North America. She shook her head. Her world was turned upside down and inside out or, more accurately, outside in. As a particularly strong gust of frozen wind bowled in off the ice, Valena turned and followed Cupcake to the low, square structure.

  Two women stood underneath the overhanging roof by a door that led into the hut. “Please brush all the snow off your boots,” one instructed, as she welcomed them in out of the wind.

  Valena scraped her enormous blue boots. “Where does the original hut begin?” she inquired.

  “This is the hut.”

  “But the wood looks almost new!”

  “Things don’t rot out here.”

  The windows were small, sparse, and recessed under the veranda, so the interior was dim, its darkness exaggerated by a thick accumulation of soot on the walls and ceiling. Two pairs of antique outer pants hung on a clothesline. Heaps of strange substances were stacked near one wall.

  Catching her inquiring gaze, a man who was standing there wrestling the legs of a camera tripod said, “Hundred-year-old seal blubber. Want to try some? It’s good with garlic.”

  Valena gave him a smile. He was a moderate-sized man of husky build and was endowed with pendulous mustaches that bristled with gray. He wore a blue watch cap, and instead of the blaze-red Valena wore, the shell of his parka was made of light brown canvas. A pair of faux tortoiseshell half-glasses gave him an oddly professorial air, and he gazed through them now at the leg-extension catches on his unruly tripod. With a final tweak, the last of the legs slid down into place. He jiggled it around, getting it into position, and then, apparently satisfied, he opened the top of his parka and produced an old Nikon F2 camera, which he clipped onto the top of the tripod.

  Cupcake appeared at his elbow. “Oh, good, you’ve found each other. Ted, this is Valena. She’s a student of Emmett Vanderzee’s.”

  Ted closed his eyes for several moments. When he opened them again, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  Valena waited.

  Cupcake said, “Valena just arrived yesterday afternoon, and it was news to her that her professor wasn’t going to be here to greet her.”

  Ted closed his eyes again and sighed heavily. “That’s very bad luck for the young lady, but what exactly do you expect me to do about it?”

  “I want you to talk to her. Tell her what you know.”

  Pain suffused Ted’s voice as he said, “I know very little.”

  Cupcake put a hand tenderly on Ted’s shoulder. “But you were there, so you know stuff.”

  “I was in the camp, but I wasn’t there when the guy died.”

  “Then tell her that much.”

  Ted finally reopened his eyes and looked deep into Valena’s.

  “Anything you can tell me would help me understand,” Valena said. “Anything at all.”

  Ted looked away. After a moment, with great consternation, he unclipped his camera and began folding up his tripod.

  “I’m sorry,” Valena told him. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work. Would you like me to meet you later on, maybe? When you’re done?”

  “No, young lady, I am now done for the day, trust me on that. But we’re not going to talk about this here.”

  Cupcake said, “When someone dies out here, it really gets to people, especially if they knew the person, even if he was a raging jackass.” Focusing her sharp eyes on Ted, she added, “Especially if you think you could have changed things had you stayed in camp. It wasn’t your fault, Ted.”

  “Then it was nobody’s fault. That’s what’s so ridiculous about yanking Emmett off the ice. He didn’t kill that man any more than I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

  “In a previous life, Ted. That’s why you’re so good at contacting your feminine side.”

  “Stuff it up your tailpipe, Cupcake.”

  Ted dropped his camera into a ziplock bag, then opened his parka halfway and tucked the bag inside the top of his bib overalls, up against a layer of navy blue fleece, and pulled his zipper back up to his chin. With a softly paternal tone, he advised Valena, “If you take your camera indoors when it’s cold, the condensation will screw it up. And the battery has to stay warm to work. It will die at these temperatures so fast you wouldn’t believe it, but if you warm it up again, it comes back.”

  “When are you going to get a digital camera?” Cupcake chided.

  “Sweet thing, I am a devout Luddite. I will still be shooting film when you’re gumming your soup in some home for the ancient and insane.” He glanced over his shoulder at Valena. “Kind of silly shooting print film, considering that I don’t see the results of my work until I go back north, but it’s what fires my rocket.”

  Outside in the glare and reflection of twenty-four-hour sunlight and wraparound ice, Ted led the way up the short hill to Vince’s Cross. There, he set down his gear and looked out across the frozen sea toward the continent. “You know your landmarks yet, Valena?” he inquired.

  “Not really.”

  “That bit of meringue is the Royal Society Range, just one small section of the Transantarctic Mountains. Scott named it in honor of the sponsors of his 1902 expedition. You’ll find lots of stuff like that around here, things named for people who never set foot on the ice. The Transantarctics run for three thousand kilometers, and here and there, glaciers flowing from the Polar Plateau flow
down valleys onto the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Ross Ice Shelf. To get to the Pole, you have to climb up one glacier or another and then continue on across the Polar Plateau. He had to drag his supplies up over the mountains somewhere, but where? You want to go inland as far as possible across the ice shelf before you start to climb, because the higher you get, the colder it gets, and the pole is 9,200 feet above sea level.”

  He pointed southward, to the left of the range, toward a group of lower summits that stood somewhat closer. “He headed out past those islands. That’s White Island to the east, then Minna Bluff—keep an eye on Minna; if it disappears, a storm’s coming and you have about two hours to take cover—then Black Island, Mount Discovery, and the Brown Peninsula. Black Island is the closest, at about twenty-five miles hence.

  “They came in by sea, not like us lazybones who fly down; they were at sea in the wildest weather for weeks. They sailed in during the height of summer when the ice was broken out, all the way to this point, and dropped anchor, spent the winter, and started out south the following spring. That was the way of it. They couldn’t get close enough to make the pole in one season, because the ice freezes out hundreds of miles to sea, and it doesn’t break out until December or January, and some years not at all. So they had to wait for their access, then unload their supplies and begin to set up depots, then hunker down and wait out the long winter night. When the sun rose again, they went out around White Island and continued south across the Ross Ice Shelf. The ice is riddled with crevasses where it flows around those islands, so that must have been a joy. That’s my job, you see. I blow up things that are in peoples’ way around here.”

  Valena nodded, letting him know that she understood, though she wasn’t certain that she did.

  Ted said, “So he took his best shot, picked a glacier, and made his climb. Then he was not only fighting the cold, but also the altitude. He crested 10,200 feet. That first attempt was unsuccessful, you’ll recall—only got to eighty-two south.” He threw up his hands. “Only eighty-two south? For Christ’s sake, can you imagine the effort that took? They did it on foot, dragging a sledge—just a few miles a day, the conditions were so bad—and with no idea what lay beyond, because no one had been there before. They had to turn back at eighty-two or die. Why? Because they’d dragged their asses up that glacier. It burns up a lot of energy when you keep falling into crevasses, and let me tell you, you can’t always see them before the snow that’s bridging them falls out from underneath you.”

  “They were lucky to be alive,” said Cupcake.

  Valena listened intently. She could never have imagined the dimensions of Scott’s undertaking without standing here at the edge of the ice—the barrier, they called it—with the wind buffeting her, her cocoon of down and polypropylene all that stood between her and certain frostbite. And this is a balmy spring day, she reminded herself.

  Ted said, “Well, that’s how it goes around here. You drum up the money to make a try at a goal—the geographic pole, or some key bit of scientific understanding—and then off you go into all that ice and you do your best. Thing is, you’ll never do it perfectly. You’ll never learn everything you set out to know. You’ll never be perfectly satisfied with yourself, or your accomplishments. But you go, and go again, until you make it or you die trying.”

  Cupcake said, “You’re stalling, Ted.”

  Valena turned to look at the man. She had to turn her whole body, because the hood of her parka was in the way. She waited.

  Ted dropped his gaze. “Your Dr. Vanderzee is a smart man, a driven man. He had questions he wanted answered. He drove really hard to get to them. And now he’s been turned back, short of his goal.”

  The use of the past tense was not lost on Valena. Had questions. Wanted answered. Drove hard. As evenly as she could, she said, “I’m here to continue his work.”

  Ted nodded. “Good. Good.”

  Cupcake said, “Tell her what it was like up there. She needs to know, Ted.”

  “Yeah, I’m stalling. That damned newspaper’s been hounding me since last year—nice way to spend my off time, dodging weasels with microphones—and now here we are with federal marshals hauling scientists off the ice. It’s just not good. The next thing we’ll have is some kind of fundamentalist preachers down here telling us the earth is flat.”

  Cupcake said, “I missed something in your reasoning, Ted. How’d you get from the Financial News to Bible thumpers?”

  Ted set his jaw. “It’s all one ball of wax.” He stared at his boots, kicked at a shard of ice. “And I don’t mean honest, God-fearing people, I mean the jerks who take advantage of them. It’s all a game of opportunism.” He sighed. “Okay, what do you need to know, young lady?”

  Valena said, “Who was in the camp when it happened? And why’s the newspaper been hounding you? I mean, there was a certain amount of ruckus on the grapevine at the University, but, well, I suppose Dr. Vanderzee did his best to keep it out of sight.”

  Ted nodded. “He’s a gentleman, your Emmett, when nobody’s poking him with sharp sticks. Well, okay, kid, let’s head for somewhere warmer so I can calm myself with a nice, cold beer.”

  Cupcake said, “Gotcha covered, Ted. Got a six of Monteith’s Black in the fridge.”

  “Lead on, m’lady.”

  They walked in silence back up the trail to McMurdo, cut along the top of the bluff toward a row of dormitories, and ducked inside the last one. Cupcake’s room was at the far end of the corridor on the ground floor. Valena surmised that Cupcake must have greater rank than she did, because the room was shared by only two people.

  Again, it was like college: all furniture except for the beds had been arranged in a line down the middle of the tiny room to form a barricade, dividing it into two. Cupcake had the far section and had arranged India-print bedspreads to give it the ambiance of a tent. Her mattress was on the floor. Half-burned incense lay about in little stone trays. The effect evoked a Far Eastern bordello.

  Cupcake opened a midget refrigerator and pulled out a can of suds for each and settled into a cuddly heap on the mattress with Ted.

  Valena grabbed the only chair. More and more, she felt like she had passed through a looking-glass into an obscure form of hell. It’s like going to college with your mom and dad and everything you never wanted to know about them, she decided.

  Ted popped the opener on his can and drained half of it in one gulp, sighed, and gave Cupcake a wet kiss on the cheek. “You’re okay, Dorothy.”

  “Dorothy?” asked Valena.

  Cupcake swatted Ted across the chops. “Damn you! It’s bad enough being called Cupcake without you trot out that old horror. Dickhead!”

  Ted kissed her again, going for her lips this time.

  Cupcake growled, letting it slide into a purr.

  “Should I come back later?” Valena asked.

  Ted patted Cupcake on the knee. “She’s got a low kindling point, eh? But go ahead and ask your questions.”

  “Who was in Emmett’s camp last year?”

  Ted sighed. He used his beer can to count off fingers on the opposite hand. “Vanderzee. Bob Schwartz and Dan Lindemann, the two grad students—the only other grantees—and yeah, they’re down here again this year. Bob’s with a crew from the University of Maine, and Dan … well, I forget, but I’ve seen him.”

  “Oh, great! Maybe I can talk to them.”

  Cupcake said, “Sure, you can go over to Mac Ops and give Dan a whistle.”

  “What’s Mac Ops?”

  “The radio relay station. It’s right over there—that building with all the antennas on it, upstairs from the Airlift Wing, next to the weather station. They monitor all frequencies around the clock, and each field camp has to check in at least once out of the twenty-four.”

  “How far away is the U Maine field camp?”

  “Out in the Dry Valleys somewhere. Under an hour, by helicopter.”

  “Can I maybe hitch a ride out there?”

  Cupcake laughe
d sardonically. “No, you can’t. Between NSF building the new South Pole Station and Raytheon trying to make a profit, things have gotten screwed down so tight you can hear their assholes squeak. Used to be you could hitch a ride anywhere they had an empty seat, but those days are gone.”

  Valena said, “Okay, so there were two grad students in Emmett’s camp last year, and of course Emmett himself. That’s three. Who else?”

  Ted continued counting on his fingers. “Sheila Tuttle, that’s your cook, an Aussie. She’d be Raytheon. She’s up at Black Island this year. Good place for her. She’s kind of a grouch.”

  “There was a cook?”

  “Hard work, those high-altitude camps. You need someone looking after the calories. Of course, she had other duties as well. Nobody in a field camp ever finds himself with time on his hands unless it’s storming, and then you just try to catch up on your sleep.” He went back to his count. “I borrowed David from Fleet Ops to help me with the machinery. So he was Raytheon, too. Then there was William what’s-his-name, the dogsbody, also Raytheon.”

  “Dogsbody?”

  “The Boss sent him along to do some heavy lifting.” He started his counting over again with his thumb. “Manuel Roig, mountaineer; Raytheon. They sent him in with Sweeny to babysit, keep him out of trouble. Hah. Calvin Hart, who was Emmett’s helper, so I guess you can put him on the grantee list. I think he’s out in deep field helping with the drill for the WAIS Divide project.”