In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “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.”

  VALENA 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.”

  Jeannie laughed. “But we’re all genetically close.”

  “Try thinking that when you look like me.”

  Jeannie turned and faced her. “There is no such thing as race.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “All the research done in the past half century has said the same thing: we are all one race with only minor variations, but the mixing is spread all across the globe, the result of constant intermarriage, not just this tribe splitting off from that. And surely you’ve heard about mitochondrial Eve? Each woman on this planet, including you and me, carries the same genetic coding in our mitochondria, with only minor, minor variations that have built up over the millennia. In a manner of speaking, we are all daughters of one ancient mother. We all carry her heritage. We are sisters.” She had begun to make emphatic gestures.
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br />   Valena smiled. “You’re upsetting the penguins.”

  Jeannie pulled in her arms and spoke more quietly. “We all trace ourselves to one small population that lived in southern Africa less than two hundred thousand years ago. Less than two glacial cycles, putting it in the time frame you glaciologists think in.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I was reading a book called Mapping Human History while I was flying down here from the States. Then when I was waiting to change planes in Sydney, I looked around at all the faces of the people who were waiting with me. They were from every part of the globe—Asian, European, African, Polynesian, you name it—and we were all standing in line, all facing into the light, and suddenly I saw what was similar about every face, instead of first seeing the differences.”

  Valena could think of nothing to say, except, “I’d like to see that, too.”

  AT NOON, VALENA PICKED FROM HER BOOTS THE GRIT and other material she had accumulated during her time on Cape Royds. After splitting the sample into two, she put each half into a separate plastic bag, labeled them, signed them with the date, and passed them to Nat and Jeannie to do the same. She then taped the ziplock edges shut and ran staples all along through the tape so that no bag could be opened and reclosed without leaving an obvious path of disruption. She repeated this process with grit from Nat’s boots, and then Jeannie’s, and added to the pile the tiny collection of glass shards lent by the archaeologist.

  “Take care of those glass shards,” said Nat. “Conserving all the artifacts in those huts is a mammoth undertaking, being done with private contributions. The Kiwis take the job very seriously, as well they should.”

  “I hear you.” Her data-collecting chores done, Valena turned to Jeannie’s laptop, clicked onto the Internet, and brought up Emmett Vanderzee’s Web site. She turned to the pages that would already have been in place the year before, trying to figure out what had caught Morris Sweeny’s interest.

  Dan Lindemann had posted a blog of preparations for that year’s deployment to Antarctica. There were two photographs on the page: one of Emmett, Bob Schwartz, and Dan Lindemann giving thumbs-ups in front of a map of Antarctica; and another of Emmett and Cal Hart packing crates to be shipped south from Reno. The picture with Cal in it interested her. Dan had caught him in profile, but he had noticed the camera out of the corner of his eye and was not smiling. In fact, he appeared to be lifting his hand to ward off having his image caught for the Web site.

  Valena typed out an e-mail:

  Em

  Am at Cape Royds penguin colony. Have photographed boot prints of uninvited visitor presumably responsible for illegal removal of six penguin eggs and two artifacts. Suspect seen scramming to McMurdo at edge of storm. Possible—or probable—connection between this suspect and contemporaneous bludgeoning death of tractor driver whom I’ll guess was unlucky enough to witness arrival.

  Also have samples of grit that collects in boots here. Visual observation indicates phenocrysts (feldspars?) and lithic fragments of decayed lava from Mount Erebus and penguin guano; also have samples of bottle glass fragments from Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Nimrod expedition as microscopic fragments might be present in boot samples. Glass was manufactured in England and possibly France (ship’s manifest indicates several cases of champagne).

  Emmett Vanderzee still in custody, though evidence builds that others had opportunity to spoil efforts to retrieve key airdrop of medical supplies to his camp last year. Person seen driving snow machine through heavy storm raises question was same person in Emmett’s camp and did he get to airdrop before Emmett could find it?

  Come on Em, admit it, you are fascinated by this. Kindly write back with advice on analyses and who to contact with results.

  Valena

  P.S. Don’t worry, I’m out of harm’s way, or just about.

  “There,” she said. “We now have a representative sampling of what we might find in the boots of our mystery guest, and samples from which to ID the missing bottles. My colleague back in the States will hopefully tell me how to proceed with the analyses.”

  “Who’s your colleague?” asked Jeannie.

  “Emily Hansen. She’s cracked a bunch of murder cases using geologic evidence. Technically speaking, the glass here is man-made geology. Em knows people in the FBI lab. The FBI would call this trace evidence.”

  “Nicely done,” said Nat. “But I shall admit to having a heavy conscience about asking you to help with this. If you’re right that there’s a connection between the eggs and bottles and the dead Cat driver, then please leave it to the professionals.”

  Valena said, “I’m on my way to the Dry Valleys, and I think I’ll be safe there. As soon as I get back to McMurdo, I’ll turn in my evidence, and then everyone will know what I know, and I’ll no longer be a target.”

  Jeannie said, “I think I hear your helo.”

  Valena cocked an ear. The distant throbbing of helicopter blades had invaded the wilderness of Cape Royds.

  They walked outside Nat’s tent to watch the helo approach around the shoulder of Mount Erebus, a tiny dot of machinery suspended in a frozen sky. Its far thudding grew louder as it increased in size, blades a blur of movement, its skids now swinging overhead, the sound concussive and deafening, snow and grit pounding into a wild dance. The machine hovered, slid sideways, chose a landing site, and settled, the blades still spinning.

  “Lucky you,” Jeannie said, shouting to be heard over the engine and rotors. “You got the AStar. The sports car of all Antarctic helos.”

  The blades continued to whirl. “Looks like he wants to load you hot,” Nat hollered. “You ever done this before?”

  “No!” Valena’s heart was hammering in her chest. In survival training, Manuel had told them that although the roar of the helicopter would urge them to hurry, they must keep their heads and not approach the craft unless beckoned by the pilot.

  Nat walked a wide arc around the field until he stood fifty feet in front of the helicopter, making eye contact with the pilot. He grabbed the front of his pants with one hand and put the other across his chest, then pointed at Valena.

  The blades crooned to a stop.

  Valena hefted her duffels and walked over next to Nat. “What did you say to him? Your semaphores, I mean.”

  “I told him you’re a virgin.”

  Valena started to laugh. Impulsively, she gave Nat a hug, and then she shared a longer, womanly squeeze with Jeannie.

  The pilot popped his door open and stepped out. “Where’s mine?” he called, in a crisp British accent.

  Jeannie wiggled her eyebrows. “You got Paul. Stand by for major flirtation,” she said. “Underneath that helmet he’s a looker.”

  “We’ll put your gear in this external basket with your skis,” said Paul, indicating a pod on the side of the aircraft. He hefted each duffel and checked them for weight tags. “And you, my dear, shall ride up front with me. Discussion of your charms around Mac Town had prepared me for a happy flight, but you far outreach their capacity for description.”

  Valena averted her eyes in embarrassment.

  “Helmets, your choice of sizes.” He produced two helmets and helped Valena find the one that fit best. Then he showed her how to climb up into her seat, buckle the restraints, and latch the door.

  Valena smiled and waved at Nat and Jeannie. I’m in a helicopter! she told herself. I am in Antarctica in a helicopter, and I’m about to fly to the continent!

  The helicopter was no larger than a passenger car inside, and the whole front seemed to be made of Plexiglas, even down to a panel of it beneath her feet. Paul restarted the engine, soon bringing its squeal to a screaming pitch. The blade in front of them began to swing, disappearing around behind them to be replaced by its opposite, and again, and faster, and faster, until they formed nothing but a blur. Paul gripped the stick and the collective, twitched them this way and that, and up they went.

  The ground dropped away. Contracted. Nat and Jeannie shran
k into mice, and then gnats. The helicopter began to slide forward, tilting slightly toward its nose, still rising. The penguins went by, tiny dots of black and white on the splattered rock. The helicopter was over the frozen sea now, the Transantarctic Range spreading across the horizon to greet them.

  They flew across trackless miles of ice, their world reduced to a tiny bubble that cast a vague shadow the size of a pinhead far below them. The edge of the continent slowly resolved from a thin line to a scrabble of rocks, and then they were over it, continuing onward, now cutting up a valley between two ranges of mountains, following a river of ice toward its source. The glacier filled the valley in a fractured cascade, frightening in its instability. “I wouldn’t want to walk on that,” she said to Paul through her tiny microphone.

  “No, you would not. But beautiful, eh? In a terrifying sort of way? And look at this one.” He pointed to their right, to a lobe of ice that hung like a tongue from a high side valley. “Incredible, all the shapes. Before I came here, I thought ice was ice, but it’s a world unto itself, infinitely variable. This will be Clark Glacier up here to our right.” He lifted the controls, raising them up higher and higher, climbing like a mosquito up over an elephant’s hide, skimming up past dry, empty walls of rock until they came out over a notch in the mountains. “This is the Olympus Range,” said Paul. “Just one of many ranges that make up the Transantarctics here in the Dry Valleys. And here on this saddle sits Clark Glacier. Just a little thing, only two miles wide and how many long. A nice, quiet little glacier with no cracks in it for you to begin your studies.”

  “I’ll take my ice as crevasse-free as I can get it,” said Valena. “Where’s the camp?”

  “Just there,” said Paul. “Can’t you see it?”

  Valena peered out across the smooth expanse of snow-covered ice looking for the line of tents she knew must be there. They had a drill rig going, so there would be at least one very large tent, but where was it?

  Suddenly, she saw it: a minuscule group of pinpoint dots. The dots grew larger now, and larger yet, until they were a line of tents: two yellow Scotts, a few small domes, one large orange dome for the drill, and something that looked like a brightly colored pill bug. A tiny person was waving at them, pointing to a position in which he wanted them to land. No, she, Valena realized, as they descended low enough to make out the smiling face of a woman.