The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  ‘We are twenty miles back, estimated overhead Cape Washington in seven minutes.’ The pilot, Lexie, is Canadian and well used to flying in the cold, despite being startlingly young. From the cockpit she can see where we’ll need to go to film the penguins and it’s not looking good.

  ‘The ice is moving through. You can see where you’re going to hit rotten ice leading up to the water. I don’t think I’d want to go on it but you guys may know more about that.’

  I’m not sure I do, but I know we are in good hands.

  Lexie circles to give us our bearings and Didier and I press our faces to the windows, looking for tracks, but the pilot spots them first.

  ‘There, lots of lines. Those are penguin trails.’ She turns the plane to show us. ‘That’s a line of penguins, all the way back to the colony.’

  ‘It’s a long way, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. You are going to run into pressure ridges. You don’t really know how big they are until you are up against them. You’ll find those tough to get through.’

  I can see the ridges she means, wavy lines of ice forced up where large floes have been pushed together by the wind or tide. They are like walls, blocking the penguins’ way. Antarctic pilots’ lives depend on judging the roughness and the strength of ice and soon our lives will too.

  ‘Do you think that grey ice would be strong enough to take a skidoo, Lexie?’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust it but that would be something you’d have to go up and see, I guess.’

  Didier shouts from his side of the plane, ‘See those holes, they are all swimming in there!’ The holes come into view, three mirrored pools, close together and a little way back from the ice edge.

  ‘They’re jumping out. This is where we go diving!’

  ‘Trouble is, getting there,’ says the pilot and she circles again so we can photograph the holes and the trails leading to them, then turns back towards the dark mass of the cape and a group of large icebergs frozen in nearby. I have seen these icebergs before, in a satellite image, but in that picture an expanse of dark water separated the last berg from the ice further out, the ice we have just flown over. Out there, where today the penguins are walking on a solid surface, it had shattered into thousands of loose floes. The picture was taken in early December last year. It’s November now and we are going to spend the next three weeks on the ice. There is no question that sometime soon it will break up, perhaps starting beside the same iceberg as last year: the question is when?

  A discoloured area of snow passes below us, covered in dots. ‘That’s the colony,’ says Lexie, ‘and this is the camp coming up now.’ She banks the plane and a cluster of yellow tents swings into view on our wingtip, with another group of dark dots nearby. ‘We’ll be landing on the northbound runway,’ she jokes. ‘You guys might get lucky and not have any wind.’ On the previous flight the plane was shunted sideways at the last moment by an unexpected gust.

  The stall warning squeals as the speed comes off but we are not blown sideways and with a crunch the skis touch down on the snow – on the sea, I remind myself. We taxi towards the tents where our three friends and fifty emperor penguins are waiting for us. Even Lexie climbs out to photograph them.

  Emperors are the world’s largest penguins and if you kneel in front of them they are tall enough to look you in the eye. Penguins’ eyes are not like ours: instead of being curved on the outside, theirs are flat, to produce sharp images underwater and at least passable ones in air. It’s one of the many adaptations to help them live at the extreme limit of what’s possible for any animal. The emperors crane forward and peer at us closely. They have probably never seen a person before and they are not at all shy. More are walking and sliding across from the colony. It seems they will travel quite a way to investigate an upright shape. It’s the first time any of us has been mistaken for a penguin.

  The nearest one turns its back, raises its feathers to shake and sleeks them down again until they look like tiny smooth scales. The bird’s head is black and velvety. The dark feathers on its back have frosty grey tips, while the white ones in front gleam as brightly as the snow. Black lines run from its neck to the base of each flipper: a lovely extra finesse, as if a calligrapher had made the strokes with a fat brush, their edges blurring slightly where the ink has spread. It has just three patches of colour: slips of pink on the sides of its bill and a sunset of orange and yellow behind its eyes and below its chin. The emperor stands as upright as a skittle, balanced improbably on the tripod of its feet and stiff tail. It starts to contort its body to scratch its head: a comic performance that entails standing on one foot while raising the other as far as its very short leg will allow, over one flipper, while extending its neck sideways and downwards. Its head and claws only just meet but it seems to enjoy the result. If everything about these penguins looks awkward it’s because they are optimised for life in the sea.

  ‘Welcome to Cape Washington!’ The can-do Australian, Chadden, is in charge of this shoot, as he was in the Aleutians. Steve, an American diver from the base, is here to work with Didier, while Leah has come with us to run the camp. Hers seems to be the hardest job of all. The first two flights brought a mountain of gear but she already has it neatly stowed and the tents are set up. The emperors watch us unload the plane, then stand beside us as it takes off in a burst of blown snow. In ten days one more flight will bring some extra food and Steve’s and Leah’s replacements. Until that plane comes, the nearest people will be the Italians at a base 130km (80 miles) away. It is so quiet that, unless a penguin calls, the loudest sound I can hear is the blood rushing through my ears.

  By the time we have sorted out our camera kit and put our bags in our sleeping tents Leah has melted a huge pan of snow, made coffee and a hot meal. As we eat in the mess tent Chadden outlines his plans. He has seen last year’s satellite photo too and the pressure ridges from the plane. Tomorrow four of us will travel light, taking two skidoos but no cameras, and we’ll try to find a way to the ice holes. We will stay in touch with Leah at camp using walkie-talkies. She seems to be ready for all eventualities, and has tuned the short-wave radio to McMurdo’s frequency in case there’s an emergency. With a flourish she produces pina coladas to toast the expedition, mixed with a handful of tooth-tingling Antarctic snow. Outside the tent the grounded icebergs are tall blue shapes in a white plain. Cape Washington looms behind us, an ice-covered headland ending in a dark bluff of rock, and inland there are row after row of mountains, as inaccessible as the moon.

  On the first day of November, ninety-eight years before we arrived, a group of British men set out on foot from a hut near McMurdo, hoping to be the first people ever to reach the South Pole, 1,360km (845 miles) away. Their Terra Nova expedition had spent months ferrying depots of food and fuel onto the ice to supply the first part of this journey and to await their return. By early in January they had climbed the enormous Beardmore glacier onto the Antarctic plateau and passed their final depot. The last of their support team turned back and the five men of the polar party continued south, each hauling more than his own weight of supplies on sledges. The group comprised Captain Robert Scott, Dr Edward Wilson, Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers, Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates and Petty Officer Edgar ‘Taffy’ Evans.

  As I look at the mountains inland from our camp I think about those five men. Unpacking a thick sleeping bag in the shelter of my modern dome tent, I wonder how cold their nights were, under canvas in their reindeer-skin bags, and I’m still with them the next morning, when Steve shows me the skidoos that will pull our camera gear across the ice. This is the most inhospitable place I have ever been: humans are not well suited to living here, but what Scott’s polar party managed to do a century ago puts our hardships in perspective. They were brave men. None survived.

  After breakfast we pack the sledges and head out to sea, past the emperor penguins’ colony; currently a shifting mass of adults and chicks, moving slowly from one side of the icebergs to the other. They do not bu
ild nests or hold territories, so they have no reason to stay in one place. Midsummer is still some weeks away but the emperors started breeding in the southern winter, so they already have quite large chicks. In May or June the females each laid a single egg, which they transferred onto their mates’ feet to be incubated. The males then huddled together through the darkness and blizzards of midwinter, while the females returned to sea to feed. More than 100 days later, during which time their eggs had hatched and the males had lived entirely off their own fat, the females trekked for many miles, back across the ice, to relieve them and to see their chicks for the first time. These chicks are surely the most attractive young birds you could find anywhere in the world. They are slender at the top with enormously fat bottoms: pear-shaped soft toy penguins, dressed in grey onesies with black hoods and white faces. Having no fixed nest is a disadvantage when it comes to finding each other, so they call to their parents with a carolling sound, like songbirds, wiggling from side to side or tipping their heads up and down. It’s a serious business, even though it makes them look ridiculously cute, but we are not here to film the chicks because that has been done already for this series and instead we follow the lines of adults walking away through the icebergs, on their way to the sea.

  A narrow gap leads us between two bergs with an ice cliff on either side, one of them indented with a vividly blue cave. The sides of the last iceberg are festooned with icicles many metres long. They’re a spectacular sign that the ice on top has been melting, allowing water to drip down the walls and refreeze. We park the skidoos at the end of this iceberg. In last year’s satellite picture this is where the fast ice ended.

  Ahead of us is a scene of absolute chaos. The ice has been shunted into ridges taller than I am. There’s an open area beyond but then another long ridge snakes across the ice, with more in the distance. Black and white figures wobble between them on a meandering path. The snow is trodden flat where the penguins have walked, dimpled by their heels and toes. Wherever the ice is flat enough they save energy by lying down and pushing with their feet. They must climb each ridge, laboriously using their bills for grip as well as their claws, then slide down the far side, unable to stop and often thumping into each other on the way. On the skidoos we cannot climb like a penguin, or fit through such narrow gaps, but we must find some kind of route, so we set out after them on foot. We know from yesterday’s aerial view that the ice ends a few kilometres further out. It’s a long walk if your legs are as short as a penguin’s but nothing compared to the females’ march in the winter, when much more of the sea was frozen.

  We step over wide cracks filled with drifted snow and pass domes of ice, pushed up by pressure from below. On a calm day like this the ice is probably stable but that could change quickly if the wind starts to blow from inland, so we have brought a satellite phone for emergencies as well as the walkie-talkies. Even so the nearest helicopter able to lift us from a drifting ice floe is very far away and it’s unlikely to fly out here in bad weather. As we hurry on behind the penguins I feel the wind picking up. Didier points out a group of emperors coming the other way:

  ‘They shine, they are wet!’ The birds look like varnished Russian dolls. More wet penguins are standing nearby, trumpeting.

  Didier finds the first hole. It’s no larger than a kitchen table. The others are close by: insignificant-looking pools we have come so far to find. A penguin surfaces in one of them and gasps air. We walk cautiously to the edge. Although, seen from the side, you could take it for a pond in a snow-covered field, looking directly down it is a door into a different world. Through the clearest seawater on Earth we look into an abyss so deep that light rays seems to converge at a point infinitely far away. As the water surface moves the rays spin like spokes in a pinwheel of light. It is impossible not to lean forward, pulled by vertigo.

  Chadden, Didier and Steve hope to dive in these holes and film the penguins in the unearthly space under the ice. To do that we will need to bring the skidoos here through the ridges. Didier waves his very large hands: ‘We must build a road!’

  Before setting off the next day, Chadden checks the time and calls McMurdo exactly on schedule.

  ‘Hello, this is Cape Washington. Please could we have a weather update?’

  ‘Where did you say?’

  ‘Cape Washington.’

  ‘Oh, OK. What’s the weather like there at the moment?’

  ‘There are two-eighths cloud cover at about ten thousand feet, the wind is light from the north-west and the temperature’s about minus twenty-five degrees Centigrade.’

  ‘OK, standby … Here’s your forecast: cloud cover: two-eighths, height: ten thousand feet, wind: light north-westerly, temperature: minus twenty-five degrees Centigrade. Have a good day.’

  ‘Ah … yeah, thanks for that. Out.’

  Unsure whether to be reassured by this forecast, we load the sledges with shovels, a big pick, an iron bar and a bundle of small red flags on wire stems. Leah has already used two of these in camp, to mark the only places we are allowed to pee and to pour washing-up water. As we make all our water by collecting and melting snow it is best not to lose track of whatever else we’ve put there, in case we start recycling it by accident. Her flags have quickly become tattered and I had put this down to the wind until I realised how much they fascinate the penguins. This morning a line of them is waiting to peck at the fluttering plastic.

  Even in a place as alien as this we have already started making the unfamiliar familiar, by naming the landmarks along our route. We drive past the Dirty Iceberg, the V-shaped One and the Last Iceberg With the Icicles, but in a place made entirely of frozen water these landmarks could change quickly, so we plan to use the red flags to mark our way through the pressure ridges. We may need to make the journey back in a hurry or in a blizzard and I hope the penguins will leave these flags alone.

  Hacking our way through the first ridge is warm work and we soon shed our heavy coats. Levelling the ice takes time but at least it’s possible. I walk on ahead to mark the next part of the route while the others shovel snow into the remaining holes. A startling noise, like a wave breaking, makes me spin round, only to find a single penguin sliding by on its stomach. They need the smoothest path too and by following the penguins’ route we make steady progress until we come to a really large obstacle. I can hear the skidoos catching me up but the next ridge is very tall and I haven’t yet found a way through. The penguin goes to the right, struggles to its feet and squeezes through a narrow gap, almost jamming its body. Didier points left: ‘That looks better. So far so good, uh?’

  By mid afternoon there are fewer penguins ahead and a long line of them behind. Instead of leading the way, our guides are now following us: our ice road must have become the easiest route to the sea.

  Hours later we break through the final ridge and drive slowly up to the pools where a group of penguins stands. Their bellies are distended by the fish they have caught during a week at sea. In the water another group is rolling upside down, washing themselves. Two weeks after leaving home we have found a way to bring the cameras and the dive gear to the edge of the ice and at last we can start filming.

  Gingerly as a cat, I set up the tripod and camera on the thin ice beside one of the holes, to film the penguins leaping out, while Didier and Steve prepare for their first dive. When they are suited up and sitting on the edge Chadden passes Didier his camera in its heavy housing.

  ‘What’s your plan if you meet a leopard seal under the ice?’ he asks. Leopard seals hunt emperor penguins much as they do the Adélies, by ambushing them as they enter and leave the sea. If one turns up here it is unlikely to be pleased to find Didier waiting by the holes.

  ‘There is no plan,’ Didier says, ‘I film it!’ and in a roil of bubbles he and Steve are gone. The ice between my feet starts to fizz. It’s the divers’ air escaping through tiny cracks; a reminder of how close they are below. Any illusion that this is solid ground is growing weaker by the minute. The water
below is about 300 metres (1,000ft) deep. The emperors can easily reach the seabed and stay there, fishing, for almost twenty minutes at a time. Unlike the penguins, Didier and Steve must stay close to the holes, which are their only way back.

  I look down through the spinning rays and in the far distance a group of penguins rises towards me like water beetles, streaming silver bubbles as they come. They surface, tight-packed in one of the holes, rolling forward to snatch air, then making way for others to breathe. They dive again and erupt from the nearest hole, right in front of me: twenty very heavy penguins hurtling out in explosions of water and bubbles, leaping well clear in case there is a seal waiting for them. Most of them do this with ease and land on their bellies with loud slaps, but so many penguins have been using the same exit, and splashing freezing water about, that a wall of ice has grown on one side of the hole. It must be invisible from below because some of the penguins smash into it at full speed. I can hear the impact of their immensely strong breastbones before they fall back into the water. Others, rocketing up, swerve in a split second to avoid a collision and dive deep to try again. One bird smacks into the wall head-on, driving its bill into the ice while its neck whiplashes. It slides back and disappears. Waves lap the ice and the fizz of tiny bubbles bursting continues for some time. Out of the water the penguins flail their feet and flippers, hurrying away from the hole, then lever themselves upright and look back at us with slight interest. Like the ice wall, we were not here when they left, but we are less important than their chicks waiting in the colony, so they turn and walk away.