Antarctica Escape from Disaster

by Peter Lerangis

  He stepped forward with his right foot over the crack.

  Solid. Not a problem.

  His team was gaining on Team Two now, the men shouting at one another. Ruppenthal, on Captain Barth’s team, had already set up a stove.

  Andrew pushed forward, digging in his ski poles. His left leg slid over the crack.

  A black shadow shot across his vision, under the ice.

  Andrew tried to react but couldn’t possibly.

  The head burst through the crack in a geyser of gray. Jaws opened quickly, baring jagged teeth for only a moment.

  Andrew had no time to scream before the teeth closed over his calf and dragged him under.

  7

  Colin

  January 17,1910

  COLIN FLEW.

  Lunging, he gripped Andrew by the arm and pulled. Out of the crack emerged a monstrous head, domelike and water-glistened, flecked with spots of black. Its mouth clung firmly to Andrew’s leg.

  For a moment its eyes appraised Colin with cold indifference. Then, with a violent lurch, it pulled down.

  Andrew fell toward the crack, yanking Colin off balance. “Get it off get it off get it yyahhhhhhh!”

  It was a killer. A predator. Trained to hunt by spying prey from under the ice, then ambushing.

  Well, not this prey.

  Colin planted his feet in the snow and held his brother tight.

  Flummerfelt loomed above them. He raised a two-by-four and swiftly struck down. The plank splashed into the crack, sending up a gusher of water that froze as it struck Colin’s face.

  Colin heard a dull, wet thud.

  “HYEEEEEAH!” Flummerfelt struck repeatedly with ferocious strength. “HYEEEEAHl HYEEEEAH!”

  “My leg! My leg!” Andrew screamed.

  The water coated Colin’s goggles, now darkening to pink, then red.

  The other men closed around fast. Shouting through gritted teeth, they struck with more wood like a team of crazed pile drivers, their red eyes bulging, their red necks veiny and thick.

  Under the barrage, the creature weakened. Mansfield grabbed Andrew and helped Colin pull.

  Andrew’s leg slowly emerged. The monster’s head reappeared, a battered mass, blackened by blood, its spots now undetectable. Still attached to Andrew.

  The thing wasn’t giving up. Its head must have been made of steel.

  “KILL IT! KILL I-I-I-IT!” the men shouted, bludgeoning the creature with renewed force.

  Finally its eyes turned toward them. It stared for a long moment, unflinching against the onslaught, as if memorizing their features for future reference.

  Then, without ceremony, it let go its jaws and sank into the water.

  Andrew fell back, knocking over Mansfield and Colin.

  The men continued striking, their frenzy unabated. Below them a shadow glided under the ice and disappeared.

  “It hurts!” Andrew cried, writhing and kicking.

  “Lie still, Andrew!” Dr. Montfort commanded, ripping open Andrew’s trouser leg. “Someone get more water. I can’t see the wound.”

  Colin tore off his leather cap, scooped bloody water from the crack, and poured it over Andrew’s leg.

  Andrew howled with pain. “What are you doing to me?”

  The gash was long and ugly. Dr. Montfort ripped a length of material from his own shirt and made a tourniquet, tying it above the wound. “Give me some pressure here, Colin.”

  Colin leaned on his brother’s leg.

  “Stop it, Colin!”

  “Ssssh, Andrew, it’s okay.”

  “Leather winter breeches,” Dr. Montfort muttered, “three pairs of moleskin pants … long underwear … he wore all his clothes. That fact may save his leg. I think the bite was more crush than tear.”

  The other men still stood around the crack, shattering chunks of ice and bellowing like madmen. They were all soaked with water now, their drab clothing darkened to a black-red.

  “Avast, men!” Captain Barth shouted. “Winslow is returning! Avast before he sees you!”

  The men slowly subsided. Their faces were drained and bewildered. They looked toward Andrew as if just remembering he still existed.

  As Colin helped Dr. Montfort lay Andrew on a cot, a team went to work building a tent around them. Andrew was unconscious now, snoring, and Colin propped his head up on a pillow made from shirts and underwear.

  This was Colin’s fault. Andrew shouldn’t have been skiing. His rest period had ended at least fifteen minutes earlier. Technically, it had been Colin’s turn. But he had let Andrew continue. If he had done what he was supposed to do, he would have gone over that crack himself, not Andrew.

  Colin had broken the rules because the team needed speed. But a leader didn’t make arbitrary rules and then change them. A leader was steady. A leader led.

  Perhaps Colin would have seen the beast. He’d have found a narrower break in the ice or alerted the others to distract it.

  But it was too late.

  “Bandage,” Dr. Montfort said. “Now.”

  Colin ran outside and took a strip of snow-washed cloth that lay drying on the stove. Andrew was losing blood like crazy. If it weren’t for the cold, he’d probably be dead.

  Father’s team was approaching now. The camp dogs yapped loudly, greeting the arrival. Colin’s heart raced as he ducked back into the tent.

  Dr. Montfort quickly removed Andrew’s bandage. The blood was beginning to clot around the edges of the gash. The redness had spread through Andrew’s thigh, and the entire leg was beginning to swell.

  Father rushed in, out of breath. “What on earth happened?”

  “This — thing,” Colin blurted out. “A seal. It jumped out of the water and bit him. It tried to take him down, but I — Mansfield and I — pulled him out —”

  Father flinched at the sight of the leg. “Will he lose it?”

  Dr. Montfort shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty inflamed right now, and he’s lost a bit of blood, but there’s not much risk of infection down here in a land with no germs.”

  “Thank God.” Father placed a hand on Andrew’s forehead, feeling for a temperature.

  “Without Colin, he might not have made it,” Dr. Montfort said.

  “That’s not true,” Colin replied.

  “Oh, yes it is,” said Bailey, his voice hoarse from shouting, his coat covered with blood.

  From all sides, crew members crowded into the tent. “ ’E yanked ’im out wif ’is bare ’ands,” Nigel said.

  Hayes nodded. “That thing nearly pulled Andrew under.”

  “It was huge,” Cranston said. “Maybe ten, twelve feet. Some prehistoric dinosaur-fish, like.”

  “Only Colin could have matched the strength of that thing,” Mansfield said. “Well, maybe Flummerfelt.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Flummerfelt said. “I was scared.”

  Father smiled at Colin. “Andrew’s a lucky boy to have a brother like you.”

  “I was the one who let him ski,” Colin said, shaking his head.

  The men stared as if they hadn’t heard him, their eyes resolute, their faces blood-spattered.

  Despair and hunger had changed them. They needed a hero. It was all black-and-white now. Evil and Good. Kill or be killed.

  We are all animals inside, Colin’s teacher used to say. Put to the test, we react like tigers. Civilization falls away, and all we’re left with is instinct.

  Civilization was the Mystery.

  Dr. Riesman rushed into the tent, holding a leather-bound book. He knelt by Jack’s side and opened it to a photo of a spotted seal. “A leopard seal. Carnivorous. Stalks its prey — penguins, usually — under the ice. When it sees a shadow, it follows patiently, sometimes swimming for miles. Then it waits by a nearby hole in the ice — perhaps a hole made by itself. When the prey steps over the open water, the seal attacks with incredible swiftness, usually crushing the head.”

  “So it thought Andrew was a penguin?” Windham asked.


  “It didn’t know what it had found,” Dr. Riesman said. “Perhaps that’s why its bite was not as … precise as it could have been.”

  Ruskey slipped between the men, focusing his camera on Andrew’s leg. “Dr. Montfort, can you remove the bandage for a moment?”

  “After it heals,” Dr. Montfort replied.

  “Dare I look?” Philip’s voice piped up from a corner of the tent. “I don’t know if I have the stomach for the sight of entrails.”

  “Will someone get him and Ruskey out of here?” Captain Barth snapped.

  Colin stood up. The photographer nodded amiably and stepped outside. Philip followed, clutching an oddly shaped sack of hardtack.

  Colin stood by the tent flap and scanned the ice. The clouds had begun to lift, and he saw the sun’s orb for the first time in days. In the harsh light, the ice directly under them seemed darker than usual.

  Water. Of course. The ice had to be pretty thin. How else could the leopard seal see through?

  In the tent, the men were jabbering loudly about the incident. Father silently stepped away from them and walked over to Colin. “Do you see what I see?”

  “Yeah, thin ice,” Colin replied.

  “I had to swerve the team to the east to avoid this floe. The pack must be breaking up.”

  “Will we be able to put in?”

  “We didn’t see leads — but that deep blue on the horizon is a water sky, and leopard seals don’t stray far from the coast.”

  “That’s great. Unless we fall through right here.”

  “This ice is still maybe three, four feet thick. It’ll do unless the weather warms. We can move after Andrew’s condition improves. I wouldn’t travel much farther north-northwest, though.”

  Colin squinted toward the horizon. From behind a decaying pressure ridge, two figures wandered out over the ice. Philip and Ruskey.

  From Colin’s angle, the ice under them looked practically blue.

  “What are they doing?” Father asked.

  Colin raised his fingers to his lips and blasted three long whistles. They echoed loudly over the ice, borne on a stiff wind that had just started up from the south.

  Ruskey continued on, snapping photos. Philip stopped to wave, then scampered after Ruskey, dragging his sack behind him.

  “The idiots!” Colin said.

  “Let’s get them,” Father said.

  They began to run. Colin let out another whistle, sharper and louder.

  Philip stopped again.

  He hadn’t turned halfway around when he disappeared into the ice.

  8

  Philip

  January 17, 1910

  IT HAPPENED FAST. AS if Philip’s body had dropped clean away from its soul. Although he felt it all, he could see it, too — feet, legs, waist, chest, head submerging in slow motion. As his lungs seized up he heard the water smack over his head, like the sound of a doctor gently slapping a newborn. In the end as it was in the beginning.

  And when the force began to lift him, Philip realized with horror that this was it. No more excuses. All sins were revealed on the Day of Reckoning, and what could he say for himself — that he hadn’t meant to rob the bank, that it had been a silly game, that he’d suffered enough already in this frozen wasteland — and he felt the force lifting him heavenward, no doubt merely a backswing before pitching him downward to the place he’d always expected to go —

  “Pkkkkuaaachhhhh!”

  Throwing up before the Pearly Gates. That would not do. Bad form.

  “Philip, if you had twice as much intelligence you’d be a half-wit!”

  “Rrrrraaaauuuugh!”He was spewing out water, his body convulsing on hard ice, his lungs frozen.

  “Ruskey, put your coat over him!”

  Colin’s voice. Jack’s.

  Philip struggled to open his eyes. He was alive. The ice fell from his lashes, tinkling onto his cheek. He tried to speak, but his jaw was frozen. “I’ng … ngot … dead.”

  “One more second …” Colin said, out of breath, “and you’d have been food for a leopard seal.”

  “They’ll have to settle for hardtack,” Ruskey said.

  “Ny vag!” Philip sat up. He retched out more saltwater. His lungs felt as if they’d been scraped with a wire brush.

  Where was the bag? Where were those bloody plates?

  “Where is my y — al mmmmy bag?”

  Nowhere. The hole — the blasted hole he’d fallen through — it was gone. The crack was sealed. Philip fell forward, clawing at the ice. He dug his fingers into the crack and tried to pull.

  “Philip, are you crazy?” Colin said.

  “You don’t understand. I must have it!”

  Colin yanked him away. “Philip, we are between two ice floes. Two thin ice floes. Any moment they could open up again!”

  Ruskey handed his camera to Jack. “I’ll take the feet. Colin, you get the shoulders.”

  The two younger men swooped down upon Philip, lifting him off the ice. He began to weep, but the tears became trapped behind globs of ice on his lashes, giving him a throbbing headache on top of all the other indignities.

  This was a punishment, wasn’t it? A salvo from the Almighty, a punishment for his bad deed.

  It was unfair. He’d already lost the money. That was punishment enough. The photos had been there, unclaimed. Surely this one last act could have been overlooked?

  The other crewmen were cheering outside the tents — all but the two medical doctors, who were tending to Andrew.

  None of them saw the dismal truth. “My plates …” Philip moaned as Colin and Ruskey set him on a cot.

  Immediately Dr. Montfort began wrapping him in tarps and blankets.

  “Wha’ did ’e say?” Nigel asked.

  “Plates?” Nesbit said. “Dinner plates?”

  “Just a moment,” Ruskey said. “Westfall, what exactly was in that sack?”

  The faces stared down at him, hard sailors’ faces, full of fight and filth.

  “Hardtack,” he mumbled.

  “Hardtack … with a little silver nitrate, maybe?” Ruskey said. “Big, b-i-i-i-ig flat biscuits with funny white-on-black images?”

  “Ruskey, please —”

  “You took my photographic plates — the ones I left on the Mystery because of the weight limit. Instead of evacuating as you were supposed to, you waited until I left and stuffed them into your sack.”

  “You common little feef!” Nigel blurted out. “You was ’idin the photogs so’s you could sell ’em! Is there no end to your greed?”

  “My greed?” Philip protested. “You’re angry because you didn’t think of it!”

  Captain Barth was livid. “You disobeyed orders to evacuate, Westfall.”

  “When the foremast fell, Pop had to run back in for you,” Mansfield said.

  “He nearly died,” Nesbit added.

  They were advancing. Slowly. Like wolves around a poor little lamb.

  Philip cowered. “Yes, well, I wasn’t too happy with that turn of events myself.”

  “You are despicable,” Pete Hayes growled, “sneaky, lazy, selfish, filthy —”

  “I am not filthy!” Philip protested. “But I am sick and injured, and frightfully hungry —”

  A twisted smile grew across Kennedy’s face. “Say, I’m hungry, too, men … how about y’all?”

  “Sure would be nice to have something besides seal, wouldn’t it?” Ruppenthal said. “Somethin’ tender and fat — you know, the way Philip is, on account of his hiding out in the storeroom, eating our good food.”

  “He sure looks like a well-fed pig,” O’Malley added. “Prob’ly just as tasty, too.”

  Their jokes were sick. Simply disgusting.

  Philip sat up. “Yes, I admit to a youthful zeal for the photographic arts, and I deeply apologize if I have offended anyone — but it is hardly the occasion for such morbid humor.”

  “I imagine he’d be pretty soft,” Sanders guessed.

  “Oily, too,”
Cranston said.

  Ruppenthal nodded. “You’d need a lot of barbecue sauce to cover the stink.”

  Barbarians. Visigoths. Cannibals.

  Philip stood up, his blankets and tarps still draped around him, and backpedaled out of the tent. “M-m-m-may I remind you, s-s-sirs, we are gentlemen. We can s-s-s-settle our hunger issues like rational, courteous b-b-beings —”

  “LU-U-U-UNCH!” cried Ruppenthal.

  Like slavering beasts, they sprang.

  Philip spun. He bolted away.

  He hadn’t seen the stove directly behind him.

  He slammed against it and fell to the ice in a clatter of coal, wood, and blubber-blackened steel. “Stop! This is inhuman! I am not edible! I am an Englishman!”

  He rolled himself into a ball and braced for the sacrifice.

  But the men did not come nearer.

  Philip parted his elbows. Cautiously he peeked out.

  Flummerfelt was the first to laugh — a long, brutish Hawwww most likely honed to perfection on some hog farm in Iowa.

  The men erupted, doubling over, slapping one another’s backs and pointing. Rejoicing at his humiliation — as if he were some cheap vaudeville performer. Even Lombardo and the Greek were up and about, enjoying a guffaw or two at his expense.

  “Gotcha, didn’t we?” Sanders brayed.

  Philip stood up. He calmly brushed himself off. He would not let them see his embarrassment. Even though his clothes were frozen through and his entire body felt bruised and stiff, he still had his dignity.

  “I didn’t believe you,” he said. “Not for a moment.”

  He was dreaming of plum pudding with heavy cream when the dogs woke him next morning. One of the larger ones — Agamemnon or Hypocrite or some blasted Greek name — was licking his face, slobbering bacteria into every cut and pimple.

  Philip sat up. He felt as if his head had been smacked between cement blocks.

  He lay back down.

  They were all bustling around him. They were always bustling.

  “Fifteen minutes for breakfast, and then into the traces, men!” Captain Barth shouted.

  “Thank you,” Philip grumbled, “but I think I’ll stay here.”

  Colin sat next to him. “How are you feeling?”