The Nature of Ice by Robyn Mundy

Author:Robyn Mundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781741766332
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Furthest East

December 1912

THE SNOW PETREL CIRCLED HIGH above Ninnis’s sledge, tracing the parhelion that circled the sun and seared through cloud. Too soon their tiny visitor flew northward, its wings a flutter of farewell. How was it that the lingering impression of such a beautiful thing—the first living creature they’d seen outside their own circle in weeks— could gladden the heart, quieten the soul, turn Douglas’s thoughts homeward?

Packed on Ninnis’s sledge were two of the dilly bags Paquita and her mother had stitched by hand. Before leaving Hobart he had opened her parting gift to find one dozen calico bags in the boldest shades imaginable—vibrant colours, she had written, to remind you and your little hutful of men of the goodness and warmth of home.

A quarter-mile ahead, breaking trail for the little pilgrimage, Mertz glided on skis. He belted out one of his student songs with such patriotic fervour that any moment now Ninnis would launch into a yodel to set the dogs howling too.

Mertz had made it his mission to bear out the worthiness of skis in Antarctica. Every so often he made a show of halting and gazing back, hand on hip—an exaggerated yawn, do you mind—while Douglas, Ninnis and the dog teams clambered in his wake through patches of knee-deep snow.

Ninnis had woken this morning his old jolly self, prattling this time last year . . . , this time next year . . ., rough-housing with Mertz and playing the giddy goat as they harnessed the dogs. Cherub had done himself a disservice by remaining stoic for so long; when Douglas finally lanced his whitlows, his fingertips were purple and bulbous with pus.

Douglas reached a stretch of névé—old, compacted snow indicative of a snow bridge—and stepped onto the sledge to spread his weight. Back on fresh snow, he flicked the whip and shouted, ‘Look out behind you, X. I’m hot on your tail!’

Thirty feet behind Douglas, Ninnis called to his team of dogs. Douglas turned to see him jump off the back of his sledge and run alongside the dogs to give old Franklin a hasten-along.

They were a jolly team trundling east in only a whisper of breeze, a balmy fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, the dogs pulling eagerly with their brushes flicked towards the sky.

Until yesterday a third sledge had carried the heaviest load to save the runners of the other two. Discarding it represented more than their imminent approach of the halfway mark. Men and dogs had slogged unyieldingly, traversing two crevassed rivers of ice so large that Douglas pictured their tongues slicking out across the ocean for fifty miles. Yesterday’s ritual of redistributing the load equally between his sledge and Ninnis’s was affirmation that they were fairly humming along; for once the expedition was all harmony and order.

Forgotten was the calamity of Tuesday’s broken bottle of primus spirit, though for two pins Douglas could have throttled Mertz for his wild, clumsy ways. Fading too was the tedious zigzagging at the glacier’s headwaters to detour around filled-in crevasses one hundred feet across.

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