The Nature of Ice (23 page)

The thought of time passing—evanescent, fleeting as a breath—jolts him at the very instant he swerves to miss an open seam running the breadth of the fjord, the rift in the ice invisible in the early evening light. He runs alongside the inky band of water until it narrows, then turns his bike to face the open lead straight on. He guns it over the break and raises his arm to caution behind.

Chad questions whether his first seasons in Antarctica offered an escape from the muddle of his twenties: Nan and Pop gone within a year of one another, any contact from the old man—never more than a Christmas card and twenty-dollar note at best—long since petered out; a time when his best mate had settled on a girl and was staking out his future like a bush block to be pegged. Now, at forty-two, Chad is as much an Antarctic veteran as the dogmen who taught the new boys how to drive—
old, bold and can't be told
, he'd thought of them then.

Even those who had never set foot in Antarctica mourned the departure of the sledging teams. The working dogs— deemed an introduced species by the 1990s Environmental Protocol—were the vestige of an age begun at a time when Antarctica stood as a frozen frontier, untrodden territory prime for enterprising heroes.

When the last Mawson dogs returned from their commemorative run out to Entrance Island and back into Horseshoe Harbour, the Mawson winterers of'93, waiting on the sea ice, must have looked as bereft as a funeral gathering. Chad held Morrie in a collar of arms, the dog's wet tongue lapping at his face; Morrie was no oil painting, one ear in pieces and the other torn off in a brawl, the greatest collar escape artist and harness chewer that ever was, but still Chad's favourite dog of all time. True to form, he evaded his leash and bolted back up the road like the young pup he imagined he was, pausing only long enough to leave his mark on each vehicle tyre and equipment box he chanced upon, ecstatic at the attention lavished on him by those in pursuit, and none the wiser that his sledging days on the great Antarctic trail had finally run their course.

The low-angle sun turns the fjord into a golden rink. As Chad rounds the corner towards Bandits Hut he lets the bike slide in a weightless arc of motion. He fans his bike across the ice in a great slithering curl and cuts the engine to wait for Freya.

The sudden silence of the fjord disquiets him. Minutes pass and still Freya fails to appear. Chad turns over the engine. He retraces his course, puttering at first, his gut tightening as the straight stretch of fjord eases into view. He pulls binoculars from his pack but can see nothing more than his own set of tyre tracks. His eyes smart from the glare but still he scans the breadth of the fjord until he catches a steely glint far away. He steadies his sights on the black curl of tyre hovering like a mirage above the ice, the chassis of an upturned bike. He waits, fruitlessly, for a sign of movement.

Before he closes the distance, he reasons that the open lead is where Freya's bike has come to grief. His mind refuses to remember if he turned around to check on her. Did she cross? Did he look back? They'd successfully negotiated a dozen such leads that day.

Mind and memory spin with imagined outcomes. A picture of the gaping chasm in Hobart's Tasman Bridge refracts from the ice. He sees Ma more clearly than he's pictured her in years, her ruddy face blanched with shock, her hands clenching the wheel of her Morris as it plunged through a blackened gap that moments before was bridge.

Splayed out before him, tumbled across the ice of the fjord, Chad makes out splashes of colour, the brilliant hue of lichen that is not lichen at all but the last of the station's fresh oranges, brought by Freya as a treat for him. In this surreal instant, he finally understands why the taste of apricot makes him gag when they once rated as his favourite fruit. The carton would have rested on the back seat of Ma's car, filled with fruit picked that afternoon from his grandparents' tree. Never once in his replay has he watched the box upend as it does now, fruit by the dozen dancing on the inside windscreen like a downpour of rain.

The channel of the Derwent River, cold and soupy dark beneath a blanket of Sunday night fog, would have folded in around her. Before, Chad has always halted his thoughts here. Part of him knows she was killed on impact, or knocked unconscious and drowned. But lurking at the edge of his vision is a ghosted image of her pawing at the window of every vehicle he's ever driven, willing him to picture her trapped in the river alive. He feels the weight of water bearing down upon her car, rising chill and briny around her feet no matter how hard she struggled with the door or tore at the window whose broken handle his father had never bothered to repair. Beyond the shuddering thought of her drowning he feels disdain for cause and effect, for chance, providence, for his own unwitting part—a vet's needless prescription, for pity's sake, to safeguard his sutured leg. When his father had dug in his heels and declared Ma
overanxious
, that
Chaddie will
be fine
, that he, for one, wasn't driving an hour out to flaming Swansea for antibiotics they didn't need and couldn't afford, Chad had lain stock-still in his bed, in anguish at being the subject of their argument, momentarily forgetting his own painful leg.

‘Suit yourself,' Ma had huffed. ‘I'll take the Morris,
and
I'll make a proper job of it.' Not the hour's drive to Swansea but double the distance to Hobart, to prove a point.

Dad had growled, ‘Don't be a bloody-minded fool, Sal.'

‘Bloody fool yourself,' Ma snapped back. ‘At least no one can call me a bone-idle fool.'

Don't go
, Chad's eyes had pleaded when she'd leaned down to kiss him goodbye.

FREYA LIES IN A SHALLOW melt pool curdled with oil, beyond the open seam her wheels have clipped. Chad will not remember later how he lifted the bike to pull her leg free because his senses are swamped by her silence, by his own panic, by the aching cold of her skin on such a still and balmy night. He is alarmed at the limpness of her leg and checks for a break, squeezing and bending the limb without eliciting complaint. He feels a stronger wave of fright and orders,
Move your toes!
, which Freya does compliantly, speaking softly,
I'm alright, Chad; I'm very
cold
, as if it were he in need of soothing. He leaves her only long enough to grab his sleeping bag and spare clothes, the medical kit buried in his pack. He peels off her sodden clothes and dresses her in his woollen shirt. He lifts her onto the sleeping bag and straps her leg as gently as he can.

He will remember, will covet the memory, below a sky giddied with gold, of holding the bundle of her against him, too roughly perhaps, wrapping an arm to envelop her with warmth, stroking her hair, resting his hand against her icy, blemished cheek and willing her to be still.

MIDNIGHT LIGHT SATURATES THE WALLS of Bandits Hut, varnishes the timbers of the bunks. Outside, the cry of snow petrels, inside a whirr of heat. She has missed her golden sunset, but he needs no camera to capture the night, to spool to memory the filmic quality of the room. The accident on the fjord has begun to fade, helped by the warmth of the hut, by a hot meal, by the feel of her skin as he winds a fresh bandage around her leg.

He sits silently at the edge of the bed, studying her face, aware of her hand weighted upon his arm. She reaches up to cup his face and in her touch he understands the question asked. He presses her fingers to his lips as proof of all he feels.

It drowns him, this want.

Stay
, she whispers, drawing him down beside her.

Bowl of chaos

January 1913

TODAY WAS FINE WEATHER AND they had agreed to go on at all costs. But here they still were, cocooned inside their bags, cramped within the tent. Xavier continued to grunt and toss—sleep, delirium—the line between the body's need for rest and failure to survive spiralling to a blur, it seemed to Douglas.

He read back through his journal, trying to make sense of the past days.

30 December

Xavier off colour. We did 15 m, halting at about 9 am. He turned
in—all his things very wet, chiefly on account of no burberry
pants. The continuous drift does not give one a chance to dry things,
and our gear is deplorable . . .

Xavier's waterproof pants and helmet were two of the many essentials on Ninnis's sledge to be swallowed by the crevasse. Xavier wore an extra pair of under-trousers to compensate, but the wind froze his wet clothing and wicked heat from his body. Their sleeping bags were sodden and heavy from sleeping on a mattress of snow. The cold struck home as it never had before. Douglas had taken to wearing his burberries inside the bag, so wretched was the shivering that racked his malnourished body until sleep dulled the brain from feeling.

From the start Xavier had made hard work of digesting the dog meat. When had he crawled back into the tent complaining of dysentery, gripes in his stomach? Douglas had assumed the gnawing pains were no greater than his own. But then X almost kicked over the contents of the primus without his usual
sorry, sorry
, instead grizzling about the dripping tent and how it was that dog meat could boil for so long and still be repulsive and far too tough to chew.

Though nothing good could be said of the dog liver's foul tinny taste, it provided additional substance and could be demolished in an instant—a blessed relief after endless chewing on moistureless ropes of meat. And it was unlike X to complain, puzzling to see him out of sorts.

‘We'll hoist the sail tomorrow,' Douglas said again to buoy him up, ‘try for another splendid fifteen-mile march and really make some inroads.'

Xavier scowled. ‘Tent. Sail. Tent. Sail. We lose eleven hours yesterday putting up and putting down, boil-ups of dog and tasks for nobody's real purpose.'

Douglas had been completely at a loss. They had to pull together—in every sense—if they were to survive.

31 December

Keeping off dog meat for a day or two as both upset by it.

‘A new year, Xavier.' They had toasted 1913 with carefully husbanded perks: two and a half ounces of chocolate each, a minuscule helping of beef and lard pemmican, cocoa, three-quarters of a biscuit. Scarcely a feast for a doll, it had left them hungrier than before.

3 January

Mertz boiled a small cocoa and had biscuit, and I had a bit of liver . . .

Did 5 miles but cold wind frost-bit Mertz's fingers, and he is
generally in a very bad condition. Skin coming off legs, etc—so had
to camp though going good.

Damp clothes added to the friction caused by walking and chafed their skin raw. Open sores on his fingers refused to heal. Skin shedding from their limbs and private parts. Peelings of it, and body hair, lined their underwear and socks. At one point Mertz had reached over from his bag and plucked a perfect skin cast from Douglas's ear. He could have done the same in return.

4 January

Mertz in bad condition so I doctored him part of day and rested . . .

Xavier's face had aged beyond his thirty years. His skin, stark against his jet beard, bore a sickly pallor with darkened rings around the eyes—likely a mirror image of Douglas's own. Their bodies were permanently cold and the skin around the hair follicles had pimpled like the hardened nodules of a nutmeg grater. Their alimentary systems were badly affected by short rations—Xavier's worse than his own. Surely lack of sustenance and continual exposure to the weather had brought on X's ailment.

5 January

I tried to get Xavier to start but he practically refused, saying it was
suicide and that it much best for him to have the day in bag and dry
it and get better, then do more on sun-shining day.

Douglas tried to persuade him,
Just three or four miles, even
if we can't see through the drift properly.
Back and forth they argued, X refusing to be swayed. Finally,
We'll rest today,
Xavier
.
But tomorrow, and every day after that . . .

Xavier nodding through a veil of shame and tears.

6 January

Got off 10.30, Xavier not being able to help at all. Did not raise sail
though favourable breeze—surface very good and downhill. Surface
slippery, so occasional falls. Quite dizzy from long stay in bags, I felt
weak from want of food. To my surprise Xavier soon caved in—he
went 2 miles only in long halts and refused to go further. I did my
best with him—offered to pull him on the sledge, then to set sail
and sail him but he refused both after trial. We camped. I think he
has a fever, he does not assimilate his food . . .

Xavier's heart seemed to have gone. This morning Douglas had found him in a pitiful state. Slow, so agonisingly slow the job of easing him out of his bag to remove his trousers and clean him. Xavier had grown so feeble that the best he could do to assist was kneel doglike on his bag with trembling limbs and his head hung low.

Rest, Xavier. Try to sleep now.

Douglas had toggled X up in his bag to warm him but he thrashed in a strange kind of fit, needing to be held down for fear he would damage the tent.

If they could not travel eight or ten miles each day, in a day or two they were doomed. Perhaps he could pull through on his own with the provisions at hand—but how could he possibly contemplate leaving his companion? And yet how could he abandon Paquita, lie idle and shivering in a makeshift tent—two sorry souls waiting for death? To be within a hundred miles of winter quarters and be faced with such a choice was awful.

Today was 7 January 1913;
Aurora
was due at winter quarters. They were expected back on the fifteenth,
the
fifteenth at the latest
, he had instructed the others.

Douglas propped Xavier's head against his chest and supported his jaw. Beef tea dribbled from the spoon.
Come
on, now. It will do you good. Small sips.