The Nature of Ice (12 page)

Douglas had hoped to run three days to the south to explore but he read the southern sky well enough to know that its blanket of stratus would soon be upon them, that snowdrift, even blizzard, could force them to hole up for days.

Ninnis and Madigan gaped with disappointment at his decision to turn back. Madigan's subversion of his leadership was artful enough to be mere inflection, a shift in tone too subtle to object to. Now his voice, tinged with disdain, reported the sledge meter's meagre record of eight miles and two hundred yards from the hut—Douglas heard the unstated inference, that they were turning tail because of his lack of pluck. Confused, Ninnis looked from Douglas to his Hyde-Park-Corner compatriot, his allegiance wavering. Douglas thought of sea elephant bulls sparring along the shoreline at Macquarie Island, the master continually having to defend his realm against contenders.

‘Bear in mind, if we're holed up in bad weather we've only brought three days' rations of dog pemmican. After that the dogs will go without.' He addressed himself to Ninnis, who fretted over the dogs' welfare and imagined ailments. Ninnis and Mertz had formed a ‘secret' Kennel Club, extending membership only to those who smuggled the dogs tidbits from the kitchen. Small chance Douglas would be invited to join. Bad enough to know it was going on behind his back.

His hope that they would make winter quarters by dark was dashed by a maze of small crevasses, and a sixty-mile-an-hour tail wind that blew the sledge into the dogs and sent them skittling in a tangle of traces. When they unharnessed the team, to take over hauling the load themselves, Pavlova was the one dog that stayed by their side. Grandmother, who was in fact a grandfather, shot away the moment he was loosened, and with the innate sense of direction unique to sledging dogs, the other miscreants ran hot on his heels back towards Aladdin's Cave.

The following day the three men spent bored and fidgety inside Aladdin's Cave while outside, in pea-soup drift, the dogs hunkered down, their bodies succumbing to occasional bouts of shivering. The drift was almost as thick the next day, and Ninnis joined Madigan in trying to persuade Douglas that they should attempt the five and a half miles to the hut.

‘Experience,' Douglas said, ‘has proven that it is usually best to wait until the drift eases.' But he finally acquiesced, reasoning that as they had a sound knowledge of the direction of the hut, they couldn't stray too far off course. Just the same, he hoped the drift would clear before they reached the coast.

They had travelled half a mile when Ninnis cried out that the dogs weren't following. ‘They'll be back at the cave buried in snow.'

‘I'll run back,' Madigan said, unharnessing himself from the sledge.

‘No.' Douglas motioned to the drift. ‘I don't want anyone going off in this alone.'

‘We'll all go,' Ninnis suggested.

Before Douglas could respond, Madigan said in a patronising tone, ‘You're being overcautious, Mawson. I'm faster than either of you. I'll be back in no time,' as if it were he, Madigan, who had the Antarctic know-how to decide what was best.

‘No!' Douglas ordered, tired of having his authority challenged. ‘The damned dogs can catch up on their own. We've wasted enough time.'

Together Douglas and Ninnis hauled the sledge downhill towards the hut. Madigan stayed at the rear of the sledge holding a guy rope taut in case the load started to slip away down the slope.

‘You wait and see.' Douglas nudged Ninnis. ‘As soon as the dogs get hungry they'll bolt for the hut. Chances are they'll be home before we are.'

DOUGLAS LAY ON HIS BUNK at winter quarters, the candle's feeble light flickering over the pages of his journal. He read back over the last fortnight's events, wincing as he recalled his certainty that the dogs would make their own way home.

15 August: Got to the Hut at lunchtime—heard that bergs had
calved from the cliffs some 2 days previously. During our absence the
top of the south mast had been put up. They had two calm spells for
a few hours each . . . Arranged for Bage, Mertz and Hurley to start
first thing in morning for dogs.

16 August: Drifting heavily and strong wind, so they cannot get
away . . .

Nor had they left the following day. The wind howled at eighty-five miles an hour, and they spent another day confined to the hut, sewing harnesses, and weighing and packing provisions ready for sledging.

19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in
a bad way.

20 August: Thick drift, heavy wind—poor dogs . . .

They finally got away on the twenty-first; the dogs had been stranded six full days. Bage, Hurley and Mertz had set off in early morning twilight;
a mere zephyr
, Hurley, dismissing the sixty-mile-an-hour wind. A bank of heavy cloud was blowing in from the north.

August 24 and no sign of them. Douglas had spent the day scraping the build-up of ice from the roof of his cabin, imagining the worst. He would go tomorrow himself. Drift poured into the store and outhouses. It took a group with shovels all day to clear it.

25 August: Sunday: Service 10.30. Weather better today but drift
fair; strong wind. We clear up outside. Rather expect the return of
Bage's party. At 2 pm they appear, all well, but Grandmother dead.

Hurley had come into his cabin breathless and weatherworn and sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Castor must have got wind of us,' he said. ‘We saw her jumping about when we got within sight of the cave.'

‘Had they broken into the provisions?'

‘Not one. They'd curled up in the snow as if they were waiting for us. Basilisk and Castor were the only two not frozen down. All the dogs were listless and wouldn't eat a mouthful until we cut them free and took them into the cave. Pavlova was in the best nick, Grandmother was as good as dead. X said Grandmother had missed out on a meal the day before you left the hut.'

‘That's true,' Douglas recalled, ‘and we rewarded Pavlova with extra food. She was the only dog that stayed with us after we unharnessed them.' He shook his head in amazement. ‘Seven days in wind and drift without a scrap of food.'

‘I doubt they'd have lasted another day. All gone in the hind legs. Could barely hold themselves up.'

Hurley's voice quietened when he told how Mertz handfed pieces of pemmican to the weakest dogs.

‘Grandmother took only a few mouthfuls before he fitted, pawing at the air like the dogs on the ship coming down. Poor old X was beside himself,' Hurley said. ‘For more than an hour he held Grandmother in his arms, murmuring to him in German, trying to warm him, and all the while Grandmother was barely breathing, just staring ahead with glassy eyes.'

HERE IT WAS THE END of August 1912 and their knowledge of Adélie Land extended a princely eight miles, two hundred yards magnetic south. Another dog had died and the rest had come dangerously close to death for no greater cause than that he wanted to assert authority over Madigan. On the opposite side of his cabin wall, Ninnis, Mertz and Madigan would be sitting on their bunks in Hyde Park Corner as sombre as mourners.

When Douglas closed his journal it occurred to him, not as a new concern but as the twisting of a knife, that the Australasian Antarctic Expedition could easily finish up an unremarkable failure. He pictured the ignomy of bringing home only meteorological and magnetic recordings, as well as a few caseloads of skins, birds and geological specimens. He cringed at the prospect of facing sponsors, government officials, the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, who had collectively vested forty thousand pounds in his ability to explore new tracts of land in the name of science. He thought of those he'd be letting down: particularly John King Davis, captain of the
Aurora
, his second-in-command— his friend—who had believed in his vision from the start. They had stood on a London street corner and gripped hands in a compact before they had even ten pounds to put towards a ship—
We'll sail to Antarctica come
what may
, Davis had said.

In a cutter
, Douglas had seconded,
without a scrap of
equipment if it comes to it
. He could hear his father in those words, a scholar with no head for business, soliciting investors for his latest get-rich-quick scheme.

Would Paquita think less of him if he failed, as he did his father?

You and your little hutful of men have done your utmost
, he could hear her say, sounding, at times, a lifetime older than her twenty years.

He wished he could enwrap himself with Paquita's warmth, just for an hour, touch the lace of her dress, rest his head upon her lap and hear—without properly listening to her talk of homely things—the lilt of her voice, the lingering trace of Holland in the clip of her words.

A twig of memory, a snap of remembrance; he turned back the page of his journal, ashamed to realise he had let the date slip by unnoticed.

19 August: Still drifting and heavy wind. The dogs will be in
a bad way.

20 August: Thick drift, heavy wind—poor dogs . . .

He took up his pencil and, as if to make amends, crammed another line under 19 August, recording Paquita's twenty-first birthday—the day he had pledged her all of his thoughts:
Angel, it will be you all day long—
between two miserable entries devoted to the dogs.

ROOKERY
LAKE

CHAD SEES FREYA CROUCH DOWN over her handlebars as intently as a rally-car driver, the headland in her sights, anxious to reach Rookery Lake in time for the best of the afternoon light. Without her GPS to hold her back, she bounds across the surface—fearless or feckless, Chad can't decide which. Either way, she pays precious little heed as she crosses a series of leads—thin channels of water where sea ice has split and eased apart.

Other than these rifts, the stretch of blue ice forms a perfect highway, smooth as a newly sealed road. Chad is mindful of the variations in cycles of freeze and thaw. Some years he has watched ice choke Prydz Bay through January; in others it has blown out of the harbour before summer begins. These stretches of sea ice and frozen fjords are fragile bridges linking islands and shores. He is reminded, with each open seam they cross, of their vulnerability on these frangible roads. Each fracture merits inspection, each rift a caution to those who cross.

Many rivers to cross
is the title of the CD that Elisia Hood, fellow winterer, has put together and presented him this morning for his forty-second birthday. Lis, who has a phenomenal number of songs in her collection, has gone all out with his birthday compilation, including not only the Toni Childs version of the title song he always sings along to, but that of every other artist who's performed it.

Freya suddenly appears beside him with her head tilted quizzically, wondering, he supposes, what the lunatic alongside is mouthing. He gives her a nod and she pushes ahead, wheels reeling, engine drumming. The music in his earphones pulls his thoughts away. Chad is drawn towards wistful songs and this, with its rivers and crossings and wanderings lost, swamps him with melancholy, dredging up a memory so palpable that even now his leg feels dull and sluggish, heavy with pain.

Sunday, 5 January 1975, the night the Tasman Bridge was felled by a ship, was the Sunday his bedroom at the bay came alive with the crazy-making drone of mozzies enraged by each squirt of the can his father brandished above his bedhead. Too preoccupied with pain to cover his face with his pillow, to care about the rain of pyrethrum falling about, Chad lay on his sheet, venom spreading from his blackening calf to glands tender as a bruise in the pit of his groin. He has never since experienced pain so engulfing as that inflicted by the razor-sharp tail of a stingray thrashing to free itself from a net. The discomfort of the six blue stitches threaded up his leg by the neighbouring veterinarian were nothing compared to the throb of poison coursing through his veins.

It was not until the following day that he first heard news of the bridge. Outside, the sunless sky matched his mood. Still shaky and weak, Chad had fallen into a sulk listening to splashes rising from the rocks where other boys were doing bombies off the breakwater. All morning he was confined to bed, impatient for Ma's return from Hobart. Was she still at home watering the lawn, fussing over her hanging baskets that lined the porch? From there, you could look straight out at the bridge. Perhaps she'd been held up at Nan and Pop's, yakking non-stop as usual. Ma had promised to return with apricots ripe from Pop's tree, along with the antibiotics the vet had prescribed—
on the off-chance of infection
, old Mr Macey had said, scratching Chad behind the ears.

He remembers his father scoffing at the prescription:
For
Chrissakes, Sal, Knowles Macey is a
vet
who should have retired
ten years ago. They give these warnings as a matter of course, to
cover themselves—
words even Chad knew were guaranteed to needle a will like Ma's; a woman with plenty of spongy cushioning but innards packed tight as a fist.

AT ROOKERY LAKE CHAD HAULS the esky and a large tub of provisions into the Apple field hut, so named for its red domed fibreglass structure. Freya has brought enough food from the station kitchen for a club of skuas to feast on for a week, never mind two people on a two-night stay.

If Chad were here with another man he wouldn't bother with a toilet tent, but as things stand he quietly pieces together aluminium poles and collects large stones to weigh down the tent's valance in case the weather turns bad. The polar pyramid has hardly changed design since the early explorer days, except that Goretex has replaced burberry, and aluminium poles are used instead of bamboo. He gives Freya a hoy to lend a hand. Try getting one of these forty-kilo babies up on your own.