By now Sam has a system in place. He’s led groups to the Amazon, to the Alps. With thirty-two tours beneath his belt, the trip to the Antarctic hadn’t felt like such a leap.
Still. When the plane skids down into the snow and slides on its giant skis across a runway made of ice, Sam inhales as sharply as the rest of his group. He grew up in northern Minnesota, a landscape once famous for its winters, but the little snow that fell during his childhood never stuck to the ground. For as long as he can remember, winters in the Upper Midwest have been brown and damp.
He’s spent months reading about Antarctic expeditions, Antarctic animals, Antarctic terrain. But now that he’s faced with snow as thick as whipped cream, with mountains of ice that blind him when the sun shines the wrong way, he sees that he isn’t prepared for this at all. He has the gear, yes; he outfitted himself from the same equipment list—boots, parkas, thermal underwear, hats, gloves, shades—that he shared with his clients. But he hadn’t accounted for the long, rippling blue shadows. The haunting silhouettes of leviathans beneath the ice. The brilliant, otherworldly expanse. The sense that he has been, immediately and unequivocally, diminished. He thinks about his father—shrunken, weakened, with his chin sinking to his chest and his skinny thighs tucked beneath an afghan.
The tourists tumble out of the plane behind him, staggering on the frozen tarmac until their boots find a grip on the snow. They turn their scarf-wrapped faces toward him but he cannot see their eyes: only the distorted image of himself and the jagged landscape behind him reflected in the curved golden arc of their polarized masks.
He and his tourists are shedding their coats and unwrapping their scarves inside the entrance to the Blue Shed when a scientist approaches Sam with a note scratched on the back of a field report. His sister has emailed, it says. She needs him to reply.
Over the group’s first meal at Mawson Station—half-populated by scientists, half-populated by tour groups such as theirs—Sam surveys his charges. Their cheeks are already wind-chapped and raw from the ride between the airfield and the station. He iden- tifies the college students, the family of four, the recent retirees, the amateur conservationists, the professors. The woman with the telephoto camera lens propped up beside her plate claims that she’s conducting research for a book.
“What kind of book?” Sam asks.
“A novel,” she says.
Sam can sense the emotions warring beneath the surface of the serene faces gazing at him. They’re thrilled to be in the Antarctic, but they’re feeling guilty about their delight. They’re reminding themselves that they’re here to see the end of something.
“So,” he says, pulling out the folder with his notes and passing around high-res photographs of fluffy Adélie chicks. As expected, the images elicit a combination of squeals and doleful sighs from his audience. “How many of you did some research before coming on this trip? Looks like most of you? Good. All right. Let’s see what you’ve learned.”
Of the eighteen species of penguins, only five live in the Antarctic proper and only two nest on its shores. The Adélie is the smaller of the two—the other being the Emperor—standing at two feet tall and weighing about ten pounds. Like other members of their species, they eat krill and fish. They lay their eggs on the ground. They waddle on land and soar through the sea.
“They’ve been in the Antarctic for about 45,000 years,” Sam informs the group once they’ve reached Béchervaise Island the following morning. He loves this part of the trip: the certainty of control, the mantle of expertise. The bottom of the boat rumbles across the pebbly shore. “And so they’ve definitely been a hardy, adaptable species.”
“And now?” the novelist asks.
Sam glances at the paper map stretched between his mittens and then gestures in the direction of the colony. “That’s the last of them. This year no chicks survived their first month.”
The mother of the family of four looks as if she’s close to tears. She pulls her sons so close to her parka that it takes them a few seconds to wriggle out of her grasp. As he watches them, Sam cannot keep himself from recalling the hard tone of Lizzie’s email. “No matter how far you go,” she’d written, “they’ll still be here, Sam. You can’t hide out forever.”
The accusation is absurd. If he’d been trying to hide, why would he have come to Antarctica, of all places? The whole continent is flooded with cold white light. Everywhere, there’s the danger of exposure. He used to think that the flat fields of the Midwest were the barest, bleakest places in the world, but that was before he’d seen these plains of ice, glittering and vast. He leads the way along one of the charnockite ridges toward the north side of the island. The crevasses between the rocks shimmer with melted snow, and the closer he gets to the penguins, the more feathers he sees glistening in the tiny pools of water. He rounds a bend, listening to his clients scrabbling at his heels, and all of a sudden there they are—several hundred birds, standing or sprawling over their empty, pebbly nests, rustling their flightless wings. The sun is shining so hard that it hurts, and in the light the penguins’ black and white feathers gleam like freshly-pressed party clothes. Sam’s breath snags in his throat and the cold slices through his bones.
The tourists are clambering over the ice and clustering at the edge of the low rock wall that encircles the one-time rookery. Suddenly he wants to get away from them. “You’ve got two hours,” he says. His eyes are stinging. The sky is the color of ice and the penguins turn their heads impassively. “Look around. Have fun. Remember that you’re required to stay on this side of the rock wall and to leave at least fifty feet between the animals and you. Whatever you do, don’t wander off by yourself. Stick with partners, groups. And meet me back here at one o’clock sharp.”