2
A
T FIRST, EVERYTHING WENT NICE AND SMOOTH
. T
HAT SHOULD
have made me nervous, but I let myself get lulled into smugness by all those experts. Nearly everyone on this expedition was an expert. Most of the graduate students could fly the planes and work the wirelesses. The mechanics kept the planes and boring machines running like Swiss clocks. The dogs was well behaved and didn’t get sick. I should have seen that everything was too good to be true, but I wanted it to go well so I didn’t listen to that little whisper of warning at the back of my mind that told me to watch out.
On the twenty-first of November, we loaded four of the big planes with forty-five dogs and all but one of the five sleds, the drills, crates of dynamite, tents and other supplies, and flew south for near seven hundred miles. We left one plane and one dog sled at Barrier Camp for emergency use, on the old principle that it tempts fate to carry all your eggs in one basket.
Mooney was the dogman who stayed behind with his team. At the time I pitied him, but now I wish I could trade places with him—no, that’s not true, I wouldn’t wish what I’ve got on anyone. Mooney is a good man, he deserved to be the one to stay behind. Only I wish it had been Henry Lake on account of he was so young, with all his life ahead of him.
Professor Dyer stayed behind until we had Southern Camp established. Even then, we could all see that there was storm clouds gathering between Professor Dyer and Professor Lake. Dyer might have been the official leader of the expedition, but Lake wanted to go his own way and wouldn’t be told what to do. There was more than a few short words between them, even before we left Dyer behind at Barrier Camp.
My own thinking is that Dyer wasn’t the right man to lead the expedition. He had the knowledge to lead, that’s true enough, but he didn’t have the will to set his foot down when somebody challenged his orders. He was always saying, “Well, well, let’s put our heads together and work it out then,” in that quiet voice of his. That may be fine for the university, but it won’t do for the Antarctic, and it didn’t.
There was no room in the planes for regular seats, so we sat on benches along the sides, with the cargo piled up under nets wherever there was a place for it. It was funny to watch young Lake and his father, sitting side by side, as we flew across those endless miles of broken ice and jagged outcroppings of black rock. They acted like they barely knew each other, they was so formal and polite, as if they’d just met a week ago. Lake didn’t want to show favoritism toward his son, and young Henry didn’t want to seem like he was asking for any favors, so they just nodded and mumbled at each other with their eyes turned away.
Weather was good. We set up a permanent camp just south of the Beardmore Glacier, not too far from Mt. Nansen. There was a lot of larking about in those early days. In mid-December Professor Pabodie, who was an amateur mountaineer as well as an engineer, climbed Mt. Nansen with two graduate students, Gedney and Carroll, and planted an American flag at the summit.
A few weeks later Professor Dyer, who came up from Barrier Camp by plane with some of the supplies, decided to take two of the planes and fly over the South Pole. Lake and Pabodie went with him, along with all seven graduate students. I didn’t go, because I wasn’t asked. Glory and fame are for the leaders, not for carpenters who handle sled dogs. Young Henry Lake went with them, though. Dyer made up some reason why he should be on the plane, and Professor Lake didn’t object to it, but you could tell it made him uneasy. I think for his part, Henry would have been happy to stay with the dogs, but he had no say in the matter.
All this time, Professor Lake was in a giddy state over the fossils he was finding when he used his heaters to melt the ice and Pabodie’s boring machines to drill into the ridges of rock beneath. He could only drill in a few spots where the rock thrust up in peaks near the surface of the ice—the ice was just too thick to bore all the way to the bottom. Even so, he found some things that stood his hair straight on end. I admit, that wasn’t hard to do—if you’ve seen photographs of Professor Lake, you know that his hair stands almost straight up even after it’s been combed—but you know what I mean.
The professors kept us on the hop with the sleds, running back and forth with specimens of fern fossils and funny little shellfish. I brought back the flat rocks that got Lake all wound up and keen on going westward, instead of east like Dyer had planned. It was in pieces from the dynamite blast, but Lake put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. I didn’t know, then, why he was so excited about it—it was just some lines, like the markings you might get if you presses a palm leaf down in the mud. Professor Dyer didn’t think much of it, either, but Lake was almost out of his head with excitement.
Lake started pushing our sleds further and further into the northwest all through the middle part of January. He was like a wild man and wouldn’t listen to words of caution. It was treacherous going over that snow. The ice under it had these wide cracks what Professor Pabodie called crevasses that went down forever, but the snow drifted over them on the wind, which blew a gale every day, so that we couldn’t tell where them crevasses was until we was on top of them and heard the snow begin to crunch and fall in under our feet.
Funny thing though, when the accident happened it wasn’t a crevasse but one of those ridges where the ice is pushed up that caused it. Me and Henry Lake was racing from the camp to where Pabodie and two of the grads had a hole dug in the rock. They wanted us to get the fossils gathered up so they could move on, so it was rush-rush. I should have known better, it was me that was at fault. Henry was just a boy and should not be held to account for it.
He was trying to get ahead of my team by cutting across some rough ice sheets that was tilted up and uneven where the edges met. I had the sense to go around and thought he did as well. He couldn’t have beat Sergeant and my other dogs in a fair race and he knew it. Well, he hit a huge slab of ice about half the size of a football field and couldn’t see that there was a drop on the other side.
His sled went over the edge. Young Henry jumped off and away at the last moment and didn’t go with them. Two of the dogs was badly hurt in the fall onto the sharp edges of ice below. One died after about ten minutes, but I had to cut the throat of the other, a sweet blue-eyed husky bitch, to put her out of her misery. Henry couldn’t do it—he started to shed tears and they froze to his cheeks and eyelashes in the wind, so that he couldn’t see.
We was able to get on to the dig site with his five remaining dogs, but it was a nasty business. Looking back on it, I see it as an omen of what was to come, but at the time I wasn’t worried about the future, only about whether Henry would buck up and do his duty like a man. When you’re on an expedition like that, there’s no such thing as calling it quits in the middle—you have to see it through to the end, no matter what.
Professor Dyer and Professor Lake barely said anything about the loss of the two dogs. I guess they expected to lose dogs, which is why they had brought along replacements. When Henry and me got back to camp, they were head to head arguing about whether to go east or west. Dyer wanted to go east, but Lake wouldn’t hear of it. He demanded that the planes be flown west, into a part of Antarctica that had never been mapped or explored. Lake claimed that the fossils was leading him west and that he had to follow their trail.
Professor Lake had a will of iron when he wanted something. Dyer couldn’t stand up to him. They argued for hours, but in the end it was agreed that Lake should take the four planes westward with the drilling machines and most of the dogs and men. Lake asked Dyer to come with him, on account of Dyer was the geologist, but Dyer refused. We could all see that his feelings was bruised. He decided to stay in Southern Camp with Professor Pabodie and five men. One of the men was Zulinski—Dyer wanted a dog sled with him, in case he was cut off from the planes by the weather or mechanical problems.
We left Southern Camp, flying westward over the mountains, on the twenty-second of January. Lake was in high spirits. He had got his own way, and he was convinced that we would find fossils that would make us all famous for life. Maybe he was right, but I’ll never know about that. It was the last time I saw Professor Dyer and the others.
3
A
FTER A FEW HOURS IN THE AIR, WE LANDED SO THAT
L
AKE COULD
drill and blast for samples. We found more of those queer palm-leaf kind of fossils that got Professor Lake so excited. After about eight hours, we took off again. There was no reason to stop and set up a camp—the sun was above the horizon all day and all night. It never got very high in the sky and it never quite set, unless it was behind a nearby mountain. The sky never got dark.
It was funny, trying to sleep when there was no night. I found myself staying awake for twenty, twenty-two, sometimes more than twenty-four hours at a time, and then sleeping for ten or eleven. I was tired all the time. Everyone else was the same. We got on each other’s nerves and stopped talking except when we had something that needed to be said.
After flying another seven hours or so, we came into sight of a great mountain range not marked on any maps. We’d never seen such mountains before. No one had. They say the Himalayas is the highest mountains in the world, but I know better now.
The Lord alone can guess what Professor Lake might have done if fate hadn’t taken a hand in things. He talked to the graduate student, Danforth, who was flying our plane. They had their heads close together—none of us in the back could hear what they was saying, but I think Lake was trying to convince Danforth to fly over the mountains. That would have been madness. Them jagged black peaks was like a sheer fence of stone clear up to the sky. They was so high, there was no snow on them. But as I say, fate took a hand.
The plane flown by the graduate student Moulton developed a misfire in one of her cylinders, and Moulton decided to land and sort out the problem. He set down on a flat expanse of ice and snow just below the foothills of the mountains. Lake decided to build our camp there, since we had to land. We set up the tents and made a temporary snow corral for the dogs.
The wind was kicking up something fierce. I’ve never felt such cold in my life. If you left the scarf off your face for ten seconds, your nose and cheeks was froze, that’s how bad it was. We had goggles, but they kept getting fogged up and iced over so that we could hardly see to work.
There was a kind of weird whistling noise in the wind that the dogs didn’t like at all. My lead dog, Sergeant, took to standing with his head into the wind and his ears perked up, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of snarl. When I went over to talk to him and give him a pat or two to comfort him, he’d whine and look at me kind of in apology like, wagging his bushy tail like a dust mop, but when I went back to work, he’d do the same thing all over again.
It was an eerie sound. Me and Henry Lake looked at each other more than once, listening to it, but we didn’t say anything about it. There was no good came from talking about things like that. It was just the wind. We couldn’t make it stop, so we pretended not to hear it.
The wind drove the snow horizontal-like across the plain, so that at times we couldn’t see more than a dozen yards. We stayed close to the planes and the tents. Lake realized that the tents would never hold on their own and ordered us to build snow barricades out of cut blocks to act as a windbreak. We put them on the windward side of the tents and in front of the planes, which were all pointed into the teeth of the wind and tied down by dozens of steel anchor lines driven with long steel pegs into the ice.
Lake was as restless as a bride on her wedding day. He couldn’t wait for us to finish building camp, but put a crew of men and one of the drilling machines on a ridge of rock that he found nearly exposed not far from camp. After a while the wind started to die back a bit, and that made work easier, but it never stopped blowing. It was always there, whistling from the mountains, whatever we did, wherever we went. There was no escape.
I was just done feeding my dogs when Gedney brought back word that the drill crew under his direction had found a cave. They drilled into the rock and set a charge of dynamite, and the blast opened a hole in the rock that gave access to the cave. We all left what we was doing and walked over to have a look.
The hole was not much bigger than a doorway, but easy enough to crawl through. It opened down into a cave with a roof high enough to stand up under that went on in all directions into darkness between these rippled rock pillars that looked like the kind of columns you see in a church, only rougher.
I went down into the opening after the others. Lake had an electric torch and used it to explore the shadows. As far as I could tell, there was no end to that cave. I heard Lake tell Gedney that it was a limestone cave and that it had been carved out by the action of water. If so, the water was long gone, because it was dry as chalk down there.
The entire surface of the cave floor was covered in loose shells and bones, so thick you couldn’t walk without crunching them under your boots. They rolled and slid around under me feet with every step, and made a kind of grinding noise as they rubbed together. The air was filled with it because about a dozen men had decided to take a look around. Their boots raised a white dust that got caught in the back of my throat.
Lake told Gedney that the cave must have been open at one time to let in all these bones, but that it had been sealed up from the outside world for at least thirty million years. I think he knew I was listening to him. He sort of looked over at me as he talked, and he had a little smile at the corners of his lips. He didn’t seem to mind my eavesdropping.
I’d never been in a cave like that before. The caves in New England are small affairs. The colors in the limestone pillars—”stalagmites” Lake called them—was something wonderful to see, all blues and greens and rosy reds. I don’t know what made the colors, maybe something in the water that carved out the cave. I was glad to get out of there, as interesting as it all was, because the grinding of the bones reminded me of grinding teeth, and there was this queer smell that made my stomach flip.