He pulls something from his pocket, then reaches for my hand. He turns my palm upward and lays the object down in my beat-up glove.
At first I can’t tell what it is, exactly—it looks like a thick, tarnished, silvery ring with some kind of engraving—but when I hold it up and look closely, I recognize it. The penguin tag I’d given him, completely transformed.
On the outside of the narrowed band are six numbers and the word Argentina. On the top is a raised setting into which is nestled a ruddy stone, barely larger than the face of a pencil eraser; the white streaks veining the layers of pink resemble the wave of a mountain range.
“It’s Argentina’s national stone,” Keller says, “rodocrosita. Nothing fancy,” he adds, “but somehow I didn’t think you’d want a big diamond from Tiffany’s.”
I look from the ring to Keller’s face.
“I love you,” he says. He takes the ring and pulls off my glove. “I figured if we make it legal, you’ll finally believe we can find a way to be together.” He slips on the ring.
I hold my hand up so I can get a better look. The tag-turned-ring is both elegant and sturdy against my red, chapped skin—the only piece of jewelry I’ve ever been given. “I always wanted to wear a penguin tag. It seems only fair, given how many I’ve doled out.”
He smiles. “I have a jeweler friend in Boston who’s a wizard.” He takes my hand. “By the way, you haven’t said anything.”
“About your tagging me, you mean? What do you need for your field report? I’m a known-age bird—”
“—who still hasn’t chosen a mate.”
I laugh. “Is there a question on the horizon, Mr. Sullivan?”
“Will you marry me, Ms. Gardner?”
I look down at the ring again, then back up at Keller. I press my body against his, my gloveless hand against his neck. “Yes.”
“I came so close to asking you over the phone because I didn’t think I’d get a chance to see you,” he says. “I know the timing isn’t the best—”
Then I lean back in his arms so I can see his face again. “It couldn’t be better,” I say. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Right then, loud voices bark from my radio, and I reach toward my hip so I can turn off the volume. Just for a few more minutes.
But from the corner of my eye I see Thom bursting into a sprint, running toward a gathering crowd near the base of a cliff. Keller sees him, too. “Something’s happened,” he says. “We better go.”
“Wait—” But Keller’s already racing after Thom, so I follow, pulling my glove back on as I jog over the rough sand. We reach the crowd, and I touch my stomach briefly before looking up at the cliff, which ascends sharply above the black sand.
Nigel, who was supposed to be giving a tour, is near the top, around what would be the fourth floor of this five-story mountain, and down below, around the second floor, clinging to the rocky surface like a gecko, is Richard.
“What the hell,” I mutter, and, next to me, Thom is shaking his head. Nigel should have known better than to rock-climb with tourists around.
Nigel’s not unlike me—here as a historian because it’s a way to get to Antarctica. At seventy years old, he’s hardy but decidedly old-school, and he’s never quite learned that, on these trips, he’s no longer an explorer or a researcher but a tour guide, and he needs to set a good example. He’s an old dog, Keller said once, as an excuse, and he was right. Nigel’s cracked, leathered face bears the marks of four decades of frostbite and sunburn; his nose is a permanent, unnatural shade of red, and his beard is white with age and sun—I’d once been astonished to see a photo of a young Nigel, black-haired and smooth-faced. When he’d worked for the British Antarctic Survey, he helped restore the survey’s research huts across the continent and, later, helped dismantle them. Last winter, he told me how he’d helped dismantle the Station J hut at Prospect Point, clearly conflicted about the orders to take it down. “Tough choice,” he said, “preserving history or preserving the continent.” We’ve become comrades in conflict as we guide heavy-footed tourists across the ice.
Still, Nigel tends to forget that he is not here on his own, that when he is on the staff of the Cormorant, he is being watched at all times—not just by Glenn but by the tourists. And apparently, when he decided to climb up the sheer side of a bluff in plain view of a tour group, he had a copycat, who is now stuck. Richard had made it about twenty feet up, but now he isn’t moving, too high to jump down, and too unstable to keep going up.