The bird’s beady black eyes regarded him impassively, but he didn’t fly away. When Michael put out his gloved hand—not, he knew, the smartest thing to do with omnivorous skuas—the bird took one hopping step closer, pecked gently at his palm, then waited there.
“I’ll be damned,” Michael said. And though he would have been hard put to say why, he felt a lump form in his throat. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the little runt had managed to survive, after all…or that it was one of the few things Michael had touched that had. He flashed, oddly enough, on Kristin lying in her hospital bed…and then on the funeral he had not been able to attend. In his mind’s eye, he saw a bunch of sunflowers—big and yellow—surrounding a coffin. The bird pecked at his hand again, and he wished he had something else in his pockets to give it.
“All out,” he said, standing up again with his empty hands extended.
The skua strutted around the immediate ground, then gave up the hunt and shot back into the air like a rocket. Michael watched it skim the quad, then disappear in the direction of the dive hut. Several other birds gathered in the sky to join it, and Michael felt, stupidly, like a parent whose kid had just been accepted on the playground by his classmates.
There was an increasing roar from the concourse behind the administration module, followed by the sight of Murphy, Lawson, and Franklin, all riding their own machines. They reminded Michael of a posse, especially when he noticed that they were armed. Murphy had his gun in its holster, and the barrel of Franklin’s rifle stuck out of the cargo compartment.
“I thought this was a search party,” Michael said, “not a SWAT team.”
The chief gave him a look that said, Grow up. “Weren’t you ever in the Boy Scouts? Be prepared.” He pulled out a speargun from his own cargo bay and tossed it to him. Lawson, Michael noticed, was carrying one, too. “When we get to Stromviken,” Murphy announced over the idling engines, “Franklin and I will sweep in from the ocean side, you and Bill here will head straight into the yards.” Then, before lowering the visor on his helmet, he said, “And watch where you’re going. I lost one beaker in a crevasse last year and I don’t feel like losing anybody else.” The visor dropped, and a second later he took off across the ice with a deafening roar.
Franklin sat down on his own Arctic Cat and said, “Best if you follow in a single file. That way you can be sure the ground ahead is solid.”
Lawson followed. The snowmobiles were powerful machines, well over five hundred pounds each, with raised mountain-style handlebars. Michael snapped down the hood of his helmet, with its oversized eye port and antifog screen, and settled himself on the seat. He twisted the throttle, harder than he should have, and the four-stroke engine growled. The tracks bit into the snow and the front skis lifted, and he shot forward in Lawson’s wake. The machine he rode was nothing like the snowmobile he’d owned when he was growing up—one of the early Ski-Doos. On the Cat he could feel the massive horsepower rumbling under him. Not to mention the heavy-duty suspension; he was used to feeling every bump in the ice and every rough patch of rugged ground, but on this it was as if he were flying across the snowfield on a magic carpet.
That, he knew, was the danger of it. Already he could see Murphy and Franklin and Lawson peeling in a straight line across the vast white field, but a crevasse could still appear out of nowhere, at any moment, and swallow any one of them whole. In snow school, right after he’d arrived at Point Adélie, Michael had gotten the full rundown from Lawson, and though he didn’t necessarily remember the exact differences between a marginal crevasse, a longitudinal crevasse, and a bergschrund, he did remember that they were often camouflaged by the previous year’s snowfall. A fragile white bridge was formed across the top—a bridge that could hold for one man and suddenly give way under the next, revealing a jagged, blue-walled canyon of ice a hundred feet deep. At the bottom, where the air was supercooled to forty degrees below, lay a bed of frozen salt water. Very few people who fell into a crevasse ever emerged alive…or, for that matter, at all.