As Michael passed by the narrow windows of the rec hall, he could just make out the sound of the upright piano. He looked inside and saw one of the grunts—a guy whose name he thought was Franklin—barreling his way through a ragtime number, while Betty and Tina, the sturdy glaciologists, swatted a Ping-Pong ball back and forth with the regularity of a metronome. Both of them, he’d learned, had winter-overed—meaning, they’d stayed at the base over the long, dark austral winter, when the sun never shone and the fresh supplies seldom came and the outside world might as well have been another planet. You actually earned a medal for doing that, and he’d seen one on Murphy’s lapel, too. It was a badge of honor, a kind of street cred, that the grunts and the beakers alike all respected.
But once he turned the corner of the rec hall, the wind suddenly hit him full in the face, so hard that he could lean into it, almost falling, and yet be kept standing. He picked his way carefully across the loose scree, the wind tearing at his clothes, and down toward the icy shore. It was never clear where the ground ended and the ice entirely took over, but it hardly mattered. It was all rock hard and equally unforgiving. In the distance, he could see a flock of penguins skittering down a frozen hill, then sliding on their bellies into the freezing waters. With a mittened hand, he fumbled for the drawstring on his hood and pulled it so tight that only his goggles remained uncovered. The sun, as cold and silver as an icicle, hovered slightly higher in the sky than it had the week before, making its slow but inexorable progress toward the southern horizon, and oblivion. The temperature, the last time he’d checked, was twenty below zero…but that didn’t take into account the infamous wind-chill factor.
A gray-and-white blur shot past his face, and he instinctively raised a hand against it. A second later, it shot past again. It was a skua, one of the scavenger birds of the Antarctic, and he realized he must be standing too close to its nest. Knowing that the birds always aimed for the head, the highest point of any intruder, he lifted one arm above his hood and, as the bird buzzed his mitten, looked around. He didn’t want to step on anything. A few yards behind him, there was a tiny hillock, which afforded some protection from the raging winds. The skua’s mate was tending to two chicks there. She had a live krill in her beak, one she must have just plucked from the water. Its many legs were still waving wildly. Michael stepped a few paces back, and the papa bird, apparently satisfied by his retreat, returned to the nest.
The two chicks were both crying for the food, but one was larger than the other, and every time the little one chirped, the bigger one whipped round and pecked at it. Each time that happened, the littler bird was driven farther from the protection of the nest, but the parents seemed completely unperturbed. The mother dropped the krill from her hooked bill and, while the little chick looked on forlornly, its sibling snatched it up and wolfed down the entire thing.
Michael wanted to say, Come on already, share and share alike, but he knew that no such rules were in play here. If the little chick couldn’t fend for itself, its parents would simply let it starve. Survival of the fittest, at its most unadorned.
The little chick made one last try at returning to the nest, but the bigger one flapped its wings and pecked again, and the little chick retreated, its head down, its pale gray wings clutched tight around its body. The mama and papa stared impassively in the other direction.
And Michael took his opportunity. He stepped forward, and before the baby bird, not yet fully fledged, could scuttle away, he bent down and scooped it up between his mittens. Only its white head and the black buttons of its eyes poked out from his hands. The papa bird screeched, but not, Michael knew, at his kidnapping the chick; it was only because he’d come too close to the nest and the fat heir apparent.
“Get lost,” Michael said, holding the baby chick close to his chest. Then he turned around, the wind at his back, and let it blow him halfway up the slope and toward the warmth of the rec hall. What, he wondered, would Kristin have named the little foundling in his mitts?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
July 6, 1854, 4:30 p.m.
ASCOT. For Eleanor, it had always been just a word, the name for a place she would never get to see. Not on her meager salary, and certainly not unaccompanied.
But there she was, leaning close to the wooden rail as horses—the most beautiful she had ever seen, with gleaming coats, colorful silks draped beneath their saddles, and white cloths wrapped around their lower legs—were led from the paddock to the starting gate. All around her, and in the grand pavilion above, thousands of people—more than she had ever seen in one place in her whole life—were shouting and milling about, waving racing calendars and arguing loudly about things like sires and dams, jockeys and muddy tracks. Men drank from flasks and puffed on cigars, while women—some of them, she felt, of rather dubious aspect—paraded about, showing off their costumes and twirling pink or yellow parasols in the sun. Everyone was laughing and gabbling and clapping each other on the back, and all in all it was the merriest, and noisiest, scene she had ever been a part of.