THE FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, as soon as he was dressed and before he’d even had his coffee, Michael checked on his baby skua, whom he’d named Ollie, after another unfortunate orphan, Oliver Twist.
It hadn’t been easy deciding what to do with him (or her, as there was really no easy way to determine its gender at that point). But adult skuas were devious birds, and had a nasty way of preying on the weak—he’d seen a pair of them work to distract a penguin mother from her brood, just long enough for one of them to snap up a chick, drag it away, and rip it, screeching, limb from limb. They just might do the same with Ollie if the bird didn’t grow a bit and get its wings.
But after consultation with several of the others at the base, including Darryl, Charlotte, and the two glaciologists Betty and Tina, it was decided that the best place for Ollie was in a protected environment, but still somewhere outdoors.
“If you raise him in here, he’ll never be able to fend for himself,” Betty had said, and Tina had vigorously agreed. To Michael, with their blond hair braided into coils atop their heads, they looked like a pair of Valkyries.
“But if you kept him in the core bin behind our lab,” Tina had suggested, “he could have the best of both worlds.”
The core bin was a rough enclosure behind the glaciology module, where the ice cylinders that they had not yet had time to cut up and analyze were stacked like logs on a graduated metal rack.
“I just unloaded a crate of frozen plasma,” Charlotte said, “and we could use the empty box to give the little guy some cover.”
It was sounding more and more like a grammar-school class working together on a biology project.
Charlotte retrieved the crate and they tucked it into a corner of the enclosure, then Darryl went next door and brought back some dried herring strips he used to feed his own living menagerie. Even though he—she?—was clearly starving, the baby bird didn’t immediately take the food. He seemed to be waiting for the bigger bird to descend from somewhere and peck him away. He’d already been programmed, as it were, to die.
“I think we’re all standing too close,” Darryl said, and Charlotte agreed.
“Just leave the strips near the crate, and let’s go in,” she said, with a shiver.
They had all gone back to their separate rooms, fallen into the uneasy sleep of people with no day or night to mark their time, and in the morning Michael had immediately gone to check on his ward.
The herring strips were gone, but had Ollie been the one to eat them? Looking around the frozen ground, where wisps of snow skidded around like wispy white feathers, he couldn’t see Ollie either. He lifted his dark green eyeshades away from his face, knelt down, and peered into the back of the crate. Charlotte had left some of the wood shavings, used to cushion the plasma bags, inside the box, but snow and ice had already blown into it, too. He was just about to give up when he saw something black and shiny as a pebble tucked into the far corner. It was the bird’s tiny unblinking eye, and now that he looked more carefully, he could make out the tiny gray-and-white fluff ball of its body. Curled up, the bird looked like a dirty snowball.
“Morning, Ollie.”
The bird stared at him, with neither fear nor recognition of any kind.
“You like the herring?’
Not surprisingly, Michael got no reply. He took out of his pocket two strips of bacon that he’d smuggled out of the kitchen on his way to the core bin. “I hope you’re not keeping kosher,” he said, leaving the bacon just inside the crate. He saw Ollie’s eyes flick, for just an instant, to the food. Then Michael stood up and headed back to the commons for his own breakfast. It was dive day, and he knew it would be important to fuel up before taking what the grunts and beakers alike referred to as “the polar plunge.”
Darryl was already halfway through a stack of blueberry pancakes, smothered in maple syrup, and a pile of veggie sausages, when Michael sat down. Lawson was sitting across the table. Contrary to any fears Hirsch might have had, his vegetarian status had done nothing to undermine him among even the grunts. In fact, nobody had turned a hair. As Michael had quickly learned, eccentricities of any sort were as common in the Antarctic, and as blithely accepted, as penguins squawking. People came to pole—Michael always had to remind himself to say it that way—to do their own thing. In the real world, they’d already been cast as loners, oddballs, and kooks, only down here nobody cared. Everybody had his own quirks to deal with, and being a vegetarian didn’t even rate on that scale.
“The first year that you come down here,” Lawson confided, speaking for the government personnel, “you do it for the experience.”
Michael could buy that.
“The second year,” he went on, “you do it for the money.”