As the dogs pulled the sled up a slight, icy rise, Michael got his first crystal-clear look at the camp, which, hard as it was to believe, was even drearier than Point Adélie. From the jetty where the boats pulled in with their catch—sometimes as many as twenty at a time, often pumped up with air to keep the carcasses afloat—wide ramps led to a crazy quilt of half-buried railroad tracks; a locomotive, gone black and red with rust, hauled the dead or dying whales to the flensing pan. That was the broad yard where the whalers took out their sharpened flensing knives and began to slice the blubber and tongues away in great, bloody strips. The tongues especially, huge and ridged with muscles, contained hundreds of gallons of oil.
It was there, now, that Danzig called out to the dogs, while pulling back on the reins; as he nimbly dismounted from the runners, the sled ground to a halt. The sudden cessation of the whooshing of the blades left what seemed a curious silence, until Michael listened again and heard the polar wind rattling the corrugated steel walls of the storehouses and moaning through the timbers of the wood-and-brick structures that had long preceded the metal ones. He clambered out of his berth in the sled, with Danzig giving him a hand, and stood up on the frozen mud of the yard. On all sides, and up the hill, he was surrounded by ramshackle buildings of obscure purpose, and he thought, not surprisingly, of a ghost town he had once photographed in the Southwest.
But this felt worse somehow. This felt like a killing ground, and he knew that the tundra he was standing on had once been ankle deep in blood and guts. The blackened rails rose, like a roller-coaster track, straight into the dilapidated building a few hundred yards up the hill; mechanized carts had carried the desirable parts of the whale into the processing facilities, while the rest of the bones and offal had been shunted off to the guano pits and the reeking shoreline, where clouds of birds, shrieking with delight, had descended upon the still-steaming piles.
As Michael fumbled to collect his tripod and waterproof equipment bag—it was too cold to take off his gloves for more than a few seconds—Danzig set the snow hook, like the emergency brake on a car, to keep the dogs from dragging away the sled. Then, for extra security, he tied the snub line to an iron skip wagon, missing two wheels and upturned on the frozen earth. Kodiak, watching him closely with his marble-blue eyes, sat back on his haunches, waiting.
“I’m going to give them their snack now,” Danzig said. “This is their favorite part of the trip.”
A couple of the wheel dogs, the ones who ran closest to the sled, pranced in place, already licking their chops as Danzig pulled a stiff burlap sack from the handlebars.
“I’ll pass,” Michael said, as Danzig took out several knotted ropes of beef jerky.
Danzig laughed and said, “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”
Picking his way across the rusted tracks and over the icy, wind-scoured earth, accompanied only by the yips of the pack and the cawing of some skuas—drawn no doubt by the dogs and the jerky—Michael thought that this might well be the most desolate place he had ever seen.
The ice block slowly continued to disintegrate in the tank, until small chunks were breaking off, much sooner than might have been expected…almost as if something inside the block were exerting pressure from within. One jagged piece, the size of a baseball, broke off the bottom of the block, just below the spot where the toe of the man’s boot could now be seen, and floated free. It drifted on the water, until it got closer to the PVC pipe that was draining the water from the tank and keeping it level; there, it was sucked into the mouth of the hose, where it stubbornly lodged.
Gradually, the water in the tank, replenished by the other pipe, rose, but as it did, it ran up into the topmost fissures and invisible brine channels, like blood rushing to fill untraceable veins and capillaries. An ear, put to the ice, would have heard a sound like static, as the ice crackled and crumbled…and a sound, too, of something else. Of scratching. Like nails on glass.