Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“To what?”

“The hut.”

“There’s another dive hut here?”

He turned and smiled quizzically. “You are new here. This is the hut Scott lived in the winter before he headed to the pole. His Terra Nova expedition.”

“You’re kidding!”

Dave’s smile widened into a grin. “Why do you think I took a day off to come with you guys?”

“Can we go inside?”

“Let’s find out!” said Matt, who had already climbed out of the passenger compartment and was heading toward the shore.

Valena tumbled out of her side of the vehicle and skidded across the ice. The wind had blown the snow off the ramp of frozen ocean where the expansion of freezing had shoved it onto the land. It was as slick as glass. Gingerly, she corrected her course to climb the ramp where there was still an armoring of snow.

Dave moved past Valena and probed the snow. “Here’s a crack,” he said, as his pole jerked down into the snow. “Just follow my footsteps.”

Valena stepped along behind him, watching his shoulders roll with the effort of finding his footing in the drift. Tucked into a hollow on the land, a roof was visible now. As she walked higher up the drift, she could see the walls below its eaves. It was a much bigger hut, taller, wider, longer. Clearly, Scott had learned from his first attempt at Hut Point and had come back better prepared with a structure that would house him and his men for as long as necessary. Snow had drifted in scoured tongues around the entrance, and as they approached, Valena saw the rusted metal of spare skids for long-gone sledges leaning against its sides, as if still waiting for Scott’s return. “This is magic!” she cried. “And look—the door is open!”

At the sound of her voice, a man dressed in yellow ECWs stepped out through the doorway. “Greetings,” he said. “Want to come inside?”

Valena clapped her hands together in delight. “Yes!”

“Step this way. We were just locking up to head over to Cape Royds, but we can certainly delay a few minutes. Be sure to brush the snow off your boots with that brush in there,” he said. “And don’t step beyond any black lines. Here, you’ll need this.” He handed Valena a flashlight.

She stepped inside and found herself in a vestibule that led to an inner door. An ancient snow shovel rested against the jamb to one side, and beside it, a row of long, wooden skis and a wheelbarrow. Behind her stood a rusted bicycle, crazily bent by some mishap.

Valena cleaned the snow from her boots and then stepped cautiously toward the inner door, letting her eyes adjust to the lowered light. It had no lock, only a rope pull with a wooden handle. As she reached out to grasp it, she realized that the hand of Sir Robert Falcon Scott had touched it also…

She pulled. The catch eased. The door swung inward.

She stepped into a world lost in the age of heroes, when men crossed Antarctic ice on foot, hauling sledges. Inside, it was dim—the only light coming from a few small windows far inside the long room—but Valena did not turn on the flashlight. Instead, she let this world envelop her.

The trusses of the room arched high above her, with equipment stored in the rafters. A sledge. A ladder. There was a cast-iron stove, and shelves made of packing crates filled with tins and jars of food stores. Mustard, ketchup, cocoa, biscuits, oatmeal. Down the center of the room stood a long table sparsely laid with crockery, and to either side, crude bunk beds.

I’ve a photograph of men dining here , she realized. A holiday feast, with pennants hanging from these beams. And I’ve seen a picture of the men lying in these bunks.

Valena moved quietly into the room, almost afraid to breathe. She switched on her light now, letting its thin beam search in among the shadows of the bunks. In the picture of the men lying in these crude beds, their faces were tired and grimed with oil from their food and soot from their lamps. How patient they had looked, as they survived the long winter they must endure before their leader headed toward the pole. Or was that photograph taken as they waited, praying for a return that would not come?

How they must have suffered!

Suddenly feeling a strong need for companionship, Valena turned to the door. Matt and Dave had followed her inside and were absorbing the magnificence of the living relic in silence, eyes roaming, mouths agape. The New Zealanders followed close behind them.

They wandered here and there, leaning carefully over books left open on a table—a headline on an Australian newspaper declared, SPRING HAS COME!—and shaking heads in amazement over the reindeer-hide sleeping bags that rested on the surprisingly short bunks.

These men were smaller than I am , thought Valena. And yet they endured.

“This was Scott’s bunk,” said one of the New Zealanders, moving up beside her. ‘And here’s his desk.” A penguin collected for study lay across the table, as fresh as if it had been left the day before.

In another corner of the room, a set of chemist’s glassware rested on a wooden bench, awaiting the scientist’s return.

“We should get going,” said one of the archaeologists.

Valena thought, I don’t want to leave, but I’ve absorbed all I can for now, it’s that overwhelming. After thanking the archaeologists for the incomparable treasure of visiting the inside of the hut, she turned to follow.

BACK OUT ON THE ICE, DAVE, MATT, AND VALENA climbed back into their Pisten Bully and followed the archaeologists’ Haaglund as it left the flag route from McMurdo behind and continued on a less-traveled track to the north, rounding Barne Glacier, a wall of ice that glowed a neon blue. They were no longer in the Antarctica of jet aircraft and flush toilets but the one of lone huts and little-used trails.

Valena rode in silence, her world far away, an abstraction.

Dave broke the quiet. “So you came down here to work with Emmett Vanderzee.”

“Yes.”

“You know I was up there last year when it happened.”

She turned and looked at him. “Yes.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help… You know, I’d hate for you to have to go home.”

Valena thought, He’s going to make this easy for me. She studied the angles of his profile. He was a fine-looking man, handsome in a gentle, kind sort of way. Unassuming. A comforting presence. “I need to know as much as I can about how it went down,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like… well, like did you hear the plane? That sort of thing.”

“Sure. It was low overhead. You could hear it even through the wind.”

“Where were you when you heard it?”

“In the cook tent. I was keeping the stove going so Emmett and Sheila and Manny could concentrate on the patient. They had him up on the table on top of a couple of camp mats to keep him as warm as possible. I had the stove on a packing crate underneath. I wanted to keep an eye on it so it didn’t melt its way down into the ice and go out, or ignite the tent fabric.”

“Who else was there with you?”

Dave thought a moment, conjuring the scene in his head. “Willy was there eating cookies a lot. Bob and Dan were in their tent, and Cal was in the one he shared with Emmett.”

“You’re sure that they were in those tents, and not somewhere else.”

“I checked on them when I went to the latrine once. Bob was sleeping, or just lying there with his eyes shut, and Dan was reading. And Cal was alone in his tent. Then the plane came over, and we took a look but the wind got so bad Emmett was on his belly using an ice axe to hold on, so he made us return to the tents until it let up. He went out again after a while but couldn’t find it.”