Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“I follow you so far.”

“The rock here is different than the rock around McMurdo. Here it has these huge phenocrysts, and they crumble out of the rock at exactly the size that sticks in the treads of these boots. Now, how many people from McMurdo get to come here?”

“Almost none. You’ve already met everyone authorized to come here this season: me, Jeannie, the three Kiwis, Kathy Juneau’s group, the two men who brought you out here yesterday. I count ten. Two men who helped set up my tent and so forth, that’s twelve.”

“Thirteen, counting me. How many pilots have landed here?”

“Three. No, all four of the helo pilots have landed here, though they don’t tend to get out of the aircraft, and they don’t wear FDXs.”

“So that’s seventeen people out of thirteen hundred who have an excuse to have these crystals at this diameter stuck in their boots, and maybe half of them even have a pair of FDXs, let alone that size. Now, name me two other things that might get caught in a boot here that wouldn’t show up anywhere else on the island. Or would not be likely, at least.”

“Why two?”

“Three’s a good number. One is happenstance, because these crystals might show up in at least one other lava flow between here and McMurdo. Two is coincidence. Three begins to be a trend.”

“Well, there’s the penguin guano. I’ve sure picked a lot of that out of my boots.”

Valena said, “Let’s try bottle glass. Shackleton group liked to break bottles, or perhaps they were just lousy shots when they pitched empties out the door of that hut, trying to hit their dump.”

“Let’s go take a look,” said Nat.

Down at the hut, they picked through the loose gravel, picking up shards of bottle glass. One of the archaeologists sauntered over to look at what they were doing. “I realize this looks like trash,” he said, “but it’s actually part of this archaeological site. Kindly do not remove it.”

Valena handed him the shards. “Are these all from the Nimrod expedition?”

The archaeologist raised his palm and examined them. “Looks like it. The pale violet started out clear. This green is common, as you can see in the dump, and this rust red is as well. It was all brought from England in 1907. There were not yet as yet any glass manufacturers in New Zealand.”

“And the impurities that made these colors? Would they be diagnostic?”

“Certainly,” he said. “The colors are various iron oxides, except the bright blue, which is cobalt oxide. And this pale purplish one might have fluorite.”

“Could you possibly make a formal loan of some shards? For the investigation of this case?”

The archaeologist thought a moment, and then said, “If it would get those unbroken bottles back, I would loan you my right arm. But I have a selection of tiny bits. Let me get them for you.” He strode away to the depot where they were storing the carefully cataloged artifacts.

Valena smiled. “That’s three. But I’d say that simply finding these phenocrysts and a little penguin guano on the boots of someone who was not supposed to be here would be fairly conclusive.”

“Right,” said Nat. “And finding six penguin eggs and antique bottles in his foot locker wouldn’t hurt, either.”

VALENA WALKED SLOWLY THROUGH THE PENGUIN colony, trading stares with the birds. I am a detective now , she realized. Shorn of the role I came down here to play, I have stepped into another. What do I need to accomplish here? Only to walk through the colony, then clean my boots into a sample bag. How strange…

She crouched to line up a photograph, zooming in on one individual who had stood up to stretch. The bird stared back at her through eyes that revealed no warmth or emotion. She clicked the shutter, then panned down the bird’s shoulder to examine its wing. The tips of its short, thick feathers were not black but blue, the same shade as the sky.

Valena lowered the camera and watched the bird as it flipped its head about, looking to its grooming. How clever you are , she thought. I sure couldn’t make it, trying to live out here on this rock. I wish you best of luck.

Valena followed Jeannie as she wove a route up and over and around the penguin-dotted lava flows, mimicking the pace and languid motions of the biologist as she turned her head slowly this way and that, peering to see who still had eggs.

“How long do they sit on the nests?” Valena asked.

“Until the job is done,” answered Jeannie. “Egg-laying occurs over a three-week period, ending about now… hatching begins mid-December… they’re off the nests by February. Off to a life on the ice floes: swimming, eating, wandering around, just being penguins.”

“You come here every year?”

“This is my first year. I think this is Nat’s twenty-sixth time on the ice. He knows these birds personally, maybe better than he knows most humans.”

“Is that true about the marine ecosystems?”

“Being broken? Too true, sorry to say. You take out the apex predator, you throw the whole game off. Take out the krill or fish, again it’s out of whack. And things don’t regenerate as fast as they do in warmer waters. When you buy Chilean sea bass at your market, sometimes it’s actually Antarctic cod. The Antarctic cod takes years to grow to breeding maturity in these waters. They are delicious, I don’t argue that, but when a fishing boat comes in, the captain is thinking return on investment, not, ‘Am I taking too many?’”

“I get you. Like too many other resources we consume, we harvest faster than the resource can regenerate.”

“The word isn’t ‘harvest.’ When we take faster than it can regenerate, it’s ‘mine.’ We are mining the edible populations of the ocean.”

“So we should eat farmed fish?”

“Farmed fish tend to be carnivorous species, such as trout. That means that some other edible species is being mined to feed the farmed species. I think the answer is to make fewer humans, not more fish.”

“I agree.”

“You and I are at that age when we have to decide these things. Do we have babies? How many? I come from a big family. I’m one of five. It will be strange to limit myself to two children. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh?”

“I’m adopted.”

“Oh.” Jeannie was quiet for a while, continuing her slow, rhythmic search through the colony. “What was it like, being adopted? I suppose that’s an option I should consider.”

“Depends on how important it is to you to be genetically close to your children.”

Jeannie laughed. “But we’re all genetically close.”

“Try thinking that when you look like me.”

Jeannie turned and faced her. “There is no such thing as race.”

“What do you mean?”

“All the research done in the past half century has said the same thing: we are all one race with only minor variations, but the mixing is spread all across the globe, the result of constant intermarriage, not just this tribe splitting off from that. And surely you’ve heard about mitochondrial Eve? Each woman on this planet, including you and me, carries the same genetic coding in our mitochondria, with only minor, minor variations that have built up over the millennia. In a manner of speaking, we are all daughters of one ancient mother. We all carry her heritage. We are sisters.” She had begun to make emphatic gestures.

Valena smiled. “You’re upsetting the penguins.”

Jeannie pulled in her arms and spoke more quietly. “We all trace ourselves to one small population that lived in southern Africa less than two hundred thousand years ago. Less than two glacial cycles, putting it in the time frame you glaciologists think in.”