My Last Continent(17)

With its bare industrial buildings, McMurdo looks like an ugly desert town whose landscape is drab and brown at the height of the austral summer and so white in the winter that you don’t know which way is up. On clear days, Mt. Erebus is visible in the distance, steam rising from its volcanic top, and later in the season, when the sun finally begins to set, the mountain looks as if it’s on fire.

I’m stretching my legs, taking it all in, when I notice Keller watching me.

“I was thinking,” he says. “Maybe I could shadow you out there one day? See the colony firsthand.”

I tell him, “Maybe,” both charmed by his interest and a bit wary of it.

We’ve been assigned to different dorms and say quick good-byes before going our separate ways. We don’t make plans to see each other, but I know I’ll eventually bump into him around the station, in the cafeteria. At McMurdo, during the busy season, you can’t avoid people even if you want to.

Yet I don’t see him again until two days later, when I’m heading out for my fieldwork and find him standing outside the Mechanical Equipment Center, wearing a jacket that looks too light for the temperature and that same red bandanna tied around his neck like a scarf.

“Hey,” Keller says in greeting as I approach the building. “Are you heading to the Garrard colony?”

“That’s right.”

“Is this a good time for me to tag along?” he asks.

I look at him, wondering how serious he really is about learning about the penguins. “Don’t you have dishes to wash?”

“Not until tonight,” he says.

“Why don’t you spend some time getting the lay of the land?” I suggest. “You could visit Scott’s hut—it’s a nice walk from here.”

“Already tried,” he says. “It’s closed for renovations. Indefinitely, they told me. What are they doing in there, anyway? Adding indoor plumbing? Central heating?”

I can’t help but smile.

“I promise I won’t get in your way,” he says.

I glance toward the MEC building, then back at Keller. “Have you been trained on the snowmobiles?”

He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

Which means if he comes along, he’ll need to ride with me. There’s just enough room for two on the Ski-Doo, and I don’t carry many supplies for day trips: a counter, field notebook, water, pee bottle and plastic bags, and a survival kit, all tucked into a compartment of the snowmobile.

“I’m not on a schedule,” I warn him. “I can’t drive you all the way back here so you can be on time for your shift.”

He grins. “You scientists. No respect for the workingman.”

I give him a look, but he’s still smiling. “What’re they going to do, fire me?”

“Probably.”

He only shrugs. “Look, I may not know a lot about penguins yet,” he says, “but I could be a great assistant.”

I’m not sure I need an assistant, but I consider it anyway. There’s a lot of data to collect, and he could be helpful—as long as I don’t have to spend my time picking up after him or fixing his mistakes. At least he knows about the colony, which is something. A decade earlier, a gigantic iceberg calved off the Ross Ice Shelf and blocked the penguins’ access to the ocean, their only source of food. They had to find a new path, which was more than twice as long. None of the chicks survived that season, and most of the adults starved. Once a fairly healthy colony, with thousands of breeding pairs, it had to start over—but it’s been recovering, growing slowly, and thanks to our five-year grant from the NSF, someone from the Antarctic Penguins Project travels down here to do the annual census. This year, it’s me.

“I guess I could use an extra hand,” I say. Keller’s smile is so genuine I can’t resist smiling back.

It’s a clear day, with lucent vanilla ice sandwiched between blue ocean and bluer sky. When we arrive at the colony, I set about my work, instructing Keller to either stay put and watch or follow my footsteps exactly so as not to disturb the molting birds.

“It’s called a catastrophic molt for a reason,” I tell him. Unlike most other birds, penguins molt their feathers all at once, rather than shed them gradually. The emperors’ molt happens over a month, a physically exhausting feat that uses up all their energy. The penguins, fattened up in preparation, look as though they’ve gotten bad haircuts, their brownish feathers sloughing off in a patchwork of fluff, the beautiful, sleek new feathers coming in underneath.

“Don’t do anything to cause them to move,” I say. “They need every bit of energy they’ve got.”