My Last Continent(6)
Even Kate looks surprised. “How far away is that boat?” she asks.
“Not far enough.”
“It must be gigantic.”
I nod. “Ten stories high, twelve hundred passengers, four hundred crew. And it has no business being down here.”
“It looks like it made a wrong turn somewhere in the Caribbean. How do you know so much about it?”
“I’ve been studying the effects of tourism on the penguin colonies,” I say. “I keep up on these things. The Australis is a new ship, registered in the Bahamas but probably filled with Americans—a floating theme park, like most of them.”
“You’re obviously not a fan.”
“I have no problem with ships like this in the Caribbean or in Europe. But down here—the last thing any of us needs, least of all the penguins, is for that behemoth to dump a small town’s worth of people on these islands.”
“Then why is it allowed down here?”
I sigh, staring at the ship, which is moving along the horizon like a pockmarked iceberg. “No one owns these waters. They can do whatever they want.”
“Is it headed south?”
“Looks like it,” I say, then shrug. “The good news is that, most of the time, ships that big just dash across the Drake to give passengers a glimpse of the icebergs and then head back up north. So we probably won’t see it again. It’s way too big to get into most of the places we visit.”
Kate’s still looking at the cruise liner, and I’m heartened to see that she appears as disgusted by it as I am. “It makes even that iceberg look small.”
I let out a wry laugh. “That iceberg is nothing compared to what we’re getting into,” I say. “And the Australis doesn’t have a reinforced hull like we do. That’s why I’m betting it will turn around.”
“What if it does come across icebergs?” she asks. “How will it navigate around them?”
“Carefully,” I tell her. “Very carefully.”
FIVE YEARS BEFORE SHIPWRECK
Petermann Island
When I notice one of our gentoo chicks is missing, I flip through our field notebook, find the colony chart, and match nest to nest. According to our records, the chick was two weeks old, but now the rocky nest is empty. I search but find no body, which means its disappearance must have been the work of a predatory skua. When skuas swoop down to snatch chicks or eggs, they leave little behind.
I move away from the colony and sit on a rock to make some notes. That’s when I hear it—a distinctly human yelp, and a thick noise that I have only heard once in my life and never forgotten: the sound of bone hitting something solid.
I stand up and see a man lying on the ground, a red-jacketed tourist from the Cormorant, which dropped its anchor in our bay this morning. The ship, making her rounds in the Antarctic peninsula, had left Thom and me here a week earlier, and she’ll pick us up in another week, during the last cruise of the season.
Petermann Island is tiny, just over a mile long, once home to small huts serving an early-twentieth-century French Antarctic expedition. Now we create our own research base, with tents and solar-powered laptops. During the two weeks we’re here, the Cormorant stops by, weather permitting, to show tourists the birds and our camp, offering a tour of the island and a glimpse of how we researchers live.
The man had fallen hard, landing on his back. When I see a spot of red spreading from the rock under his head into the snow, I start toward him. Fifteen other tourists are within twenty yards, yet no one else seems to notice.
Thom must have seen something; he gets to the man first. And now a woman is scrambling guardedly down the same hill, apparently taking care, despite her hurry, to avoid the same fate.
I turn my attention to the man. His blood is an unwelcome sight, bright and thin amid the ubiquitous dark-pink guano of the penguins, and replete with bacteria, which could be deadly for the birds. I repress an urge to clean it up.
“Deb,” Thom says sharply, glancing up. He’d spent two years in medical school before turning to marine biology, and he looks nervous. By now, four more tourists in their matching red jackets have gathered around us.
I hold out my arms and move forward, forcing the red jackets back a couple of steps. The woman who’d hurried down the hill is trying to see past me. She looks younger than the usual middle-aged passengers who cruise down to Antarctica. “Are you with him?” I ask her. “Where’s your guide?”
“No—I don’t know,” she stammers. Blond hair trails from under her hat into her eyes, wide with an anxiety I can’t place. “He’s up there, maybe.” She motions toward the gentoo colony. I glance up. The hill has nearly faded away in the fog.