There were about as many women as men among them, Val noted as she walked around. If that were true generally then it would be a first in Antarctic history. So there were some firsts left after all.
And the women there were a capable-looking crowd, reminding her in many ways of her lunch group in Mac Town. Scandinavians, Japanese, Eskimo, Kiwi, whatever. Muscled or round, tall, short, scarred and beat up, underfed or nicely blubbered; very few classic beauties in this crowd, though there were a few analogs to Lars there too. All of them looked good to Val. They liked to spend their time out in the wilderness, working hard. And they were doing that without being part of the tourism industry. Some kind of high-tech polar hunter and farmer life. What do you do for a living? I hunt and farm. I farm the ice. She had to laugh.
And when she stopped and asked one of the women about it, about the way they lived, the woman was instantly friendly. She had a German accent; she said, “Come with us now, we’re going to empty traps in the bay.” Val was still sloshing around inside her skin, her muscles turned to Jell-O; but this was her chance to do this, and another might never come.
So she told Ta Shu and Jim where she was going, and geared back up, and left the tent with a group of five women. Back into the rush of frozen mist; but in her clothes it was not so bad, the spacesuit effect very distinctly felt after their exposed wet foray outside; she was in the wind but protected, warm, disconnected. Geared up! It was pretty remarkable how protected they were. And it was by no means as windy as it had been on the Shackleton Glacier.
They followed a rope line, an Ariadne thread the woman called it, down the glacier to a very broad ice staircase, cut into the side of an ice slope with one of the laser borers. They were on a piedmont glacier, Val saw, or a remnant of the Ross Ice Shelf itself. So this camp was located where the Transantarctics dropped into the Ross Sea, tucked into some rock outcrop like Mount Betty. Iceberg fragments of the old shelf dotted the misty sea ice offshore, like a vast city of white buildings slowly dispersing into the distance. Visibility fluctuated in the cloud; sometimes she could see a few meters, other times a few kilometers, but all within the rushing cloud.
Down on the cracked surface of the sea ice there was a little fish hut, beside a round hole that had refrozen. They took turns breaking the new ice with a crowbar, Val taking a single whack and then passing the bar along, as she judged she was a danger to them all. Then she helped haul up on a chain, her mitted hands chilling swiftly, first throbbing with dull cold pain, then numbing to the point they became only big fat gloved things at the ends of her arms. She did windmills to return feeling to them, then helped the other women lift up the metal trap at the end of the chain. Out of the hole it came, splashing water that froze on the ice in seconds. Inside was a big mawsoni, and they stood back and watched as it thrashed out its life, everyone silent and intent. “What a dragon,” one said emphatically after it was dead. They opened the trap; it was like an elongated lobster trap, with a door people could unhook. They hauled out the dead monster and laid it on a banana sled. Val took one end of the sled, and helped the Germanic woman who had invited her out to carry the sled up the steps cut into the broken slope of the ice shelf. She could feel the exhaustion of the long walk across Mohn Basin in her legs; she was tired, very tired.
Then they hauled the fish over the ice, tromping back up to the camp slow step after slow step. In harness and pulling a sled again. It felt like a long way, going uphill and into the wind. The cloud flew right at them over the ice; everything white; not a classic whiteout, in the sense of losing all horizon and distance, but a blustery needle mist flowing right on the white glacier. Val was beat, her legs quivering and tweaking, on the edge of cramps. But her mind was sharp, needling inside her like her thawing hands. She felt full. The haul through the white wind suddenly ballooned: it took forever, it was the whole world, and she there in it completely, seeing it all in exquisite detail, the surface of the glacier as textured and semitransparent as her skin in the pool, everything flowing but still, everything in its place. She hit her stride and pulled forever.
Back in the refuge she sat again in the dining room, warming up by the stove, listening to the people around her talk. “All the Eskimos I’ve seen have had to learn snowcraft all over again, they’ve been living in pickup trucks or off their government grants. Either too poor or too rich. But what stayed with them was their values. Eskimos think it’s important to be happy. You’re supposed to react to difficult situations cheerfully. A happy person is considered a capable person, a good person. Unhappy people are thought to be deficient in some significant respect. It isn’t acknowledged to be an appropriate response. You have to face up to Naartsuk, that was their storm spirit, the biggest god in their pantheon. They don’t seem religious anymore, but they definitely still believe in Naartsuk.”
Carlos was telling people at Val’s table about arrowheads found on the Peninsula, indicating visits by prehistoric peoples in boats, no doubt from Chile. Also ancient maps which showed a surprisingly accurate Antarctic coastline, some of them even appearing to map what the deglaciated coastline would be, as if the civilization had been ancient beyond knowledge. Ta Shu was shaking his head at this, murmuring “No, no. Von Daniken, very bad. We are first here, we have that obligation.” Wade too seemed dubious about the possibility of previous Antarctic humans: “Is not possible,” he repeated more than once. “Is not possible.”
Many of the ferals, however, seemed to disagree. “There were beech forests here for millions of years,” one of the German women said. She had pulled a foot-powered sewing machine over to the table, and with Lars’s help was sewing together pieces of what looked like seal fur. “Who knows what else might have lived here?”
“We will bring the beech forests back,” Lars said. “The climate is just right for them again. It only needs planting them. Prehistoric and posthistoric. Our children will take refuge in these forests. They can harvest the wood, and make what they need, and set terraria in the protection of each grove. The fjords will come back too.”
Then the cook set a plate of fish cutlets and rice before Val, and a big salad of mixed lettuce and cut cabbage, and after she had wolfed it down Mai-lis came in and said to her, “We would like to move you on toward McMurdo now.”
“Now?” She was surprised; it was still storming outside, the clouds right on the ice and very windy. Of course that hadn’t stopped them so far.
“Yes, now, please. It’s best for us if our involvement in your affairs is over before McMurdo is back to normal. The ecotage has caused them to call in the U.S. Navy. Right now this storm is still keeping flights from Christchurch from coming down, but when they arrive we want to be gone.”
“Does it matter, now that people know you’re here? Once they start looking they’ll be able to find you for sure.”
Mai-lis nodded. “We haven’t decided what to do yet. Saving people was more important than staying hidden, that was clear. We don’t think anyone will actually try to evict us, so … well, we will see. But we want to start this next phase with some distance. So if you and your group will suit up, we will fly you to Ross Island.”