So between the walks and the breaks they made steady progress. But after several of these had passed, they came upon swales of softer snow, which had been pushed by the winds into sastrugi like crosshatched dunefields. These snowdrifts were new, the result of unusually heavy snowfalls on the edges of the polar cap in recent years, generally assumed to be an effect of the global warming generally, and of the shorter sea ice season in particular. Climatologists were still arguing what caused all the different kinds of superstorms, aside from the overall increase in the atmosphere’s thermal energy. In any case the snow was here, one more manifestation of the changes in weather.
Val stopped for a meeting. “Follow me and step right in my footsteps, folks, and it will be a lot easier.”
“We should trade the lead, so everyone saves the same amount of energy,” Jack said.
“No no, I’ll lead.”
“Come on. I know we’ve got a long walk, but there’s no reason to get macho on us.”
Val looked at him a while, counting on her ski mask and shades to keep her expression hidden. When her teeth had unclenched she said, “I’ve got the crevasse detector.”
“We could all carry that when it was our turn.”
“I want to be the one using it, thanks. I know all its little quirks. It wouldn’t do to have any falls now.”
“You having the radar didn’t keep it from happening last time.”
They stood there under the low dark sky.
“Go second, and make her steps better for us,” Ta Shu suggested to Jack.
“We shouldn’t have anyone lose more energy than anyone else.”
“I have more energy than anyone else to start with,” Val said. “Everyone except maybe you, but you’re hurt. You cut your hand. You hit the wall of the crevasse. Let’s not waste any more energy arguing about it. It’ll work out.”
It was very hard to be civil to him. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and so took off before she said something unpleasant.
He stayed right on her heels, like some kind of stalker. She could hear his breathing, and the dry squeak of his boots on the snow. Untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind …
They followed her through the soft snow dunes in single file. She kept the pace easy, resisting the pressure from Jack. Never was the snow as soft as Rockies’ powder, of course, but it was extremely dry, and already had been tumbled by the winds until it was on its way to firn. It was more like loose sand than any snow back in the world, loose sand that gave underfoot, thus much more work than the firn. Then in the areas where it adhered, she had to pull her boots out of their holes after every step, and lift higher for the next one, which was also hard work. But she had put in her trail time—a lifetime’s worth—and it would take many many hours of such walking to tire her. No, she would be fine; she could walk forever. It was the clients she was worried about. She was responsible for them, and she had gotten them into trouble, as Jack had pointed out; but she couldn’t carry them, they had to walk on their own. So it had to be made as easy for them as possible.
So she did what she could. But as they walked on, and hour after hour passed, under the sun that wheeled around them in a perpetual midafternoon slant, they began to lose speed and trail behind. Jack no longer trod in her bootprints the second she left them unoccupied, nor during the breaks did he again mention leading the way. In fact he spent the rest periods in silence now, a mute figure under his parka hood, behind his ski mask and shades. He wasn’t eating much of his belt, either. That worried Val, and she tried to inquire about it by asking the group generally how they were feeling, and getting a status report from everyone; Elspeth was developing blisters on her heels, she thought; Jorge’s bad knee was tweaking; Jim and Ta Shu reported no problems in particular, but like everyone said they were tired, their quads in particular getting a little rubbery with all the loose soft snow. Jack, however, only said, “Doing fine. ‘Pacing myself for the long haul.’”
So, okay. End of that break. On they walked.
Her GPS was still out of commission, but occasionally when she turned it on it flickered and gave a reading, then blinked out again. The last one that had come through indicated that they were averaging about three kilometers an hour, which was normal on the plateau; a bit slower in the soft snow no doubt, hopefully a bit faster on the hardpack.
Then they came to a patch of blue ice, and Val groaned to herself. They had to stop and put on crampons, then scritch cautiously across the ice, which here was pocked and dimpled by big polished suncups. The nobbly surface gave their ankles a hard workout indeed, as their crampon points forced them to step flush on the terrain underfoot no matter its angle. It was best to step right on the cusps and ridges between the little hollows, crampons sticking into the slopes on both sides and keeping the foot level; but that took a lot of attention and precise footwork. So scritch, scritch, scritch, they stepped along, making perhaps two kilometers an hour at best. Val headed directly for the nearest stretch of snow in the distance, so that as soon as possible they reached the far side of the blue ice, groaning with relief, and could sit down and take the crampons back off, and drink what water had melted at the bottom of their flasks, then restuff the flasks with hacked chips of the blue ice, which would yield more water when melted than snow. Then they were up and off again, on what felt like land, after a precarious crossing over water.
Jorge and Elspeth were clearly tiring now, though they did not complain. Jim too was getting tired, and Jack stuck with him, arms crossed over his chest. Jack still wasn’t eating very much compared to the others, but he still wasn’t responding to her questions about it, either.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m fine.”
“We’re probably burning three or four hundred calories an hour doing this.”
“I’m fine.” Don’t bother me.
So she shrugged and took off again. They were back on good firn again, and could make decent time with minimum effort. Just walking, a great relief after what had preceded it.
But now when she looked back, she saw that Jim and Jack were behind Ta Shu, bringing up the rear, and losing a couple hundred yards per hour on all the rest of them. It didn’t seem like much, but it added up. And it worried her. But there was nothing to do but carry on, and ratchet down the pace a bit so that no one pushed too hard, especially those bringing up the rear.
They had been hiking for ten hours when Val got another GPS fix. They had come some thirty kilometers, a good pace; but she had aimed them out to the south to avoid the crevasses at the top of the Hump Passage, at the head of the Liv Glacier. So they still had at least seventy kilometers to go, she figured, depending on how far south they would have to detour to get around the ice ridge extending southward from Last Cache Nunatak. Beyond that ice ridge lay the head of the Zaneveld Glacier, which was heavily crevassed; they would have to stay south of that; and then on the far side of the Zaneveld was Roberts Massif. All those features lay below the horizon, of course; they could see only about ten kilometers in all directions, which meant that they could see nothing but the ice plain, except for occasional glimpses of the peaks of the Queen Maud Range, poking over the horizon to their right.