said, I was hired on the expedition to climb mountains. After we’d rescued Byrd—which required the four of us staying with him in that little underground cell he’d created at Advance Base from August eleven, when we arrived, to October twelve, when Byrd and Dr. Poulter were flown out in the
“The
Mr. Perry had every right to say something like
I grinned. “Got it. But call me Dan.”
“If you’ll call me Jake,” he said.
I was surprised that I couldn’t—easily call him Jake, that is. I’m rarely impressed when I find myself with people known for their fame or title or supposed authority, but I found that I was
“Anyway,” he continued, “they had the big Fokker, named
“Had you joined the expedition in order to climb mountains in Antarctica?” Mary had knocked and come in with lemonade for both of us, but it was a brief interruption. And the lemonade was homemade and excellent.
Mr. Perry nodded. “That was my one real skill. My one real reason for being on that expedition. Climbing. Oh, I could handle motors and fiddle with equipment well enough…that’s how I ended up working with the snow tractors for Demas during the winter, when there was no climbing…but I went to Antarctica for its mountains.”
“Did you get to climb many?” I asked.
Perry grinned and again his blue gaze grew ruminative. “McKinley Peak that summer of ’thirty-four…not
“Who’s Jean-Claude?” I asked. “Someone else on the Byrd Expedition?”
Mr. Perry’s eyes had been at their most ruminative, but now they came back into focus and he looked at me and smiled. “No, no. Just a climber I knew a long time ago. Someone who loved any problem involving snow, ice, glaciers, or crevasses. Oh, I climbed Mount Erebus and Terror.”
“Those last two are volcanoes,” I said, trying to show that I wasn’t totally ignorant of all things relating to the South Pole. “Named after British ships, weren’t they?”
Mr. Perry nodded. “They were named in eighteen forty-one by James Clark Ross—he was credited for actually finding Antarctica, although they never really set foot on the continent—and the HMS
I scribbled all this down, not knowing what use it might be for my possible book about giant mutant killer penguins attacking Shackleton’s hut in Antarctica.
“Crozier was second-in-command a few years later on Sir John Franklin’s expedition, where both
I looked up. “They sank? The two ships the volcanoes were named after,
“Worse than that, Dan. They totally
I scribbled madly. I’d had no interest in writing about the North Pole and its expeditions, but more than a hundred men and two ships just…gone? I asked for this Captain Crozier’s full name and the spelling of it and Mr. Perry gave it to me, spelling it out as patiently as if I were a child.
“Anyway,” concluded Mr. Perry, “since Admiral Byrd wasn’t all that happy seeing me around—I guess I reminded him of his near-criminal negligence for gassing himself up at his much-ballyhooed ‘Advanced Base’ and making other men risk their lives to save his behind—for my next and last winter there, instead of my wintering on the main base with the other men, Admiral Byrd ordered me to ‘observe the penguins’ while staying alone in Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds. March to October nineteen thirty-five.”
“Observe the penguins that had already left,” I said.
“Yes.” Mr. Perry folded his arms as he chuckled, and again I could see how powerful his forearms still were. They also showed several livid scars. Old scars. “But in the autumn, before it got too ungodly cold, I could smell the overpowering guano stench of their rookeries every day. But one gets used to bad smells.”
“It must have felt like real punishment,” I said to him again, still feeling the horror of such isolation and moved to real anger at Admiral Byrd’s pettiness. “Not the guano, I mean. The sense of solitary confinement.”
Perry only smiled at me. “I loved it,” he said. “Those winter months at Shackleton’s hut were some of the most wonderful days I’ve ever spent. Dark and cold, yes…very cold at times, since the Cape Royds hut wasn’t really designed to heat for just one person, and the wind found its way in through a thousand cracks and crevices every dark day there…but wonderful. I used canvas and Shackleton’s old crates to create a little cubby near the door where I could stay a little warm, although some mornings the wolverine fur around the opening of my sleeping bag was almost covered with frost. But the experience itself…wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”
“Did you climb any mountains that winter?” I asked. I realized it was a stupid question as soon as I asked it. Who can climb mountains in the dark when it’s sixty or seventy degrees below zero?
Amazingly, he nodded again. “Shackleton’s men climbed Mount Erebus—at least to the rim of the volcano— in nineteen oh-eight,” he said. “But I climbed it solo three times, by different routes. Once at night. Oh, and although they credit the first winter climb of Erebus to a British climber, Roger Mear, just six years ago in nineteen eighty-five, I climbed Erebus twice in the winter of ’thirty-five. I don’t think that’s in any record book. I guess I just never bothered to mention it to anyone who might have written it down.”
He fell silent and I also stayed silent, wondering again if this nice old man was bullshitting me. Then he stood, lifted his old wooden-staff ice axe, and said, “Just a few months ago…this past January…an ironworker at McMurdo Station, a guy named Charles Blackmer, did a solo ascent of Mount Erebus in seventeen hours. It was in various alpine journals because it set an official record. Beating the older recorded times by hours and hours.”
“Did you pay attention to your time climbing the mountain fifty-six years earlier?” I asked.
Mr. Perry grinned. “Thirteen hours, ten minutes. But then, I’d done it before.” He laughed and shook his head. “But this doesn’t help you with your research, Dan. What do you want to hear about South Polar