CHAPTER SEVEN
November 30
For days the sky had been filled with a swirling cloud of birds, following the Constellation as it headed south toward the Antarctic Circle. And Michael had set up his monopod-a Manfrotto with a trigger grip for quick, automatic adjustment-on the flying bridge to get as many good shots of them as he could. In his cabin at night, he'd been reading up on them, too, so he'd know what he was looking at.
Now-even if it didn't make them any easier to catch in flight-he could at least begin to tell them apart.
Nearly all of the birds were tube-nosed, with bills that contained salt-excreting glands, so that didn't help much. Nor did their color scheme, which was almost unrelievedly black and white. But the different species did exhibit unique flight patterns and telltale feeding methods, and that made the job a bit easier.
The diving petrels, for instance, were small and chubby, and shot above the sea with fast-beating wings, punctuated by short glides; often they went right through the crest of a wave, before plunging down to capture a bit of krill.
The pintado petrels danced with their webbed feet across the top of the water itself.
The southern fulmars, gunmetal gray, would allow themselves to stall in the wind, then fold their feet and drop, head last, into the sea, like a scaredy-cat jumping off a high dive.
The Antarctic prions plowed through the surf using their broad, laminated bills like shovels, filtering plankton from the water. Their cousins-the narrow-billed prions-flew more languidly, leaning down to pluck nimbly the occasional prey from the top few centimeters of the sea.
The snowy white petrels-the hardest to see against the foam and spray of the turbulent ocean-caromed around like pinballs, darting this way and that, their sharp little wings even touching the icy water to gauge the shape and drift of the swells.
But the king of them all-soaring on high like a ruler calmly surveying his realm-was the wandering albatross, the largest of all the seabirds. Even as Michael rooted around in his waterproof supply bag for a new lens, one of them had roosted on the helicopter tarp on the lower deck, and several more were keeping time with the ship, flying at the height of the bridge. Michael had never seen any creature travel with such beauty and economy of motion. With a wingspan of over three meters, the ashy white birds-with bright pink beaks and blackened brows- barely seemed to exert themselves at all. Their wings, Michael had learned, were a miracle of aerodynamic design, feeling every tiny shift in the wind and instantly adjusting an entire suite of muscles to alter the angle and sweep of each individual feather. The bones themselves weighed almost nothing, as they were partially filled with air. Apart from the brief spells when an albatross might alight to nest or mate on an Antarctic island, the bird lived its whole life in the air, borrowing the power of the changeable winds and using it, through some prodigious feat of navigation, to circle the entire globe, again and again.
No wonder sailors had always revered them and, as Captain Purcell later explained over dinner one night, “regarded them as a symbol of good luck. Those birds have a better global navigational system in their heads than we've got in the wheelhouse.”
“I had a few of them keeping me company today,” Michael said, “while I was up on the flying bridge.”
Purcell nodded as he reached for the bottle of sparkling cider. “They can adjust their dip and their speed to the velocity of the ship they're following.”
He refilled Dr. Barnes's glass with the cider. As Michael had learned on his first night aboard, when he'd innocently asked for a beer, no alcohol was allowed on U.S. Navy or Coast Guard ships.
“A friend of mine, a Tulane ornithologist,” said Hirsch, “radio-tagged an albatross in the Indian Ocean and tracked it by satellite for one month. It had traveled over fifteen thousand kilometers on a single foraging expedition. Apparently, the bird can see, from hundreds of meters up, the bioluminescent schools of squid. When the squid come up to the surface to feed, the bird goes down.”
Charlotte, taking one of the serving bowls from its rubber pad, paused and said, “This isn't calamari, is it?” and everyone laughed. “I mean, I'd hate to deprive some hungry albatross.”
“No, that's one of our cook's specialties-fried zucchini strips.”
Charlotte helped herself, then passed it to the Operations officer-Ops, for short-Lieutenant Kathleen Healey
“We serve lots of fresh vegetables and fruit on the way out,” Captain Purcell observed, “and lots of canned and frozen on the long way back.”
The ship suddenly swerved, as if taking a step sideways, then swerved back again. Michael put one hand on the rubber strip that went all the way around the rim of the table and the other on his cider glass. He still hadn't gotten used to the ship's constant rolling.
“The ship is shaped sort of like a football,” Kathleen said, looking utterly unperturbed by the turbulence. “In fact, she's not really designed for calm seas; she hasn't even got a keel. She's designed to move smoothly through brash ice and bergs, and that's when you'll be glad you're on her.”
“We've been lucky so far,” the captain said. “We've had a high-pressure area over us-meaning low seas and good visibility-and we've been able to make good progress toward Point Adelie.”
But Michael could hear the hesitation in his voice, and so could the others. Charlotte was holding a zucchini strip on the end of her fork.
“But?” she asked.
“But it looks like it's dissipating,” he said. “On the cape, the weather can change very quickly.”
“We're gradually moving across what's called the Antarctic Convergence,” Lieutenant Healey put in. “That's where the cold bottom water from the pole sinks beneath the warmer water coming up from the Indian and Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We're traveling into much more unpredictable seas, and less temperate weather.”
“Today was temperate?” Charlotte said, before snapping the zucchini strip off her fork. “My braids froze so hard, they felt like jerky.” She said it with a laugh, but everyone knew that it wasn't really a joke.
“Today will feel like a heat wave before we're done,” the captain said as he held out the big bowl of pasta primavera. “Anyone for seconds?”
Darryl, who'd passed on the appetizer-shrimp cocktails- immediately reached out. Despite his size, they had discovered that he could eat them all under the table.
“I'm only trying to prepare you,” the captain went on, “for what's coming.”
His warning came true even sooner than he might have expected. The winds had been picking up steadily, and the ice, drifting their way in chunks the size of train cars, was lumbering past in even-more-massive blocks; when some became impassable, the ship did what it was designed to do and plowed right through them. With dinner done, and the sun still hanging motionless above the horizon, Michael went out to the bow to watch the grudge match unfold between the oncoming bergs and the pride of the Coast Guard's cutters.
Darryl Hirsch was already out there, bundled up with only his eyeglasses poking through the red woolen ski mask that covered his entire head and face.
“You've got to watch this,” Hirsch said, as Michael joined him at the rail. “It's positively hypnotic.”
Just ahead lay a tabular slab of ice the size of a football field, and Michael felt the Constellation pick up speed as it rammed directly into the center of the snow-covered pack. The ice at first didn't give an inch, and Michael wondered just how thick it was. The engines groaned and roared, and the hull of the ship, rounded for just this purpose, rode up onto the surface of the glacier, and let its own weight-thirteen thousand tons-press down. A crooked fissure opened in the ice, then another, shooting off in the opposite direction. The cutter pressed forward, bearing down the whole time, and suddenly there was a great splintering and cracking of the ice. Massive shards reared up on either side of the prow, rising almost as high as the deck Michael and Darryl were standing on. Instinctively they stepped away from the railing, then suddenly had to lunge for it again to keep from tumbling all the way back to the stern.
When the shards subsided, Michael looked down over the rail and saw the pieces slipping away to the sides, before being sucked under the ship, on their way toward the giant screw propellers- three of them, sixteen feet in diameter-at the other end; there, they'd be chewed and chopped into manageable size, before drifting off in the ship's wake.
But what probably surprised Michael the most was the underside of the ice. What looked white and pristine on top did not look at all that way when broken and upended. The underbelly of the ice was a disheartening sight to see-a pale, sickly yellow that reminded Michael of snow a dog had peed on.
