Phil Richardson

7010 Cornell Rd.

Athens, Ohio 45701

(614) 593-2748

2,852 words

Bill grabbed his bright blue parka, opened the hatch, and stepped out of the warm compartment of the ship's mess deck into the chill of the Antarctic summer. He stopped for a moment to pull up his zipper and surveyed the bright sunlit and snow-brightened scene before him. In the distance he could see another Navy ship anchored to the ice. Remembering orders, he reached in his pocket for his prescription sunglasses and exchanged them for the glasses he usually wore. Snow blindness was not something you wanted to fool with. Their lectures on Antarctic survival had really emphasized this.

"Dammit! I hate the cold," he muttered. "Now I got to walk a mile to that supply ship because our stupid radar broke down. " He shuffled carefully across the gray metal deck--it was coated with hoarfrost and was very slippery. The ship's battleship-gray color was made a little more interesting by the covering of frost, snow, and ice, the masts stood up like crystal stalagmites and the cables and wires were covered with icicles. The ship's guns were blanketed with snow, and they glistened in the bright sunlight. It was hard to imagine how dull they usually looked.

. As Bill approached the quarterdeck, his buddy Ron turned and smirked at him. "Guess you're finally going get some exercise, old buddy. Wish I could go with you. That supply ship is supposed to have a good ship's store and we've been out of candy bars for a week."

Now that they were coming close to the end of their tour of duty, it seemed that they were always running out of something. They were getting pills in the mess hall instead of salad and milk--rumor had it that they would soon be eating seal meat instead of hamburger. Candy bars were always in short supply because the cold seemed to sap all the energy from their bodies and they often needed a quick sugar fix.

Bill slapped Ron on the back and nodded, "OK, I can take a hint. You want me to bring you a whole box, right! You got any money? "

Ron dug into the pocket of his dungarees, handed Bill four dollars and pointed to the gray shape of the supply ship USS Wyandotte which, like their ship, was tied up to the ice shelf just as the first Antarctic explorers had tied up, with a "dead man's anchor", a series of railroad ties buried in the ice with long cables reaching up to the ship.

"Be careful now, there's a whole flock of Skua gulls out on the ice shelf workin' on the garbage and those birds are mean. I seen 'em peck out the eyes of a penguin yesterday and then when he couldn't protect himself, they just start tearing him apart. I'd hate to have 'em start workin' on me"

"I know," Bill replied, "I always thought gulls were neat birds until I saw those things in action. Gotta' go now. The captain wants that radar up and running when we leave tomorrow."

Bill walked down the gangplank, holding onto the rope railing to keep from slipping into the icy water and then scrambled up onto the ice shelf and began the long trek to the other ship. Walking in the Antarctic was something like walking in a desert, just a different temperature. There were no plants, no rocks, just endless snow and pressure hummocks--where the ice was forced together and pushed up into ridges. The wind began to pick up a little, so he tightened the hood on his parka and hunched over to protect his face. "Maybe I should turn back," he thought. "But if I do, Ron will give me a hard time because I didn't get his candy bars and the Chief will bawl me out again."

` He trudged on and when he reached the spot where the skua gulls were gathered he plunged through the flock and scattered them with kicks and handfuls of snow. He was just about half way to the Wyandot when there was a sudden shift in the wind and snow began to fall. Suddenly the whole world turned white and he lost sight of the supply ship. He stopped and looked around, but could see nothing. It was the most feared of all the crazy weather of the Antarctic, a whiteout. It was worse than the worst fog you could imagine. You couldn't see anything and, if you didn't have your feet on the ground, you couldn't even tell up from down. A lot of planes and helicopters had crashed in whiteouts. Nobody was certain as to what caused them and you never could tell how long they would last. Well, he wasn't going to stand there in the cold and wait. The chief would be ticked off if he didn't get the parts that they needed.

He headed in the direction where he had last seen the supply ship and stumbled on through the blinding white nothingness. The cold wind stung his cheeks and he shut his eyes against the icy blast so they wouldn't freeze. After an hour, he knew that he was lost. He should have found the ship by now. He should have at least found the ocean. Damn, if he had only just stood there and waited. He continued walking, hoping that the whiteout would lift, hoping that he would find the edge of the ice shelf and then he could just follow it to the ship. He had to detour many times because some of the pressure ridges were to high to climb. His sense of direction was completely gone now.

Two hours later he still had found nothing. The whiteout continued to hide everything from him and now he was beginning to feel tired. He was so cold--colder than he had ever been in his life. Cold as death. He thought of Ron back on the ship waiting for his Mars bars. Ron would probably think he had stayed over on the other ship because of the whiteout. If he'd been lucky enough to reach the other ship, he would've stayed. No one was dumb enough to go wandering around in a whiteout.

Maybe they would send a helicopter or one of those tracked weasels to find him when they noticed he was missing. Of course, helicopters couldn't fly until the whiteout lifted. That might not be till morning, however, and he might have the whole Antarctic night before him. Night was not really night because the sun never set in the Antarctic summer. That was a good thing, but the problem was that it never got above freezing in the summer either. If he stopped moving, he knew he would freeze to death. If he lay down in the snow, and died there the skua gulls would eventually find him and peck out his eyes. For some reason, that bothered him most of all.

He looked at his watch and it was now 3 am. How long had he been lost? He was so tired that it felt like he was walking through molasses. He could barely put one foot in front of the other. He thought about finding some place to sit down and get warm, but there was no real shelter, just the hummocks of ice and snow forced high in the air by the pressure of the wind on the enormous ice shelf. He stopped to look around and wished that there were just some way to tell where he was going. He could not count on the sun--it simply circled the horizon and gave no indication of direction at all. Maybe, when they finally got around to looking for him, they would find his frozen body. He would be sure to cover his eyes with his hood so the gulls couldn't peck them out. His mom would be real upset if they had to have a closed coffin funeral.

Coffins---his mind wandered back to the supply ship--the last time he had been there, the bosun's mate had taken him down into one of the dark holds to search for the supplies he needed. There he had seen a big stack of coffins.

"We made 'em on the way down." The old chief gestured towards the cold wooden boxes. "Never know when you'll need 'em in a place like this. We had to make 'em square so they would stack neatly in the freezer. Think about that, supper and your best buddy stored in the same freezer." He laughed, "Never know when some dumb sucker will fall over the side. They'd last about two minutes in this friggin' water and then they'd be frozen solid." He scratched his head, "Of course then they'd sink and we wouldn't need these coffins." Ted had quickly gotten his supplies and left.

Now he might end up in one of those boxes, stacked neatly in the freezer next to the ground beef and the chickens they had picked up in New Zealand. He supposed it would make the chief happy that his construction work had not gone to waste.

Ted stopped to clean his glasses, frosted over from his breath and the blowing snow. If he hadn't been so dumb, he would be back in Norfolk planning a trip to Virginia Beach right now. Never volunteer! Everybody knew that, but he had read the request for volunteers for the International Geophysical Year, and he had thought that he would finally find that adventure he had joined the Navy for. Ohio had never given him any adventure and neither had Norfolk. Norfolk with signs that read "Sailors and dogs keep off the grass." Norfolk, where women looked at your shoes when they first met you. If your shoes were black, they knew you were in the Navy and, by Norfolk standards, "Off limits." Now he had found adventure and he was it.

He trudged along, wearily lifting one foot and then the other. The thermal boots that he wore kept his feet warm, but they were heavy. He glanced around once more, looking nervously behind him. All he needed to make his day perfect was to run into a leopard seal, one of the few predators of the Antarctic. Information that had also been in the lectures they had been forced to attend on the way down to Antarctica. Leopard seals, the lecturer had said, looked like all the other seals. The only problem was that they would eat anything that wasn't bigger than they were. They could travel across the ice almost as fast as a man could run and were to be avoided at all costs. Some wiseacre had asked how to tell the difference. The officer in charge had said, "You kick it. If it chases you and bites you its a leopard seal."

He wasn't about to kick any seals to find out. His chances were slim enough as it was. Maybe he should just stop and wait. Didn't all the manuals say not to keep moving? Just to wait for someone to find you. Those lectures had been boring, but somehow he remembered some of them. Skua gulls, leopard seals, killer whales were all things you had to look out for. Most things here were friendly, however. There were all kinds of seals that you could walk up to and they hardly noticed you. Probably thought of you as just a big penguin.

Penguins--they were the most! They just didn't seem to be afraid of people. He had even picked one up once and at first it hadn't minded, but then it had given him a good peck on the arm. It had taken three stitches to close up the wound and all the guys had kidded him about his "lovers bite." They were always kidding him because he was so young looking. "Pogey bait" the old salts would say. They were always making cracks to all the young sailors, like "Wanna' come down to the hold with me? Wanna' come up to the top bunk? Sometimes their comments scared him because he sensed that some of those guys were only half kidding. He would be glad when he could grow a beard and look more like an old salt himself. Maybe then they would leave him alone. He had always looked younger than he was. His voice had not changed until last year when he was eighteen and it was still kind of high.

His heart beat faster as he suddenly realized that the whiteout had lifted. He could finally see again. "Thank you God. Thank you" he shouted. "I'm gonna live. I'm gonna find the ship now." No ship appeared on the horizon, however. There was nothing but the endless white snow and, he discovered as he looked up, a flock of skua gulls. One of the skua gulls cried out and he turned to follow its flight as it swooped low over the snow. There, not fifty feet behind him stood an Emperor penguin. It was at least three feet tall and was banded below the throat with a collar of yellow feathers.

"Hey old buddy," he cried. "Where you going'? I know, you're gonna join your buddies and they're all down by the sea. Down by the sea where my ship is. All I gotta do is follow you and I'll be safe. I got my own guide!" The penguin turned at his shouts and then continued its waddling walk across the snow.

He waited for the penguin to catch up and, relieved to find some living thing, started chattering at the large bird.

"Bet you're looking for a lady. There's lots of ladies down by the sea. You can find a lady, you can go swimming, and I can find my ship."

They walked together like two comrades. Their tracks were strikingly similar because his sailor's walk left footprints that were pointed outward just like the penguins. Sometimes the Emperor, tired of walking upright, would fall to his stomach and, using his wings, swim across the snow. Once when they were going downhill Bill had to run to catch up to him. Running was good because it made him feel warmer. The air was beginning to get very cold, and Bill could feel the chill through his entire body. He began talking to the penguin again.

"Why don't you and I find us a couple of chicks?" He laughed at his own pun. "We could have a good time. I bet you got lotsa lady friends. Hell, I don't even know if you're a lady yourself or not. I wished I hadn't slept through all those lectures. I wish I knew more about penguins."

Bill talked and talked to the stately bird as they walked along. He told it about all of the sights he had seen, the women he would make love to when he got back to the real world, and how maybe girls would pay attention to him when they find out all the places he had been and all the adventures he had had. He told it about his life and how he was going to make something of himself. He was going to write books and he was going to make a lot of money. He was going to be something.

The penguin just kept walking. Bill was soon tired of talking and trudged wearily along, with the solemn bird. It was getting harder and harder to keep up now, for his legs seemed to be unable to match even the penguin's slow progress.

Bill looked at his watch again. Hours and hours had passed and he couldn't figure out why he and his companion hadn't reached the sea yet. "Hey old buddy. You sure you know where you're going?"

The penguin turned and seemed to be shaking its head. It peered at him through eyes that looked like black buttons and then turned to continue its steady walk. Bill decided to sit just for a while on one of the small hummocks of snow. The penguin stopped too, stood and watched him. "Keep going old buddy. I'll catch up. I just wanna rest for a while. I just want to sit and think for a while."

They found Ted two days later. One of the helicopters was ferrying scientists inland when they spotted his bright blue parka against the white snow. They circled to find a good landing spot and then walked over to the still figure. He was frozen in a sitting position and next to him stood an emperor penguin. The penguin watched curiously as they loaded the body into the helicopter and then it turned to continue its solitary journey, never looking back and not even stopping when the rotor blades began to wind up.

One of the scientists gestured toward the receding figure and turned to his friend. "Crazy birds, those Emperors. You'd think they would stay by the sea like the other penguins do, but, no, they go miles inland to mate. Sometimes as much as fifty miles. This one has already traveled at least ten."