It slid a foot, a foot and a half, and then it hung up. With a metallic screech, the sledge broke loose. “My ankle,” he said through gritted teeth. Momentum carried him over backwards, floundering in the snow as Bishop curled fetal beside him. He reached down, locked his hand around Bishop’s wrist, and hauled him up, boots slipping. face blanched, eyes red rimmed inside his goggles. Then a hand closed around his ankle.īishop, clinging to the ice, a hand-slip away from tumbling into the crevasse himself. Garner visualized him–thrashing against his tack in a black well as the jagged circle of grayish light above shrank away, inch by lurching inch–and he felt the pull of night inside himself, the age-old gravity of the dark. He could hear them whining, claws scrabbling as they strained against harnesses drawn taut by the weight of Atka, the lead dog, dangling out of sight beyond the edge of the abyss. As Garner stood there, it slipped an inch, and then another, dragged down by the weight of the dogs. The wrecked sledge hung precariously, canted on a lip of ice above a black crevasse. food and tents, cooking gear, his medical bag, disgorging a bright freight of tools and the few precious ampules of morphine McReady had been willing to spare, like a fan of scattered diamonds. He glanced back at Faber, still miraculously strapped to the travois, his face ashen, and then he pelted toward the wrecked sledge, dodging a minefield of spilled cargo. Then the airborne runner slammed back to earth and the sledge skidded to a stop in a glittering spray of ice.ĭogs boiled back into its shadow, howling and snapping. For a moment Garner thought that it was going to roll, dragging the dogs along behind it.

The hooks snagged, jerking the sledge around and up on a single runner. Garner flung out a second brake, then another. Rope sang out behind him, arresting his momentum. Garner felt the jolt in his spine when it caught. Garner flung one of the brakes out behind him. The wrecked sledge, jutting out of the earth like a broken stone, hurtled at him, closer, closer. the lead sledge sloughed over–hurling Connelly into the snow–and plunged nose first through the ice, as though an enormous hand had reached up through the earth to snatch it under. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.Īnd then, abruptly, the silence split open like a wound:Ī thunderous crack, loud as lightning cleaving stone, shivered the ice, and the dogs of the lead sledge, maybe twenty-five yards ahead of Garner, erupted into panicky cries. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. Ten dogs, big Greenland huskies, gray and white. Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan.

Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his facemask, the dry rasp of the fabric against his face reminding him that he was alive. What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf: the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky.

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