“From the Lost Diary,” from The Address Book, published by House of Anansi in 2004. 2 Jan. 1912: 87º 20 8 S., 160º 40 53 E. At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along. Or one of the men once more adoze in the traces whimpering in waking nightmare but no it was too loud and instantly repeated and then somebody halloed There! a catamaran shadow against the low sun hovering, and now above us banking sheer and screeching came a gaunt monstrous skua, first animate thing we had seen save for one another and our lost ponies since starting onto the ice shelf at the sea two months ago. Half blind, rused by the loomings and the ridged snow in spars like candlerock, defiling through gin-cold ventricles of ice and back into eye-stabbing sunlight—if alone I’d have feared for my own mind not the gull’s. Yet we all did see it. And not so little food as a colony of lichen or a louse for eight hundred miles. How many days’ flight would that need? It did look starved. S believed some disturbance in the upper atmosphere must have veered the bird far off range and yet the high cirrus had sat unconvulsed for days. And here it was not a hundred and fifty miles from the Pole. Somebody quipped about it beating us there and the Norwegians too while the snow-bellied bird touched down ahead and fluttered always a few yards farther as we neared and at this, what, this rumour or fledged missive dispatched by the dream world of warm yearning life to ourselves a brief agony of delight punctured the frozen shell of our shambling fatigue, fear, hunger, frostburn and returned to us our purpose. All agreed the visitation was an auspice. The messenger would see us to the Pole. Yet I wondered still what she was doing so remote from her own skies in that time— not quite an hour—till she flared her wings and rose with serum-yellow eye unclosing to swerve close above us in the return direction, diminishing then dipping out of view as a bead of mercury in the day’s bitter foregone——
Lost Diary
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