Stay:The Last Dog in Antarctica by Jesse Blackadder Read Free Book Online

litres of diesel fuel needed to run the station.
    ‘It can take a week to resupply the station, or even more if anything goes wrong,’ the Boss had told her. ‘We have a thing called the A-factor, which means that in Antarctica something nearly always goes wrong.’
    The Boss would notice she was gone, Stay knew, but this was his busiest time. Getting the ship wedged into the ice without breaking it up and making it unstable was a delicate and dangerous business. He’d need all his concentration to do it properly. He’d have no time to come looking for her.
    Stay thought that they must be getting close to the station. The ship went crunch-crackle-grumble-crack-crunch forwards through the ice and stopped. It backed up with a heavy roar of engines and then moved forwards again. Crunch-crackle-ram-crack-boom!
    The Aurora Australis stopped. They had arrived. They were in Antarctica. As hard as she could, Stay sent out a silent plea for anyone, anyone on the ship at all who might hear her.
    Help me!
    But no one heard.
    The noises of cargo unloading went all day and all night. Stay imagined that she was blind. Without beingable to see anything, her hearing became even more acute. She could picture the unloading process from the sounds that were magnified through the ship’s hull.
    Stay heard the big ship’s crane groaning as it lifted the containers high in the air, swung them over the ship’s side and lowered them to the ice. If she strained her ears, she could hear the sound of cracking and shifting in the ice when the heavy containers landed.
    The trucks rumbled back and forth between the ship and the station. She heard excited laughter and talking as the passengers crowded at the top of the gangway and then made their way down. Stay heard the throb of the pump sending fuel through the long, flexible pipe and across to the shore. Very close to where she was hidden, she heard the doof-doof-doof of the helicopter taking off and landing, its blades beating rhythmically.
    Sometimes, if it wasn’t too noisy, she could hear the squawking of penguins and little splashing noises when they were swimming nearby. Antarctica sounded so interesting! Stay was terribly frustrated that she couldn’t see it.
    From the way the ship sounded more and more echoey, Stay realised that the resupply was almost finished. She could tell there were far fewer humans on board now — just the crew who would be taking the ship back to Hobart. The Boss had told her that the handful ofpeople who’d spent winter in Antarctica would be coming back with them too. But compared with their trip down, the ship would be very quiet on the way home.
    Stay moped in the darkness and thought mean thoughts about Chills and Beakie and even Kaboom, who’d seemed so nice and wasn’t nice at all.
    Everything went quiet and eventually Stay fell asleep.

Chapter 12
    A sharp metallic CLANG jolted Stay awake. She was moving. She rocked from side to side. The single coin clattered and spun inside her until she had a funny feeling in her belly. She couldn’t see anything, but it felt like she was being lifted into the air. Then she heard a familiar metallic groaning noise. It was the sound the crane made when it was lifting something heavy.
    She must be inside something big that was being unloaded. Stay’s heart leapt. Perhaps she was going to Antarctica! She hoped she was, and that she wasn’t simply being shifted around the cargo hold to another spot.
    The wind was whistling in the chains, and the rocking motion would have made a real dog seasick. She was going up-up-up. Then the movement of the crane halted and she was hanging, suspended in the air. She could faintly hear voices far below, but couldn’t make out their words.
    There was a jerk and she was moving again. This time it was down-down-down until she felt the crunch as she landed on the ice.
    ‘OK! Get that Hägg unhooked and into shore ASAP!’ a man’s voice yelled. ‘The wind’s picking up. No more