The Last Hunter - Collected Edition by Jeremy Robinson Read Free Book Online

to friends or relatives they weren’t seated with. About five minutes into the shift, my parents are on their feet.
    “I’m going to visit with Aimee,” mom says. “Your father needs to pee. Won’t be long.”
    I shrug, not really caring where they’re going and turn my attention back to the view. I can no longer see the ocean. That’s right, our stop-over is in Texas. Then Peru. Then... As my thoughts turn to Antarctica, I feel my Dad return to his seat next to me. But something’s not right.
    I sniff. The person next to me doesn’t smell like my Dad. I turn, expecting to see Mira, but it’s not her either. It’s Dr. Clark. He looks over at me, his dark hair ruffled in the back from leaning on his seat. And there is something odd about his eyes. Not the color, they’re a perfectly normal blue. It’s the tightness around the edges. He looks nervous.
    I know I must, too, because he forces a smile. I return it with one I’m sure looks equally as awkward. He clears his throat. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just excited to meet you.”
    “Excited to meet me?” I’m honestly thrown by this.
    “You are the modern equivalent of what I’ve spent most of my career searching for.”
    “An Antarctican.”
    He nods.
    “That doesn’t make me special. If anything it makes me stranger than I already am.”
    “Strange, my boy, is a good thing,” he says. And I can tell he’s not joking. “We live in a world of mediocrity, of settling for society’s norms. Anything outside of that is deemed strange. If you’re smart. If you’re creative. If you simply just want something different for your life. Of course, you’re all three of those, aren’t you?”
    “So, I’m stranger than most?”
    “ Better than most,” he says with a wink.
    I can tell he’s relaxing, which is good, because it’s helping me relax, too.
    “We weren’t put on this Earth to be stagnant.”
    I think about his word choice. Stagnant in the current context means a lack of progress. But when talking about the physical world it means things are going foul from standing still. It’s a loaded sentence. “So our brains will rot if we aren’t strange?”
    “Precisely.” He laughs. I smile. This is going much better then when I fell on my face.
    “But I’m not really different because I was born on Antarctica, am I?”
    His smile fades some and I know the answer to my question. He thinks I am different. More so than makes any sense. “Why?” I ask, but then think, because he knows—he was there when I was born.
    “There is so much about Antarctica we don’t know,” he says. “The vast majority of the continent, which is the size of the United States, is buried beneath the ice. What little is exposed has been all but scoured clean by the katabatic winds.”
    Katabatic winds are created when gravity pulls dense air down a slope from higher elevations. Since Antarctica is essentially a big mound of snow, this is commonplace. The winds can reach speeds faster than any hurricane and a few of the people who have been lost on the continent disappeared into a cloud of rushing snow carried by the winds. Just one of the many dangers the continent offers visitors.
    Hello and welcome to Antarctica , I think, try not to get killed !
    “But we know people visited Antarctica, even lived on Antarctica, more than six thousand years ago.”
    “The Piri Reis map,” I say.
    He nods, growing excited. “Not only does the map show animals reminiscent of cattle and mink, it also shows other strange creatures and odd looking primates. Even a wall of some kind.”
    “I’ve often wondered if those were just embellishments by the artist,” I admit.
    “That is a possibility,” he says, “but I highly doubt it. The map’s details are better than any modern map, and it depicts the coast of an Antarctica free of ice. Given its geographic accuracy and the fact that the continent would have had to be ice free at the time, there is no reason to doubt that