The Nature of Ice by Robyn Mundy Read Free Book Online Page B

rise as her bike becomes airborne, launched by an unseen wave of sastrugi. Time moves in frames. She feels as weightless as a bird. Freya looks out upon a surface of crystal blue shimmering in silver light. She sees a blur of peacock green and red, the clothing and bike of the rider ahead wheeling through the ice. In the time it takes a shutter to blink, Freya captures the spark of a photographic idea: a summer aurora, its celestial lights streaked vivid through the ice. Her quad lands with a jarring thud, skittles over ice and returns with a flick of its tail to the furrow of tracks . The helmet droops over her eyes again like a forelock from an unkempt mane.
    BANDITS HUT STANDS THIRTY KILOMETRES north of Davis Station. Another ten k’s, a mere hop and a skip, and they would be at Walkabout Rocks, the station’s northern boundary.
    Pockets of steam lift the lid from a pot of melted snow, mist upon the window waxes and wanes. Though Freya feels weary from a full day of training, she leaves her companions to the warmth of the field hut, its gas heater glowing, a clutter of Scrabble tiles spilled upon a board.
    Outside cold bites at her skin. Shadows stretch the length of the frozen fjord. Bergs on the horizon rest in evening light. Below, five quad bikes nestle between the shadow of stone and undulations of broken ice—the tide crack, which can be seen rammed against every outcrop of land. Freya breaks off a wedge of chocolate, her last bar, having demolished the rest of her monthly supply in her first two weeks at the station. She savours the bittersweet square as it thaws and melts inside her mouth. No matter that it’s Old Gold and five years out of date.
    Granite dykes meander the length and width of the Vestfold Hills, corridors of shiny black that crisscross the rocks like a cobbled road. On the southern horizon luminescence glows from the river of ice they call the Sørsdal; the large glacier with its fissured tongue slicks out across the ocean to mark the station’s southern boundary. Beyond the hills the icecap, always the icecap, beguiling in its blush of rose. She turns in circles, drawing in the wonder of the place, giddied with the reality of being here, immersed in its beauty and expanse. She will photograph it all, from Walkabout Rocks to the Sørsdal Glacier, the calm and wild of the place. This, she knows, reaching for her camera, is joy.
    The lookout above the hut is capped with boulders as crimson as the evening light. The air surrounding her is charged with life. Angel wings blur in Freya’s camera shutter: snow petrels darting and swooping, agile with every turn. The night is filled with the chatter of these birds no larger than doves, flashes of white fluttering into and out of rocky crevices.
    Freya hears a bird call. She kneels upon the rock and whistles a quavered note, then hears from beneath her feet a soft trill in reply. She releases her camera from its tripod and scrambles down to where she can lie flat and squint into a rocky cleft. She can see deep inside a pair of glassy beads peering out. The snow petrel, small and white, could fit in the cup of her hands. How does a bird so seemingly fragile exist in such a hostile place? Freya watches and absorbs, struck by a sense of the familiar, and remembers, Frank Hurley’s image of a snow petrel, identical to the scene before her. To shared discoveries ; Freya whistles and the snow petrel tilts her head, she studies Freya for a time. Finally, the bird plumps her breast feathers, closes her eyes and tucks her head into a curve of downy white. She knows she is beyond reach, safe, protected by her hug of rock.

Nesting snow petrel

Composites
    March 1912
    THE CURIOUS NOISE PLAGUED DOUGLAS and Hurley all afternoon. Douglas thought of surf breaking incessantly on a distant beach; Hurley likened it to wind raking the tops of trees. To the west, flurries of snowdrift lifted from the cape while along the foreshore the bay