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She tried to knock the ice from the fabric before she pried the stakes out of the ground, but she was never able to get rid of it all, and when she activated the pull cord and the tent deflated, fragments of it would invariably crack and go spitting through the air, gliding across the ridges for twenty yards or more. She was usually able to load the sledge and set off again before the sun got too high. She estimated that she had covered sixty miles on her first day of travel and eighty miles on her second – better time than Puckett and Joyce had made, she imagined. The wind and the snow had long since covered their tracks, but for her the weather had been nothing but stillness and sunshine. It felt good to be moving. The crying fits that had come over her in the shelter seemed to have fallen away. She felt stronger than she had in weeks.
Soon she would wind her way down the ice stream and through the coastal pass. She would cross from the land mass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. And not long after that – a matter of days, probably – she would make it to the station. What a relief it would be to have other human beings to talk to again.
But on her third day of sledging, the temperature dropped and the sky clouded over, and the wind began whipping up pe
The ru
Muscle memory. Mussel memory. Alive, alive-O!
The storm continued for the next few days. She had to trust to her compass and the few flickering signals that registered on her GPS monitor to maintain her bearing. She knew when she had reached the ice stream that co
The snow fell heavy and fast. Sometimes she didn't see the obstacles that lay ahead of her until they were only a few feet away. She had to drive very slowly to avoid them. She was lucky to cover a mile or two in an hour, ten or fifteen in a day. The ru
She was working harder than she ever had in her life, and she was exhausted. She had chopped wood before. She had mixed concrete. She had even helped the Coca-Cola Homes for Neighbors Club build a row of apartments on the side of a hill, clearing the stumps and brush, laying the foundations and everything. But this was nothing compared to the effort of keeping a two-ton sledge on course through the center of a snowstorm. Whenever she stopped to rest, for even a few minutes, a stabbing pain would tear through the muscles in her calves and forearms, and she would have to remind herself to breathe. It was not so much the amount of exercise she was subjecting herself to, but the way she was holding her body at tension for so long. It took an hour or more of total stillness before her muscles would begin to go slack, followed by a comforting numbness that made her want to drift off to sleep.
She was too tired to cook at night, and she was tempted to leave the metal pots and the Primus stove in the back of the sledge, but she carried them into the tent with her so that she would be able to heat her coffee in the morning. The temperature sometimes dipped to forty or fifty degrees below zero, and she would have to spend a good half hour shivering in her coat and gloves before the tent truly began to warm up. She ate two or three multivitamins and a handful of dehydrated biscuits as she waited, and sometimes also a protein bar, and sometimes also a piece of chocolate, and she allowed a few chips of ice to melt on the surface of her tongue. Then she stripped to her long Johns, tightened the drawstrings of the sleeping bag around her, and listened to the side wall of the tent going taut and slack and taut again, bellying in and out as it took the wind like a sail.
On the eighth day of the storm, she was traveling on a downhill slope when a spur of rock came rearing up out of the snow and filled her windshield. Her heart rose up in her chest. She swerved to avoid the rock, but it was too late.
She rammed into the spur at the rear corner and heard the solid crunch of something breaking. The sledge spun around twice and gradually drifted to a stop. She let go of the steering mechanism. Her skin was covered in sweat, and her stomach had tightened into a knot. The droning sound of the sledge slowly died away, and its ru
She made her way toward the back end of the vehicle, holding on to the upper rail with her gloves, the snow twisting around her in an obscuring shroud. She had heard stories about people who had become so disoriented in snowstorms that they had lost their sense of direction only a few feet from their front doors, people who went stumbling and weaving into the tempest with their arms stretched out in front of them like zombies. She knew better than to let go of the rail. She found the spot where the sledge had run into the spur. A long rent had been torn into the wood and metal, exposing the inside of the storage hutch. Her duffel bag was wedged inside the hole, so that only a thin crack of space remained open to the air, bordered with a row of jagged wooden teeth. She could hear the wind passing through it with a whistling noise.