Free Death on the Ice by Robert Ryan Page B

squawking. Skelton took a pot-shot at them and they whirled away, before finding their courage again moments later. Sinister sooty petrels patrolled above the mêlée, also waiting their turn at the feeding table, along with the more attractive blue-grey fulmars. A whale breached nearby. Scott wondered if it was a killer, drawn by the blood sliding down the five-foot edge of the floe and staining the green water black. It might explain why the surviving seals were reluctant to slither free. They were stuck between the murdering devils and the deep-cold sea, which glistened with submerged frazil-ice, the slush of solidifying seawater.
    Scott’s eyes ached from the glare. He had been up all night, unable to pull himself away from the ever-changing scene. The endless dance of light on ice was more fascinating than he had ever thought possible. As the sun skimmed the horizon for a brief time and then rose again, the shades went from crimson to burnished copper to salmon pink to a soft, rose hue. Sometimes bands of different colours played over the floes, like earth-bound rainbows, at other times a sea fog reduced everything to a dull grey. The harsh light when an unclouded sun shone on the pack was fearsome and he often had to wear goggles. Sometimes the same sunlight struck a mist-shrouded berg and caused it to glow with an inner light of jewel-like intensity and rays of sapphire and jade to shoot across the waters.
    ‘All done, skipper.’ Shackleton and Skelton, who had performed the shootings, returned onboard, cradling the rifles, their breath coming hard after the exertion of execution.
    ‘We’ll do the sheep next,’ said Shackleton brightly. ‘They can be skinned and frozen too.’
    ‘Very well.’ Scott caught the smell of seal guts on the wind as Wilson eviscerated a crabeater. ‘I hope those things taste better than they smell.’
    ‘A few months in and they’ll taste just fine,’ said Skelton. ‘Even the skuas.’
    ‘Well, I should wind up the electrometers. And perhaps take a pipe to get that stench out of my nostrils. Gentlemen.’
    ‘Skipper.’
    ‘Is he all right?’ Shackleton asked as Scott moved to the wooden hut that housed the two self-recording clockwork quadrant electrometers which measured the earth’s potential gradient on a roll of paper. Scott spent a long time watching the dots on the continuous roll of paper, recording the fluctuations in the planet’s magnetic field. Apparently, he couldn’t wait to set up his device for measuring the ionisation of the air.
    ‘Skipper doesn’t like the slaughter,’ the engineer replied, recalling how he had barely tolerated the killing of the penguins on Macquarrie Island, en route to New Zealand. ‘Bit of an animal lover, is our Commander Scott.’
    Shackleton understood sentimentality about dogs and perhaps horses, but seals and sheep? Shackleton looked over the apparently endless floes and the bergs, which ranged from table sized to enormous mansions of ice, and at the dark channels between them. This ice-littered seascape appeared brooding and terrifying, but this was only the beginning. They had nudged through groaning, granular sea ice for two days and now they were on the edge of the far less accommodating pack ice, a confusing maze of black water and white tabulars. ‘Nervous?’ asked Skelton.
    Shackleton looked at him. ‘About the sheep or the ice?’
    ‘The sheep won’t bite,’ laughed Skelton.
    But the ice might give you a nasty nip. Those who had ventured to the far north had a refrain they were fond of repeating: You can’t trust the ice. Shackleton knew all about the forty-six gruelling days it had taken for Ross to break through the barrier of floating ice to reach the solid mass of the ice shelf. He had heard Armitage’s tales of ships crushed like hen’s eggs in the floes. To Shackleton, the sea ahead was a white, blue and green kaleidoscope, where the currents and the icebergs seemed to flow in contradictory directions.