Mag 198

Ice Field

   Leader raised a hand and all three sno-cats stopped.  The crews peered, squinting into the sun glare.

   "Looks like a tent!"

   About two miles ahead on the level ice horizon, a triangular shape showed, the single interruption to the glassy vastness.

   "A tent? Here? Eighty-seven north? More'n forty below?"

   Leader beckoned the teams forward. The engines revved.  When they had covered half the distance, she called another halt.

  "It's not a tent!  It's a sail. It's a dinghy."

  Three crews looked at each other.  "Come on. Someone's in big trouble."

  They came up to the tiny boat, stopping the sno-cats equidistant around it, staring, not believing. After a moment Leader dismounted her sno-cat, approached the craft, pushed up her goggles.

  "These guys didn't die of cold, hunger, whatever . ."

   The ice-trapped dinghy had a two man crew. One, his hand still on the tiller seemed to be calling out to his mate who was leaning out backwards over the port gunnel to balance the tilting hull. A crew tacking a small boat, perfectly coordinated, dead. Both bodies were rigid, covered in the rime of frost, beards iced, hands set like claws as they went about their tasks.

   "Jesus!  They were, like . . . flash frozen. What on earth . . . ?"

   The sno-cat team, uneasy now, gazed round the flat and featureless ice. The sheet

darkened as the summer sun sank to the horizon, approaching midnight, and a strange wind began moaning from the north, from the Pole.


This Mag post was suggested by the Mag 198 picture - from Tess Kincaid.

   The Ice Cutters, 1911, Natalia Goncharova