Among Penguins: A Bird Man in Antarctica

34. The Chase

167 34. The Chase eee At 4:30 a.m. I was sprinting hard down the Antarctic glacier, searching for a wily penguin to wrestle. Behind me, Mount Terror stood starkly backlit by low-angled sunlight, cracked and crevassed with glaciers and sheer cliffs. Though the sun never dipped below the horizon, it did disappear behind Terror for a couple hours around 4 a.m., and now the mountain’s long, pointed shadow reached over camp, down the glacier, and past several tabular icebergs stranded offshore. Nothing moved but the wind. Cold gusts nipped my cheeks as I hurdled snowdrifts, working downhill toward the ocean. My course tracked lines of least resistance, winding around sastrugi ridges and across patches of shiny blue ice, blown clear and polished by the last storm. Both of my quad muscles felt the effort of constant braking and swerving during the descent through treacherous inclined stretches. I balanced two steps in advance, wary of the top-heavy pack on my back. Frozen shrapnel exploded from under my crampon spikes, and each step landed with the heavy shattering sound of window panes dropped on concrete. Somewhere ahead, a penguin waited. I’d stayed up all night waiting for this, watching the sun gradually orbit lower in the sky. Alone inside the hut, I watched the only two movies saved on my laptop, a Pierce Brosnan caper and a Warren Miller ski flick, on repeat, all night long. Every thirty minutes, I paused the entertainment to don a pair of industrial headphones hooked up to a giant antenna mounted on the roof of the hut. If a tagged penguin returned to its nest in the colony about a mile distant, it could be heard arriving with a series of mechanical chirps from the antenna. When that happened, it was time to run like the wind. 168 Noah Strycker Why anyone decided to put the field hut more than a mile from the penguin colony is debatable. The separation helped minimize disturbance when helicopters occasionally dropped in. But it also meant that, when a satellite-tagged penguin returned to the colony after a feeding trip, reaching it took a special kind of effort. The chase was fun, though. Who wouldn’t want to be running alone down an Antarctic glacier at 4:30 a.m., knowing that someplace ahead a penguin was waiting to be tackled? It wasn’t a hypothetical question. I kept a good pace, carefully picking out my steps. Back in the U.S., it was 7:30 a.m. the previous day. I was running a full twenty-one hours ahead. To be so completely off-grid, off-map, and isolated felt refreshing. I had settled in nicely to Antarctic life. My beard had grown to the point where it kept my face warmly insulated from the cold. It was also starting to make me unrecognizable. After Kirsten showed me a photo on her laptop the previous afternoon, depicting someone holding a penguin, I asked who it was. She looked quizzical, then laughed. It was me. I hardly ever looked in a mirror. The Antarctic sky was spectacular. The sun’s cool, low light— passing through layers of shimmering, extremely clear frosty air—scattered, diffracted, reflected, and refracted off ice crystals, creating a show that never seemed to repeat itself. I was glad to be wearing extra-darkened wraparound polar shades. At the saddle, I stopped to quickly remove my crampons, propping them under a big rock as usual. Just a few hundred yards farther, at the edge of the massive colony, I hoped the satellite-tagged penguin would still be at its nest. I walked this last rocky stretch, regaining my breath in anticipation of a good wrangle. The edge of the colony spread out before me with penguin nests stretching all the way to the floor of the valley. When the targeted nest came into view, however, its chicks stood alone with no parents in sight. The penguin had gone. 169 The Chase In the icy chill of early morning, I stood staring despairingly at the place where the bird was supposed to be. I’d stayed up all night and run down an Antarctic glacier at an abnormal hour for nothing. Frustrating. But the bird might still be somewhere in the vicinity. I started walking toward a portable telemetry antenna stashed nearby in case of just such a situation...