The Penguin and the Tree
LLOYD JONES (born Lower Hutt, New Zealand, 1955) has written a number of novels, including Biografi, The Book of Fame and Mister Pip – which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2008. His most recent novel is Hand Me Down World. Based in Wellington, he visited Antarctica in December 2008 as a guest of the New Zealand Antarctic Centre.
Until I received an invitation from the New Zealand Antarctic Centre I had never thought of Antarctica as a place that I must visit. As large as Antarctica is, and despite the fact that after Australia it is our next closest neighbour, it has never really exerted presence.
So it was a surprise to hear and feel contact with ground as hard as concrete as the plane touched down on the frozen ice field of the Ross Sea in December 2008.
In a single file of buffoonery we exited the plane. We were mainly returning American scientists and field workers. Bundled up in four layers, heavy boots that were impossible to walk in, head gear, and special sunglasses, I followed hard on the heels of an equally burdened and shuffling figure – Boyd Webb, from Brighton, England, the other invited artist – into a sun-blazing white landscape.
On the plane down I had finished Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita, and that was the end of my reading for the duration of the trip. It made more sense for me to directly experience the place for myself. So I had stocked up weeks before. I had read Ernest Shackleton’s South and picked up Frank Worsley’s Endurance for about the tenth time and as with all the other times read with the same mounting sense of awe. South, though, pays closer attention to the dailyness of the men’s lives. I made notes on the quirkier details, such as the banjo Shackleton thought to unpack from the Endurance; as well as the endless amounts of seal and penguin eaten by the men on Elephant Island (including the special treat of morsels of undigested fish taken from the gullets of the larger penguins cooked in tin cans strung up on bits of wire around the stove); and the surprisingly small selection of books – a copy of Browning, Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and a ‘portion of Encyclopedia Britannica’ to settle the usual disputes.
I’ll be brief about the next ten days. What we got up to. The tiresome but understandable rules and regulations around individuals leaving Scott Base on their own. Boyd’s elephantine snoring which he professed not to know about. Boyd has the extraordinary ability to go from his last utterance to fast asleep the moment his head touches the pillow. It’s a great talent and one which I feel will ensure his longevity so long as one day in the future he is not slaughtered in his sleep. At Scott Base, I had to wear the ear muffs issued by the plane crew for the flight from Christchurch. It was hopeless. The only sleep I got was when we slept out at the ice caves below Mt Misery and at Royds, by which time his snoring had become so legendary and feared that he was sent to sleep in a tiny hut above Shackleton’s hut while the rest of the party slept on the ice in tents. Boyd, by the way, is the loveliest fellow you could ever hope to meet.
It is eighteen months since I returned from Antarctica to the marvel of green lawns, bitumen, kerbs and cars. I was nearly run over twice on the five minute walk from the Antarctic Centre to the Christchurch domestic airport. Since then the Antarctic experience has been one of slow devolvement of certain highlights. Such as the time Boyd and I stood grinning at the window of the A-frame hut near the ice caves, urging the distant figure on skis bearing wine for the ‘artists’ to go faster. And in Scott’s Hut, the dead penguin laid out on the dissection table. Presumably it will go on waiting. And on visits such as the one enjoyed by Boyd and myself, poets will commemorate the penguin, painters will paint it; and the penguin will continue on, as it were, to be captured over and over.
In Antarctica, everything is preserved for all eternity – mistakes, follies, vanities, even the exhaust fumes of the massive Hercules landing and taking off. The smell of pony shit in the stables outside Scott’s hut lingers on more than a century after the last of his Welsh ponies expired; Discovery Hut continues to be marked by a filthy, smoke-grimed degradation and a dangerous level of boredom.
IT WAS ON the stony wastes behind Scott’s Hut at Cape Evans that I first encountered a skua, a large grey bird which from afar looked like a very large seagull as it floated on air, its wings still and cut out against the immense sky; then as it came closer I saw its claws, and as its motionless eye looked down I understood that I was its target. I ducked just in time, and then as it circled, and unfussily lined me up a second time, I picked up a stone. As it swept in, I waited until I could stall no longer and lobbed the stone into its flight path and the skua lifted off again. It seemed to hang in the air, on its wing, before it began another sweep at my head. I lobbed up another stone and it lifted off as before. Then another skua arrived, and joined in the attack from a different direction. I must have lobbed twenty or thirty stones in the air before I regained the safety of Scott’s Hut from the nesting ground I had unwittingly strayed onto.
This was also the day we made our way to Royds. After unpacking our gear and pitching tents on the ice beneath Shackleton’s hut, after forcing down a few biscuits and hot tea, and after Boyd was shown his own splendid, separate accommodation, we followed a path up through scree and around the ‘summer pond’ to the Adelie penguin nesting colony. From up there we found ourselves on a high coastal point above the frozen sea. In the distance we could see small numbers of Adelie penguins making awkward progress across the ice to the sea. They had another sixty miles of falling over and getting up again before they would strike open water. They were males and either they had crushed the nesting egg in a clumsy moment, or else had abandoned the nest, fed up with waiting for the female to return from the sea with food. We settled down in a hollow amongst the rocks. Boyd handed me the binoculars. I had them trained on several hundred nesting Adelies when the air shifted just above our heads and the skua came to rest about twenty feet beneath our position.
The whole penguin colony immediately erupted. Those Adelies nearest the skua drew up their flippers and bobbed forward, making aggressive gestures with their beaks. The skua raised its wings as if in readiness to fly off, but it didn’t move. It seemed to know it could come to no harm and calmly turned its head to look in another direction. Very quickly the protest settled down. And when I next looked the skua had dropped its wings. Another five minutes passed. By now the Adelies had forgotten about the skua. Over the same time, imperceptibly the skua moved itself deeper inside the nesting Adelies.
It happened to be my turn with the binoculars when the skua, with a shoplifter’s sense of opportunism, grabbed a chick in its beak. Once more the penguin colony erupted. Their noise added to the horror of the spectacle. The Adelies gazed up as the skua raised its wings and beat lethargically as it tried to gobble the chick in the air. It didn’t manage either task very well. The chick was too big or too fluffy and the skua dropped down to an uncontested area just beneath where Boyd and I crouched, and there it coughed up the baby Adelie. The grey fluffy chick wobbled onto its feet. It shook its head. It shook and shook. It was alive. It was alive – in spite of what had happened, and as it tried to move away I felt the onlooker’s horrible dread. It had two more seconds of life left. The skua picked it up in its beak and shook it vigorously until the sides of the chick split. Then the skua released it and dove in with its beak and pulled the red stitching out of the chick’s insides, and that red, that shocking red against the immensity of the silent white continent is what remains of my ten days in Antarctica.
BACK AT SCOTT BASE I recounted the event to one of the scientists. He was surprised that I had found it upsetting. It was just Nature taking its course. None of this I disagree with, and yet what remains is this undiminished horror whenever I remember the skua coughing up the Adelie chick. What remains, forever I suspect, is the moment between the ‘before’ and ‘after’; it is the chick shaking off the experience. It has a second more left of life. But for the moment it remains gloriously alive, eternally alive.
I’ve gone back over the notes I made at the time to see if there is anything more I might add. I see I made a note about the thickness and the size of the Adelie eggs. They lay shattered and piled on the ground beneath where Boyd and I had sat in the rocks. The chicks aren’t so much born as smash their way out into the world.
There is something else too which may be relevant. This morning it just surfaced in that way of old memories as I lay in the bath.
I am ten years old. My mate has just handed me his slug gun. It’s the first time I’ve held it, or any gun for that matter, and yet I seem to know what to do. I put the stock against my shoulder, aim casually up at a tree, and squeeze the trigger. To my astonishment a bird falls out of the tree. I am appalled.
Forty years later, I am still appalled.
