Read Online A Victim of the Aurora by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online

said.
    But he insisted.
    We continued, some seven yards apart and, as agreed, looking at each other and at the snow between us and on both sides. My brain became a small numb cube, all protein but no spark.
    It jumped and reared however when Paul’s light vanished. I looked to the rear. Paul was hunched a yard behind me. I let the wind blow me towards him and to my knees as well. It was pleasant to give in to it even in small ways.
    He had found boot-tracks, in spite of his iced spectacles. We knelt together, viewing them. They crossed our own. Flakes settled on them but were blown away. That was the way of wind, snow, ice in that place. A bootprint or a skitrack compacted the surface snow so that later snow-drift found it too slippery to settle there. I remember that later during the expedition Peter Sullivan took a photograph of month-old bootprints standing up six inches above a wind-eroded ice-surface, like little buttes. Originally they would have been sharp and indented like the boot-tracks we were watching by the light of two storm lanterns.
    We followed them and found Henneker, though not easily, since snow had fallen at his back and mounded him over. He lay facing the Pole. We had to walk round him and squat with our backsides to the south. His open eyes were very bulbous in the light of the lanterns. His tongue stuck out. It was black, a frightful excrescence, hopelessly ice-bitten. The panels of the face – cheeks, forehead, jaws – were bloated and already blackening.
    Paul ripped the covering from his own mouth and vomited in the snow. I had felt nothing yet, my senses were still all in hiding and I saw the corpse and the problem distantly.
    â€˜We have to carry him,’ I called.
    I saw Paul button up his mouth and shake his head. I felt anger. It spiked my throat.
    â€˜Paul, damn it!’ I screamed. ‘Take his legs!’
    He obeyed me. It was obvious the body had already stiffened in the cold. Somehow, as we were blown north carrying Victor, we retained our lanterns. Possibly we were too numb to understand they were still in our hands. I was shocked and useless and dropped the shoulders twice. Paul seemed patient with me.
    Some yards back we stumbled on Stigworth, the sweeper, and Nikolai, the dog handler. Under Stigworth’s eyes were frozen tears.
    â€˜The bastard won’t move, sir,’ he yelled at me. ‘He’s hexed.’
    Nikolai sat in the drift snow, shivering, his eyes closed.
    â€˜It’s all right. We’ve found Mr Henneker.’
    I must admit that the class-consciousness of the day required me to call our weird load ‘Mr Henneker’.
    â€˜Oh good, sir.’ Stigworth screamed, ‘This bloody Roosian, he hates the dark, sir. He just sits there. You’d think, sir, in bloody Roosia, they’d be used to the dark.’
    He kicked Nikolai, who opened his eyes, saw us and the corpse we carried, and began screaming.
    That was the way we took Henneker back to the hut. Paul, Stigworth and I hauling him and a demented Russian wailing in our wake.

3
    Sir Eugene Stewart had an alcove of his own. It was formed on three sides by a tall bookshelf, a plywood partition against which his bed stood, and the wall of the hut. The fourth side was made by a curtain hung from a rod. The curtain was rarely closed, but even when it was pulled back you could still only see in there from the corner where Dryden and Troy slept.
    In this way Sir Eugene expressed both his accessibility and his desire for privacy.
    On the night of Henneker’s death the curtain was pulled firmly across, making a private room out of the alcove. Stewart had Alec Dryden in there, conferring with him. The rest of us were also finding it hard to digest Victor’s death. We sat at the table, reading or writing, or else working numbly in our appropriate places. Paul, for example, had gone back to work on the skua, Hoosick wrote up the day’s discovery in the biology-room,