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�Time, gentlemen!� The dogs� masters leapt into the pit, landing between the dogs and among the few maimed rats still crawling about, half-alive.
     
The pit boss looked to his fellow judge�a dirt-covered urchin holding the brass bell�and announced, �It's Duke, gentlemen! Duke of Rosemary Lane has carried the day with a baker's dozen.�
     
There was a happy clamor from Duke's supporters, and the passing of notes and coins among the mob. The bookmaker in the cap appeared before Sinclair, who grudgingly handed him the fiver. Frenchie did the same.
     
�Won't Rutherford gloat,� Le Maitre said.
     
Sinclair knew he was right, but he had already put the loss out of mind. It was always best not to dwell on misfortune. And his thoughts, as it happened, had already turned in a decidedly more pleasant direction. As he joined the raucous throng heading back to the tavern, he was thinking of that fetching young woman he'd seen, in the crisp white bonnet, closing the hospital shutters.
     
     
     
     
     
��� CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    November 30
     
     
FOR DAYS the sky had been filled with a swirling cloud of birds, following the Constellation as it headed south toward the Antarctic Circle. And Michael had set up his monopod�a Manfrotto with a trigger grip for quick, automatic adjustment�on the flying bridge to get as many good shots of them as he could. In his cabin at night, he'd been reading up on them, too, so he'd know what he was looking at.
     
Now�even if it didn't make them any easier to catch in flight�he could at least begin to tell them apart.
     
Nearly all of the birds were tube-nosed, with bills that contained salt-excreting glands, so that didn't help much. Nor did their color scheme, which was almost unrelievedly black and white. But the different species did exhibit unique flight patterns and telltale feeding methods, and that made the job a bit easier.
     
The diving petrels, for instance, were small and chubby, and shot above the sea with fast-beating wings, punctuated by shortglides; often they went right through the crest of a wave, before plunging down to capture a bit of krill.
     
The pintado petrels danced with their webbed feet across the top of the water itself.
     
The southern fulmars, gunmetal gray, would allow themselves to stall in the wind, then fold their feet and drop, head last, into the sea, like a scaredy-cat jumping off a high dive.
     
The Antarctic prions plowed through the surf using their broad, laminated bills like shovels, filtering plankton from the water. Their cousins�the narrow-billed prions�flew more languidly, leaning down to pluck nimbly the occasional prey from the top few centimeters of the sea.
     
The snowy white petrels�the hardest to see against the foam and spray of the turbulent ocean�caromed around like pinballs, darting this way and that, their sharp little wings even touching the icy water to gauge the shape and drift of the swells.
     
But the king of them all�soaring on high like a ruler calmly surveying his realm�was the wandering albatross, the largest of all the seabirds. Even as Michael rooted around in his waterproof supply bag for a new lens, one of them had roosted on the helicopter tarp on the lower deck, and several more were keeping time with the ship, flying at the height of the bridge. Michael had never seen any creature travel with such beauty and economy of motion. With a wingspan of over three meters, the ashy white birds�with bright pink beaks and blackened brows�barely seemed to exert themselves at all. Their wings, Michael had learned, were a miracle of aerodynamic design, feeling every tiny shift in the wind and instantly adjusting an entire suite of muscles to alter the angle and sweep of each individual feather. The bones themselves weighed almost nothing, as they were partially filled with air. Apart from the brief spells when an albatross might alight to nest or mate on an Antarctic island, the bird