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TENT , and every time she saw it, she imagined the thing exploding like a balloon as it tightened around its bubble of trapped air, drifting to the ice in a thousand tatters of pink cloth. It was the kind of tent that was purchased by wealthy corporate executives who intended to hike the Rockies or the Appalachians someday but never quite managed to leave the city. Eventually, their children would set it up in the middle of the living room, between the sofa and the fireplace, and pretend they were pioneers.
    And who’s to say they weren’t?
    Ever since she was a little girl, Laura had felt like a pioneer, passing over into the wilderness of the rest of her life. She remembered lying beneath her bed on her twelfth birthday, staring up into the orchardlike rows of the box springs and thinking how strange it was that she had no idea where she would be a year later, on the day she turned thirteen, and that she had had no idea where she would be today the year before, on the day she turned eleven. Certainly she could never have guessed that she would find herself lying underneath her bed staring at the box springs and wondering about the way time was put together. Why was it that everything that had happened to her in the past seemed so clear, but as soon as she turned toward the future, it all went dim and faded to nothing? Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes she felt that way.
    The tent kept her warm at night, or as warm as she could reasonably expect to be. She found the hum of its soft coil oddly comforting, like the sound of car wheels hissing over wet asphalt—a sound she always associated with the million rainy fall nights she had spent listening to the traffic flow past her bedroom window. But it was obvious that the heating system had not been designed for polar use. The heat from the coil radiated though the bottom of the tent, which caused the ice to melt, flow toward the edges, and refreeze, creating a sort of ovenlike seal. When she woke in the morning, there was always a shallow puddle beneath the floor that rippled back and forth as she shifted her weight. It made her feel as if she were sleeping in a waterbed.
    She tried to knock the ice from the fabric before she pried the stakes out of the ground, but she was never able to get rid of it all, and when she activated the pull cord and the tent deflated, fragments of it would invariably crack and go spitting through the air, gliding across the ridges for twenty yards or more. She was usually able to load the sledge and set off again before the sun got too high. She estimated that she had covered sixty miles on her first day of travel and eighty miles on her second—better time than Puckett and Joyce had made, she imagined. The wind and the snow had long since covered their tracks, but for her the weather had been nothing but stillness and sunshine. It felt good to be moving. The crying fits that had come over her in the shelter seemed to have fallen away. She felt stronger than she had in weeks.
    Soon she would wind her way down the ice stream and through the coastal pass. She would cross from the land mass onto the Ross Ice Shelf. And not long after that—a matter of days, probably—she would make it to the station. What a relief it would be to have other human beings to talk to again.
    But on her third day of sledging, the temperature dropped and the sky clouded over, and the wind began whipping up pennants of ice and snow. Before she knew it, she was in the middle of a blizzard. She could still move forward, but the wind was coming from the northwest now, directly in front of her, which made the traveling slow and difficult. Pellets of hardened snow tapped against the window of the sledge, so much of it that it sounded like leaves crackling in a fire. Her headlights bored a narrow tunnel through the blizzard, but the snow confused her vision, making everything go white. She