His empty stomach rumbled. Gray Wolf looked about and found what he was looking for. Hanging outside of his shelter on a pole was a piece of frozen goose meat. He reached over, grabbed a piece of meat, and jammed it onto the end of a long stick. Gray Wolf took a seat on a log and held his stick out over the fire. It was then that he realized he was feeling fine. If the geese had been diseased like the larger animals, they had not passed on the sickness to the people.
Relief replaced the gnawing fear that had inhabited his heart for the past few days. Gray Wolf began to realize that with luck, they were going to make it to their summer lands to catch fish as they had for generations. They weren’t going to starve to death after all. If he and his son could continue to catch geese and other birds, they could continue to feed the clan. He sat back, looked up into the early-morning sky, and saw a lone star shining bright on the horizon. Like an impudent child, it waited to be chased off by the rising sun that jealously guarded the daylight sky as her own. He recognized it as the star his father had told him his ancestors’ spirits rested on. Gray Wolf thanked his ancestors for letting him and his people live. Before the star left, he asked his ancestors why the Gods had decided to kill so many of the large animals.
Gray Wolf grew old and died without ever receiving his answer.
2
A thick, impenetrable wall of fog rolled off the freezing waters of the South Atlantic, swallowing the ice-covered island whole. Damp and bitterly cold, the mist quickly seeped into the bones of the badly injured men trapped on Bouvet Island, a bleak, uninhabited, sub-Antarctic, volcanic island claimed by England. Their twin-engine Dornier flying boat was a wreck. It would never fly again.
What had started as a bright idea between two old friends in Oxford late last year had ended in tragedy when their plane developed engine troubles on its maiden flight over the South Atlantic. William Hetherington and Darcy Wright, both second sons of well-to-do Earls, had hired a ship and crew to take them to and from Antarctica with the goal of flying over the South Pole. It was all just a big lark to both young men. They had survived the horrors of the Great War and lived each day as if it were their last. Like a pair of drunken sailors, they spent their substantial inheritances on a series of wild and exotic schemes. From a failed attempt to climb Mount Everest in which five Sherpas had died in an avalanche, to an expedition into the Amazon to look for a fabled lost mine full of conquistador gold that nearly killed them both, Hetherington and Wright wanted desperately to do something that would bring fame to themselves and glory to England. After a long night drinking with some of their friends, they hit upon the idea of dropping the Union Jack from a plane onto the South Pole. They would hire a camera crew and film the grand adventure from beginning to end.
Neither man was an experienced pilot, but that didn’t stop them from buying a flying boat from an old acquaintance who told them that for a modest price he could obtain the most advanced flying boat of its day. The seller even claimed that it was the ideal plane for flying over the South Pole.
Two Rolls Royce V-12, water-cooled piston engines powered the Dornier Do J — known as the ‘Whale’ for the long design of its body. Capable of flying up to 180 kilometers an hour and climbing to thirty-five hundred meters, the flying boat could carry up to eight passengers. However, for their inaugural flight, Wright and Hetherington decided to fly alone.
On a cool, but cloudless day, they had their plane lowered from the side of their ship onto the gray water of the South Atlantic. They took off at precisely noon, intending to do a quick trip to get a feel for their plane. With a hearty wave up at the ship’s captain, Wright shouted that they would be back in a couple of hours after a good long flight. It was the last anyone would see of them for decades.
After an hour of flying straight south with Hetherington at the controls, Wright opened up a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. “Here’s to England,” said Wright raising his glass.
“To England,” heartily replied Hetherington. Together they toasted their first successful flight.
Although the plane could fly for over four hours before needing to refuel, both men knew that it was better not to press their luck. Besides, they were due back at their ship in just over an hour. With a hearty handshake, Hetherington handed off the controls to Wright. He headed back into the cabin to retrieve his camera when all of a sudden the plane’s engines, mounted on a nacelle behind the cockpit, began to shake and sputter. Within seconds, a thick black oily cloud of smoke trailed behind the plane.
Neither man panicked. It wasn’t in their nature. They looked out the windows of their plane hoping to find a spot to put down. Wright soon spotted an island a couple of kilometers to the east.
Had they tried landing on water, as their plane was designed to do, they most likely would have survived the ordeal and been found several hours later by their ship. However, for reasons known only to themselves, they decided to try to land on the island. They overflew the island and chose a spot to put down. Wright brought the plane around and dove out of the sky. He lined up the plane for what he hoped would be a smooth landing. From above, the glacier looked as flat as glass but it was deceiving. The truth was that long ridges of ice, as solid and thick as a brick wall, jutted out of the glacier.
Wright calmly brought their plane into land. He slowed the plane down as much as he could without stalling their already troubled engines and touched the belly of their plane down on the ice. Immediately, the thin metal underbelly of the plane slid across the glacier, like a puck shot across an ice rink. Shaking loudly, with a cloud of ice and snow trailing behind, the plane rocketed over the glacier.
Wright tightly held onto the plane’s controls, even though he no longer had any control over what happened to the flying boat.
For a few seconds, both men thought they were going to make it, when they suddenly hit a jagged ridge of ice. With a loud, shrieking wail, the undercarriage of the flying boat tore wide open. Ice and snow instantly flew up inside the cabin, blinding both men. A couple of seconds later, the plane struck another, slightly higher wall of ice, ripping off several large pieces of the undercarriage as if it were paper and sending the plane spinning like a child’s toy across the glacier. Anything not securely fastened down flew about inside the plane in a swirling maelstrom of maps and papers.
Unable to do anything but hold on for dear life, both men waited for the inevitable while the plane spun out of control towards a jagged, open fissure. In the blink of an eye, the floatplane disappeared headfirst into the fifteen-meter-deep crevice. With a loud crunch, the plane smashed into the far side of the rocky gap. The front of the plane instantly crumpled inwards, trapping both men in their seats, while the rest of the seventeen-meter-long plane collapsed in on itself like an accordion. The sound of snapping and twisting metal was deafening. The plane’s long wing ripped free from its nacelle, collapsing down on either side of the fuselage. A few seconds later, the plane settled down at the bottom of the icy hole.
Silence soon filled the air.
As if their predicament couldn’t have been any worse, clouds quickly rolled in and snow began falling from the sky to cover the wreckage.
Hetherington was the first to wake up. His head ached horribly. His stomach suddenly turned. With a moan, he vomited onto the wrecked windshield of the plane. When he had nothing left in his stomach, he took a deep breath to calm his nerves and reached up with his right hand. He wasn’t surprised to find a large goose egg-sized bump growing on the side of his head. Hetherington was about to check on his friend when he felt a snowflake land on his cheek. He turned his head and saw that the glass window on the top of their cockpit had been destroyed during the crash and that snow was coming down inside from above. Hetherington swore when he tried to unbuckle himself from his seat, only to find that his left arm was broken. What bothered him the most was that he couldn’t feel his legs. He glanced down and saw that his legs were trapped under a twisted piece of blood-covered metal. Hetherington cursed when he realized that he couldn’t feel a thing below his waist. He had shattered his spine in the accident. There was no way he was ever going to free himself. Fighting back the growing feeling of despair in his chest, Hetherington called out Wright’s name several times, trying to get his friend to wake up. After a few agonizing minutes in which Hetherington thought that his friend was dead, Wright slowly came to life.