South

The next installment of the Tusker adventure, Icebound

(Photo: Paul Clammer)

Author’s note: Earlier this year, I published the prologue and first chapter from my unpublished (and unfinished) novel, provisionally named Icebound. I’ve been noodling on the idea of serialized fiction for some time, and thought it would be a fun and challenging exercise to occasionally publish further chapters, and perhaps continue to write more, here on Swimpruf. The risk with serialized fiction, and writing forward, as it were, is that I can’t go back and edit or change details later since it will have already been put out into the world. A bit like removing your climbing anchors as you go up a rock wall. But there’s something thrilling in that challenge. So I’m going to give it a try, aiming loosely for once a month. So here is the next installment. I hope you enjoy it. — JH

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The flight was nauseatingly choppy. The Avro RJ85 bobbed and ducked in the clouds and the cabin was soon filled with the smell of several passengers’ partially digested breakfast. Tusker sat wedged in his seat, its thinly covered frame biting into his lower back, between a large German woman and an older man who kept his eyes closed for the duration of the flight, mumbling through pursed lips. Tusker had managed to avoid a long ocean crossing by tagging along on a charter flight with a group of tourists, but he wasn’t so sure it was any better than the Drake Passage. The flight lasted a little over two hours, but he was glad to step out into the biting wind on the gravel airstrip on King George Island on the Antarctic Peninsula. The pilots, two young Argentinians, climbed down and proceeded, with little urgency, to pull bags from the cargo door of the plane and pile them onto a trolley. The tourists, bowed against the wind, hustled en masse, into the quonset hut that served as a terminal building. Two Ford Econoline passenger vans with oversized tires, idled outside. Tusker wouldn’t be joining them.