THE DEATH AND DEEPLY VIOLENT AFTERLIFE OF FRANCIS RAWDON WOLFE

There are two kinds of Arctic problems, the imaginary and the real. Of the two, the imaginary are the most real.

⎯Vilhjalmur Stefansson, 1945


Chapter 1


That country is nothing but its own bare bones. Where’s my solitary neighbour? No, not now, not here, not Cape Royds, bad as this place is, godforsaken, inhuman cold. Talking where I’m going to be. Forty days and then the wilderness. Prepositions be damned, I’ll say it again, where I’m going is bones, nothing for square thousands of miles, or nothing except death, of course, and more ice and more freezing cold and more myself, which are all the same thing, and a killer of a common denominator in there.

So not a lot of people know Shackleton buried two crates of scotch in the ice down here at the South Pole. Fifteen people, maybe, maybe up to twenty by now? Make it twenty-one, then. This is good scotch, of course, because Shackleton never pared his cheese, and its golden-shouldered stuff, stronger than a century, strong and equal to the men it was to help. Say what you want about Shackleton⎯and there’s a lot to say, isn't there, the usual hemorrhaging catalogue, what with the drinking, what with the adultery, what with the arrogance, what with the whoring for anyone who would pay him a pound, what with the failure to find any task he, our man, Shackleton, explorer, gentleman, was successful at, what with the hypocrisy, what with the petty fraud, or, in other words, what with the behaviour of someone more or less shaped along the same lines as you and I⎯listen, the man, Shackleton, gentleman, explorer, he knew quality. And, even though he wasn’t a doctor, psychologist, name your term, he understood the principles and he knew what heart-strong substances would keep a man standing week in and week out in sub-zero temperatures nine thousand kilometres from home. He knew what spirit could build up the shape of a man's heart. Wasn’t the dogs, alright? Wasn’t the stiff upper lip. The explorer bought the stuff-of-life with some of the money he had raised for the abandoned expedition of 1907. Twenty-eight shillings’ worth of Mrs. Arthur Constantine Godfrey’s husband’s California liver-pill fortune, and the rest was donated at the British National Antarctic Expedition’s Debutantes’ Escalated Charity Ball, was poured into twelve bottles of Chas Mackinlay & Co’s finest and shipped below the decks of the HMS Nimrod along with twenty-three other straw-stuffed crates of Rare Old. I’ve got a copy of Shackleton’s 1907 letter to prove the pedigree, but Carter and I, we don’t need a letter of authenticity, not with a couple of cheap champagne flutes of Shackleton’s best beloved in our hands and a staved-in crate in the far corner. This is not even to mention, of course, not to mention the half-empty bottle, half-full, whatever, and the old Scottish straw on the floor, and our current address, which is not ours and not warm. But at least we have the whiskey to keep the flesh on our bones.

>>>