North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud Page A

shifted above him as Atka thrashed in his harness. Still he hesitated.
    The rope creaked under the strain of additional weight. Ice rained down around him. Garner looked up to see Connelly working his way hand over hand down the rope.
    “Do it,” Connelly grunted, his eyes like chips of flint. “Cut him loose.”
    Garner’s fingers loosened around the hilt of the blade. He felt the tug of the dark at his feet, Atka whining.
    “Give me the goddamn knife,” Connelly said, wrenching it away, and together they clung there on the single narrow thread of gray rope, two men and one knife and the enormous gulf of the sky overhead as Connelly sawed savagely at the last of the traces. It held for a moment, and then, abruptly, it gave, loose ends curling back and away from the blade.
    Atka fell howling into darkness.

    They made camp.
    The traces of thelead sledge had to be untangled and repaired, the dogs tended to, the weight redistributed to account for Atka’s loss. While Connelly busied himself with these chores, Garner stabilized Faber—the blood had frozen to a black crust inside the makeshift splint Garner had applied yesterday, after the accident—and wrapped Bishop’s ankle. These were automatic actions. Serving in France he’d learned the trick of letting his body work while his mind traveled to other places; it had been crucial to keeping his sanity during the war, when the people brought to him for treatment had been butchered by German submachine guns or burned and blistered by mustard gas. He worked to save those men, though it was hopeless work. Mankind had acquired an appetite for dying; doctors were merely shepherds to the process. Surrounded by screams and spilled blood, he’d anchored himself to memories of his wife, Elizabeth: the warmth of her kitchen back home in Boston, and the warmth of her body, too.
    But all that was gone.
    Now, when he let his mind wander, it went to dark places, and he found himself concentrating instead on the minutiae of these rote tasks like a first-year medical student. He cut a length of bandage and applied a compression wrap to Bishop’s exposed ankle, covering both ankle and foot in careful figure-eights. He kept his mind in the moment, listening to the harsh labor of their lungs in the frigid air, to Connelly’s chained fury as he worked at the traces, and to the muffled sounds of the dogs as they burrowed into the snow to rest.
    And he listened, too, to Atka’s distant cries, leaking from the crevasse like blood.
    “Can’t believe that dog’s still alive,” Bishop said, testing his ankle against his weight. He grimaced and sat down on a crate. “He’s a tough old bastard.”
    Garner imagined Elizabeth’s face, drawn tight with pain and determination, while he fought a war on the far side of the ocean. Was she afraid too, suspended over her own dark hollow? Did she cry out for him?
    “Help me with this tent,” Garner said.
    They’d broken off from the main body of the expedition to bring Faber back to one of the supply depots on the Ross Ice Shelf, where Garner could care for him. They would wait there for the remainder of the expedition, which suited Garner just fine, but troubled both Bishop and Connelly, who had higher aspirations for their time here.
    Nightfall was still a month away, but if they were going to camp here while they made repairs, they would need the tents to harvest warmth. Connelly approached as they drove pegs into the permafrost, his eyes impassive as they swept over Faber, still tied down to the travois, locked inside a morphine dream. He regarded Bishop’s ankle and asked him how it was.
    “It’ll do,” Bishop said. “It’ll have to. How are the dogs?”
    “We need to start figuring what we can do without,” Connelly said. “We’re gonna have to leave some stuff behind.”
    “We’re only down one dog,” Bishop said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to compensate.”
    “We’re down two. One of the swing dogs snapped her