The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (5 page)

“You can’t remember it?”

“I was only one when my parents came to the States.”

I look at the plate of cookies, feeling awkward. Once again, she looks inside me and sees what no one else ever has. She gasps. “You can remember Antarctica, can’t you?”

I give the slightest tilt of my head. I can. “Clark Station smelled like rust. There was a lot of it on the walls, and around the doors. My parents’ room was decorated with Indian wall hangings—India Indian, not American Indian.”

Her open mouth confirms the accuracy of what I’ve said. I remember much more, but I’ve made my point.

“I knew you were smart, Solomon, but I had no idea...” She puts her cookie down. “Do your parents know?”

I shake my head, no. They already treat me special enough.

She nods as though she understands why, and I think she really might.

“What was the very first thing you remember?” she asks.

“You mean after I was born?”

Her eyes go wide for a moment. A wide smile follows as she realizes I’ve just made a joke. She picks up the cookie again and takes a bite. “Yes, after you were born.”

“First memory?”

“Very first.”

I pause. I know the answer. But I don’t want to freak her out. I think she’ll see through it if I try to lie. So I tell the truth. “You.”

The cookie falls from her hand.

“Your face,” I say. “You delivered me. You were smiling just like you are now. When I saw you, when I looked into your eyes, I felt...loved.”

“And you stopped crying,” she says, and I can see tears in her eyes. Good to know I’m not the only crybaby going on this trip.

“I remember our eyes meeting,” she continues. “And then you just stopped crying. I thought it was a fluke, but you stared up at me so intently.”

“And then Dad took me,” I say, “and I didn’t like it.”

“He wasn’t used to holding a baby, never mind a newborn.”

 “Let’s go, you two!” Dr. Clark yells from the front door.

Aimee wipes her eyes and dumps the cookies into a Tupperware container. She picks up a bag and heads for the door. “Let’s get a move on, Sol. I’ll keep quiet about your memories if you keep quiet about those cookies in your pocket. Otherwise we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

I smile as I follow her to the door. For the first time in a very long time, I’ve made a friend. And it’s not Merrill, whom I admire so much, or Mirabelle, who is age appropriate and beautiful, it’s Aimee Clark, who is not only the first person I met upon entering the world, but is also the nicest.

I make a mental note to be far away from her when I step off the plane and onto Antarctica. If I get violent, I don’t want her anywhere near me.

4

The car ride to Logan Airport is cramped. Not only am I still surrounded by luggage, but I’m also wedged in tight with Mirabelle Clark. I have never been this close to a girl for this length of time. I’ll be dehydrated from sweating before we even reach the dry air of the airplane cabin.

But it could be worse. She doesn’t smell like a girl. Few things irritate me more than the chemical scents women and girls douse themselves in. Scented soaps, perfumes, deodorants—they’re all bad. The worst ones are those made from animal pheromones. Don’t people realize what they’re spraying on themselves? Gross.

She also seems to have no interest in talking to me. Instead she’s playing twenty questions with my dad. More like one hundred and twenty questions. They’ve been talking photography since they shook hands. Dad seems to be enjoying the conversation as much as Mirabelle. The only interest I showed in photography was when I read all of dad’s camera manuals and how-to guides. As a result, there are several points in the conversation when I could correct both of them on the proper way to light, frame or filter a shot. But I learned to keep my mouth shut about such things long ago. No one likes a know-it-all.

What stinks about the current scenario is that I have yet to talk to Dr. Clark. My dad said we’d get to talk on the plane, but I’m starting to doubt it. He doesn’t seem all that interested in me. Back at the house, our eyes met and he looked quickly away, like he wanted nothing to do with me. I’m sure I read his face right. I’ve seen that look before. Several times.

But Dr. Clark is not the reason for this trip. I try to remind myself that. Unlike Larry Bird, Dr. Clark isn’t used to having young fans or being a role model. He may positively loathe children, though I doubt it. Mirabelle seems too well adjusted.

In fact, I think I’ll be okay with her joining us on this trip. I can’t stand most kids my age, but she’s well spoken, fairly intelligent, kind and pretty. Though that last quality is a drawback and will probably prevent us from ever really being friends.

I’m suddenly being ribbed by Mirabelle’s sharp elbow. At first it hurts, but then I remember whose elbow it is and it tickles so much I flinch away. But she and dad are laughing and don’t notice. Was there a joke at my expense? I’ll never know because they’re back to talking about cameras—Polaroid this time.

Before I can tune out the conversation again I’m punched in the shoulder. It hurts as much as one of Justin’s slugs and I have to fight the urge to cry out. But Mirabelle is smiling in my face.

“What do you think about Polaroid?” she asks.

And there it is. I’m in the conversation. I’m not sure how to answer. I don’t know what’s been said so far or if I’ll contradict it. Mirabelle has no patience for my pause.

“Well?”

“The first Polaroid camera was sold in 1947. It uses self-developing film that works when microscopic crystals of iodoquinine sulfate—”

“No, no, no,” she says, “that’s what you
know
. What’s your opinion of the cameras? Of the photos they take? What do you
think
?”

“Oh, well. I like to shake them,” I say. It’s true. Vigorously shaking a Polaroid photo gives me some kind of strange satisfaction. I have yet to determine why.

She’s nodding, but has a look on her face that says,
who doesn’t
? And she’s waiting for more.

“They provide instant gratification, which is fun I suppose, but the images are small, not nearly as clear and seem to fade quickly.”

She punches me again. “There, you see?” She’s talking to my dad. “Exactly what I said, but more intelligent sounding. Not great quality, but instant gratification.”

Before I realize it, she’s got her head on my shoulder. Her curling blond hair tickles my cheek. And a Polaroid camera rises in front of us. As my nervousness at her close proximity rises to near panic status, a flash of light blinds me. While my eyes recover, I feel a faint breeze and hear a repetitious flapping. When I finally recover, I see Mirabelle leaning over, writing on something with a permanent marker. Then she’s back up and handing me a Polaroid picture.

“The first of many memories,” she says.

I take the picture and look at it, dumbfounded by what I see. There’s Mirabelle, smiling wide, eyes unbelievably dark, head on my shoulder. And then there’s me. Despite my nervous jitters I look happy. Really happy. In fact, this might be the first photo of me sporting a genuine smile.

Beneath the photo, Mirabelle has written: Mira and Sol, 1987.

“Mira,” I say, reading her name.

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” she says.

“Why not Mirabelle?”

“Kind of a mouthful. Does your family call you Solomon?”

They don’t. I shake my head, no.

“Well, we’re both lucky. Our names sound just as good shortened as they do long.”

My eyebrows rise involuntarily. “You like my name?”

“Are you serious? King Solomon the wise and his legendary mines. Solomon Grundy—the nursery rhyme and evil comic-book zombie super villain.”

Then she’s singing, “Any hemisphere. No man’s land. Ain’t no asylum here. King Solomon he never lived round here.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The Clash,” she says.

“Clash of the Titans?” Harryhausen was a genius with stop motion, but I don’t recognize the lines as being from any of his films.

She gives me a funny look. “You don’t listen to music much, do you?”

“Only what Justin brings over. He’s my friend.”

She digs in her backpack. “I kinda figured that.” She pulls out a bright yellow cassette walkman. She extends the earphones as far as they’ll go and stretches them over both our heads, one side on her right ear, the other on my left. Then she hits play and I hear a tune similar to the one she was just singing.

I don’t hear the words at first because I’m distracted by the softness of Mira’s cheek up against mine. She’s bobbing her head to the music and our skin is rubbing. As I grow accustomed to the closeness, I hear the beat again. Then the tune. To my surprise, I like it. Then I hear the lyrics, and I’m not so sure.

There ain’t no need for ya. Go straight to Hell boys.

Go straight to Hell boys.

5

Logan is a whirlwind of confusion. I’m not sure how my parents can navigate through the terminals. But they do. And after checking our luggage and Dr. Clark’s massive amount of supplies—so much that he needed to get special permission to bring them—we’re on the plane and in the air.

I sit in a window seat, watching the East Coast pass below us as we head south. My mom and dad are sitting next to me and coax me into eating a small bag of peanuts and drinking a Sprite. I’d be worried if this was all I had to eat—the airline food is hideous—but I know Mom’s carry-on is full of food and drink. As my father’s photography assistant it’s her job to be prepared for anything, which includes my father’s voracious appetite.

About an hour into the flight, people become restless and a sort of musical chairs breaks out. Some people move to unoccupied rows, seeking solitude. Other people shift spots so they’re sitting next to friends or relatives they weren’t seated with. About five minutes into the shift, my parents are on their feet.

“I’m going to visit with Aimee,” mom says. “Your father needs to pee. Won’t be long.”

I shrug, not really caring where they’re going and turn my attention back to the view. I can no longer see the ocean. That’s right, our stop-over is in Texas. Then Peru. Then... As my thoughts turn to Antarctica, I feel my Dad return to his seat next to me. But something’s not right.

I sniff. The person next to me doesn’t smell like my Dad. I turn, expecting to see Mira, but it’s not her either. It’s Dr. Clark. He looks over at me, his dark hair ruffled in the back from leaning on his seat. And there is something odd about his eyes. Not the color, they’re a perfectly normal blue. It’s the tightness around the edges. He looks nervous.

I know I must, too, because he forces a smile. I return it with one I’m sure looks equally as awkward. He clears his throat. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just excited to meet you.”

“Excited to meet me?” I’m honestly thrown by this.

“You are the modern equivalent of what I’ve spent most of my career searching for.”

“An Antarctican.”

He nods.

“That doesn’t make me special. If anything it makes me stranger than I already am.”

“Strange, my boy, is a good thing,” he says. And I can tell he’s not joking. “We live in a world of mediocrity, of settling for society’s norms. Anything outside of that is deemed strange. If you’re smart. If you’re creative. If you simply just want something different for your life. Of course, you’re all three of those, aren’t you?”

“So, I’m stranger than most?”

“
Better
than most,” he says with a wink.

I can tell he’s relaxing, which is good, because it’s helping me relax, too.

“We weren’t put on this Earth to be stagnant.”

I think about his word choice. Stagnant in the current context means a lack of progress. But when talking about the physical world it means things are going foul from standing still. It’s a loaded sentence. “So our brains will rot if we aren’t strange?”

“Precisely.” He laughs. I smile. This is going much better then when I fell on my face.

“But I’m not really different because I was born on Antarctica, am I?”

His smile fades some and I know the answer to my question. He thinks I am different. More so than makes any sense. “Why?” I ask, but then think,
because he knows—he was there when I was born.

“There is so much about Antarctica we don’t know,” he says. “The vast majority of the continent, which is the size of the United States, is buried beneath the ice. What little is exposed has been all but scoured clean by the katabatic winds.”

Katabatic winds are created when gravity pulls dense air down a slope from higher elevations. Since Antarctica is essentially a big mound of snow, this is commonplace. The winds can reach speeds faster than any hurricane and a few of the people who have been lost on the continent disappeared into a cloud of rushing snow carried by the winds. Just one of the many dangers the continent offers visitors.

Hello and welcome to Antarctica
, I think,
try not to get killed
!

“But we know people visited Antarctica, even lived on Antarctica, more than six thousand years ago.”

“The Piri Reis map,” I say.

He nods, growing excited. “Not only does the map show animals reminiscent of cattle and mink, it also shows other strange creatures and odd looking primates. Even a wall of some kind.”

“I’ve often wondered if those were just embellishments by the artist,” I admit.

“That is a possibility,” he says, “but I highly doubt it. The map’s details are better than any modern map, and it depicts the coast of an Antarctica free of ice. Given its geographic accuracy and the fact that the continent would have had to be ice free at the time, there is no reason to doubt that the land was populated. The map itself proves that ancient humans visited the continent.”

“Makes sense,” I say. “But that doesn’t make me any different.”

“You might change your mind when we get there,” he says. “There’s something magical about the place. And I think a little bit of that magic was instilled in you when you were born.”

Magic? I can’t believe a man like Merrill Clark would buy into such things. I can’t stop myself from asking. “You don’t believe in magic do you?”

“Not in the sense you’re thinking,” Dr. Clark says. “Not the hocus pocus, bunny-in-the-hat kind. I do believe in the supernatural. In God. But that’s not what I’m talking about either. It’s hard to describe. What I do know is that something truly strange happened when you were born. Something that still excites me when I think about it. Perhaps we’ll understand the science behind it someday, but—”

“You think it will happen again when I go back, don’t you?” I ask.

“Can’t say I haven’t considered the possibility. But you were on the continent for several weeks before it was safe to move you. The event never repeated itself, though the storm that eventually buried the station didn’t let up for years.”

His eyes drift to the seat in front of him. I can tell he’s remembering something. He snaps out of his thoughts and says, “The truth is, I hope nothing happens when you set foot on Antarctica.”

Like becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions and going on a killing spree
, I think, but then I force the concern from my mind. This is the moment I have been waiting for. Clark knows everything my parents have hid from me. His memory is the safe I need to crack. “What happened?” I ask.

“You’ve heard, I’m sure. About the howling.”

I nod, but the look in my eyes betrays how little I actually know. I heard about the howling on two occasions, both at gatherings my parents hosted, from people whose memories of the past were diluted by alcohol at the time.

He chuckles. “Have they really not told you yet?”

My anger at my parents’ silence increases and my voice oozes frustration. “Dad says the only howling was my mother.”

He looks down the aisle in both directions and then leans in close. He’s clearly about to tell me something my parents wouldn’t want me to know. When he speaks, his eyes are wide and his voice is animated. “Well, I’m sure that’s all
he
could hear, but the rest of us...it was like a Viking war horn sounding from all around. I felt terrified when I heard it. Then the wind came. Tore the roof away from one of the research buildings. The wind carried snow so thick I couldn’t see more than a foot. It’s a miracle I made it back at all.”

“You were out in the storm?”

He’s quiet for a moment, lost in thought again. “I was,” he whispers. “I was. And I’m the only one who saw it.”

Saw what
? I think, but he doesn’t give me time to ask.

“You know about the ice sheet breaking free?”

I dip my head down in a nod.

“I was there. When it broke. A flash of blue, like lightning contained in the ice, shot down the hill toward the ocean. When it reached the edge of the continent, where the ice floated on top of the ocean, the energy burst, dissipating suddenly. The crack of the ice was so loud it hurt my ears. The split spread to the horizon in both directions and then it was free, a six hundred square mile iceberg formed at the moment of your birth. The wind came just after that, then the snow. I was bedridden for days afterwards. Nearly lost a toe. I still have a ringing in my ears. I’ve never seen another storm like it since.” He fixes his eyes on mine. “How do you think you got your name?”

“Solomon?”

“Ull, the god of winter. You descended on Antarctica that day and brought your storm with you.” He gives me a smile. “Don’t let your father fool you. He knows everything I’ve told you is true.”

“You think that’s why they named me, Ull?”

“I have no doubt.”

“Why?”

He laughs at this. “Because I gave you the name.”

This has me stunned. Dr. Merrill Clark named me? Ull, the god of winter. It sounds unbelievable, but now that I’m thinking about it, it makes too much sense. My father has very little interest in ancient cultures, religions or history in general. He’s more concerned with capturing the here and now on film. But Dr. Clark, he’s an anthropologist who has written extensively on the ancient religions of the world, including the Norse gods. He’s telling the truth.

The insanity of all this has me shaken. For a moment, I understand why Mom and Dad kept all this from me. It’s so...unbelievable. So strange, even for me. If not for my experience with the Antarctic stone in my father’s safe, I might have discounted everything Clark said. But if it’s true...

I shake my head. Though I have a thousand more questions, I feel overwhelmed and need to process what I’ve heard. So I whittle my queries down to one and ask, “My parents kept this from me my whole life. Why are you telling me now?”

“To prepare you.”

“For what?”

“In case it happens again.”