Antarctica is ruled by ice.
The ice is ruthless. It is unforgiving. It demands respect and it gets it. You bend to its will or you aren’t long for the world.
You need to be one of three things to survive, really:
You can be tough, and bear the storms, and hunt for food.
You can be cunning, and hide from danger.
Or you can be like a penguin – we survive by being part of a group. We huddle for warmth and we keep each other company in the desolate snow.
Wherever we go, we go together, and that’s how we stay afloat in this sea of ice.
But sometimes the ice has different ideas, and then you’ll just have to go along with it.
Just like I had to.
I was not four weeks old when the storm hit.
You have to learn fast in Antarctica, and I should have been intensively learning to swim and hunt by then, but instead I was nestled in the snow on top of the snowdrift by the sea, watching the bay. This was my favourite place to be, as the view of the expanse of water, blue-green speckled with silver icebergs, never failed to take my breath away.
But today, I was surprised to notice a new colour in the mix. Seeping slowly through the blue and green and silver was a creeping cloud of grey.
Rather than immediately alert and quick to warn the others as I should have been, I was curious, and I wondered where the ever-growing cloud of grey came from and what it meant. So I sat there, watching it draw closer and closer, until all of a sudden, I was enveloped in it, and for the first time in my life was struck by fear.
The mist was all around, a gale arose out of nowhere, I couldn’t see and couldn’t hear and couldn’t for the life of me remember which way was home.
So I panicked, and ran, and slipped on the ice, and slid a long way down a slope, then crashed into a snowdrift and lay there, whimpering, a pathetic sound rendered inaudible by the wind.
I lay there a long time. I didn’t try to count, I just shivered through my feathers. The cold crept in. I closed my eyes and slept, but didn’t dream.
An eternity passed.
A steady rocking motion woke me.
I tried to stand, but found I couldn’t, then suddenly remembered the blizzard and forced my eyes to open.
The storm had passed, but the wind had roiled up the waves and they hadn’t quite subsided. It took me a moment to realise that I was moving with them. I clumsily scrambled out of the snowdrift that I appeared to have landed in, then struggled to my feet on the rocking ice and looked around.
Dark water on all sides – I was on an ice floe in the sea.
Now I really wished I had learned how to swim.
Suddenly, before I had had time to sit down and think, and before panic had had time to set in, the whole floe was jolted and a shadow fell across my back.
I froze. Now I was awake.
I turned very slowly to see an enormous skua towering above me.
Now panic set in. You have to imagine that you’re a small penguin chick and that you encounter a menacing-looking bird which your grandmother has warned you likes to eat small penguin chicks.
“Please don’t eat me!” I stuttered, but it came out more like “Squeak, squeak!”
The skua cocked its head.
“Why shouldn’t I, little penguin?” Its voice was raspy and grating. “I have chicks to feed, and you don’t look to have anyone.”
My feet wouldn’t move, no matter how sternly I told them to, and anyway, where was I going to go? So I channeled every bit of my youthful optimism, hardened my resolve and looked the big bird in the eye.
“But I do! I have a family! You can’t eat me, because they’ll miss me!”
There was no compassion in the skua’s eyes, just cold resolve.
“That’s not how it works around here, little penguin. You have to fend for yourself, else you won’t last long.” And the skua lunged at me with beak agape.
I just about managed to dodge backwards and out of the way, but in doing so I slipped and fell, landing on my back and sliding all the way off the ice floe and into the dark water.
The shock petrified me immediately. It was freezing! I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which way was up. In fact, it was rather like the storm all over again.
Unlike in the storm, though, I felt a powerful jolt after what couldn’t have been more than half a minute underwater, and I was yanked back above the surface.
My first thought was the skua, and I tried to struggle, but was still in shock.
Slowly, I came to my senses enough to realise that I was not in the air, but on the water’s surface, being carried towards the shore on something grey. It took my still iced-up mind another few moments to realise that the grey thing was a seal, and by that time we were approaching a rocky beach that I knew.
The seal swam right up to the shore, then flopped a little further and dropped me onto the rocks.
“Thank you!” was all I could think to stammer.
“Not at all.” said the seal “we all have to keep each other afloat, no?”
As the seal flopped back to the water and disappeared with a little wave of the flipper, I started to make my way up the beach towards where I knew my parents would be waiting with open wings.
Looking back over the bay, I saw the icebergs shine silver in the sun.
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