My Last Continent Read Online Free

notebook, find the colony chart, and match nest to nest. According to our records, the chick was two weeks old, but now the rocky nest is empty. I search but find no body, which means its disappearance must have been the work of a predatory skua. When skuas swoop down to snatch chicks or eggs, they leave little behind.
    I move away from the colony and sit on a rock to make some notes. That’s when I hear it—a distinctly human yelp, and a thick noise that I have only heard once in my life and never forgotten: the sound of bone hitting something solid.
    I stand up and see a man lying on the ground, a red-­jacketed tourist from the Cormorant, which dropped its anchor in our bay this morning. The ship, making her rounds in the Antarctic peninsula, had left Thom and me here a week earlier, and she’ll pick us up in another week, during the last cruise of the season.
    Petermann Island is tiny, just over a mile long, once hometo small huts serving an early-twentieth-century French Antarctic expedition. Now we create our own research base, with tents and solar-powered laptops. During the two weeks we’re here, the Cormorant stops by, weather permitting, to show tourists the birds and our camp, offering a tour of the island and a glimpse of how we researchers live.
    The man had fallen hard, landing on his back. When I see a spot of red spreading from the rock under his head into the snow, I start toward him. Fifteen other tourists are within twenty yards, yet no one else seems to notice.
    Thom must have seen something; he gets to the man first. And now a woman is scrambling guardedly down the same hill, apparently taking care, despite her hurry, to avoid the same fate.
    I turn my attention to the man. His blood is an unwelcome sight, bright and thin amid the ubiquitous dark-pink guano of the penguins, and replete with bacteria, which could be deadly for the birds. I repress an urge to clean it up.
    â€œDeb,” Thom says sharply, glancing up. He’d spent two years in medical school before turning to marine biology, and he looks nervous. By now, four more tourists in their matching red jackets have gathered around us.
    I hold out my arms and move forward, forcing the red jackets back a couple of steps. The woman who’d hurried down the hill is trying to see past me. She looks younger than the usual middle-aged passengers who cruise down to Antarctica. “Are you with him?” I ask her. “Where’s your guide?”
    â€œNo—I don’t know,” she stammers. Blond hair trails from under her hat into her eyes, wide with an anxiety I can’t place. “He’s up there, maybe.” She motions toward the gentoo colony. I glance up. The hill has nearly faded away in the fog.
    â€œSomeone needs to find him,” I say. “And we need the doctor from the boat. Who’s he traveling with?”
    â€œHis wife, I think,” someone answers.
    â€œGet her.”
    I kneel next to Thom, who’s examining the man’s head. If we were anywhere but Antarctica, the injury might not seem as critical. But we are at the bottom of the world, days away from the nearest city, even farther from the nearest trauma center. There’s a doctor along on the cruise, and basic medical facilities at Palmer Station, a forty-person U.S. base an hour away by boat—but it’s not yet clear whether that will be enough.
    The man hasn’t moved since he fell. A deep gash on the back of his head has bled through the thick wad of gauze Thom applied. Voices approach—the guide, the wife, the doctor. The man’s chest suddenly begins to heave, and Thom quickly reaches out and turns his head so he can vomit into the snow.
    The man shudders and tries to sit up, then loses consciousness again. Thom presses fresh gauze to his head and looks up.
    â€œWhat happened?” the wife cries.
    â€œHe slipped,” I tell her.
    Susan Beecham, the ship’s doctor, is now right