No Man's Land
Some time ago, I embarked on a solo research expedition to the South Pole. It has taken me a while to make sense of my experiences and field notes.
Now, I present them to you with one question:
what do you think I encountered?
Upon arrival, five silhouetted figures stood waiting on an ice floe.
They didn't move. The closer I got to land, the worse the visibility became. Were they coming closer, or was it just the shifting fog?
To the left, you can see my home for the next six months.
The expedition company left me well-stocked.
Hover over the image to take a look inside.
My first hike ended... interestingly. On my way back to my hut, I noticed footprints - at first, just my own, but then more, leading toward home.
Some of them seemed smaller. Others... deeper.
Inside, I found my can of sardines open. The lid was peeled back neatly.
Had I done that? I must have. Right?
Not long after, I was trapped inside my hut for a month. Relentless storms made venturing outside impossible.
Through the howling wind and flurries of snow, I sometimes glimpsed figures moving,
struggling against the storm, just beyond visibility. Or maybe it was just shifting ice.
With the moon as my only marker of time, I began having the strangest dreams.
I would wake up certain I had heard voices outside. When I listened closely, only the wind remained.
I dreamt of an arctic civilisation - tall, silent women who lived by ice fishing, mastered archery, and worshipped the moon.
Could they be the figures I saw in the distance? Could this explain the strange, low, braying calls I kept hearing at night?
One day, the creatures started bringing me gifts.
At first, I thought the storms had simply unearthed strange objects—fish, smooth stones, and pieces of ice, arranged in a line outside my hut.
But they kept appearing. Placed there. Deliberately.
I never saw the creatures. But they were watching me.
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Here are some of the objects I received.
Take a closer look - arrange them
as you see fit.
I followed the footprints back to strange structures, like hollowed-out burrows or nests.
Scattered around them were bones, too large to belong to any bird I knew.
I had miscalculated. The creatures were not just watching.
They were hunters.
With that realization, I was relieved that my expedition was nearly over.
What do you think I encountered?
When I left, I expected the mystery to stay behind, buried in the ice.
But even now, thousands of miles away, I still wake in the night to strange sounds outside my window. Soft, shuffling footsteps. A low, braying call.
The wind, I tell myself. Only the wind.