What were his last days like? How many of them had there been? Did he live until winter? Did he fall in a crevasse after all? His body wasn’t inside Little America or the scientists would have found it. If it had been her, she would have done what he said he would do: walked in the winter night far away from camp and lain in the snow, under the stars and the aurora. Or maybe not—it is not lost on her she had twice failed to choose death. She’d written in her logbook that her life was her one possession. She had kept it; she had wanted it.
In 1963, the crew of a navy icebreaker will catch sight of buildings smushed like sandwich filling in the middle of a tabular iceberg drifting three hundred miles from the Ross Ice Shelf: Little America III, its bunks and Victrola and frozen dog turds and corn on the cob, all gone out to sea.
Eddie, too, wherever he was, would eventually be calved into the Southern Ocean inside an iceberg, would sail north aboard his grand funeral barge, a pyre that would not burn but melt. He would end in the ocean after all, but he must have known that.
Caleb comes to New Zealand a second time. They argue about money. He wants her to take all the royalties from the book. Finally she convinces him to keep forty percent. With her new fortune, moderate though it is, she is able to shift her identity once more. She goes away to the North Island for the better part of a year, becomes a woman again, calls herself Alice Root. What documents she needs, she gets from a forger in Auckland. When she is ready, she returns to the South Island, buys her farm, makes a go of it. She trains horses and sheepdogs. She hires the right hands. She is one of the first to use a helicopter for mustering—the land is rugged; the sheep find their way to places that would take full days to reach on foot—and allows herself the indulgence of learning to fly it.
Early on, she occasionally encounters someone from her shepherding days, and usually they do not recognize her, or not confidently enough to ask, but to those who say she reminds them of a man called Martin Wallace, she admits, almost casually, that, yes, she had been posing as a man for a time because she’d needed the work and wanted to learn the ropes of sheep farming. Some are outraged; others, after brief astonishment, manage to admire her pluck. Gradually, word spreads through the sheep community and everyone knows. Though a few prudish souls refuse to do business with her and do their best to spread vituperative rumors, by then she is well established and independent enough to suffer no important ill consequences. There is a long history of women disguising themselves as men in order to be soldiers or sailors, even pirates. Who was to worry too much about one lonely shepherd?
Lambs born, lambs sent to slaughter, sheep shorn, prices of wool. In the late sixties, adventure cruises to Campbell Island come on offer, and in 1974, she and Caleb go. As the ship enters Perseverance Harbour, she points out where she had been dashed against the rocks, where she had walked along the hillside before finding the beards. He sees the seals and the penguins. There are still sheep on the island then, though in the eighties the last of them will be culled except for a handful brought to the mainland for genetic study. They are so very hardy, so tough. She and Caleb sit together in the tussock grass among tourists in anoraks and watch groups of young royal albatross preen and show off, wings spread, calling out with their pink bills pointing at the sky. It’s called gamming, she tells Caleb, a word for when whaling ships used to pull alongside each other at sea for a chat.
She is sixty years old.
She shows Caleb the direction she had last seen the Peregrine flying, the horizon over which it had passed and, somewhere, unseen, crashed into the ocean. And so she returns to another beginning, closes another circle.
She is pleased, when she is old, not to have a string of descendants to worry about. The world will do as it will without any of her blood. When she learns you can look people up on the internet, she looks up Adelaide Scott and discovers she is an artist. She thinks Jamie would have been pleased.
Caleb comes for the last time when she is seventy-five. A few years later he writes to tell her that he is ill. He will not, he says, say goodbye.
Her heart flutters in her chest sometimes. Her bones are brittle. Gravity seems greedier than before, eager to tip her to the ground. The final smashup. In her will, she includes a bequest to a woman, her farm manager, who has worked for her longer than anyone else. The farm manager has always wanted to go to Antarctica, and Marian will leave her money for a trip to the Ross Sea, along with a request that, somewhere south of Campbell Island, she scatter Marian’s ashes from the ship.
Marian can imagine the plume of herself riding the westerly wind over the Southern Ocean, the bits of teeth and bone sinking at once, a gritty gray film settling on the surface until the chop mixes her in. But she doesn’t know what will happen to the part of her that is not her body. All the times she has brushed against death, she’s never given much thought to what might come after. Now she considers it. She supposes there will be nothing. She supposes each of us destroys the world. We close our eyes and snuff out all that has existed, all that will ever be.