War Photographer's Notebook

"The sewing machine is not important. I just want to stay in the cabin and not go anywhere."

Hanno said straightforwardly, "I have no interest in accompanying the major on hunting, let alone working as a retrieval dog."

"It seems that you have a lot of resentment towards the major?" Wei Ran extended the topic in a mocking manner.

"Resentment? No, no, no, I have never had any resentment towards him."

Hanno's tone was particularly candid when he said this, "Anyway, he is our mountaineering instructor, and it is because of him that the two of us had the opportunity to avoid the battlefield in Europe and come to the Antarctic.

Although this hellish place is colder than the top of the Alps, at least you don't have to worry about being sent to the front line, right? "

"That's true."

Wei Ran nodded in agreement. This was indeed the case. Although they had just encountered the pursuers yesterday, the intensity of the fighting was probably not even a fraction of that on any battlefield in Europe.

"It would be nice to work in Antarctica until the end of the war."

Hanno said happily, "It would be great if my parents and wife could come here to work."

"You should be satisfied if you can get that sewing machine."

Wei Ran said dumbfounded, "Besides, the sleeping bag you made started to smell like it was thrown into a dung heap, and it gave me nightmares."

"I smell it too"

Hanno grinned, "I'm not a professional tailor, I just made it casually based on our sleeping bags. Let's not talk about it, Victor, have you noticed Dr. Yog and the other three?"

"What's wrong with them?" Wei Ran asked, pretending to be confused.

After a moment's hesitation, Hanno whispered, "They want me to help them get the compass. Didn't they also ask for your help?"

"I would have forgotten about it if you didn't tell me," Wei Ran suddenly realized, "What are your plans? Are you going to help them?"

"I'm not going to help them."

Hanno replied without thinking, "But I can roughly guess what they want to do?"

"Tell me?"

Hearing this, Hanno simply stopped the sleigh completely, and then sat in the seat vacated by Wei Ran, "Victor, do you have any cigarettes? How about giving me a cigarette?"

"certainly"

Wei Ran nodded happily, took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and put it into his mouth, then gave all the remaining cigarettes to Hannuo.

Hanno couldn't wait to light a cigarette, and then moved the kerosene lamp hanging on the rear of the sleigh between the two of them, and then he made a wild guess, "Carsten is a geologist, and Dr. Cross is a naturalist." Scholars, they must be trying to find out the location of the mine, but as for Dr. Yog, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was so close to Carsten and the others despite being good friends with the major.”

"When you put it like that, even I'm starting to wonder where that mine is and what it contains."

Wei Ran said in a joking tone, "What exactly was sent away in the first cycle of Qi Qi?"

"I'm afraid only Major Schubert knows where that mine is."

Hanno took a puff on his cigarette and said, "Maybe I don't even know where he is. Who knows? Although I have been to the warehouse, I have never been to the mine. Dr. Cross and Mr. Carsten have been there, but I heard Said they were blindfolded by Schubert halfway through.”

"So what was given away a week ago."

"I heard Dr. Yog say that it seems to be the fossil of some kind of animal."

Hanno shared the secret he knew without reservation, "But I haven't seen it either. That thing was previously kept by Dr. Cross and Mr. Carsten, and they wouldn't show it to me."

At this point, Hanno lowered his voice and said, "But I know another secret."

"What secret?" Wei Ran asked with interest.

"How about another pack of cigarettes?" Hanno made his small request.

"No problem at all"

Wei Ran happily opened his hiking bag, took out a pack of cigarettes and handed it to Hannuo.

"We are on our way to the warehouse"

Hanno said firmly as he took the cigarette, "You know, the Major and I have been to the warehouse twice, both when we went there to receive airdrops, so I remember the way."

At this point, Hannuo raised his finger and pointed in the direction and said, "It's probably in that direction. If it's daytime, you'll see the shadow of a mountain range. Just keep walking in that direction and you'll find the warehouse. There are quite a few there. As for the supplies, I guess the major is planning to take us there to hide them.”

"Isn't there a sewing machine or something there?" Wei Ran asked jokingly, suppressing the shock in his heart.

"There is definitely no sewing machine."

Hanno was extraordinarily honest, "But the supplies there are definitely enough for us to last until summer."

Wei Ran urged, "Can't you tell me in detail what's there?"

"There's a lot of coal and kerosene, a generator and a lot of cans and other supplies."

Hanno thought for a while, "That's probably it. Oh, the last airdrop dropped a lot of weather balloons and so on. I guess they plan to build a weather station there."

At this point, Hanno took the last puff of his cigarette, stood up with the kerosene lamp, and said while walking to the back of the sleigh, "Okay, Victor, it's time for us to set off to find the penguins. If we can still find them this time, After saving so much penguin down, I will definitely find a way to wash it and make it into a sleeping bag."

"I hope so"

Wei Ran also sat up straight as he spoke, holding up his telescope and continuing to search for traces of the penguin colony on the ice sheet shrouded in the aurora.

As time passed by, the sled they were riding on left longer and longer marks on the snow, and their body temperature became lower and lower.

"Stop!"

On the sleigh, Wei Ran, who occasionally raised his telescope, suddenly shouted, "Hanno! I think I saw a penguin!"

"where?!"

"Two o'clock direction!" Wei Ran responded immediately.

Hearing this, Hannuo immediately ordered the dogs to stop, raised the telescope hanging around his neck and looked over.

"That area is obviously different in color from the snow!"

Weiran raised the telescope again and reminded, "Did you see it? They seem to be still moving!"

"I saw!"

Hanno shouted excitedly, "I saw it, a penguin! That is indeed a penguin!"

"It's been more than two hours since we left the camp." Wei Ran glanced at the time displayed on his watch, "Would you like to take a closer look?"

"go!"

Hannuo responded happily, felt the wind direction for a while, and then ordered the dogs to pull the sleigh in a circle, approaching the astonishingly large penguin colony from the downwind position.

As the distance got closer, the penguins huddled together in the telescope became clearer and clearer.

Even the two of them could clearly smell the unique fishy smell of penguin daddy in the cold wind blowing in front of them.

"Shall we go back?" Hanno asked excitedly as he put down his telescope.

"Let's go back." As Wei Ran spoke, he also put down the telescope.

Without wasting any time, Hanno stuffed a piece of seal meat the size of a mahjong piece into each dog's mouth as quickly as possible. After they had eaten it, he immediately pulled the reins and turned around and started walking back.

Compared with the stop-and-go when they came, the two went back much faster. It only took them about an hour and a half before they saw the kerosene lamp hanging between the two tents.

"Major, Penguin! We found the penguin!"

Far away, Hanno shouted excitedly, "It's in the direction we just went! It's about an hour and a half away!"

"Major, do we want to leave now?" Dr. Jorg asked immediately before the sleigh stopped.

"It's already past ten o'clock in the evening"

Major Schubert looked up at the night sky full of aurora, hesitated for a moment and said, "No, we are leaving now. We have to replenish enough food supplies before the weather gets bad!"

Now that Major Schubert has made a decision, no one will object. All of a sudden, the campsite that had been built so hard yesterday was immediately dismantled and loaded onto the sleds, and the dogs who had had enough rest also got on the sleds.

Wei Ran and Hannuo were still arranged to take charge of the sleigh at the back, and Schubert was at the front, following the sled tracks in the direction of the group of penguins.

When the pointer on the dial on Weiran's wrist pointed to 23:19, a group of six sleighs stopped at the spot where Weiran and Hanno once stopped at the edge of the penguin colony.

After raising his telescope and looking in the direction of the penguin colony, Major Schubert said after a moment of hesitation, "I'm going to hunt penguins. You guys can find a place nearby to set up a camp."

Before he finished speaking, he had already ordered an empty sleigh, pulled his precious cipher machine and ran towards the direction of the penguin.

The others looked at each other, and Hanno pointed to a large protrusion not far away that was covered with snow and couldn't tell whether it was stone or blue ice and said, "Let's go there!"

Naturally, Wei Ran and the others had no objection. They shouted and drove the sleigh pulling the materials that the major had just unloaded in a hurry to the side of the bulge that was about three meters high above the ground. "Luckily, it's a piece of ice!"

As Hanno spoke, he had fixed the sleigh and started digging in the lee of the ice with a snow shovel.

He became more and more skilled in cooperating with these people to dig out the snow. Before they could use the sleigh to lay the foundation, crisp gunshots were heard one after another from the direction of the penguin colony.

Soon, Schubert ran back pulling two huge emperor penguins on a sleigh.

"It's Emperor Penguin"

Before the car stopped, Schubert said loudly, "And they are the fattest emperor penguins, each weighing about 40 kilograms!"

"We can't take away seven such big penguins," Dr. Cross couldn't help but remind him.

"I only killed three."

Schubert explained while pushing the two penguins down, "Three are enough to eat. I will bring the remaining one back. Victor, Yog, please deal with these two penguins quickly." one time."

"Leave it to us!"

Dr. Yog responded before Wei Ran could speak, pulled one of them to his side and started working.

After just a brief glance, Wei Ran knew what he was doing. He pulled out his hunting knife and started to disembowel the other penguin, cutting open all the steaming internal organs and throwing them to the dogs.

By the time Major Schubert brought back the third penguin, the two of them had already peeled off the thick fat stored in various parts of the body of the first two penguins and threw them into a tin bucket and heated them with the gasoline stove in the tent. Cut off the thick red meat and throw it into another bucket.

Under the skillful operation of these two people like an assembly line, the three huge penguins provided them with enough meat, and the fat that was removed was also refined into more than half a barrel of grease under Carsten's patient boiling.

After all this busy work, it was almost two o'clock in the night.

"We will set off after daylight"

They each filled their stomachs with half a can and the remaining bread. Schubert threw the freshly brewed coffee and two sugar cubes into his kettle and said, "I will keep vigil tonight."

Before he finished speaking, he had extinguished the gas stove, thrown it into the sled along with the coffee pot, dragged the sled out of the tent, and got into the dog tent next door.

There was someone keeping vigil, and Wei Ran naturally had the least objection. He immediately got into the smelly sleeping bag and fell asleep without even waiting for Dr. Yog to cover the tent door.

Upon seeing this, Dr. Cross and Carsten, who had originally wanted to say something, looked at each other. In the end, they could only get into their sleeping bags, which were also starting to smell bad, and lay down on the waterproof canvas side by side with Wei Ran and Hanno.

But this time, the five people in the tent only slept for less than an hour before they were woken up one after another by the biting cold wind outside.

"The weather in Antarctica has begun to get worse," Carsten said to himself, "and it will get worse until the short summer comes."

"I don't care what happens in the summer"

Dr. Yog also said to himself, "I just hope there will be good weather during the short daytime, otherwise we will all be trapped and die here."

After a brief exchange, everyone fell into silence again, but the wind outside the tent became more and more frightening. It seemed that even the tent, which was not that big, and the surrounding sleds pressing down on the tent, would be blown away at any time.

However, compared to whether the tent will be blown away, whether it will be crushed by the snow is obviously more worthy of concern.

Because of this, everyone in the tent had to pick up their ski poles from time to time to lift up the round and plump tent to let the snow slide down.

That night, although Major Schubert was nominally on duty, in fact no one fell asleep at all.

But compared with these, when it was close to 11 o'clock in the afternoon and the sky became slightly brighter, the blizzard still did not stop. On the contrary, most of their tents had been buried, so that they had to dig like diggers one by one. Earthworms usually crawl out of the tent, dig out the snow around the tent with a snow shovel, and strengthen the surrounding windshield.

This effort over and over again lasted from two o'clock in the night to two o'clock in the afternoon, and again from two o'clock in the afternoon to two o'clock in the night.

During this period, Dr. Cross and Carsten were also called to the tent next door by Major Schubert to help.

Finally, after another night, when the increasingly short days came, the wind and snow finally stopped.

In the tent that was almost overwhelmed at any time, Wei Yan picked up the already boiling kettle on the oil stove and filled Hanno's and Dr. Yog's kettles with boiling water.

While Wei Ran was filling his own kettle, the two of them immediately stuffed the kettle with the lid tightly into their arms, not daring to waste the precious heat.

"The wind and snow have stopped, it seems we should set off."

After Wei Ran finished speaking, he couldn't help but yawned. They had hardly slept at all in the past two days, or in other words, no one dared to sleep to death, for fear that they would never wake up again after falling asleep.

"Are you still alive?"

Just when Dr. Yoger was about to say something, Major Schubert from next door asked loudly while banging on the tent.

"Alive! We are all alive!" Dr. Yog responded immediately.

"It's time for us to go!" Major Schubert shouted and reminded, "Hurry up and pack your things!"

"I hope we can have a good sleep when we reach our destination."

After Hanno finished speaking, he couldn't help but yawned, then sat up and got out of the smelly sleeping bag.

After putting on one-piece thermal insulation suits, the three people squeezed out of the tent, only to find that the snow outside was almost more than half a meter thick, and more than half of their tent was already buried under the snow.

Not daring to delay at all, everyone immediately dug out the lower part of the tent and the sled cart with their snow shovels, packed them in a hurry, and then hitched the sled dogs.

"Follow me, Victor, Hanno, you two are still behind." Before Schubert finished speaking, he had already shouted to the sled dogs to start running.

Watching the sleighs set off again, Wei Ran, who was accustomed to staying at the end, also took out his camera and pressed the shutter again towards the backs of everyone.

Putting away the camera calmly, Wei Ran shook the reins, and the dogs, which had been well fed and prepared, immediately started running wildly, chasing after them along the sled tracks.

This time, Major Schubert's direction was particularly clear, and although the people had not had a good rest in the past two days, the dogs had regained their energy, and the speed of pulling the cart naturally increased a lot.

While driving at high speed, the sky gradually darkened, and Major Schubert also lit a kerosene lamp and hung it on the rear of the car, obviously preparing to take advantage of the rare good weather to travel as much as possible.

Lifting the fur coat at his wrist and glancing at the time, Wei Ran couldn't help but frown. Their sled dog had been running continuously for more than three hours.

If this is a light load, just one car and one person would be fine, but at this time, the sleds that everyone is responsible for are all overloaded.

Keep running like this

Seemingly thinking of the same problem as him, Dr. Yog, who was usually responsible for taking care of the sled dogs, shouted at his sled and caught up with Schubert, shouting, "Major, we must stop and let the sled dogs rest. Otherwise they will be exhausted!"

"We don't have time to rest!"

Schubert slowed down slightly and responded loudly, "Another snowstorm will come soon, and we have to travel a little more before then!"

"If the sled dogs are exhausted, we will have to pull the sled ourselves." After Yog finished speaking, he directly shouted to the sled dogs to stop.

Seeing this, Dr. Cross and Carsten also shouted to the sled dogs to stop.

The three of them stopped, and Wei Ran and Hannuo, who were following the team and were responsible for finishing, also had to stop.

"We can't keep running"

While feeding the dogs pieces of penguin meat, Dr. Yoger loudly reminded the other people who stopped, "If the sled dogs die, we will all die!"

Before he could finish his words, Major Schubert also shouted at the sleigh and drove back in a circle.

"Oh!"

Without saying a word, Schubert kicked Dr. Yog in the ass. Then he pulled out the 1912 pistol from his waist, pulled the slide and loaded the bullet. He pointed at Dr. Yog who was lying on the ground and said coldly, "Jog, Mr. Jog Schmeling, you have to be clear about one thing. This team is under my command."

"Major Schubert, please wake up."

Dr. Yog stood up and patted the snow on his butt, "If the sled dog is exhausted, we can't expect you to command the penguin to help us pull the car."

"Take a break for an hour"

Schubert finally put away his weapons and said indifferently, "In an hour, no matter what the weather is like, we must set off as quickly as possible. This is also related to whether we can survive."

After a short pause, he continued, "Hanno, ask Victor to help you set up the radio."

"Okay" Hanno responded immediately.

While Dr. Yog was carrying a tin bucket full of penguin meat to feed the dogs, Weiran also helped Hanno set up the radio again and started the generator that was still on the sled. Almost immediately, Major Schubert, who was hiding far away, also sent the encrypted telegram to Hanno for him to send.

However, it was not until an hour later that the sled convoy set off again at the urging of Major Schubert. Hanno, who hurriedly put away the radio system, still did not receive any signal feedback.

It's hard to say whether the hour of rest that Yog just fought for saved the sled dogs pulling the cart. At least in fact, it was only an hour. The biting cold was blowing again on the vast ice field. The wind, and the cold snowflakes that were carried by the cold wind and flew again.

But this time, Major Schubert, who was leading the way, did not stop at all. He just ordered the dogs to slow down slightly.

One hour, two hours, three hours, the wind and snow became heavier and heavier, and the speed of the sleigh became slower and slower, but it never stopped from beginning to end.

Glancing at the dogs running slowly in front, Wei Ran, who had not had enough rest or sleep, simply got out of the back of the car, took two quick steps and sat on the sled, then shook off his sleeping bag, which was already freezing and almost losing weight. My conscious legs were put into the smelly sleeping bag, and I took out the stove from my arms and threw it in together.

After an unknown amount of time, Wei Ran fell into a drowsy sleep because his body was getting warmer, and woke up in an instant the next moment.

However, in his own consciousness, it only took the blink of an eye, but when he subconsciously looked at the dial of the watch, he found that more than two hours had passed!

What made his heart even more chilling was that at some point, the dozen or so dogs pulling the cart had stopped. Apart from the flying snowflakes, no other sleds or lights could be seen within his field of vision!

broken! Got separated from the convoy!

Wei Ran woke up instantly, but was immediately followed by a wave of dizziness, and sat back down on the wooden box filled with jam. He bit off his gloves and touched his forehead, but the hot temperature made him more desperate.