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on the head. ‘Don’t be scared of me. My bark’s worse than my bite.’ He looked around again. ‘And don’t tell them I was talking to you!’
    Stay smiled to herself. He was certainly a lot friendlier when no one else was around. Then she thought of Chills and Beakie and Laser and Kaboom and Antarctica. Chills had promised her an adventureand she still longed for it. What should she do? Go to Antarctica with him, or return with the Boss to her job in Hobart, full of money for the Royal Guide Dogs? She wished she knew how to decide.
    The two of them stared out at the ocean ahead of them. ‘Big iceberg coming up over to starboard,’ the Boss said. ‘You know what? I never get sick of seeing them.’
    Stay watched as the ship moved closer to the iceberg. It looked like an enormous dollop of ice-cream. Even in the gloomy evening light it seemed to shine. The section of it below the water was a beautiful pale green and the cracks down the side glowed a bright electric blue.
    ‘The blue means the ice has broken off from a glacier,’ the Boss said. ‘Do you want to hear a poem about an iceberg?
    ‘ And now there came both mist and snow,
    And it grew wondrous cold:
    And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
    As green as emerald.
    ‘That’s from a very old poem called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stay. We see some wondrous sights up here on the Bridge. You might see a jade iceberg like the one in the poem if you’re very lucky. Look — there’s a humpback whale!’
    Stay followed the direction the Boss was pointing. She glimpsed the arch of the whale’s back and the mist from its blowhole. As it dived, it lifted its tail and she realised how big it really was.
    Dusk was starting to fall. Stay knew it was very late and most people had probably gone to bed. The light outside was a deep blue and the water was so dark it looked black.
    ‘Time to close the bird curtains,’ the Boss called out, and the first mate pulled the curtains in front of the first row of instruments and computer screens, cutting the Bridge into two sections. The front section was almost dark, with just a little light spilling onto the instrument panel.
    ‘If the birds see the light, they can get disoriented and fly into the windows,’ the Boss said to Stay. He rubbed his hands together and looked down at the instrument panel. ‘Minus three degrees outside. That’s getting a little nippy, Stay.’
    Stay agreed. She was glad to be on the Bridge, which was warm and cosy. She liked how the bird curtains shut off the light and made the room seem like its own little world in the middle of a vast, dark ocean.
    It wasn’t such a bad place to stay, for now at least. It sure beat hiding behind the flour bags. But she did wonder what Chills was doing.

Chapter 10
    The Aurora Australis entered the pack ice, a belt of broken-up, melting sea ice and icebergs that surrounded Antarctica for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Stay’s spot on the instrument panel, under the Boss’s watchful eye, looked like becoming her permanent home. She loved watching the sheets of sea ice cracking far out ahead of them under the weight of the ship’s prow. Sometimes the ice was so thick that the Aurora Australis had to stop, back up and charge full steam ahead to break its way through.
    They passed crabeater seals (who didn’t eat crabs at all, but lived on krill) and little black-and-white Adélie penguins, who looked very surprised to see a giant orange metal ship bearing down on them, and ran off or swam away as fast as they could. Small white birds fluttered and darted around the ship; Stay learnt that they were snow petrels, and a sign that Antarctica wasn’tfar off. The nights had almost disappeared and although the sun set for a few hours, it never got really dark.
    The Bridge was always busy. Everyone came up to watch their progress through the ice and spot animals and birds through the binoculars. People put coins