Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  10

  Her name was Sara.

  She fed Byrne spoonfuls of broth from a pot of mulligatawny stew. Since he had first awakened, his tongue and throat had been burning, while the rest of his body shivered. The spicy broth was painful to swallow, but after a few mouthfuls Byrne felt warmth growing in him. He looked more closely at the woman.

  She was dark-skinned, her face thin, the cheekbones sharp. Her long graying hair was tied back at the nape of the neck with an ancient strip of leather. She had on a woollen coat over what looked, to Byrne’s puzzlement, like a sari of dark green cloth wrapped tightly around her. At her neck he glimpsed a brooch, a swan on a blue enamel field.

  In the light from the doorway, her skin shone like a young woman’s. Age was in her grey eyes, in the measured steps she took from the stove to his bedside.

  She turned away from him to set the soup pot on the table, and he saw his grandmother. Nana. He was lying on a cot in her kitchen, under a thick wool blanket, feverish, sick. Outside, in the garden, a soft rain falling. With tongs, Nana banked the smoking clumps of turf around the huge iron pot in the fireplace. She was baking bread, singing to him as she worked. Soothing him.

  The woman named Sara moved quietly to the doorway.

  —Your friends are outside. I’ll tell them you’re

  awake.

  When she had spoken again, he identified at last the faint remnants of an Anglo-Indian accent.

  Byrne felt he should talk to her, but he had no idea what words to say. She went out, closing the door behind her. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

  11

  When he woke again fragments of the last few hours came back to him. Bright pain slicing through the fog of delirium as Collie tended to his broken collarbone. The maddening weakness of his limbs when he moved to the edge of the bed, slid his legs out from under the blankets and tried to stand. He wanted to show Collie he was capable of going with them, at least back to the base camp if no farther. But Collie would not listen. They debated carrying him back down the trail to Banff. There was no way to get a stretcher over the pass. The rivers would be swollen now with late summer meltwater, dangerous even for able-bodied travellers. He imagined at times that he was still in the crevasse, listening to their talk from a great depth.

  Furious at them, at himself, he shouted at Collie and fell back on the bed, exhausted.

  They had left him in the care of the woman, to make one more attempt to locate the mountain Collie was searching for. This time we’ll scale the peak that flanks the glacier, Collie had said, rather than venture onto the ice again. It should give us a better view of the surrounding terrain. We’ll see what we can see from up there, and then we’ll come back for you.

  Byrne kept silent and then Collie added, You’ll be well looked after here.

  When they returned he would be transported east to Edmonton in a pony cart. Driven by a man named Swift, an American who lived further down the Athabasca valley.

  Lying alone in the silent cabin, he decided this plan was right. It was what he would agree to if one of the others had been injured. A part of the unwritten code he had accepted by joining an expedition of the Royal Geographical Society.

  He would lie here and rest.

  He slept.

  12

  Drifting back to England in his dreams.

  The memory of visits to the botanical gardens at Kew, out of the city haze and into a fragrant, tidy wilderness. Marvelling at flowers grown from the specimens collected by David Douglas and other early scientist-explorers of the Rockies. In the humid glass cathedral of the Alpine House he leaned forward and breathed their delicate scents.

  He took a young woman to the gardens one day. Martha Croston. It was the day he almost proposed to her.

  They were there now, weren’t they? Opening his eyes upon the long, well-tended rows of plants, he would take her arm, stroll among the flowers, inhaling their mingled odours, watch with a rare feeling of envy as the old whiskered nurseryman carried his trays of seedlings reverently down the aisle.

  He opened his eyes. The woman’s face leaning over him.

  —You are beautiful, he said.

  Her grey eyes looked into his for a long moment and then she moved away.

  13

  It was at Kew where he first met Professor Collie and learned of his proposed expedition. Collie amazed him: a chemist, a pioneer of colour photography, an artist. Mountaineering was only one of his many passions.

  The goal is Mount Brown, Collie had said. Find it, or prove it a hoax. It’s been on every map in the empire for sixty years as the highest on this continent. And no one even knows if it really exists. So far no one has thought to go and verify the one lone sighting that got it on the maps in the first place.

  He was determined to rediscover the lost giant and, if possible, to be the first to reach its summit.

  Among the flowers at Kew, putting himself forward as a candidate for expedition doctor, Byrne formed his own unstated plan: to create a private botanical collection when he returned to London, grown from the field specimens he would gather during the search for Collie’s lost mountain. Perhaps one day he would even see some of his own flowers blossoming here along the lofty aisles at Kew.

  And when he returned he would also ask Martha to be his wife.

  14

  He thought about climbing back down into the crevasse and searching for his rucksack, the tin plant collection box it carried. Salvaging what he could of his specimens. Of course Collie would not allow it and, even if he did, by now the narrow chasm into which he had fallen had probably changed shape, or closed over altogether as the glacier crept relentlessly forward.

  Then he remembered what he had seen in the ice wall.

  15

  During the daytime children gathered at the open doorway of the old trading post to stare at Byrne. Women came and herded them away and turned their heads to look at him themselves. He also saw, or thought he saw as he drifted between wakefulness and dreams, the dark shapes of men in the clearing, men leading horses, followed by dogs, men with bundles on their backs.

  Only Sara came near him, and she said almost nothing.

  16

  A noise, a distant rapping on glass. Someone knocking. Brought him up out of sleep to answer the call. Always urgent at this hour.

  He sat up. There in the cabin window, a giant’s hand, fingers outstretched, knocking against the glass.

  He made a sound of sleepy terror. Hahhh.

  The hand bobbed stiffly, as if carved of wood, and then sank below the window frame. Elk antler.

  He took a deep breath, the nightmare fears of childhood subsiding. The fur blanket slid from his shoulder. He leaned on his good arm and listened while the huge animal bumped along the wall of the cabin, foraging the long grass.

  Then he saw Sara in the doorway.

  —I heard you cry out, she said.

  Byrne shook his head.

  —It was nothing. The elk, it woke me up rather suddenly.

  —He comes here to rub the velvet off his antlers. It’s the rutting season.

  —Ah.

  —Do you need anything? I’ll get the fire going.

  Outside, the sky was grey. Not yet sunrise. He wondered if Sara ever slept. Watching her gather up an armful of kindling for the stove, he suddenly knew that she was young, not many years his elder. He had been fooled by a stillness within her movements that suggested age, but was in fact her body’s own quiet grace.

  —No, nothing. Well, yes, now that I’m awake, I’d like some tea.

  She turned toward the stove.

  —Wait, he said. One moment.

  He looked closely at her.

  —Tell me about this place.

  He would say nothing about what he had seen in the crevasse, give nothing away. Only listen.

  17

  She told him that this small cabin was once a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. Snow House. Sara’s father, Viraj, took it over wh
en the trader before him left to try his luck goldpanning in the Cariboo. There had been no traffic in furs through this valley for years, and it was her cabin now. While Byrne slept here she was staying with her nearest neighbours.

  Before her father settled in the valley and took over the trading post, he had been a valet in the service of an Englishman, Lord Sexsmith.

  During his travels through Rajasthan, Sexsmith had taken Viraj on to care for the horses. He was pleased with the young man’s quiet efficiency and, when he left India and returned to England, Viraj remained in his entourage.

  —Sexsmith was not a healthy man, Sara told Byrne. Lung trouble. His doctor thought a less damp and foggy climate would help. Someplace higher up, colder. He looked through an atlas and chose the Rockies. Of course my father had little choice but to go with him.

  Byrne sat propped up in the narrow bed. She talked while she made tea and hot cakes for him and sat with him and talked while he ate.

  —My father was sick at heart when he first came to this country. He had a premonition that he would die here, far from his own country, among strangers.

  Byrne stared into his teacup, swirled the cold dregs. He was alone here, with this youthful ancient woman. A woman with stories.

  18

  —They were on the plain of stumps outside Fort Edmonton, Sara said. Sexsmith was on his favourite horse, a black gelding he had named The Night. My father was holding the reins. They were starting that morning for the mountains, with an escort of Company men. Sexsmith stretched out his arms and said

  The prisoner of civilization is free.

  19

  Sexsmith had been forewarned about the mosquitoes. He paid no attention to the stories. Frontier exaggeration.

  When the sun went down, however, they came. The stars were blotted out by them. The Company men had gathered loads of dry wood as they travelled during the day, and at night they lit smudge fires in a ring around the camp, to keep the tormented horses from stampeding.

  Baptiste the Iroquois showed Viraj how to crush alder leaves and rub the pulp on the bites to soothe them.

  Sexsmith had his tent cocooned in layers of fine netting. He took refuge there, his face and arms covered in a salve of camphor ice, to read Shakespeare.

  A thunderstorm one evening gave a respite from the buzzing plague. At dawn the next day several of the horses wandered away from camp and rolled in a wet buffalo wallow at the side of the trail. They had to be ridden or loaded with baggage as they were, encased in carapaces of dried mud. Terrible saddle sores appeared on their flanks and were rubbed with salt to form calluses. Three of the ponies could no longer carry packs and had to be turned loose.

  One morning as the camp was being struck, a party of Cree hunters appeared on a hill and rode slowly toward them. Sexsmith put a hand on the rifle sheathed at his side, when a glad shout of recognition erupted from one of his men.

  The Cree hunters said they had heard of Sexsmith’s expedition and had come with a gift of bear tongues for the great chief visiting their lands. Macpherson bartered with them for horses. To make the trade, Sexsmith was forced to surrender half the tobacco he had brought.

  Sexsmith also solemnly accepted a buffalo cap and cloak from the hunters. Later that day he gave them to Viraj.

  I’m afraid I would make a laughable figure in these hides.

  20

  Two visions drew the English lord on into the mountains.

  The first was a grizzly bear, thundering across a meadow toward him. He would be kneeling with Macpherson, rifles leveled, rock steady. Macpherson, with eyes so sharp the other men said he could see stars in daylight. The flash and report, and after a heartbeat the great bear toppling, a mountain of silver fur and muscle avalanching into the dust. Baptiste would cut out the grizzly’s heart, present it to him. He dreamed of the hot sensual heart sliding into his palm.

  The second vision was the Grail.

  21

  —You are Irish, I think, Sara said to Byrne. She sat on a pine chair in the doorway of the cabin, smoking a pipe. The watery light of dusk reflected in her grey eyes.

  —I was born in Dublin, Byrne nodded, frowning. He turned in the bed, glanced away toward the window. But I’ve lived in England since I was eleven.

  Sara smiled.

  —I thought I could hear it in your voice. You asked for another cup of tay. My father used to mimic the accent. Jaysus Mary and Joseph. It would send the traders into laughing fits.

  Byrne pushed away the memory of a dark church niche, dim candlelight. A sad, gentle face of cold stone. Ever this day be at my side.

  —My father was a doctor, Byrne said. He practiced in London for several years before his marriage. When my mother died we went to live there.

  He sipped his tea and waited for her to speak.

  —They made fun of my father, Sara finally said. The Company men. They called him the tarred butler, the black man. Even though like many of them he was a half-caste in his own country. His father was an Englishman.

  22

  They struggled up the gorge of a river just that day named by Sexsmith. Hemmed in by wet, overhanging walls of rock, deafened by the roar of rapids.

  The fur trade trail took them high above the river, then vanished in a steep escarpment of broken slate at the foot of a cliff. The horses shied and stumbled. Sexsmith climbed down from the saddle. Viraj led the nervous horse while Sexsmith lit his pipe and lagged behind, smoking and picking his way slowly across the loose scree.

  Like walking on a church roof, Sexsmith shouted to Viraj. Albeit one badly in need of repair.

  The Company men often sang songs as they traveled, but now they were silent. They worked their way across the clinking, clattering slate like sleepwalkers, like knights bewitched by music from under the earth. Only when a horse strayed out of line was the quiet disturbed, by an echoing curse.

  Demon. Old sinner. Tonight I’ll wear your hide for a blanket.

  Each man was absorbed in his own efforts to keep a straight heading, to step forward without sinking sideways into the deepening bed of slate. After a while the tight column of horses and men broke apart, meandering at a tortuous pace across the scree.

  Sexsmith tapped his finished pipe against a rock. He looked up to find himself several metres down-slope from the rest of the party. He had been smoking and musing on Caliban’s beautiful speech in the third act of The Tempest, the rhythms of which had become strangely mixed up with the chink clunk of slate under his boots.

  Sexsmith shook his head and began to climb upward, only to find that after a full day’s march, this kind of effort was beyond him. The sun had heated the dull, flat shards of rock into kiln bricks. Sexsmith wiped his brow and his hand came away dripping with sweat. With effort he set down a booted foot, felt it slide helplessly underneath him, sending a cascade of shards down the slope. He cursed. Plunging forward, he stumbled to his hands and knees, scrambled for purchase. He was sinking into rock, drowning.

  Viraj. Help me.

  23

  Viraj heard the shout and turned. Through a liquid shimmer of heat he saw Sexsmith’s flailing arms. He dropped the horse’s reins and took a few steps down the slope. The scree gave way beneath him, throwing him off balance. He leapt forward to keep from falling, and broke into a run, taking great bounding strides, each footfall plunging down, pushing up a mound of rock and springing free.

  A smile spread across his face. He was moving with the element now, not against it. Leaping like a gazelle, the fringes of his buffalo cap fluttering as he descended.

  Like feather’d Mercury, the lines came to Sexsmith haltingly, as he watched Viraj’s descent. Vaulting with such ease.

  24

  Above the canyon wall, a snowy peak rose into view, the pyramid of a mountain they had seen the day before from a distance and remarked on for its beauty.

  A palace, Sexsmith had written in his journal the night before, rose-pearl in the late sunlight, an Asiatic temple floating in air.

>   This close the mountain was a massive presence. Sexsmith closed his eyes, overcome by sudden vertigo. Here was the edge of the earth, and far below it clouds drifted over an empty blue ocean. He took a deep shuddering breath. His body went slack and he dropped the reins.

  Viraj, your arm.

  Sexsmith crawled down from the saddle and staggered forward. He took the spyglass from around his neck with trembling fingers, sank to one knee..

  He was thirty-one years old. A Victorian in the presence of the sublime.

  25

  Sara took Byrne with her on this journey that she had not witnessed, that for all he knew she might have been weaving out of thin mountain air. A mythology of cast-off stories, poetry, scraps of historical fact, growing and changing shape like whorls of smoke in the gloom of a snow-locked cabin. What he learned of her life was gathered in the shadow of her father’s story.

  She lived alone in her cabin, in the midst of this Metis settlement. The Stoney people she had known as a child no longer wintered in the Athabasca territory. With the signing of the treaties they had chosen land further south.

  Viraj, her father, was dead. Just as he had feared on the day Sexsmith stabbed a finger at that blank, wordless space in the atlas, he had journeyed here and never left.

  On the morning of the fourth day, Byrne insisted he was strong enough to leave the bed. He kept himself covered with the fur blanket while Sara handed him the clothes and personal effects that Collie had left with her. She went outside to wait, at his request, while he struggled into his shirt, trousers, and boots. When he had dressed she came back in with a fur robe, placed it over his shoulders, helped him out onto the stoop of the cabin.

  This place that Sara called Jasper was a gathering of log cabins and plank shacks, ranged over a grassy river flat. Above each roof stood a thin rope of smoke. There was no one about. A sandy-coloured dog, stretched out on the porch of the nearest cabin, raised its head and watched Byrne for a moment, then went back to sleep. At the far end of the meadow a few untethered horses were moving among the trees, lowering their dark heads to the grass.