Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  Byrne shivered and tugged the robe closer around him.

  Above the dark slope of the valley rose the mountains. Byrne raised a hand to shade his eyes, grown accustomed to the cabin’s cave-like gloom, against their painful brilliance. For a moment he could not believe in these hard, unfathomable masses of rock. They seemed to hang suspended in the sky. A quick, cold breath might shatter them like an illusion of ice crystals and light.

  Squinting, he picked out the crevasses and ice-falls of Arcturus glacier. From this distance they seemed only delicate, spidery wrinkles in pale blue silk. Above them gleamed the white rim of the névé, where the glacier spilled from a gap between the flanking peaks. A slender curve of burning snow.

  If all had gone well on the second attempt, Professor Collie and the others would be up there, beyond that shining edge.

  —There are no doctors here, Sara said. They say the railroad will be coming this way in a few years. The workers will need a doctor to travel up and down the line. You could be stationed here.

  Byrne shook his head.

  —My life is in England.

  26

  After two days Swift had not yet come to meet Byrne.

  —He visits us once a year, Sara said. He buys furs and dried meat to see him through the winter. He says he’s too busy with his crops and his inventions to bother with hunting.

  —Inventions?

  —He wants to grind his own flour, so he’s building a sluice and a water-wheel.

  Lucas Napoleon Swift, from Saint Louis. At seventeen he was a bugler in General Custer’s cavalry. Then he came down with cholera and was sent home, two weeks before Little Bighorn.

  —He roamed around after that, Sara said, always afraid the death he’d cheated was coming for him. He didn’t want anyone else nearby when it found him.

  Twenty-five years after Sexsmith’s journey, Swift arrived in the Valley of the Athabasca, one of the very few white men to make an appearance during all that time. The fur trade had gradually died out and there was no longer any material reason to follow the old overland trail. Until men like Swift came looking for the one precious substance that remained here: the gold of solitude and silence.

  Sara sat down by the bedside, opened a book. Motes of dry paper fell from its foxed pages and flickered in the slanting light.

  —Sexsmith liked to have my father read poetry to him. And when I was a girl my father read it to me.

  She turned the pages slowly, searching, and then began to read aloud. In a voice like spring leaves against a windowpane.

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  She read the poem to the end and then asked him if he wanted her to keep reading.

  —I want to hear more about Sexsmith’s expedition, he said.

  She got up and set the book back in its place on the shelf, and when she turned to him again she was smiling.

  27

  Viraj prepared a bath for the lord.

  On the advice of the outfitter at Fort Edmonton, excess baggage had been left behind. But his collapsible India rubber bathtub was one of the few luxuries Sexsmith could not part with. He allowed no one else the use of it. Here, immersed in water heated over the campfire, he read Shakespeare and made critical notes in the margins, the book propped on a split log laid across the tub’s rim.

  Perfect, Sexsmith sighed as he eased himself into the sagging tub. He smiled at Viraj, who stood waiting at the door of the tent. Exactly the temperature and humidity of your monsoon season.

  One evening when the bath had just been made ready, Viraj informed his lordship that a group of Stoney hunters was camped on the far shore of the river. Some of the hunters had come across to meet with the Company men. Among them were two brothers who claimed they had travelled much in the country that lay ahead.

  Send for them, Sexsmith said, turning a page with the ragged end of his quill pen.

  He was still soaking when the Stoney brothers, Joseph and Elias, entered the tent unannounced, Viraj gesturing them away in alarm. They looked blankly at Sexsmith and then their faces softened into shy smiles. Viraj coughed, and Sexsmith glanced up over his Shakespeare. He gave a quick snort of amusement.

  Can you speak English? he asked them. They nodded. Sexsmith waved Viraj out. Leave them be. There’s no need for the usual proprieties.

  28

  The brothers returned the next day, with a young woman. A thin robe of ermine fur covered her shoulders. Her face was painted blue. The Company men watched silently as she walked through the camp with the Stoney brothers. The passage of an unknown animal.

  Except for the robe, she was dressed like the brothers and her hair was tied back. Viraj at first thought she was a young man. And then, as she passed the place where he was standing, she turned, her eyes darting white amid the dark blue face paint.

  Wapamathe, Baptiste said. The throat cutters.

  And the girl is goddamned windigo for sure, someone else whispered in mock terror to Viraj. She’ll devour you in the night.

  The brothers met with Sexsmith in a spruce bark tipi at the edge of camp. Joseph said she was their adopted sister. She knew the land better than they did because her people had once lived here in this valley, and even deeper in the mountains. They called her Athabasca.

  She is one of the Snake people, Joseph said. Maybe the last one. A healer.

  On this trip, he told Sexsmith, she could gather herbs needed for her medicines.

  She will keep her magic potions to herself, Sexsmith said. He lifted a paper cone in his finger tips, held it up before Joseph and Elias who sat across from him in the circle of men.

  He bit on the end of the small white cone, pulled it quickly away from his mouth as the paper fussed into blue flame. The brothers blinked and Joseph jerked his head away as Sexsmith thrust the sputtering fire towards him.

  The tipi filled with laughter. Sexsmith smiled and set the tiny flame to the end of his pipe.

  The humble Prometheus match, he said. The young woman sat staring into the fire pit. Sexsmith frowned.

  Are you aught that man may question?

  She did not move. Sexsmith turned to Joseph.

  Does she speak English? I would like to know how she can find her way so unerringly if she never looks up.

  Joseph said something to her in a language punctuated with quick hand movements. She raised her head. The flat stone hanging from a leather strap around her neck caught the firelight and gleamed.

  The young woman held out her left hand, the open palm toward Sexsmith.

  She has the tracks of the rivers, Joseph said. On her hand. The rivers and all the streams.

  Sexsmith leaned forward and looked closely at the young woman’s hand. He stabbed a finger into her palm.

  What’s this reddish blotch?

  Their enemies came, killed them all, Joseph said. She ran and fell on the cooking stones. He pointed to her pendant. This one she kept in her hand.

  An incomplete map, then, Sexsmith said. But I imagine there are a few gold-seekers, he sawed at his wrist with his pipe stem, who would do anything to get it.

  29

  At night the temperature in Jasper plummeted. A solemn young man Byrne had not seen before came in, carrying an armload of firewood.

  —Thank you, Byrne said.

  The young man set the wood down by the stove and went out again without a word.

  With his good arm Byrne dragged the pine chair closer to the stove. He huddled there, humming to himself, bored, uncomfortable. As the wood burned down in the belly of the stove it collapsed on itself with soft hisses and thumps. The only sounds, until Byrne thought he heard music.

  Drums, pipes, a fiddle. Bursts of laughter.

  He got up from the chair. The glass-paned window was frosted over. He breathed on the glass, rubbed it with his sleeve, and peered
out. A tiny square of gold light hung in the blackness. The window of a nearby cabin, shadows flickering within it.

  While Byrne watched, the frost invaded the clear patch of glass he was looking through. The distant square of light dilated into a constellation of gold points.

  St. Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

  That damned poetry.

  Dropping back into the chair, he was enveloped again in a sphere of warmth that extended just to the reach of his arm. He discovered the boundary of this shell by breathing out, watching the exhaled air appear, a cloud of steam that congealed and slid to the floor. When he rocked back too far, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising as they passed through the sphere and into cold air.

  He waited out the night, reaching for sticks of wood and tossing them on the fire.

  30

  —They forded the river at sunset, Sara told Byrne, and halted on an island.

  Little more than a willowed gravel bar, in the middle of the river. Sexsmith was giddy with fatigue. He insisted they make camp here.

  This is quite picturesque. I’ll call it little Albion. It’s even shaped something like England, wouldn’t you say, Viraj?

  He strolled along the bank, prodding his stick in the stony earth.

  You see, here is Southampton, the Solent. That rock out there is the Isle of Wight. It all works out.

  There’s no forage for the horses, Macpherson said. On the far shore there’s at least some goose-grass.

  Sexsmith would not listen. Macpherson led the horses across the shallow channel to the far bank, and stayed with them.

  On the island, the other men built a fire with bleached driftwood. They roasted grouse and sang songs.

  My boy’s far away in the land that’s called Canada

  There would he go, though it left me lone and sad

  0, ’twas gold he would gain to send home to

  his mother

  Will he e’er come back to me, my little Irish lad

  Sexsmith went for a stroll. He crossed a blue terrain of hummocks and hollows, climbed over Hadrian’s Wall, to the upstream end of the island. The sky in the west was bright green over the black battlements of the mountains.

  His senses were dulled by the long ride along the river flats, all except hearing. In the failing light he listened to the river rolling rocks in its bed. The rustle and click of willow shrubs in the evening wind.

  The geese called, laughing in the dark.

  wa hoh wa hoh wa hoh wa hoh wa hoh

  He caught sight of them, a skein of five in a wavering line, letters of an unreadable word, shifting shape and position as they dwindled into distance.

  31

  At midnight Sexsmith blew out the starveling candle that lit his tent and stepped outside. He passed silently by Viraj, who was huddled by the remains of the watchfire, eyes closed.

  Macpherson was standing on the far shore. When he saw Sexsmith he smiled easily, as though no distinctions of class and birth could cross the water between them.

  In the west, above the black silhouette of the nearest ridge, the underbellies of low clouds glowed silver.

  That light, said Sexsmith, raising his voice to be heard above the roar of water. It was casting shadows on the wall of my tent.

  I’ve not seen such a thing before, Macpherson said. The moon, shining on snow, I’d guess.

  Sexsmith lowered his voice to a whisper.

  That’s the place I’ve been seeking.

  32

  That night Sexsmith dreamed an old man in rusted armour, whose long white hair flowed out behind him in the wind from the west. He walked stiffly, held up more by the creaking metal carapace that enclosed him than by his own failing strength. Carrying his sacred trust, an object shrouded under a white cloth, across the plain and into the blue mountains.

  Sexsmith walked beside him into the light from the setting sun. He looked down at himself and saw he was dressed in buckskin, with a buffalo robe draped over his shoulders.

  Who are you? he asked the old man.

  There were seven of us. I am the last one. We took an oath to follow the king into the west, and to keep the Grail hidden.

  The old man stumbled at last and sank into the long grass. A gust of wind lifted the cloth and swept it away. The old man was holding a silver cup. At that moment the sun caught the lip of the cup and filled it with fire. The blazing light spilled over onto his armour, burnished it into white gold.

  Sexsmith woke at dawn. His dream lingered with him, shining at the edges of his mind.

  Viraj was at the campfire, brewing tea and heating water for the lord’s morning shave. Sexsmith was surprised to see the young woman sitting beside him. The paint was gone from her face. Now she was only a thin girl warming herself by the fire. A cold, hungry mortal. The brothers stood nearby, talking with Macpherson, who had crossed back to the island with two pack ponies. Sexsmith scratched his stubbled neck. Throat cutters.

  He sat down on the camp stool by the door of his tent, picked up one of his boots. The watchfire Viraj had tended outside his tent all night was cold ash. This was their fire, not his. Viraj brought him a cup of tea and he took it without speaking.

  Elias, the younger brother, laughed. A quiet, pleasing laugh that made Sexsmith glance up. He liked Elias, his soft voice and unassuming manner.

  Whatever Elias had said, it had even put a smile on Joseph’s gaunt, scarred face. Sexsmith lowered his head and tugged on his boots. The word for a smile like that was diabolical.

  Sexsmith looked up again just as Viraj handed the young woman a cup of tea.

  33

  When they reached dry ground, Sexsmith said,

  The Stoneys were amused at something this morning.

  Macpherson nodded.

  Elias had a dream, sir. He thought it worth the telling.

  Sexsmith called the brothers to him. He asked to hear the dream. Elias nodded.

  I went with you to your city of London. There were plenty of buffalo there. I hunted them, with the Queen’s sons. We chased buffalo over a jump. But when we went down to the bottom of the cliff, the animals had turned into books.

  He grinned shyly at his brother and went on, in a near whisper.

  The Queen’s sons tried to read the books, but all the words were smashed in.

  Sexsmith glanced at Joseph, whose gaunt face had withdrawn into grey immobility.

  So tell me, Joseph. You are a wise fellow. Will you interpret your brother’s dream?

  34

  The hunting party climbed a ridge that ran alongside a gently rising slope of dirty snow and ice.

  Arcturus glacier, Sexsmith named it. Bear watcher.

  Dark clouds were piled up over the peaks in the west. Macpherson expected snow at any time. He told Sexsmith that there would be no game at such an altitude.

  The burn on the girl’s palm, Sexsmith said. If her map is accurate, we’re just below it now. I want to know what’s up there, what she’s hiding from us.

  The young woman shook her head and spoke a few words to the Stoney brothers. Joseph turned to Sexsmith.

  She’s been there, he said. In a dream. She says it’s a spirit place. Not for the living.

  I’ll find out for myself, Sexsmith said. She’s afraid of something. Something we’ll discover if we go up there.

  The young woman would not look at him.

  They got her from the Snakes, Sexsmith said to Viraj. And we all know the serpent is the subtlest beast of the field.

  He sent everyone back down to the camp, told Macpherson to keep a close watch on the young woman. She’ll be ransom against my safe return. He went on alone with the Stoney brothers.

  35

  It was late. Byrne and Sara sat facing each other in front of the stove. The flame of the candle on the shelf fluttered, drowning in its own wax. In the sepia gloom, Sara’s skin resembled parchment.

  —My father and the Company men stayed below in camp. While they waited the sun came out, and ice
began to break off the wall of the glacier. The Company men gathered chunks of this broken ice that fell near them, to soothe the blisters on their hands and feet.

  Sara knelt in front of the firebox, nudged the door open with a stick of stove wood and tossed it in. She stood up and turned towards Byrne.

  —Athabasca came up to my father. She held out one of these broken pieces to him. He took it. It was exactly the size of a cricket ball, he told me, and looked like a blue-green diamond. He held it for a moment.

  Sara cupped her hands around an invisible piece of ice.

  —It burned.

  Her hands moved apart.

  —He dropped it. It was the first time he had been this close to ice. He had never touched it before.

  36

  Sexsmith and the brothers returned to camp the next evening. Macpherson was called into the lord’s tent. A short time later he came back out to announce that the hunting trip was over. They would start back down in the morning.

  The Company men grinned at one another. One of them brought out his fiddle, but Macpherson held up a hand in warning. Sexsmith was in a black mood. The sounds of celebration might give him cause to change his mind.

  The fiddler set his fiddle down. He closed his eyes and began to tap his foot noiselessly on the earth. His fingers touched the strings of an invisible instrument. His body swayed to unheard music. The others stared at him and Macpherson shook his head and turned away. After another moment of hesitation the Company men slowly came together, choking back laughter, linking arms to dance a silent reel.

  37

  —What was it? Byrne asked. What turned Sexsmith back?

  Sara shrugged.

  —Snow, ice, she said. Maybe nothing more than that.

  Byrne frowned, sat back in his chair.

  —When I was in the crevasse. … He paused, rubbed his shoulder. What exactly did the girl mean … a spirit place?

  —I don’t know, Sara said. I was very young when she went away. I don’t remember her.

  —She was your mother.

  —Yes.

  38

  On the return journey, Sexsmith came down with a chest cold. He stayed in his tent and refused to travel for several days. The hunting party camped on the river flats near the trading post.