Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  The Stoney brothers told Viraj that their sister could be of help to the English lord.

  Viraj went with this message to Sexsmith, who was bundled up in the buffalo robe he had taken back from Viraj, reading The Tempest. He did not care to be reminded of the world outside his canvas study.

  I wish I could be transported back to England without leaving this tent. That would be pleasant indeed.

  Viraj urged Sexsmith to let the young woman see him.

  She may be able to help you, sir.

  And then again she may be the death of me.

  Viraj shook his head.

  No.

  Sexsmith swung the book upward and struck him on the side of the face.

  You forget your place.

  You are quite right, Viraj said.

  He left the tent. He rode in a canoe with the Stoney brothers and the young woman, back to their fall camp on the far side of the river. When Sexsmith called for him he refused to come back.

  Finally Sexsmith crossed over himself. In the Stoney camp, surrounded by willow racks of drying meat, they came to a gentlemanly agreement: Viraj was no longer in Sexsmith’s service.

  39

  The next summer Athabasca took Viraj as her husband. They had a child the following year, and Viraj gave her the name Sarasvati. Her mother called her by another name, one from her own language.

  In the fall, Joseph and Elias brought Viraj hunting with them, taught him to read the tracks of deer, moose, bear, wolf. And one other. A single print in the snow, invisible to Viraj until the brothers knelt beside it. Further on they found a camp and a pit of warm ashes in a narrow ravine. Joseph picked up a broken twig, its needles still bright green. It had been carried from somewhere else, from a tree that was unknown to Viraj, one that did not grow on this side of the mountains.

  The Snake people, Joseph said.

  When Viraj and the brothers returned to the Stoney camp, the Snake people came out of the forest after them like ghosts, four men, three women, a child. They had come into the valley from the west to trade furs and, though Athabasca did not remember them, she knew their stories.

  One evening Athabasca gave Viraj the stone from around her neck. When the Snake people left that night, without a word, she went with them.

  There was a storyteller in my village, Viraj said to Sara when she was much older, who had one green eye. When I was a little boy I dared to ask him about it, and he told me his eye was green because his wife had left him. He said that long ago she wove a bolt of green cloth, the most beautiful that had ever been seen. He was very proud of what she had done, since it gave him great prestige in the village. Then one day his wife put on the green sari she had made from this cloth, walked out into the tall grass on the edge of the village, and disappeared. The storyteller searched for days and days, and sat by the tall grass, waiting, but she did not return. The storyteller leaned forward and pointed to his green eye. He said, Look closely and tell me if you see her.

  Sarasvati grew up with her father. The people of the valley, the hunters and trappers and their children, found her name strange and difficult. They took her name, carried it around with them, stretched and scraped it like a strip of hide, wore it down into something more brief and familiar.

  She was never called by the name her mother had given her, and in time it was forgotten. She became Sara.

  40

  Shouts, from the children outside, in the meadow.

  Collie and Stutfield returned at last, alone. Thompson, Trask, and the wranglers had already started south for their headquarters in Banff. The two men strode into the cabin, sunburnt and wearily triumphant.

  Collie had not found his mountain. He had stumbled upon a new world.

  —The icefield, he said, eyes glittering in his wind-blasted face. I thought it would be an ordinary névé, feeding a single glacier. But it’s huge, Ned. Stretches for miles. Greater than any mer de glace in the Alps. Breathtaking.

  Stutfield nodded his agreement.

  —We are probably the first human beings ever to see it. Definitely to have traversed it.

  Byrne glanced at Sara. Her face was impassive. She knew he would say nothing, he read that much in her eyes. He was still afraid she had been lying. Weaving a smoke of fantasy around him that would shred away in the cold light of reason that entered the cabin with the two scientists.

  —Think of it, Collie whispered. The last great remnant of the ice sheet that once covered this continent.

  41

  The next morning, Collie and Stutfield went to find Swift.

  —I’ve never seen the icefield, Sara said as she waited with Byrne on the cabin steps. The great ice prairie, the Stoneys called it. A good place to stay away from. My father and I never went up there to see it for ourselves.

  —Never? Byrne said. Living so close by all these years?

  Sara shook her head and glanced up across the valley at the ice.

  —In my father’s country, he told me, the mountains are gods, or at least the palaces of gods. And, I think, for my mother’s people as well. Spirit places. It was enough for us that we could see them from the valley.

  42

  Snow flurried through the morning air as Swift’s cart, pulled by two lean horses, creaked up in front of the trading post.

  Swift jumped down from the box of the cart with the agility of a cat. He wore a grey suit and necktie. His gaunt face was shadowed by a stetson, the brim of which he tipped toward Sara in a slow and deliberate mockery of politeness. His hawk eyes studied Byrne for a brief moment.

  —Let’s go, he said.

  Byrne turned to Sara. He considered the few coins in his buttoned breast pocket, then decided against it.

  —Thank you, he said.

  She nodded and then said,

  — Don’t get lost, Swift.

  Byrne was installed in a corner of the cart. He wrapped himself in a sleigh robe.

  Swift flicked the reins and they jolted into motion. Collie and Stutfield rode ahead on two of the expedition ponies purchased from Trask. They were smiling, pleased with the morning air and with themselves, discoverers. Byrne glanced back at the cabin. Sara was gone from the doorway.

  He sank back into the cushions and closed his eyes. The cart bumped and swayed along the track, lulling him. Bringing a rhythm, and a singsong voice, out of the past.

  Doctor Foster went to Gloucester

  in a shower of rain

  he stepped in a puddle right up to his middle

  and never went there again.

  43

  Sexsmith had to be satisfied with a black bear, a young male that Baptiste shot on the return trip. The Company men skinned the bear and cut it open. There were live ants in the stomach. One of the men took up the skin and danced with it around the fire, humming a Strauss waltz while the others laughed and clapped their hands.

  Sexsmith examined the carcass, stripped to pink muscle. It looked like the naked body of a man. The hairless face grimaced at him in frozen hilarity.

  Byrne

  Not long after my return from the expedition I began to keep a daily journal. It was intended to coincide with what I considered to be the first flowering of my mature life—my engagement to Martha, and the securing of the post of assistant physician at Saint Mary’s Hospital. Looking through the pages now, in 1911, I see that for the first two years the journal kept to that initial purpose, a concise chronicle of hopes and achievements. But then, beginning in the winter of 1901, it became a record of something very different.

  Doubts about the meaning of the life I was pursuing. Doubts about marriage and family life that most men probably face if they give these matters serious thought, but which in my case persisted and grew into irrational fears. Attacks of panic in confined spaces or unlit rooms. Waking in the middle of the night with chest pains, a madly galloping heart, unable to draw enough air into my lungs. Moments of unaccountable dread, and long hours of deep, harrowing sadness.

  A delayed effect of the
crevasse accident. That was my self-diagnosis. I wanted to believe it was merely a physiological problem, and I was determined to convince everyone else of this simple explanation for my increasingly erratic behaviour. I said nothing to Martha about the mental wrestling bouts that kept me awake throughout each night, the insidious voices that I knew well enough were coming from my own exhausted mind, not some demonic outside source, but that nevertheless counselled horrifying expedients to end this torment.

  Writing alone seemed to keep my terror at bay, and so I recorded everything.

  In less than a year I watched, incapable of any struggle on my own behalf, incapable even of anger or regret, as both my career and my engagement came to an end. Out of sheer financial necessity I began a private consulting practice. Patients were very few in number for some time, but this difficulty proved to be beneficial in that I thereby found the quiet and solitude that seemed to lessen the severity of my condition. Martha wrote to me and came to see me, but I closed myself off from her. I believe that she sensed there was something dreadfully wrong with me, that this behaviour was the cause rather than the result of my wish that our engagement be broken off. But as there was nothing she could do or say to make me confide in her, her attempts to breach my defenses eventually ceased. She called at my consulting room one final time in the fall of 1903, to wish me well. I have not spoken to her since.

  Searching for an explanation at the time, I wondered whether this sudden fracturing of my world was in some way connected to an illness I had gone through as a child.

  Lying like an invalid in Sara’s cabin touched the memory of that forgotten episode. I was nine years old. My mother and my maternal grandmother, Nana, were both still alive at that time. The seizures, as my father’s colleagues referred to them, began with a sensation of dizziness and weakness in my limbs. I would have to lie down, but I could not lie still. I shivered and my teeth chattered, and after a few moments of this my body went crazy. My eyeballs rolled back, my jaw twisted to one side. My spine would bend and bend, backwards like a bow, until I thought it would snap.

  The procession of specialists who my father brought in to examine me agreed on only one point: they had no idea what was wrong with me. Epilepsy was ruled out because I was conscious through the whole ordeal. And each time it happened I got weaker. For a while they thought I wouldn’t live. No one said this to me, but what with the candles and the visits from the priest and the rosaries being thumbed night and day … well, how could I not know? My mother even talked about taking me to Lourdes, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. I remember his angry voice in the hall. I won’t have them waving incense over the boy and mumbling about unclean spirits. He was convinced it was doing me no good to remain at home in this kind of atmosphere, and that I should be taken to the hospital where I would be kept under close observation by one of his colleagues. My mother would not consent to this, and to avoid the terrible arguments that began to erupt between her and my father, she took me with her to stay at my nana’s house. And it was there that my mother and I prayed together without my father’s intervention. We prayed and prayed, and then, one day, the attacks ceased. No gradual lessening of severity, they just vanished overnight. My mother called it a miracle.

  So it was that years later, after this childhood memory had been restored to me with every painful detail intact, I had to ask myself if the same malady that once seized hold of my limbs was now returning to life in my mind. As a boy I had apparently been witness to, or in some sense had embodied, a miracle. And as a young man I had again brushed close to something that defied rational understanding. I began to trace a thread in the fabric of my life that I had not cared to acknowledge before. A history growing in the shadows, obscured by the order I wished to see or impose on my experience. I believe that it was by taking hold of this thread, no matter how illusory it might have been, that I was able to find my way out of a labyrinth of madness rather than to continue to stumble towards its centre. From that moment I felt I had passed the crisis of the illness and began to grope my way slowly back to sanity.

  Several years later I made the journey to Lourdes that I had not made as a boy, but I went as a tourist rather than a terminal case. The worst of the “hell” I had gone through was over, and I was only hoping this trip to France would provide some relief to my aching lungs, the last remnant of the misery that had all but consumed my life.

  I was not expecting a miraculous cure, just an opportunity to breathe some less congested air, but when I first arrived in Paris I realized I would not get even that. For some reason I had imagined a city entirely unlike my own, one without London’s unending procession of faces and bodies, a city without the smoke and the dirt and the soot.

  On my second morning in Paris I went for a stroll along the Champs-Élysées. The day was hot, I had overdressed, and the crowd was swarming and darting around me like fish in an aquarium. I sat down on a bench. My sense of time and space was abruptly fogged. I had to think for a moment before I could remember the time of day, where I was and what I was doing there.

  I closed my eyes. And then I was upside down again, hanging in the crevasse. The graceful, motionless figure there before me. All around us, silence and stillness. The meditation of ice and rock.

  When I returned to London I went to the Society headquarters in Savile Row, to see Professor Collie. He and Stutfield had been back to the Rockies several times since the first expedition. They’d rediscovered Mount Brown, found it to be a relatively minor peak, and had then named and climbed some of the giants that ring the icefield: Arcturus, Diadem, The Brothers, Parnassus.

  We sat together in the Society tea room. Two confirmed bachelors. He and his mentor in chemistry, William Ramsay, had recently isolated a new element, neon. He talked about it with his customary vigour, how the excitation of the gas molecules produces a rather pleasing illumination, one that might have some interesting uses for commercial lighting.

  I brought up the subject of his further icefield explorations, but I knew I was avoiding the very thing I had hoped to discuss: what I had seen in the crevasse. I had never said a word about my experience to anyone, not even to Martha. And now, in this cathedral of skepticism and science, I found myself unwilling to speak of it. In fact I panicked for a moment when the thought occurred to me that I had not only imagined the figure in the crevasse, but that the entire expedition was only a fantasy of mine, a hallucination, and were I to mention anything about my part in it, Collie would stare at me, knit his brows, and say something like I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Byrne. You weren’t on that expedition. As I recall, we only discussed it briefly at Kew, and you declined the invitation. Now perhaps you’d better let me accompany you to the hospital.…

  I recognized this irrational fear as a faint echo of what I suffered during the many sleepless nights spent at my desk, furiously writing. Trying to convince myself, by retracing the events of my life in meticulous detail, that I was not going insane, and how, in reading what I had written about my own life, a similar cold terror had washed over me that none of it had really happened. That it was someone else’s life, or a baseless fabrication of my crumbling mind. At that time the terror of this thought was magnified a thousandfold by fatigue and my already distraught condition. But now, sitting in a comfortable leather armchair, in the oak-panelled tea room with its spears and ritual masks hanging innocuously from the walls, I was able to remain at least outwardly calm. The fear passed as quickly as it had come, but I knew then that the chance to speak my mind had passed.

  I could see that Collie guessed there was some unspoken purpose behind all my questions, and after a while we both lapsed into silence.

  At the far end of the room sat an explorer recently returned from Asia, surrounded by an eager audience. His stentorian voice reached to where we sat and we were forced to listen to his rather self-glorifying monologue. I remember him saying A godawful place, the Gobi. And yet lovely. I quite liked it. It resembled my mind.<
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  MORAINE

  ROCK DEBRIS DEPOSITED BY THE RECEDING ICE: A CHAOTIC JUMBLE OF FRAGMENTS, FROM WHICH HISTORY MUST BE RECONSTRUCTED.

  1

  An item clipped by Byrne from the London Times (1907):

  Jasper Forest Park, a national game preserve, has been established by the Dominion government, along the western boundary of the newly-created Province of Alberta.

  Within the boundaries of this new preserve, hunting, trapping, and unauthorized settlement are prohibited.

  A railway is now proposed for this region, to rival the Canadian Pacific line to the south. Anton Sibelius, one of the major financiers of the venture, has said: “The Jasper game and forest preserve, similar to that created at Banff, will ensure the virginal beauty of this remote wilderness is not defiled, that it can be enjoyed forever by travellers, mountain climbers, and seekers after solitude.”

  2

  —That woman, Trask says, blowing out a cloud of smoke. Now there’s a tale.

  Four years after pasting the clipping from the Times into his notebook, Byrne is in Jasper Forest Park, in a garden under glass, telling the story of the expedition.

  He is a guest at Frank Trask’s chalet, invited to afternoon tea in the glasshouse. He came late, not knowing what to expect, and his first surprise was the young woman, Elspeth Fletcher, who greeted him in the lobby. She was quite young, Scottish by her accent, and quietly self-assured. She escorted him to the glasshouse, introduced him to everyone there, then returned with a tray of refreshments, and stayed to listen while he told his story.

  He says nothing to Trask’s assembled guests about what he saw in the crevasse. When he comes to the place where he must speak of Sara, he hesitates.

  —Of course I don’t remember how we got to her cabin. I’ve merely borrowed Frank’s version of the events.

  Trask folds his arms across his chest.

  —You’re telling it fairly, doctor. Although I’d put more emphasis on the bravery of the young guide who saved your skin.