Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  Trask wrote Elspeth a letter in which he asked her such questions as Do you smoke? and How tall are you? and What colour is your hair?

  Elspeth was twenty-three years old. She was unmarried. This was an adventure.

  She answered everything truthfully except the question about smoking. And instead of telling him her hair was red, which might mark her as hot-tempered, she wrote auburn.

  She stepped off the train that first day to be met by one of Trask’s men. He said hardly a word, seemed unwilling to look at her. She understood later he was bearing the weight of his good fortune, being the one chosen to meet the young lady.

  The older woman she had shared a compartment with, who was going on to Victoria, came out during the brief stop to take her picture.

  —Let’s get you and the young gentleman here, and the train, together.

  Elspeth and the guide were obliged to step off the platform. Watching the woman with the camera, Elspeth stood in a patch of spring snow. Instantly the felt travel slippers she had been wearing on the train were soaked through. She smiled for the photograph, her feet throbbing with cold.

  13

  The day’s tasks are finished, but her mind is still a hawk, holding her limp body upright in its talons. She is little more than thought. As bodiless as light.

  At this time of night she goes to the hot spring pool to be alone, to steam away this nervous residue of energy leftover from the work day. But tonight the team of alpinists from Switzerland is still there. They returned late from the glacier, shivering, wet, and hungry.

  The alpinists in the pool are celebrating, splashing, howling back at the coyotes calling from the black hillside above the chalet. In from the cold and dark, they are giddy with joy at the comforts of civilization. Hot running water, wine and cheese, the anticipation of a warm feather bed.

  Elspeth steps out onto the promenade. She sees a tiny glimmer of light in the darkness. A lantern. Someone is still out there, coming along the trail from the glacier. The first person she thinks of is Hal Rawson.

  Elspeth makes her way down the steps of the promenade and along the gravel path, lined with whitewashed stones, that leads toward the creek. She lights a cigarette. This is the only place, and time, that she has the privacy to smoke.

  She walks along the path, to the wooden bridge over the creek. On the far side of the bridge, the broad, stone-lined path gives way to a rough dirt trail that snakes into the forest. The soft earth there, at the end of the paved path, holds the imprint of many passages. The delicate impression of a woman’s fashionable shoe. A grizzly paw print.

  Elspeth walks to the middle of the bridge and leans against the rail, smoking, looking down into the black water. Some nights she meets other people on the bridge, often couples who have found this to be a likely setting for romance.

  This is a cold night, and the bridge is deserted. Elspeth finishes her cigarette and flicks it over the railing. Sometimes she can hear, above the roar of water, the brief hiss as the spark is extinguished.

  The light she saw on the promenade is now much closer. It bobs and flickers through the trees at the head of the path. She hears the chock of a horse’s hoof on stone. Then a man appears with a lantern raised over his head. At first she can see only a hand, the silhouette of a hat, and behind it, the dark bulk of the horse being led. The hand lowers the lantern, and Byrne’s face appears. He looks shocked to see her.

  14

  The next morning Elspeth finds an envelope from Byrne left for her at the front desk of the chalet. She tears it open. Inside, a small filing card.

  Miss Fletcher:

  I hoped to see you today, but I’ve been called to an accident down the line.

  Ned Byrne

  She turns the page over. Nothing else.

  I hoped to see you today.

  15

  The morning he left the note for Elspeth, Byrne was taken on a handcar to the construction site. There had been an accidental dynamite blast. A man, the foreman told him, had been nailed to the rock cut by a flying spike.

  The injured man stood upright, as if resting against the rock face, the rest of the crewmen gathered in a half-circle around him. He whispered to himself, his right arm held outstretched, the fingers of his pinioned hand opening and closing around the spike. Examining him, Byrne found he had been struck in the abdomen as well, probably by a fragment of rock.

  When Byrne probed the stomach wound, the man opened his eyes. He screamed once, a brief, hoarse cry of agony, and fainted.

  There was no morphine. Byrne administered bromide of potassium as a sedative. He decided it would be best to wait for the end and then cut him down.

  Towards evening the man woke up again. One of the crewmen cut a makeshift crucifix out of blue paper. He held it up to the injured man, who fixed his eyes on it, his lips moving noiselessly.

  The vigil beside the dying man lasted into the night. The man who had held up the blue paper cross stayed with Byrne after the others drifted away. He stroked the injured man’s head and answered him softly when he spoke out in fitful moments of consciousness. The speech of the two men lapsed in and out of Italian, a language Byrne did not know, although he caught a few familiar words. Maria. Acqua. Madre. Finally he realized the men were brothers.

  At dawn, Byrne woke to the sound of a giant heartbeat. He lifted his head from the roll of canvas he had been dozing fitfully against. The section crew was back at work, hammering down the rails.

  The man’s brother stood over him. He held out his hand and helped Byrne to his feet. Byrne took the magnifying lens from his satchel and held it to the man’s mouth. There was no condensation.

  The crewmen stopped work and came over when they saw Byrne. He left the body in their care and walked stiffly alongside the track to the cluster of tents beside the lake. The water glittered with fragments of sun. Cloud shadows slid across the white dunes. A glorious morning.

  Byrne found coffee and a leftover bread roll in the empty mess tent. He ate quickly and then wrote out his report. Later the section foreman came in, sat down beside Byrne, and began to talk.

  He had once helped build a railroad into the gold fields of Colombia. There, the trains often came under attack by bandits. The gold-carrying cars had to be sheathed in steel and guarded by armed men. But then it often happened that the overloaded trains, and the rails themselves, were swallowed up in the swamps.

  —Here, the foreman said, there’s nothing. No gold in the rocks, in the rivers. Nothing but grass and wind. Why put in a railroad?

  From outside, the shriek of a hawk. The two men looked past the tent flap snapping in the wind, at the bright wedge of sunlit dunes.

  16

  The foreman’s tale, which Byrne set down in his notebook as he rode the handcar back to town:

  It happened years before, on the Canadian Pacific railhead far to the south, in the Kicking Horse Pass.

  To the foreman’s crew, the Swan glacier resembled a woman in flowing skirts. They nicknamed her Anastasia, joked about the spunk that would be needed to thaw her icy disdain. One night the foreman saw this ice maiden at the window of his hut. Like moonlight she entered his sleeping compartment. She glided down to where he lay, whispering softly, and kissed him with frozen lips.

  In the morning, the rail crew discovered that two hundred metres of track near the bunkhouse were buried under the snout of the surging Swan glacier.

  They found the foreman lying on the floor of his cabin, without blankets, shivering. He came down with pneumonia and spent a week in bed, feverish and incoherent.

  —I was babbling of green fields, the foreman said. And the whore of Babylon, too, no doubt.

  The rail workers kept bonfires burning for two weeks, to speed up the melting of the glacier. At last the buried stretch of line was exposed. They shovelled away heaps of slush and found a section of track torn up from its gravel bed, the two steel rails twisted around each other like twining snakes.

  17

  Two days
later Byrne returns from the construction site. He and Elspeth make an excursion to the till plain. Clouds shroud the peaks and a cold mist descends around them. Byrne shrugs.

  —I’m sorry I can’t predict the weather.

  —I grew up with this, she says. It’s the Scot way of basking in the sun.

  —In the glasshouse you were wondering about the origin of the town’s name. That’s what I wanted to see you about the other day, before I was called out to the accident.

  —Yes?

  —Warden Langford traces the name to an early fur trader named Jasper Hawes. But I think it was possibly derived from the French phrase j’espère: I hope.

  —Why is that?

  —An early surveyor spelled it Jespare in his published journal. What local meaning this phrase has I don’t know. But on one old map the region is labeled Despair, which might be a further corruption of the original French phrase.

  —Well, the next time I’m asked about the name, I’ll have an answer.

  A spruce tree appears ahead of them. Its branches emerge out of the haze into sudden sharp clarity. A tree so green in the shrouded landscape it seems to be the only living thing in a world of ghosts.

  Taking shelter under the branches of the tree, they share coffee from Elspeth’s vacuum flask. Byrne holds his tin cup in both hands, near his mouth. It has been a long time since he has been alone with a woman. And she is almost a stranger. When Elspeth is not looking he studies her bare, slender neck, her hair neatly gathered under her straw hat, the small pale wrinkle beside her mouth when she smiles, perhaps a scar from a childhood injury.

  —Frank told me you were the last person he expected to see in Jasper again.

  —That’s what I thought, too.

  18

  Bundled up in Swift’s cart as the Collie expedition headed for Edmonton, he told himself he would never return.

  When the sooty arches of the Victoria railway terminus appeared out of a grey London drizzle, he was certain of that. He was home.

  There was no one at the station to greet him, as he had planned. He had written to his father, and to Martha, while still in hospital in Edmonton, but had been deliberately vague about when he would be arriving. This way he would be free, at least for a while, from questions and concerns about his health. He felt there was an invisible boundary he had to pass through, alone and in silence, in order to reenter the world he had left only five months before.

  The first thing he did upon entering his flat was to light a fire in the grate, with the remnants left in the coal scuttle. He stood by the door in his overcoat, waiting for warmth to make the room his own again.

  19

  He tells Elspeth of his discovery of the ice-cored moraine running through the chalet grounds.

  —It was about a week after I first arrived. Frank took me out here to show off his creation, and I saw right away that there would be a problem.

  He said nothing at first to Trask, whose one complaint about the site was that the well buckets often came up filled with slush.

  For some time he was busy studying a detailed relief map. At last he wrote a letter to the railway company.

  An ancient glacial moraine runs under part of the railroad grade, and alongside the chalet grounds. This moraine still has a core of glacial ice that was buried by rock and never melted. I recommend that you find another location for your proposed hot spring pool, otherwise you may find the present site prone to destabilization.

  When Trask heard about the doctor’s recommendation, he was furious.

  —It’s one hell of a tall tale, Byrne.

  —It’s true.

  Trask leaned over the chalet railing and spat.

  —As true as that woman’s stories. Yeah, I heard them too: ’My father was a maharajah and my mother was a snake woman.’ Christ.

  Byrne stared at Trask.

  —That’s right, doctor, I’m telling you it was all horse manure. Here’s my version: she was a fatherless brat hanging around the trading post, and some fool made the mistake of teaching her how to read. Arabian Nights and Tales of King Arthur, that’s where she got her life story.

  The railway company sent out their own geologists, who verified Byrne’s findings. The railroad had to be diverted slightly for several hundred feet, and the hot spring pool was built higher up on the hill behind the chalet. Trask met the doctor in town one day and whispered,

  —No more icy surprises, please.

  20

  While they sit together under the spruce tree, the mist rises and dissipates. In the widening sky, wraiths of rain clouds drift. Sunshine lights up the far slopes of the valley. Elspeth and Byrne are still within the cool shadow of the mountain wall.

  —One thing you can depend on here, Byrne says, is the changeable weather.

  A raven flaps overhead, croaks once as it climbs into the sky. It weaves slowly from side to side, loops around once as its wings ride the wind currents. Just before the dark shape dwindles in the distance to invisibility, they see it veer to the left, away from the bright, forested side of the valley. The raven comes into sharp black focus against the white gleam of snow, as it glides down into a glacial cirque.

  —Why would it choose the dead side? Elspeth

  says.

  —It’s a scavenger, Byrne says. An opportunist. Chance meals always show up more clearly in the snow. And more often, too, I would imagine.

  —That’s another tidbit I can pass on to the guests.

  —It sounds like you get a lot of strange questions.

  —Yes, but I don’t mind. I like talking to people. Most people. It’s the ones who won’t deign to say a word to me that make my blood boil.

  She smiles.

  —Once or twice I’ve come close to ruining things for myself. There was one old fellow, he put so much effort into being oblivious to my existence. He would tap his saucer with a spoon, and carry on this lofty conversation with his wife while I poured the tea. When I dared ask him a question he’d stare past me and his wife would answer for him. It drove me mad, but after a while I thought it was funny. If I had suddenly dropped to the floor in a dead faint, I’m sure he would’ve stepped right over me without a word and gone on his way. I almost tried it, just to see what he’d do.

  —Then I hope for your sake my father doesn’t visit. That sounds something like him, although in his case it’s not deliberate. He’s too busy thinking about his work to notice the rest of the human race. The man is nearly seventy and he’s just started working on another textbook. The Principles of Obstetrics.

  —He’s a doctor, too.

  —Yes, although now he mostly lectures and writes. Kate, his wife, told me he ate and slept in his study for two weeks while he was finishing the last book.

  —She must be a patient soul.

  —She is. With me, too, in those first years. I’m afraid I made things difficult for her then. But she never said a word about it. And now when I write home, she’s the one I write to, if I want a reply. When I write to my father the letters end up in a stack on the floor.

  —What do they think of your coming back to Jasper to work?

  —I never asked.

  Byrne glances up into the sunlight.

  —We’d better start back while this good weather holds.

  21

  Byrne hires one of Trask’s guides to help him haul supplies to Arcturus glacier. Hal Rawson, who had startled Trask’s guests with his quote from Shelley.

  Byrne and Rawson ride out to the glacier, bringing along a pack pony loaded with the doctor’s gear. Rawson sets up camp, cooks, and cares for the horses, while Byrne spends the day on the ice.

  In the evening Byrne returns to camp, exhausted, sunburnt, taciturn. He sits under the hanging lantern, absorbed in his sketches and field notes.

  —Would you like something to eat, doctor?

  Byrne looks up in surprise at Hal, who is holding out to him a plate of mutton stew. He had forgotten he is not alone.

  —This
seems pretty earthy work for a man of letters, Byrne says.

  —Or for a man of medicine, Rawson says, and blushes. He swallows a mouthful of food, makes a grimace.

  —Pretty earthy stew, as well. My apologies. They share a laugh.

  —No, Rawson says, this place wasn’t quite what I imagined it would be.

  22

  Hal Rawson first disembarked at the Jasper station on a chilly May evening. He was advised by telegram to wait for the carriage from the chalet.

  A few tourists milled about, muffled in overcoats, stamping their feet in front of the stove. Voices were low and weak. A hall of strangers. Rawson found a vacant place on a bench and from his valise took a shiny new leatherbound book. Collie and Stutfield’s Climbs and Explorations. His father’s parting gift.

  A little boy in a navy jacket ran across the room clutching a Noah’s ark. He collided with Rawson’s legs.

  An explosion of toy animals. Rawson caught one tiny figurine as it fell: a white bird. He handed it to the boy who was already kneeling, gathering his scattered menagerie. A young woman in a huge fur coat smiled at Rawson as she led the boy back to his seat, her gaze charged with some emotion that drove him to glance down quickly at his book.

  Carriages arrived and carried the tourists away to fireplaces and warm beds. The sound of harness bells, hooves on packed snow, growing distant. Soon there were only two people left sitting in the station hall. Rawson and an old man across from him. The stationmaster, chained to his pocketwatch, eyed them with suspicion.

  From an inner room the telegraph clicked at a breathless pace. Drowsily, Rawson wondered whether the receiver could sense the emotion of the sender in those disembodied dots and dashes.

  The old man said a few words in a language Rawson did not understand. Smiling, he held up a bottle. Greek lettering. Retsina. Rawson declined with a shake of his head. The old man made a face, a grotesque parody of sorrow. He took a drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.