Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  The stationmaster cleared his throat, nodded sternly toward the entrance. The old man sighed, slipped the bottle into a coat pocket and stood up. He smiled at Rawson, held his hands up by his ears and fluttered them like wings as he shuffled out the door.

  23

  The next morning Rawson met his new employer, Frank Trask, at the chalet office. On the wall hung a framed photograph Rawson recalled having seen before, in a book on the opium war in China. A portrait of three convicted smugglers, decapitated moments before the image was captured. Their executioner standing to one side, uninterested in the result of his work, examining his blade. Three heads, with contorted faces like masks representing Tragedy, lined up in the grass before the bodies. And a boldface caption: Don’t Lose Your Head.

  Trask no longer personally supervised the pack trains. But this day he appeared in his old boots, dungarees, and buckskin jacket to welcome the new man. He strode across the yard, Rawson following cautiously, sidestepping mounds and puddles.

  —I’ll show you around the outfit—bunkhouse, stables, corral. Oh, and of course the place everybody asks about first. The shithouse, as we affectionately call it. I’m afraid the indoor plumbing is still for guests only.

  Hal’s first day ended with a lesson on the arcane science of the diamond hitch.

  —That’s more like the Gordian knot, son. Here, let me show you.

  Trask had his doubts about Rawson. For the past two years the young man had been living in England. Last year, at the age of twenty-one, he had published a book of poetry, Empty and Waste is the Sea, a book that Trask hadn’t read, but that he heard had gained a modest fame both in Canada and across the Atlantic. Somewhere, this ethereal type had learned to ride, passably, and aim a rifle, and if that awkward shyness left him he could charm the ladies. What he didn’t know about trail life and packhorses young O’Hagan and the other guides could teach him.

  As it was now, they rode circles around him and delighted in the fact.

  —I took a poet on a packtrip a few years back, Trask said to Hal the first day. Well, he was a painter and poet, that’s what he called himself. He told me his god was Nature. I thought to myself, We’ll see about that. When we set up camp the first night he took a stick and scraped himself a little trench around his tent and pissed in it. I said, why the holy circle? And he informed me, quite seriously, that it would keep away the bears. So I told him it was a rare pleasure to meet a god-fearing man.

  24

  While Rawson waits below in the camp, Byrne climbs the glacier. He stops to rest against a boulder lying in the middle of the ice, blows on his cold fingers, and writes in his notebook.

  There can be little doubt the glacier is at present retreating. The terminus is an arcuate, shelf-like lip, furrowed with the longitudinal depressions of seasonal ice wasting. The frontal slope varies between 20 and 30 degrees, and this fluctuation also indicates the glacier’s unstable state. The logical next step is to determine as closely as possible the flow rate and the average yearly amount of recession.

  Collie’s Geographical Society report, meticulous as the man himself, noted that Byrne’s accident occurred at the base of the first icefall. Several metres from a large dome of rock, a nunatak as the Inuit named these solitary landmarks in a desert of ice. Collie remembered the nunatak as a marker of the farthest point reached by the expedition before Byrne’s mishap. Its dark, humpbacked shape is visible from the chalet.

  In Europe they are called rognons, but here the Native word, its harsh sound, seems more accurate.

  The nunatak is huge. Byrne circumnavigates it, finds a shred of faded green cloth in a crevice of the rock. He was wearing a green scarf the day of his fall into the crevasse. He knows that Collie removed it to examine him.

  He takes his bearings from the nunatak, marches several paces down the glacier surface. At the time of his fall, the blue ice was bare and glazed with melt-water. Now there is a light dusting of fresh snow, but not enough to hide crevasses. There are none as far as he can see around him, and he admits to himself the foolishness of his search. The chasm into which he fell was no doubt long ago sealed up by the forward flow of the glacier.

  25

  He reaches the base of the first icefall. He can walk no farther, and now must climb.

  The glass mountain.

  He takes the newly-purchased gear from his rucksack, straps the claws onto his boots. Steps out of the sunlight into the icefall’s colder penumbra.

  The point of his axe bites through the brittle surface, into the harder layers beneath. He gouges the ice with his lobster claws, hauls himself upward, carefully planning each movement, no matter how slight. The dagger technique. Stab with the axe, the boot, crawl upward like a slow and methodical spider. Breathing in deeply, breathing out slowly.

  An ice shard skitters from above, bounces off his coat sleeve and nicks his cheek just below the eye. A larger chunk falls past him. He presses himself flat against the wall, holds his breath, listens.

  Silence.

  26

  After an hour the sun has risen overhead and climbs with him, now an enemy. The ice weakens, sloughs off its brittle outer skin, releasing itself into liquid all around him. He is climbing an emerging waterfall.

  Breathing has become a labour. His arms tire far too quickly, his neck and shoulders are rigid with pain. The broken collarbone that did not heal well has betrayed him. An unexpected weakening of strength, a loss of concentration on this vertical river would be fatal.

  He touches his forehead to the ice, closes his eyes. If he makes it to the top of this wall, there is still another trek of over three kilometres to the base of the upper icefall. The true terra incognita. And only beyond that obstacle will he finally reach the névé.

  It might as well be the moon.

  He drags himself into camp in late afternoon, huddles in front of the fire while Rawson packs their gear.

  27

  In the field hospital, Byrne lies stretched on a cot with a hot water bottle pressed against his shoulder, a strip of wet surgical gauze over his face. From the saloon tent a piano rattles out delirious ragtime tunes. Laughter. The clink of glasses. At the other end of the long tent, behind a white screen, someone is being loudly sick.

  The orderly sets down a tray, beef tea in a feeding cup. Byrne sits up, peels off the gauze.

  —It was all I could find, doctor.

  Byrne nods, takes the cup. The orderly jerks his head toward the far end of the tent.

  —The cook spent the day in some drinking hole. That’s his penance disturbing your repose.

  Byrne lies back against the pillow. His limbs and face throb, throwing off heat. In the cool dusk he is the sun’s memory.

  The easy slopes of the lower glacier will be the edge of his known world. He will never see the field, never climb from the dark jumbled debris of rock into that space of burning, eternal light.

  28

  FRANK TRASK’S GUIDED WALKING TOURS

  To the alpine meadows and the Arctueus glacier, starting from the chalet lobby at 7:15 a.m. sharp, led by experienced mountaineers who can answer all questions. Please consult beforehand with the management concerning appropriate dress. All other supplies, and a luncheon, will be provided.

  “‘We can take you above the clouds at a very reasonable charge, and let you touch a real glacier.”

  Trask snaps his fingers. He is exuberant, light-hearted. The new porcelain has arrived on this morning’s train. Just in time for the long-awaited visit by Sibelius, the railroad’s major financier. As the crates are pried open, Trask, hovering on tiptoe behind the haulers, breaks into a beatific smile. In the same tone he uses to calm a horse, he exhorts care from the men, easy now with that piece, gently, that’s it, as a gleaming array of washbasins and commodes is revealed in the raw air.

  He touches the cold porcelain with reverent hands, as if it were the substance of civilization.

  Another crate is unloaded and pried open for inspection, one full o
f glass bottles. Another of Trask’s ideas become reality, one he hopes will reveal to Sibelius his talent for exploiting to the full the resources at hand.

  With the coming of the railroad and the building of the spur line and the chalet, Trask’s fortunes blossomed. He had become a major outfitter and freighter along the mountain section of the Grand Trunk. As he liked to say, the biggest toad in the puddle.

  His one great annoyance was that Sibelius, the man for whom he was in essence the representative here, had not yet made a visit. Trask hoped to impress him with his schemes and plans for improvements, and at last he gathered the courage to send the railroad baron a telegram, inviting him to Jasper. After a long wait, a reply came: I’ll consider any ideas you’ve got, Mr. Trask, but I prefer words on a page. They don’t gesticulate. Write it all out before I get there.

  29

  —The railroad, says Trask, hauled this place out of the ice age. When I go back east people no longer say to me Jasper, where the hell is Jasper?

  Some of the townspeople believe Sleeping Beauty is their myth. They have been awakened, from a frozen slumber into the warm embrace of the twentieth century.

  Freight trains carrying fabrics and spices from Asia rocket through the valley, leaving an imagined perfume of the orient in their wake. Electric lamps line the main boulevard, not yet paved, it must be admitted, but ladies with parasols and gentlemen in white suits will soon stroll there.

  The days when savage men wrestled with grizzly bears, or were said to have done so, have vanished in the glow of these electric street lamps. And in this new age, for good or ill, women attempt fields of endeavour that were once reserved only for men. Such as mountain climbing.

  —There was that Mary Schaeffer a few years back, the American woman who says she discovered Maligne Lake. Well, I can tell you it was one of my boys, guiding her, that climbed a mountain and saw it first. And now we’ve got the famous Miss Freya Becker. Freya. What kind of a name is that for a Christian soul?

  Trask is talking too much and he knows it. This is his first face-to-face encounter with Sibelius, and he is nervous, perspiring, driven by panic to blurt out whatever tumbles through his head. Elspeth, at the far end of the long dining table, looks amused by his discomfort. And Hal Rawson, as usual, says nothing.

  Sibelius, having at long last come to see the town he envisioned, sits across from Trask, quietly stroking his Vandyke beard. Trask is surprised to find him a small, unremarkable-looking man. He thinks that if Sibelius had been the beefy, cigar-chomping capitalist he had imagined, the evening would be going much more smoothly. He would know what to say. He would not be making this flustered attempt to fill the silence with words, like a fireman shoveling coal to feed a dying locomotive engine.

  —Anyhow, Trask says, it seems likely Miss Becker is a devotee of Sappho, if you catch my meaning. So perhaps she doesn’t count as a representative of womanhood.

  Sibelius frowns. Then it hits Trask like a stomach punch: Sibelius and Freya’s father were business acquaintances.

  —The private affairs of Miss Becker, Sibelius says at last, will be discussed no further in my presence.

  —Well, you know I was only repeating the kind of gossip that runs rampant in a place like this, where people don’t know each other very well.

  —That’ll be enough, Mister Trask. Now I want you to show me the town we’ve built.

  30

  On the map in his Montreal office, a red X marked the site of the city Anton Sibelius had planned. A railroad and a city in the mountains, to rival and surpass the domain of the Canadian Pacific to the south.

  As a young clerk in the Hudson’s Bay Company he had seen a painting at the Fort Garry headquarters: Gentle green hills around a placid lake. Peaceable Natives camped in the shade of giant trees. And far in the distance a mountain peak, weightless, serene, from which a fragile glacier wound a serpentine course. In the bright morning sunlight the avenues and spires of ice shone in the air like a celestial city.

  A city amid the ice.

  Trains carrying away the black diamonds of coal to a world hungry for energy. Trains disgorging fresh adventurers before a domed and turreted hotel. Trains with refrigerator cars, packed with glacier ice, so that travelling dignitaries could dine on fresh lobster as they rushed across the plains, hundreds of miles from the ocean.

  31

  Nothing is said, but something is clearly troubling Sibelius. At the end of the tour he returns to his private rail car, and Trask goes with him. They head west, out of town, in silence.

  Several miles out the whistle blasts a warning as the line crosses a trestle bridge over a gorge. Trask watches the baron’s sallow face for a raised eyebrow, the slightest twitch, any reaction to the sudden terrifying view, one that has made many passengers gasp, cover their eyes, even faint.

  To Trask’s horror, Sibelius signals for a halt on the far side of the bridge. Brakes squeal and cutlery clatters in the dining car.

  The baron climbs down from the train and walks swiftly to the edge of the gorge, whipping a silk handkerchief out of his breastpocket to wipe his glistening brow. Trask scrambles after him.

  —Do you see this? Sibelius says in a tremulous whisper. He points to a stunted spruce that the wind has almost uprooted from its foothold at the edge of the gorge. The tree leans out over the abyss, gnarled, like a tortured soul on the verge of a final leap.

  —Unsightly, Sibelius mutters, shaking his head. He bends down, grasps the trunk and is pulled off balance, his polished black oxfords slipping on the wet stone. Trask lunges forward and grips his arm.

  —And dangerous.

  32

  Hal Rawson returns to the chalet bunkhouse in the evening after the reception for Sibelius. He takes off the ill-fitting suit and slips into a flannel shirt and wool trousers.

  Pain twinges in his right hand. He holds it up, examines the bright red bead growing beside his thumbnail. He tore skin from his dry, calloused fingers all through the reception, under the edge of the tablecloth. Removing himself from the tedium in strips.

  From the pile of books in his steamer trunk he picks out Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, props a pillow, and stretches out on the bed.

  The green fields of England. He lived in London for two years with his uncle. Hardly looked at the countryside. Too busy trying to live as he thought a writer should. Bohemian. Scrambling around in a panic to meet literary eminences and women, impress them with his serious writerliness. He knows that people often thought him to be English. There were times when he found it useful or just amusing to affect the clipped accent of the poets and lecturers he often went to hear.

  He likes to read aloud, when alone, in mimicry of those grave, resonant voices.

  Loveliest of trees the cherry now….

  He is suddenly aware of the sounds and smells around him in this bunkhouse. The sharp tang of spruce, kerosene, the blankets with their faint, indelible reek of smoke. The nickering of horses in the corral.

  He looks down at himself, his clothing, sees an actor in a wild west show.

  33

  Celeste, one of Elspeth’s chambermaids, is in love with him.

  Elspeth watches her. This girl is a long way from her home town. Nervous, forgetful, often cries at night, the other girls have told her. Has to be cautioned about chewing her fingernails, as it is unsightly to the guests. And now she is in love.

  At the chalet staff picnic, Hal sat with Celeste on the green sloping bank of Lac Beauvert. He quoted Yeats, his favourite poet.

  She carries in the candles,

  And lights the curtained room,

  Shy in the doorway

  And shy in the gloom;

  And shy as a rabbit,

  Helpful and shy,

  To an isle in the water

  With her I would fly.

  Then a woman shouted Hal’s name, and he jerked to his feet like a marionette. She was a stranger to Celeste, this thin, quick young woman with cropped blond hair. She pouncedon Hal
and gave Celeste a quick, cold glance.

  Hal gave a helpless shrug as he was led away.

  Now Celeste sees him only from a distance, always in the company of that strange woman, Freya Becker. The scandalous lady alpinist, some have dubbed her, or the bitch who wears men’s trousers. What’s worse, she’s older than Hal. Her face is ruddy, prematurely lined by wind and sun, but her eyes are a beautiful, watery green.

  34

  Freya made a special demand for Rawson this summer. Unlike the rest of your crew, she grinned at Trask, he speaks. Rawson helps her gather supplies and choose packhorses.

  At first it is her language that shocks him. The way her words push him into an unfamiliar room, spin him around. She tells stories from her travels, stories he finds difficult to believe.

  —I’m not sure, but I think I killed a man, on a lake near Chojend.

  —Chojend. Where is that?

  —Exactly. It’s a city north of the Hindu Kush. The ancient name was Alexandria the Farthest. The locals have a legend about its founding.

  —Never mind the legend. What about the

  man?

  —Someone climbed aboard our houseboat. He was standing in the cabin doorway, there was a gauze curtain and I couldn’t see if he had a weapon. My host said shoot and I did and he disappeared. A few seconds later we heard a splash. He was a thief, the others said, they kill.

  —So you did the right thing.

  —That’s what they told me. I don’t know. I’m more angry now for what happened when I got home. I did a piece about Chojend for the paper, and the editor talked me into dropping that part of the story. I gave in to him.

  35

  He watches the way her body moves beneath the rough male disguise. When she tugs at a saddle strap, or heaves a satchel of climbing equipment over her shoulder. The muscles as loose and supple as water, then pulling taut. A decisive body. The truth of her stories is revealed there.