Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  While he crouches on the hard clay of a dry rivercourse to eat his pack lunch, he thinks:If I had no other way to describe what I saw in the crevasse?

  He scratches in the clay with his finger. Sketches a stick figure, then crosses it out.

  Elspeth?

  And himself?

  6

  He invites Rawson to hike up with him and examine the petroglyphs. Perhaps a poet can help him find patterns, identify motifs.

  Hal silently runs his hand over, the scars in the rock.

  —They’re strange, wonderful. But I confess I don’t understand.

  A record of communal memory. Or a prediction. Or both. Or a panorama of visions dreamed in solitude and brushed outside the history of the tribe.

  There are no winged figures.

  —This may be an alphabet, Hal says. Or a dictionary.

  There are many stories. The two of them make summaries, conjectures.

  Woman, in a river? Escapes battle, massacre of her people by enemy tribe. Runs away to (from?) forest, lives with rocks, standing stones. The rocks stand in a ring. Erratics? She walks between two of them. Then a space, nothing.

  Further along the carving the woman reappears (or is it in fact the same one?) A single line spirals around her. She faces the other way now, west (?), going up into the sun.

  The story is there, as far as Byrne can tell, although he knows he and Rawson have created it out of intersecting icons that may not be related.

  The images have been here for an unknown length of time, carved into rock the ice had only just scoured and withdrawn from. Not waiting for him to come close and squint at them through his magnifying lens. These scratches have nothing to do with his presence, they do not anticipate him, prophecy him.

  7

  Among the distinguished visitors to the park this year were Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle and party. They visited a number of points of interest and expressed themselves delighted with everything they saw. Sir Arthur kindly gave his assistance and practical knowledge to the laying out of a nine-hole golf course on a plateau over looking Jasper townsite and close to the site of the proposed Grand Trunk Pacific Hotel. He also took a turn at bat with the local baseball club, and made several excursions to see the sights of our wilderness playground.

  Byrne meets the creator of Sherlock Holmes at one of Elspeth’s glasshouse receptions. He has heard that Doyle, a doctor, is also a spiritualist, a collector of the unexplained. He offers to take him on a guided trek to the glacier.

  Trask grimaces, envisioning wasted time, a broken ankle, bad press.

  The two doctors hike slowly across the till plain. Sir Arthur stops often to examine the wildflow-ers. He marvels at the sky: the change in colour, depth. The purity and sharpness of the air. Byrne takes him to see the rock carvings.

  —This is wonderful, Doyle says, taking out a pencil and note pad to make sketches. I may be able to use this.

  They carry on across the till plain.

  —There, Doyle says, pointing his walking stick at a massive slab of rock perched on a mound of ice, a glacier table.

  —Let’s stop there.

  They circle the glacier table and find a place to climb up. When they reach the flat top of the slab, two small stones roll toward them and wobble to a stop. Doyle chuckles softly.

  —The welcoming committee.

  They sit down on the slab, open their packs and unwrap sandwiches.

  —That young lady at the chalet, Doyle says.

  —Elspeth?

  —Yes. My wife can sense or see things about certain people. Images that come to her when she is near them, or hears their voices. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I have learned not to doubt her gift.

  He sips from his water flask.

  —She told me that when she shook Elspeth’s hand, she had a vision of a tree. A tall pine, green and alive.

  He smiles.

  —She said she almost sank down and wrapped her arms around the young lady’s ankles. She came to her senses in time, thank goodness.

  8

  Crawling across the gritty snow of the lower glacier, a spider. Doyle sees it first.

  —Will you look at that hardy little soul.

  Byrne takes a kill jar out of his pack and unscrews the lid.

  —I see you come prepared for everything, Doyle says.

  Byrne scoops the spider up with a handful of snow and drops it into the jar. He ties a piece of surgical gauze around the rim and stuffs the jar down into his pack.

  9

  On warm days the volume of meltwater rapidly increases. Rivulets on the glacier surface swell into rushing torrents. Hillocks and banded fonts form on previously level stretches. Passage through this transforming landscape becomes a struggle.

  A wide crater-like depression on the glacier slowly fills with water, by early evening it has become a lake, perfectly transparent, filled with the purest water on earth. There are no fish in its depths, no sedges or grasses along the shore. No geese, no shore birds gather here at dusk.

  Each night, as the meltwater lessens, the lake subsides. In the morning it has vanished again.

  As the glacier flows forward, its topography will inevitably change, and the lake will vanish. For that reason, its ephemerality, I see no reason to give this body of water a name. It will remain the ideal lake.

  10

  Rawson throws his pack to the ground, takes off his jacket and tosses it on top, kicks off his boots.

  Blankets and gear are strewn over the grassy flat, stretched out to dry after the eventful crossing of the Athabasca River. The horses, hazed across the river and now free of their burdens, have trotted out into the meadow. He watches them nip at each other and toss their heads. The tourists from Chicago are gone, having decided to hike the remaining three miles to the chalet rather than wait for Rawson.

  He sets the pack contents out around him to survey the damage. The flour is a doughy mass, mixed now with the cocoa powder, and rapidly growing a hard shell. The bannock he had made that morning soggy and limp. He finds the waterproof container of matches, crouches down by the fire pit in his soaked shirt and trousers, shivering.

  —Freya, he says aloud. She would be italic, he told her. Now he knows he was thinking of a page of cold text, and in the midst of it, a word that whispers fire.

  11

  Byrne props his notebook on his knees and writes.

  I see a rippling pool on the bleached surface of the nunatak and the sparsity of the landscape draws me to it.

  Water.

  The pool is perfectly transparent, fringed with a crust of spring ice. Fed by a thin rivulet that spills with the clarity of music from the glacier. I cup my hands and drink.

  I lean back on the sun-warmed rock, close my eyes, and listen. The glacier moves forward at a rate of less than one inch every hour. If I could train myself to listen at the same rate, one sound every hour, I would hear the glacier wash up against this rock island, crash like waves, and become water.

  12

  On the hill above the meadow of flowers floats a silk pavilion. Men and women with glasses of champagne and slices of cake stroll beneath its billowing walls. The members of the alpine club are celebrating the summer’s successful climbs.

  Rawson leads his string of horses along the edge of the wet meadow, back to the camp. The buzz and shimmer of insects fills the humid sunlit air.

  His name is called from across the bright space. He stops. Freya is standing at the pavilion entrance with her camera. She shouts, waves him over. He tethers the lead horse to a tree and climbs the hill. He stops just outside the pavilion, suddenly aware of how he must look. Freya sets her camera down in the grass and steps out of the pavilion to where he is standing as if halted by a spell.

  —What happened to you?

  —A river.

  —You’re mud from head to foot.

  —Nonsense, darling. Waiter, another bottle of your finest.

  She runs a finger lightly down his fore
head to the tip of his nose.

  —Come to my room tonight, she says, showing him her smudged fingertip. We’ll get you clean.

  —When will you be finished here?

  —I really don’t know.

  —Are you having a good time?

  —You mean me and the other toffs? Yes we are. But there’s always a place for poets in our salon.

  —I have to go.

  —I know. I’ll see you.

  13

  Byrne imagines himself as an alpine Alexander Selkirk, set down here on this island in the ice at his own request. Lying back on a flat slab of limestone, he watches high cirrus clouds form and dissipate.

  The sun-heated moisture off the snow rises invisibly and shakes itself out into clouds. Swans. Nana called them the children of Lir.

  He remembers Nana telling him the story, how achingly desirable their fate seemed to him as a boy. The enchanted exiles, sundered from home and family, wandering over the dark waters of the earth in immortal loneliness.

  Some say they’re wandering still, Nana told him. Until the day God burns up the world with a kiss.

  14

  Hal wakes up in her bed. She is not there.

  —Freya?

  —Here.

  She moves across the room, her naked body black against the window for a moment, then invisible and slipping into bed beside him.

  —-You won’t be staying this winter, either.

  —No.

  —I’m leaving too. I’ve found a position at the Herald. Reporter. They liked the fact that I wrote a book and I can also saddle a horse.

  —Hal, you didn’t tell me. That’s wonderful.

  —Is it?

  —You’ll be busy.

  He moves in close to her warmth, slides his arms around her.

  —I’d rather spend the winter just like this.

  —I get mean and bloodthirsty if I have to stay in one place very long. She bites his wrist. The vampire. You know that.

  —And Hal knew his wife Freya and behold, he knew nothing.

  —Wife. That’s very funny.

  —Where will you be?

  —You’ll laugh, but probably at home with my mother, at least for a while. I can work on my book there.

  —You could work on it here. We could hibernate all winter in Elspeth’s garden.

  —I’m afraid I don’t thrive under glass.

  15

  Hal lights a lamp and sits down on the edge of the bed with a notebook and pen. Freya yawns, opens her eyes.

  —What’s this?

  —I’m going to interview you. An exclusive to the Herald by Henry Rawson.

  —Fine, I’m too sleepy to argue. Fire away.

  —Miss Becker, the readers would like to know how many lovers you’ve had.

  —Mm?

  —Miss Becker? Wake up. Please answer the question. How many lovers.

  —Two. Next question.

  —Two?

  —Next question, and then I’m going back to sleep.

  —Is there a question you might be willing to answer?

  —Ask me what I think I’m doing acting like a man. The other one did.

  16

  The remains of a shelter built on the nunatak by a group of lost climbers becomes Byrne’s scientific observatory. With help from Rawson, he enlarges the rock structure, reinforces it with a wooden framework, a door. They hollow out an area for a fireplace and build a mantle of stones around it. Byrne lines the walls with furs given to him by Sara and Swift, spreads canvas and oilcloth on the floor.

  He brings in a camp bed, a pine table, and a chair. He builds shelves and stocks them with books, medical supplies in glass-stoppered bottles, tins of evaporated vegetables, tapers, cooking utensils. He sets a spirit lamp in one wall and a desk clock on the ledge above the fireplace. Next to the clock he places a sea urchin shell, the only surviving relic from his childhood.

  When the shelter is completed and stocked, Byrne shuts himself in for his first night. He lights a coal fire, wraps himself in a sleigh blanket, and sits at his table to write by the light of the lamp.

  As it grows late the sound of trickling water ceases. The wind has died. He is at the heart of stillness.

  The hut is insulated well enough that he is uncomfortable in the blanket, and sloughs it off. He removes his vest and shirt, and his shoes. He writes for a while in his undershirt and trousers, then pushes the chair back. The heat is palpable, a thick garment wrapping his skin.

  He sees the kill jar on the shelf and remembers. The spider. He picks up the jar, wipes the dust off it.

  The snow has long since melted and evaporated. At the bottom of the jar lies a desiccated black speck. Byrne shakes it out onto the palm of his hand. Under the magnifying glass he counts the eyes, notes the mottled colouration on the thorax.

  The spider’s legs uncurl and it scuttles across Byrne’s palm. He flicks it back into the jar, opens the door of the hut and steps out onto bare rock. The lunar cold stuns him.

  Space blooms with stars.

  He crouches, lowers the jar to the snow and shakes it. The spider drops out and crawls slowly away over the shadowed, granular snow. Byrne stands up and looks out into the darkness.

  The distant lights of the icefield chalet are the only signs of human presence. He can see the lamps along the promenade that give it the look of an ocean liner. The tall windows filled with light.

  To study accurately the variations in temperature and flow rate, it was necessary to live on the glacier for several consecutive days.

  When the temperature drops at dusk to below zero, all the streams on the glacier surface cease to flow. Everywhere the ice bristles up with glittering frost needles as the melted and now refreezing surface water dilatates. A garden of tiny ice flowers seems to be growing all around me.

  17

  Elspeth walks along the chalet promenade and sees the wink of Byrne’s lamp across the valley. She imagines herself an astronomer, and the distant light a constellation of a single star: The Doctor.

  18

  Glacial ice is not a liquid, nor is it a solid. It flows like lava, like melting wax, like honey. Supple glass. Fluid stone.

  To watch it flow, one must be patient. There are few changes that can be seen in the course of one day. But over time crevasses split open and others close. There are ice quakes that shift the terrain, unpredictable geysers of meltwater that carry away ice aiguilles and other landmarks. And of course the evidence of flow, acts of delicate, random precision: shards of rock are plucked by the ice from their strata, carried miles downstream, and left lying with fragments from another geological age.

  19

  He asks Lightning Bolt, the old man in the telegraph office, for messages from home.

  —If there were any, Lightning Bolt mutters, glancing up over his pince-nez, you’d already have them.

  There are days when Byrne sinks into a dull lethargy. At these times he goes to the hot spring pool.

  He arrives there one morning out of the rain, shivering and pale.

  —You’re not sitting out there like this, Elspeth says.

  Elspeth takes him inside, sits him down on a chair in the warm kitchen and brings in towels, a basin of hot water.

  —This has happened to me at least once a year since the accident, he tells her. It’s like a recurrence of the hypothermia.

  —It’s no wonder, she says. You tramp around in the mank all day.

  —In the what?

  —The mank. The wet. She shakes her head, tugs at his soaked shirtsleeve. This.

  —It’s a good word, he says. It sounds right.

  —I’m surprised you’ve never heard it before.

  He looks down at her hand, which she has kept on his sleeve, and then up into her quietly laughing eyes.

  —And this is a hand, she says. You’ve got two.

  —I. . . yes.

  He nods and laughs, a short huff of breath. She hands him one of the towels.

  —Thank y
ou.

  She sets the basin down at his feet and leaves the room.

  20

  During the next week he travels up and down the line, busy with a routine inspection of camp conditions. He suspects cholera in two men and accompanies them to Edmonton on the train. Late one evening he returns to the chalet without seeing Elspeth, and the next morning he is back on the ice with his notebook.

  Seracs. Massive, unstable pinnacles of ice often form in the icefall.

  Here, as the glacier flows over a steep grade in the bedrock, internal stresses split and tear the ice. It buckles and heaves into a tortuous topography.

  Byrne watches for three days as an architectural wonder is created. The glacier groans, cracks, thunders, and rears up a cathedral.

  On the nunatak Byrne lies on his stomach and sketches in his notebook.

  When the sun breaks through cloud, the cathedral fills with light. The warmer air hollows it into a more baroque, flamboyant shape. Spires, archways, gargoyles begin to flow. Waterfalls set festive ice bells ringing.

  Then, slowly, the delicate balance that kept it aloft is undermined. Even as light glorifies it, the cathedral is diminished, begins almost imperceptibly to collapse. Sepulchral booms and crashes attest to hidden vaults and hollows, the shifting instability of the foundation.

  No one can predict exactly when a serac will give way and topple back into the landscape. The next morning Byrne climbs to the icefall’s base to find that the cathedral is gone, swallowed up in its demesne.

  Vanished, he writes in his notebook. It must have fallen quickly, in the night. But it made no sound.

  He realizes it has been almost two weeks since he last saw her. Twelve days of the brief alpine summer. In another month he will be returning to England. He remembers the touch of her hand on his arm.

  In the afternoon he hikes back down to the chalet. He is told by the desk clerk that she has been in Jasper for the past three days.

  He takes the train into town.

  She is here somewhere, perhaps at the general store, or visiting friends. Searching for her, he begins on the outer streets, flanked by the railroad track on one side of the long, narrow town, and the dark bulk of Bear Hill on the other. He makes the brief circuit of Jasper three times, moving inward, stopping in to talk with Trask’s son Jim at his father’s gift shop, watching the doorway to see if she will stroll past. He halts at last in front of Father Buckler’s unfinished stone church. The sun has almost set and its dusty golden light stretches into the valley from the corridor of the Miette River. The lamps are coming on along the street.