The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  The snow on top of the glacier was mostly frozen, so that our feet either did not sink in at all or only crunched down a few inches. In other places, all the snow had blown away, revealing the ice below. Here, the scraping of our bladed feet across the surface was like the slow and steady sharpening of knives. Where the ground leveled out, the snow was softer and deeper. Sometimes we had to stop and switch our crampons for snowshoes, which slowed us down considerably.

  The Rocket at last began to move more smoothly, its runners no longer shrieking over the stones as if they were in agony. Instead, its passage made a steady whisper through the snow.

  We marked our way across the glacier using the wands I had brought down with me from England. The orange paint stood out sharply against the snow and would, we hoped, guide us back across safe ground on our return. Every now and then, I looked back at the wands, which marked our wobbling path across the featureless white ground like a quiver full of arrows which had missed their mark.

  We filled our canteens with snow and left them on the top of the Rocket so that the sun would warm the wool covers and melt what was inside. Whatever we drank came out as sweat.

  In the hours which followed, my thoughts evaporated. I was aware of nothing but the angle of the land ahead and, in its slanting, the precise measure of the discomfort I would endure.

  Sunset of that day found us in the middle of a white desert, where we pitched our tent like Bedouins among the frozen dunes. We ate without tasting the mush of beans, tinned peaches, and rubbery slabs of Danish ham which we shoveled into our mouths.

  Afterwards, huddled in my sleeping bag, I was fading away into sleep when Stanley’s voice exploded in my ears.

  “Three things you cannot live without!” he shouted.

  “What?” I groaned.

  “Come on!” he said. “Name three things you cannot live without.”

  At the sound of that old game we used to play, I turned my head, slowly and painfully, until I could fix him with eyes made bloodshot by the smoke of our paraffin stove. “I am trying to sleep,” I said, as slowly and menacingly as I could.

  Stanley appeared to have recovered completely from his exhaustion, whereas I was still wallowing in mine. “Three things!” he said again, his voice annoyingly cheerful.

  I groaned and dug my dirty fingers into the corners of my eyes. “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  “No,” he said.

  I sighed. “All right.” What seemed like an hour later, after much “constructive criticism” from Stanley, I had settled on three things. All of them were—not surprisingly, given our present condition—food. The first was Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade, the vintage kind, as well as Fortnum & Mason Christmas pudding and Camp Coffee. This last item was a kind of syrup made from coffee, sugar, and chicory. It had the consistency of dirty motor oil and was incredibly sweet. If you poured more than a couple of teaspoons into a glass of milk, it was undrinkable. But if you got the proportions exactly right, and if the milk was the correct temperature, it was very good. Stanley and I had practically lived off the stuff when we were studying for exams at school. Camp Coffee had been around forever. On the label of the bottle was a picture of a kilted Scottish soldier sitting on an large upended drum outside his campaign tent and drinking a cup of Camp Coffee. Flying from the tent was a red flag on which were the words “Ready Aye Ready.” Standing next to the Scot was a turbaned Sikh in a blue uniform, the Scottish soldier’s servant, who presumably had just made the coffee for his master, because his right arm was still raised as if he had only in that moment drawn back his hand.

  I argued aggressively for Camp Coffee to be included and by now was wide awake. I had just finished pleading my case—very eloquently, I thought—when I realized that Stanley had fallen asleep.

  THE NEXT DAY, as we struggled on, I prayed for clouds to mask the sun, which blinded us even through our goggles. I was worried that I had not brought a second pair, since it would not have taken much to break the delicately curved lenses, which were held in place against the leather eye cushions only by tiny, rounded blades of metal. Without these goggles, I would have gone snow-blind in a matter of hours. I had experienced this once before, on a climb up Grossvenediger mountain in the Hohe Tauern Alps. I had not been badly blinded and recovered in a day or two, but even so I remembered the pain, as if someone had rubbed salt into my eyes.

  The space we crossed showed on the map as a calm cream-colored emptiness no longer than my thumb, washed over with the calm pond ripples of contour lines. But standing here was like being on the anvil of the sun, on which it felt as if we would be hammered into particles of light.

  I marched without any thought except of twilight, when the sound of our plodding footsteps could cease.

  Stanley, on the other hand, proposed that we should discuss exactly what the kilted Scot on the Camp Coffee label was saying to his Indian servant. “Because I’ve always thought,” said Stanley, “that his mouth was a little bit open and he does appear to be saying something.”

  “Perhaps he’s saying, ‘Thank you,’” I mumbled, hoping this might be enough to shut Stanley up.

  No such luck.

  “I think that Sikh looks bloody cheesed off,” explained Stanley. “I think he must be saying—”

  “The Sikh or the Scot?” I asked.

  “The Sikh! I’m talking about the Sikh now.”

  “But you asked me what the Scot was saying.”

  “All right,” he said exasperatedly, “you do the Scot and I’ll do the Sikh.”

  “I’d rather do the Sikh myself,” I told him.

  “Fine!” he shouted.

  “I think he’s saying, ‘How the hell did I end up working for a funny-looking little man like you? And why are you sitting on your drum? And I’ve put some special sauce in your coffee, by the way.’”

  “Special sauce?” asked Stanley.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what’s in it?”

  “You figure it out.”

  “Well,” said Stanley, “I would be saying, ‘It’s about bloody time. I’ve been sitting on this drum for over an hour. Where did you get to? What do you think I’m paying you for?’”

  “But hold on a minute,” I interrupted. “What if the Sikh didn’t make him the coffee at all?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What if he’s got his hand raised because he wants some coffee. He could just be saying, ‘Can I try some of that?’”

  “And the Scot would be saying, ‘Bugger off and get your own coffee, laddie.’”

  “He wouldn’t say that,” I protested.

  “He would if I were him.”

  “It’s talk like that which is losing us the Empire,” I said.

  This conversation lasted a disturbingly long time. Fortunately, there was no one else around to hear it.

  I was grateful to Stanley for the stubbornness of his good humor, but that evening, even Stanley could not see the funny side of things as we unpacked the tent and other gear and realized we had lost the second of our two food containers. This had almost certainly happened during the scramble up onto the glacier two days before. I was positive that we had not left it behind at our last campsite. I had just assumed it was packed away with the other stuff we had not moved off the Rocket when we made camp.

  My first reaction was to be furious with Stanley, since he was the one handling the coffin while I winched it forward over the ice. But I kept my mouth shut, both because it wouldn’t have done any good to yell at him and because I hadn’t noticed it myself at our last campsite, so I was at least partly to blame.

  The food box we had been using until now was almost empty. As the truth of the matter sank in—that we had only two one-pint cans of olive oil and six cans of bean stew left, instead of twelve—my already empty stomach twisted inside me.

  We decided not to go back for it. The thought of retracing our steps was too much to bear.

  “We’ll go on hal
f rations,” I said in a whisper.

  Stanley nodded grimly.

  “We’ll find the box on our way back,” I continued. “There’s just about enough food to get us up the mountain.” I held up one of the remaining bean cans, which had been dented slightly; the dent had already turned rusty. “I expect it’s still all right,” I said, tossing the can from one hand to the other and watching Stanley’s face for some sign of agreement.

  Two hours later, any visitor to our campsite would have seen what looked like two large dogs insanely barking at the snow beneath their feet. Closer inspection would have revealed Stanley and me, noisily emptying our guts of rancid bean stew.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, as we dragged the Rocket mindlessly across a plateau of jade-green ice, a gust of wind grabbed my cap and skimmed it vertically into the blue.

  We squinted up into the sun, waiting for it to come down again, but if it did we never saw it.

  “I never did like your hat,” said Stanley.

  As a replacement, I unknotted my scarf and tied it around my head.

  “Now you look like that Sikh in the Camp Coffee picture,” remarked Stanley.

  I glared at him.

  Soon after this, Stanley began to complain that his special dozen-pocket climbing coat was too long and that the weight of it dragged on his thighs.

  “Nothing you can do about it now,” I told him.

  “We’ll see about that,” replied Stanley.

  After we had made camp at the end of that day, he used the folding scissors from his pocket knife to cut the jacket to a length just below his waist. He tried it on again and grinned with satisfaction. Loose strands of wool hung down around his legs as the twill cloth unraveled piece by piece. He reminded me of those sheep I used to see in the fields around Painswick, their dirty fur dragging in clumps along the ground.

  Not satisfied with this, Stanley then tucked into his cap some of the material he had taken from the jacket. The shredded cloth now served as crude ear flaps, and made him look like a bloodhound.

  For dinner that night, in order to conserve our food, we each drank half a can of olive oil and were too starved to care.

  Stanley gulped it down and smacked his lips appreciatively. “I have,” he said, “thanks to that breakfast you cooked me at your apartment the other day, experienced considerably worse.” Then, as if to punish him for his rudeness, the left lens of his goggles fell out and dropped into the oil can, where it broke in half. Stanley looked down into the can. “Well, bugger,” he said and busied himself cutting a piece from his scarf, which he then fitted into the empty eye socket of his goggles. He tried them on.

  “You look like a pirate,” I said.

  “Give me your goggles, then,” he replied.

  I took the goggles from around my neck and tossed them in his lap.

  “Thank you, Auntie,” he said, and pressed the lenses against his eyes. He looked around the tent with short, birdlike movements of his head. Then Stanley gave a grunt of disapproval, took them off, and gave them back to me. “I’d rather look like a pirate.”

  Half an hour later, driven almost insane by Stanley’s growly monologue about buried treasure, kissing the gunner’s daughter, keelhauling, and the Black Spot, I felt sleep settle on me like a mist so thick that even Stanley’s ranting could not penetrate it.

  THE NEXT DAY’S MARCH had us moving up a gradual incline. It was afternoon by the time we reached the crest of the rise. From here, the ground sloped away into a narrow valley, revealing lumps of rock and what looked like a cave at the bottom. The glacier above the cave had sagged down, revealing line after dirty line of ice, like the growth rings of a tree. Outside the cave there was no snow, only gray and muddy ground.

  The wind flapped around the collar of my mountain jacket. The olive-brown color, which had hidden me so well in the San Rafaele woods, now stood out garishly against the white.

  Beyond this valley, out across the countless rolling waves of snow, towered Carton’s Rock. The rock stood by itself, and the first impression was of a ship with black sails, moving slowly through an ocean made of clouds. It was like a mirage, shimmering in the heat haze which rose off the ice. The dirt and silt of its lower elevations gave way to cleaner snow, which the sun had polished to a mirror shine. How far away it was, I could not tell.

  The valley extended too far in either direction for us to consider going around it. In order to stay on course for the rock, we had no choice but to head down into the valley, climb back up the other side, and then keep going.

  Stanley stood behind me, leaning against the coffin with a smoldering cigarette pinched in ratty fingerless granny gloves, while I fished the compass from my pack to take a bearing before we started down into the valley. The compass was a heavy brass thing with a disk inside made from mother-of-pearl, on which all the degrees were marked, and a flip-up sight which allowed me to aim the compass like a gun. I looked through the sight, feeling the powder of dried salt in the corners of my eyes crumble as the muscles of my face tensed. I was waiting for the little disk to stop spinning so I could get a proper reading when I heard a swishing sound, and turned to see that Stanley was no longer leaning against the coffin. Instead, he had climbed up onto it as if he were riding a strange metallic horse. Now he and the coffin were sliding very slowly down the hill. Soon the Rocket had come level with me and I found myself walking down the slope beside it, since we were all still tied together with the climbing rope.

  “What exactly do you think you are doing?” I asked, stashing the compass and coiling up the rope as it grew slack.

  “You’d better get on,” he replied. “I think the Rocket is taking off.”

  He was moving faster now. With the gathering speed, the runners seemed to be rising from the snow as they moved forward. I had to run to keep up. Then I was galloping down the slope. Soon, I knew, I would be left behind. Without giving it another thought, I jumped aboard. I only managed to slump over the coffin, legs sticking out one way, my stomach on the coffin’s lid, and my head only a few inches from the ground, before the coffin began to move with a speed that drew involuntary shouts from Stan and me.

  I had a view of snow sliding beneath us and a sudden glimpse of a narrow crevasse, hacked as if with the blade of a huge ax, falling away beneath us. The coffin sliced over it as if on an invisible bridge.

  By now, I was pushed back against the fins of the Rocket, where the remainder of our gear was stored. Stanley was holding on to a rope, heels digging into the sides of the coffin as if spurring on the great metal horse, and was making cowboy noises as we careened down the slope.

  With a crash we reached the valley floor and shot out across the flat ground, heading for the mouth of the cave. It looked as if we might shoot straight into it, but we were already losing speed, and the runners began to sink back down into the snow.

  We came to a whispering stop, just where the dirty snow gave way to pasty gray earth at the mouth of the cave.

  I slid forward off the coffin, careful not to impale myself on my own crampons.

  Stanley was still straddling the coffin, holding the rope as if a sharp tug and a click of the tongue would send us racing on across the snow. “That was brilliant!” he shouted.

  “You could have killed us,” I gasped, and was about to list the half dozen ways in which he could have accomplished this when Stanley flapped his hand in the air and made a dry spitting sound through his teeth.

  “Quiet, you old fusspot!” he commanded.

  Muttering under my breath, I untied myself from the mad cowboy and his tin pony.

  The huge cliff of sagging ice, rising at least a hundred feet above us, looked as if it might come crashing down at any moment. The buckled lines of dirt embedded in the snow were like a warning, proof that this glacier was in motion, and that its usual imperceptibly slow course was never to be trusted.

  Despite the danger, Stanley and I could not help walking into the cave, drawn into it as if by some strange music which played
deep in the catacombs inside.

  The air was damp and there were puddles on the ground. There had to be a spring of some kind here, melting the ice from below. The arching walls and ceiling of the cave were vivid blue and dimpled like the sides of a beer glass.

  We stood there for a while, listening to the steady drip of water from the walls.

  I was just about to say that we should turn around when I caught sight of something hanging from the ceiling of the cave. At first it looked like a branch, but as I stepped forward, I realized it was the wing of a bird. It was a large wing, as long as my arm and still with the feathers attached, hanging down vertically as if reaching for the floor. The feathers were brown, almost black, shimmering purple and green like the feathers of a starling. The ceiling was high enough here that I could stand directly beneath the wing. Above the place where it protruded from the ice I could see the rest of the bird, or part of it, anyway. The bird was far larger than any of the crows or ravens I had seen in these mountains. I could just make out, blurred inside the ice, the large hooked beak of the bird, whose neck had been twisted around, and a band of white stretching from its eyes to the beginning of its beak. The chest appeared to be a dirty, reddish white.

  Stanley stood beside me. He reached up to touch the feathers, and as soon as his fingers reached them, a handful of them fluttered down onto the ground. “What do you think it is?” he asked.

  At first, I could not remember the name I wanted to say, but now it appeared, rising through the dark inside my head. “A lammergeier.”

  “There aren’t any lammergeiers here,” said Stanley.

  “Not anymore,” I replied. “But it is a lammergeier.” I was sure of it now, recalling pictures of its white body and black wings and the masklike streak across its eyes. I did not know how long the great vulture had been gone from the Alps, but I had heard of its reputation for carrying off lambs and dogs and even babies, flying them thousands of feet into the air and then dropping them to their deaths. Birds like these had wingspans of nine feet and still existed in some parts of the Middle East, Spain, and the Himalayas. But not here. Not anymore.