Icefields (18 page)

The sliver of icefield he can see from the nunatak is painfully bright in the morning sun. The edge of a radiant white planet rising too close to the earth. He lowers the field glasses and rubs his eyes.

He ducks back into the shelter, the red branch of an afterimage floating before him in the dark. He sits down at the table where he has been working.

Trask has asked him to put together a short primer on ice and glaciers, to accompany his diorama with its interestingly misspelled inscription:

Ariel View of Jasper and Environs

He sets aside an earlier draft and picks up his pen, begins again on a fresh sheet of paper.

The icefield is the source of several major river systems, and a storehouse of fresh water. The layers of ice deep within the field may be hundreds of years old, formed from snow that fell here before the discovery of America, before the birth of Shakespeare, before the industrial revolution.

He writes of the Swiss glaciologist Louis Agassiz, and quotes his dramatic imagining of the
Eiszeit,
the great ice age of the past:

The land we call Europe, before that time a tropical jungle inhabited by elephants, enormous reptiles and gigantic tigers, was swiftly buried beneath a great sheet of ice covering valleys, plateaus, and mountains. Over all descended the silence of death. The rays of the sun, shining down on a frozen world, were met only by the shriek of the wind, and the groaning of crevasses as they yawned open across the surface of this vast ocean of ice.

Agassiz was also the first scientist to speculate that ice ages and subsequent warming periods have recurred many times in geological history. He eventually came to believe that each glacial epoch obliterated all life on earth, and that when the ice receded an entirely new creation arose. He felt this would explain the many mysterious gaps in the fossil record.

While the idea of the utter extinction and regeneration of life has long been discredited, there is no doubt that the global climate has fluctuated greatly in the past, and that the ages of ice have greatly affected all living things, including the human race.

Some scientists believe, in fact, that it is to the effects of the most recent ice age
we owe
the emergence of early civilization.

The onset of this glacial epoch, hundreds of thousands of years ago, must have brought catastrophic change to the earth's surface. Previously lush vegetation dwindled. Many animal species vanished, evolved, or migrated. The early tribes of humans, once simple hunters and gatherers, were forced into a nomadic existence, into the unknown, and they needed new tools for the journey.
New
ways of thinking. New words.

Byrne sets down his pen. Stories. They took their stories with them, to remind them who they were. And there were the tales brought back by those who scouted ahead. They moved through stories.

Byrne sits back in his chair. This isn't what he was asked to write. Trask wants his tourists to have the model, a brief explanatory text, and a view of the real thing. Prehistory will come alive for them, they will commemorate the moment by buying postcards, souvenirs, film for photographs.

In his enthusiasm for the idea Trask also considered a dome of blue, rather than transparent, glass. To illustrate fancifully how the site where the town lies was once submerged under ice. He then decided that would be too frightening, and might possibly offend the religious.

9

Byrne copies the words of Agassiz into his journal.

“No one can say exactly what physical forces are responsible for the recurring ages of ice. Nor is it
known
how long we have before our own, perhaps brief, summer comes to an end.”

10

They halt for the night at the edge of the icefield, pitching camp in the lee of a rock buttress. In the wedge tent, lit by a hanging lantern, they suck pastilles to soothe their burning throats. Hal brews coffee on the portable camp stove, mixes it with a few drops of rum in aluminum cups.

Fists of wind hammer the tent walls.

They are alone together. Out on the mountain they were kept distanced by the rigours and discipline of climbing. Now they are inches away from each other in this tiny tent. They make halting conversation about the wind, the cold, the next day's climb. Freya builds a wall of talk about the difficulty of photography in such vast natural landscapes. A vista that is breathtaking to the eye rarely keeps that awe-inspiring grandeur intact on film.

—You have to know what to leave out. You have to choose some detail to . . . suggest all the rest of it.

They are tired and the subject is soon exhausted. Freya inspects her camera, cleans the lenses.

Rawson sits uneasily under the swinging light that seems a moving figure of their unspoken thought, crossing the silence between them. He props his journal on his knees, reads over what he has written. Notes for a poem about ice:

Colors: blue, gray, white

Arts: architecture, sculpture, music

Hour: crepuscular

Senses: vision, touch

Organs: skin, lungs, skeleton

Artifacts: glass, porcelain, bone, paper

Contraries: blood, passion, Freya

Planets: Mercury, Pluto

Glaciers are seraphic. Think of Antarctica, embraced by a vast angel of ice.

—The wind really wants in, she says.

He looks up over his journal at her. She is digging in her rucksack, not looking at him.

Freya takes out a porcelain pipe, a smoking kit from a small tin case. She fills the pipe, lights it, and leans back against her piled gear to smoke.

—The look on your face, she laughs, handing
the pipe to him. As he takes it she says with mock solemnity,

—I should warn you, that's not any ordinary fine cut.

He sniffs at the sweetly pungent smoke curling out of the pipe.

—This is what? Hashish?

She nods.

—I first tried it in Darjeeling. Wonderful for fatigue, depression, nervous strain.

He allows himself an acid smile.

—Well then, hand it over. It's just what the doctor ordered.

—What's that supposed to mean?

—Nothing. Only I think the air's a bit thin up here for the intoxicating perfumes of the East.

She shakes her head.

—I thought you poets were supposed to thrive on new sensations.

Again he is the novice. With her, his only role. He takes a drag on the pipe, the acrid smoke searing his throat. Tensing himself against the urge to cough, he glares defiantly over her head, his eyes welling with tears.

He leans back and puffs out a perfect, redeeming smoke ring.

—Don't puff it, Freya says, poking a finger through the collapsing ring. Drink it. Savour it.

—Anything for you, my love.

—Hal. . . .

He sucks in another mouthful of smoke, then hands the pipe back to her. He swallows the smoke, feels it burn into his lungs. He breathes out and his head reels, but in a moment the sensation fades and is gone. His mind and body remain as they were, every ache and blister in place. His gaze focuses again on Freya. She has set the pipe down and is massaging her bare feet.

—Which father am I?

Her eyes flick up at him, glittering.

—Don't. That has nothing to do with us.

—It doesn't? I'm sure I must remind you of one of them. The paper father. The warm milk father. How about the toast and tea father?

—Don't mock that, please, Hal.

—I only want to know which one you're leaving behind this time. So I can try to be one of the others, or even myself, if that's possible. Just tell me how to do it.

She sets the pipe down carefully, her hand trembling, though it may be the wavering light that plays this trick.

Her hand. All her power over him seems concentrated there at this moment. He watches her hand with a sense of desperate urgency.

He thinks,
this is the absolute wrong place for
this. There's no room in this tent for thunderbolts.

—It wouldn't matter what you did, she says at last. It's me. I don't like hurting you, but I also know I'm not coming back. I never have before. This is how I live.

—Then I'll go with you.

—No.

—I'll follow you. You can't stop me from doing that.

She looks at him with a distant smile.

—Then I guess I'd have to shoot you.

11

They start across the icefield before dawn, carrying candle lanterns. Low cloud banks become visible after an hour. The greater expanse of the field is shrouded from them.

The sky grows steadily lighter and then darkens again suddenly. The wind strengthens. Needle droplets of rain sting their faces.

He hears a note. An unwavering high-pitched hum in the air near him. His ice-axe. He can feel the vibration through his wool gloves. He holds the axe up to examine it.

Freya grabs it out of his hand, flings it away onto the snow.

The electrified air crackles. Green lightning pops overhead and they crouch together as thunder smacks the field. The roar is a long time in dying.

—The enchanted axe, Hal shouts. Sings to warn you. Freya shrugs her shoulders, points to her ear.

Swiftly the storm cloud tumbles overhead, then breaks against the mountain wall.

The sun appears through the thinning veil of cloud, a pale disc. For a moment Hal thinks it must be the moon.

They help each other to their feet. Their hands grip each other's shoulders for a long moment.

Freya breaks the clasp.

—Sorry. All the bells were ringing.

12

He imagines that days are passing as they cross the icefield. There are no reliable landmarks in this sea of snow. They walk in single file, Freya taking the lead. The white expanse opens out as they move forward, growing in immensity the further they penetrate into it. Hummocks that appeared to be quite close recede into distant uplands, vanish completely, or turn, by some trick of light, into hollows down which they stumble, floundering into chest-high snowdrifts.

The world is drained of depth and colour, and he finds himself filling the empty space with phantom figures that silently watch him pass or trudge along with him. One of them is his father, who walks beside him for a while in silence and then says,

Where is this girl taking you, Hal?

Up a mountain, Dad.

It won't last, but you'll be glad you knew her. Someday you'll look back and be glad.

Light bursts briefly through the cloud cover, so intense it presses down like darkness, a negative of midnight. Hal watches Freya's shape drop below the edge of a swale ahead of him. Soon all he can see is the end of the rope that links him to her. For a moment he wonders who is really there at the other end of that swaying line. He stops. The rope pulls taut.

She reappears, reeling in the slack. Breathing hard, he mutters an excuse about the rope getting tangled. She smiles and says something encouraging it seems, but the words are taken by the wind. He is like that now: weightless, soundless, light enough to float up with the whirling ice crystals into the white sky.

I'll be a ghost to her. A lesser shade, haunting some room in her memory she hardly ever enters.

13

A knife-edge ridge of hard, sculpted snow is the last obstacle. Climbing pure geometry. On either side the slope drops away for hundreds of feet into a gloomy cirque.

They dig their ice axes and hobnail boots with greater confidence in this solid surface. They make good time, reaching the summit ridge at twelve-thirty, just as clouds roll in again.

14

They embrace at the summit. A brief, formal clasp.

The space around them is enclosed in ice fog, muffled, like a room. They make a cursory inspection of the cornice, prodding with axe handles for weaknesses, then take turns squinting through the field glasses in an unsuccessful attempt to pick out landmarks. The wind is relentless. They know they cannot stay very long. And suddenly it seems there is very little for them to do here.

—Should we try the mirror, Hal asks, for

Byrne?

Freya shakes her head.

—There's no sun.

15

Biscuits and coffee from a thermos bottle make up a quick summit meal.

While they eat, a gap is torn in the fog. Clouds shred away in the wind. The world is unveiled.

To the southwest stretches the rolling expanse of the icefield. They turn away from its unrelieved whiteness.

Down in the rocky valley the bright red roof of the Hot Springs Chalet. A toy house. Below it, the river's slender curve glitters through trees.

Some nearby peaks they can name by sight: Ammonite, Diadem, Alberta, Stutfield. And closer to them Parnassus, Athabasca, Arcturus. Almost directly below them, hundreds of feet down, stretches the rubble-strewn track of the glacier.

—Can you see Byrne's place?

—I see the nunatak, but I can't make out the shelter. Can you?

—I'm not sure.

Freya begins a contest, to describe the mountains ranged around them. Olympian palaces. The heavenly host bright with all their crowns. Beethoven's Ninth, final movement. Frozen writing desks.

—Damn it, Freya says.

—What?

—I have to pee.

—Not here.

They give in to giddy laughter.

—The mirror, Freya says. They make a hurried search of each other's pack, not sure which of them was carrying it.

Freya shakes her head.

—Forget about it. No time.

She sets up the collapsible tripod and begins snapping pictures with her Panoram portable.

16

She wants to kodak Hal for posterity. He shrugs his assent.

—Stand over there. We'll get the icefield in the background, for Byrne.

—Then I'll take one of you, Hal says. For me.