Icefields (5 page)

Sexsmith woke at dawn. His dream lingered with him, shining at the edges of his mind.

Viraj was at the campfire, brewing tea and heating water for the lord's morning shave. Sexsmith was surprised to see the young woman sitting beside him. The paint was gone from her face. Now she was only a thin girl warming herself by the fire. A cold, hungry mortal. The brothers stood nearby, talking with Macpherson, who had crossed back to the island with two pack ponies. Sexsmith scratched his stubbled neck.
Throat cutters.

He sat down on the camp stool by the door of his tent, picked up one of his boots. The watchfire Viraj had tended outside his tent all night was cold ash. This was their fire, not his. Viraj brought him a cup of tea and he took it without speaking.

Elias, the younger brother, laughed. A quiet, pleasing laugh that made Sexsmith glance up. He liked Elias, his soft voice and unassuming manner.

Whatever Elias had said, it had even put a smile on Joseph's gaunt, scarred face. Sexsmith lowered his head and tugged on his boots. The word for a smile like that was
diabolical.

Sexsmith looked up again just as Viraj handed the young woman a cup of tea.

33

When they reached dry ground, Sexsmith said,

The Stoneys were amused at something this morning.

Macpherson nodded.

Elias had a dream, sir. He thought it worth the telling.

Sexsmith called the brothers to him. He asked to hear the dream. Elias nodded.

I
went with you to your city of London. There were plenty of buffalo there. I hunted them, with the Queen's sons. We chased buffalo over a jump. But when we went down to the bottom of the cliff, the animals had turned into books.

He grinned shyly at his brother and went on, in a near whisper.

The Queen's sons tried to read the books, but all the words were smashed in.

Sexsmith glanced at Joseph, whose gaunt face had withdrawn into grey immobility.

So tell me, Joseph. You are a wise fellow. Will you interpret your brother's dream?

34

The hunting party climbed a ridge that ran alongside a gently rising slope of dirty snow and ice.

Arcturus glacier,
Sexsmith named it.
Bear watcher.

Dark clouds were piled up over the peaks in the west. Macpherson expected snow at any time. He told Sexsmith that there would be no game at such an altitude.

The burn on the girl's palm,
Sexsmith said.
If her map is accurate, we're just below it now. I want to know what's up there, what she's hiding from us.

The young woman shook her head and spoke a few words to the Stoney brothers. Joseph turned to Sexsmith.

She's been there,
he said.
In a dream. She says it's a spirit place. Not for the living.

I'll find out for myself,
Sexsmith said.
She's afraid of something. Something we'll discover if we go up there.

The young woman would not look at him.

They got her from the Snakes,
Sexsmith said to Viraj.
And we all know the serpent is the subtlest beast of the field.

He sent everyone back down to the camp, told Macpherson to keep a close watch on the young woman.
She'll be ransom against my safe return.
He went on alone with the Stoney brothers.

35

It was late. Byrne and Sara sat facing each other in front of the stove. The flame of the candle on the shelf fluttered, drowning in its own wax. In the sepia gloom, Sara's skin resembled parchment.

—My father and the Company men stayed below in camp. While they waited the sun came out, and ice began to break off the wall of the glacier. The Company men gathered chunks of this broken ice that fell near them, to soothe the blisters on their hands and feet.

Sara knelt in front of the firebox, nudged the door open with a stick of stove wood and tossed it in. She stood up and turned towards Byrne.

—Athabasca came up to my father. She held out one of these broken pieces to him. He took it. It was exactly the size of a cricket ball, he told me, and looked like a blue-green diamond. He held it for a moment.

Sara cupped her hands around an invisible piece of ice.

—It burned.

Her hands moved apart.

—He dropped it. It was the first time he had been this close to ice. He had never touched it before.

36

Sexsmith and the brothers returned to camp the next evening. Macpherson was called into the lord's tent. A short time later he came back out to announce that the hunting trip was over. They would start back down in the morning.

The Company men grinned at one another. One of them brought out his fiddle, but Macpherson held up a hand in warning. Sexsmith was in a black mood. The sounds of celebration might give him cause to change his mind.

The fiddler set his fiddle down. He closed his eyes and began to tap his foot noiselessly on the earth. His fingers touched the strings of an invisible instrument. His body swayed to unheard music. The others stared at him and Macpherson shook his head and turned away. After another moment of hesitation the Company men slowly came together, choking back laughter, linking arms to dance a silent reel.

37

—What was it? Byrne asked. What turned Sexsmith back?

Sara shrugged.

—Snow, ice, she said. Maybe nothing more than that.

Byrne frowned, sat back in his chair.

—When I was in the crevasse. … He paused, rubbed his shoulder. What exactly did the girl mean … a spirit place?

—I don't know, Sara said. I was very young when she went away. I don't remember her.

—She was your mother.

—Yes.

38

On the return journey, Sexsmith came down with a chest cold. He stayed in his tent and refused to travel for several days. The hunting party camped on the river flats near the trading post.

The Stoney brothers told Viraj that their sister could be of help to the English lord.

Viraj went with this message to Sexsmith, who was bundled up in the buffalo robe he had taken back from Viraj, reading
The Tempest.
He did not care to be
reminded of the world outside his canvas study.

I wish I could be transported back to England without leaving this tent. That would be pleasant indeed.

Viraj urged Sexsmith to let the young woman see him.

She may be able to help you, sir.

And then again she may be the death of me.

Viraj shook his head.

No.

Sexsmith swung the book upward and struck him on the side of the face.

You forget your place.

You are quite right,
Viraj said.

He left the tent. He rode in a canoe with the Stoney brothers and the young woman, back to their fall camp on the far side of the river. When Sexsmith called for him he refused to come back.

Finally Sexsmith crossed over himself. In the Stoney camp, surrounded by willow racks of drying meat, they came to a gentlemanly agreement: Viraj was no longer in Sexsmith's service.

39

The next summer Athabasca took Viraj as her husband. They had a child the following year, and Viraj gave her the name Sarasvati. Her mother called her by
another name, one from her own language.

In the fall, Joseph and Elias brought Viraj hunting with them, taught him to read the tracks of deer, moose, bear, wolf. And one other. A single print in the snow, invisible to Viraj until the brothers knelt beside it. Further on they found a camp and a pit of warm ashes in a narrow ravine. Joseph picked up a broken twig, its needles still bright green. It had been carried from somewhere else, from a tree that was unknown to Viraj, one that did not grow on this side of the mountains.

The Snake people,
Joseph said.

When Viraj and the brothers returned to the Stoney camp, the Snake people came out of the forest after them like ghosts, four men, three women, a child. They had come into the valley from the west to trade furs and, though Athabasca did not remember them, she knew their stories.

One evening Athabasca gave Viraj the stone from around her neck. When the Snake people left that night, without a word, she went with them.

There was a storyteller in my village
, Viraj said to Sara when she was much older,
who had one green eye. When I was a little boy I dared to ask him about it, and he told me his eye was green because his wife had left him. He said that long ago she wove a bolt of green cloth, the most beautiful that had ever been seen. He was very proud of what she had done, since it gave him great prestige
in the village. Then one day his wife put on the green sari she had made from this cloth, walked out into the tall grass on the edge of the village, and disappeared. The storyteller searched for days and days, and sat by the tall grass, waiting, but she did not return. The storyteller leaned forward and pointed to his green eye. He said,
Look closely and tell me if you see her.

Sarasvati grew up with her father. The people of the valley, the hunters and trappers and their children, found her name strange and difficult. They took her name, carried it around with them, stretched and scraped it like a strip of hide, wore it down into something more brief and familiar.

She was never called by the name her mother had given her, and in time it was forgotten. She became Sara.

40

Shouts, from the children outside, in the meadow.

Collie and Stutfield returned at last, alone. Thompson, Trask, and the wranglers had already started south for their headquarters in Banff. The two men strode into the cabin, sunburnt and wearily triumphant.

Collie had not found his mountain. He had stumbled upon a new world.

—The icefield, he said, eyes glittering in his wind-blasted face. I thought it would be an ordinary névé, feeding a single glacier. But it's huge, Ned. Stretches for miles. Greater than any
mer de glace
in the Alps. Breathtaking.

Stutfield nodded his agreement.

—We are probably the first human beings ever to see it. Definitely to have traversed it.

Byrne glanced at Sara. Her face was impassive. She knew he would say nothing, he read that much in her eyes. He was still afraid she had been lying. Weaving a smoke of fantasy around him that would shred away in the cold light of reason that entered the cabin with the two scientists.

—Think of it, Collie whispered. The last great remnant of the ice sheet that once covered this continent.

41

The next morning, Collie and Stutfield went to find Swift.

—I've never seen the icefield, Sara said as she waited with Byrne on the cabin steps. The great ice prairie, the Stoneys called it. A good place to stay away from. My father and I never went up there to see it for ourselves.

—Never? Byrne said. Living so close by all these years?

Sara shook her head and glanced up across the valley at the ice.

—In my father's country, he told me, the mountains are gods, or at least the palaces of gods. And, I think, for my mother's people as well. Spirit places. It was enough for us that we could see them from the valley.

42

Snow flurried through the morning air as Swift's cart, pulled by two lean horses, creaked up in front of the trading post.

Swift jumped down from the box of the cart with the agility of a cat. He wore a grey suit and necktie. His gaunt face was shadowed by a stetson, the brim of which he tipped toward Sara in a slow and deliberate mockery of politeness. His hawk eyes studied Byrne for a brief moment.

—Let's go, he said.

Byrne turned to Sara. He considered the few coins in his buttoned breast pocket, then decided against it.

—Thank you, he said.

She nodded and then said,

— Don't get lost, Swift.

Byrne was installed in a corner of the cart. He wrapped himself in a sleigh robe.

Swift flicked the reins and they jolted into motion. Collie and Stutfield rode ahead on two of the expedition ponies purchased from Trask. They were smiling, pleased with the morning air and with themselves, discoverers. Byrne glanced back at the cabin. Sara was gone from the doorway.

He sank back into the cushions and closed his eyes. The cart bumped and swayed along the track, lulling him. Bringing a rhythm, and a singsong voice, out of the past.

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
in a shower of rain
he stepped in a puddle right up to his middle
and never went there again.

43

Sexsmith had to be satisfied with a black bear, a young male that Baptiste shot on the return trip. The Company men skinned the bear and cut it open. There were live ants in the stomach. One of the men took up the skin and danced with it around the fire, humming a Strauss waltz while the others laughed and clapped their hands.

Sexsmith examined the carcass, stripped to pink muscle. It looked like the naked body of a man. The hairless face grimaced at him in frozen hilarity.