Icefields (9 page)

An ancient glacial moraine runs under part of the railroad grade, and alongside the chalet grounds. This moraine still has a core of glacial ice that was buried by
rock and never melted. I recommend that you find another location for your proposed hot spring pool, otherwise you may find the present site prone to destabilization.

When Trask heard about the doctor's recommendation, he was furious.

—It's one hell of a tall tale, Byrne.

—It's true.

Trask leaned over the chalet railing and spat.

—As true as that woman's stories. Yeah, I heard them too: 'My father was a maharajah and my mother was a snake woman.' Christ.

Byrne stared at Trask.

—That's right, doctor, I'm telling you it was all horse manure. Here's my version: she was a fatherless brat hanging around the trading post, and some fool made the mistake of teaching her how to read.
Arabian Nights
and
Tales of King Arthur,
that's where she got her life story.

The railway company sent out their own geologists, who verified Byrne's findings. The railroad had to be diverted slightly for several hundred feet, and the hot spring pool was built higher up on the hill behind the chalet. Trask met the doctor in town one day and whispered,

—No more icy surprises, please.

20

While they sit together under the spruce tree, the mist rises and dissipates. In the widening sky, wraiths of rain clouds drift. Sunshine lights up the far slopes of the valley. Elspeth and Byrne are still within the cool shadow of the mountain wall.

—One thing you can depend on here, Byrne says, is the changeable weather.

A raven flaps overhead, croaks once as it climbs into the sky. It weaves slowly from side to side, loops around once as its wings ride the wind currents. Just before the dark shape dwindles in the distance to invisibility, they see it veer to the left, away from the bright, forested side of the valley. The raven comes into sharp black focus against the white gleam of snow, as it glides down into a glacial cirque.

—Why would it choose the dead side? Elspeth

says.

—It's a scavenger, Byrne says. An opportunist. Chance meals always show up more clearly in the snow. And more often, too, I would imagine.

—That's another tidbit I can pass on to the guests.

—It sounds like you get a lot of strange questions.

—Yes, but I don't mind. I like talking to people. Most people. It's the ones who won't deign to say a word to me that make my blood boil.

She smiles.

—Once or twice I've come close to ruining things for myself. There was one old fellow, he put so much effort into being oblivious to my existence. He would tap his saucer with a spoon, and carry on this lofty conversation with his wife while I poured the tea. When I dared ask him a question he'd stare past me and his wife would answer for him. It drove me mad, but after a while I thought it was funny. If I had suddenly dropped to the floor in a dead faint, I'm sure he would've stepped right over me without a word and gone on his way. I almost tried it, just to see what he'd do.

—Then I hope for your sake my father doesn't visit. That sounds something like him, although in his case it's not deliberate. He's too busy thinking about his work to notice the rest of the human race. The man is nearly seventy and he's just started working on another textbook.
The Principles of Obstetrics.

—He's a doctor, too.

—Yes, although now he mostly lectures and writes. Kate, his wife, told me he ate and slept in his study for two weeks while he was finishing the last book.

—She must be a patient soul.

—She is. With me, too, in those first years. I'm afraid I made things difficult for her then. But she never said a word about it. And now when I write home, she's the one I write to, if I want a reply. When I write to my father the letters end up in a stack on the floor.

—What do they think of your coming back to Jasper to work?

—I never asked.

Byrne glances up into the sunlight.

—We'd better start back while this good weather holds.

21

Byrne hires one of Trask's guides to help him haul supplies to Arcturus glacier. Hal Rawson, who had startled Trask's guests with his quote from Shelley.

Byrne and Rawson ride out to the glacier, bringing along a pack pony loaded with the doctor's gear. Rawson sets up camp, cooks, and cares for the horses, while Byrne spends the day on the ice.

In the evening Byrne returns to camp, exhausted, sunburnt, taciturn. He sits under the hanging lantern, absorbed in his sketches and field notes.

—Would you like something to eat, doctor?

Byrne looks up in surprise at Hal, who is holding out to him a plate of mutton stew. He had forgotten he is not alone.

—This seems pretty earthy work for a man of letters, Byrne says.

—Or for a man of medicine, Rawson says, and
blushes. He swallows a mouthful of food, makes a grimace.

—Pretty earthy stew, as well. My apologies. They share a laugh.

—No, Rawson says, this place wasn't quite what I imagined it would be.

22

Hal Rawson first disembarked at the Jasper station on a chilly May evening. He was advised by telegram to wait for the carriage from the chalet.

A few tourists milled about, muffled in overcoats, stamping their feet in front of the stove. Voices were low and weak. A hall of strangers. Rawson found a vacant place on a bench and from his valise took a shiny new leatherbound book. Collie and Stutfield's
Climbs and Explorations.
His father's parting gift.

A little boy in a navy jacket ran across the room clutching a Noah's ark. He collided with Rawson's legs.

An explosion of toy animals. Rawson caught one tiny figurine as it fell: a white bird. He handed it to the boy who was already kneeling, gathering his scattered menagerie. A young woman in a huge fur coat smiled at Rawson as she led the boy back to his seat, her gaze charged with some emotion that drove him to glance down quickly at his book.

Carriages arrived and carried the tourists away to fireplaces and warm beds. The sound of harness bells, hooves on packed snow, growing distant. Soon there were only two people left sitting in the station hall. Rawson and an old man across from him. The stationmaster, chained to his pocketwatch, eyed them with suspicion.

From an inner room the telegraph clicked at a breathless pace. Drowsily, Rawson wondered whether the receiver could sense the emotion of the sender in those disembodied dots and dashes.

The old man said a few words in a language Rawson did not understand. Smiling, he held up a bottle. Greek lettering. Retsina. Rawson declined with a shake of his head. The old man made a face, a grotesque parody of sorrow. He took a drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

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.