Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  Swift glanced around, turning where he stood. He knelt and drove the stake into the earth.

  46

  When he had built a sod-roofed hut, Swift went exploring further up the Athabasca valley. He had seen a frayed rope around the neck of one of the horses.

  He found a cabin and a fire burning nearby, with a black pot suspended over it from a tripod of aspen poles. He lifted the lid of the pot. Three skinned rabbits, eyes gaping, turning in the bubbling water. Swift grinned and nodded his head.

  He heard a shout and looked up. A group of women were walking towards him across the clearing. One of them raised her hand and waved to him. Her voice, with its unmistakable English accent, rang like a bell through the still air.

  Swift shouldered his axe and stalked away.

  The next day a welcoming committee of men came to Swift’s Cabin. Albert Blackbird and his four sons. They asked him if he was planning to stay and he said he was.

  How many people live in this valley? Swift asked

  them.

  Seven families here, by the Athabasca, Albert Blackbird said. And five further up, at the river’s source.

  What about the Englishwoman?

  Blackbird shook his head.

  There haven’t been any English here for years.

  47

  His cabin was finished. By the next summer he had broken land and planted wheat.

  He knelt one bright morning at the edge of his field and put his hand close to the earth. Felt a cool rivulet of air being sucked along, as though a giant were drawing breath.

  The fire appeared on the crest of the bare hill. Smoke dragged behind the rushing flames like a grey cape. The wild grasses exploded into black ash as the heat roared over them.

  The other men in the valley gathered at Swift’s, shouting to each other through the thickening smoke. One man rode up in a hay wagon, reining in his two frantic draft horses. The others waved at him, pointed over his head and he turned, saw the burden of fire he was carrying to them. The man jumped down and unhitched the horses. He took hold of their bridles, jerked their heads in the direction of the river, and slapped their flanks to start them galloping. Behind him the burning wagon disappeared in its own smoke.

  Most of the women had gone down to the river with the children, although some came to help fight the fire.

  It never stops burning, Albert Blackbird told Swift. Just hides underground for a few years.

  They fought the fire for the rest of that day and into the night. Swift was seen wherever the flames were the most threatening, his shovel flying. They fought for three days and nights, resting when the many smaller fires seemed to be vanquished, digging furiously wherever they leapt to life again.

  On the morning of the third day, people from Arcturus Creek appeared on horseback. Sara was with them. They had wakened the day before to ash falling like grey snow and had come to offer their help.

  That night the fire fighters could see a constellation of livid embers in the blackness around their fields. They remained watchful.

  At midday a grey twilight hung over the valley, and from it rain began to fall. The charred land steamed and hissed. The Blackbird brothers, the Miettes, Finlay and his wife Mistaya, and Sara gathered around the place where Swift stood, pouring water from a leather flask over his head.

  Too exhausted to celebrate, they sat down together on the bare earth and looked into one another’s smoke-blackened faces without recognition.

  Swift looked across at Sara, who was sitting crouched forward, holding a wet cloth to her face.

  You are the Englishwoman? he said.

  Sara stared at him, and understanding slowly dawned. The day, last summer, she had been visiting her friends the Blackbirds at their cabin and had called out to him across the clearing. He had been fooled by her voice.

  Yes, I am.

  Swift nodded, his face twisting into a grimace that could have been an answering smile.

  You did well.

  The others laughed, and Swift soon realized his mistake.

  Well I’m damned.

  When Sara got up to leave she stumbled and fell to the ground. Swift’s cabin was the nearest. He helped her to walk there, sat her down and gave her a tin mugful of water. Then he cooked a meal of fried bread and potatoes.

  It’s not my own bread, he said. Not yet.

  While she ate he stood at the open doorway squinting out into the dusk. When she was finished he said, I’ve still got some work.

  He placed a heavy black phonograph record on the Victrola, the tenor John Parkinson singing “Che gelida manina” from Puccini’s La Bohéme. He asked Sara to play it again when it ended, and to keep playing it until he returned.

  He took a shovel and went out. In the dark he was able to find the last of the embers, invisible in daylight, and smother them in earth.

  The smoke surrounded him, burned his eyes. He put a wet rag over his nose and mouth. Found his way back to the cabin by the sound of the tenor’s voice.

  48

  —It was the only music I owned, he tells Byrne. Other than my bugle, which doesn’t get much use out here. I wore that Parkinson record out long ago. There’ve been a few fires over the years.

  Swift creakily hums the melody. He shuts his eyes, settles back in his chair, and folds his arms with finality across his chest. The story is at an end, and the evening as well. Sara offers to take Byrne to town in the pony trap.

  —Nonsense, I’ll walk. After all, it’s so late.

  —The pony knows the way, and old people like me sleep like owls, with one eye open.

  —I didn’t mean to imply. …

  —Hop up.

  —Thank you.

  —Are you coming with us, Louisa?

  The girl nods and scrambles up into the trap between them. Swift wakes up, mutters a good night.

  After they have driven for some distance in silence, Byrne says,

  —About the arm, holding the spike. You believe him?

  —Yes, the girl says sleepily. Sara puts an arm around her.

  —There’s your answer.

  —I suppose it is. And really I’m not one who should be doubting the fabulous tales of others.

  —I know, Sara says.

  Byrne stares straight ahead.

  —You know.

  —Not everything.

  —But you understand what brought me back

  here.

  —Some of it.

  —What?

  —You looked about this pale the night they brought you to the cabin.

  He turns. Her grey eyes hold him.

  —You were feverish, and you babbled a fair bit.

  —What about? He glances at the girl. Tell me, Sara, what did I say?

  —Enough that I could guess we might see you again. That there was something here you wouldn’t forget. You’d have to come back and try to finish the story.

  They drive in silence around the bend of the dark hill. The lights of Jasper flicker through the trees.

  —Can I finish it? Byrne finally asks.

  —I don’t know everything, but I know it’s a story with wings, Sara says. They’re hard to catch.

  49

  An early September snowfall brings summer to an end. The chalet road is clogged with slush, creviced with wheel-ruts. But on the morning of Byrne’s departure the sun is shining again. The breeze from the west is warm.

  He searches for Elspeth at the chalet, to say goodbye. She is not there.

  —She asked for the day off, Trask says. I nearly fell out of my chair.

  —She didn’t say where she’d be?

  —No, but I can give her your regards, if that’s what you want. You’re going now, I take it? Because the eleven o’clock run into town is pulling out in ten minutes.

  —No, I’m not leaving until later today.

  By midafternoon the snow is gone. The sky is cloudless. Byrne gazes across the valley at Arcturus glacier, its blue ice bare and gleaming again.

&nbs
p; In the evening he meets Elspeth stepping from the chalet train.

  —I thought I’d missed you, she says. Freya and Hal took me hiking with them. Are you leaving now?

  —No, Byrne says. I’ve decided to stay one more

  week.

  50

  Freya. Her history. Hal understands that for all her confidence she walks a tightrope. She runs, leaps, pulls her daredevil stunts over an abyss like the one that dashed her father to pieces. And he stumbles along behind her. She needs no help from him. If he gets too close he will only throw off her sense of balance.

  She crouches with her back to him on the gravel shore of the river, working with her camera. He tells her he might visit his parents this winter.

  —Where do they live? she asks without looking at him.

  —They’re divorced. My father hides out in his cottage on the Ottawa River. He makes furniture. My mother is remarried, in Toronto.

  She is silent for a moment, then turns to face him.

  —I’m leaving at the end of the week, she says.

  —You should start packing then.

  —No, there’s plenty of time for that. I don’t bring much with me.

  51

  Hal goes with Freya to the station, helps with her baggage, and then stands in the crowded waiting hall, avoiding her eyes.

  —Say something, Hal.

  —Don’t leave.

  —We talked about it. I’m coming back next spring.

  —Yes, I know.

  —This is not how I wanted to say goodbye.

  —I don’t think it can be helped.

  In the station, waiting for her train out of Jasper, Freya glimpses Byrne as she passes the gentlemen’s smoking room. At least she thinks it might be the doctor. She stops, takes a backward step. She can see only the back of his head, his shoulders. One hand holding an open book.

  She steps forward, then hesitates. The one man in this town she’s not sure how to approach.

  The man that might be Byrne rises abruptly and walks out the far door. Freya waits a moment longer, then enters the room filled with blue smoke and men. Heads dart up from behind newspapers, eyes follow her. A lioness passing through the room, surefooted, indifferent to lesser powers.

  She pauses to glance down at the open book left on the table.

  Swedenborg’s The True Christian Religion. Freya wrinkles her nose. Lunatic theosophist stuff. She’d had it propounded to her by melancholy, bejewelled women at her father’s dinner parties. Her eyes take in just a few words before she moves past the table.

  —wonderful it is that each one of that great host, in whichever direction he turns his body and his gaze, beholds the Lord in front of him.

  As she turns back to the main hall she knows it was Byrne.

  Elspeth

  The snow is almost gone from the grounds.

  Frank is expecting great crowds this year. The Grand Trunk has been advertising all over the continent, but despite the warm weather the hotel is still practically empty. So lately I’ve found a lot more time for the glasshouse. I was there tending to things most of yesterday. Hal kindly risked his neck on a ladder to help me clean the dust and leaves off the roof panes. After that I worked among the plants alone, repotting, watering, planting new bulbs, with all this glorious sunlight streaming in. I’d forgotten that on good days this place can be close to paradise.

  In the afternoon I took a rake to the lawn around the outside of the glasshouse. It’s the caretaker’s job, but I love raking the grass in the spring, when it’s still yellow and matted, just beginning to breathe again. When I drag the rake over the grass it seems to purr, like a cat getting its back scratched.

  The truth is I’ve been hiding out in the glasshouse. Ned Byrne has been here for three days now. He’s back for the summer, as he said he would be, but not as a railway doctor. He brought a crate of supplies with him, and he says he’s going to spend his summer exploring the icefield. I said I hoped he’d come visit us at the chalet once in a while.

  God, I’ve really turned into a wilting flower.

  NUNATAK

  AN ISLAND OF ROCK RISING ABOVE THE SURROUNDING ICE, UPON WHICH ONE MAY DISCOVER THE TENUOUS PRESENCE OF LIFE.

  1

  Prismatic compass. Clinometre. Steel tape for baseline measures. Red paint for marking fixed stations.

  Byrne cracks open a new notebook. 24 May 1912.

  By calculating flow rate, one should be able to predict the approximate time it would take an object imbedded at a particular location in the ice to travel to the terminus and melt out.

  He places a line of stones across the ice surface, stretching from one lateral moraine to the other. Every week he returns and checks the alignment of the stones, with reference to painted boulders on the moraines. A table in his notebook slowly fills with numbers.

  2

  In the notebook he also sets down his observations.

  The branches of the trees near the terminus all grow to one side of the trunk, away from the knife wind blowing off the ice. Ragged pennants.

  Stones, fragments of a lost continent, lie scattered in the dirty snow of the till plain. A shattered palette at my feet, the mad artist having just stalked away. Grey breccia flecked with acid green and primrose yellow. Pock-marked slabs into which powder of burnt sienna has been ground. The many-coloured constellations of lichen growth: rocks splattered with alizarin crimson and cadmium orange. The purple and white veins of limestone.

  The enchantment of these mute fragments is undeniable. The bewitching garden of signs. Down among the cool stones, one might not perceive the burning rays of sunlight reflected from lingering patches of summer snow, until it is too late.

  In certain rare conditions of wind and sunlight, glacial ice evaporates immediately, without passing through the liquid stage. This is called sublimation, a more refined form of melting.

  The phenomenon is often accompanied by a rhythmic crackling sound, as if invisible feet were stepping across the ice.

  3

  Freya leaps. She arrows into the water, slips beneath the broken surface. Her body ripples and recedes, a flickering tongue of flame.

  Elspeth watches her from the steps in the shallow end of the pool. She knows that Freya and Hal swim here, naked, late at night. And she knows she should put a stop to it, before they are seen by guests and Trask finds out. But Freya has won her over, captivated her as she has Hal. Ned Byrne, as well, though he pretends otherwise. And Freya is aware of it. Elspeth has felt the ripple of uneasy attraction that passes between the two of them when they are together in a room. Like two solitary wolves aware of one another across a clearing, both keeping the unknown animal in sight at a respectful distance.

  Freya’s sleek head rises from the dark surface of the water, her ruddy face and pale shoulders steaming in the cool night air. She smiles, wading toward Elspeth.

  —You were right, this is heavenly.

  4

  The sun here sends forth billowing streamers and scintillant curtains of radiance. On the earth this light acts strangely: it has substance, life: it bobs, spills, dances, changes direction. It appears and disappears suddenly, changing the colour and shape of objects in front of your eyes.

  An exposed ice surface often displays a dull, undifferentiated facade. The intricate crystalline structure can be revealed, however, by pouring a warm liquid over the ice. Urine is the most readily available reagent for this purpose. It will seep into the spaces between the crystals and disassociate them briefly, long enough for the pattern of formation to be examined.

  The mud at the glacier terminus has a consistency similar to quicksand. You step carefully from one exposed rock surface to another.

  The mud swallows boots, as I discovered yesterday. Elspeth was amused to see me limping up to the chalet with one barefoot.

  5

  Byrne reads the glacier’s writing.

  Tiny fragments of hard quartz, frozen to the basal surface of the glacier, scar the limestone bedr
ock as the ice flows forward.

  This undersurface, visible from inside an ice cave at the terminus, although smooth in appearance and glossy, like a polished gemstone, is studded with small grains and fragments of rock.

  The shiny polish, the fine striations, and irregular chock marks which occur in the underlying bedrock result from contact with this granular ice as it flows.

  He makes careful observations of these striation patterns. Crossing the till plain he finds a boulder on which the striations are wavy and realizes it is a petroglyph. Carved by someone in prehistory. A radial series of lines around a central disc. Perhaps a representation of the sun.

  Byrne climbs a huge erratic at the edge of the north lateral moraine, finds a river of striations in the rock and follows it. Where the lines submerge underneath the shell of ice there is a labyrinth of scars. They cross and recross the natural markings like a palimpsest. Fossil worm tracks, Byrne thinks, then moves closer.

  There are human figures, crude and distorted, but recognizable in various poses: fighting, hunting, giving birth. And other figures, more like animals. Interweaving among the human shapes. And curving lines like the traceries of braided streams. Circles. Arrows. Lines of force.

  He traces a frieze along the flank of the cabin-sized boulder.

  Confusing everything is the presence of the glacial scars. Undeviating straight lines. They lure his linear mind’s eye into following them, away from the human carvings.

  The carvings cannot be a history. They do not flow in an orderly sequence.Who carved them? he wonders. Sara had said the Snakes once lived in this valley. Athabasca’s people.

  Following, tracing, taking notes. So that he can avoid leaving the glacier, he makes a cache of food under some morainal rubble and sets up a canvas tent on the till plain. He bathes in a meltwater fall that spills into a shallow rock basin. In the crevices of his wind-hardened face, and along the wings of his nose, every morning he finds and scrubs out fine white powder, rock flour.