Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  He continues his orbit of Jasper, moving outward again, a cold satellite glowing with secret fire.

  She is here somewhere. He will meet her soon. She will look into his eyes and realize that he has finally seen her.

  21

  He checks his pocketwatch and realizes that the last train for the chalet will be leaving soon. If he misses it, he will be stuck in town for the night.

  Hurrying back to the main street he catches sight of her, on the steps of the sloping lawn that fronts the warden’s office. She is with an old couple, two small, frail-looking people. The old man has long, silky white hair that gleams like an unkempt halo in the lamplight.

  Elspeth is pointing across the river, towards Signal Mountain, its peak caught in the fleeting amber of sunset. Standing close to her, the old man and woman listen to what she is saying and nod their heads. Byrne thinks of two seagulls, battered and dazed as if they had just flown through a storm, and now huddled under the shelter of a loving wing. The scene might be one for a sentimental painting, Byrne thinks. Evening in Jasper.

  Her parents. He recalls that recently she had talked of them. She was hoping they might visit her. At that time, he had envisioned two tall, stern figures, disapproving in principle of the place their daughter had come to live, sourly listing off the inconveniences of the voyage the moment they stepped from the train. Plain, dour, undemonstrative folk.

  And now he sees them laughing at something she has said, her father’s hand in hers, her mother gazing up at her. A look of wonder at a daughter grown so tall and graceful and strong.

  He hesitates. The bell on the station platform clangs. Elspeth glances across the street and sees him. She waves. Byrne nods and then turns abruptly, hurrying down the stone steps into the station.

  22

  As the chalet train pulls out of the station, someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns. Elspeth. He gets up and slides into the seat beside her.

  —When I saw you, he says, I thought you were staying in town. I’m sorry. … I didn’t want to miss the train.

  —We were just saying goodbye. My parents are taking the eastbound in the morning.

  She brushes back a stray lock of hair, a nervous gesture he has never seen before. He realizes she has been struggling to keep back tears. For a moment he thinks his behaviour on the street is to blame, and then remembers the leave-taking she has just come from. Unlike him, she stays in Jasper every winter. It may be years before she sees her family again.

  —You didn’t have to worry about the train, she says. They wouldn’t dare leave without me.

  23

  Byrne takes Elspeth up to the glacier. Snow has fallen for two days, dusting the lower glacier and even piling into drifts higher up, near the nunatak. They climb the lateral moraine to avoid crevasses and then strike out over the snow, roped together, Byrne hacking with his ice axe every few steps.

  They come to an open space of level ice that Byrne cleared of snow the day before.

  Byrne walks out carefully onto the bare ice surface, testing its strength after a morning of warm sun. He reaches a spot where a thin sheet of meltwater has accumulated on the ice. He steadies himself with the ice axe and leans his weight on one foot. The ice gives slightly, and he hears the chirrup of air bubbles. He steps back. A hairline crack has formed in the ice under his boot. He turns and treads carefully back to the snowbank. Elspeth has disappeared. Her boot prints lead up the side of the snow dune.

  —Elspeth?

  —Over here. . . .

  Her voice is muffled by snow and wind, so that he can only make out a few words.

  —Snow angel. . . .

  Byrne drops one of his skates.

  —What?

  He sees her hand waving from behind the wind-chiseled crest of the dune, and climbs to her. She smiles, gestures to the winged impression she has created in the deeper, drifted snow of the hollow.

  —I haven’t made one of these since I was a little girl. I’d forgotten how lovely they are.

  He crouches beside her.

  —Your turn, she says, her smile fading at his intense, misplaced gaze. He is looking past her at the shape her body has left in the snow.

  —It’s beautiful.

  She flicks up a gloveful of snow that powders into his face.

  —Oh. She puts a hand over her mouth. I didn’t mean for that to happen.

  He smiles, wipes at his eyes with his scarf.

  —It feels. . . .

  —Tell me.

  —Like this.

  He sinks beside her onto the snow. With her lips she brushes away the snow on his eyelids, his forehead. He bends to her. They touch each other with their faces, their wrists, the only skin left bare in the cold.

  —Are we going to skate?

  —I don’t think so.

  24

  —I like that, he says.

  —What?

  —The way you touch the page with your fingers as you read.

  She puts down the paper cover copy of Wuthering Heights. She is sitting up on the bed, a blanket over her bare shoulders. He lies beside her. The latched door of the shelter rattles in the wind.

  —I suppose I like the change in texture, when you pass from the type to the margin. The feel of the blank page around the words.

  His mouth creases in amusement.

  —You can feel that?

  —Well, I imagine I can. Sometimes I think it’s half the pleasure of reading.

  He props himself up on one elbow.

  —There’s something I want you to see. Some of my notes.

  —No. No more history. No more dates and little-known facts.

  He slides from the bed, across to his worktable, and thumbs through his stack of notebooks.

  —If you want to know what I’m really doing out here every day. …

  —I think I do.

  —Then read this.

  —I’d rather hear it from you.

  —It wouldn’t come out right. I would simplify things too much. This will give you the uncertainty.

  She takes the book he has opened, his finger pointing out the place where she should begin. These are the notes he made after his trip to Paris, when he shut himself up in his London flat, pacing, gazing out the window. Elspeth reads and he remembers the writing.

  25

  First the crevasse. Everything he could remember. The winged shape. And then notes from memory of the stories told him by Sara, by the settler Swift on the journey to Edmonton.

  Notes that lead nowhere, that circle back on themselves. Notes taken while studying Sexsmith’s memoir of his travels in the Rocky Mountains. Sexsmith’s tales of hunting adventures, a bare mention of the Stoney brothers and the young woman. Nothing about the map on her palm, just the observation that she was a sort of good luck charm for the brothers. And of the icefield, not one word. Sexsmith wrote of his decision to turn back, blaming it on fatigue and the grumbling of the men.

  Notes that Byrne took as he read everything he could find on glaciers and the ice ages. The romantic Agassiz, John Tyndall the cool-headed Victorian, the methodical observations of the Vaux family.

  He copied out Tyndall’s quiet confessions:

  I was soon upon the ice, once more alone, as I delight to be at times.

  For Tyndall, a greater mystery than glacial dynamics was the human imagination. From a few scattered observations it had dared to reconstruct the prehistory of the world. Was imagination, he wondered, an energy locked like latent heat in ancient inorganic nature?

  Or rather, Byrne wrote in his journal, was it a power that overflowed from some unseen source, pressing inexorably forward to enclose and reshape the world?

  And with that thought, a fact he had always known and yet ignored rose into the light of significance. Glaciers are rivers. Water.

  He stood up, went over to the window of his study and opened it. The sky was a white roof from which rain dropped like melting snow. Leaning on the sill in his shirtsleeves, he gazed down t
he wet ravine of the street, breathed in the damp ash odour of London air.

  The basic paradox: frozen flow. Fragments embedded in the ice do not move, yet are ceaselessly in motion.

  Below him, foot passengers and horses pulling carriages struggled through the slush. In the gutter a troupe of shouting children were building a wall of dirty snow.

  As the ice flows downward from its site of accumulation, it descends into a warmer climatic zone and begins to melt. If the amount of summer melt exceeds the rate of advance, the glacier wastes away, recedes. To early European observers in the Alps it seemed that the more swiftly receding glaciers were actually crawling backwards up the mountain. In a single day and night, land previously buried would reappear.

  In the Alps, the bodies of missing mountaineers have emerged from the wasting ice of glaciers decades, perhaps even centuries, after they were lost.

  He paced around the flat, a glass of sherry balanced on the palm of his hand. The fumes rose to his nostrils, potent, innervating. He sat down and read over what he had just written:

  Immense pressure, coupled with extreme cold. Combining to produce hitherto unknown effects on matter. Or upon spirit.

  The possibility of a spiritual entity trapped, frozen, in ice. Enmeshed somehow in physical forces, immobilized, and thus rendered physical and solid itself.

  He finished the sherry, set the glass down, and turned again to the window. The thin lace curtain billowed with a breath of wind and sank back again.

  And when it melted out of the ice, would it then just sublimate back into metaphysical space, leaving human time and scientific measurement behind?

  If I could be there, observe it, at the moment of escape.

  26

  He turns from stoking the last embers of the fire, steps across the frozen floor on tiptoe as though over hot coals. He stands hunched over the bed for a moment, rubs his naked arms and chest, marvels at the brief sparks that light his fingertips.

  He smiles. Friction, heat. Did her body pass this blue fire to his? It must be an effect of the dry air, the fine dust that settles imperceptibly, ceaselessly, on everything at this elevation.

  He climbs between the cool sheets. She is somewhere beside him in the bed, already asleep, but he cannot feel her warmth. He lies on his stomach, listening for her breathing. At times she moves slightly, a hand, a leg, sliding across the blanket like a whisper. A word spoken in a dream.

  They are swimming side by side in a night lake, their bodies never touching. Only the waves of breathing tell of the other’s presence.

  She had said to him, when she finished the pages he asked her to read, So you want to know what I think?

  He was standing by the fireplace, arms crossed over his chest.

  —You don’t have to tell me, he said.

  —You won’t like it.

  —Tell me.

  She set the notebook on the bed beside her.

  —I don’t know what this thing was, is, will turn out to be, and right now it doesn’t seem to matter.

  —I see.

  —You should read my journal. Pages of what is he thinking? Can he tell what I’m feeling? Would he care?

  —This, she waved a hand at the notebook, the fact that you let me read this, it’s my first bit of tangible evidence. I ought to rush home this instant and write it down. Day forty-nine: a breakthrough. I believe the creature now trusts me.

  —That’s funny, he said.

  —Then laugh.

  He sat down beside her on the bed.

  —To be honest, she said, I don’t think you saw anything in the crevasse.

  —You mean I imagined it.

  —I mean you saw something, but my guess is, as you said yourself, it might have been a natural shape formed by the ice. Only I would add, not might have been, but probably was.

  —You would have made a good scientist. I didn’t know you were so unromantic.

  —Am I? When I was a girl I believed in the fairies, even though I’d never seen one. I was told it was all foolishness and superstition, but of course I didn’t care. One day I went with my brother up the hill above our town, to find a pony that had strayed. But I couldn’t keep up with Sandy. As usual, he was in a hurry. I was a nuisance, he said, he had to keep stopping and waiting for me, and finally he told me to turn around and go home. I sulked and wandered for a while, and then I sat down by a stream. On the other side was a great wild hawthorn, and I let out a shriek when I saw there was a girl standing there, in the shade of the leaves. I jumped up. I said hello and waved my hand. She just stood there on the other side of that stream and watched me. Her eyes were green. She was elfin, beautiful. I felt that this was her place on the earth, her life had grown here and was rooted here like the hawthorn, and I was an intruder. I ran home, frightened out of my scarce enough wits, but almost every day after that I would climb the hill, hoping I’d see her again.

  —But you never did.

  —Freya reminds me of her, but no, I never did.

  —And you’ve always wanted to know whether she was a dream, a vision, or just an ordinary girl under a tree.

  —Yes, but she was not ordinary. That’s just it. Years later I thought, she didn’t have to be a spirit, a fairy, anything like that. She didn’t have to be from another world, to fill mine with magic. I’d never seen anyone, anything, like her. A beautiful girl under a hawthorn, that’s enough of a wonder, isn’t it?

  27

  —I wanted to introduce you to my parents.

  —As what?

  —My friend the doctor. They only saw you from a distance, and you managed to keep it that way.

  —Tell me something about your father.

  —Oh, he’s a fierce man. When my brother and I would fight, he had a truly horrible punishment for us.

  —What was it?

  —He made us hold hands and sing.

  28

  —Thank you, she says.

  —For what?

  —For bringing me here, where no one can find me. I haven’t had peace and quiet like this for months. Even on my days off they come looking for me with some problem.

  —They won’t come looking for you up here.

  —No, I don’t think they will.

  —This will be your chalet. You’re the guest whose every whim will be indulged. And you can stay as long as you like.

  —No, I can’t.

  29

  —And what did you think?

  —About what?

  —When you got better, and your mother said it was a miracle. Did you believe that too?

  —I don’t know.

  —You don’t remember?

  —I remember too much.

  —But not that.

  —I just mean I didn’t know if it was a miracle, and I still don’t. But because my mother believed it, I wanted to believe it too. I became very religious. I even thought about the priesthood. I wanted to be like Saint Francis of Assist, living in the wilderness, loving every living thing, even the trees and the rocks, everything. Then one day, about four years after my father and I moved to London, I was in church by myself, and I got up and walked out and that was the end of it. Just like that. Later that year I told my father I wanted to be a doctor.

  —How old were you?

  —Fourteen or fifteen. I just dropped it, the great passion of my life, and walked away.

  —And what about this great passion, the ice?

  —There are times I hate this place. But I keep coming back, as if I’m condemned to do this.

  Once this world had been on the periphery of his imagination, a place from which one returned to tell the tale. Now it has become the centre of his field of vision. And more than central: inevitable. From this vantage point, for good or ill, he believes that his life could have taken no other road.

  The contours of the icefield, even those he cannot see and must envision from the maps of others, now seem to embody a form he has sensed vaguely all his life.

  30

&
nbsp; Trask nudges Hal with an elbow.

  —I don’t believe it. Look.

  Hal follows his pointing finger past the corral fence, down the sloping lawn to the footpath where Elspeth and Byrne are climbing into view.

  Trask shakes his head.

  —I cannot for the life of me understand what she sees in him. The man’s spent so much time on that glacier I’ll bet he shoots icicles.

  31

  The next day Elspeth returns, unexpected, to visit him. Freya is with her, but she says very little, inspects the shelter and then stands in the doorway, looking out at the glacier.

  —A bachelor’s hideout, she says. Nothing new.

  —You shouldn’t have come up on your own, Byrne says.

  —She didn’t, Freya says. I’m here.

  Elspeth sets a basket on his worktable.

  —There’s some cold roast beef, potatoes, rolls. And an orange.

  They smile at each other, at their shyness in the presence of Freya.

  —Wonderful, Byrne says. Especially the orange. Scurvy is a hazard of this kind of work.

  —So is insanity, Freya says.

  She tugs a small book out of her jacket pocket and holds it out to Byrne.

  —I brought you something too, she says.

  He takes the book and opens it to the title page. A tattered volume of plays by Shakespeare.

  —I found it by the outlet of Grizzly Creek, in an old circle of campfire stones. Elspeth told me you collected things like this.

  The pages of the leatherbound book are swollen from years of exposure to wind and rain. A dry deposit of grit in the gutter. The print has faded, but in many places miniscule marginal notes can be seen.

  He examines the book from front cover to back. Stamped on the endpaper is a heraldic family crest: on a field of azure, a celestial city, proper. And the motto: J’espére. Freya leans forward.