Icy Clutches

by Aaron Elkins

  "Basically, I want to know how those bones got where they did. Look, as I understand it, Tremaine and his people were on Tirku Glacier itself, about two miles above the snout, when the avalanche came down on them. Since then, the snout has retreated about half a mile inland. Which means that it's now one and a half miles below where they got hit in 1960."

  She sipped from the cup, basking in the steam. “That's the way I understand it too."

  "But the avalanche came from Mount Cooper, to the southwest, which means it hit Tirku sideways, so it wouldn't have carried them down the length of the glacier toward the snout."

  "True. What's the problem?"

  "The problem is, how did those bones wind up at the snout? How did they get carried forward that mile and a half down the glacier? If Tirku had been advancing all this time I could see it, but it's retreating."

  She studied him. “You really don't understand how glaciers work, do you?"

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

  "That's amazing. How can you be a full professor, a recognized—"

  He sighed. “Do you ever hear me going on about minor deficiencies in your education?"

  "Are you serious?” She tucked in her chin and frowned, the better to affect a deep, masculine voice. “No need to be ashamed, my dear. You are not dumb; merely ignorant."

  "Julie..."

  "Okay, okay. Well, what you have to realize is that there's a difference between glacial retreat and advance on the one hand, and glacial flow on the other. Even when a glacier is retreating, the ice is still flowing forward, it's just melting at the snout faster than it's flowing. It's like a...oh, like a big conveyor belt that's working fine but being dragged slowly backwards. Whatever's in the ice keeps moving forward all the same."

  "I see."

  "Bill!” she called over his shoulder.

  Bill Bianco, the course instructor, stopped at their seats. A blond, easygoing thirty-five-year-old who looked twenty, he was a much-published expert on glaciers, particularly on crevasses. ("How did you get to be an expert on crevasses?” Gideon had asked him the evening before. “Fell into enough of ‘em, I guess,” he had replied.)

  "Bill,” Julie said, “what's Tirku's rate of flow?"

  "Tirku? On the average about a foot a day, maybe a little less."

  "Say three hundred feet a year,” Julie said. “In twenty-nine years that'd be, uh, between eight and nine thousand feet.” She smiled at Gideon. “A mile and a half. Voila."

  Gideon laughed. “I'm impressed."

  The boat slowed again.

  Bill looked out the window. “This is your drop-off point,” he said to Gideon. “Tirku Spit. We'll be back for you in about three hours.” He looked at his watch. “At about one. Have fun."

  * * * *

  The bottom of the boat grated against rock. An aluminum ladder was hooked on a couple of cleats and lowered over the bow of the Spirit of Adventure. Gideon, Chief Park Ranger Owen Parker, and two subordinate rangers clambered down onto a narrow gravel shore and stood back as the digging tools were tossed down to thunk against the pebbles. The boat backed off, gunned its engines, and turned slowly around. There was a glimpsed wave from Julie, and the big, white, three-level catamaran glided northwest toward Tarr Inlet, already looking small and faraway in the immense bay.

  Gideon shivered. Tirku Spit was not an amiable place. To their right the flat gray beach stretched around a curve and into Johns Hopkins Inlet. To their left was a long black ridge clotted with a scum of gray-green vegetation. Beyond it, the freezing upper reaches of Lamplugh Glacier could be seen, and then, far off, Mount Crillon and the ice-buried, Fairweathers. Ahead, the lumpy gravel, seamed with crisscrossing, inch-deep rivulets of water, sloped uphill for half a mile to Tirku Glacier, a grimy, humped excrescence oozing from an ice field somewhere beyond Mount Abbe.

  The shore itself was bare except for a border of beached, decaying icebergs at the waterline; melted down into grotesque gray-white shapes two or three feet across, they looked like a scattered row of bleaching mammoth bones, as if the remains of some prehistoric kill had washed up. Under a bleak, slaty sky of cirrostratus the day was gloomy but clear. Gideon could see at least thirty miles in every direction; three or four thousand square miles all told. And in all that vast space there was no sign, aside from the inconsequential, diminishing speck of the boat, that any other human beings existed on the planet Earth, or had ever existed. Or animals. Or plants, other than the hummocked, foot-high mat on the ridge. Nothing but ice, black rock, and water the color of pewter. It was like being back at the beginning of the world.

  He shivered again, glad to have the rangers’ company.

  They headed for the big notched boulder Tibbett had told them about, each carrying some equipment. Gideon shouldered a couple of spades, Owen Parker a pickax, Russ Davis another pick and some food, and Frannie Martinez a knapsack of hand tools—trowels, small hammer, forceps, chisels, brushes. These had been brought at Gideon's request. Probing for bones was delicate business. If he could help it, those picks and shovels weren't going to get within five feet of any skeletal remains.

  Walking to Tirku's foot was easy going. The slope was gentle, the wet, pebbly land scoured smooth by the glacier during its long advance. Avoiding the small streams of water and the isolated boulders left behind when it retreated created little difficulty, and they covered the half mile in fifteen minutes.

  When they got to the moraine where the bones had been found the day before, Gideon put down the spades and stared up at the dirty, seeping snout. Gritty and black with soil, it was more massive than it had appeared to be from the shore; well over a hundred feet high and five hundred feet across, a bulging, irregular protuberance furrowed with cracks and pockmarked with holes. There were steady sounds of trickling water from all across its face. The area in front of it was littered with lumps of dingy, melting ice that had fallen from it, some the size of snowballs, some as big as automobiles.

  "Ugly sonofabitch, ain't it?” Russ said cheerfully. He was working his first season at Glacier Bay, a hulking, wonderfully clumsy kid from Arkansas with the scrubbed, pink, innocent face of an angel.

  "Not my favorite glacier of all time,” Owen agreed. “Well, let's get to it. We'll divide the area up into quadrants and split them up between us. That sound all right, Gideon?"

  "Sounds fine."

  It took only twenty minutes for Russ to find (by stepping on them) the twisted aluminum frames of a pair of wraparound sunglasses that might or might not have belonged to the survey team. And ten minutes after that, Owen let out a whoop and held up a picklike tool with about eight inches of splintered wooden handle, from which dangled a looped leather strap.

  "Ice ax!” Frannie said excitedly. “Were Tremaine's people carrying them?"

  "We'll sure as hell ask them,” Owen said. He brought it over to show it to them. “It was right at the base of the snout. Must have fallen out of it in the last few days."

  "An ax?” Gideon said after a moment. “What would a botanist want an ax for?"

  Aside from hitting a fellow botanist in the jaw with, of course. The steel head was a long, vicious-looking affair with a tapering, blunt point at one end and an adzelike blade at the other. Gideon ran his hand slowly over the cold metal, as if he could somehow feel its history. Careful now; his imagination began to get the better of him again.

  "Nothing strange about it,” Owen said. “You can chop with it when you're climbing, but mostly people use it for walking on ice, sort of like a cane or a ski pole. You hold it by the head—the strap goes around your wrist—and there's a whatchamacallit, a ferule, in the other end of the handle that you poke into the ground. Gives a lot of security on a slippery ice field."

  A little later the sharp-eyed Frannie spotted a ragged strip of red-and-black plaid material trailing from a typewriter-sized chunk of smoke-colored ice. The rangers wanted to smash the ice open with a pick, but Gideon insisted on working with a cold chisel and a small hammer
, tapping away for forty minutes to carefully chip the material free. To no avail, however. When the ice was reduced to a pile of shavings there were only a few more inches of woolen plaid to be found. No bones.

  "Maybe Tremaine or one of the others can identify it,” Frannie suggested, but without conviction. Twenty-nine years was a long time to remember somebody's shirt, let alone distinguish it from a million other shirts made of the same common material.

  In the next hour, nobody found anything. By noon, when they stopped for a lunch of ham sandwiches and coffee, Gideon was discouraged. He was also cold. Julie, knowing she would be out on the glaciers, had brought her warmest coat to Alaska, a hooded, quilted parka that encased her like a sausage in a bun. But Gideon, expecting to spend his time around protected Bartlett Cove or in a warm tour boat, and believing the tales of fifty-degree weather in September, had only a thinly lined, waist-length windbreaker. It probably was fifty degrees back at Bartlett Cove, but here, on this desolate glacial shelf, it was fifteen degrees colder at least, and the frigid vapor that hung over the glacier made it seem colder yet. His nose was running, his fingers numb and red, his wrist cuffs sopping from poking in the ice, his trousers soaked at the knees from kneeling in the gravel.

  All the same there was a time-spanning magic here if you looked for it. These rotting gobbets of ice littering the gravel had traveled eleven or twelve miles from the Brady Ice Field, Owen had told him. At three hundred feet a year, that meant it had taken two hundred years for the ice flow to make its slow way down. Now, today, you could pick up a fusty gray chunk with the knowledge that it had fallen as rain or snow at about the time George Washington was first taking office on the other side of the continent.

  Russ saw him staring thoughtfully at a dingy, melting chunk of ice in his hand. “What's up?” he asked curiously, around a mouthful of sandwich.

  "When this fell,” Gideon mused, “Mozart was still alive."

  "No shit,” Russ said.

  "Keats hadn't even been born, or Shelley. Paganini was just a kid. The Reign of Terror was just beginning in France."

  "Yeah, I guess,” Russ said, and went back to his sandwich.

  Nothing more was found after lunch, and they were more than ready to call it a day by the time they spotted the white, welcome shape of the Spirit of Adventure rounding Russell Island and heading their way, twenty minutes early.

  It was only after they gathered up the picks and spades—left leaning carelessly against a rock when they arrived and untouched since—that Gideon saw it.

  "Hold it,” he said sharply.

  They stopped. “What, what's the matter?” Russ said with the tone of someone who expected to get blamed for it, whatever it was.

  Gideon pointed toward the ground at the base of the boulder. “That's a human skull. Part of it, anyway."

  It took the others a few seconds to locate it.

  "That?" Russ said, his eyes popping. “I saw that before, when we put the tools down. I thought it was, you know, some kind of upside-down crab shell. That thing's a piece of somebody's head?"

  His surprise was understandable. It was half imbedded in the soil, a stone-gray, slightly concave disk about five inches in diameter, thickly caked with dirt over much of its surface, rough-edged, and furrowed with deep, branching grooves. And it was thoroughly beaten up, looking every bit as if it had spent thirty years or so grinding along in a glacier. It lay no more than a dozen feet from where Russ had found the glasses.

  Gideon knelt to have a closer look, rewetting his knees but not noticing this time. “It's a parieto-tempero-occipital fragment,” he said.

  "No,” Owen murmured. “You're kidding me."

  "The right side of the cranium,” Gideon explained, and used his hand to trace the area on himself. “From a little in front of the auditory meatus—the ear hole—to the occipital protuberance at the back of the head, and about halfway up the cranial vault."

  "Those grooves,” Frannie said. She was leaning intently over, hands on her knees, her dark face taut with interest. “What are they?"

  "Those are channels for blood vessels."

  "Blood vessels?” She seemed confused.

  "The veins and arteries that supply the brain.” He looked up at her. “This is the inside of the skull we're looking at."

  "Oh.” She grimaced but kept her place.

  They all looked at him, waiting, he supposed, for some Skeleton Detective wizardry.

  "There's not much to be told from the inside,” he said. “I'll need to turn it over."

  They waited. Gideon put a finger against one edge and pushed gingerly. The fragment didn't move.

  "Stuck,” he said. “I don't want to push too hard. The bone seems sturdy enough, but it might be wet through and I don't want to take any chances. We better dig it up with the soil it's on. I can get it out later."

  With a trowel he quickly scooped out a foot-wide trench around the fragment, then used one of the spades to undercut the central pedestal of gravelly dirt and lift it out, parieto-tempero-occipital fragment and all.

  "Damn,” Owen said, “I forgot to bring a box."

  "We can carry it down to the boat right on the spade,” Gideon said.

  Russ reached for it. “I'll do it!"

  Gideon looked at him. "Carefully."

  "You bet!” Holding his breath, Russ took the spade from Gideon and held it stiffly in front of him, moving erectly downhill with exquisite care.

  Seen from the Spirit of Adventure they must have seemed an odd procession: four people in a row, marching slowly down the barren slope, led by a uniformed giant gravely bearing something before him like a treasure on a salver. Later Julie would say that the scene had started her humming the triumphal march from Aida.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 6

  * * * *

  The question is,” Bill Bianco said, holding up a liter-and-a-half plastic bottle of Jim Beam at the front of the passenger cabin, “will Chief Park Ranger Owen Parker over there agree to forget about it if I break the rules and pour us all a little something to warm us up? Or will he turn us in?"

  "Why, what bottle is that, Bill?” Owen asked mildly, to a chorus of cheers.

  Gideon had reboarded the Spirit of Adventure to find Julie and her classmates almost as cold-looking and bedraggled after their session on Margerie Glacier as he was after Tirku. He had gotten a mutually warming hug from her, downed a cup of hot chocolate, and just begun to unthaw when Bill broke out the bourbon. And very welcome it looked.

  The instructor moved slowly along the aisle, pouring a couple of fingers of the amber liquid into the plastic cups that were held out to him. With Julie, Gideon went to the rear and topped off their cups from the hot-water urn.

  Julie gestured at the galley. “I bet I can find us some lemon in here."

  Gideon went with her. Russ had put the skull fragment and its bed of earth on the galley's counter, carefully setting it on the sliced-off lid of a Del Monte ketchup carton. (Gideon was going to have to write a letter of appreciation to Del Monte if this kept up.) In the warmth of the boat's interior, the bone seemed drier, less fragile. He was anxious to have a look at the outer side, the side pressed into the earth, where any potentially useful information was likely to be, but it didn't pay to take chances with it. What was the rush? His tool kit had probably arrived at the lodge during the day, and this evening he could take whatever time was needed to free the skull from its context. It always paid to do it right.

  But leaving Gideon Oliver with an unexamined skull fragment was like handing a four-year-old a candy bar and telling him to leave it alone until after dinner; it wasn't realistic to hope for too much. He poked it with his finger. It felt solid enough. With a fingernail he scraped at a little clotted black dirt. It came away without taking any of the bone with it. He scraped some more.

  "Found one,” Julie announced. “Some cinnamon too.” She got a kitchen knife from a rack, set the lemon on the counter next to him, and sl
iced out a couple of wedges.

  Gideon glanced up from the piece of skull. “I'm not sure the health department would approve of this setup."

  "I'm not sure I do,” she said with a sidewise glance at the silvery gray bone. She squeezed the wedges into their cups, then dropped them into the hot liquid while Gideon rubbed away some more dried mud. “Want some sugar?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Look at this."

  "At what? That little clump of dirt in the middle?"

  "That little clump of dirt is plugging a hole, Julie. See? You can just make out the margin over here."

  "Oh boy, a hole,” she said. “Here we go again.” She set down her cup. “What's so strange—this is not an argument, okay?—but what's so strange about a hole in a skull that's been through an avalanche, followed by twenty-nine years of tumbling along inside a glacier?” She gestured at the fragment. “The skull itself's been smashed to pieces. Why shouldn't it have a few holes in it?"

  "Well, you have a point.” He sipped at the toddy. “Mm, perfect.” The sharp, lemony fumes seemed to drift up, warm and pungent, behind his eyes, then fan out to heat his throat and shoulders. “All the same, I'd sure like to get this thing out of the dirt and see the other side."

  He got three fingertips around the occipital margin where the bone was thickest and tugged lightly. Nothing happened. He held his breath and tugged marginally harder. The bone popped cleanly and satisfyingly out of the dirt.

  "Ah,” he said.

  Owen Parker put his head through the doorless entry. “Oh-ho, I figured that's what you'd be doing back here. Finding out anything?” He came in, bourbon in hand.

  "I don't know yet. You're just in time to see. Grab a paper towel and put it on the counter, will you?"

  With Owen and Julie watching closely at either side, Gideon turned the fragment carefully over, brushed away most of the clinging dirt, and set it on the towel, outer side up. The hole was still filled and mostly hidden, plugged by its clod of dried mud. He pushed cautiously at the dirt. It didn't budge.

  If this hole was what his gut—or rather his soundly based but intuitive assessment—told him it was, it wouldn't pay to take chances with it. Preserving the margins would be important.