Icefields (12 page)

—I know.

A girl of about eight or nine, in a white sack dress and sandals, appears beside her at the door.

—And this is Louisa.

The girl will not look at Byrne. She kicks off her sandals, jumps from the porch and scampers across the yard.

—The child can't sit still, Swift says.

—I'm used to that, Byrne says. Children and doctors are natural enemies.

During dinner and afterwards on the porch, Sara says very little. Louisa sits at her feet, holding the skein of wool she is winding. It is Swift who does the storytelling.

—When I first came to this valley, he says, I found an arm.

He was in the heart of a spruce bog, surrounded by crooked, black trees. His ox was stuck. The huge animal thrashed for a moment in the thick green pool and then went still, its flanks steaming in the cool air. Swift stood back at a distance, more wary of this great bulk becalmed than he had been of the ox's frequent displays of temper. He shook his head.

—I turned away, thinking this was the end of line, and then I saw it.

An arm sticking up out of the spongy brown
earth. A bloodless arm in a tattered sleeve of black cloth. The hand, bone white, clutched a survey stake. Swift pried the stake out of the hand's dry grasp and checked its number. It was the one indicated on his map. This was the land he had filed for.

Somehow, after a desperately long time, the ox hauled itself out onto firmer ground. Swift approached, righted his belongings on the cart, and went on.

Byrne shakes his head.

—Forgive me if I'm a bit incredulous.

Swift scowls.

—It's hanging on the wall, he says, gripping the arms of his chair. The stake, I mean. I can go get it for you right now.

—It's not the stake I have doubts about.

—Well, you may be the doctor, but. . . .

—Let's have the story, Sara says.

Swift took the stake with him, slung in his belt. Up the valley of the Athabasca, until the survey stakes ran out and he lost sight of the river.

He pushed through a dense thicket of willows that scratched his face and tore at the canvas on his cart. A wheel jammed in the crevice of a split stone. Swift knelt to free it, growling soft curses. Then he
stood up, listened. A gust of cool air stirred the leaves around him.

He knew then there was an open space just beyond the next stand of willows. The sound and smell of flowing water reached him. He stepped from the thick brush into an open meadow by the river.

Into the midst of a herd of wild horses.

Swift stood motionless. The horses raised their heads from the grass they were feeding on and watched him. Their quiet shapes, grey and paint and roan, stood gathered in the clearing like suddenly remembered dreams. Slowly, led by a dappled mare, the horses turned and moved away, down the long stretch of open meadow.

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.

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.