Icefields (13 page)

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.

A
N 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 bedrock 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.

While he crouches on the hard clay of a dry rivercourse to eat his pack lunch, he thinks:
If I had no other way to describe what I saw in the crevasse?

He scratches in the clay with his finger. Sketches a stick figure, then crosses it out.

Elspeth?