Icefields (14 page)

And himself?

6

He invites Rawson to hike up with him and examine the petroglyphs. Perhaps a poet can help him find patterns, identify motifs.

Hal silently runs his hand over, the scars in the rock.

—They're strange, wonderful. But I confess I don't understand.

A record of communal memory. Or a prediction. Or both. Or a panorama of visions dreamed in solitude and brushed outside the history of the tribe.

There are no winged figures.

—This may be an alphabet, Hal says. Or a dictionary.

There are many stories. The two of them make summaries, conjectures.

Woman, in a river? Escapes battle, massacre of her people by enemy tribe. Runs away to (from?) forest, lives with rocks, standing stones. The rocks stand in a ring. Erratics? She walks between two of them. Then a space, nothing.

Further along the carving the woman reappears (or is it in fact the same one?) A single line spirals around her. She faces the other way now, west (?), going up into the sun.

The story is there, as far as Byrne can tell, although he knows he and Rawson have created it out of intersecting icons that may not be related.

The images have been here for an unknown length of time, carved into rock the ice had only just scoured and withdrawn from. Not waiting for him to come close and squint at them through his magnifying lens. These scratches have nothing to do with his presence, they do not anticipate him, prophecy him.

7

Among the distinguished visitors to the park this year were Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle and party. They visited a number of points of interest and expressed themselves delighted with everything they saw. Sir Arthur kindly gave his assistance and practical knowledge to the laying out of a nine-hole golf course on a plateau over
looking Jasper townsite and close to the site of the proposed Grand Trunk Pacific Hotel. He also took a turn at bat with the local baseball club, and made several excursions to see the sights of our wilderness playground.

Byrne meets the creator of Sherlock Holmes at one of Elspeth's glasshouse receptions. He has heard that Doyle, a doctor, is also a spiritualist, a collector of the unexplained. He offers to take him on a guided trek to the glacier.

Trask grimaces, envisioning wasted time, a broken ankle, bad press.

The two doctors hike slowly across the till plain. Sir Arthur stops often to examine the wildflow-ers. He marvels at the sky: the change in colour, depth. The purity and sharpness of the air. Byrne takes him to see the rock carvings.

—This is wonderful, Doyle says, taking out a pencil and note pad to make sketches. I may be able to use this.

They carry on across the till plain.

—There, Doyle says, pointing his walking stick at a massive slab of rock perched on a mound of ice, a glacier table.

—Let's stop there.

They circle the glacier table and find a place to climb up. When they reach the flat top of the slab, two small stones roll toward them and wobble to a stop. Doyle chuckles softly.

—The welcoming committee.

They sit down on the slab, open their packs and unwrap sandwiches.

—That young lady at the chalet, Doyle says.

—Elspeth?

—Yes. My wife can sense or see things about certain people. Images that come to her when she is near them, or hears their voices. I don't pretend to understand it, but I have learned not to doubt her gift.

He sips from his water flask.

—She told me that when she shook Elspeth's hand, she had a vision of a tree. A tall pine, green and alive.

He smiles.

—She said she almost sank down and wrapped her arms around the young lady's ankles. She came to her senses in time, thank goodness.

8

Crawling across the gritty snow of the lower glacier, a spider. Doyle sees it first.

—Will you look at that hardy little soul.

Byrne takes a kill jar out of his pack and unscrews the lid.

—I see you come prepared for everything, Doyle says.

Byrne scoops the spider up with a handful of snow and drops it into the jar. He ties a piece of surgical gauze around the rim and stuffs the jar down into his pack.

9

On warm days the volume of meltwater rapidly increases. Rivulets on the glacier surface swell into rushing torrents. Hillocks and banded fonts form on previously level stretches. Passage through this transforming landscape becomes a struggle.

A wide crater-like depression on the glacier slowly fills with water, by early evening it has become a lake, perfectly transparent, filled with the purest water on earth. There are no fish in its depths, no sedges or grasses along the shore. No geese, no shore birds gather here at dusk.

Each night, as the meltwater lessens, the lake subsides. In the morning it has vanished again.

As the glacier flows forward, its topography will inevitably change, and the lake will vanish. For that reason, its ephemerality, I see no reason to give this body of water a name. It will remain the ideal lake.

10

Rawson throws his pack to the ground, takes off his jacket and tosses it on top, kicks off his boots.

Blankets and gear are strewn over the grassy flat, stretched out to dry after the eventful crossing of the Athabasca River. The horses, hazed across the river and now free of their burdens, have trotted out into the meadow. He watches them nip at each other and toss their heads. The tourists from Chicago are gone, having decided to hike the remaining three miles to the chalet rather than wait for Rawson.

He sets the pack contents out around him to survey the damage. The flour is a doughy mass, mixed now with the cocoa powder, and rapidly growing a hard shell. The bannock he had made that morning soggy and limp. He finds the waterproof container of matches, crouches down by the fire pit in his soaked shirt and trousers, shivering.

—Freya, he says aloud. She would be italic, he told her. Now he knows he was thinking of a page of cold text, and in the midst of it, a word that whispers
fire.

11

Byrne props his notebook on his knees and writes.

I see a rippling pool on the bleached surface of the
nunatak and the sparsity of the landscape draws me to it.

Water.

The pool is perfectly transparent, fringed with a crust of spring ice. Fed by a thin rivulet that spills with the clarity of music from the glacier. I cup my hands and drink.

I lean back on the sun-warmed rock, close my eyes, and listen. The glacier moves forward at a rate of less than one inch every hour. If I could train myself to listen at the same rate, one sound every hour, I would hear the glacier wash up against this rock island, crash like waves, and become water.

12

On the hill above the meadow of flowers floats a silk pavilion. Men and women with glasses of champagne and slices of cake stroll beneath its billowing walls. The members of the alpine club are celebrating the summer's successful climbs.

Rawson leads his string of horses along the edge of the wet meadow, back to the camp. The buzz and shimmer of insects fills the humid sunlit air.

His name is called from across the bright space. He stops. Freya is standing at the pavilion entrance with her camera. She shouts, waves him over. He tethers the lead horse to a tree and climbs the hill. He
stops just outside the pavilion, suddenly aware of how he must look. Freya sets her camera down in the grass and steps out of the pavilion to where he is standing as if halted by a spell.

—What happened to you?

—A river.

—You're mud from head to foot.

—Nonsense, darling. Waiter, another bottle of your finest.

She runs a finger lightly down his forehead to the tip of his nose.

—Come to my room tonight, she says, showing him her smudged fingertip. We'll get you clean.

—When will you be finished here?

—I really don't know.

—Are you having a good time?

—You mean me and the other toffs? Yes we are. But there's always a place for poets in our salon.

—I have to go.

—I know. I'll see you.

13

Byrne imagines himself as an alpine Alexander Selkirk, set down here on this island in the ice at his own request. Lying back on a flat slab of limestone, he watches high cirrus clouds form and dissipate.

The sun-heated moisture off the snow rises invisibly and shakes itself out into clouds. Swans. Nana called them the children of Lir.

He remembers Nana telling him the story, how achingly desirable their fate seemed to him as a boy. The enchanted exiles, sundered from home and family, wandering over the dark waters of the earth in immortal loneliness.

Some say they're wandering still,
Nana told him.
Until the day God burns up the world with a kiss.

14

Hal wakes up in her bed. She is not there.

—Freya?

—Here.

She moves across the room, her naked body black against the window for a moment, then invisible and slipping into bed beside him.

—-You won't be staying this winter, either.

—No.

—I'm leaving too. I've found a position at the
Herald.
Reporter. They liked the fact that I wrote a book and I can also saddle a horse.

—Hal, you didn't tell me. That's wonderful.

—Is it?

—You'll be busy.

He moves in close to her warmth, slides his arms around her.

—I'd rather spend the winter just like this.

—I get mean and bloodthirsty if I have to stay in one place very long. She bites his wrist. The vampire. You know that.

—And Hal knew his wife Freya and behold, he knew nothing.

—Wife. That's very funny.

—Where will you be?

—You'll laugh, but probably at home with my mother, at least for a while. I can work on my book there.

—You could work on it here. We could hibernate all winter in Elspeth's garden.

—I'm afraid I don't thrive under glass.

15

Hal lights a lamp and sits down on the edge of the bed with a notebook and pen. Freya yawns, opens her eyes.

—What's this?

—I'm going to interview you. An exclusive to the
Herald
by Henry Rawson.

—Fine, I'm too sleepy to argue. Fire away.

—Miss Becker, the readers would like to know how many lovers you've had.

—Mm?

—Miss Becker? Wake up. Please answer the question. How many lovers.

—Two. Next question.

—Two?

—Next question, and then I'm going back to sleep.

—Is there a question you might be willing to answer?

—Ask me what I think I'm doing acting like a man. The other one did.

16

The remains of a shelter built on the nunatak by a group of lost climbers becomes Byrne's scientific observatory. With help from Rawson, he enlarges the rock structure, reinforces it with a wooden framework, a door. They hollow out an area for a fireplace and build a mantle of stones around it. Byrne lines the walls with furs given to him by Sara and Swift, spreads canvas and oilcloth on the floor.

He brings in a camp bed, a pine table, and a chair. He builds shelves and stocks them with books, medical supplies in glass-stoppered bottles, tins of evaporated vegetables, tapers, cooking utensils. He sets a spirit lamp in one wall and a desk clock on the ledge above the fireplace. Next to the clock he places a
sea urchin shell, the only surviving relic from his childhood.

When the shelter is completed and stocked, Byrne shuts himself in for his first night. He lights a coal fire, wraps himself in a sleigh blanket, and sits at his table to write by the light of the lamp.

As it grows late the sound of trickling water ceases. The wind has died. He is at the heart of stillness.

The hut is insulated well enough that he is uncomfortable in the blanket, and sloughs it off. He removes his vest and shirt, and his shoes. He writes for a while in his undershirt and trousers, then pushes the chair back. The heat is palpable, a thick garment wrapping his skin.

He sees the kill jar on the shelf and remembers. The spider. He picks up the jar, wipes the dust off it.

The snow has long since melted and evaporated. At the bottom of the jar lies a desiccated black speck. Byrne shakes it out onto the palm of his hand. Under the magnifying glass he counts the eyes, notes the mottled colouration on the thorax.

The spider's legs uncurl and it scuttles across Byrne's palm. He flicks it back into the jar, opens the door of the hut and steps out onto bare rock. The lunar cold stuns him.

Space blooms with stars.

He crouches, lowers the jar to the snow and
shakes it. The spider drops out and crawls slowly away over the shadowed, granular snow. Byrne stands up and looks out into the darkness.