Icefields (20 page)

Ned had written to me as well, a few months earlier. He was living in Jasper now, year-round. He still saw a few patients in town, but as he admitted to me in one of his letters, he was really there as an amateur glaciologist. That's what he'd called himself once, the summer he left for the war, and I'd laughed. Glaciologist. I'd never heard the word before. I'd never considered there might be others like him, scientists who studied only glaciers. I thought he was the one man on earth who bothered that much with them, that this science was his alone, that he had invented it. Arcturology. The science of being distant, and receding a little every year.

I remembered a freak blizzard one evening in July, when Ned showed up for one of his therapeutic baths, despite the weather, and sat in the pool up to his neck, letting the snow pile up on the top of his head like an absurd crown.

And another evening, not long after Freya's death. Spreading a fresh white cloth over the dining room table. For him. Setting out two places of the chalet's best china, two crystal goblets, port wine, sherry, and a carafe of Frank's glacier water, with the labelled bottle beside it. I thought that would make him smile, since he knew as
well as I did that Frank went no further than the creek for it. But I thought the arrangement still needed something more. Something
he
would appreciate. So I went out to the glasshouse and cut a handful of lilies and put them in a blue vase on the table. He came in, sat down at the table, looked at the lilies, and then started talking about his long lost botanical collection. The orchids and other rare flowers that he had hoped to take back to England with him, that would've earned him a place at the Royal Botanical Garden. And then he went on about the high alpine wildflowers and lichens that grew amid the bare rock. Within an apparent desert of water, soil, shelter, the resilient life that will find the merest sliver of sunlight, and bloom. And I listened, because I always listened. When he was finished his lecture, I took the vase off the table, went into the kitchen and dumped the flowers in the dustbin. He came in after me.

What are you doing?
he said.

I dropped the vase on the floor and it smashed. He just stood there and stared. I was embarrassed now, I bent down and started picking up the pieces of the vase. And then he laughed, that maddening laugh that said
Excuse me, but I just walked in the door. I'm afraid I have no idea what's happening here.

Once more he was pretending not to see, to feel. Or maybe not really feeling anything other than just dismay at the fuss and bother I was causing him. As if he hadn't shown me his kind nature, never
shown
me he
could laugh and feel pain and be something other than a shell

Freya would've laughed at me if she'd seen this. I'm not like her. I don't know why people expect me to be, hut they do. Perhaps it's nothing more than the colour of my hair. But I'm not full of fire. I'm not a woman out of a myth, like Freya or Sara, I don't have that kind of power over anyone and I wouldn't like it if I did. I spent my winters here, in this snowy valley, waiting for the return of this man. I was faithful. I'd had to conserve my fuel.

I stood up and said,
come here. He
came closer, wrinkling his brows, not sure what this was leading to, and neither was I.
Closer, I
said.
All right,
he said. He moved closer, with this perplexed grin on his face, and I reached out my hand, slowly. At first I intended to simply touch his face, I'm not sure why, to see if it was as cold as his voice, I suppose. Then I hit him. Pretty hard, on the side of the face. Slap. I knew it was ridiculous the moment I did it. He went red. He walked out of the room, and then he turned around and came back, and then walked out again. He couldn't speak. And it was suddenly so funny. Right then he looked, I don't know, like Charlie Chaplin. Walking out, coming back, walking out again.

When a week had gone by I sent Frank a telegram. “Your new manager will be arriving at the end of June.”

When I
stepped off the train in Jasper, Ned was there to meet me. He had changed in some way. I had always thought he looked older than he really was, but that was no longer true. When he spoke I heard for the first time the voice that belonged with that weathered face and white hair.

He kissed me and said,
You look a bit sunburned.

This was a time when people understood the world would never be the same. You could be forgiven for desiring a little joy in your life. For seeking comfort in familiar rituals. People wanted to make some kind of gesture, something momentous and hopeful. There were a lot of sudden marriages.

The question was there between us for those first few days. Unspoken, but there in the embarrassed silences, the way we avoided being alone together. But after a few days it seemed we'd resisted the fever. And now we could be ourselves again. I suppose neither of us felt very comfortable with grand gestures.

T
HE TERMINUS OF THE GLACIER IS AN INSTRUCTIVE PLACE.
C
EASELESSLY CHANGING, AND YET ALWAYS THE SAME, LIKE THE SEASHORE. ICE STREAMS BECOMING RIVERS, MOUNTAINS WRING DOWN INTO VALLEYS.

T
HE TRANSITION ZONE BETWEEN DOWN INTO VALLEYS.

1

Nineteen-nineteen. A photograph of the era:

A black bear, chained to a post at the golf course. Sir Harry Lauder, on a visit to Jasper, poses with Arthur the Bear. Within the photograph's frame the placid fairway runs level behind them, bordered by a neat row of pines. Trask, who arranged this tableau,
is visible as a truncated arm and hat brim to one side.

Sir Harry, in straw hat and tweed golf togs, leans on his pitching wedge and eyes Arthur askance. The beloved singer is well aware of the comic incongruity. He knows just what pose to strike for the camera.

Arthur stands upright on his hind legs, the chain taut behind him. He holds his front paws out, as if reaching for the man beside him. His small black eyes are barely visible in the photograph. He does not know that his image is being captured, frozen onto film, and perhaps for that reason he looks a little blurred, as though his innocence of the camera keeps him slightly out of focus.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to cross the gap, to say what his awkward straining posture conveys. No human emotion seems quite adequate to describe the gesture of the animal.

2

Freya first returned to Hal as water.

He was huddled with others in the doorway of a trench dugout. A morning in late winter. He had been sleeping and was nudged awake by the voices of the men around him.

He remembered where he was and tried to pull the shreds of his unfinished dream around him like a
blanket. It was no use. He was awake again, stiff and sore, his head clogged by a cold that has worn him down for days. The men were moving around him. Another day beginning. Someone stumbled over his leg.
Are you dead, Rawson? Let's go.

He looked up, and saw a row of icicles hanging from the beam above the entrance to the dugout. Beads of water budding at the tips, glittering in the sun as they broke free.

I sometimes have the feeling the ice is alive.

He reached up, broke off one of the icicles and held it to his dry, cracked lips.

3

In the dream, Hal climbs down from the summit where she left him and crosses the penitent snow, her landscape.

Hal.

She is there by the ice lake, sitting on a blanket, a picnic basket beside her. Cutting into an orange with her pocketknife. Hal steps from the snow onto the ice, sheds his jacket and sits down beside her. She hands him a slice of orange. The day is warm, aegean. They stretch out together on the blanket, under a turquoise heaven, and laugh about his fears. They kiss.

Now they are together on the long train east.
Newlyweds. They will live in his father's riverside cabin. He will write and she will travel, he would not keep her from that great passion. She will make excursions to the mountains of Wales, to the Lake District, and come home with tales of storms sweeping across the dark waters of Windermere.

He wakes and knows the dream is wrong. A betrayal of her fire, the spirit that rushed through him and was gone. He remembers an evening in her room at the chalet.

—About that city, Alexandria the Farthest. You said there was a legend.

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, a map unfolded in front of her.

—Yes. The locals say their ancestors were the only people who defeated Alexander the Great. And they did it without drawing a sword. The story went something like this. When he arrived in the region with his army, Alexander was forced to call a halt. There was a slight problem, you see, his soldiers no longer wanted to fight. It was discovered that during their victorious march across Asia, the army had collected a huge city of tents in its wake. A city of refugees, people whose cities were burned, escaped slaves. Wandering merchants, confidence artists, prostitutes. And a few travel writers, too, no doubt. Rootless people, pulled into the wake of this great thundering mass of armoured men. And when
Alexander's soldiers discovered this, they couldn't believe their luck. They'd never stayed more than a few days in any one spot, and here was this maze of tents and pavilions travelling along with them, a place to go drinking, to hear fantastic tales from other lands, to dance and make love. Discipline in the ranks all of a sudden went to pieces.

—Hard to believe.

She laughed.

—That's what Alexander thought. His goal of world conquest was so close. Aristotle had told him India was at the edge of the earth and he was almost there. So he sent out a proclamation, demanding that these camp-followers pack up their things and go home, for the good of the army and the empire. But it did no good. Next he tried attacking the tent city and burning it, but as his advisors pointed out, sacking one city of refugees would only end up creating another, and the problem would begin all over again. In the end he had to set his army on a forced march through a desert, promising the men plunder such as they had never seen when they reached India. Well, after a few days of this relentless pace, the tent city lagged behind and was left to its fate in the middle of a wasteland.

—And this became the city of Chojend.

—Eventually. The story goes that they wandered the desert for a few years, like the Israelites.
Until their momentum ran out, I guess. Although they say some of their number kept on moving, searching for Alexander's army, and were lost to history. That's the millennial part of the legend: the hope that the wanderers will come home some day.

—So what brought you there?

She began to roll up the map.

—The name, of course.
The Farthest.

4

Hal Rawson returns to Jasper from the Great War, from the battles of Ypres, the taking of the ridged salient at Passchendaele. He works for Trask again as a guide. Watching the jaded tourist ponies plodding down the loop trail to the stable, he thinks: that is how I ended up back here. Sleepwalking.

He meets Byrne from time to time at the chalet, but always finds some excuse to avoid talking with him. When their eyes meet he looks away. The doctor is the one man in this town who would know what the past four years have been for him. Or what he may have missed. He imagines those four years of ordinary life as a single morning. A holiday. Getting up early to make a sleepy child's breakfast. Talking with his wife, whose face he cannot see. Saying whatever it is husbands and wives say to each other.

He feels ashamed in front of Byrne, like a boy trying to mimic the speech and walk of a grown man.

He wakes often from nightmares. There are complaints from some of the tourists he takes on packtrips about his screams in the night.

An English watercolourist is his last client. He calls Hal his
equerry
and talks with him about the great English poets.

They camp at night below the Ancient Wall, a sawtooth ridge that cuts black into the powder of stars.

The watercolourist tells him of the Austrian painter, Wilhelm Streit, who passed through the Athabasca valley in 1857, on a tour arranged by George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Simpson commissioned several paintings for the company headquarters at Lachine, Quebec. To reveal to guests the glories of the fur empire he commanded.

—I read Streit's published journal before I embarked on this trip, the watercolourist says. To compare my reactions to his.

Streit did not like the way the wood burned in this country. He thought it snapped harshly, with a disturbing echo. He did not like the way the rivers flowed. And the trees were thin, scabbed, spaced too far apart.

He travelled in a canoe with the company
traders and clerks. He camped with them, ate with them, slept in tents with them. And while they hunted, he set up his easel and sketched. He could not work in anyone's presence. He needed solitude.