Icefields (2 page)

—The pulse is weak, but he's still with us.

Byrne shuddered and moved his arms. His breathing became audible. A pink glow spread slowly from the center of his chest, outward to the limbs, suffusing the blue pallor. He yawned, opened his eyes, and shut them again.

The professor forced hot tea down Byrne's

throat.

—We must get him away from the ice, Collie said. I'm afraid that if we bivouac here he might relapse.

As he spoke, he pried the pocketwatch from Byrne's closed fist.

2

Dark was rising in the valley and, with it, a liquid chill to the air. Collie intended to make camp in the shelter of the nearest stand of trees, where there would be some cover from the freezing wind off the glacier. He stood up from his ministrations over the doctor and glanced around.

—Where is Trask?

—He thought he saw lights, Thompson said, further down the valley. He went to have a look.

After a few minutes, Trask rode up.

—I've got us some shelter. He had found people living at the site of the old Arcturus trading post, just a short ride away. He told the settlers about Byrne, and they would have blankets and hot food ready when the expedition arrived.

Trask was astounded at his own discovery. —I thought the place had been abandoned years ago.

The wranglers improvised a sling with a blanket and willow poles and carried Byrne while the others rode. Trask led them through the stunted trees along the
edge of the creek into a grassy clearing. They saw lighted windows in the darkness and headed toward them.

—Dear God, Stutfield said. To think people live here through the winter for the sake of a few marten skins.

A woman stood at the door of the nearest cabin, holding up an oil lamp. She beckoned them inside.

3

Byrne dreamed of flowers.

He breathed their scents and read the names that ran in orderly columns down the pages of his botanical notebook. Names of the flowers he had been collecting. The seeds and bulbs he had stored with their native earth in the tin specimen box he carried in his rucksack. He walked among them, he breathed and named, not knowing or caring if the scents matched the names he gave them. Flowers of snow melt, of early and full summer, of dry August.

Western Anemone, or Chalice Flower. Glacier Lily. Wild Blue Flax. Four species of violet, three of
Orchidaceae.

Flowers of the lush valleys and the high, wind-scoured slopes.

Yellow Mountain Avens. Bluebell,
hedysarum.
River Beauty and Grass of Parnassus. Indian Paintbrush.

4

He woke in a log cabin, on a bed, under soft blankets of fur. Looking up at smoke-grimed rafters, the glitter of melting frost on the wood. His arm was stiff, held tightly against his chest with a cloth or bandage. He moved, and was aware of his nakedness under the thick fur blankets.

He lifted his head and looked around at sagging shelves cluttered with tins, bottles, books. Skins and sleek pelts hung from the walls between the shelves. A pot-bellied stove stood in one corner. There were three small windows, two of them on one wall papered over with oil-stained parchment.

Framed in the open doorway, a meadow of flowering grass. In a chair by the door sat a woman, reading.

She heard him move and glanced up.

—The flowers, Byrne said. In my rucksack.

—Lost, the woman said. The guide had no choice. He couldn't free you without cutting away your kit. Don't try to sit up. Your collarbone.

Byrne lay back on the furs.

—You'll have to stay here for a while, the woman said.

—Where am I?

—This is Jasper.

5

His fall.

They had unroped minutes before, at Professor Collie's insistence. The ice was bare of snow and unsafe for roped travel: one man's mishap would bring the others down with him. The guide had argued with him over that decision, but Collie's word was final. Trask had been hired in Banff to lead the expedition as far as his knowledge of the terrain surpassed the professor's, and to him the glacier was unknown territory. This was Collie's domain.

Once free of the rope, they started up through the labyrinth of crevasses and snowbridges at the base of the first icefall.

They skirted the edge of a narrow chasm. Byrne stepped up close, intrigued by the rippled bands of ice along the rim of the crevasse. Frozen waves. A faint childhood memory came to him, a fairy-tale sea from one of his mother's stories. There had been a picture of waves like this in the book she read to him in bed at night. He took off his green-tinted snow goggles for a better look. The ice was aquamarine, deepening further down to blue-black.

He looked up, glanced around. Collie and the others were already well ahead of him. And Trask was several yards behind, taking slow, careful steps, his head down.

Byrne inched closer to the crevasse. He knew it was foolish even as he did it, but the wet cold seemed to have numbed his good sense along with his fingers and toes. Planting one foot behind him, he slid the other cautiously to the edge. He leaned forward, extended his arms for balance like a man on a high wire. He bent from the waist, craning his neck, and then his forward leg gave way.

He could not remember falling, but suddenly he was in darkness, meltwater splattering over him. He felt icy rivulets of water slide upward from his neck to his face and into his hair, and after a dazed moment he realized he was hanging upside down.

He felt no pain, not in those first moments. Distant shouts reached him from above, but when he tried to answer, the ice wall slapped his voice back at him, flat and dead.

6

The woman was gone. He was alone in the cabin. He drifted between sleep and wakefulness, jolted awake often by his arms or legs jerking, as if to ward off a blow or escape some unseen danger. In these moments it seemed to him that the different regions of his body lay at an immense distance from one another.

He remembered the woman saying she would
fetch Collie and the others. He was confused by this, thinking that they were still on the glacier and that she would have to climb up after them. Then her words came back to him.
This is Jasper.
He was in a cabin. They had carried him off the ice and brought him to this place.

He closed his eyes and remembered the dead gloom of the crevasse. And then the ice creaking and groaning as it flooded slowly with light.

7

He knew that the sun must have broken through the swath of cloud hanging over the glacier. Somehow its light had found a way into the depths of the crevasse. The ice wall in front of him became lit with a pale blue-green radiance.

At first he felt only anger, at himself and the others. Far above him, Professor Collie, Stutfield, Thompson, Trask, would be welcoming the sunshine while it lasted, unwinding the scarves from around their necks, taking off their thick gloves, glorying in that sudden benediction of light. A rest from the dull overcast sky and the stinging crystalline shards streaming off the névé. And while they sunned themselves he was trapped here because of his own stupidity, upside down, freezing to death.

He struggled to move, to turn his head and shout upward. Still he felt no pain. Nothing, and then horror.
I've broken my neck.

He moved his arm. His legs. They still obeyed him. It was the cold that was numbing him, and the shock of his fall. His spine was not broken. The others would find him. They would free him, and he would have a wonder to report to Collie.
A hitherto unknown periscopic property of glacial ice.

He stared straight ahead and realized he could see quite far into the ice. It was almost free of impurities, like a wall of furrowed, tinted glass. He squinted. There was something in the ice, a shape, its outline sharpening as the light grew. A fused mass of trapped air bubbles, or a vein of snow, had formed a chance design, a white form embedded within the darker ice and revealed by the light of the sun.

A pale human figure, with wings.

The white figure lay on its side, the head turned away from him. Its huge wings were spread wide, one of them cracked obliquely near the tip, the broken pinions slightly detached.

One arm was also visible, outstretched, in the semblance of some gesture that Byrne felt he had seen before, but could not interpret. A remembered sculpture, or one of Blake's hovering, pitying spirits.

The shape gleamed wetly, like fine porcelain or delicately veined marble.

Byrne groped for his notebook but found he could not reach around to the side pocket of his rucksack. His other arm was stuck fast, dead. He struggled, gasping against the pressure on his chest that would not allow him to fill his lungs. Pain awoke, tearing through his neck and shoulder.

I'm alive.

He held himself still, clamped his jaw against a rising scream. He was suddenly aware that any movement could send him plummeting deeper into the crevasse.

8

He was thirsty.

He scraped at the ice wall with his one free hand, pressed his fingers to it until he felt them burn, then held them in his mouth.

His head and chest pounded with a dull throb of pain that he realized was his own heartbeat. He had to think, keep his mind working and alert. What would the orientation of this artifact be if he were not looking at it upside down? Had it fallen from above? Or seeped in from below? Did the ice encasing it cause a magnifying effect? It seemed to be very large. Large enough, if it suddenly stirred to life and flowed toward him through the ice, to surround and enfold him with its wings.

He closed his eyes. When he looked again, the light had faded. The ice wall was blank.

He laughed. It was absurd. A magnificent, impossible figure from a long-forgotten childhood dream.

9

How long
have I been here?

Minutes, or hours. There was no way to tell. The pain had sunk and contracted into a jagged stone in the middle of his chest. When he moved his jaw he heard the skin of ice on his neck cracking. He argued with himself, reasoning against the desire to sleep, against the insane thought that he had been wedged in this crevasse for centuries. Freezing into absolute stillness, his thoughts crystallized around one idea. He moved an arm, fumbled at his coat for his pocket watch.

He had to know the time.

Time was the one constant. It did not change or freeze into immobility. Time would go on and so would he.

Do I have the watch in my hand?
He could not be sure. His fingers were numb.

Perhaps it did not matter. He closed his eyes.

10

Her name was Sara.

She fed Byrne spoonfuls of broth from a pot of mulligatawny stew. Since he had first awakened, his tongue and throat had been burning, while the rest of his body shivered. The spicy broth was painful to swallow, but after a few mouthfuls Byrne felt warmth growing in him. He looked more closely at the woman.

She was dark-skinned, her face thin, the cheekbones sharp. Her long graying hair was tied back at the nape of the neck with an ancient strip of leather. She had on a woollen coat over what looked, to Byrne's puzzlement, like a sari of dark green cloth wrapped tightly around her. At her neck he glimpsed a brooch, a swan on a blue enamel field.

In the light from the doorway, her skin shone like a young woman's. Age was in her grey eyes, in the measured steps she took from the stove to his bedside.

She turned away from him to set the soup pot on the table, and he saw his grandmother. Nana. He was lying on a cot in her kitchen, under a thick wool blanket, feverish, sick. Outside, in the garden, a soft rain falling. With tongs, Nana banked the smoking clumps of turf around the huge iron pot in the fireplace. She was baking bread, singing to him as she worked. Soothing him.

The woman named Sara moved quietly to the doorway.

—Your friends are outside. I'll tell them you're

awake.

When she had spoken again, he identified at last the faint remnants of an Anglo-Indian accent.

Byrne felt he should talk to her, but he had no idea what words to say. She went out, closing the door behind her. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

11

When he woke again fragments of the last few hours came back to him. Bright pain slicing through the fog of delirium as Collie tended to his broken collarbone. The maddening weakness of his limbs when he moved to the edge of the bed, slid his legs out from under the blankets and tried to stand. He wanted to show Collie he was capable of going with them, at least back to the base camp if no farther. But Collie would not listen. They debated carrying him back down the trail to Banff. There was no way to get a stretcher over the pass. The rivers would be swollen now with late summer meltwater, dangerous even for able-bodied travellers. He imagined at times that he was still in the crevasse, listening to their talk from a great depth.

Furious at them, at himself, he shouted at Collie and fell back on the bed, exhausted.

They had left him in the care of the woman, to make one more attempt to locate the mountain Collie was searching for.
This time we'll scale the peak that flanks the glacier,
Collie had said,
rather than venture onto the ice again. It should give us a better view of the surrounding terrain. We'll see what we can see from up there, and then we'll come back for you.

Byrne kept silent and then Collie added,
You'll be well looked after here.

When they returned he would be transported east to Edmonton in a pony cart. Driven by a man named Swift, an American who lived further down the Athabasca valley.

Lying alone in the silent cabin, he decided this plan was right. It was what he would agree to if one of the others had been injured. A part of the unwritten code he had accepted by joining an expedition of the Royal Geographical Society.

He would lie here and rest.