Icefields Read online

  Clouds of steam rise from the bubbling mineral fountain in the glasshouse. Water drips from the broad, sagging leaves of hothouse plants. Down the glass panes, droplets of condensation slide, so that the windows seem to be melting in the heat.

  While Trask takes over the conversation, Byrne settles back in his chair. Through the fogged windows he can make out the jagged silhouettes of spruce trees rocking slightly in the wind. He would like to step outside into the cool mountain evening.

  He is the doctor for the mountain section of the Grand Trunk Pacific, where the line is being doubled in expectation of increased overland traffic. In the fall he will return to London and another doctor will take over his duties.

  The field hospital where he lives and works is a giant canvas tent with a red cross painted on its roof, set up and dismantled to keep pace with the advancing construction. His spartan living quarters are behind a screened enclosure in a corner of the hospital.

  There are many accidents on the line. The men work themselves into exhaustion trying to battle unexpected obstacles, like the creeping sand dunes along the river flats that bury the same section of track every few days. Dysentery and other ailments are rife in the crowded, unsanitary camps. Byrne is kept busy.

  When he makes his infrequent visits to the chalet or the town, he finds himself surrounded with the comforts of the twentieth century. As a special guest of Trask, he has been lodged in a cozy chalet room with a fireplace and running water. There are oystershell electric lamps and palm trees in the lobby. If he wanted to, he could sit at an oak desk in the lounge, under a delicate bowl of light, and write letters home to England.

  3

  —I’d like to hear more, Father Buckler says, about what it was like in the crevasse.

  —Cold, says Byrne. Everyone laughs. Byrne hesitates, searching for words. Frank Trask leans forward in his chair, pounces on the unwanted silence.

  —That’s right. Cold. But you didn’t have to be at the bottom of a crevasse to feel it. The whole valley was inhospitable.

  The 1898 expedition was Trask’s first as a head guide.

  They had started from Banff in search of Collie’s prize, and he had found his own. A wild valley waiting for a resourceful young man to see its potential.

  Now he is part-owner of the chalet and its marvelous glasshouse, half a day’s journey by train from the growing town of Jasper. It was he who convinced the railway magnates to build a spur line from the wide Athabasca valley into this more remote and colder region of the mountains.

  He has a responsibility to ensure that conversation travels a smooth path, and so he leads it, like a string of pack ponies, out of deadfall and other difficulties.

  —Cold and desolate. I came west from Bruce County, Ontario, at the age of sixteen, my head stuffed with foolish notions. There wasn’t much in Banff, and less than nothing here. Whatever I had, I had to make for myself. And now look at the place. I’ve got a theory. You can measure the progress a frontier settlement makes by counting how many fewer dogs there are roaming the streets every year.

  He drops back heavily into the comfort of his velvet-backed chair, waves his cigarette with a flourish.

  —All this in a decade. I’m sure Doctor Byrne agrees it’s a change for the better.

  Byrne smiles and sips from his tea cup.

  Trask takes note of the admiring glances directed at the doctor. A romantic figure to those who keep to the immaculate lawns that girdle the chalet and go no further. Elspeth certainly seems to like him. Reserved, cultured, gentlemanly, and yet he was trapped down in that crevasse, during a dangerous expedition. It could, Trask muses, be turned into a profitable curiosity. The man who was trapped in the jaws of icy death. The icy jaws of death might be better. Trask wonders if he could persuade Byrne to lead guided walking tours up to the glacier. It might work. If he wasn’t such a stiff-necked bastard.

  4

  —There must be a fantastic view of the icefield from the summit of Arcturus.

  Byrne glances up at the sound of the voice. Freya Becker, the travel writer.

  —I’m tackling it this summer, she says. What about a teahouse up there, Mr Trask?

  Byrne studies her. The notorious Miss Becker. Pilloried by the Canadian papers for her one-woman attack on the male bastion of mountaineering. He had heard of her before she came to Jasper, and this is not the woman he had imagined. Not this slender, sunburned girl who stirs restlessly in her chair.

  —A hot drink at the summit would fetch any price you’d dare charge.

  —It’s a thought, Trask says without looking at her. The more civilized we can make things, the better.

  Next to Freya Becker sits Hal Rawson, the young poet working for Trask as a trail guide. He has not said a word yet this afternoon. When Byrne catches his eye he looks away.

  5

  —It was from Arcturus that Collie first saw the icefield, Byrne says. And according to him, yes, the view was magnificent.

  Byrne is aware he has been invited here as a kind of special treat for the people who make up Jasper’s frontier society. He is the Englishman. Trask expects him to display certain qualities thought to be lacking this far west in the Dominion: nobility of sentiment, decorum, a cool reserve lightened by gleams of urbane wit. He has had much practice in playing the role and this afternoon it comes easily to him.

  He is also aware of Elspeth Fletcher, the hostess. The fact that their eyes happen to meet whenever he glances her way.

  6

  This garden under glass is her creation.

  A rock pool with a fountain bubbles in the centre of the glasshouse. The water is pumped in from the hot spring.

  Humid air fills the glasshouse like a rippling green liquid. Byrne watches the other men pulling at their collars, and he wonders how Elspeth can remain so unruffled, so cool and intact in this heat.

  This is the first time Byrne has seen the chalet’s glasshouse. He remembers the tiny native flowers he collected on the expedition, the precariousness of their existence. Here in this garden, sealed off from the glacial winds, are giant, unabashed blossoms from Europe, India, the Pacific islands. Camellia fictilia growing next to hyacinth. The effort, the likely cost of such a display, astounds him.

  —This region has had a lot of names, Trask says, but Jasper is the one that stuck.

  He leans forward, flicks cigarette ash on the glasshouse’s stone floor, then darts a worried glance in Elspeth’s direction. He grins, gives her a stage wink.

  —The old Métis settlement called Jasper was near here. During the fur trade it was called Snow House, or Arcturus House, but some of the natives called it Jasper. Then when Yellowhead Pass was chosen as the rail route over the Divide, the town had to be located further down in the Athabasca valley. It’s wider there, of course, less of a grade for the railroad, and not so beastly cold. Jasper wasn’t the first choice for a name, though. We called the place Fitzhugh for a while, in honour of one of the railroad moguls. When it was still just a tent city.

  —Jasper, Elspeth says. I’ve wondered about that. Where the name came from.

  Trask shrugs.

  —That’s what the traders and Indians called it. As to why, I couldn’t say. Sara, the woman who minded Doctor Byrne for us, she was here before Christ—pardon me, Father—so she might know. But I wouldn’t take it as gospel.

  —Why not? Freya Becker says.

  —Well, Miss Becker, Trask says slowly, you should ask the doctor that question.

  —All right, I will. Doctor Byrne?

  Byrne looks up, startled, at their wondering faces.

  —Excuse me. I’m sorry. I was admiring the flowers.

  Trask grunts.

  —Still mourning your lost treasures, I suppose. That’s the thanks I get.

  —I always kept the seeds and bulbs with me, but I didn’t want you to know that at the time. No offense, but your pack ponies were rather good at scraping their cargo off against trees. I was hoping to get some British Columbian s
pecimens when we crossed the Divide.

  —You were the expedition botanist, Father Buckler says, as well as the doctor?

  —Not officially. It’s just that camp life turned out have its monotonous side.

  —Purgatory, it’s been called, Trask says.

  —Yes. I hadn’t expected that. For the first few days I was living the romance of camp life. And then at night I started dreaming about my featherbed at home. After a while the only topic of conversation around the fire was our favourite restaurants. Collecting the flowers kept my mind busy.

  Elspeth rises and refills his tea cup.

  —I believe Miss Becker wanted to hear more about Sara.

  Byrne smiles. He will tell them about Sara. He will not tell them everything.

  7

  The guests drink their tea, help themselves to cucumber and orange slice sandwiches. Trask tells mountain legends and bear stories. The party lingers into the evening.

  Byrne takes a sip from his cup. The tea has gone cold.

  Elspeth knows the right moment. She rises and asks her guests to follow her down the stone path to the back gate. They stroll through a tunnel of thick foliage.

  Elspeth unlocks the narrow wooden door and swings it open. Gelid air streams into the glasshouse. Like rubbing alcohol it lifts away the film of sweat from Byrne’s skin.

  —Now this is wonderful, Freya Becker says. She stretches out her arms. Yes.

  The glasshouse fills with a milky, luminescent fog, and the guests watch one another grow pale and fade. Cool droplets condense like a cold sweat on their faces and arms. Feathery snowflakes appear above them, drifting down on their heads, on the leaves of the tropical flowers.

  When they have all gathered outside, Elspeth quickly shuts the door behind them.

  —The flowers don’t like it as much as we do.

  The conversation is revived by the cool air, the keen scent of pine and spruce. While they stand at the back gate and talk, twilight seems to bring the mountains closer around them. Patches of snow gleam like phosphors against the dark rock.

  Hal Rawson steps out the furthest into the shadows. He turns and regards the others through the arabesques of his cigarette smoke, his expression unreadable.

  Trask frowns at him, clears his throat.

  —Now, Doctor, I understand you’re also back in Jasper to study glaciers.

  —That’s right.

  Trask shakes his head.

  —You’re a persistent sort, Byrne, I’ll grant you that. But I’m afraid if you get swallowed up I won’t be around this time to come to your rescue. So don’t do anything foolish, please.

  Rawson’s sudden voice out of the dark:

  —The glaciers creep like snakes that watch their prey.

  The guests glance at one another. Another awkward silence falls. Elspeth opens her mouth to speak, then purses her lips.

  —Shelley, I believe, Byrne says, coming to someone’s rescue, Rawson’s or Miss Fletcher’s. Or both.

  —From his poem Mont Blanc. It’s curious: in 1816 Shelley apparently understood that glaciers once covered most of Europe. In that poem he imagines an ice age, an idea that scientists scoffed at for another thirty years.

  Rawson flicks his cigarette away. There is evidently nothing more to be said. Elspeth turns and smiles at Byrne.

  —It’s fascinating when you think about it. The fact that a glacier moves, I mean, but so slowly that you can’t see it.

  Byrne raises his cup of cold tea, pours a little out into the saucer.

  —Think of this saucer filling to its rim and then spilling over. A glacier is an overflow from a great saucer of rock that has filled with ice over the millennia. It pours out, one could say, wherever there is a gap between the encircling peaks.

  He tips the saucer and a few drops spill onto the paving stones with an unmistakable dribbling sound. Trask coughs out a cloud of cigar smoke and Freya laughs. Byrne goes on in a chastened tone,

  —Eleven thousand years ago, it’s estimated, the ice covered this entire valley.

  Elspeth watches Byrne as he speaks. He is ten years her senior and looks much older, weatherworn. His manner is distant, reserved. She feels a momentary desire to touch his face, imagining it would be as cool and impervious as marble.

  He has returned to the mountains after more than a decade. To the place where he nearly lost his life. She wants to know why.

  8

  The next morning Byrne leaves the chalet on a chestnut mare from Trask’s stable and rides along the creek. He follows the windings of a sinuous esker to the site of the old settlement, although he knows he will find it deserted.

  —The settlers were kicked out four years ago, Trask told Byrne as he helped him saddle up. When the national park was created. Well, most of them got compensation or deeds to land further north. So it wasn’t totally ruthless, you see. They weren’t driven off with guns.

  Only those who had sanctioned business within the boundaries, guides and trailblazers like Trask, were allowed to remain.

  —Swift’s still here, Trask said. Nobody was going to order him off his land. And prime real estate it is. I only wish I’d seen it first.

  9

  At the old settlement Byrne realizes how much the Arcturus glacier has receded, the advance made by trees, grasses, flowers, into the barren valley. What is strange, what can only be a trick of memory, is that the cabins themselves are much farther from the river bank than he remembers, tucked in a stand of dark trees, as if they too have been receding with the ice.

  The trading post is gone. He is sure of that. None of the remaining log ruins show traces of the trellised portico, the narrow windows, that he remembers. He dismounts, ground-ties the mare and enters one of the cabins that has no door. Inside it is bare, the dark logs streaked with light from the gaps in the sagging roof. A willow is growing in through the window.

  In the silence he speaks aloud the words he imagined he would say to her.

  —Do you have any more stories to tell?

  Byrne follows the course of Arcturus Creek to the till plain. Here he dismounts again and leads the horse. This flat stretch of sand, gravel, and braided streams has lengthened in the years since he was last here. Dividing it are the moraines, curving outerworks of recessional rubble, resembling the concentric walls of an ancient Celtic fortress. Each time he struggles to the top of a moraine, Byrne finds that the glacier is still farther away than he thought it would be.

  Twelve years before, when the expedition established its base camp here, the glacier terminus was a high wall of cracked pinnacles surrounding a wide cave entrance. He fancied it resembled a giant marble foot, all that remained of some forgotten colossus. Now there is only a rounded slope buried at its end in a mound of wet mud and rock, the debris laid bare by recession.

  Perhaps this is a landscape better suited to a rational new century.

  In the evening he returns to the old settlement and sets up camp near the cabin he entered before. Night falls swiftly and the mare, tethered to a krummholz stand, lifts the black silhouette of her head against the moonlit clouds.

  Byrne leaves the dying fire and crawls inside the

  cabin.

  10

  My Dear Loved Ones:

  I’m sure you’ve been wondering at the long delay since I last wrote, and now that the mail service has been restored, I can tell you the reason. We’ve just had a flood.

  Apparently a dam of loose ice built up downstream, and with the spring melt already underway, there was a lot of water coming down from the glaciers. I woke up on the first morning of the flood to see ducks paddling down a river that had once been the road past the chalet. I also heard that a black bear, driven away from its feeding grounds by the rising water, took refuge on the roof of Mr. Trask’s house. For the next three days our little corner of the world could have been described in one word: slush.

  When the dam burst, slabs of blue ice tumbled down the swollen river, surfacing and diving like sapphire d
olphins. Trees were sheared off the crumbling banks. Further down the valley in Jasper, the ground buckled and doors no longer closed. Headstones in the cemetery sank into the spongy earth. The ends of coffins rose up like the prows of sinking ships.

  The Anglican church, a hopeful wooden structure, collapsed during the first night of the flood. In the morning the townspeople found a saint standing in the river, grounded upright on a gravel bar. The wooden statue wobbled unsteadily in the rushing current, birds perched on one of its outstretched, nut-brown arms.

  Two days ago it was snowing, and yesterday I was helping with the cleanup and got a bit of a sunburn. It feels wonderful to be outside a lot more though, even with this crazy weather.

  I must close now. Morning comes very early, and I have a full day ahead. A world of love. From your loving daughter,

  Elspeth

  11

  The morning after the glasshouse party she is in the chalet’s front parlour, sipping hot Earl Grey tea from an eggshell china cup.

  From her window, she can just make out a climbing team struggling up the glacier against blowing snow. Five tiny figures huddled together, crawling slowly forward up the slope. The alpinists from Zermatt.

  Elspeth blows on the surface of the steaming tea, sips from it, raises her head and listens.

  Above the sound of the wind, she hears the distant crack and crumple of an avalanche. The thin glass in the windowframe rattles. She glances out. It takes her a moment to find the source, a slender white plume flowing down a dark seam of Mount Arcturus. The avalanche is high on the mountain and the alpinists are in no danger, but they stand motionless, watching as the cascade of snow and ice bursts over a rock ledge.

  So graceful and delicate from this distance, as if unconnected to the thunder echoing across the valley. At the glasshouse party Byrne had told her there could be chunks of ice the size of train cars falling in those powdery veils.

  Elspeth takes another sip of tea, pleased with the bitterness of lemon.

  12

  In 1910 she came to Jasper from Inverness, having managed a tea and pastry shop there. A Canadian aunt of hers had met Trask while on a railway excursion through the Rockies. In the dining car Trask went on about his new “glacier” chalet, the difficulty of finding good staff. The aunt mentioned her niece. A bright young woman. Diligent. Level-headed and absolutely trustworthy.