Icefields (19 page)

—Step back, she says, waving a gloved hand. Way back now.

At first he does not understand she is teasing him, so he glances behind to see how far he can safely step. When he turns again to share the joke, she is gone.

17

In the evening Byrne hears the crunch of footsteps over the snow and sets down his pen. He goes to the door, thinking he will greet both of them and tell them
I'm sorry but I didn't see your signal. I started writing and lost track of time.

He opens the door. Hal is there, alone. He tries to speak and breaks down. Byrne sits him in the chair and extracts the story.

18

The summit cornice had collapsed.

He crawled to the broken edge and saw only the billowing cloud of snow loosened by her fall.

He retraced their path along the ridge, then crawled away from the trail of their boot prints onto the cliff's sheer face.

He descended methodically, working on each foot and hand hold. Talking to himself about his progress. After some time he realized he was chanting aloud a meaningless litany.

—I am stone, the world is stone, everything is stone.

19

He found her in a gently sloping snow hollow. She was standing, he saw with a momentary rush of hope, and then thought
this is impossible, she fell three hundred metres.
With that thought he halted, suddenly afraid of her.

She was brushing snow from her wool jacket, and looked vaguely perplexed, like someone who had misplaced her reading glasses.

I'm fine,
she said when she was aware of his approach.
just cold.

He saw the streak of snow stained red at her feet. She looked past his shoulder as if blind.

Freya….

She turned away, sinking, and he crouched with her, saw the split from temple to ear, the white of bone. She drew her legs up underneath her and settled against him.

He carried her down the slope and onto the glacier. Her head was nestled into the front of his wool jacket. Her body warm and heavy against his. There was so much warmth.

As he staggered down the ice the sun burned the clouds away. The air warmed. He heard the sound of rushing water and followed the winding course of a meltwater stream down-slope to the shore of Byrne's nameless lake. A wide, calm pool, perfectly transparent.

He set her down by the lake and looked into her open, sightless eyes.

20

The two men take rope and blankets back up the glacier to the lake.

They wrap the body and carry it to the shelter, placing it gently on the stone floor. Byrne examines it briefly under the light of his spirit lamp.

—We'll leave her here tonight and return with help tomorrow.

—Leave her?

—Yes, it's too dark now to bring her down.

—You can find the way with your eyes closed, bastard. I'll carry her myself.

—You don't have the strength left. You know that.

Rawson gives in, steps outside.

For the first time, Byrne closes the door of the shelter firmly behind him and blocks it up with several large stones.

21

Elspeth fills a kettle with water and sets it on the stove. She crouches down in front of the wood box,
strikes a match, and lights a fire while rocking on her heels. She is not yet fully awake. She watches the paper crumple, the broken bits of an orange crate licked at by the flame, and then she stands up.

Byrne and Rawson are in the front parlour, sitting in the dark. Four in the morning, the world a blue-grey shadow, they brought her the news of Freya's death. Waking her from deep sleep with a knock at her door. They have just come down from the glacier and they need coffee, a place to sit quietly, someone to talk to. They are sitting together, not speaking, waiting for her.

The water in the kettle begins to hiss. Elspeth holds her hands for a few moments above the warming iron surface of the stove, and then sits down at the unvarnished kitchen table. Freya had sat here with her one evening, not long before the climb. There was something she wanted to say, something difficult. It was the first time Elspeth had seen her hesitate before speaking her mind. And then Frank had come into the room, and Freya left soon after that, without saying it. Elspeth thinks she knows what it was Freya had been about to tell her. It was about Byrne.

In the window the blackness outside is paling to grey. Elspeth imagines the mountain will look different to her tomorrow. After three years here it has become as familiar as the wall of her own small room. Mute background.

She stands up. The kettle is boiling. In a little while the morning staff will be coming in to make breakfast for the guests. The accident will be common knowledge soon enough, on everyone's mind, but the work of the chalet will go on as it must. The room will fill with voices and light, the clang of pots and pans. Eggs will be cracked, flour and baking soda will be shaken out of tins, bacon will sizzle. The cooks will quickly forget to be solemn, they will chatter and joke with one another. It will become a noisy, human room. But for now it is still involved in the night.

Years later, when she remembers Freya's death she will see everything as if contained in this dark room.

22

At the end of the summer, Rawson brings Byrne two photographs, the remnants of Freya's film cartridge. The rest of the exposures were spoiled when the camera cracked during the fall.

—I wanted to give you these, before I left. I may not be coming back to Jasper.

The ice carapace of Mount Arcturus is the main subject of the first shot, the icefield below its summit a dark amoeboid blur to one side. The clerk in the camera shop explained to Hal that the glare of sunlight on the snow caused this effect.

13

Byrne's portrait also survived the fall. He finds himself frozen inside it. Her gift to him.

Grey peaked hat. Knee-length, weather-stained mackintosh over a dark flannel shirt. Tinted spectacles on a leather strap around his neck. Knee breeches, puttees, overshoes mottled with damp. Waterproof railway gauntlets in one hand, calfskin notebook in the other.

Prematurely white hair, thin white beard lining a long, bony face. Eyes look slightly Asiatic. Squint caused by sun glare on the spring snow at his feet. Chiselled lines at the corners of his eyes, alongside his thin-lipped mouth.

The markings of time. The ice has been at work here too.

24

Nineteen-fourteen. Britain and its dominions go to war against the German Empire.

Elspeth watches Byrne come down the path to the glasshouse in his shirtsleeves, hatless, grim-faced. His last day of the season.

—I can't believe how quickly the temperature has dropped this year. One day all the streams are
rushing, and the next everything's frozen over and silent.

Elspeth smiles.

—I seem to remember my father saying something like that on one of his birthdays.

She has knit Byrne a green wool pullover. He tries it on in the parlour, holds out his arms and turns to let her admire her work.

—It's warm, he says. Thank you.

That night he packs the pullover in his valise to take with him to London. He will wear it against the English damp, and take it with him to the war, to where Rawson has already gone. He will be wearing it one day on a village street in France. Past him will file another seemingly endless procession of faces, the soldiers, this time most of them chalk-white, the eyes looking away into some place more distant and unspeakable than the depths of a glacier. He will write about this moment in a letter to her, one that he decides not to send but keeps tucked in the back of his notebook.

Four years will go by before they see each other

again.

25

Trask's son is kept busy in his father's gift shop. There are more people than ever coming into the park these
days, despite the fact of a war. Trask has an explanation for this.

—The sad fact is that when somebody falls to their death in the mountains, like poor Miss Becker, all the fools in the world come running to see if they can accomplish the same thing.

A customer mentions the new flying machines, built to make war in the skies. Jim Trask follows the man out into the street and stares up at the peaks, livid in the rose light of sunset. To be able to soar to those heights.

He leaves home one day, unexpectedly, setting a short note and the bulk of his savings on the shop counter. This distant war has occurred at the opportune moment.

26

People talk of the war as though it is rumbling up the valley toward them. They imagine Jasper as the last bastion of the British Empire, defended in the final hour against the armoured Huns. Dynamiting the cliffs at Disaster Point to build a wall of rock rubble where townsfolk would patrol and keep watch fires.

The ambrosia of English poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Tennyson, is recited every Saturday evening at the town hall as a tonic.

In 1916, German soldiers arrive in Jasper, shackled and locked up in freight cars. The idea is that little surveillance will be needed in a place where there is nothing to escape to. Given the choice, any sane man would stay behind the fences and barbed wire.

Much of the old settlement is still intact, half-submerged in the willow scrub. Some of the salvageable buildings are renovated, to serve as the nucleus of a prisoner of war camp.

That winter the German prisoners build a palace of ice blocks on Connaught Drive, for the annual February carnival. The blocks are cut from the frozen Athabasca, hauled up by sledge to the town, chiselled into shape and sprayed with water to cement them in place. The plan is to build a scaled-down ice replica of the Taj Mahal.

Given the tools and the material, this proves to be beyond the engineering skill of the prisoners. Instead they build a four-sided castle with battlements.

It is to this castle, lit from within by torches, that The Ice Princess, chosen by the Chamber of Commerce, will come at the end of her horse-drawn carriage procession through the town. The problem will be to keep the Princess from freezing in the thin silk costume they have designed for her.

27

A patriotic fever of naming soon fills up the blank spaces on the map of Jasper National Park. Battlefields. Commanders. Dead heroes. La Montagne de la Grande Traverse is renamed in honour of Edith Cavell, an English nurse at a Red Cross hospital in Brussels, tried and shot by the Germans for helping wounded Allied soldiers escape into Holland. Trask unveils the plaque at the base of the mountain.

In memory of those valiant young men and women who have gone on ahead of us to the Elysian fields.

28

Jim Trask returns to his father after three years, from a ruined world, a future of destruction.

Byrne is on the same train. He understands something more about the ice as a time machine when he sees Jim in his Royal Flying Corps uniform, direct from the Great War, having flown not over mountain passes and hidden valleys, but fortified towns, broken bridges, smoking fields.

From the east coast Byrne passed through a sequence of crowds on his way back to Jasper. An unsettled time. Soldiers, families, young women. Children travelling alone. He brushed past giddy revellers
and tearful reunions. But there were just as many faces numb with grief and shock. Bodies bent around wounds. The train stations seemed to him like the waiting rooms of overcrowded hospitals. And as he came west, the numbers of people milling about the station platforms dwindled. The train began to empty.

He approaches Jasper in a wintry dawn, alone in the lounge car. It seems to him the train is sliding towards the icy edge of the world. With himself and the young man, Trask's son, its only passengers.

The young man rides into town in the refrigerator car of the train, resting on a sawdust-covered block of ice carved from a frozen river. Around the block of ice are bags of freezing salt. Led by the local pipe band, the bearers carry the boy from the train, up the street past his father's gift shop, to Father Buckler's new stone church on Turret Street, and past it to the cemetery.

When Ned Byrne came back to Jasper after the war, I was still at the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

The Grand Trunk had gone bankrupt, and the chalet was all but boarded up for three years. The staff found work where they could, or if they could. I was lucky. I knew what was coming, and so
I
wrote to my friend in Victoria, the woman I had met on the train that first brought me to Jasper. She knew the manager at the Empress, and helped me get an interview. Three weeks later I left Jasper. At the time I didn't think I would be coming back.

The war ended, and the next spring a letter came from Frank Trask. He told me about Jim, and how he and his wife had considered leaving Jasper and moving back east. But now he was working again. The chalet was his, he'd bought out his partners. He was thinking about adding a new wing. An auto road from town was just about finished. Now he needed someone to manage
the chalet, someone who knew it as well as he did. He was
willing
to offer a share in ownership, but I was going to have to give him an answer soon. I wrote back and told him I'd think it over, and get hack to him within a week.