Free Icefields by Thomas Wharton Page B

stables, corral. Oh, and of course the place everybody asks about first. The shithouse, as we affectionately call it. I’m afraid the indoor plumbing is still for guests only.
    Hal’s first day ended with a lesson on the arcane science of the diamond hitch.
    â€”That’s more like the Gordian knot, son. Here, let me show you.
    Trask had his doubts about Rawson. For the past two years the young man had been living in England. Last year, at the age of twenty-one, he had published a book of poetry,
Empty and Waste is the Sea,
a book that Trask hadn’t read, but that he heard had gained a modest fame both in Canada and across theAtlantic. Somewhere, this ethereal type had learned to ride, passably, and aim a rifle, and if that awkward shyness left him he could charm the ladies. What he didn’t know about trail life and packhorses young O’Hagan and the other guides could teach him.
    As it was now, they rode circles around him and delighted in the fact.
    â€”I took a poet on a packtrip a few years back, Trask said to Hal the first day. Well, he was a painter and poet, that’s what he called himself. He told me his god was Nature. I thought to myself, We’ll see about that. When we set up camp the first night he took a stick and scraped himself a little trench around his tent and pissed in it. I said, why the holy circle? And he informed me, quite seriously, that it would keep away the bears. So I told him it was a rare pleasure to meet a god-fearing man.
    24
    While Rawson waits below in the camp, Byrne climbs the glacier. He stops to rest against a boulder lying in the middle of the ice, blows on his cold fingers, and writes in his notebook.
    There can be little doubt the glacier is at present retreating. The terminus is an arcuate, shelf-like lip, furrowed with the longitudinal depressions of seasonal icewasting. The frontal slope varies between 20 and 30 degrees, and this fluctuation also indicates the glacier’s unstable state. The logical next step is to determine as closely as possible the flow rate and the average yearly amount of recession.
    Collie’s Geographical Society report, meticulous as the man himself, noted that Byrne’s accident occurred at the base of the first icefall. Several metres from a large dome of rock, a
nunatak
as the Inuit named these solitary landmarks in a desert of ice. Collie remembered the nunatak as a marker of the farthest point reached by the expedition before Byrne’s mishap. Its dark, humpbacked shape is visible from the chalet.
    In Europe they are called
rognons,
but here the Native word, its harsh sound, seems more accurate.
    The nunatak is huge. Byrne circumnavigates it, finds a shred of faded green cloth in a crevice of the rock. He was wearing a green scarf the day of his fall into the crevasse. He knows that Collie removed it to examine him.
    He takes his bearings from the nunatak, marches several paces down the glacier surface. At the time of his fall, the blue ice was bare and glazed with melt-water. Now there is a light dusting of fresh snow, but not enough to hide crevasses. There are none as far ashe can see around him, and he admits to himself the foolishness of his search. The chasm into which he fell was no doubt long ago sealed up by the forward flow of the glacier.
    25
    He reaches the base of the first icefall. He can walk no farther, and now must climb.
    The glass mountain.
    He takes the newly-purchased gear from his rucksack, straps the claws onto his boots. Steps out of the sunlight into the icefall’s colder penumbra.
    The point of his axe bites through the brittle surface, into the harder layers beneath. He gouges the ice with his lobster claws, hauls himself upward, carefully planning each movement, no matter how slight. The dagger technique. Stab with the axe, the boot, crawl upward like a slow and methodical spider. Breathing in deeply, breathing out slowly.
    An ice shard skitters from above, bounces off his coat