Icefields Read Free

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.
    He slept.
    12
    Drifting back to England in his dreams.
    The memory of visits to the botanical gardensat Kew, out of the city haze and into a fragrant, tidy wilderness. Marvelling at flowers grown from the specimens collected by David Douglas and other early scientist-explorers of the Rockies. In the humid glass cathedral of the Alpine House he leaned forward and breathed their delicate scents.
    He took a young woman to the gardens one day. Martha Croston. It was the day he almost proposed to her.
    They were there now, weren’t they? Opening his eyes upon the long, well-tended rows of plants, he would take her arm, stroll among the flowers, inhaling their mingled odours, watch with a rare feeling of envy as the old whiskered nurseryman carried his trays of seedlings reverently down the aisle.
    He opened his eyes. The woman’s face leaning over him.
    â€”You are beautiful, he said.
    Her grey eyes looked into his for a long moment and then she moved away.
    13
    It was at Kew where he first met Professor Collie and learned of his proposed expedition. Collie amazed him: a chemist, a pioneer of colour photography, an artist. Mountaineering was only one of his many passions.
    The goal is Mount Brown,
Collie had said.
Find it, or prove it a hoax. It’s been on every map in the empire for sixty years as the highest on this continent. And no one even knows if it really exists. So far no one has thought to go and verify the one lone sighting that got it on the maps in the first place.
    He was determined to rediscover the lost giant and, if possible, to be the first to reach its summit.
    Among the flowers at Kew, putting himself forward as a candidate for expedition doctor, Byrne formed his own unstated plan: to create a private botanical collection when he returned to London, grown from the field specimens he would gather during the search for Collie’s lost mountain. Perhaps one day he would even see some of his own flowers blossoming here along the lofty aisles at Kew.
    And when he returned he would also ask Martha to be his wife.
    14
    He thought about climbing back down into the