The bottom of the boat grated against rock. An aluminum ladder was hooked on a couple of cleats and lowered over the bow of the Spirit of Adventure. Gideon, Chief Park Ranger Owen Parker, and two subordinate rangers clambered down onto a narrow gravel shore and stood back as the digging tools were tossed down to thunk against the pebbles. The boat backed off, gunned its engines, and turned slowly around. There was a glimpsed wave from Julie, and the big, white, three-level catamaran glided northwest toward Tarr Inlet, already looking small and faraway in the immense bay.
Gideon shivered. Tirku Spit was not an amiable place. To their right the flat gray beach stretched around a curve and into Johns Hopkins Inlet. To their left was a long black ridge clotted with a scum of gray-green vegetation. Beyond it, the freezing upper reaches of Lamplugh Glacier could be seen, and then, far off, Mount Crillon and the ice-buried, Fairweathers. Ahead, the lumpy gravel, seamed with crisscrossing, inch-deep rivulets of water, sloped uphill for half a mile to Tirku Glacier, a grimy, humped excrescence oozing from an ice field somewhere beyond Mount Abbe.
The shore itself was bare except for a border of beached, decaying icebergs at the waterline; melted down into grotesque gray-white shapes two or three feet across, they looked like a scattered row of bleaching mammoth bones, as if the remains of some prehistoric kill had washed up. Under a bleak, slaty sky of cirrostratus the day was gloomy but clear. Gideon could see at least thirty miles in every direction; three or four thousand square miles all told. And in all that vast space there was no sign, aside from the inconsequential, diminishing speck of the boat, that any other human beings existed on the planet Earth, or had ever existed. Or animals. Or plants, other than the hummocked, foot-high mat on the ridge. Nothing but ice, black rock, and water the color of pewter. It was like being back at the beginning of the world.
He shivered again, glad to have the rangers’ company.
They headed for the big notched boulder Tibbett had told them about, each carrying some equipment. Gideon shouldered a couple of spades, Owen Parker a pickax, Russ Davis another pick and some food, and Frannie Martinez a knapsack of hand tools-trowels, small hammer, forceps, chisels, brushes. These had been brought at Gideon's request. Probing for bones was delicate business. If he could help it, those picks and shovels weren't going to get within five feet of any skeletal remains.
Walking to Tirku's foot was easy going. The slope was gentle, the wet, pebbly land scoured smooth by the glacier during its long advance. Avoiding the small streams of water and the isolated boulders left behind when it retreated created little difficulty, and they covered the half mile in fifteen minutes.
When they got to the moraine where the bones had been found the day before, Gideon put down the spades and stared up at the dirty, seeping snout. Gritty and black with soil, it was more massive than it had appeared to be from the shore; well over a hundred feet high and five hundred feet across, a bulging, irregular protuberance furrowed with cracks and pockmarked with holes. There were steady sounds of trickling water from all across its face. The area in front of it was littered with lumps of dingy, melting ice that had fallen from it, some the size of snowballs, some as big as automobiles.
"Ugly sonofabitch, ain't it?” Russ said cheerfully. He was working his first season at Glacier Bay, a hulking, wonderfully clumsy kid from Arkansas with the scrubbed, pink, innocent face of an angel.
"Not my favorite glacier of all time,” Owen agreed. “Well, let's get to it. We'll divide the area up into quadrants and split them up between us. That sound all right, Gideon?"
"Sounds fine."
It took only twenty minutes for Russ to find (by stepping on them) the twisted aluminum frames of a pair of wraparound sunglasses that might or might not have belonged to the survey team. And ten minutes after that, Owen let out a whoop and held up a picklike tool with about eight inches of splintered wooden handle, from which dangled a looped leather strap.
"Ice ax!” Frannie said excitedly. “Were Tremaine's people carrying them?"
"We'll sure as hell ask them,” Owen said. He brought it over to show it to them. “It was right at the base of the snout. Must have fallen out of it in the last few days."
"An ax?” Gideon said after a moment. “What would a botanist want an ax for?"
Aside from hitting a fellow botanist in the jaw with, of course. The steel head was a long, vicious-looking affair with a tapering, blunt point at one end and an adzelike blade at the other. Gideon ran his hand slowly over the cold metal, as if he could somehow feel its history. Careful now; his imagination began to get the better of him again.
"Nothing strange about it,” Owen said. “You can chop with it when you're climbing, but mostly people use it for walking on ice, sort of like a cane or a ski pole. You hold it by the head-the strap goes around your wrist-and there's a whatchamacallit, a ferule, in the other end of the handle that you poke into the ground. Gives a lot of security on a slippery ice field."
A little later the sharp-eyed Frannie spotted a ragged strip of red-and-black plaid material trailing from a typewriter-sized chunk of smoke-colored ice. The rangers wanted to smash the ice open with a pick, but Gideon insisted on working with a cold chisel and a small hammer, tapping away for forty minutes to carefully chip the material free. To no avail, however. When the ice was reduced to a pile of shavings there were only a few more inches of woolen plaid to be found. No bones.
"Maybe Tremaine or one of the others can identify it,” Frannie suggested, but without conviction. Twenty-nine years was a long time to remember somebody's shirt, let alone distinguish it from a million other shirts made of the same common material.
In the next hour, nobody found anything. By noon, when they stopped for a lunch of ham sandwiches and coffee, Gideon was discouraged. He was also cold. Julie, knowing she would be out on the glaciers, had brought her warmest coat to Alaska, a hooded, quilted parka that encased her like a sausage in a bun. But Gideon, expecting to spend his time around protected Bartlett Cove or in a warm tour boat, and believing the tales of fifty-degree weather in September, had only a thinly lined, waist-length windbreaker. It probably was fifty degrees back at Bartlett Cove, but here, on this desolate glacial shelf, it was fifteen degrees colder at least, and the frigid vapor that hung over the glacier made it seem colder yet. His nose was running, his fingers numb and red, his wrist cuffs sopping from poking in the ice, his trousers soaked at the knees from kneeling in the gravel.
All the same there was a time-spanning magic here if you looked for it. These rotting gobbets of ice littering the gravel had traveled eleven or twelve miles from the Brady Ice Field, Owen had told him. At three hundred feet a year, that meant it had taken two hundred years for the ice flow to make its slow way down. Now, today, you could pick up a fusty gray chunk with the knowledge that it had fallen as rain or snow at about the time George Washington was first taking office on the other side of the continent.
Russ saw him staring thoughtfully at a dingy, melting chunk of ice in his hand. “What's up?” he asked curiously, around a mouthful of sandwich.
"When this fell,” Gideon mused, “Mozart was still alive."
"No shit,” Russ said.
"Keats hadn't even been born, or Shelley. Paganini was just a kid. The Reign of Terror was just beginning in France."
"Yeah, I guess,” Russ said, and went back to his sandwich.
Nothing more was found after lunch, and they were more than ready to call it a day by the time they spotted the white, welcome shape of the Spirit of Adventure rounding Russell Island and heading their way, twenty minutes early.
It was only after they gathered up the picks and spades-left leaning carelessly against a rock when they arrived and untouched since-that Gideon saw it.