Icy Clutches

'Hey, is that a crack about the cabinet I tried to put up in the den? Because if it is, there's no way that can be considered my fault. In theory those toggle bolts should have...” He grinned at her. “Okay, I see what you mean. I admit it: Operational details aren't my strong point.'

'Really.'

'Now wait a minute. The only reason the back door won't hang straight is—I mean, sliding doors are not as simple as you think. How the hell was I supposed to know...What's that look supposed to mean?'

'Gideon, have I told you that I loved you today?'

He shook his head. “Not a word.'

'Well, I love you.'

They leaned together and kissed gently, barely touching. “I love you too,” he said quietly. Her soft, glossy black hair fell against his cheek. He closed his eyes. What astonishing power she had to move him. He tipped her head toward him. They kissed again.

'Hey, we don’ ‘low none of that stuff ‘roun’ here,” a ranger rumbled from across the aisle. “Eyes front.'

They separated, smiling.

'Now,” Julie said, “exactly what do you want to know about glaciers?'

'Basically, I want to know how those bones got where they did. Look, as I understand it, Tremaine and his people were on Tirku Glacier itself, about two miles above the snout, when the avalanche came down on them. Since then, the snout has retreated about half a mile inland. Which means that it's now one and a half miles below where they got hit in 1960.'

She sipped from the cup, basking in the steam. “That's the way I understand it too.'

'But the avalanche came from Mount Cooper, to the southwest, which means it hit Tirku sideways, so it wouldn't have carried them down the length of the glacier toward the snout.'

'True. What's the problem?'

'The problem is, how did those bones wind up at the snout? How did they get carried forward that mile and a half down the glacier? If Tirku had been advancing all this time I could see it, but it's retreating.'

She studied him. “You really don't understand how glaciers work, do you?'

'That's what I've been trying to tell you.'

'That's amazing. How can you be a full professor, a recognized—'

He sighed. “Do you ever hear me going on about minor deficiencies in your education?'

'Are you serious?” She tucked in her chin and frowned, the better to affect a deep, masculine voice. “No need to be ashamed, my dear. You are not dumb; merely ignorant.'

'Julie...'

'Okay, okay. Well, what you have to realize is that there's a difference between glacial retreat and advance on the one hand, and glacial flow on the other. Even when a glacier is retreating, the ice is still flowing forward, it's just melting at the snout faster than it's flowing. It's like a...oh, like a big conveyor belt that's working fine but being dragged slowly backwards. Whatever's in the ice keeps moving forward all the same.'

'I see.'

'Bill!” she called over his shoulder.

Bill Bianco, the course instructor, stopped at their seats. A blond, easygoing thirty-five-year-old who looked twenty, he was a much-published expert on glaciers, particularly on crevasses. ('How did you get to be an expert on crevasses?” Gideon had asked him the evening before. “Fell into enough of ‘em, I guess,” he had replied.)

'Bill,” Julie said, “what's Tirku's rate of flow?'

'Tirku? On the average about a foot a day, maybe a little less.'

'Say three hundred feet a year,” Julie said. “In twenty-nine years that'd be, uh, between eight and nine thousand feet.” She smiled at Gideon. “A mile and a half. Voila.'

Gideon laughed. “I'm impressed.'

The boat slowed again.

Bill looked out the window. “This is your drop-off point,” he said to Gideon. “Tirku Spit. We'll be back for you in about three hours.” He looked at his watch. “At about one. Have fun.'

* * * *

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