Icy Clutches

GLACIER BAY—A man's platinum ring engraved with the inscription “To Steve, Love Forever, Jocelyn” has led to the solution of a grisly mystery. National Monument officials have now confirmed reports that the fragmentary human remains recently discovered at the terminus of Tirku Glacier are those of members of a botanical research party killed in a 1960 avalanche. The ring, found in association with a small number of bone fragments and some tattered items of clothing and equipment, was identified by Robert Fisk of Boise, Idaho, as belonging to his brother, Steven Fisk, a member of the ill-fated Tirku survey team. The ring had been a gift from his fiancee, Jocelyn Yount, also killed in the avalanche.

According to A. D. Stutfield, monument supervisor, the remains washed out of the glacier after being locked in the ice since 1960. “They may have been lying out in the open for months,” he said. “It's not an area that gets much in the way of foot traffic.'

A skeletal-identification expert has subsequently identified the bones as those of Fisk and James Pratt, both graduate students at the University of Washington, No trace of Miss Yount is believed to have been recovered.

Reached at his home in Seattle by telephone, the expedition director, Professor Melvin A. Tremaine of the University of Washington, said that he was “too overwhelmed with emotion by this new development to offer meaningful comment.” Tremaine himself was trapped in a glacial crevasse for 21 hours in the avalanche's aftermath.

The assistant director, Dr. Anna M. Henckel, was unavailable for comment.

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Chapter 1

* * * *

Glacier Bay Lodge, September 10, 1989

'I think it only fitting,” Professor Tremaine said, rising with a feline grace not often seen in a man of sixty-nine, “I think it only fitting that we conclude our first dinner together with a toast.'

He inclined his handsome, scarred face downward while the waiter glided noiselessly around the table with a towel-wrapped magnum of Piper Heidsieck, the third of the evening. When each of the six fluted glasses had received its portion of champagne, Professor Tremaine lifted his head. With a tanned and graceful hand he casually brushed back the lock of thick, strikingly white hair that fell so often and so artlessly over his brow. His lean shoulders under the cashmere jacket were squared, his back straight. He raised his glass.

'To the memory of three young people,” he said, “three brave young people who gave their lives—so full of promise—in the pursuit of the advancement of human knowledge. To Jocelyn Yount, to Steven Fisk, to James Pratt. We who remain behind...remain and grow old...we salute you.'

He made as if to speak further, then stopped with a small shake of his head and raised his glass.

Five glasses besides his own were raised. Five throats besides his own gurgled with champagne. Here and there an eye glistened. It was a poignant moment, a moment satisfactorily replete with memories and emotions. It would, Professor Tremaine thought serenely, make a moving opening to his book, far better than the one he'd been planning.

In mid-September of 1989, in a warm and pleasant dining room, I looked out—make that gazed out. Make that gazed pensively out—across a chill, gray Bartlett Cove toward the ice-choked inlet where it had all happened so many years ago. I raised my glass. “To the memory of three young people,” I said, “three brave young people who—'

His train of thought interrupted, Professor Tremaine scowled. “What?'

No one responded, but he knew what he'd heard. “What a crock of shit,” somebody had said.

And unless he was very much mistaken, it had been uttered in the distinctly Teutonic tones of the eminent Dr. Anna M. Henckel.

* * * *

The subsequent angry thump with which Professor Tremaine set his glass on the table was not quite loud enough to carry to the far end of the Glacier Bay Lodge dining room. There, at the only other occupied table— actually four tables pushed together—sat twelve men and two women in the gray and green uniforms of the National Park Service. And one tall, quiet man in cotton slacks and a much-laundered, pale blue sweatshirt. Most of those in uniform were engaged in a vigorous after-dinner argument on the merits of the conventional prusik sliding- friction knot versus those of the Kleimheist. The lone civilian, by contrast, was gazing (abstractedly rather than pensively) out the window at the placid, darkening waters of Bartlett Cove and the sunset-reddened glaciers of the Fairweathers beyond. Occasionally he lifted his coffee cup to his lips, or sighed, or crossed his restless legs, or uncrossed them.

Gideon Oliver was beginning to wonder if coming along with Julie to her training session had been such a good idea. It had made sense when they'd planned it. His fall classes at the University of Washington—Port Angeles would not start for another week, and his notes were fully prepared. He had finally finished the proto-hominid evolution monograph on which he'd been working for most of the summer and sent it in to the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The one case he was handling for the FBI (two skeletons buried under the parking lot of a membership discount department store in Tacoma) was on hold; he'd finished his analysis and wouldn't be called as an expert witness until the case came to trial in November, if then.

So why not use the unaccustomed free time to accompany Julie on a trip to the pristine far north, to Glacier Bay, Alaska, which neither of them had seen before? Wouldn't it be better than being separated for a week? Her days would be taken up, of course: She would be attending the five-day Glacier Search and Rescue training course. But he could spend his days in long, cool, solitary walks, and look at icebergs floating in the bay, and maybe take