Collected Short Fiction, page 208
He, too, farmed the land. It was difficult and it got steadily more difficult, but he planted spring wheat at the beginning of the short summer, when the glaciers did not so much retreat as paused for a few months as if to gain new strength, and he harvested, if he was lucky, before the snow started to fall again. He found and penned a few chickens in the barn. And he hunted—northern animals had been pushed south: caribou and moose, and also the wolves that preyed upon them and made short work of the domestic dogs that had turned wild.
When he wasn’t farming or hunting or doing chores around the house, he sometimes went to the north ridge and looked toward the approaching ice. At first there was nothing, then a white haze in the distance that he could see only when the day was clear. Then as it got closer the haze turned bluer, in some instances almost indistinguishable from the sky, and he began to estimate how soon it would enter his valley.
It had come sooner than he expected, but he knew he would not be driven out. The looters had not done it and the ice would find him just as stubborn. He would stay there until the end, keeping what was his by right of inheritance, by right of the blood in his veins and the blood of Reeds spilled upon the ground, and by right of the sweat that had turned a wilderness into a human place. The wilderness might reclaim it, but not without a struggle.
There, looking at the ice looming where he had been accustomed to stand upon the flint ridge, he saw the girl for the first time. She was only a glimmer of color within the face of the ice. He thought it was an illusion, but he stepped closer to the blue mass, feeling it suck the warmth from his face and his hands, and brushed at the snow adhering to the surface of the ice. He saw more color and tried to peer deeper. Then it was too dark to see anything. Next morning he returned with an axe and a shovel and shaved away enough ice to see clearly.
Inside the ice, lying as if asleep, was a young woman, a girl. She had dark hair and a fair complexion, and she was dressed in a fur coat—muskrat, perhaps—and she had furlined boots on her feet. She was lying almost horizontal with her eyes closed and her face peaceful.
She was not beautiful, at least not at first, but Reed could not get over the wonder of her there in the ice.
The snow came down in the night in large, wet flakes. That was the first time he dreamed about Catherine. When he awoke he couldn’t remember what she had said to him, only the urgency in her voice and the feeling that she wanted him to do something.
The snow fell all the next day and the next night—a meter or so in all—but the following day was bright and clear. The sunlight glinted off the mounds of snow like a knife to the eyes. Reed discovered in himself an unusual impatience, but he forced himself to rebuild the fires, restock the supply of firewood inside the house, and feed the chickens before he set off again for the face of the glacier.
This time he wore snowshoes that he had made himself and carried a broom. The glacier was twenty kilometers from the house, and he was out of breath by the time he got there. The last hundred meters he almost ran.
The glacier seemed closer. It had moved into the valley, well beyond the flint lip. He did not care about that, but it spoke of dynamic processes within the ice that threatened the vision he had seen there. For a few moments he leaned on the broom, reluctant to begin the work of unveiling that might reveal his vision as nothing but a dream inspired by loneliness, or worse, that the girl in the ice had been destroyed by the inexorable movement of the glacier.
He should measure the rate of progress, he told himself. If the glacier moved as fast as the ice had been advancing generally, it would approach his house by the end of winter, and the next winter its first advance would engulf it. But such considerations were only a means of delaying the moment of reality and were swept away as easily as the snow that covered the glacier face.
Once more he peered into the ice. She was there—just as before—and he felt a vast sense of relief. The uneven strains and pressures within the ice that made it crack and groan as he stood there, that made it surge forward at irregular intervals, had left the girl untouched.
He had not realized until now how much he had come to depend upon her existence, and how much, during the two nights and a day he had been imprisoned by the snow, he and his imagination, he had come to question the magic of her appearance. By what processes, natural or supernatural, had she got here? Standing in front of her on his snowshoes, with the north wind cold around his face and plucking at the folds of his coat, he looked at her lying peacefully within the ice, like someone who had just lain down for a moment’s rest, and he wondered again.
Had she been caught in a blizzard far to the north? Had she wandered helplessly through its blinding fury until, at last, she had given up the hopeless struggle and lain down to wait for the end, huddled to retain her body’s heat? And toward the end, had she felt the chill fade into a deceptive warmth so that her body relaxed and stretched out as it was now? Had the snow around her body compressed itself into ice, and had the ice carried her all the way to this spot, untouched by the terrible forces that pushed it forward, indifferent to all obstacles?
It was too astonishing to think about, but he kept returning to it again and again, constructing fancier and more fantastic scenarios to explain her presence almost at his doorstep. Finally he believed in it because it was real, and he came to accept it, as sinners accept God’s grace. He even constructed philosophic justification for miracles. All unique events, he told himself, appear miraculous to those to whom, by chance, they happen. Mammoths and other creatures of an earlier ice age had been found in glaciers. Why not a person today? Once in a million years—if that was the frequency—was not so incredible.
For a while, then, chin on the handle of the broom, he was content just to look at her, to enjoy her company almost as if she were a living person come to relieve his solitude. Finally a grinding noise from the glacier and the loud crack of ice splitting stirred him from his contemplation.
“What shall I do with you?” he asked the frozen figure. “Shall I leave you here to the mercy of the glacier that brought you this far? Shall I carve you out and take you down with me into the valley? It’s a long trip, but I could make a sledge—I’m handy with tools, you know—and I would tie you down securely so that you did not fall off. I could bury you up on the hill with Catherine and Billy and Josie, and all the other Reeds. They wouldn’t mind.”
But the ice was inexorable. It would grind its way across the hill as well as through the valley. It would grind the hill flat and with it all the bodies, corrupted and uncorrupted, lying there. Oddly, he did not mind that his family and his ancestors should be pulverized by this great, impersonal, natural phenomenon; everything would be turned to dust and returned to the soil eventually, and someday, if the ice ever retreated, a part of the land would be more fruitful because of it. But that this miraculous apparition should have come so far without damage only to be destroyed by his intervention seemed sacrilegious.
He could keep her near him to wait, like him, for the end, but that, too, seemed unfit, as if he were to capture the rainbow and keep it in a jar for his convenience. And, since he was a man who considered consequences, he thought of the brief summer when the ice would melt and his frozen miracle would thaw into clay like the mud in which she would lie.
No, he decided, it would be better to leave her where she was, to the forces that had brought her this far. He would return when he could to see if she was all right. At the moment of that decision he heard the ice shift and saw it plunge toward him by almost a meter. He staggered back, clumsy on his snowshoes, and then looked with sudden alarm toward the face of the ice. The girl was still there; she was still all right.
The incident stirred him to action, however, and he climbed the snowy hill beside the ice until he could see the blinding horizon where the unblemished sun had climbed two hands’ breadths into the sky. Cool as it had turned, he could not look at it, nor in that direction. He would have to make some snow glasses, he thought. To the west, in places where the snow had been blown free of the ice beneath, he could see that the glaciers had advanced generally. He looked upon a scene of desolation, like the north pole, ice and snow as far as he could see; they had consumed everything in their path, leveling and then concealing what they had destroyed.
He should find a way to keep track, he thought. It would not do to be engulfed without warning. He wanted to meet the end, when it came, awake and aware of what was going on, and he wanted to know how long it would be. Landmarks still stood at the edge of the desolation—a hill in the distance with a tower on it, a tree still struggling to survive a few hundred meters from the frozen wasteland—but he would need a theodolite to measure angles and a way to mark the spot on which he stood. Until he could make something that would serve, he descended the hill, slipping only once, and paced off three snowshoe lengths and then three more from the glacier’s face toward the valley and scratched a deep mark at each place on the brown flint rock that had been protected from the drifts.
He turned and looked once more at the girl in the ice, and turned toward the valley and home.
Reed returned the next morning. The sky was overcast and the clouds were heavy with snow, but he could not keep away. Nothing else demanded his attention; there was not much to do in the long winter except repairs, and he had done all of those. Even if he could have been out in the fields, he didn’t think it was any use. Last summer nothing had grown; next summer the snow might never melt.
He walked up to the face of the glacier in his snowshoes, carrying a bundle of laths on his shoulder. He was surprised to discover that the advancing ice had obliterated his marks on the flint ridge; in fact, the ridge itself had disappeared under the glacier and the hill on which he had stood yesterday was distant and capped with the ice that filled the entrance to the valley at a level some meters above the hill.
The ice was like a living creature advancing upon him faster than he had imagined. But when he thought about it he realized that forty kilometers a year was an average of nearly one hundred fifty meters a day over the ten months the glaciers advanced. This arm of the glacier had moved at least that far in the past twenty-four hours.
He had given up the idea of the theodolite. After toying for a while with an old telescopic gun sight, he had realized that he soon would have difficulty climbing to that point of land, and he wasn’t really interested in the general progress of the ice sheet, only the part that had begun to occupy his valley.
He was not surprised to find the girl in the ice untouched. At its base the glacier carried along rock debris that chewed up the soil and stone beneath, and the ice that held the rock flowed like slow water, but neither affected the girl. Reed was beginning to think of the girl as indestructible, as a gift carried into his life as compensation for the destruction of the past years and that yet to come. She was lying in the same position, as if she had been waiting for him.
“Ice is plastic under pressure, you know,” he said to her. “It flows like a liquid, only very slowly.” He thought about its progress in the past few days. “Maybe not so slowly.” He stopped, a bit embarrassed by the sound of his voice in the wasteland, by the way it bounced back at him off the ice. Then he shrugged and leaned his bundle of sticks against the face of the glacier. He removed his snowshoes and put them down in the snow where he could sit on them, close to the girl but not so close that he would be struck by a sudden lurch of the ice.
“No one thought,” he said, “that an ice age could develop so quickly. The scientists said that even if the conditions were right the ice sheets would take centuries to become a factor. ‘The continental glaciers were not formed in a day,’ they said. Of course they had no experience with glaciers except those left from an ice age that ended twelve thousand to thirty-eight thousand years ago. During an ice age, glaciers behave differently. It may have had something to do with what they called ‘catastrophe theory.’ The glaciers over Greenland and the Antarctic moved a few inches a week, and even the valley glaciers of the Arctic, only several feet a day.”
He leaned back and put his hands behind his head, making himself comfortable. He hadn’t had anybody to talk to for several years. He had been alone too long, in silence too long. That did bad things to a man.
“Then came what the scientists called a ‘snow blitz,’ when the snow didn’t melt in the northern latitudes all summer. Then came another. Each of them brought a hundred feet of snow or more. The glaciers spread down from the Arctic, and up from the Antarctic. They covered Canada within a decade. Scandinavia, too, we heard on television, and the northern half of Russia. Siberia went under even quicker. The Baltic Sea froze over and the North Sea. Scotland was covered with ice and parts of Germany and Poland. In the later stages we were getting reports only by radio, and then that stopped, too.”
He glanced at the girl from time to time as if checking to see if she were listening. “What the scientists called ‘the albedo effect’ took over. Ice and snow reflected more sunlight; the more sunlight they reflected the less heat was retained by the earth. That made the summers even colder.” He shifted his position so that he could look at the girl while he was talking. “Looking back upon it,” he said, “I wonder if the new ice age didn’t begin about the time I was born. Temperatures got steadily cooler for a couple of decades, and then the sunspots disappeared almost entirely. Radiation from the sun dropped by ten percent. Or so they said.”
A snowflake hit Reed’s face and melted, and then another. He looked up to see if it was blowing off the glacier, but it was coming from the sky. He could see the flakes, large, laden with moisture, slowly drifting down. Another storm was developing, but it would be several hours before the drifting flakes became a blizzard. He had become expert at predicting snowfall.
“I was ten, I guess, before the Arctic ice began surging down over Canada. No one believed in an ice age. Everyone thought the cold summers and colder winters were simply statistical aberrations, that temperatures would average out. ‘All we need is one good hot summer,’ the optimists said. Of course a few alarmists said that it was the beginning of an ice age. Boy! Were they surprised when they turned out to be right.” He laughed.
“There were anomalies. Scandinavia had a warm spell that held back the ice for several years, but then it came with a rush. Finally scientific data began to accumulate: the absence of sunspots, the average decrease in temperature worldwide, the accumulations of snow and ice, the lowering of ocean levels. Theories were proposed and checked. Finally everybody agreed, cheerfully enough at the time: we were in for an ice age. It wouldn’t be like the last one; we had civilization, we had science. We would dig more coal, create more heat, add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, start a greenhouse effect that would counteract the sun’s betrayal. Science would find an answer.”
The snow was getting heavier. Reed looked once more into the sky and knew he would have to get started home soon. “Some northern cities thought they could protect themselves with heat barriers; they would build more nuclear generators and let the waste heat keep the ice away. Others thought they could divert the ice with huge vertical knife-edged barriers made from old automobile bodies backed with rock and earth and cement. But the forces that could wear down mountains pushed them aside as if they were built of sand.
“Eventually the northern populations began trickling south, slowly at first. The Canadians were accepted in this country without question; the Swedes and the Norwegians met more opposition because the population was denser, but they finally were allowed into Denmark and then, as the ice pushed on, they and the Danes were admitted into Belgium and the Netherlands, Germany, and even France and England. The Finns, though, were turned back at the Russian border; they, too, moved into western Europe. In most places everything was friendly; it was like temporarily out-of-work relatives moving in for a brief stay.”
Reed got up and put on his snowshoes. “Science had no good answers, it turned out—not against the kind of forces gathering against humanity. Before the radio went off, I heard a few partial answers. Maybe a few individuals had answers like mine. I thought I could hide until things quieted down, but I waited too long. Now the ice that I thought might never reach here has come for me. You’ve come for me.”
He looked at the girl again. “Did you say something?” Then he laughed. “Of course you didn’t say anything.” He picked up his bundle of sticks and paced off one hundred meters from the face of the glacier, pushed a stick into the snow, and then, as the world began to be obliterated by the universal whiteness, he headed back toward the farmhouse, inserting a stick into the snow every five meters until they ran out.
Next morning the snow still fell from the sky so thickly that Reed could not see the barn. By mid-day, however, it let up long enough for him to reach the face of the glacier to check his markers. Only the top thirty centimeters or so stuck above the snow, and only a few of them remained. He estimated that the glacier had advanced another one hundred sixty meters. If that rate continued, the ice would reach his house before it slowed and stopped during the brief summer. He couldn’t clear away enough of the snow before the blizzard enclosed him again to see if the girl was still there in the ice, still all right, but he was sure she was. He had come to count on her.
The snowstorm lasted for almost a week. He had to climb out a second-story window to shovel snow off the roof before it caved in from the accumulating weight, and he had to tunnel through the snow, now five meters deep, to reach the barn. He had rigged a wood stove there to keep the chickens from freezing, and it, like the chickens, had to be fed. Fortunately, the temperature was relatively warm; the gulf air bringing the moisture up from the coast always kept the temperature from falling more than a dozen degrees below freezing.
