"
"What about that?" Raven gestured to their left. Several hundred yards down the glacier's front, a dip in the ground swallowed the tape for a while before it emerged on the other side. "If you were down there the ranger couldn't see you."
"Assuming it's more than three feet deep," Kelsa said. "Assuming there's not another ranger posted there."
"She's only here to keep people off the ice," Raven replied, in the confident tone that usually meant he was bluffing. "If we got up on the ice she could see that from here. I'll distract her."
He strolled toward a group of tourists, who were already distracting the ranger with questions.
Kelsa looked over the muddy debris field the glacier had left in its wake. Several other tourists were hiking along the glacier's face. They were another set of witnesses who might rat her out to the ranger, but their presence meant that people were allowed to wander in that area.
Swearing under her breath, Kelsa switched her com pod to record mode and made like a tourist, taking pictures of the glacier as she hiked over the rugged silty rocks.
Like the glacier itself, the dip was bigger than it had looked from a distance. Kelsa stared curiously, for this shallow trench was nothing like the water-cut gullies and canyons she was accustomed to, just a slightly deeper groove amid hundreds of others the glacier had carved into the mountain's stone. She couldn't see the ranger anymore, and no one else was in sight.
Heart pounding, since she was usually a law-abiding person, Kelsa scurried under the orange tape and up the glacier. Clearly others had taken advantage of this dip in the landscape, for there were words scratched in the dirty melting snow that covered the glacier's face: Burt was here. Nicklaus and Gretta 2094.
Kelsa could see nothing now but a wall of white curling away, for its top was far higher than her head. It didn't look very inspiring, but this dirty snowbank was just one branch of an ice field that could be seen from space, and that even now was carving away the peaks that towered around her.
Kelsa pulled out the medicine bag and untied the neck, then folded the top down to prevent it from spilling as she put it in her pocket. She stepped forward, trying to keep her feet out of the trickling stream that undercut the glacier's lip, and laid her hands in the half-melted snow that covered the ice.
She stilled her thoughts, pushing aside the embarrassment discovery would bring. Slowly her awareness stretched beyond the icy wall, into the immense depth and weight that lay behind this lacy outlier. The words welled sluggishly out of her subconscious.
"Carver of mountains. Source of rivers. Ice that carries the memories of our planet, carry this healing from the peaks you cut to the seas - be strong!"
Keeping one cold hand pressed against the ice, she pulled the bag from her pocket and dashed a wisp of sand onto the glacier.
The hard wall beneath her palm was still, but Kelsa felt the slow grinding power roll through her and shuddered with terror and joy.
Boom. Boom. Boom. The deep hollow voice of the cracking glacier echoed off granite peaks like cannon fire. Boom. Boom. More cracking, fainter, and then more, finally fading into the distance.
Kelsa pulled her hand away, smiling at the sight of the prints she'd left, at the knowledge that her mark on the glacier's face would do more good than Burt's had.
In moments she was back under the tape, clambering up the muddy rise till the ranger and the others came into view.
The tourists were exclaiming and waving their arms, much as they had in Craters. The ranger was explaining that it wasn't uncommon for glaciers to crack on a warm, rainy day, even multiple fracturing when the atmospheric conditions were right.
Raven stood at the edge of the crowd, grinning with the same delight Kelsa felt. In that moment, she could almost forgive him for the lies, for all the information his people had withheld.
Whatever the danger, surely this was worth it.
***
They'd been on the road that led down toward Jasper for only a few minutes when a traffic jam, caused by drivers on both sides of the road stopping to take pictures of a mother bear and her cub, brought the bike to a halt.
"The rangers say you shouldn't stop like that," Kelsa told Raven, watching the furry brown lumps. "The bears become accustomed to people and cars,