Tirku Glacier is hardly one of Glacier Bay's great attractions. The cruise ships that ply the waters so majestically do not stop near its foot to view it. It is not one of the famous tidewater glaciers fronted by a vertical, spired facade of blue-white ice from which skyscraper-sized chunks split off and crash slow-motion into the bay with booming, spectacular explosions of water. Its receding, grimy snout is now half a mile inland on a gritty plain of its own making, and it is not a gloriously photogenic wall of ice at all, but a squat, humped protrusion one hundred and fifty feet thick, black with dirt and boulders, and shaped something like an enormous bear's paw laid flat on the ground.

On a low, rocky moraine at the northeastern edge of this ugly, imposing paw, seven people stood shivering in a freezing miasma that oozed from the glacial face like carbon dioxide from a lump of dry ice. They had walked, speaking little, from the catamaran beached on the barren gray shoreline. Tremaine had expected some emotion from them, but there seemed to be only a bored restlessness. Now they began to wander off individually, poking spiritlessly at rocks and chunks of gray ice that had fallen from the glacier face. Anna, who affected a six-foot ebony staff, like some ancient Watusi queen, was using it to prod the glacier itself.