Ice ticks when something hot has crossed it. The sound runs across Candlemuss Tongue for a quarter hour after a remorhaz has passed, small and dry, like a stove cooling in an empty house. The cause is the ridge. Eleven plates stand along the spine, each as tall as a barn door, and they hold heat the way a flatiron does, orange at the crown and dull red at the root. The worm melts its tunnel as it goes. Meltwater pours off the flanks, the ice behind refreezes glassy, and it splits into a thousand hairlines, which is the ticking. The belly stays pale and cold, the color of tallow.
The tunnel is the part that can be measured, since the animal will not lie still for a rule. At the mouth of one above the Candlemuss moraine I stretched a cord across the widest point, then laid the cord against a surveyor's chain on the snow: eleven feet and three inches. Following the passage on foot took two days and ended at a fork past four hundred yards. A worm that fills that bore runs about forty feet. The walls are glazed like the inside of a bowl, and daylight comes down the vent shafts in blue-green columns that show every crack.
Nobody at Ulmas Pass says the word thaw on the ice. They say the ice is tired, or the ice is slow. A child who forgets is marched off the glacier and made to hold a mouthful of snow until it melts. Lisbet Hallan, who keeps the hut there, will not lend a kettle or sell lamp oil to anyone bound for the upper Tongue, and when asked why she says only that the ice has enough heat of its own. She tracks the worm by its steam, a thin white thread standing straight up from a vent, visible for miles on a windless day.
Between hunts its habits are dull. Every day it hauls itself onto the same south-facing shelf of scree below the Tongue, rolls onto its back, and drags the pale belly over the stones, back and forth, as a horse works an itch against a post. It swallows grit while it does this and sheds it later in gray heaps packed with quartz. The shelf is grooved four inches deep. Herders use the heaps to sand their sledge runners. The instruction given to anyone going up is the same every season: when the ice ticks, step onto rock and stay there until it stops.
- Classification
- Giant burrowing glacier worm
- Habitat
- Glaciers, ice shelves, frozen tundra
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- 40 ft long, 11 ft across
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Glacial highlands and frozen tundra
- Binomial
- Vermis glacialis calidus
- Diet
- Seals, elk, stray cattle
- Temperament
- Territorial, patient, quick to strike