It did not choose to return him.

It simply changed state, as glaciers have been doing throughout the history of the earth, according to the conditions imposed on it by climate.

But the communities of the region have their own relationships to the ice and the mountains that give the glacier’s behavior a significance that goes beyond physics.

The glaciers of the Northwest Coast and subarctic interior are not simply geological features in Indigenous understanding.

They are part of a living landscape — powerful, dangerous, and meaningful in ways that the oral traditions and ceremonial knowledge of the region have always recognized.