← catalogue

Seeds of Pine

by Emily F. Murphy · English · Gutenberg #32409 · 435,967 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Seeds of Pine
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Seeds of Pine

Author: Emily F. Murphy


        
Release date: May 18, 2010 [eBook #32409]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32409

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEEDS OF PINE ***




Produced by Al Haines









SEEDS OF PINE


_By_

JANEY CANUCK


Author of

"Open Trails", etc.



  "_A handful of pine-seeds will cover mountains
  with the green majesty of the forest, and I, too,
  will set my face to the wind and throw my
  handful of seed on high._"
          --_Fiona Macleod_




TORONTO

THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY LIMITED




Copyright, Canada, 1922

THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY, LTD.

PUBLISHERS

TORONTO




  _Affectionately dedicated to
  my four brothers;_

  _Thomas R. Ferguson, K.C.
  Gowan Ferguson, M.D.
  Harcourt Ferguson, K.C.
  Honourable Mr. Justice W. N. Ferguson_




CONTENTS


Chapter

     I  WESTWARD WITH THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC
    II  A FRONTIER POST
   III  TO THE BUILDERS
    IV  BEHIND THE HILLS
     V  THE END OF STEEL
    VI  BITTER WATERS
   VII  MOTORING TO ATHABASCA LANDING
  VIII  COUNTRY DELIGHTS
    IX  AT THE LANDING
     X  ON THE ATHABASCA RIVER
    XI  SOME NORTHERN PIONEERS
   XII  AT THE PARTING OF THE RIVERS
  XIII  ON THE PORTAGE
   XIV  ON THE LESSER SLAVE RIVER
    XV  THE BISHOP OF THE ARCTIC
   XVI  NORTHERN VISTAS
  XVII  A COUNTRY WOMAN AT THE CITY RACES
 XVIII  IN NORTHERN GARDENS
   XIX  COMMUNING WITH THE RUTHENIANS
    XX  THE SHADOW OF THE SCAFFOLD
   XXI  THE BABOUSHKA
  XXII  THE HERO PRIESTS OF THE NORTH
 XXIII  COAL-MINING IN ALBERTA
  XXIV  THE PLAYGROUNDS OF THE WEST
   XXV  THE OVERLAND TRAIL OF '98
  XXVI  A SONG OF THIS LAND




SEEDS OF PINE


CHAPTER I

WESTWARD WITH THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC

"'What went ye out into the wilderness to see?'  They answered thus,
'So that we might not see the city.'"--SIR WILLIAM BUTLER.


The new steel trail the railway men are laying from Edmonton leads away
and away, I cannot say whither.  For these many days I have had an
anxious desire to follow it and the glories thereof.  I am tired of
this town and of the electrical devices that appear and re-appear in
the darkness like eyes that open and shut--wicked eyes that burn their
commercial message into my very soul.  I am sick of these saucy,
swaggering streets and of sundry of the townspeople.  Come you with me
and let us travel down the ways through the heart of the summer!  We
shall have breeze and sun in our eyes, and breeze and sun in our
hearts.  If you like not the prospect, pray, come no further, for we be
contrary the one to the other and no way-fellows.

As we climb on the train this morning, it seems as though our quest for
quiet is to be cheated by the wallowing wave of humanity that threatens
to submerge us.  Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?

She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search
of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for
talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage
bags--young fellows all in the full force of life--these, and "the
gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty.  The gang fare forth
to work on the railway grades.  They are always ganging--that is
going--for the words are strictly synonymous.  The gang going to the
city meet the gang coming out.  And so in everything they are
retroactive, and fight much, and swear, to give weight to their
differences of opinion.  In one thing only is the gang agreed, no navvy
has yet been found who disputed the axiom that the Boss is a yellow
canine.

There is a sprinkling of women, too, and we talk to each other in the
friendly manner of the country.  A couple of them are half-breed girls,
with drooping feathers and skirts that have a hiss.  Surely their men
are industrious Indians.  Both are cinched into their clothes like a
cayuse into its pack-saddle.  Both have skin the colour of brown coffee
into which milk has been poured, and always they are fussing with their
pinned-on curls.  "The judicious Hooker" once watched some women doing
this, and he said they were "a-dilling and burling their hair."  No one
may ever hope to strike out a more apt expression.  The younger of the
girls has an indiscreet mouth and desirous eyes.  I should not be
surprised, if one of these times our little brown woman found these to
be a mortgage on her soul somewhat difficult of discharge.  And the
usury, little woman, it troubles me, the usury!

The farmer's wife who shares my seat came to this province ten years
ago from the United States.  Her husband made entry for a homestead and
she built the house, outbuildings, and fences on it, and bought the
implements with money she had saved from school-teaching.  The first
year, their crop was frozen; the second, it was hailed out; and the
third, a spark from the threshing-machine burned their wheat stacks.
Their horses died and they had to incur debt for others.  All this
time, the woman supported the household with the returns from her
poultry yard and dairy.  These last years have been fat ones, thus
enabling them to save sufficient money to send two of their sons to the
business college in Town.  The eldest girl is walking with the young
man on the adjoining farm and a wedding is brewing.

To my thinking, this homely, ill-accoutred woman is something like a
heroine, and it is a pity the end of her troubles is not yet.  Her
husband, who appears to be a flabby-spirited fellow, has always wanted
to, and has finally decided that he will sell the farm and go to the
town to keep a boarding-house.  She is opposed to the move and has been
in the town endeavouring to protect her interests in the property, but
finds she is unable so to do.  Because of this she has decided to buy
the farm from him and has the agreement ready for his signature.  I am
astounded by her hardihood.  She has the soul of a warrior.  If the
recalcitrant spouse refuses to sell--no, I won't tell what she intends
doing, for I am willing to wager you, even to the half of my kingdom,
that he sells.

The woman is proud, I can see, and accordingly careful to enlarge on
her man's good qualities, but it takes no acuteness to read through her
assurances that he is a pessimist and one who always draws tails in the
toss of life.

The readers who have come with me thus far may here swing off key, but,
People Dear, you would be wrong; she is not chastising him; she is
mothering him.  It is a remarkable trait in the make-up of a good woman
that she can, in critical junctures, not only be her own mother but may
also act in this capacity to the husband of her children.  It is this
same office the Holy Ghost performs in the Trinity.

The newsy is giving the last call to breakfast.  He is a full-lifed
young man, with a cock-o'-my-walk air.  I would not be surprised if he
were hatched out of the egg of a pouter-pigeon.  He serves meals as far
as Edson, from whence we will be transferred to a construction train
and trust to manna being rained down from heaven.  His tables are
crowded with guests, and we sit close like kernels on an ear of corn.
For breakfast, there is tea; there is coffee; there are pork chops, and
other fat foods which are made palatable by the sprightly addition of
sour pickles.  Indeed, you may credit me, this breakfast is not one to
be sniffed at.  I drink pannikins of tea that is very strong and green,
and fearlessly ask for more.  If there is a happier woman in the North
than myself, I have never heard of her.  I quite agree with you; our
pouter-pigeon serves the public far more effectually than do the
cabineteers, or even the bishops.

We are yet in the wheat belt and the wheat is at flood-tide.  When I
see a large stand of grain that is breast-high I say, "Well done, Good
Fellows!" and "Haste to the in-gathering!"  The field hears my
salutation to the sowers and bows a million heads to me.  And it says,
_shibboleth! shibboleth!_  (If you would pick up the talk of the fields
you must be still and listen.)

The Hebrews, with ears a-tilt, caught this whisper, and so their word
for an ear of wheat was "shibboleth."  It was this word the Ephraimites
lisped and so betrayed themselves to Jephthah.  The difference was only
one of an aspirate.  What they said was sibboleth.

Now, while one can tell the sound of ripe wheat, no word is exactly
descriptive of the odour thereof.  When I am not tired my pen almost
catches it.  The odour is an intangible something between dryness and
colour, and the sign that expresses it can only be revealed.

It is the mental habit of people to think of wheat as only so many
bushels of inert matter that is bought and sold on margins by half-mad
men, whereas, in all the world, wheat is the thing most richly alive.
It won't die, not for thousands of years.  We would put jars of wheat
in the corner-stones of our state buildings, even as the Egyptians
buried it in tombs of rock.  It is the only food we could pass down the
centuries to posterity, and apart from its scientific value, there is
little doubt posterity would appreciate the gift infinitely more than
those stupid name-lists of still stupider people.  The grain should be
of the highest grade, with the name of the grower and the exact
location of his farm added thereto.

Yes! let us tuck away these northern wheat grains till England becomes
a republic; the United States a kingdom; and until the yellow peril has
turned white.  Let us lay them safely aside for that day when labour
and capital have become one, or till a still later epoch when instead
of sex in soul, there shall be soul in sex.  Then take them out,
Posterity, and crush them into a sacramental wafer that all the world
may eat of it as a loving pledge from the twentieth century.

If you think this too long to wait, perhaps you will recall that while
the seven sleepers slept, Caesar was superseded by Christ.  Now, the
time they slept was for the lives of three men.

In handling wheat, you have doubtless noticed that it is not only alive
but possesses a markedly developed will-power.  It is ever resisting
conquest.  They tell me that in the part of the exchange called the
pit, you cannot beat back wheat.  Some men have succeeded for a while,
but always it has rolled in and smothered its erstwhile victors.  Try
to hold a handful and the task is well-nigh impossible.  It slides
through your fingers and causes your palm to open involuntarily.  It
wearies a man to hold wheat tightly for long.  Oats may be held and
other cereals, but not wheat.  Its tendency is to fall to the ground
and reproduce.  Thus, it is age-old but still eternally young.  It is
the true Isis and no one has lifted its veil.  I tell you men, there is
something uncanny and almost wicked about a thing that refuses to die,
and it so small as a grain of wheat.

As a whole, this country is not beautiful, but now and then, there come
striking pictures.  Here are pleasing lakelets a-flush with ducks; tall
cotton-woods which I name the maidens because of their fluffy
hair--these, and lush meadows, over which range regiments of asters,
sunflowers, and yarrow.  It is a magic lantern fantasia with an
occasional muskeg to represent the waits between views.  On the muskegs
the trees are so thin and straight they fairly scratch your eyes.

Oh! but it is hot this day, and every leaf seems a green tongue thrust
out with thirst.  The sun is making amends for his insulting reticence
of last winter.  The Indians call him Great Grandfather Sun, but why, I
do not know.

The houses of the homesteaders are built of poplar lumber,
weather-stained and ugly.  Others are of logs chinsed with mud and
moss.  All are small and favourable neither for hospitality nor
reproduction.  Some day, when a large acreage is under crop, pretty
bungalows with brave red paint, will edit the scene as in the older and
more settled districts of the north.

At every station, land seekers get out and disappear into the trees as
if the country ate them up, and, indeed, I am not so sure but it does.

A baby gets off too--a new baby that has come from the city hospital is
being brought home.  You would fancy a baby was a miracle the way the
men look at it and ask questions.  Her name is Annette.  She was born
on duck-day.  Her father works in a saw-mill.  We crowd to the window
to watch him meet Annette, for we would see the gladness on his face.
He is an admirably strong man, with the hard sinews of a wolf.  He has
surely gone through the mill to some effect.  I think he likes Annette,
but he looks most at the small mother and he has the mate tone in his
voice.

The women ask me concerning my husband, and I say, "Oh yes!  I have a
husband up here, somewhere--a big, fair man--I wonder if you have seen
him."

They are discreetly silent, but I can see they are hoping I'll catch
him.  This is not a case of duplicity on my part but rather of
kindness.  It is one's stoutest duty to convey colour and snippets of
gossip of women, who, for the long winter months to come, are to remain
in these wilds.  You must understand that gossip is not wicked up
North.  Besides, this word actually means a sponsor at baptism--an
office recognized by all the world as one of unimpeachable
respectability.

At Wabamun there is a great sweep of forest, but, a year ago, a great
fire raged here and large patches of burnt trees assault the eyes.
Hitherto, the homesteaders have had a two-handed harvest, one from
their lovely lake and the other from the land, but, nowadays, their
richest harvest comes from the summer tourists, who are building up a
popular resort at this point.  Summer girls are trespassing on the
berry-patches, once the sole preserve of Indian maidens, and Ole
Larsen's fishing grounds are full open to sailing yachts and electric
launches.  Such fish as Ole could catch, and such fish as his Frau
could cook!  Always, I bowed my head over my plate and said the Indian
grace, "Spirit, partake."  Ole can tell where the fish are to be found
in certain seasons by the movements of the birds.  The fish feed on
flies and rise to the surface for them, whereupon a t gull or duck will
fall with plummet-like pounce.  White-fish bite in the autumn.
"Yumping yiminy, dey yust do."

The remains of the railway construction camps have almost disappeared,
and only the bleached bones of horses mark out the long trail of the
grading gangs.

Here are the grades I descended a couple of years ago while prospecting
over this ground.  What slopes these are to put a horse down.  They are
like those described at St. Helena, upon which you might break your
heart going up or your neck coming down, with the additional risk of
being arrested as a trespasser.  On this place where we once ranged for
coal-rights, the real-estate agents have sub-divided the surface into
desirable building lots, that sell from three to five hundred dollars
the lot.

One day, this lake shore will be a hive of industry, for deep in her
loins Mother Earth had hutched her riches of coal and fire-clay, and,
mayhap, more minerals that are precious.  Once, in drilling here, our
men came upon black sand with a showing of gold, but it petered out,
after a couple of inches.  It was with great difficulty they were
persuaded to go on with the drilling instead of going to town to file
on claims.

Already there are several towns along this lakefront--that is to say,
towns consisting of three or four tents or houses.  In the earlier days
of the North each settlement was commenced with a fort, now it is begun
with a railway station.  The next building to be erected is the station
agent's house, which is quickly followed by a restaurant, and a general
store with a post-office.  This is the axis from which the homesteaders
radiate into the surrounding country, and, presto! before you know it,
there is a bank, an implement shop, a church, a hotel, and the other
conveniences of modern civilization including mortgages.

Already you may see trails like long black welts across the
land--trails that appear to fare forth without any preconceived plan
and to hold a lure in their far reaches for happy-go-idlers like you
and me.  There is no telling what we might find on them a goodish way
off.  The only straight trails made in this North land are made by the
engineers, and as you look down the lines you may readily see that they
lead into the sky.  I like greatly the unthanked, unknown engineers who
beat out these paths for the people who are to come after.  No trumpets
herald their coming, or announce the leagues they have herded behind,
but I tell you these fellows are a commonwealth of kings, and we may as
well stop here for a moment and stand at salute.

And after the engineers came the builders with their sinews of steel to
bind the trail.  It is this steel strength that makes the land to bud
and blossom.  It is creative.  Well and truly has a builder said that
the land without population is a wilderness, and the population without
land is a mob.  Yes! it is a steel idol we worship in this country and
not one of gold, and we do refuse to grind it to powder and drink
thereof, no matter what any Moses or Aaron may say.

This last hour I have been in mind-to-mind talk with a young Englishman
who does not think much of Canada.  He speaks of our dismal
respectability, our tombstone virtues, and our provincial
small-mindedness.  We call our gardens yards, and have no manners to
speak of.  Indeed, nothing but a major operation could remedy our
boorishness.

Now, all he says is quite true _but I don't believe it_; besides, his
English-sure way of summing us up is irritating to my sense of
patriotism.

In some places up here he has had to sleep in puppy's parlours, which
means with his clothes on.  This must have been uncomfortable in that
he still wears leather puttees which are the true hall-mark of men from
the British Isles.  He talked about our cold winters and how unbearable
they were, just as if the cold were not the sepia the North shoots
forth to protect herself from joyous loafers.  I did not say this, for
one cannot be polite and patriotic at the same time, and it is well to
be polite ... only I remarked that one of these cold days we will shut
off the Gulf Stream instead of sending it out to heat up England.

I have no doubt he has private means, for he has travelled widely and
is a well-educated man.  He came here to have a go at homesteading.
"Have you succeeded?" I ask.  He does not reply except to ejaculate,
"Farming--my hat!" whereupon we both laugh, he at the Canadians and I
at the English.

The average youth from England finds it trying to be stripped of
precedent, and there is nothing approximating Canadian homestead life
in London.  We too often forget this and so fail to make allowances for
his prejudices and lack of adaptability.  Our government mounts him and
puts his foot in the saddle, but he must set the pace himself.  One can
hardly expect the government to do more, but yet, it seems a pity so
much excellent material is annually lost to the Dominion because we
have not the time or means to work it up.  It will take some years to
manipulate the crude European immigrants into the mental and physical
trim of this Britisher and to inculcate them with equally high
political standards.  We do not recognize this, or maintain an easy
passivity to it, until at some election crises our hearts fail us for
fear because of the preponderance of the foreign vote in educational
and moral matters.

And the Englishman and I speak of subjects of grave import, and of how
it is not seemly that we trade too freely with foreign peoples
(especially with the States of the American Union), neither is it loyal
to our most Christian King, George V.  "Wealth at the expense of
loyalty is not a thing to be desired," says the Englishman, "and
Colonials do well to preserve the integrity of the Empire," to which
dictum I make no reply, not being able to gainsay him.  I could wish
though that he tell me how we are to avoid so doing.

This dear lad would go into literary work if we read anything in Canada
besides statistics, sporting news, and crop forecasts.  In the
contemplation of our sordid practicability, he is lost in astonishment.
"No, madam, I shall not do it, and I shall tell you my reason," says
he.  "If you write with a sense of life or colour along will come some
weighty, grim fellows whose business it is to write stock
quotations--leaden creatures, believe me--and they will distinctly
sniff and sneeze out the word 'impressionistic,' by which they mean
fanciful.  Sons of bats!  If once they tried to frame an impression in
black and white they might have some proper comprehension of the word.
Any uncouth man can state facts, but it is the telling what the facts
stand for that hurts.  A coarse man cannot take impressions except from
a closed fist, which impression he would probably describe as a 'dint
in the pro-file.'  Such an one hears no farther than his ears,
although, in not a few cases, this might be no inconsiderable distance."

"No, I will not become the local _litterateur_," continues the lad, "to
be received by the community with a mingling of pride and sarcasm.  I
tell you what I will do: it is better to be a real-estate broker, in
that all conditions tend to what you Colonials call 'a dead sure
thing.'  It is the only business in which a man reaps where he does not
sow.  I will surely be a real-estate man.  This I will be."

We are come to Edson now--the terminus of the passenger route--but I am
going to describe it in another chapter, for it would be ungrateful to
bulk it with other events because of the sense of adventure I enjoyed
from my visit thereto.




CHAPTER II

A FRONTIER POST.

The new world which is the old.--TENNYSON.


Have I told you about Edson and its prospects?  No! ah, well, never
mind, I shall do so by and by, when I have talked to the citizens.

While biding my time for a seat at the lunch-counter, I will walk up
and down the station platform.  Every minute men are arriving to await
the out-going train to the city.  They come and come, apparently from
nowhere, till there are quite a hundred of them.  Of course, they
really come from up the street (I should have said from the streets,
for there are two, or, perhaps, three streets), having recently arrived
from the grading camps somewhere up in the mountains.  We are going
there to-morrow, or maybe the next day, and then we shall see the
habitat of these battling, brown-throated fellows who nose the stream
of flesh-pots and feed on hunks of brawn.

The men philander about, or sit on the platform planks, and loll lazily
against the sun-warmed wall.  They count their money, smoke, and talk,
but on the whole they are quiet.  Also they stare at me like they were
gargoyles and whisper the one to the other.  This is not because of
rudeness--not at all!  Even the white armoured Sir Galahad would find
it difficult to be knightly in the circumstances.  For months they have
done naught save stake out and measure up, shovel gravel, dig ditches,
set transits, sweat and swear, for a railway, you may have heard, is
built with heavier implements than batons, pens, or golfsticks.  No
woman has come near them except certain will-o'-the wisps whom the
Mounted Police did straightway turn back to town.  Their lives have
been filled full of contest, hardship, and loneliness, so that every
mother's son desires, above all else, that some woman (she may be
either saint or sinner) put her hands upon him and tell him he is a
truly fine fellow and worthy to be greatly loved.  This is why they
will give her all their money and not because they are of the earth
very earthy.

Do you waggle your head at me!  Do you?  Then I care not a straw.  It
only means you do not comprehend the ways of men at our frontier posts.

Some men are here preparing to take the wagon trail to Grand Prairie in
the Peace River District.  This trail, they tell me, is one hundred and
fifty miles long, and may be traversed in six days, a journey which
from other points formerly took as many weeks.  Hitherto, it has seemed
the faraway edge of the world, a place for none save the adventurous
blooded and sturdy, but in this day it seems to lie at our very door,
for, in the North, one hundred and fifty miles is merely a stone's
cast.  In the spring, fifteen thousand homesteads will be thrown open
for entry, so that presently it will seem that all creation is trekking
this way.

And why not?  It requires no fore-vision to know that the land has a
future above anxiety.  Up this trail there is a new world to be
possessed, an unequalled empire, in which men may go hither and yon as
they please.  It gives my feet a staccato movement to think of it.
Some city folk there are who might fear the trail, but this were
foolish.  It is good to ride on a long trail and laugh out loud for
sheer joy.  On the trail, the ear of Society is closed and there are
smoked goggles on her eyes.

I have been talking to a stripling from Nova Scotia, who has been here
these four months.  When first he came, there were but three girls in
the village; now, there are eighteen.  As a result of this increased
immigration, the weekly dance is better attended and is more amicable.

Besides his outfit, this Nova Scotian is taking in a year's provision
to his homestead, and so has been working to secure a sufficiency of
money.  He hopes to get a steading that will one day become a town
site.  This is the dream of every northern farmer: it is the gold at
the foot of the rainbow.  Perhaps, my Boy o' Dreams may find it.  Who
can say?  Providence keeps a closer eye on farmers than we imagine.  As
yet, the boy has not persuaded any girl to accompany him to Grand
Prairie.  I would go myself only (I had the reason a minute ago but it
has escaped me); what was it?  Oh yes!  I remember now, I am already
married.  The Land of Cockaigne could not have been situate in the
North, for in that most blessed land every Jack has his Jill and found
no difficulty in keeping her.  No! it was never in this latitude.

I went to two hotels before I could find a room.  I should have
registered at once instead of loitering at the station.  In the first
hotel they could eat me, but to sleep me was out of the question.  In
the second, a stout well-looking German--or, as I prefer to call him, a
coming Canadian--took possession of me, remarking in one breath, but
with an air of great punctilio, "You would in my house put up?  Der
conductor-man he so told me you to me might come.  This my wife is.
You should become to each other known.  She a bed for you will
get--water!--towels!--whatsoever Madam she may desire."

"Urbanity" is the one word that fits the German, my host.  His Frau,
who is of the pure Teutonic type, has a heart of great goodness, with
emotions that lie close under the exterior.

All might have been well with me at this hotel, but, unfortunately, in
descending the closed-in stairway, I stepped on a sleeping cat and
plunged headforemost to the bottom....  "Der drouble mit you," says my
host, "a crick in der back is."  The cat's "drouble" seems to be
paralysis.

Some one has said that reserve is a sign of great things behind.  Sweet
Christians! this is entirely true; I realized it to the full while
holding back the tears and assuring the assembled household I was not
even jarred.  I am proud of the way I behaved, and sorry my own folk
were not there to see.  Now, they will never believe it.

One of the maids brought me brandy which I did not drink, but after
awhile, my hostess fed it to me in what she called canards.  You dip a
lump of sugar into the cognac and transfer the lump to your mouth--that
is all.  You could never believe how nice they taste, or how curative
they are for "crick" in the back.

Before long I am able to limp down the street and call on the doctor.
I used to know him in days when we both lived farther south.  But any
way, a previous acquaintanceship would have made no difference.  We do
not need introductions at a frontier post like this, for there is an
undercurrent of good fellowship which understands that the stranger who
talks to you is not necessarily a scalawag, with subtle designs on your
purse or your person.  Any one who fails to grasp this plainly obvious
fact is either a newcomer or a solemn humbug.

This doctor has charge of the hospital car that lies in the station
yard, and most of his time is spent travelling from camp to camp down
the line of construction.  I saw the car to-day, or rather I nosed it,
for the smell of iodoform came siftingly through like dry cold.  It is
owned and operated by the railway company for the benefit of their
employees.  At certain stations along the line, the company have placed
cottage hospitals where emergency cases are treated.  Those who have
fevers or require major operations, are usually taken to the city.

Long ago, when the earlier railroads were being constructed it was not
possible to supply such life-saving appurtenances, so that nothing
remained for the wretched fellows but to drag themselves away and die
like hurt dogs.  There is a current aberration that the golden age was
"once upon a time," but, in my opinion, it is here and now, or at least
it will be when every municipality has instituted classes to teach
policemen the difference between drunkenness and a fit.  I will say a
prayer about this some of these days.  One must be business-like.

As he builds up and smokes a cigarette, the doctor tells me that the
navvies and teamsters have a singularly critical taste in the matter of
medicine.  They do not like tablets or medicine with an innocent
flavour.  Unless it be distinctly pungent, they feel cheated.

"Do you accede to their demand?" ask I.

"I do, Good Lady," says he.  "It is modesty that prevents my describing
to you the excellency of my flavours" (and here he assumed a truly
sagacious air): "my medicines have 'nip' to them and a body that is
really desirable.  They are indescribable, but most they approach the
little girl's definition of salt--'that which makes potatoes taste bad
when you do not eat it with.'

"I see, Dear Lady, you are still of inquisitive mind," says this Man of
Medicine.  "Yes!  I can see that and I dare say you will put me in a
book, so I shall not rise to your questions--not I!  Let us prefer to
talk of how we shall invest our money when we sell our lots, and things
like that."

"Real-estate is a valuable asset in this place," continues he, "if you
buy it 'near in' on the original town site, but three miles out of the
subdivisions, it is equal in value to a pop-corn prize.  And yet who
can say?  Who knows?  In these new places, the bread we cast on the
sub-divisions has a way of returning to us in meat and pie and cake.
It is often the height of wisdom to be foolish.  That singularly
unattractive person on the doorstep across the way--the shrunken,
hollow-stomached one--has made much money in buying and selling."

"Do you believe me?" he asks with some trace of heat; "then pray heaven
speak!"  For I have fallen into silence.  But I will not speak--not one
word--but only smile in an enigmatical way, for the stop I am pulling
out is one of intended indifference.  It is about the navvies and
teamsters I would talk and not of hollow-stomached men who gather much
money.

The doctor rolls up two cigarettes and offers me one.

"You will smoke?" asks he.

"No!" says I, "not till I am sixty."

"Let me see your palm and your nails.  Humph!  Lady, you had better
start now as a mere matter of expediency.  Why not try this one?
Where's the use of a mouth and an index finger if you do not smoke?"

Now, I cannot say why I do not smoke, except that there are so many
reasons why I should, and so I return to our first topic and ask, "Does
your medicine make the men well again?"

"No, no, decidedly no!" he replies--"they allow me to hold no such
illusion.  The talismans they carry, work the cure--a bear's tooth, a
lucky penny, or the image of a calendar saint.  A snake's rattle is a
panacea for anything but a broken heart.  Time was when men only choked
on grape seeds as did the old poet chap, Anacreon, but in these days,
the navvies get appendicitis from them.  It would be offensive to
suggest other causes, in spite of the fact that most of them never
taste grapes.  No! it would not be right for me to put my patients in
the wrong and shockingly poor policy."

"Have you much trouble with drunkenness?" I query.

"Not a great deal!" he makes answer, "for the Mounted Police have a
disconcerting habit of probing into bales of hay and of finding false
floors in wagons.  They have fifty-fox power, these police fellows,
although I have heard tell that a gallon or more of whisky has been
within roping distance of them and escaped.  A bottle that gets by them
is worth ten dollars, but the navvies declare whatever it costs it is
worth it.  But, dear me, there are other liquids for inordinate and
uncritical thirsts, such as----"

"Your medicine?" I suggest, whereupon our conversation abruptly ends,
for he will be no longer beset by me; and he will not give me a bottle
of liniment for "crick" in the back; no, not if I die in Edson, without
even a graveyard started wherein to bury me.  He supposes Providence
knows his business, but how ever woman came to be made is a mystery far
beyond his wit's end.

Huh!  Huh!  I am tingling to scratch this man's eyes out, but I only
call him a brown pirate.

Do you think I care so much as a snap of the fingers for the medicine
of this spiteful doctor of the countryside?  Not a bit of it!  One of
the navvies will give me a talisman if I cannot find the cordial tree
for which I search.  It grows in the North, and the fruit gives life to
strong people and faintness to the weak.  It was Theophile Tremblay who
told me about it.  He lives always in the woods.  Once, he found the
tree but he was afraid to eat of it, for how could he know whether he
was strong or weak?  He has heard tell that, in the tree, there is a
wood's-woman and that sometimes she laughs aloud, but he thinks it may
be a soul or something like that.

      *      *      *      *      *

The only drawback to happiness is the peculiar impermanence of its
character.  Happiness is a large, comely person, but, withal, as
elusive as the smallest sprite.  Such hours of pain as I spent last
night on this wretched sagging bed--I who was so happy only
yesterday--with nothing to look at save a little lamp with a flame like
a bleary red eye.  Truth to tell, it was the eye that looked at me.  It
stared till I became hypnotized, when by the blessing of God, I fell
asleep.

This morning, I am consumed between a desire to get up and one to lie
still.  In all such crises of the will, it is better to follow the line
of least resistance, and so I lie in bed.  My hostess brings me an
amazingly pungent liniment which she calls "Herr the Doctor's
medisome."  It came last night, but Daisy, who is a waitress, neglected
to deliver it.  Perhaps the sarcastic advice which the doctor set down
for me under the word "Poison," may have frightened Daisy.

"She a lump is, that Daisy!" says the Frau.  "Believe me, Madam, for I
know.  I tell her a thing to do and she doing it keeps on, till I to
stop tell her.  Then I to her explain that she is not for ever to stop,
nor for ever on to go, and all the time, about everything, I have her
so to tell."

The Frau pours on the liniment with generous measure and rubs me till I
prickle with it, and feel for all the world like a wet newspaper caught
in a wire fence.  She rubs me with a used-to-things way until I beg her
to desist.  I should not be surprised if Herr the Doctor took this
means of venting his spitefulness on me.

The Frau tells me she had a vision once.  I wish to experience a
vision, or a miracle, but nothing comes to me save presentments which
have their terrible plain origin on the basis of cause and effect.  Her
vision was about heaven.  She saw heaven quite distinctly and the
streets were really made of gold.  There were no children there, but
only men and women, so that there must be a special Paradise for boys
and girls.  The Frau believes heaven will be a failure because there is
no division of the sexes provided for.  How, she would like to know,
could a woman enjoy heaven with men there all the time looking at
everything she does.  It would be an impossible situation.

After awhile, Daisy brings me a meal.  There is a tremendous finality
about the way she sets down a tray.  Daisy, in spite of her name, is
not so much a housemaid as what they used to call a stout serving
wench.  She is courtly neither in figure nor manners.  Her hair is
puffed out over her ears and drawn down low, till her head looks like
the husk of a hazel nut.  But what odds?  Daisy is splendidly plebeian
and really of more value to the community than a writing person who
falls downstairs.  She cannot see for the life of her how I happened to
come out here, and so I am apologetic and find it necessary to explain.
She asks permission to try on my hat and tells me she has ordered a new
one from Edmonton.  It is to have three "ostridge" feathers.

To assure me that the cat I stepped upon is not dead, she descends to
the kitchen and returns with it.  The cat seems all right except that
it sags in the middle, but Daisy says this is because it has just been
fed.  I am glad I did not kill it, in that I always associate a cat
with Diana Bubastis, the Egyptian goddess who presided over childbirth,
and who was represented with a feline head.  Indeed, Bubastis is said
to have transformed herself into a cat when the gods fled from Egypt--a
play of gods and women and cats that has continued even to this very
day.

After dinner, I am able to go down to the sidewalk where I fribble away
the hours agreeably enough.  It is a sun-shot afternoon, but the air is
cool to one's skin, and grateful after the scorching heat of yesterday.

Some civil engineers who came in on the train with me are playing
baseball on the road.  These are no aesthetic feeblings, these merry
gentlemen, but a sturdy breed, upstanding and handsome, with skin like
the colour of well-seasoned saddles and a smell of burnt poplar in
their hair.  I think the rough clothes they wear throw their good looks
into relief.  Or it may be that the people _are_ better looking in the
North and have better physiques.  It must be so, for the South has in
all ages drawn upon the northern blood for rejuvenation just as, in
these days, they need hard wheat to tone up their softer varieties.

I write of them as merry gentlemen because this fornight agone I had
been watching them make ducks and drakes of their savings.  When they
come to Town, which they do once or twice a year, they cannot be
accused of nearness.  Each mother's son holds to the amended maxim of
this country, "Hard come, easy go."  "Jack ashore," I called one the
other day.  "Possibly so!  Possibly," answered the delicious boy, "but
I prefer to think of myself as March--in like a lion and out like a
lamb."

The whole Town is a foraging pasture for the engineers on vacation.
They buy everything they do not need, from gramaphone records and
swearing parrots to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.
They yell into the telephones as if it were a lung tester, and it makes
their hearts dance like daffodils to hire taxicabs for the day, boxes
at the theatre, and to give suppers and dances to all and sundry of
their acquaintances.  Neither are they laggards in love.  They are
vastly appreciative of the girls, and I am told go sweethearting with a
directness there is no possibility of misunderstanding.  It is well the
girls do not take them too seriously, for they are roving bachelors
all, and would seem to be as faithful as the poet who vows his love for
Kate, and Margaret and Betty and Sweet Marie.

Yet, once in a blue moon, an engineer and a girl make decision "to be
man and wife together," and to live in a shack on the Residency, much
to the annoyance of the townsmen, who dislike the engineers, being
inordinately jealous of them.

The game of baseball which the engineers carry forward on the highway
is strenuous rather than scientific.  Things that are considered
important in the league matches have no significance here.  As I watch
the pitch and toss of the ball, it occurs to me that this game has
filtered down the ages from the primeval woods where orang-outangs
threw nuts from tree to tree.  They pitch them that the young lady
'rangs might admire their cleverness and good form.  You may credit me
this was the way of it.

A Chinaman and some Indians are also watching the game.  The Indians
think it fine fun, and fetch and carry the lost balls like spaniels
retrieving sticks.  I like the Indian men for several reasons, but
chiefly because they are shrewd riders; have a sovereign indifference
to appearance, and never quarrel over theology.

The game of ball was not completed, the interest of the players being
diverted by a blindly vindictive fight between a staghound and a
bulldog.  I did not see the conclusion of the fight, but the honours
lay with the bulldog.  "For you must know, Dear Lady," explains one of
the engineers, "that all things considered, the grip on the throat is
an eminently practical one."




CHAPTER III

TO THE BUILDERS

  To the builders of the highway, that skirt the canyon's brink,
    To the men that bind the roadbed fast,
    To the high, the low, the first and last,
  I raise my glass and drink!--EVELYN GUNNE.


As yet, there is no passenger service from Edson to the End of Steel.
Several day coaches are run, but they are chiefly for the use of the
engineers and workmen.  This is how I happen to be the only woman
aboard pulling out for the mountains across this newly-made trail.

Do not misunderstand me; it is the railroad that is new.  The trail
that runs by its side was an old one when Columbus discovered America,
and beaten deep with feet, and also it is a long trail, for it leads
through to the Pacific Ocean.  For centuries, it was the only mark of
human interference in this waste that is world-old.  It is a trail of
lean hunger and bleeding feet, one that has ever been prodigal of
promise, but wary of accomplishment.  Surely this is so, for once over
it stumbled and swore those half-mad men known as the Caribou
Stampeders--these, and other unwept, unhonoured fellows who fared into
the wilderness for what reasons even the wise Lord knoweth not.  If the
bones of the red and white folk who have travelled this long, long
street were stood upright, I doubt not they would make a fence of
pickets for us all the way.

I have no sooner thought this thing than it happens there is a dry
stirring and, in an eye-wink of time, the dead men have taken on flesh
and colour.  They must have been keenly near.  Grim, plainish fellows
are they, not unlike the gang around me, but rougher-clad and more
hairy.  They are powerful and full-lifed men, I can see that, and the
rough-necked one with the trail stride and mop of curly hair is
Alexander MacKenzie, a Scotchman from Inverness, but late of Messrs.
Gregory & Co.'s counting-house.  He is "down North" endeavouring to
open out a trade with the Indians, obtaining a foothold they doubtless
call it; his masters, the Nor'-West Fur Company--for monopolists are
always sensitive to terms.  His is a continental errand (mark this
well), for he is the first white man to cross the Rockies, and to tell
us what lies over and beyond the hills where the sun goes down.  Honour
to Alexander MacKenzie, Esq., of Inverness, say I!  Some day, when
Messrs. the Publishers give me fuller royalties, I shall surely build a
cairn to him on the height of land e'er it falls away to the Western
Sea.

This man lived more than a century ago, and yet, as his figure fades
back into nothingness, we see this other figure close by.  It is David
Thompson, the Welshman, who has recently discovered a river, and has
called it by his own name.  Also, he has captured the Astoria
fur-trade, and has established a trading post, which future generations
will know as Kamloops.

And here is Sir George Simpson, Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay
Company.  He likes to travel with pipers who go before him, piping as
he enters a fort in order that Lo, the Red Man, may be properly
impressed.

The ugly person with the harshly aggressive features is Sir James
Douglas.  He looks as fully open to convincement as a stone pavement.
This spalpeen near by is none other than young Lieutenant Butler of
Ireland.  He is gathering material for a volume he proposes to call
_The Great Lone Land_.  I like the way he carries his head.  Who runs
may read him for a fighter with a fighter's build.

But on they go, and on, this long procession of pioneers, till we can
only call out their names as they file by--Dr. Hector, Daniel Harmon,
Viscount Milton, Alexander Henry, Dr. Cheadle, and other lean,
laborious fellows, long since passed into the shadows.  Dead men do
tell tales.  You may hear if you care to listen.

And what a strange thing has come to pass in these latter months!  The
tenuous, twisting trail--that very old trail--has been superseded by a
clean white road that is like to a long bowstring.  Its impotent,
creeping life has given way before the gallant onslaught of pick and
spade, chain and transit, and before monstrous lifting machines which
have other names, but which are really leviathans.

Hitherto, it may be said of this land what was once said of Rome, that
the memory sees more than the eye.  This is no longer true.  Before we
realize it, Baedeker will be setting down a star opposite the name of a
fashionable hotel in the Athabaska Valley, and the whole of this
morning world, from end to end, will be spotted with a black canker of
towns.  Right glad am I to go through it this day with a construction
party, and for my own satisfaction to mentally tie together the threads
of the Past and Present.  And who knows but in a century from now some
curious boy in one of these towns may find this record in an attic
rubbish-heap, and may rejoice with me over the knotted threads.  (I
love you, boy! you must know this.)

My fellows of the Way, who are young engineers, tell me the peculiarity
of each cut and grade and the difficulties they encountered.  They do
not speak of stations but of "Mile 48" or "Mile 60," by which they mean
48 miles from Wolf Creek.  The railway, when completed, will measure
3,556 miles.  They talked of other matters mathematical, much to my
bewilderment, but from which I, for myself, ultimately deducted that
while the genie who built Aladdin's palace in a night was the champion
contractor of fairy-tale countries, he is not to be mentioned in the
same breath as these master-men who blaze out this metal highway
towards the sea.

Each engineer lives on a residency which is twelve miles long, and it
is his duty to supervise the work of grading in his division.  This
duty occupies about eighteen months, when he is moved on to another
residency.

The men placed in a residency camp are an engineer, an instrument man,
a rod man, two chain men and a cook.  Over these camps, there are
placed the chief engineer at Winnipeg; the divisional engineer at the
End of Steel; and assistant divisional engineers, who may locate at
different points from fifty or sixty miles apart.

The grading itself is built by contractors, and sub-contractors, down
to station men, who with the aid of spades, picks and wheelbarrows,
built a hundred feet.  All these are paid by the yard and according to
the nature of the soil or rock.  The station men work from five in the
morning until nine or ten at night, and make from five to ten dollars a
day each.  The blasters are known by the uneuphemistic title of
"rock-hogs."

The first engineers who scouted had a hard time in their unsplendid
isolation, but now that the rails are catching up, life on the
residencies is more pleasant than one might imagine.  The shack is
fairly warm and comfortable and the Powers that Be supply to the men an
abundance of the best food procurable, with a reasonable portion of
dainties.  The Powers doubtless recognize the distant advisability of
keeping the engineers and their assistants in health and temper, for
after all, nothing is so expensive as sickness.  Still, the men are by
no means petted.  It is true that one engineer has a pair of sheets,
but these are the talk, and possibly the envy, of all the residence's
on the line.  When visitors come to his residency they sleep between
the sheets, while their chivalric host betakes himself to the long desk
that is built for map work.

Each residency has a gramophone, and some of them have small
menageries, including pet bears.  In the summer, after hours, the men
have outdoor games such as baseball and tennis.  They have been able on
several occasions to secure a sufficiently large attendance of women to
have a dance.  It may happen that the engineer is married and that his
wife has girl-visitors, which party may be augmented by a visiting
contingency from the residency twelve miles further down the grade, or
some such fortunate happening as this.  It is a heyday, I can tell you,
when this happens.

They do not quarrel in the residencies as missionaries do at their
posts, although a man sometimes gets moody.  All through the winter
they talk over everything they did when last in town, and what every
one else did.  Between times, they can watch the married engineers and
declare how much better the bachelors are situated.  Purple grapes were
ever sour.  They told me about other things, but I forget them;
besides, they are secrets.

One of the engineers gathers me some flowers at a wayside station,
concerning which the others, with full-throated laughter, propounded
riddles.

"When did he ast-er?" "How much did the rose raise?" "Who gave Susan
her black eye?"  These, and other problems of peculiar interest to
young bloods, the solution of which we shall never know till flowers
learn to speak plainer.

The riddle, "Why does the willow weep?" elicits a discussion on music,
and on the sound of the wind in the pines.  One man says he has read
somewhere that violin makers construct their instruments out of the
north sides of trees.  He does not know if this be true, but I think it
must be, for the urging of the north wind in the trees and the soft
calling of the violin, are one and the same.  They both allure to a
land where no one lives.  You must have observed this yourself.

One rueful rascal with no civic conscience, and an overweening
appreciation of his sex, gives it as his opinion that this is an
ill-reasoned theory.  He declares the sound to be a screeching
crescendo that has its origin in an implacable quarrel between the wind
and the pines.  The wind is a suffragette, a woman of determined
grievance, who would be better of bit and bridle and possibly of gag.
She makes the pine a butt for her insult and ridicule and a target
against which she lashes the hail and drives her shrewish snow.  When
not grappling his throat with her plaguing, pestilent fingers, it is
only because she is recoiling to strike again.  She calls this "a spell
o' weather."

It is a bitter monologue this leather-fleshed, lathy-framed fellow
gives me, and I takes it as a body blow, but I answer not a word, for I
have heard it said, or perhaps I have read it, that the meek will own
the earth; besides--you can try it yourself--nothing so puzzles the
understanding of mortal man as a woman who refuses to go on defence.
Her silence fills him with a gnawing uneasiness similar to that one
feels when he has swallowed a tack.

And yet I would like to tell him he has overstated his case; to point
out that the trees are cross-grained to the wind; that their green
spectacles prevent their seeing things in proper perspective, and that
they are deep-rooted in obsolete prejudices.  Sir Pine cannot escape
being an intractable old person, seeing that woman's suffrage was not
the rule seventy-five years ago, or more, when he was born.  Yes!  I
should have liked to say this, but it is almost as equal satisfaction
to score a verbal chicane.

I think, perhaps, the men felt my silence more than I intended, for
they argue the anti-suffragist out of countenance, although I have no
doubt they secretly and sincerely agree with him.  To change the
subject, one of them brings me a caged squirrel he is taking to his
residency.  Punch is a well-groomed squirrel and has an immoderate
tongue.  His owner says that in the mountains these red squirrels
collect and dry mushrooms.  They group them on a rock, or fix them in
the forks of young trees, ultimately banking them in hollow logs.  He
is trying to tame Punch, but then we have all heard of the American who
tried to tame an oyster.

Punchinello is as active as pop-corn in a pan.  He is a squirrel with a
job, and not nearly so light-minded as he looks.  His job is to go
round and round on a wheel but never to make progress, for the wheel is
so swung that it revolves with him.  I am appalled by the absolute
inutility of it.  What a life!  What a life!  Wearing out a wheel and
himself at one and the same time.  "Let him go when you get to the
woods," say I, "it will be kinder.  You have heard of those Eastern
folk, who, when they wish to praise Allah, buy birds and set them free."

"No!  I have not heard," he replies; "tell me about them."

"There is no more to the story, that is all."

"But I don't see the application when a fellow does not want to render
praises.  I invested part of my savings at the races and the tenor of
my success was markedly uneven.  I bought town lots, hoping to sell
before the second payment--'Stung'--Yes! it's as good a word as any.
The father of my best girl has cursed me to the tenth generation."

"For what?"

"Oh! for a newspaper item which concerned me.  I will allow it would
have been just as well had it not appeared, but there it was!  There it
was!  No!  I cannot see any special reason why I should set the
squirrel free.  Besides" (and here he speaks softly and with a kindly
persuasiveness, as if he had butter in his mouth), "this Punchinello is
a sweet-toothed fellow, and the cook will feed him daintily; he has no
store set by for the winter; no drey, no mate; he is not properly
furred for exposure, and he would not know how to protect himself
against the hawks and stoats.  Surely, you would not have him go free?
I tell you the thing would be cruelty itself, and I will not do it."

You see, he does not know this matter is a personal one with me, I mean
the wheel that goes round and never gets anywhere.  If he did it would
probably make no difference, for the peculiarity about his arguments
are their sincerity and wisdom.  I always did suspect that Providence
was a large serene young man with a strain of steel in him.

At Bickerdike, all the engineers I knew got out.  Some are stationed
here; some await orders, but most of them go down the branch line that
is under construction from this point.  Bickerdike is largely a tent
town, although, as yet, it is the metropolis of the Grade.  I heard one
man on the train tell another it was "one of these here high-society
places where folks dance on a plank floor and don't call off the
figures."  I promise to visit at Bickerdike on my return trip with some
friends I have not seen for years.  No matter where you come from, it
would be almost impossible to drop off at any of these little frontier
posts without meeting some one you knew elsewhere, so representative is
the population of this Northern country.

At each post the same question is asked the newly-arrived passenger.
"Well, what's the news along the road?"  To-day the news concerns a
wash-out near the End of Steel, and doubts are expressed as to the
possibility of our getting through.

At Marlboro, the people are talking of their cement industry, and at
the next station lumber is the topic.  They are making the lumber out
of spruce.  The small logs have been converted into railway ties.  Some
of them are crossed.  If ever you have "taken out" ties you know what
this means.  As you likely haven't, I'll tell you.  The railroad
contractor, when he rejects a tie, crosses the end of it with a blue or
red pencil.  Once an acquaintance of mine, by name Jerry Dalton, took
out a cut of ties in the Province of Saskatchewan.  One day Jerry--an
accurate man rather than a placid one--was stamping about somewhat more
rampageous than a baited bull.

"What is the matter now, Man Jerry!" I asked; "you are always having a
big sorrow."

"Sorrow ith it?" lisped Jerry at the top of his tall voice.  "Look at
them d---- ties (begging your pardon, ma'am).  Look at them ties!  Does
that turkey-faced, muddle-headed idjit of a contractor think I'm
running a Catholic themetery?  Crosses ith it?  It's crosses he's after
giving Jerry!  Troth! an' it's a crown I'll be puttin' on him." ...

And so as I look at this pile of crossed logs by the wayside, I am
wondering who is the rascal responsible for the Catholic themetery.

These mills belong to a Northern timber chief whose large holdings have
made them turbulent.  They have called him a timber-wolf, and other
names that are smart rather than polite.  As a matter of fact, any man
who pays the government dues and converts the trees into lumber for the
use of the settlers, deserves all the emoluments that can possibly
accrue.  On account of floods and fires, lumbering is a precarious
industry, and the majority of operators fail thereat or carry a
nerve-grinding overdraft at the bank.

And did you ever stand on the heights and watch a rising, ripping flood
bear out your booms and incidentally the year's logs?  If you have, my
good little man, you'll be sensible to something closely approximating
a tender regard for the timber-wolves.  This play of lamb and wolf is
frequently disastrous to the wolf.

I would like to rest off here to see the whip-saw bite into the logs;
to watch the long white boards as they fall from the carriage, and to
drink in their refreshing odour, for the whole essence of the North is
concentrated in the odour of the spruce.

Big Eddy takes its name from the whirlpool formed by the confluence of
the McLeod River and the Sun Dance Creek.  The creek is an impetuous,
capering stream that leaps to the McLeod as a little laughing girl
would throw herself into the arms of her father.  This is the fairest
tarrying place I have seen this way, and fit for a ball-room of the
dryads.  Down in the valley beside the great bridge, the divisional
engineer has built him a wide house of logs, with hospitable porches
and chimneys that suggest generous fireplaces.  I covet his right,
title and ownership thereto.  They say this engineer is seventy-eight
years old, but I don't believe it.

"Beyond all doubt he is," says one of the train officials; "believe me,
he has eaten up his teeth at the work of building roads, and he has a
heart of great goodness."

"A strong man, is he?" I ask.

"Why, I cannot say, only that he sticks to his work and takes the trail
with the best of them.  The men say he is 'sun-ripened,' which I am
convinced means something praiseworthy, for every man is his friend."

The Canadian Northern Railway Company is running a line immediately
parallel to this of the Grand Trunk Pacific, and as I look out of my
window I can see the men at work on the rival road.  They are the
primal ploughers of the land, these railway fellows, and can cut a
valley out of a hill, like it were the rip of a brutal blade.  To my
thinking, this is an enterprise of high heart and bravery.....  And
yet, as I watch them at work, heaping up a grade, they seem small to
me, and paltry, like dirty boys intent on nothing more serious than
mud-pies.  In some places, they build through marshy dunes that are
coppery-brown and tawny-red.  Walking in these places is like walking
upstairs all the way, or like treading in deep straw, forms of exercise
most certainly concomitant with heart disease and a hackney gait.
Westward they go and Westward, these uncouth moving pictures of the
landscape, that change well-nigh as quick as those on a canvas, but
always it is a picture of a grade, a new cut, a gridiron of ties, and
long, long trails of steel.  I tell you, these trails are the
heartstrings of the North.

But you must not think that the only builders are the men.  The horses,
mules and oxen help.  Some folk there are who mislike the oxen, but
these are foolishly prejudiced and ill-informed.  The ox, it is true,
has a tiresome straddling gait, and his brain is small in comparison
with the bulk of his head, but contrariwise he retains a stolid
reliability that keeps him at his job.  Once inspanned, he has no
desire to kick over the traces or to explore foreign parts; he doesn't
bite his trace-mate, or engage in any of those little playful jinks so
strangely peculiar to northern horses and northern men, not he ... the
ox is a good sort, and one who strictly attends to business.  He is an
animal that walks in the light.  There are northern men who will
doubtless resent these remarks, so I may as well explain that my
comparisons have been prompted by the conduct of "the gang" which
offends my sense of decency.

The "happy low lie down" all over the car in various stages of
intoxication.  How hideous they are with their unshaven faces, open
mouths and yellow teeth!  Abroad they are silly; at home they are
heart-scalds.  As they sprawl over the floor like huge primeval toads,
I am consumed by a desire to kick them with my boots.  Drunkenness is a
disgusting, unfleshed sin.

And yet, these prostrate fellows are hardly more offensive than those
still able to sit up and debate about nothing.  As controversialists
they remind me of the characters in _Alice through the Looking-Glass_,
who want "to deny something and don't know what it is."  When any
over-wise babbler feels himself worsted in an argument, he says to his
opponent, "You are a liar."  While fairly popular, this argument can
hardly be considered a logical one.  It can be claimed, however, to
cover the whole ground, and to be a masterpiece of brevity.

One fellow, who reeled through the car in a molluscous invertebrate
condition, stopped by my seat to tell me he was my friend for life.  He
was old enough to have known better, and I was glad when a glorious,
tall stranger collared the fellow and hurtled him down the aisle like a
hockey-player would hurtle the puck.

Soon afterwards the train's agent, a civil-spoken young man, came into
the car and took me into his caboose.  I knew something fortunate would
happen on this journey....  And to think it came just as my nomad
spirit had failed me, and I was utterly crumpled with weariness and
hunger.

I would here desire to reiterate my belief that Providence is a large,
serene young man, with a strain of steel in him.




CHAPTER IV

BEHIND THE HILLS.

  "Behind the hills, that's where the fairies are,
  Behind the hills, that's where the sun goes down."


I fell asleep in the cupola of the caboose and dreamed that my head was
a rubber band holding too many notes, and that it was going to snap any
second.  "Hit's the bloomin' haltitude in your 'ead, Ma'am," explained
a Cockney later, and I expect he was right, for we have made an ascent
of over one thousand feet since leaving Edmonton.

When I awake the train is standing stock-still.  Here is the trouble!
the heavy rains have been playing havoc with the newly-made grades that
have hardly been shaken down to stay, and progress is necessarily slow
till the proper ballast has been laid on.  Outside, on the grade, the
fireman is swearing with remarkable precision.  His language is not
exactly that described by the Prayer-book as "comfortable words," but
then, a man who fires up with slack coal when the thermometer is
sometimes thirty degrees below zero naturally becomes proficient in the
use of secular expletives.

I open my window above him and say very distinctly, "Wicked man! swear
not by the Lord Christ."  Then I lean back so that he may not see me.
It must have surprised him to hear such a reproof in this no-woman's
land.  Out he goes and looks up and around, and up again, but I keep
well hidden.  That writer who conceived the horror of _The Wandering
Voice_ was no nid-noddy fellow, I can tell you.

As I was thinking this very thing, a voice close behind said to me,
"Wicked woman! play not the oracles," and almost I fell out of the
cupola with fright.  It was the glorious tall stranger, and he was
laughing mightily.  I almost hated him.  Indeed, I quite hated till I
saw the joke and laughed too.

He had been reading in the opposite bunk and, incidentally, watching so
that I might not roll out, for it is a high climb to the cupola bunk,
and there are no sides to it.  He says that he is an engineer and that
the boys who left the train at Bickerdike gave him instructions to see
that I got through all right.  Did I say mean things awhile ago about
certain northern men?  Did I?  Well then, I am a spiteful jade and my
tongue should be split.

He has yellow fruit for me, and cherries, but hands them out carefully,
for the smell of steam from the stove shows that dinner is deliciously
imminent.  The cook is turning cakes on a pan with a spat like the
sound of clog-dancers on the stage.  He turns them with a grace and
intelligence which I may never hope to equal.  I have an idea his elbow
and wrist work on ball-bearings.

The glorious tall stranger whose name is _not_ Burney (but it will do
as well as any other) tells me he was reared down by the Miramichi
River.  He went back East to see his mother last Christmas, but it took
her some days to get used to the grown man who had left home a lad.  I
can see this thing in my mind's eye.  His mother is very clever and has
a beautiful face.  He need not have told me this.  It is true of every
man's mother "back home."

Burney was among the first men who scouted for the railway to the West
and helped run the try-lines.  Falling into the pose of the
raconteur--one very natural to the northman--he tells me tragic things,
and some that are both tragic and humorous.

One of these was about a Mounted Policeman who was sent out from his
post to bring in a murderer.  It was terribly cold weather, the mercury
almost falling out of the tube.  Now, the wanted murderer is the
wariest game in the world, and to take him in those mountains one needs
boldness and caution in the right proportions--that is to say
ninety-nine per cent. of the former, and one per cent. of the latter.
The policeman who was sent out was only a stripling, but there was no
yellow in him save the streak on his trouser-legs.  The round journey
was one hundred and twenty miles, but, alone and unaided, he brought in
his man, not even waiting to sleep.  Almost immediately on a fresh
mount, he again started out from the post, but this time to bring in
the corpse.  The second hundred and twenty miles were terribly long and
arduous ones, and the cold cut like a blade.  By shutting your eyes you
can see and feel this thing: the two frost-covered horses plodding
through the bleak and sterile mountains that are grim as eternity--no
sound save the cry of starveling wolves, or the white whine of the
sleepless wind, these and the sharp-drawn breath of the men.  No! we
must be mistaken.  Only one man breathes, the other seems strangely
still, and his lips are tight shut.  There is something peculiarly
defective in his stony eyes and stony face.  If you look closer you can
see he is roped close to the horse, and that he doesn't give to the
lope....  God of men and beasts! that is a dead man that rides through
the snow, and he rides to confront his slayer....  And when the two
reached the police post, the live dare-doing man was found to be
terribly exhausted from hunger, lack of sleep, and the long, long ride,
so that his brittle nerves were like to snap in two.  This was how they
came to give him the stimulants which in some way (it is not for a
tattling civilian to say the way) had not entirely worn off when he was
summoned to give evidence at the inquest.

The auditory consisted of engineers, and chainmen from the residencies
who resented this grim sitting with a murderer, a judge and accuser,
and the white, stark man on the table, whom presently they would put to
bed with a spade.  They were sitting austerely upright with grave faces
as became the occasion, when it came upon them suddenly that the police
stripling was intoxicated.  It is true he faced the judge with an
uncompromising attitude and stood erect, and "at attention" as if a
perpendicular rod braced his body from his crown to his heels, but when
the judge's glance wandered for the fraction of a moment, the stripling
would wink prodigiously at the engineers, and in an unholy manner that
threw them into suppressed convulsions.  The thing was grievously
grotesque.  It was as though a stone altar-saint had suddenly awaked
and had put his fingers to his nose in a way that was sinister.  Comedy
with her wry face was peeping through a tragic mask.  It is a way of
hers.

It was not until the judge observed the policeman constantly dropping
his papers and picking them up in a stiff unjointed way, that the
reason of the court's commotion became apparent to him.

"What is the rest of the story?" you ask.  I do not know.  I am a
reviewer of books and never go so far as the end.

Sirs and Mesdames, but it is an athletic feat climbing out of the
cupola of a caboose.  I stepped on the shoulder of Burney, who is
admirably strong, and then down to a chair.  The brakesmen enter the
cupola off the roof and have a way of sliding to the floor backward.
It looks easy, and if I were alone, I would surely try it.

There were four of us for dinner, and we had pork and beans, beefsteak,
potato-cakes, rolls, peaches and coffee.  The butter was tinned, but
withal toothsome, and so was the milk.  The butter is shipped here from
Nova Scotia, and is supplied to all the camps on the road.  I help the
cook clear away the dishes, but he thinks me rather unhandy, for I
upset both the sugar and salt.  He comes from Kilmarnock in Scotland,
and is a nice lad, I can see that.  He has a thicket of hair that
stands erect from his head like a growth of young spruce, and he always
looks as if he had just heard some good idea.  His latest idea, he
confides, is a job with the purveyors who contract for the supplies for
all the grading camps on the line.

Hitherto, I have always looked upon a caboose as something commonplace,
but now, I know it may be truly a Castle of Indolence.  I have a sweet
tooth for this kind of life, and have no objection to continuing it for
a month.  Journalists, and important people with stamped passes, go on
private cars, but the advantage of mediocrity is that you can travel in
a caboose and need not view the scenery as a commercial commodity.
When I can think of what to say, I will write a story called "The
Romance of a Railway Van."  Its setting will be in the hills.  The
heroine will be a southern girl of probably twenty summers (with a
corresponding number of winters).  She shall be no fine die-away lady,
but middling strong and built to go out in all weather.  Each move of
the romance will be made by invisible kelpies, ogres and dryads, who
will say "Ha!  Ha!" and "Ho!  Ho!" and who will clap their hands when
the wicked flourish, or valour wins against the odds.  But I never
could think this story out, so I pass it on to you.

At the McLeod River the grades begin to spy into the mountains.  These
mountains have all the bewilderment of an elusive dream, and in the
thin northern air seem nearer than they really are.  There is a
come-hither look about them.  It is well, at first, to thus see from a
distance, for to stand against a mountain is to lose one's sense of
proportion and symmetry.

At Prairie Creek the road runs high up on a ridge to the south of the
Athabaska Valley, so that it looks like a ribbon of steel basted on to
the hills.  The Athabaska River is wide and swift here, and has what
the Japanese call the language of line.  The Cree Indians call it the
_Mistahay Shakow Seepee_, meaning thereby the great river of the woods.
A semi-spectral mist rises off its waters, as if it were an incense to
the mighty spirit, Manitou.

It would be well if I, one of the first of the tourists who, world
without end, will travel through these hills, could tell how they
impress me, but I am crushed into a wordless incompetency.  I cannot
speak the language of this land nor interpret its spirit.  These hills
of White Alberta have something to say, but they will not say it.  It
must be true what the essayist wrote, that you cannot domesticate
mountains.

There appears to be no life here, nor any form of sentience, but when
it is dark, the grizzly bear, the lynx, the moose, and other
night-things, will move out for purposes of life or death.

Alexander Mackenzie, who entered these defiles one hundred and
twenty-five years ago, wrote down that the Atnah Indians believed all
this land was made by a mighty bird whose eyes were fire, the noise of
his wings thunder, and the glances of his eyes lightning.  This bird
created all things from the earth except the Chipewyans, who were made
from dogs.  Now the Chipewyans and the Atnahs were not on borrowing
terms.

These were the times when the Indians were as plentiful in the
Athabaska Valley as dandelions in a meadow, and they told this
Mackenzie of Inverness how, in the good old days, their ancestors lived
till their throats were worn out with eating and their feet with
walking.

The Athabaska Valley is enclosed by a circle of the hills, the two most
prominent of these being Roche Perdrix, or Folding Mountain, and Roche
Miette.  The latter peak takes its name from the French word _roche_,
meaning "rock," and _miette_ which is the Cree for sheep, this because
of the mountain-sheep which make it their home.  It is 8,000 feet high
(I give you the height because it is not legal to go down the line
without so doing).  Somewhere, near here, at Fiddle Creek, at a height
of 1,200 feet above the railway, there are wonderful hot springs
concerning which Burney talks learnedly.  I pretend to understand all
about sulphuric anhydride, and carbon dioxide, and 127 degrees
Fahrenheit, but do not really know if there are things which should be
remembered or forgotten.

Other of the peaks which enclose the Valley are Roche Ronde, Roche
Jacques, Bullrush and Roche Suette.  Off to the west, the range of
hills silhouetted against the sky is known as the Fiddle Back Range.
These are crowned with snow, but as the sky changes, take to themselves
its moods--coral-red, opal, stone-blue and a mellow, purple glow, which
blend and shift like the weird fantasy of the auroral lights.

It is an idea of mine that these hills are the lair of the running
winds which for past eons have swept in bitter streaks across the
prairies, winnowing them like a thresher would winnow grain.
Seven-leagued boots have they and no man has tracked them down.  How
could a man when they fling dust in his eyes?  They are the bitter
scouts of the North who fight as they go.  I have no doubt their home
is hereabout.  It might be found if we had time to stay, but this would
take too long, for you must surely understand these winds are
non-resident to a degree that is nothing short of scandalous.

At this point, we ought in all propriety to talk about Brule Lake,
which is not a lake at all, but an enlargement of the river.  We should
nudge each other and remark that this is Jasper Park; that it consists
of 5,450 square miles, and that it is held in perpetuity for the
nation.  I should ask, "Why do they call it Jasper Park?" and you, my
fine fellow-farer, should tell me how old Jasper Hawes was one of "the
gentlemen adventurers" of the Hudson's Bay Company, and doubtless a
purposeful man and clever.  "But why do they call this defile 'the
Yellow Head Pass?'" I should further query, whereupon you ought to
reply, "I perceive you are an untaught person else you had heard how
this Jasper Hawes had hair the colour of September wheat in the sheaf,
so that the Indians called him 'Tete Jaune' or 'Yellow Head,' much
after our mischievous manner of turning about on the street to look
after a lady who is flaxen."

Yes! we should say all this, and more, but it might sound like the
private car "write-up," so we had better not.  Besides, our engine has
come to a sit-still and will not go a step farther.  The gossip we
heard at Bickerdike about the wash-out has been verified.  The
officials in the private car are in no very graceful temper over this
landslide, and some of the men on the firing-line who dug and blasted
and built the grade, are going to have their hearts cut out because of
it.

The trouble is that these vastly particular officials conceive of the
mountain into whose body they have slashed as a dead thing--dead as
pickled pork--whereas it is splendidly alive.  Because of the malapert
efforts of the builders, the mountain has shaken its monstrous sides
with laughter till the tears ran adown its face and washed out their
puny sticks and stones.  One might hint this to the officials, but one
is scared to.  They belong to the unamiable sex and are showing an
anger highly disproportioned to the cause.  Indeed, I saw a very
special official put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth.  Sometime
to-night, a few flat cars will come from the End of Steel to convey the
gang thither.  The gang will climb up one side of the wash-out and down
the other, and I will too, if the train's agent will let me, but from
his hard-baked, non-committal manner, I glean he is predetermined to
take me back to Edson in the caboose.

The men have lighted a fire in the hills, and this fire seems to be the
kernel of the land.  Strange elemental figures appear and disappear in
the darkness as though they were performing unnamed, unholy rites.
They seem human but, perhaps, they are spirits, for I have some
splendid clues that these mountains are the haunted house of the world.

Here, there are eyes that watch you all the time, but they are hidden;
and if you have a listening ear you may hear voices that call.  The
gods come close in the hills.  They go whispering about in the night
and calling your name.

Foolish folk there are who say that the world is old, and that all its
songs are sung.  There is a new song that can never be told, else I
would tell it to you.  Only it may be heard.

      *      *      *      *      *

A man whose face is covered by the dark is spinning a yarn about an
engineer lad on this grade who truly loved an Indian girl.  This is
what he says--

"She died a week ago, and the lad was with her.  It is a beautiful
story, but I know another like hers.  It is about a butterfly that had
specks of gold on its wings."

I did not see the gang climb down the crevasse and up the other side,
but I heard the low lorn echo from the train roll up along the crags
and die away in the snows.  The train's agent said I could go to the
End of Steel if I insisted, but I was not to insist.  This is why I am
travelling back to Edson.  Only I am disappointed much, but he says I
may come again soon, when no one shall disallow me.  It would have been
all right for me to go with the gang, and I could have taken care of
myself: any woman could who has been years and years "in society."

The agent and the Scotch boy have made a bed for me on a wide bench
with my blankets and cushions.  If little private, the bed looks wholly
comfortable.

"You'll be after loosenin' your collar," says the young person from
Kilmarnock as he fluffs up another cushion, "an' ye 'ull be takin' off
baith your shoes an' your stockin's.  I'll be keepin' the daftie loons
out o' the car till ye get a bit o' sleep."

For the benefit of the nervous readers I may add he does not say,
"ye'll be layin' off your bloose," but these are such nice lads I could
do so with absolute propriety.

And they turn the lamp low and shade it with paper while I am asking my
prayer.  And I pray, "Spirits of the Mountains and Rivers, be not angry
with me for talking in the hills.  Gods of the North, strong Gods who
watch over little children and us older ones, let me sleep in quietness
this night, and at last bring me home in safety where all the lights be
white ones."

And I press my lips to the palm of my heart-hand to say "Amen," and to
let the gods know I love them.  To let them know I love them!




CHAPTER V

THE END OF STEEL.

  I love the hills and the hills love me
  As mates love one another.--MACCATHMHAOIL.


It is over a year since, in the last chapter, I was turned back from
the End of Steel because of a wash-out on construction, and now I am
come back, but this time, through the kindness of the Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway, on a through service, electric-lighted,
fast-scheduled, no-fare excursion.  And on this occasion, I am not the
only woman on the train but merely one among a hundred, for this, you
must know, is the triennial excursion of the women journalists and
authors of Canada.  The men present may be counted on one hand.  The
engineers who travelled with me last time have gone on further to new
outposts.

"What are they doing?" you ask.  I'll tell you.

  "They are busy building railways on
    The map's deserted spot,
  Or staking out an empire in
    The land that God forgot."


Doers of deeds are these men and the world has salted them with curious
and stern experiences.  To my way of thinking, Dinny Hogan, boss
contractor, with his blue eyes that are the blue of steel, is a bigger
man than the First Lord of the Admiralty and his work is of more
permanent value to the Empire.  It was only the other day that Dinny
made an arch of "coyotes"--that is to say, of round holes--in one of
the mountains, and into them he packed fifty carloads of gunpowder.
The reader may find it difficult to follow this idea, but no doubt he
could if he saw where Dinny removed the mountain in one shot.  This
would seem to be a kind of big game shooting which has all others
vanquished into nothingness.  This is a wonderful trail through the
mountains--the pass called the Yellowhead--a level ribbon of land along
which the steels are laid for most of the way.  But in some places, a
road has been blasted out just to show how the mountains can be beaten.
These lords of earth and sky, when called upon, must bow their
unwilling necks to the yoke of steel.  And no proper-spirited person
can stand in this pass without feeling the challenge of the hills and
without an immutable desire to conquer them.  This I take it is the
spirit of the buccaneer.

The highest mountain in these Rockies is Robson, called
_Yu-hai-has-kun_ by the Indians, meaning thereby a high, winding road.
The Alpine Club of Canada intend, one of these times, to erect a chalet
at Mount Robson so that they may attempt to scale it often.  Three men
succeeded in making the ascent this very summer.  They were roped
together for thirty hours, and when they had come down again, their
faces were seen to be cut and greatly marred.  These men spoke fine and
glorious things concerning the hilltop, and of how they looked down
upon five hundred other peaks, but, in strait and narrow minds like
ours, these climbs may be accounted only as strange follies.  I have
talked to Clausen Otto about these things, for he has been a guide
hereabout these ten years or more, and is a notable man of affairs.  He
said I was only a terribly lame dog in front of a terribly high stile,
and then, fearing that his comment was truthful rather than polite,
Otto proceeded to salve my feelings by explaining how the desire to
climb glaciers was an ill-regulated one, and that what the Bible said
about sucking honey out of a rock was "plumb foolishness."

Once, he was climbing with a hunter of goats when a bear came swiftly
over the glacier-clad peak of the mountain.  They were greatly puzzled
to know why the bear had climbed so high, and why it dashed across the
summit.  Surely there was something remarkable on the other side of the
peak.  After climbing several hours they made the ascent and looked
over.  "What do you think we saw?" asked Otto.

"Give it up," said I.

"I wish we had too," said Otto; "there was nothing on the far side but
another glacier."

Perhaps, the literary critics will help me decide if Otto meant this
for the parable of the climber or whether he was only singularly adept
in the art of suggestion.

You do not see Mount Robson till you have passed by.  Our train stops
to let us look aright, but cloud curtains obscure the turrets of this
great temple of stone.  Like a sorrowful Caryatid it stands erect under
the burden of the sky.  But, after awhile, the veil is rent asunder and
a tingling flood of light spills itself on the snow in blurs of garnet
and blue and gold which scintillate and blend like the colours of a
shell: Of a surety, the North has the alchemy that transmutes base
metals into gold.

What else may one see at Robson in this dream of summer Canada?  Come
near till I whisper!  You may see white horses--and roan--and chariots
of fire, but not every one can.  This is one of the mountain's secrets.

And if you listen you may hear what the hills talk about, but you must
listen.  One mountain who is not so solemn as you might imagine wishes
to deny that he is of the earth, earthy.

"Bosh!" he said, and "Stuff!  Any one who hasn't moss on his eyes can
see I am of the rocks, rocky!"

"Mark me and be astonished!" boasts a stupendous fellow near by whose
face is furrowed by snow-slides.  "I am a western mountain.  Beat me if
you can!"

"I used to be a fish plantation," remarks a chalky-looking individual.
"It was in the cretaceous period and I lay underneath the sea."

"Lobster plantation?" queries the western one.

"No, you froward ignoramus," replies the fossiliferous fellow, "I
consist of Inoceramus problematicus, Faseiolaria buccinoides, and other
aristocratic mollusks of the which you have never even heard."

... Overhead, an aweless eagle, rising wing above wing says to his
sweetheart, "It is my opinion God made these mountains for no other
reason than that you and I might build our nest in them....."

There is, in this region, a body of water called Maligne Lake, and
Jules DuBois, a trapper, whose son is married to 'Toinette, the niece
of the second cousin of Pierre, whose mother-in-law was the third wife
of Black Moccasin, the chieftain, once told me that this lake is
dreaded by the Indians because there are no fish in it.  This is why it
is called "maligne."  It frets Jules at the heart to go near it, for he
has heard how the fish have been frightened away by a dead man who
lives there.  This man can see without eyes and his face is like a
fungus with white teeth.  When he laughs there is a noise in his throat
like the crackle of tamarack twigs, freshly lighted.

Because of the glaciers on these hills and the warmth of the summer in
the valleys, this atmosphere seems like that of an eternal spring.
Just to breathe it is a delight.  Here the air strokes you into
quietness till you forget the tearing hurry of life; the fretting
uneasiness that rasps, and the hurt that comes of the fight.  This is a
sating of one's desire for the spiritual.  And should you wish for a
token you may stay awhile and drink of the water that cascades over the
rocks.  This is living water.  This is the good wine of the hills.  You
may drink it in remembrance.

I am very sorry I must die some day and miss these wilding joys and the
odour of the trees and flowers, but it is my comfortable hope that when
I return to Claeg, the Round One, who is called the earth, I shall be
evolved into a pine-tree and grow happily in this mountain pass.  Then
will other people come to, even as I come to these trees, and say,
"Good morning, my friend!  I have been lonely for you."

The pines are our fellow-creatures and more closely related to us than
anything that has roots in the earth.  They speak to our inmost being.
A group of pines will restore sanity to the disdistracted and sorrowful
mind, for they are cordial trees, and in quietness and confidence is
their strength.  The pines are never tremulous or trivial, neither do
they fade or die.  Other trees are green for awhile, but these all the
while.

... Pippa, the little maid who sang for the world's hurt, came out of
the woods, as likewise the Nazarene who died for it.

Upland growths are the pines as befitteth the gods of the arboreal
world.  They are northern trees, "the chief things of the ancient
mountains, the precious things of the lasting hills."  Their history is
writ far back in the black strata of the carboniferous age, and that
they will be the last trees to disappear off the earth, who can
gainsay?  As for me I shall not be persuaded otherwise though a man
rise from the dead to tell me.

And now we have come to Jasper, where we have two hours to rest off and
talk to the men of a construction camp who have struck work for the day
in order to see the train come in.  Of course, it does not take all
their day for this, but there were the preliminary toilet preparations
to make and the walk in and out.  Such newly shaven chins; such freshly
brushed clothes; such irreproachable boots!  Who could have expected it!

Like the ascetics who of old-time went into the wilderness and found
themselves dreaming of scarlet lips and white arms, so these fine
fellows are ever fancying a comely woman gliding across their trail; a
distressed damsel who needs to be fed and carried for long, long
distances and sheltered in a low-built house of logs that is
well-warmed and well-provisioned, with no other bachelor nearer than a
hundred miles.

The bachelors will doubtless deny this sweet dalliance with a vehement
fervour, but it has the matter of fact virtue of being true, and is no
whimsey of mine.  A year ago it was, in a prize competition, I was
called upon to read over a hundred short stories, or more properly
speaking, human nature studies.  An amazingly large proportion of these
came from northern camps, and in nearly every case the afore-mentioned
situation was the theme.  The variation from this concerned a young
Englishman of education who is notified that he has inherited wealth at
home but prefers to stay with his woodland wife--a beautiful Indian
girl--rather than return to the granitic conventions of the old world,
and to the busy idleness that goes by the name of society.

And why deny that their hearts are a-brim with dreams, for these are
beautiful reveries and worthy the most chivalrous of knights.  Since it
was given me to look into the recesses of their minds I have liked them
better than ever and am many times heartily glad.  Any woman who is a
gentleman would.

And here Opportunity has spilled a whole trainload of women before
them--old and young, wise and otherwise.  It would be tempting the
patience of Providence if they didn't meet the train, these bachelors
who would gladly lose a rib.

"Such a waste of excellent material," says a poetess who looks over the
bachelors with an appraising eye.  "How big they are!  Someway or
other, they make me think of steel girders."

"Ragingly handsome, I call them," says a petite miss who edits a page
on a big eastern daily.  "Do you think it possible, Lady Jane, that
they--could--have--holes--in--their--socks?"

"Not only possible, My Dear, but highly probable," I reply.

"What odds?" asks Cy Warman, the poet.  "It is recorded that President
Taft was noticed to have a hole in his sock when he took off his boots
in a Tokyo tea-room."

"I am persuaded," remarks an historian who has been listening, "that it
is the duty of the Prime Minister of Canada to import wives for the
bachelors who live on the frontiers.  He has most excellent precedent
in the case of Talon, the Intendant, who in 1670, because of the
disparity of the sexes in this country, imported one hundred and
sixty-five young women.  Moreover, Talon specified that in sending out
these girls from France, the King should see that they had good looks
and were strong and healthy."

"My fellow-women!" interrupts a society reporter, who is an incarnation
of frankness, "lend me your ears; I won't need your money.  I intend
coming here to live.  No longer will I remain a martyr to good form.  I
am weary to death of musicales and other entertainments of an
objectionable character.  I intend to quit the 'best circles,' the
'local coteries,' and the '_haut noblesse_ in favour of a man with a
bungalow at Jasper, and for these delectable mountains with the glories
thereof.  Now, what do you say to that?"

"Taken," replies a distinctly masculine voice in the rear--a voice that
might come from a steel girder--whereupon the rest of us discreetly
retire to allow for the arrangement of preliminaries.  Love is born
through effrontery more often than we think.

When we have achieved the sights of Jasper we entrain for Tete Jaune
Cache, a beautiful moping place on the Fraser River.  All the way along
we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and
mystery, and perhaps of fear.  Here our eyes are pleasured with an
illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form
cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which
the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green
where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river
with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a
glacier--a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun.

The artists with us talk of values, vistas, truth of space,
chiaroscuro, mellowness of effect, and transparence of air.  Perhaps
they are right, but it seems to me that when Nature stretched her stone
canvas in the Rockies she did not trouble with the trivialities of
pleasing prettiness or technical nicety.  She brushed in her colours
with a boldness of mass and outline, with an energy and expression that
stagger.  There is no ambiguity about them.  She used primary colours
and never hesitated.  Royal purple, the orange light of fire, and the
sickening red in which Tintoretto has painted the wounds of his
martyrs, she here emphasized by the "cold virgin snow" on the peaks.

For uncounted centuries, silence has brooded over the beauty of these
imperturbable hills and over their unpathed, desolate places which only
the eyes of the gods have seen.  It is well with me this day that I
journey through them, for here, as in Eden, the terrestrial and
celestial may be one.  It is well, too, that in passing I may shut my
eyes and mentally sing the song of the land as it came hot from the
heart of a poet in his home at the foot of these hills--

  "Oh, could ye see, and could ye see
    The great gold skies so clear,
  The rivers that race the pine shade dark,
  The mountainous snows that take no mark,
  Sunlit and high on the Rockies stark
    So far they seem as near.

  But could ye know, and forever know
    The word of the young Northwest;
  A word she breathes to the true and bold,
  A word misknown to the false and cold,
  A word that never was broken or sold,
    But the one who knows is best."


At Tete Jaune Cache, they are preparing to "strike camp" and move on to
Mile 149.  This has been the supply station for all the outposts, which
means more than you may think, for the Railway Company furnishes an
amazingly generous and varied bill-of-fare to its employees.

Don't ask me what you can get here, for I won't tell lest the urban
epicures whose jaded palates need tickling should start out in a body
for this lodge at Tete Jaune.

And the leading man in the kitchen has the most substantial merit and
can roast a sirloin of beef or bake a cake of prodigious bigness for
the men's supper just as he can cunningly and designedly contrive a
pimento bisque, an omelette espanol, or shrimps a la creole for the
boss and his company.  I'll not tell another word about the fare, but,
believe me it is "with such cookery a monkey might eat his own father."

Te' Jaune, as it is familiarly called in the North, is situated on the
Fraser River.  Because of the snow melting on the mountains, the Fraser
is swollen as if the waters surged from underneath.  While we wait,
swart, husky-looking men are putting off to Fort George in primitive
craft built of squared logs.  These boats are called scows.  They are
carried along by the current which is from six to eight miles an hour,
and are guided by means of a paddle with a vast yellow blade.

As the men pass on and wave their hands to us, a fret falls on me to go
with them along this river-road to its very end, and if you are of my
kin you would want it too.  We would live sturdily; we would be sopped
in sunshine, and God would give us joy.

At Te' Jaune there are many tongues spoken, for the workmen hail from
all over the universe.  Of late, we have heard much about these
foreigners and of "those nations which we, so full-mouthed, call
barbarous."  Certain Canadians are enwrathed and utterly discomfited
because of them.  It is their desire to tidy up the country by sending
the "alien offscourings" to where they belong.  They tell us that our
manners will become corrupted and our institutions imperilled by them.

This fear of strangers is not peculiar to our country and age.
Strangers have, in all lands, been looked upon as enemies to the
commonwealth, and consequently to be avoided or extinguished.
According to Flavius Josephus, when Moses came to die he said, "Oh you
Israelites and fellow-soldiers....  I would advise you to preserve
these laws to leave none of your enemies alive when you have conquered
them, but to look upon it as for your advantage to destroy them all,
lest if you permit them to live, you taste of their manners and thereby
corrupt your own proper institutions.  I do farther exhort you to
overthrow their altars and their groves and whatsoever temples they
have among them, and burn all such, their nation and their very memory
with fire; for by this means alone the safety of your own happy
constitution can be secured to you."

The Jewish constitution was not worth the price asked; neither is ours.
This should be far from the spirit of Canada--"the manless land that is
crying out for the landless man."  Canada is the child of the nations
and our husky provinces have need of these husky peoples.  Not only
must we open wide our doors and bid them a good welcome, but having
entered, it must be our endeavour to weld them into a seemly and
coherent whole.

This is a task which is half accomplished e'er it is begun, for the
Russian, the Italian, the Scandinavian and all our immigrants are eager
to be like the Canadians, to speak our language, to wear our clothes,
and to think, talk and walk like us.  Their differentiation is a burden
to them and they desire to drop it as quickly as possible.

These Coming Canadians from Europe are of a fine advantage to this
country where thousands of miles of roads and railways are to be built,
in that they perform the more onerous tasks of digging and drainage
which the Canadian, British, and American turns from as menial and
unworthy.  It would be a wide mistake for us to turn back from our
sea-ports these unlearned and common peoples who seek entrance--as
foolish as the farmer who would fear a large yield of wheat lest he
could not thresh it, or a banker who dreaded an inrush of gold lest he
could not count it.

It was Michael Gowda, a Ruthenian living at Edmonton, who expressed for
his people their feelings of loyalty towards the land of their adoption
in a poem entitled "O Free and Fresh-home Canada"--

  "And are you not, O Canada, our own?
  Nay, we are still but holders of thy soil,--
  We have not earned by sacrifice and groan
  The right to boast the country where we toil.

  But, Canada, our hearts are thine till death,
  Our children shall be free to call thee theirs,
  Their own dear land where, gladly drawing breath,
  Their parents found safe homes, and left strong heirs.

  Of homes, and native freedom, and the heart
  To live and strive and die, if need be,
  In standing manfully by honour's part
  To guard the country that has made us free."




CHAPTER VI

BITTER WATERS

I

They could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were
bitter.--_The Pentateuch_.


"Tweet, my little plover!  Thy lips are like unto the bleeding
strawberry."

Wasi, the father, smiled indulgently on this child-play, cooing
chatter, and sweet-flavoured words of his girl-wife as she fondled
their wonder-eyed baby.

And in truth, it was a round dimpled baby--a cunning, cuddling papoose
that looked for all the world like a live bronze.  Wasi did well to
smile.

The older Braves had sneered at Wasi, "the Yellow Pine," for had he
not, they asked, breathed the breath of his squaw till his heart was
even as faint and soft as a squaw's heart.  But Wasi of the swart face
heeded not their gibes for he loved Ermi with the flaming love known
only to men of hot heart and greedy senses.

"Lazy one, to sleep till sun is high," merrily chided Ermi.  "Little
Ninon has been awake since the dawn raised the meadow-larks."

Wasi rose hastily, for he would take the trail early to the sun-dance,
and it was four suns' journey to the North.

Once, Ermi had gone when she was ten spring-tides old, but the
cruelties of the scene with its shrill jubilations, had bitten
themselves into her memory.  Her brother had been one of the candidates
for the coveted title of "Brave," and she had seen the wooden skewers
thrust through the muscles of his chest by which he was suspended to a
tree and from which he only freed himself by tearing away the flesh.
Since then, she had been to the mission school at St. Albert, and the
nuns had taught her that the body was holy, "a temple," they called it,
and that the sun-dance was sinful exceedingly.

Father Lament at the cathedral had christened her Agatha, for she had
come to them in February on the day of the virgin-martyr of Sicily.
But Wasi was a Pagan, and called her Ermi.

Ermi busied herself laying out Wasi's beaded moccasins, his bow of
cherry-wood with its leathern thong, and his arrows of Albertan
willows, that were winged with eagle feathers and tipped with iron.

All the while she sang a quaint song about love.

"Why singest thou thus!" asked Wasi.  "'Tis the foolish song of the
hunters from the south-land."

But Ermi laughed as she sang--

  "'Twas odour fled
  As soon as shed,
  'Twas morning's winged dream;
  'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
  On life's dull stream."


Then, as Wasi held his pony, Ermi kissed her brave and rested her
slight little body against him with love speaking in every line of its
limp abandon.


II

Outside, the smouldering sun sank earthward in a drapery of blood-red.
In the tepee, the fierce dryness of the hot winds breathed on the baby
that lay dying by the open door.

The Indian women feared the measles more than any other plague, and so
Ermi had been alone all the days, save only for the medicine-man who
had come to her thrice.  He would drive out the evil spirits who had
caused the sickness, but Ermi only shook her head and held little Ninon
the closer.  Once, she had seen him sear the flesh of Cheneka with a
burning piece of touchwood, and he had sucked the blood from the breast
of Kon.  Besides, Ermi was a Christian and worshipped always at the
shrine of the great white virgin.

The hours passed, horrible hours, and still in her loneliness and
parching anxiety she cried for the life of her baby, cried the prayers
of impotence to omnipotence.  Already the baby-face was old and tired,
but the mother crooned and rocked her all through the night till, at
dawn, the wearied eyelids drooped over the darkened eyes for the last
time.  The dove had found no rest for the sole of her foot.

Ermi knew where there lay a great stone in the coulee off by the river
bank.  She would carry her baby thence and bury it under the stone,
safe from the grovelling of wolves.

Then she washed the tiny form and combed the tangles from the soft
hair, looping it back from the face with a band of scarlet.  "After
all," she mused, "life has no beauty so wonderful as death."

And because it was the tribal belief that if a corpse were carried
through a door, the next person following would shortly die, Ermi put
Ninon through the window, for Wasi would come home soon and the dread
fate might fall on him.

Gathering the little clod of flesh in her arms and pressing it closely,
the dry-eyed mother set out on her journey across the wide-lying
plains.  On and on she walked, trudge, trudge, trudge, under a brazen
sky that looked down pitiless and tearless.

"Oh!  If Wasi were here," she thought.  "He would carry the spade and I
would hold little Ninon only.  If Wasi were here!"

The ground reflected heat to her weary soul and body, and the weight of
the world seemed to crush her frail being.

"Oh, Mother of God!  Sweet Mother of God!" she moaned.  "How the sun
burns, and I am very tired."

But the women of the Braves are in pain and weariness often, so Ermi
staggered on till she reached the coulee, with its boulder that had
been carried hither by the river when it overflowed its banks at the
last springtide.

Laying her burden in the shadow of the rock, Ermi hollowed out an
earthen cradle for the baby.  She lined it with green, too, just as
they had done at school when any one died, and then passionately
kissing Ninon, she wrapped a bit of blanket about her, for the living
would have the dead sleep soft and warm.

Ermi tried to think a prayer, but she had forgotten them all since the
nights when Ninon was sick.  She could not think of even one.  She only
noticed that the white butterflies swam lazily to and fro like floating
blossoms, and that the sunflowers were wondrously beautiful as they
punctuated the rank, shaggy grass with gold.  Lissome lilies swayed
gently in the hot breeze and made blotches on the earth like spilled
wine.

At midday, the lilt of a lark stabbed the air, and the sound roused
Ermi, for she rose sharply to her feet and sang with hoarse voice and
stiff lips--

  "'Twas odour fled
  As soon as shed;
  'Twas morning's winged dream;
  'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
  On life's dull stream."

The startled gophers darted into their cover and waited.  When they
looked again, the mother had packed the little form in clay, had rolled
to the stone and lay face down wards on the earth.  It was early dawn
when she rose from her vigil.


III

As Ermi neared the house, she saw that Wasi had returned, and with
bursting heart she ran to tell him of their sorrow.  His face grew sad
and stern as he listened, but again, it lit up as he took her by the
hand and led her to see Asa, the woman he had brought as a wife to his
hut.  Asa, who would be to her as a sister, one whom she would love in
the place of Ninon, the child.

There are half-hours that dilate to years, and Ermi seemed to have
suddenly grown cold.  It was as though the vampire vixen who haunts the
muskeg swamp had suddenly sapped her youth.  Ermi spoke nought, only
she laughed like Kayosk, the sea-gull, as he flies across Lac Wabamun,
a loud laugh and bitter, like the taste of sleugh salt in summer.

She knew the unwritten laws of their tribe permitted polygamy, but she
knew not that, even in his best love, a man's heart is never entirely
absorbed, that no Wasi ever belongs wholly to any Ermi, knew not that
this is the tree of woman's crucifixion.

And Wasi endeavoured to comfort her, but she was only silent and
motionless.  He told her of the great sun-dance, and of the feastings,
and of how the sisters of the youths had cut little pieces of flesh
from them, but the youths cried not, for they were no weak women.

Then Ermi moved around gently and prepared food for Asa, who wore a
wreath of yellow blossoms wherewith Wasi had crowned her.

Sometimes, as she moved to and fro, she stopped as in a dream to look
at the glowing and beautiful body of her rival.  The woman was lithe as
a sapling, her cheeks were like wild red roses, and her mouth was like
to a bow and arrow when it is set.  Asa's hair was blue-black, but her
skin was almost white, for her father had been a pale face, one of the
Company's men at Fort Edmonton.

But Ermi neither spoke nor complained, even when she read in Wasi's
eyes strange depths of passion as he looked on the lovely stranger.  A
few days agone, she would have torn this woman to pieces, but there was
no rage in her heart now.  The world had hardened around her, and she
could not cut through.

And so four moons filled and waned, and darkness and sun passed
unheeded to the stricken Ermi, for the light had gone out of her life,
and from the heavens too.

The women who loved her, and even Asa, tried to break her apathy, but
guessed not that her wound was past all surgery--that her life was a
bitter marah into which no tree of healing could fall.

Some said the sun had kissed her when she carried little Ninon to the
coulee, and others said it was the touch of God, for the world has
always a name for a broken heart.

Once the wife of Tusda told her that Ninon was better off and not
needing her in the least, but this only made Ermi's heart the more dull
and leaden.  Wazakoo thought that Ninon might have grown into such a
wicked woman as the bold Asa, but the words were an insult to the
innocent eyes, the little unsullied feet, the lips pure as thought of
God, which the mother's eyes called up.

"Very soon, you will go also," added Taopi, but it bewildered Ermi the
more to know that the little piece of ground on which she stood was
crumbling too.

Another moon waned and yet she served the household.  In her brain the
fire still burned on.  Without, on the plains, the wind made a black
discord like the sobbing cry of a starved wolf, and, sometimes, it was
most like the whine of a whip-thong.  Manitou walked about the earth
and the leaves faded and fell from the trees.  Manitou blew with his
breath, and the river became like flint.  At the wave of his arms the
animals hid away in the ground and the birds forsook their nests in the
wild rice and flew far off to the south-land.

But all the days the baby called to Ermi, and often it wailed.  One day
the voice wooed her unto the snow, out into the sheeted storm that
turned the air into a white darkness.  Streaks of bitter wind screamed
across the prairie.  The snow cut her face with stinging lash and the
cowering cold cut into her very bones.  But still, without ceasing, the
baby called to her.  Now and then, she almost clasped it, and her soul
swooned, but something intangible, impalpable ever waved her back.

And then Ermi understood that the night was closing in and that she had
come a long, long way.  She would go back to Wasi, for she had
forgotten about the other woman.  The fire would be low, he would need
her and she must find him, however weary the trail.

But even as she resolved, the woman sank limply to where one finds
dreams and soft reveries and where church bells toll the vesper hour.
Her hands clasped her rosary, but she did not pray.  She only maundered
softly the foolish song of the hunters from the southland--

  "'Twas odour fled
  As soon as shed;
  'Twas morning's winged dream;
  'Twas a light----"


Once at school, she could not solve a problem and so she broke the
slate.  She remembered it quite well; it was a question in the rule of
three.  "How foolish!" she mused, and Ermi smiled as she remembered.

      *      *      *      *      *

The morning dawned brightly in the coulee where a stone covered a
little grave.  There was nothing to be seen, nor anything to suggest
that it was here Ermi had lain down to dreams.  The snow had hidden her
well in its white bosom, but somewhere, somehow, Ermi, the Indian
woman, was working out the pitiful problem of life on another slate.




CHAPTER VII

MOTORING TO ATHABASCA LANDING

  "I'll tell the tale of a northern trail,
  And so help me God, it's true."


I dreamed three times that I was taking this trip, and here it has come
to pass.

Our party consists of an editor from Vancouver; an editor from
Edmonton; a Member of Parliament, a chauffeur, and myself.  I feel
guiltily feminine.

The road is one hundred miles long and connects Edmonton with the
North.  Over it are hauled all the supplies for the settlements and
trading posts clear down to the Arctic.  Once arrived at Athabasca
Landing, the supplies are loaded on to scows or, in the winter, to
sleighs, and from thence carried to their destination.  I secretly call
this the Trail of Sighs, for to the freighter it is a long and weary
way, especially in these later days when editors, M.P.'s and graceless
witty bodies whirl past him at forty miles the hour in motors that are
quite mad.  Some day a teamster will kill a chauffeur for sheer spite.
Even now the fuse is fizzing round the magazine, or whatever you call
the gasoline receptacle under the seat.

It would be hard to declare how long this trail has been used, but I
would say for a century at least.  From Edmonton for a few miles out,
it is called the Fort Trail because--allowing for a slight
divergence--it goes to Fort Saskatchewan, the head-quarters of the
Mounted Police in this district.  From thence, it is called the Landing
Trail.

But soon this whole country will be shod with steel, for, even now, you
may see navvies building grades as you pass along the trail, and next
week the first railway to the Landing will be opened for traffic.  I
tell you, these railways are creating a new heavens and a new earth
however much the freighters may object.  It is true, the trail will
lose in interest once the lumbering stage coaches and heavily laden
"tote" wagons have disappeared.  When there are no long whips that
crack like pistol shots; no night encampments around blazing fires, and
no browsing cattle with tinkling bells, much of its picturesqueness
will have been surrendered to the implacable cause of civilization.

From this time forth, the men who travel the trail will work for a
wage.  They will forget the feel of frozen bread in the teeth; the hard
earth underneath them and the rough blanket against their chins.  Yes!
and they will also forget the fine elemental thrill that comes from
hitting a running moose at long range, or a slithering wolf that lurks
privily in a covert of kinikinnic.  The pity of it!

No longer will our trail know the tired huskies, and still more tired
runners, who each year, come February, make this homestretch to the old
fur-market.  The enormous bundles of fur that each spring sell for a
million dollars to the bidders from Vienna, St. Petersburg, London and
Chicago, will, for the future, figure as only so many untanned hides,
as per bill of lading, instead of precious peltry or--supposing you to
have sight and insight--"the lives o' men."

Our first stopping place is Battenberg, by the Sturgeon River.  The
place is not named for the lace as you might conjecture, but in honour
of the son-in-law of her late Majesty, Queen Victoria.  It is here the
rural telephone wire comes to an end but if you are inclined to be
finicky, it is not well to telephone.  I tried it and had a
conversation with Central in the which she expressed her opinion of me.
I cannot complain that it was not informing.

The motor in which we travel has a record, not for speed, but as having
made the farthest north trip on its own power.  Last winter, Jack Kydd,
our chauffeur, took it down the Athabasca River, on the ice, as far as
the Pelican Rapids--that is to say, 225 miles north of Edmonton.  "The
make of the car?" you ask.  I would tell you straight off and, later
on, would endeavour to collect a bonus from the manufacturers were it
not for the uncompromising prejudice of the publishers and their
editors.  Men are like that.

But I was telling you about Jack Kydd!  His talent as a chauffeur is
one that trails no feathers and he is a fine, likely looking lad.  This
day, I saw him pull the remains of a stump out of the road without
breaking the axle.  Such a performance should be rated as a religious
act like the planting of the pipal tree in India.

All the way along, our road is contested by farmers' dogs who surge out
from the shacks in a vain endeavour to regulate our speed.  The dog is
an incurable motophobe who says everything profane about motors that
can be said.

Here is a morose young bull contesting the high way with us, refusing
to budge an inch, and facing the motor with a menace.  He is a
grim-visaged brute and built for battle like an ironclad.  His
challenge to combat is a very dagger stroke of sound.  Although the
M.P. wagers fifty dollars on the motor, we do not try conclusions, but
discreetly take to the side of the road at an angle that is truly
appalling.

Even the calves are not afraid of the car and make their perilous bed
in the middle of the road, thus causing us to reduce our pace to a
legal one.  Indeed, the only animals frightened of it are the horses.
Its huge black snout and great goggle-eyes must make it seem to them
like some monstrous, unthinkable brute.  And, all considered, the
horses are the wisest of the animals---wiser even than men--for the
yellow peril--is as nothing to the black one.

Still, we are having a mighty good time.  When the road is clear, the
car spreads her wings and flies.  Her gentle pliancy seems incompatible
with her hurtling force.  Each moment, she accumulates momentum so that
we feel a sensation of tremendous power without pity.  For the nonce,
we are potential murderers and pigmy men had better have a care how
they lounge across our paths.  This mad car doesn't know a hill when
she comes to it and even sings a long-metre song on the ascent.  She
might fairly be considered to have conquered gravitation.  On!  On!
with bird-like swoop she goes, fairly skimming the ground and taking
the corners just as if she knew what was there.

You can never believe how stretched out the world is till you motor
this way north and see the long ribbons of road that unfold at every
turn, the silver illimitable distances that suggest both a mystery and
an invitation.  I love these open trails, and to be of the earth earthy
is not so wicked after all.

Gur--r--r--umph!  Our 50 H.P. had dwindled to less than one-pony power
and we haven't a leg to stand on.  I will never say we burst a tyre: we
cast a shoe.

"It is neither, Madam," said the Vancouver editor who was helping to
prise up the wheel.  "It is a valvular disease.  Our viary accident is
the result of a vicious valve that, of its own volition, has put a veto
on our volacious voyage."

"Avant!" retorts the editor from Edmonton.  "I will vouch that the
accident to the vitals of our vehicle was a voidable one and arose from
violent vibrations and vulgar velocity."

"Your verbose verdicts will never make the vamp or fill the vacuum,"
says the more practical M.P.  "Bring me the vade-mecum this instant,
you vacillating vagabonds."

I cannot think of any assonant words so I am content with fining each
man a "V" or "vifty" days.  I told you I was guiltily feminine.

Sitting at the side of a road, waiting for a plaster to dry on a valve,
is about as exciting an occupation as knitting.  Men should see to it
that women learn to smoke if only that the women may take breakdowns
more placidly.  I can understand smoking becoming a means of grace.
Besides, the sun is very hot this day and burns my face and neck to a
vivid scarlet.  Each man in the party produces a talcum tin for my
alleviation.  "Sunny _Alberta_!" snorts the British Columbian, "_Sunny_
Alberta! a place of sun, believe me, for people who would prefer shade."

This newly acquired habit of the modern man in carrying a talcum tin is
one that, hitherto, has escaped print.  I here set it down for your
consideration.

While we are at work, three handsome boys drive up and stop to talk
with us.  I take their photograph while they pose for me on a stump.
They are real-estate fans, so that their heads are full of
"propositions," their pockets full of maps.  They have imagination,
unflagging industry, facility of expression, and love of
country--qualities which are sure to bring them to the front in their
gainful pursuit.

The illustrious financiers who come yearly to this province to deliver
much kind advice and sage instruction, warn us to beware of these boys
whom they are pleased to call "wildcatters," just as if we were the
first to spend our money on the evidence of things hoped for, the
substance of things not seen.  The trouble which follows from
over-investment in real-estate futures is attributable, not so much to
the wildcatters, as to the unknown author of the multiplication table.
Multiplying is our favourite occupation in Alberta even as it is in
some other provinces I know of.  Up here, every one who has a tongue
talks about his "turn-over"; his "c'mission"; his "stake."  Those who
haven't tongues are the listeners.  And it is a good thing to have a
stake in this North-West Canada--very good.  I have never yet met a
person who regretted having one, but there are many regret they have
not.  I could tell you more about the real-estate situation only Jane
Austen says if a woman knows anything she should strive superlatively
to conceal it.

Fifty miles from Edmonton, we cross the Arctic watershed, so that from
this point it is strictly proper to say down North, although the fall
is only two feet to the mile.  It is at this height of land that we
look around and mentally spy out the country.  We talk about the
incomparable wheat fields of Grande Prairie; the water-powers of the
Peace River; the oil-fields at Fort McMurray; the natural gas at
Pelican Rapids; the timber berths and asphaltum of the Athabasca; of
the coal, salt, fisheries, furs, and minerals spread all over and under
this new and unrivalled Northland.  And all this riches lies at our
very feet--_ours for the taking_.  "Hungry and I feed them," says the
North.  "Naked and I clothe them; thirsty and I give them----"

"No, it doesn't," says our chauffeur.  "You can't get anything to drink
beyond the Landing.  The North is strictly a prohibition country."

"Dear me!" whines a person in the back seat, "and we are dreadfully out
of tea."

At five o'clock, we stop at Eggie's for supper.  Eggie broke land here
fourteen years ago, and ever since has kept a stopping place for
travellers.  There is no need of his transporting eggs, butter, meat,
grain, and vegetables to market, for the market comes to him.  He makes
hay when the sun shines, and also in the dark.  As a result, he has
accumulated sixty thousand dollars in money and gear.  So far as I
know, there is no eating-house with a record in any way comparable.

Eggie Jr. is a telegraph operator.  His instrument is back of the cook
stove over against a window.  When he is away from home his young
sister works the code.  She picked it up while tending the stove.  You
can never tell what is up the sleeve of these pioneering women.  I told
her she was the sixth wise virgin.  "The other five?" she queried with
a glint of laughter in her eyes.  There are other folk having supper at
Eggie's.  The man with the long slouchy stride is a land surveyor.
They grow on every bush here.

That crisp-mannered youth with the honey-coloured hair is going down
north to cap a gas well.  In what better task can a youth engage than
to conserve power, heat, and light for humanity?  Dear young man!

Their driver quotes Cicero, and swears in Cree.  He is a living example
of what whisky can do for a Bachelor of Arts who entirely devotes
himself to it.

By six o'clock we are again on the road, and passing through a rolling
park-like country dotted with clumps of cottonwood, birch, poplar, and
spruce.  Sometimes, we pass lush meadow upon which graze full-fleshed
cattle and comfortably rotund sheep.  On one farm, a man is burning
dead brushwood.  There is no keener pleasure than, here and there, to
thrust a core of fire into long grass or brushwood, and to watch the
red tongues of flame as they greedily lap it up.  As yet, no farmer has
written about it, but this is only because farmers are afraid of
literary critics.  It is a pity the workers are so frequently
inarticulate, thus leaving their joys and sorrows to be imperfectly
sensed by onlookers.  But, Hear, Oh Men! and rejoice with me for at
this game I am not a mere onlooker, having once burnt over twenty-eight
acres.  In making these fires, there is a kind of madness that takes
possession of you so that you pay no heed to the shrivelling of your
shoes; to the scalding cinders on your hands; or the inky blackness of
your face and clothes.  Indeed, it would not be surprising to
ultimately learn that the direful task assigned to Lucifer is not
wholly without its compensations.

At long intervals, we pass fat little shacks that spread over the land
instead of stretching up.  At one of these, we stop to get cold water
in the engine.

"Any news moving?" asks the bachelor who is overlord to the shack.

He does not wait for an answer, but proceeds to inform us that the
prime knowledge a man needs for homesteading is the art of cooking in a
frying pan.

His homestead is a ranch; not a rawnch.  The difference, he explains,
is that the former pays sometimes; the latter never.

He very kindly invites me to see his swineyard, the special pride of
which is a heavy thoroughbred called "Artful Belle" ... O la! la! la!

As he upholsters his pipe with a stuffing of cut-plug, her master would
have me observe that Belle's face is "dished" and that her eyes are
free from wrinkles of surrounding fat.  Indeed Belle is no waddling,
commonplace sow; no mere animated lard keg, for she has been bred to
the purple with great care.

"A bacon hog?" I ask.

"Yes, madam," he replies, "but in order that her bacon may be of the
desired streakiness I feed and starve her alternately."

It makes a vast difference to a sow whether her ears stand up or lie
down.  Belle's ears are 'pliable' and 'silky.'  Her hair doesn't comb
straight either, but tends to swirls and cowlicks which are
proof-positive of her blue blood in the same way that a cold nose is in
a woman.

I made a grave error, too, in speaking of Belle as red.  Every swine
husbandman knows the technical word for her particular colour is
"mahogany."  She has already farrowed two litters of six, the members
of which inherit their mother's fatal beauty.  He tells me other things
but I forget them, except that pigs can see the wind, and that they are
older than history.

We take a photograph of this bachelor homesteader and promise to print
it in a city paper under the caption, 'Wife Wanted.'  In the North, we
call a bachelor, 'an anxious one.'

The last miles of our journey are heavy going because of the hills and
stones, and our motor makes a lugubrious noise internally that is
wholly at variance with her velvet wheels, well lubricated machinery,
and the comfortable roundness of the corner seats, as if a plump and
smiling matron had suddenly started to swear.

We reach Athabasca Landing at half-past ten while daylight still
lingers.  Our complexions are somewhat impaired, but the man who
settles the bill for the steaks and coffee says there is nothing wrong
with our appetites.




CHAPTER VIII

COUNTRY DELIGHTS

Sometimes, I go a-fishing and shooting, and even then I carry a
note-book, that if I lose game, I may at least bring home my pleasant
thoughts!--PLINY.


I am fishing for graylings, but so far have caught none, my case being
similar to that of one Chang Chi-Ho, who in the eighth century, "spent
his time angling but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish."

And truth to tell, I have not even the grace of an object, unless it be
to talk to the men folk who are lading the big flat scows called
"Sturgeon-Heads," for the trip down the river.

By these right pleasant waters of the Athabasca, you are no longer
guided by duty but throw a rein on the senses.  You do things because
you want to do them, and not because you ought to.  This is owing to
the fact that the time-table loses its thrall north of 55 deg.  I intend
stopping here a long while.

It is a sun-steeped day, and the river looks like a bed of sequins.
The sun, although it is strong in Alberta, doesn't seem to ripen people
like it does farther south.  I can see this from the way people give me
greeting and from how they tell me all that is in their hearts.

Antoine hears that far off in that place called Montreal they dig worms
out of the clay for bait, and that these worms have neither shells nor
fur.  This must be "wan beeg lie," for how could the worms keep from
freezing?  It is not according to reason.  These white men with trails
in the middle of their hair say these things so that the Crees, who are
very shrewd rivermen, will go to live in Montreal.

I heartily concur with Antoine.  I have been to Montreal myself and
have never seen so much as the sign of an earth-worm.  They tell queer
yarns, those Eastern fellows who come from down North to write books
and buy land, but Antoine and I won't be fooled by them.  Indeed, we
won't.

Antoine caught a pike the other day without a line, but he lost it
again.  It was the biggest fish he ever caught, but this is only
natural, and is no new thing, for ever since the first slippery fish
slithered through the hands of primeval man, it has always been the
biggest one that got away.  Where these biggest fish foregather
ultimately has always been a mystery to me.  Some day, we shall
discover a piscatorial paradise with millions of them in it.

Antoine presents me to Captain Shot, an Indian who has been on this
river for forty-eight years.  The Captain is seventy-three, and his
name is really Fausennent.  He is called "Shot" because he was the
first man to shoot the rapids of the Athabasca.  I say that Antoine
"presents me" but I say it advisedly, for the North levels people, by
which is meant the primitive north where they live with nature.  In
this environment, the man who builds boats and supplies food or fuel,
is the superior of the man or woman who writes, or pronounces theories.
I may be able to hoodwink the people up south as to my importance in
our community, but it is different here.  And this is as it should be.

Captain Shot is engaged in building a boat for the Honourable the
Hudson's Bay Company, and there is even a smoking-room in it.  But,
Blessed Mother! it is no trouble to build a boat now--none at all, for
presently the railway will be completed and the boilers and metal
fixings will come in over it, but in the old days--that is to say up
till now--it was different.  When the Northern Navigation Co. brought
in the boilers for their boats, they hauled them a hundred miles over
the trail from Edmonton, and it took seventy-two horses on each boiler.

"Didn't the government help any?" I ask.

Oh yes! the late government at Ottawa tried to help transportation by
sending in fifty reindeer; but the Captain has heard tell that some men
swore terrible oaths at the government, and set their dogs about eating
up the deer, for these men hold a kind of an idea it is railways the
country hereabouts needs, but he is not quite sure as to the rights of
the story.

There are four hundred men employed here at the Landing in building
scows and transhipping.  Only a few of the scows are brought back, for
they have to be tracked up by power of man.  For this reason, a new
flotilla is built each year.

Captain Shot has many estimable sons, all of whom are rivermen and
shipbuilders.  They could hardly be expected to disgrace their name by
becoming mere farmers or teamsters after the unwisdom of the white
man's way.  Ho!  Ho! the idea of any one wishing to become a farmer.

But I was telling you about the scows.  Unless you sat here catching
fish, you could never believe how much stuff can be packed into a scow.
As I watch the men at work, I think of Mark Twain's ambitious blue-jay
who tried to fill a house with acorns.  Still the men do not seem
lacking in confidence, and keep wading backward and forward through the
water with sacks of flour, slabs of bacon, chests of tea, crates of
hardware, tins of stuff, and treasures in boxes that can only be
guessed at.  I am hoping the biggest box contains dolls, ribbons,
work-bags, picture books, peppermint bull's eyes, and things like that,
for a mission school Christmas-tree somewhere down near the Arctic.  I
am almost praying that it does.

The smaller boxes are called permits, and each contain six bottles of
whisky.  These are for the pioneering gentlemen at the different posts
who are delicate, and who honestly desire to get strong.

Each permit is signed by a doctor so that the liquor must be considered
strictly as medicine.  Irritating people who fail to understand that
there are only two licensed hotels between Edmonton and the North Pole,
sneer about there being a thousand delicate men on the rivers; but, for
my part, I am inclined to stand by the doctors, although I have always
held the clinical thermometer to be the only thing about the medical
profession with an integrity beyond question.

If any one should glean from reading these lines that all there is to
loading a scow is to load it, he or she is a much misled person.  The
last bale is hardly stowed away till two of the men have disappeared.
No one saw them go, least of all the Boss, but any one can see they are
not here now.  The Boss is a creature of steel who seems to forget
there is much to be done in the last hour or two before a boatman
leaves the Landing for the stretched out journey beyond.  Various
purchases are to be made; people are to be seen; drinks are to be had
against a long, long thirst, to mention nothing of new vows to Marie,
Babette, and Josephine.

After awhile, the voyageurs are all rounded up with the exception of
Luke.  The best the Boss can say for Luke is that he has been given a
Christian name.  Jake is sent to fetch him.  Luke turns up, but Scotty
must find Jake.  Luke isn't drunk either--not he.  It's the scow that's
drunk.  Who said Luke was "fuller'n a goat," I'd like to know.
Ultimately, the Boss starts off to get Scotty and Jake.  He gets them,
and he sits them down in a highly decisive manner, only to find that
Bill, and Jean Baptiste, and One-eyed Pete have gone up town for a
dunnage bag they left at the Grand Union Hotel....  The Boss looks
eight feet tall when he is angry, but, otherwise, to the unseeing eye,
he is only a young factor, or maybe an independent trader, intent on
his work like scores of other ordinary, unaccounted workmen.
Contrawise, the eye of imagination may see in him an adventuring
gentleman launching a craft that is to traverse for hundreds of miles
through many and diverse waterways, carrying with it a veritable cargo
of blessings to the far and lonely outposts of the North which, as yet,
are little else than names.

The rivermen push off from shore with their oars till, in the centre of
the stream, the current catches them and carries them along.  This is
their only method of locomotion, to float and float with the stream.
They have a steering-pole in the scow similar to that which may be seen
in pictures of old Roman galleys, and when, because of darkness, the
voyageurs wish to stay their course, they make to shore by its aid,
even as the Romans did more than two thousand years ago.  To make the
simile complete, I stand on the bank and repeat the invocation of the
Roman poet: "Oh ship that conveyest Virgil to Greece, duly deliver up
the precious life entrusted to thy care."...

If I hadn't jerked the crown of an old hat out of the river under the
impression that it was a fish, Justine would not have laughed out loud
and I would not have had an excuse to get acquainted with her.  She has
been sitting nearby this half-hour.  Her name isn't really Justine and
I forget what it is.  She is the prettiest breed-girl in the country
and, by the same token, the frailest.  "Believe me, Madam," explained
an old officer of the Mounted Police, the other day, "those eyes were
never given her for the good of her soul.  She is a little
worth-nothing person like all the other breed-girls."

This man despises breed-women and he has made a sufficiently intimate
study of them to form an opinion.  He wishes they were all dead.  "For
an absolute truth, Madam, listen to me.  For years, these women have
paddled their canoes up this river with kegs of contraband liquor
a-swing from ropes beneath and none of the force ever suspected.  They
were so monstrously civil, they would even give us 'a lift' if we
desired it.  I was highly surprised when we found them out, and so
disgusted with myself that, for a time, I thought of becoming a
type-setter.  By Jove! you know; a fellow doesn't expect to find a keg
outside a canoe.  Now does he?"

But I am not one of those who believe there are good women and bad
women.  Some are elemental and others are not; that is the only
difference.  I will maintain this to the very day my tongue wears out.

Justine's white father must have had a head and shoulders of the most
perfect classical type.  As she sits on the beach with a light shawl
drawn down over her head, this girl resembles greatly the Madonna of
Bouguereau.  I tell her this, and we talk for a long while.  She thinks
my suggestion that she marry a riverman, or a trapper, and have quite a
large family, a wholly foolish suggestion.  It causes her to think
little of both my discernment and my knowledge of men.  Rivermen, she
would have me understand, hardly ever come home, and when they do, only
to get drunk and beat their wives.  A white man won't marry a breed
girl, nowadays, and if he should give her his heart, he expects it to
be returned sometime.  Still, Justine considers his transient
affections to be preferable to those of the breed's, in that a white
man seldom strikes his girl.  Justine gives me a short lesson in Cree,
and, among other words, I learn that _saky hagen_ is the equivalent of
"one I love," and that _nichimoos_ means "sweetheart."  The former is
usually applied to a child, the latter to an adult.

When I ask Justine to tell me a story about the North, she complies
because she has been educated in a mission school and speaks English
well.  And then she is not in the least afraid of me since I showed so
lamentable a lack of insight about marriage.  Now listen to the story.

Once a mallard who was sick of love asked a blackbird to marry him.
"Marry me," he said, "and I will give you fish to eat and wild rice.
And when the sun is hot, I will hide you in the rushes and keep you
under my wings."

And so they lived together as man and wife and the blackbird bore her
husband three sons, but soon he tired of her and made believe he was
dead so that she went away and left him in peace.

And then the mallard went in search of another wife....  It was a story
I craved of Justine, and lo! she has told me a parable.




CHAPTER IX

AT THE LANDING.

  A city founded is no city built
  Till faith becomes prolific by the fathering tale
  Of good report and all-availing effort.--J. M. HARPER.

  The sweet of life is something small,
  A resting by a wayside wall
  With God's good sunshine over all.--R. W. GILBERT.


This is the rainy season at Athabasca Landing, so that the streets are
very muddy.  Long ago, it was like this in Edmonton, my continuing
city, but when we were come to a very considerable puddle our escorts
carried us.  This is why big, fine-looking men were in high demand.

But, this day, by some strange providence, the glut of rain has abated
and the clemency of the sky fills me with an importunate inclination to
gad about and use my eyes.  There are no moments to be lost, to-morrow
it is sure to be raining again.  Never was land more golden; never one
more grey.

Here at the Landing, it makes no difference where one goes in search of
diversion, for it is to be found in all directions and every foot of
the way.  This morning I preferably take to the hill back of the town,
for the water has drained off it to the river and the footing is good.

The hill is held by the Honourable the Hudson's Bay Company, who have
owned it time out of mind.  It hurts the Company to sell land, for they
are the true lineal descendants of that classical tree which groaned
with torture when a limb was dissevered from its trunk.  This being the
case, they may be expected to hold the hill until the municipality
taxes it away from them.

Ignorant people like the wheat-sellers of Winnipeg, speak of this
settlement as a new place, a mushroomic upstart of yesterday, whereas
it was an old post before Winnipeg was thought of.  North of the
Landing, there are thirty thousand people who depend on the local
rivermen to bring down their year's supplies, so that this is a place
of no small concernment and it has seven streets, you might say.  As
yet, its houses and public buildings do not run to paint or useless
ornamentations, and there is a stolid practicability about its front
doors.

But about the hill: Terry, who is in "the Mounted," tells me it is a
walk of three cigarettes to the top of it, but two if you step lively.
This Terry has a bold and busy fancy, and if he cared to write, he
would, like Xenophon, be "an author of wonderful consequence."  Once,
he tried to set down a story, but it was like trying to make a fire
with a wet match.

Aha!  Terry, Aha! you have said it exactly--defined it to a
hair's-breadth--the plight of the authors who would rise up on wings as
eagles but only they faint and are weary.  A wet match!  What greater
or more invincible deterrent could exist to the kindling of a fire?  If
Terry's manners were less adroit and his hair less curly, I could
almost love him.  I am half-purposed to anyway.

And now that we are on matters literary I wish to announce that some
day, when my thoughts have come to issue, I intend writing an article
on the evil taste of pen-handles.  There are several million dollars in
store for the man who will manufacture handles that are toothsome--say
of licorice, cinnamon, or sassafras wood, or of some composition
agreeable to the palate.  The connection between the tongue and the pen
is a much closer one than generally recognized.

We might even have pleasantly medicated pen-handles guaranteed to
stimulate our addled heads, or--Heigh, my hearts of the fourth
estate!--to fill us with an irresistible desire to work when there is
music and laughter downstairs, or a horse and sunshine out of doors.
The invention of such a pen could not fail to be imparted as
righteousness....  The roses are in full blast, and all the way along I
walk the earth in a fine rapture.  On the hill-top, there is a spread
of blue hyacinths like a torn veil that has been thrown to the earth.
Here, in bewildering array, grow wild parsnips, feverfew, painter's
brush, mint-flowers, and lilies that flame riotously across the sheens
and greens of the open ways.  I love the crimson glories of these
lilies; they seem to bring grist to life.  Indeed, there is no question
but they do.

The poplars and cottonwoods are hanging out long tassels of woolly
silver.  It is a pity these do not pledge fruit like the tassels of the
Indian corn.  Mayhap, some day, a scientist will cause the black poplar
to produce something for the sustenance of the North.  Even the honey
which the bees store in its cavities becomes bitter and acrid to the
taste.  Or it may happen we shall discover a cordial substance which
will transmute the tassels of the poplar into something else--say into
mulberries.  Long ago, the English orchardists believed such things to
be possible, for, in the fourteenth century, one wrote down that "a
peach-tree shall bring forth pomegranates if it be sprinkled with
goat's milk three days when it beginneth to flower."

It is good to be here this day enjoying the pleasant amity of the earth
and sky.  One may draw physical and spiritual renovation from both.  It
is very good to feel on one's face the soft-handed wind that is seldom
still.  This is the kindly unrestricted breeze which brings gifts to
the North and West.  It blesses the grain by swaying it to and fro, for
the word "bless" means literally to fructify.  On some such day as this
I will come back here from the dead.

On this hill, the Hudson's Bay Company, the world's oldest trust, have
erected their storehouse and factor's residence.  These are log
buildings, austerely square and ugly in the extreme.  In the factor's
garden is an old sundial which adds the needed touch of romance to the
place; also, it connotes a fine leisureliness.

The erstwhile typical regime of a Hudson's Bay fort is a phase of
existence which shortly will be sponged off human memory.  It has never
been as fully explained to me as I could desire, but as nearly as I can
make out, the staff of a well-manned post consisted of the factor and
chief factor, the trader and chief trader, an accountant, a postmaster,
two or more clerks, a cooper, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and labourers,
the work of the last mentioned being to haul water, cut wood, and
secure meat.  There were also as many cooks as required.  Food was
sometimes scarce, so that the men were required to lick their platters
clean.  Contrariwise, they drank not a little of heady beverages which
they are said to have "carried well."

The Indian's idea of a house is a different one to the trader's.  It is
not a place to be lived in, but exists merely as a shield from the
weather.  Accompanied by Goodfellow, a frowsy, stump-tailed dog from
the hotel, I visited the Indian houses hereabout.  Goodfellow came with
me, not as a protector, but because he wouldn't be driven back.  He is
a reprobate cur, forever spoiling for a fight; a natural born feudist
who lives in a state of violent excitement.  Terry says he is "no
bloomin' lap-dog," but a four-legged incarnation of the devil himself.
Sometime soon, this dog's day will be over, for he is surely going to
die of lead poisoning.

All the way to the Indians, with a stupid malignity, and in defiance of
the plainest laws of fence, Goodfellow gave chase to every cat and
rabbit and bit every cow.  It is not open for me to say what I thought
of him, except that his conduct was solidly wrong.  It was,
accordingly, of high gratification to the rancour I hid in my heart
when the Indians' huskies made short shrift of him.  Like Humpty
Dumpty, it will be hard to put him together again.  They are no dealers
in sophistries, these wide-mouthed wolf-dogs, with their wicked teeth,
and would fight against the stars in their courses.

When the women have beaten them off and learn I am not offended
concerning Goodfellow's drubbing, they are pleasant to me.  A thin,
pock-marked squaw invites me into a shack or, more properly speaking,
into a baby-warren which fairly bristles with a flock of semi-wild
children, for, as yet, the squaws have not deliberately ceased from
having children.

What I said awhile ago about the Indian's house applies equally to his
children's wearing apparel.  It shelters rather than ornaments.  Their
clothes seem to have no visible supports, but are held to their small
fat bodies by some inexplicable attraction.  One may see the same
phenomenon on the apostolic figures on stained glass windows.

A chocolate-coloured baby with blackberry eyes is propped against the
wall in a moss bag, and looks for all the world like a cocoon that
might any moment push off its sheath and take to wings.

An unsavoury mess of entrails is stewing in a black pot and filling the
house with an unpleasant odour.  I try not to show my repugnance lest
my hostesses consider the white woman to be proud-stomached with no
proper appetite for lowly faring.  I tell them as I take down the
blanket from the door--not untruthfully you understand, but as a small
matter of immediate expediency--how it is light one desires rather than
fresh air, and that it is hard to see aright when one has been walking
in the sunlight.

This Hudson's Bay blanket is, next to _uskik_, the kettle, the one
indispensable thing in an Indian household.  It serves as a door, a
coat, a carpet, a bed, and for other things which it boots not to
mention.  It is, therefore, well to be explanatory when one removes it
from its place, just as it is wise to apologize when one pokes an
Englishman's fire of coals.

Mrs. Lo tells me the old woman who is making moccasins is _Naka_, which
word, she explains for my better understanding, is the Cree for "My
Mother."  Naka is a very old woman and "can no English say."  Neither
can she be considered as typical of Whistler's mother.

There are amusing things to be done in this shack.  For instance, you
may by signs and smiles make Naka, my mother, to understand how you
greatly desire to sew upon the moccasins she holds, and Naka may, in
the amiability of her disposition, accede to your importunity.

As thread, deer sinew is not so easily manipulated as you might
imagine; indeed, I should say it is distinctly uncontrollable.  The
audience, in spite of its manifest efforts at politeness, is
nevertheless widely diverted.  Who would have thought a white woman
could be so droll in the woods, and so very stupid?

Huh!  Huh! she may be so stupid that even old Naka, who is a proper
woman with her needle, has to scrub the air with her arms and show her
yellow gums in laughter.

Their always wakeful curiosity leads the maidens to enquire as to what
might be inside a white woman's hand-bag, and that they may
sufficiently know about this matter, the white woman empties it upon
her knees.  Immediately, the articles are passed around for appraisal
and approval.  Bank cheques! ... _Oui_!  _Oui_!  The men who work on
the boats get these.  The girls know how it is talking [Transcriber's
note: taking?] paper to get money.

My penknife, pencil, note-book, purse, and handkerchief are duly
examined and quietly commented upon, but a package of tablets packed in
a silver paper, and small tube of cold cream, cause no small flutter in
our circle.  When I am through demonstrating their use, every one's
breath is laden with the odour of mint, and their hands with that of
roses.  Um--m--m--mh!

The women feel my arms, try on my bracelet and rings, and ask me to
take off my hat that they may see my hair, which, alas! is devoid of
all waywardness and coquetry.  I can see they are disappointed in this
and think me what Artemus Ward calls "a he-looking female."

In one shack to which the girls accompany me, an emaciated, coughing
boy is bed-ridden and near to death.  Lili Abi has him in her arms, and
he may not go free.

Who this Lili Abi, or Lilith, is does not certainly appear, but,
according to the Rabbis who wrote of old time, she is the first wife of
Adam and queen of the succubi.  Some there are who declare this to be
an ill-framed story, and a conceit of the fancy, but others hold it as
a creed that she lives by sucking the blood of children till they fade
away and die.  It is from Lili Abi that we get our word lullaby.  The
malific lullaby she sings has come nigh to breaking the heart of
humanity, but, one day, it shall happen that a sure and strong-handed
scientist will get a strangle hold on Lili Abi and pierce her to death
with his slender but omnipotent needle.

Amil, who is the lad's father, says, "I am mooch scare' 'bout leetle
boy, for sure.  I ees pray all tam to de holy mother.  Mabbe he ees get
well... la bonne chance ... mabbe non!  Leetle boy sing all de tam when
he ees well."

Amil has never been to the south, or over the mountains, but he has
heard much about these countries.  He has been told how, in the United
States, they do not believe in the pope and get married many times.  He
has also heard that the Yankees mean to conquer Canada and pull down
the tricolor.

Michele Daubeny, who once went across the mountains to where the
fish-eaters are, told him that the ocean never freezes.  But this
Michele has a tongue which is not straight, also he has been known to
steal fur out of the traps, so that Amil does not know what to believe.

"I have mak rip'ly," says Amil, "dat mabbe by'me by, I ees tak de trail
dem queeck an' see _kickekume_, de great sea water, to myse'f."

And when I leave the shacks and go back towards the village, I fall in
with some swart broodlings, who are shooting with arrows.  At first,
they will have none of me until I make the mortifying confession and
concession that I cannot shoot and desire greatly to be taught.  After
this, nothing could exceed their pedagogic enthusiasm.  Apollo, prince
of archers, could do no better.

In the pale face, the hunting instinct, while never entirely lost, is
still greatly modified.  In the red man it is a passion.  Watch this
little lean-bellied Indian as he stalks his game.  The bird rises and
settles again a few yards away.  The boy trails it up closer and closer
with a feline softness of tread, a queer slurring movement that belongs
only to animals of prey, and then, standing taut and tense as a
finely-bred setter making game, he concentrates the whole energy of his
body on one piercing point and sends his arrow home.

The bow-and-arrow stage through which these Indian lads are passing
corresponds in the white boy to that inevitable condition of
development known as gun fever.  In our city, at a highly immoral
price, we dress up in khaki the boys of the lower classes, give them
guns, and call them scouts.  I like the Indian way better.  Of course,
there is this to be said for our method, that it instils a martial
spirit into the youngsters so that when they are grown larger we shall
have no lack of soldiers.  This is a statement so obvious and axiomatic
that it hardly needs writing down.

Well, so be it!  How else are our bonds to be protected?  And may not
the lower classes be relied upon to constantly produce batches of boys
to step into the ranks?  Yes!  I believe in Boys' Brigades and in war.
I have some bonds myself.

In the village, several homesteaders who are trending northward to the
Peace River country, have drawn up to the hotel.  Their wagons are
piled high with farm implements and household stuff which they
purchased at Edmonton.

All of these people are topful of enthusiasm, being of wise and gallant
mind.  Indeed, the whole country seems surcharged with it and even the
poplars clap their hands.  The settlers will tell you the only knocker
here is Opportunity.  There is always a mirage in the pioneer's sky
which, God be praised, he manages to haul down bit by bit and pin to
the solid earth.  "The pins!" you ask.  Ah yes!  I may as well tell
you; they are surveyors' stakes and tamarack fence-poles.

I have some little talk with a woman who is resting on the balcony
while her horses are being fed.  She comes from the United States and,
until her marriage three months ago, practised her profession as a
trained nurse.  Her husband is going to make entry for a homestead, and
when, in three years, he has "proven up," they will open a store in one
of the villages.  By that time, the railway will have reached their
district.  Here is a woman of varied interests and many pursuits; one
with more than an arm up her sleeve.  I am doubly sure of her
practicability now that she has told me of the stuff she has packed in
the corners of the wagon, and in the narrow spaces between the
household utensils.  She has seeds for her kitchen garden, also sweet
peas, mignonette, sunflowers, hollyhocks, and pansies.  The firebox of
her stove contains a hand sewing-machine, while the oven is the
receptacle for a guitar, some music a surgical case, a box of
medicines, a small looking-glass, two metal candlesticks, a roll of
coloured pictures for her walls, a few thin paper classics, stationery,
fishing-tackle, and a well-stored work-bag.  The matches she carries in
a case with a close top, while the groceries are packed in tin bread
boxes which will serve the same end in her new home.  Besides their
cooking utensils, toilet articles, clothing, blankets, and tent, this
couple carry a rifle, a shot-gun, ammunition, and other small but
useful things like a map, a compass, and an almanac.  The wagon has a
canvas top.

One man who is also heading for the far north tells me he has sold
everything from painkiller to mining stock.  Of late, he has been
selling real-estate, but the bottom has dropped out of this business.
For the future, he intends raising potatoes on the land instead of
prices.  He has "cleaned up" eight thousand dollars in real-estate, but
he wishes me to understand he made this honestly by taking options on
property and selling before the options came due.

With remarkable precision of language, he explains how the slump in
real-estate is chiefly due to those large, didactic gentlemen of slow
conscience and insulting superior manner who come here by the trainload
and tell the North she is still a flapper, and that it is unbecoming of
her to do up her hair and lengthen her skirts, after which cheap and
unsolicited advice, they take themselves and their pestiferous money
homewards.

Their opinions are quoted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which I
must know takes in Spruceville, till the bankers are seized with the
complaint known as cold feet--pest take them!--and "get orders from
headquarters" to close up all outstanding accounts.  These banker
fellows, my informant says, lose their beauty sleep, but as far as he
can see, lose nothing else.  A business man may be potentially rich and
yet be put into bankruptcy by a corporation, the spoils going to the
corporation, or its manager.  There should be a law against elderly
wide-jawed financiers who prophesy hard times because, with them, the
wish is father to the thought.  There is nothing in all the world they
desire so much in order that they may, by their phenomenal rates of
interest, pillage the country to their heart's satisfaction.  So
gainful is their pursuit, my friend will not be at all surprised if, at
the last day, it is found that these tongue-lolling financiers have a
lien on heaven; indeed, he believes this to be inevitable.  Owing to
the fact that we are unaccustomed to it, the process of thinking is a
somewhat painful one to us of Alberta, but it is wonderful what flashes
of illumination come to us sometimes.

To-day, the first train of cars has entered this place.  It belongs to
the Canadian Northern Railway Company.  For many years Edmonton was
known as the last house in the world.  This, of course, was not
literally true, and it would be hard to state where or which is the
ultimate hearth-stone in this very good land of Canada, but assuredly
Edmonton was the last post-office and, until this year, the End of
Steel.  To-day, this road is born.  When will it die?  We fall into a
way of thinking it is here for eternity, but railways vanish like
everything else.  Even the great Appian Way, which lasted for over two
thousand years, has, in these last centuries, become little more than a
name.

To build even one of our railways, a hundred forests are sacrificed,
and, in the uncanny gloom of the dead country which lies in the heart
of the earth, thousands of bowed, grim workers toil, Vulcan-like, for
the iron to make its spikes and nails.

The railroad seems like a huge centipede with rails for the body, ties
for the limbs and smoke for the breath.  The men who stand by her side
are the waiters who feed her with coal and slake her thirst with water.
Sometimes, when she is weary of the freightage these men lay upon her,
she rises and crushes it to atoms.  Men call this happening "a broken
rail" or "an open switch," but we know better.

Or we may think of the railroad as a streak of light through desolate
places telling the pioneer to be strong and of good courage with the
hope of better days.

Or, again, it is a belt which binds the lustrous provinces of the East
and West into the eager land of Canada.  What odds that the belt,
partaking of its environment, is rocky here or sandy there, so long as
it be really a belt?

No one can truly say when this road will die.  It may be--if one may
hazard so saucy a suggestion--that the airships will kill her by taking
her traffic in men and merchandise.  And maybe the great-grandchildren
of the "Coming Canadians" who arrived this year from Scandinavia or
Austria, will plough long furrows on her right-of-way and haul off her
bridge timbers for firewood.  Guesswork all!

I might have gone on musing about this railway until now, and computing
what its advent means to the North, the country which has hitherto been
the land of the dog and the canoe, had not a commanding voice bade me
come and "drape" myself with the crowd beside the first train in order
to have my picture taken.

"I won't go! not a toe," said I, but I went, for no woman who is even
fairly normal can successfully resist having her photograph taken.  She
always hopes it will turn out better than the last one, and I hoped so
too.




CHAPTER X

ON THE ATHABASCA RIVER

I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk
from a handsaw.--_Hamlet_.


All the world is a deluge of rain when we leave Athabasca Landing, and
we wait at the hotel till the last minute, hoping the storm may abate
in order that we may reach our steamer without losing too much starch.
But the horn is making the asthmatic lamentations, meaning thereby that
everybody should be aboard, so we say good-bye to all at the hotel;
promise to be good; to take care of ourselves; and to come back soon.
I say "we" because it is journalistic etiquette to be impersonal, but
actually there is only myself, the other passengers having gone down to
the river over an hour ago.

It is a troublous jaunt which I make, for a streak of wind turns my
umbrella into a cornucopia; the fat drops of rain splash into my eyes;
I take the wrong turn, get mired and lose my rubber shoes.  When the
river is reached, I find the descent to the steamer is buttered with
mud and so steep that sliding is the only method of locomotion possible.

A vastly tall man stands on the gangway at the foot of the hill; holds
out a pair of arms that must measure ten feet from tip to tip and says,
"Come on, lady."  The lady comes, but with such impact that we nearly
go through to the opposite side of the steamer.  Our final resting
place is on a banana crate, which, in all conscience, is yielding
enough, the fruit proving to be over-ripe.  The passengers are
distinctly amused, but the freight master is in no gallant temper over
it and disapproves of the whole affair.  I could tell you what he said
to the vastly tall man, but you would have to come very close to hear
me.

After supper, which consists of beef with stuffing, macaroni with
cheese, pork with beans, white fish, stewed tomatoes, escalloped corn,
boiled potatoes, walnut pickles, catsup, soda biscuits, pumpkin-pie,
apple-pie, currant buns, cocoanut cake, cheese, coffee, stewed figs,
tooth-picks and other things which I cannot remember, I crawl to the
deck to find out where Grouard is, and how we are to get there.

Although thither bound, my knowledge of its location is shamefully
vague.  Here is what I learn.  We sail north and west on the Athabasca
River till we come to Mirror Landing, at the confluence of the
Athabasca and Lesser Slave River, at which point we leave the steamer
and make a portage of fourteen miles to Soto Landing.  This portage is
to avoid the government dams which have been built to make the Lesser
Slave River navigable.  At Soto Landing we embark on the _Midnight
Sun_, another steamer of the Northern Navigation Company, and travel on
till we enter Lesser Slave Lake, down which we journey to its extreme
western end, where Grouard sits on a hill overlooking a bit of the lake
called Buffalo Bay.  Without mishaps, we ought to reach Grouard in four
or five days, but no one will cut off our heads if we loiter a bit on
the way.

There are about thirty male passengers on board and seven women.  This
half-hour I have been talking to a plausible prolix villain whom it
would be easy to like greatly.  He is going to make three million
dollars from his oil-wells on the Mackenzie River.  He says so himself.
He has been down north for several years and walks like one who has
been used to the spring of a snowshoe beneath his foot.  His clothes
have the odour of the forest--that is to say of leaf mould, poplar
smoke and spruce resin.  He went to England two years ago to persuade
Grandfather Bull to invest in oil and asphaltum, but was not as
successful as he could desire.  "I figure," he says, "it will take
another century to convince Grandfather, and by that time the fourth
generation of America 'Coal-oil Johnnies' will have squandered the
dividends on actresses and aeroplanes.  Pouf! these Americans have no
idea the world belongs to the Lord."

It was well I agreed with him so civilly, for he said, "If you wish to
invest in some oil-stocks, Madam--and no doubt you will after what I
have told you--I will see to it that you get in on the ground-floor and
no questions asked."

Now I did not like to inquire of him what is meant by the ground-floor,
lest he should think me the veriest ignoramus, but I am persuaded it
means something most excellent, for I have frequently heard promoters
mention it to people like me, who have not much money to buy with.

This man originally hailed from New Zealand, but he tells me that
country is no good; it is too far from Fort McMurray.  At Fort McMurray
life is one round of pleasurable anticipation and all the day seems
morning.  Who can tell at what moment a gusher may shoot into the
clouds and blot out the sun itself?  Then it's gorged with gold we
should all be--those of us on the ground-floor--and are millionaires,
with hundreds of universities and public libraries to give away.  What
would be the use of having oil and hiding it under bushels of rocks,
we'd like to know.

At this point the purser explains that the steep ascent to our right is
called Bald Hill.  It can be seen from a long distance, and is one of
the features of the landscape from which, in the winter, the freighters
measure distances--a kind of millarium or central milestone.  Surely
this is a country of vast horizons, both mentally and visually.

About every twelve miles we pass a stopping place where the winter
freighters and their teams are fed.  These houses and stables are built
of logs and are sheltered by the forest.  I prefer to say they have a
roof-tree, the words seeming to suggest a good deal more.  In spite of
their splendid isolation, these stopping places do an excellent
business and, while warm and well-provisioned, are still somewhat in
the rough.  The purser says this roughness is not worth regarding, for
while here is the country a fellow roughs it, in the city he "gets it
rough."

"And that reminds me, ladies, of my errand to you," he continues; "you
are probably aware there are only sixteen bunks on this boat and eight
mattresses.  You, of course, will use your own blankets and pillows,
but I perceive you have not secured mattresses.  It would be
wonderfully easy if you were to carry off one, or even two, from the
priests' state-rooms, for at this very minute the priests say prayers
on the lower deck."

"And believe me," he concludes in a highly chivalrous manner, "you two
ladies have an unquestionable right to the mattresses, so that I shall
consider your act to be one of perfect propriety."

Thus encouraged by the pursuer I proceeded with my room-mate to seize
our "unquestionable rights," but, approaching the priests' door, my
heart failed me, and our undertaking seemed a plain and undeniable
demonstration of wickedness like the robbing of a child's bank.  They
are such quiet, well-deserving men, these eight black-smocked Brothers
who are going North to the jubilee of the great Bishop Grouard, the
like of whom there never was.  Also, they are very polite, and the one
who is an astronomer and comes from Italy, picked out the tenderest cut
of beef for me at supper.

"Pray don't be silly," snorted my room-mate, "the rules of their Order
say distinctly they shall deny themselves and not sleep softly.
Besides, when men take terrible vows that they will never get married,
it is a woman's stoutest duty to steal their mattress whenever the
opportunity serves."

She also told me with rapid brevity some names which Clement of
Alexandria, a Father of the Church, applied to women in the early days
of the Christian era.  She had read about them in a history......

In the falling of the night, at the mauve hour, our ship having been
made fast, we go ashore and talk with the Indians who are camped here
in a wigwam.  One of the passengers, who has lived among the Crees for
many years, tells me I express myself with redundancy in that the
literal meaning of wigwam is camping-ground.  She says the Indians have
many grotesque folk tales, which are told by the men.  Each story has a
moral which they desire their wives to consider from an educative
standpoint.  Once there was a man whose _utim_ (that is to say his dog)
used to turn into an _iskwao_, or woman, when it became dark.  She had
yellow hair and her arms were white and soft like the breast feathers
of a young bird.  This happened long ago, before the Indians were
baptized and when people were not so pious as they are now.  Any man
can do the same thing to this day if he happens to know the magic
formula.

There is also a tale about a woman of the woods whom we, in our
scientific conceit, call the echo.  Once when her man was away for many
moons on the great _sepe_, or river, the woman took another husband, so
that when her man came back she flouted him and slapped his face.  That
night the moon changed her into a voice, and now she calls for her
husband to come and love her, but he only mocks at her.

This habit of the husbands in telling tales with palpable deductions
attached would seem to be common to other races than the Indians, for
the Romans, likewise, had a story about the echo.  It appears that
Jupiter confided to Madam Echo the history of his amours, and when she
told his secrets among her friends she was deprived of speech and could
only repeat the questions which were asked of her.  The Cree story is
the better one.  It has a fine human motive which the other lacks, and
also it drops, a much-needed tribute on the worn altar of domesticity.

When a fire is lighted with birch bark and tamarack knots, we sit
beside it and are more merry than you could believe.

The sweetheart of Jacques dances for us to the well-cadenced rhythm of
a Tea Song.  I cannot spell her Indian name, but it means "Fat of the
Flowers," by which term they express our word "nectar."  The cree is a
droll language.

  "Ha!  He! ne matatow,
  Ha!  He! ne saghehow."

she chants and rechants as the fitful flames make sharp high-lights on
her dark skin, causing her to appear as the flying figure of a bronze
Daphne, and, in truth, the boughs of the trees lend likeness to my
fancy, for as she dances into them, they seem to absorb her, even as
the laurel absorbed the Grecian nymph of old time.

Translated literally, the words of the Tea Song read thus--

  "Ha!  He! I love him,
  Ha!  He! I miss him."


This is a supremely cunning song, in that it utters in six words (if we
exclude the interjections) the summary of all the love songs which have
ever been written--"I love him: I miss him."  I am glad it was framed
in the unsophisticated North.

And Fat of the Flowers sings another song which is addressed to her
lover.  She is lonely for him, our interpreter explains, but drinks her
tears in silence.  Sometimes his presence comes to her in the hour of
twilight, and she kneels to it as the poplar kneels to the wind.  When
he returns to the camp fire she will give to him a blanket made out of
the claw skins of the lynx, and a white and scarlet belt from the young
quills of the porcupine.

I can see that her honeyed words are agreeable to Jacques and give him
fullness of pleasure, for there is a tell-tale joy in his face that
refuses to be hid.

Jacques, who is a riverman, was educated at a mission school on the
Mackenzie, and he tells me that Fat of the Flowers is nearly as
"magneloquent" and clever as a man.  He is almost sure there is a
little white bird that sings in her heart.

After a time, our dusky friends steal away one by one to their rest, or
two by two.  The ship lolls lazily on the bank and there is no sound
save the whimper of the fire and the deep breathing of some over-tired
sleeper, but once a sleeper laughed aloud.

I step carefully between the recumbent forms on the deck lest I hurt
them or disturb their quietude.  I am sorry now that I stole the
mattresses.  Surely I am a bitter sinner and unlovely of heart.

In the morning, when I told the Brothers how I had privily taken the
mattresses because I disapproved of their vows concerning marriage, and
because of the unseemly remarks Clement of Alexandria had applied to
women in the early days of the Christian era, they laughed again and
again with much hilarity.  Indeed, one of the Brothers said he
applauded my moderation and marvelled that I was good enough to leave
their blankets and pillows.  Another gave it as his opinion that
Clement's pleasantry was a shabby-minded one and needlessly sarcastic,
the result of an ill-governed disposition.  But this Brother, like the
others, took full care to evade the question I had raised as to
celibacy....

What Clement of Alexandria said was that women, like Egyptian temples,
were beautiful without, but when you entered and withdrew the veil,
there was nothing behind it but a cat or a crocodile.




CHAPTER XI

SOME NORTHERN PIONEERS

  Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
  Pioneers!  O Pioneers!--WHITMAN.


In the morning, soon after sunup, we continue our joyous journey on the
Athabasca, but the birds are out and about before us.  An occasional
duck rises off the water sharply with a whir of wet wings, but
generally they are self-complacent and play at last across the road
with the ship, just as if they sought trouble and despised it.  The
young ducklings, who have only taken to water these few days agone,
form themselves into tiny rafts and one might almost expect to see a
fairy step aboard them.  The fish jump out of the water, praying to be
caught.  They look like strips of silver ribbon.  Mr. Patrick O'Kelly,
who is also watching their come and go, declares this to be a sign of
rain.  "When birds fly low, lady, and when fish swim near the surface,
it is well to bring in the clothes off the line."  He also says that
the plover's cry indicates rain, even as does its name--the _pluvoir_,
or rain-bird.

There are few birds to be seen, except an occasional hawk, who seems to
have no other object than to curvet about and display his clipper-built
wings for our admiration.  Sometimes he soars into the skies in order
to exercise a keen vision that covers half the province, or, again, he
appears to hang in the air with an invisible string, so perfect is his
poise.  It is foolish to call hawks ravening birds and to impute evil
motives to them.  We only do this because they like chickens and other
gallinaceous fowl whose end we should prefer to be pot-pie.  This is
not a reprobate taste on the hawk's part, for, of course, he has never
read the game-laws, nor the Book of Leviticus, and cannot be expected
to know that certain flesh, in certain localities, in certain seasons,
is the particular appurtenance of the _genus homo_.  In truth, we are
so uninstructed in these laws ourselves that the government must,
perforce, keep game-wardens and the churches must keep preachers to
educate us more fully.

The Athabasca River, Mr. O'Kelly calculates, is about eight hundred
feet wide and about twelve feet deep.  Its current is about five or six
miles an hour.  The less said about its colour the better.  At
Athabasca Landing they use the water as a top-dressing for the land.

I get on well with Mr. O'Kelly because he does not mind answering
questions, and I am rather stupid and do not understand irony, a fact
now published for the first time.

Mr. Patrick O'Kelly started on "his own" thirty years ago in Manitoba.
His name isn't really O'Kelly, but in this country a name is neither
here nor there.  He homesteaded one hundred and sixty statute acres,
but to be a farmer one had to possess a capacity for waiting and he
didn't possess it.  After this, he became a prospector.  Now, in
prospecting, a man does not have to wait: his money is always
discernible to the eye of faith.  Mr. O'Kelly still holds his on this
unnegotiable, spiritualistic plane.  In the meanwhile he is boss of a
big lumber camp over Prince Albert way.  He used to be a captain on
this river, but he doesn't captain any more.  Some of these days he
intends to take a wander back home.  He hears that northern folk are
foreigners in the South.  This last remark is made with a rising
inflection as if an answer were expected.

Who would have thought such a pathetic fear to be lurking under so
confident and so square-shouldered an exterior?  I can see now why Mr.
O'Kelly finds it hard to get away.  Without letting him know that his
secret is suspected, I try to explain how it is the northerners who
have changed.  We pioneers talk of going home but we really never go
back--that is the person who went away.  This may be equally true of
all migrants who go into a far country, whether it be Abraham who went
into Ur of Chaldea, or Reginald of Oxford who goes into Saskatchewan.

There are several scribes on board, and one of them, "a editor in human
form," gives us greeting and joins our company.  He is a thin, straight
young fellow with a likeable face, but his hair is shockingly awry.

"So you are an editor," says Mr. O'Kelly.  "Your unpeaceable tribe has
committed much damage in this country."

"What do you mean by calling us a tribe?  I conceive that you are an
old fool and perhaps a liberal in politics.  Although I am an editor,
and by no means proud, I consider myself to be much better than you."

"Young person! you mean you are no worse," answers Mr. O'Kelly, "but,
in faith, I meant no offence and I am not a liberal."

Being thus reassured, the editor proceeds to discuss his difficulties
with us.  He has been treated with great unfairness in one of the
northern towns.  They gave him a fine mouthful of promises when he went
there, but they gave him nothing else.  They failed to pay their
subscriptions and their advertisements, so that he had to leave the
place naked and ashamed.  Some day, he is going to write a story in an
American magazine and describe this town as a real-estate office in a
muskeg.  It will be marrow to his bones, and he will let the magazine
have the story for nothing.

Or, worse still, he will tell the truth about all the leading citizens;
he will set it down without equivocation or shadow of turning.

"But you wouldn't do this latter," I argue; "only a man with ink for
blood could do so terrible a thing."

"On the contrary, lady," snaps he, "I shall take blood for ink, that is
what I will do."

"But," said I, "you must expect to be beat a few times in your life,
little man, if you live such a life as a man ought to live, let you be
as strong and healthy as you may."  This was quite a clever answer, and
I wish Charles Kingsley had not said it first, then it would have been
original with me.

This young editor talks with so much vigor and so many gesticulations
one might think he was acting a picture for a biograph machine.  It is
a pity his political heroes do not avail themselves of his services.
As a fighter, the dear lad would have a fine genius if properly
incited; also, he has a marvellous vocabulary of flaming adjectives.

There is an Indian woman on the ship who is married to a white man, who
seems most kind to her.  The northern woman who interpreted the Toa
Song for me, says this man believes the world well lost for love, his
heart being very full and his head very empty.  You will observe that
this northern woman is a philosopher, probably owing to the fact that
she has had little to read and plenty of time to think.  She was born
in this country over fifty years ago but was educated in the South.  At
the age of sixteen, she married a Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company,
and is now his widow.  This year agone she has been in Europe, but has
returned once more to her native North with its hidden wilds and yet
unhappened things.  I tell you that some secret presage lies upon this
land, and one who has sensed it must come back again and again to its
intangible allurement.  It may be the strong, austere spirit of the
land that holds one; or the vast voids of the sky, with their blue and
gold, and blue and silver.  Or it may be that Tornarsuk, the great
devil of the Arctic, who rides on the wind, steals from their breasts
the midget souls of humans so that they belong to him and must follow
whither he wills.  It is not for me to know the reason, or to tell it
to you, for I am southron born and cannot construe aright.

Time was when this woman only tasted flour once a year.  It was in New
Year's Day, when her mother baked cakes for the gentlemen who came to
pay their respects to her--the doctor, the missionary, the clerks at
the post, or the visitors from other posts.  On the first of these
occasions her mother, with an ill-grounded confidence, passed the plate
of cakes to the earliest visitors so that there were no cakes left for
the callers who came afterwards.

When flour became more plentiful, it was her mother's custom to have
cakes every Sunday evening.  A cake was baked for each member of the
family and one for the plate.  No one dreamed of taking the last cake.
It would have been accounted a gross breach of etiquette to have done
so, and one not to be thought of.

"But what became of it?" I ask; "who ate it ultimately?  Surely some
one knew?"

Apparently no one did, for I am answered by a lift of one shoulder,
suggestive of ignorance and possibly indifference--a little defensive
shrug which precludes further intrusion into the subject.  It is unkind
of her to leave me with this worrying problem, for there are fifty-two
cakes a year to be disposed of, and I may never hope to dispose of them
alone.

The Indian woman who has the white husband gives me bon-bons from a box
she purchased in Edmonton last week.  Nothing so makes for confidence
in women as to eat sweets together.  Authors write much about breaking
bread and the sacredness of salt, but, in actual life, nothing cements
friendship like chocolate drops.  This is why the woman opens her heart
to me and says she desires to write a book--a great book about the
white people of whom she knows many things.  I have no doubt she does,
and that if she put down all that is in her heart without one glance at
the gallery and without trimming her language to the rules of syntax,
her book would be the literary sensation of the year.

She wants to know if ever I wrote a book.  Now, once I did, but it was
a simple book, so that wise people did not care so much as one finger's
fillip for it, but, sometime, I am going to put all their counsel
together and compose a really great one.  It will not be disjointed,
but will flow along without a break in the smooth, natural way people
talk when they are alone with their families.  It shall concern psychic
phenomena, yearnings, root-causes, the untrammelled life, strange
decadencies, and things like that.  It shall be paradoxical,
epigrammatic, erudite, even vitriolic.  I will pierce the self-conceit
of these Canadians and tell them they have need to mend their manners;
that they are primitive beasts--even _Diprotodons_.

Now the _Diprotodon_ was a kind of ferocious kangaroo, carnivorous and
predaceous, which lived in the Tertiary Period and had a skull three
feet in length.  Those who are not of this species, I shall designate
as fanatics who cling to worn-out shibboleths over which they snarl
like pestilent dogs; or prigs who affect neurotic cults that are
exceedingly false and not native to this country.  I will be superior
and insufferably arrogant so that they may be vastly annoyed with me
and rage like the Psalmist's "heathen."  I shall not be kindly to any,
nor say them fair words, no matter how much I may desire to, nor how
much it hurts me to tell lies.

Then will the wise people take their pens in hand to say that "This
writer is possessed of the discriminating sense to an extraordinary
degree.  She has vision, luminosity, verve, technique, and artistic
self-restraint--these, and other palpable qualities which bid us hope,
in spite of all which has been said to the contrary, that the time is
not so hopelessly remote when Canada may lay some small claim to having
a literature of her own."

Oh Me!  Oh Me!  This is what they will say, and I will laugh in my
throat and in my sleeves.  I win not care the point of one pencil what
they say, so long as they refrain from using the adjective breezy.
When a northern woman goes visiting and the wise people wish to be
kind, they all apply this word to her.  When the dubious visitor looks
into the dictionary for the exact meaning of breeze, she finds it
stands for either an uproar or a gentle gale.  People have been
murdered for less obvious errors, so that all wise people will please
to be forewarned.

If you were to ask here what the Indian woman wished to write in a book
about the white people, I would not be able to tell you, for, at this
juncture, we all forgot to talk and crowded to the prow of the vessel
to see a moose that swam boldly ahead of us in the river.  He kept far
enough away to be out of range, so that no one shot him.  I use the
word shot in deference to the untaught urban folk into whose hands this
book may pass.  What the men really desired was to "trump" him.

We did not see him take to the bank, for we took to the bank ourselves
in order to load wood for the engine.  He is a worthy gentleman, the
moose, and should be well esteemed.  Dropped in a thicket, hunted by
wolves, unprotected save by his sharp hoof, which, however, will rip
anything softer than a steel plate, he ranges the forests till his
antlers are full-branched, and then, at the age of three, without
costing the Province or the Indian a cent, he tips the scales at a
thousand pounds of meat.

We are invited to the tent of Mrs. Jack Fish, who receives us seated.
This is not owing to any lack of hospitality on her part, but because
she is very old and quite blind.  The Oblate Brothers say she is over a
hundred years old, and truly she might pass for the honourable
great-grandmother of all Canada.  Her son, with whom she lives, minds a
wood-pile on the Athabasca, but in the winter he has a house of logs at
Tomato Creek to which he retires.  All Indians live in tents from
preference, and not from the sordid reason assigned them by the
would-be poet who declares that "Itchie, Mitchie lives in a tent," for
"He can't afford to pay the rent."  There are no rented houses in this
country, and no man has ever heard of a landlord.  Every person holds
his house, or his several houses, in fee simple.  In Great Britain,
these residences would be designated as "shooting boxes."

Neither would it be a sign of mental superiority on the part of the
traveller to consider Jack Knife's job a menial one.  Banking
situations or provincial politics may have an importance in the fence
country, but in boreal regions the prime test of intelligence is a
knowledge of how to handle a boat or an axe.

Madam, our hostess, informs the Factor's widow that she keeps quite
well except for an evil and tormenting spirit in her chest.  She
desires to know who are in our company, and when she learns that the
_Okimow_, or Great Chief of the Peace River Country, is one of us, she
asks for tobacco.  Ah! the Chief at Fort Edmonton would be generous to
her, but he is dead now and there is no tobacco to soothe her pain.
When she was young, her people fought with the Blackfeet tribe in the
Bear Hills, and many of the Crees were scalped.  She fled through the
forests to Fort Edmonton, carrying her two children on her back, but
there was much rain and almost she was drowned crossing the rivers.
That was many, many nesting-moons ago, and now she is old and her pipe
is empty of tobacco.

"Is the kind lady going down the river to find a man?"

No! the kind lady has white hair and her man is dead.

"May be it is the _Okimow_?"

No! the _Okimow_ has a wife in the South with brown hair.

Ah well!  Ah well! but it was different when she was young.  Then every
woman's skin was full of oil and there were many braves who loved her.

After she has been led into the open, and has had her picture taken
with us, the great _Okimow_ takes her back to her blankets and fills
her lap with a heap of pungent tobacco.  It will be many moons before
our honourable great-grandmother requires a fresh supply.  "An old
straggler," that is what I call her, after the beggar-woman who asked
Sir Walter Scott for alms.

The religion of the gentle Nazarene has cut the fighting sinews of the
Indians.  This was why the Christianized Hurons were brushed off the
earth by the tigerish and unapproachable Iroquois.  The Hurons became
soft, and being soft, they became a prey.  In some inexplicable way, we
Anglo-Saxons have managed to keep our bumps of veneration and
combativeness well partitioned or estranged and so keep mastery of the
changeling tribes who permit them to commingle.  This is why the
Indians are a dying race in a new country.  This is why our honourable
great-grandmother whimpers for tobacco instead of hurling us over the
bank and throwing her camp-fire on the top of us.  I could almost find
it in my heart to wish that she had.




CHAPTER XII

AT THE PARTING OF THE RIVERS

  "Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track
  O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac;
  Of fur and gun, an' ranch, an' run, an' moose an' caribou,
  An' bulldogs eatin' us to death!
      Good-bye--Good-luck to you!"


Mirror Landing, where we leave the boat to make the portage to Soto
Landing, is on the Lesser Slave River, at its confluence with the
Athabasca.  Its name has been well chosen, for the Lesser Slave River
is a clear stream, and shows a kindly portrait to all who look therein.
A telegraph office, an official residence, a stable, and storage sheds
are the only buildings.  What is to be done with the portaging party,
whom we have met here and who go back to Athabasca Landing on our boat,
is beyond a mere woman to say.  Both parties must spend the night here;
there is only one bunk to every twenty persons, and those who hold
possession utterly refuse to sleep outside with the mosquitoes and
bulldog flies.  Once I read a story in the Talmud which I considered
wholly fabulous.  It was about a mosquito saving the life of David when
Saul hunted him upon the mountains.  I no longer doubt this story, my
incredulity having vanished this day with my courage.  A mosquito is
big enough to do anything.

A member of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, truly a most
formidable appearing man, insisted on searching our luggage for
contraband liquor.  I was sorely displeased, and could have dealt him a
clout with all my might, for the froward manner in which he turned out
my things to the public view.  He might have known if I carried a
flask, it would be in my coat pocket.  His only find was an unbroached
bottle of elderberry wine which a rancher's wife was bringing home for
her dinner-party next Christmas.  Be it said to the youth's credit that
upon the circumstances being explained to him he returned the wine to
her.  He had no authority for so doing, but assuredly he had the
countenance of a great example Yahveh of the Jews having aforetime
"winked at" certain breaches of the law which He considered to be the
better kept in their non-observance.

The liquor taken by the police is either given to the hospital at
Grouard or poured on the ground as a libation to Bacchus and his
woodland troup.  It is very foolish to ask the officer in command if
his men ever drink themselves, for he will say, "Pooh!  Pooh!" and use
other argumentative exclamations that will fright you out of your wits.
You would almost think the subject was loaded, and it takes a soft look
and a wondrously soft answer to turn away his wrath.

Early in the evening I was invited to browse at the official residence,
and I had a good time; that is to say, I found it distinctly
entertaining.  "I would say that you are very welcome," remarked my
hostess as she held out both her hands, "were it not that it seems an
understanding of the fact.  I have read your _Sowing Seeds in Danny_,
and feel that I know you extremely well."

It was fortunate I did not tell her she had confused me with Mrs.
McClung, for she gave me eggs to eat that were most cunningly scrambled
with cheese; also many hot rolls sopped in butter, and yellow honey in
its comb.

This is a ramblesome bungalow and very comfortable.  Musical
instruments, couches, big cushions, book-shelves and pictures take on a
peculiar attractiveness when they are the only ones in a hundred miles
or more.

After supper we read _Phil-o-rum Juneau_, by William Henry Drummond,
and discussed its relation to the French Canadian legend, _La
Chasse-Gallerie_.  Of all our Canadian legends, I like it the best, and
it may happen that you will too.  It tells how on each New Year's Night
the spirits of the woodsmen and rivermen are carried in phantom canoes
from these lonely northlands back to the old homesteads in the south,
where, unseen and undisturbed, they mingle with their friends.  The
father embraces his children; the lover his maiden, the husband his
wife, and once more the son lays his head on his mother's lap.  All of
the voyageurs join the feast, the song, and the dance, so that no man
is lonely in those hours, neither is he weary or sad.  It is a better
thing, I make believe, than even the communion of saints.  But just
before the dawn comes, the wraith men find themselves back on the
Athabasca, the Mackenzie and the Slave, and no one speaks of where he
has been, or of what he experienced, for all this he must keep hidden
in his heart.

When, over a century ago, the legend first sprang to life, there were
none save men to travel like this, but now, of times, a woman may
travel too.  I know this for a certainty in that each New Year's Night
I go myself.  In my dug-out canoe--delved from wishful thoughts and
things like that--I take my hurried way across prodigious seas of ice
where never living foot has fallen; adown ill-noted trails through
silver trees; by hidden caverns that are the lairs of the running
winds; over dark forests of pine and across uncounted leagues of white
prairies which light up the darkness, till I come to the warmer
southland, where youths and maidens make wreaths of greenery, and where
mellow-voiced bells ring out the dying year.

And when those who are my own people feel their hearts to be of a
sudden rifled of love; that some one has brushed their cheek, or that a
head is resting on their shoulder, then do they know the exile has come
back, for I have told them it will be thus.

And you, O my readers of the Seven Seas, now that we are friends and
know each other closely, will you of New Year's Night be keenly
watchful too.

It was here that our conversation wheeled off from the consideration of
this legend to the northern postman.  In the final summary he must be
classed among those peerless fellows who, because of their courage and
incredible endurance, have won for Canada this myriad-acred but
hitherto waste heritage.  No man here who puts his hand to the mail
bags must ever look back; he must have the quality of keeping on
against the odds.  He is the modern young Lord Lochinvar, who stays not
for brake and stops not for stone.  Often his route is stretched out to
hundreds of miles, and there is no corner grocery where he may thaw out
his extremities while mumbling driftless things about the weather and
the government.

Presently the railways will have taken over his perilous profession,
and he will exist only as a memory of pioneer days.  For this reason I
took great heed while my host talked concerning him and of the
qualities which go into making a successful postie under the aurora.
He must be agile, light of weight, abstemious, trustworthy, tireless,
thewed and sinewed like a lynx, and, above all, he must have
wire-strung nerves.  In a word, his profession requires a strong will
in a sound body.

"Does it ever happen that the mail is not delivered?" I asked.

My host hesitated, and made three rings of smoke while he considered
the answer, as though he would be sure-footed as to his facts.

"Sometimes it is not delivered, Madam," said he; "there may be an
untoward happening, in which event its delivery depends upon the
recovery of the carrier's body."

When he made another three rings of smoke he proceeded with the story.
"Yes! the mail-carrier in this country is a special person and must not
be judged as general.  He deserves a much better reward than he gets.
To my thinking, it is a vast pity poetic justice so frequently fails.
It may be that some day you will write a story about us Northmen, and
if you do, be sure you set down how Destiny so often blue-pencils our
lives in the wrong places.  We will read your book down here, all of
us, just to see if you have been true to us instead of laying up for
yourself royalties on earth."

"And where do you bury a postman who dies with his mail-bags?" I
further pursued.

"Holy Patriarch!" he ejaculated.  "You don't think he is carried back
to Athabasca Landing?  His body is cached in a tree and the police are
notified.  When they give their permission, and when the ground is
thawed out in the spring, we bury him just where he died.  It may,
however, interest you to know that the letters 'O.H.M.S.' are cut on
his tombstone."

"'O.H.M.S.'" I repeated.  "Don't you mean 'I.H.S.,' _Iesous Hominum
Salvator_, the same as we write over our altars and on our baptismal
fonts?"

"No!" he replied, "I mean 'O.H.M.S.'; the same as they stamp on
government letters which are franked '_On His Majesty's Service_.'  You
see the work of delivering the mails down this way, while extremely
arduous, must never for a moment be considered as menial.  The carrier
is a servant to none save His Imperial Majesty, George the Fifth, of
England."

They are all gamblers, these Northmen: they play for love, for money or
for the mere pleasure of the play, and Boys of our Heart, like the
mail-couriers and the striplings of the Mounted Police, gamble with the
elements for life itself.

"Ah, well!" remarked my host, as he put away his pipe for the night,
"these fellows know the

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/32409