Over Prairie Trails Part 3

At ten o'clock every bolt had been tightened, the horses' harness and their feed were ready against the morning, and everything looked good to me.

I was going to have the first real Christmas again in twenty-five years, with a real Christmas tree, and with wife and child, and even though it was a poor man's Christmas, I refused to let anything darken my Christmas spirit or dull the keen edge of my enjoyment. Before going out, I stepped into the office of the stable, slipped a half-dollar into the hostler's palm and asked him once more to be sure to have the horses fed at half-past five in the morning.

Then I left. A slight haze filled the air, not heavy enough to blot out the stars; but sufficient to promise h.o.a.rfrost at least. Somehow there was no reason to despair as yet of Christmas weather.

I went home and to bed and slept about as soundly as I could wish. When the alarm of my clock went off at five in the morning, I jumped out of bed and hurried down to shake the fire into activity. As soon as I had started something of a blaze, I went to the window and looked out. It was pitch dark, of course, the moon being down by this time, but it seemed to me that there was snow on the ground. I lighted a lamp and held it to the window; and sure enough, its rays fell on white upon white on shrubs and fence posts and window ledge. I laughed and instantly was in a glow of impatience to be off.

At half past five, when the coffee water was in the kettle and on the stove, I hurried over to the stable across the bridge. The snow was three inches deep, enough to make the going easy for the horses. The slight haze persisted, and I saw no stars. At the stable I found, of course, that the horses had not been fed; so I gave them oats and hay and went to call the hostler. When after much knocking at last he responded to my impatience, he wore a guilty look on his face but a.s.sured me that he was just getting up to feed my team. "Never mind about feeding," I said "I've done that. But have them harnessed and hitched up by a quarter past six. I'll water them on the road." They never drank their fill before nine o'clock. And I hurried home to get my breakfast...

"Merry Christmas!" the hostler called after me; and I shouted back over my shoulder, "The same to you." The horses were going under the merry jingle of the bells which they carried for the first time this winter.

I rarely could hold them down to a walk or a trot now, since the cold weather had set in; and mostly, before they even had cleared the slide-doors, they were in a gallop. Peter had changed his nature since he had a mate. By feeding and breeding he was so much Dan's superior in vitality that, into whatever mischief the two got themselves, he was the leader. For all times the picture, seen by the light of a lantern, stands out in my mind how he bit at Dan, wilfully, urging him playfully on, when we swung out into the crisp, dark, hazy morning air. Dan being nothing loth and always keen at the start, we shot across the bridge.

It was hard now, mostly, to hitch them up. They would leap and rear with impatience when taken into the open before they were hooked to the vehicle. They were being very well fed, and though once a week they had the hardest of work, for the rest of the time they had never more than enough to limber them up, for on schooldays I used to take them out for a spin of three or four miles only, after four. At home, when I left, my wife and I would get them ready in the stable; then I took them out and lined them up in front of the buggy. My wife quickly took the lines: I hooked the traces up, jumped in, grabbed for the lines and waved my last farewell from the road afar off. Even at that they got away from us once or twice and came very near upsetting and wrecking the buggy; but nothing serious ever happened during the winter. I had to have horses like that, for I needed their speed and their staying power, as the reader will see if he cares to follow me very much farther.

We flew along--the road seemed ideal--the air was wonderfully crisp and cold--my cutter fulfilled the highest expectations--the horses revelled in speed. But soon I pulled them down to a trot, for I followed the hors.e.m.e.n's rules whenever I could, and Dan, as I mentioned, was anyway rather too keen at the start for steady work later on. I settled back.

The top of my cutter was down, for not a breath stirred; and I was always anxious to see as much of the country as I could...

Do you know which is the stillest hour of the night? The hour before dawn. It is at that time, too, that in our winter nights the mercury dips down to its lowest level. Perhaps the two things have a causal relation--whatever there is of wild life in nature, withdraws more deeply within itself; it curls up and dreams. On calm summer mornings you hear no sound except the chirping and twittering of the sleeping birds. The birds are great dreamers--like dogs; like dogs they will twitch and stir in their sleep, as if they were running and flying and playing and chasing each other. Just stalk a bird's nest of which you know at half past two in the morning, some time during the month of July; and before you see them, you will hear them. If there are young birds in the nest, all the better; take the mother bird off and the little ones will open their beaks, all mouth as they are, and go to sleep again; and they will stretch their featherless little wings; and if they are a little bit older, they will even try to move their tiny legs, as if longing to use them. As with dogs, it is the young ones that dream most. I suppose their impressions are so much more vivid, the whole world is so new to them that it rushes in upon them charged with emotion. Emotions penetrate even us to a greater depth than mere apperceptions; so they break through that crust that seems to envelop the seat of our memory, and once inside, they will work out again into some form of consciousness--that of sleep or of the wakeful dream which we call memory.

The stillest hour! In starlit winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening boastfulness. "Now sleeps the world," they seem to say, "but we are awake and weaving destiny" And on they swing on their immutable paths.

The stillest hour! If you step out of a sleeping house and are alone, you are apt to hold your breath; and if you are not, you are apt to whisper. There is an expectancy in the air, a fatefulness--a loud word would be blasphemy that offends the ear and the feeling of decency It is the hour of all still things, the silent things that pa.s.s like dreams through the night. You seem to stand hushed. Stark and bare, stripped of all accidentals, the universe swings on its way.

The stillest hour! But how much stiller than still, when the earth has drawn over its shoulders that morning mist that allows of no slightest breath--when under the haze the very air seems to lie curled and to have gone to sleep. And yet how portentous! The haze seems to brood. It seems somehow to suggest that there is all of life asleep on earth. You seem to feel rather than to hear the whole creation breathing in its sleep--as if it was soundlessly stirring in dreams--presently to stretch, to awake. There is also the delicacy, the tenderness of all young things about it. Even in winter it reminds me of the very first unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the earth--under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the contrast of the universe and of creation.

We drove along--and slowly, slowly came the dawn. You could not define how it came. The whole world seemed to pale and to whiten, and that was all. There was no sunrise. It merely seemed as if all of Nature--very gradually--was soaking itself full of some light; it was dim at first, but never grey; and then it became the whitest, the clearest, the most undefinable light. There were no shadows. Under the brush of the wild land which I was skirting by now there seemed to be quite as much of luminosity as overhead. The mist was the thinnest haze, and it seemed to derive its whiteness as much from the virgin snow on the ground as from above. I could not cease to marvel at this light which seemed to be without a source--like the halo around the Saviour's face. The eye as yet did not reach very far, and wherever I looked, I found but one word to describe it: impalpable--and that is saying what it was not rather than what it was. As I said, there was no sunshine, but the light was there, omnipresent, diffused, coming mildly, softly, but from all sides, and out of all things as well as into them.

Shakespeare has this word in Macbeth, and I had often pondered on it:

So fair and foul a day I have not seen.

This was it, I thought. We have such days about four or five times a year--and none but the northern countries have them. There are clouds--or rather, there is a uniform layer of cloud, very high, and just the slightest suggestion of curdiness in it; and the light is very white. These days seem to waken in me every wander instinct that lay asleep. There is nothing definite, nothing that seems to be emphasized--something seems to beckon to me and to invite me to take to my wings and just glide along--without beating of wings--as if I could glide without sinking, glide and still keep my height... If you see the sun at all--as I did not on this day of days--he stands away up, very distant and quite aloof. He looks more like the moon than like his own self, white and heatless and lightless, as if it were not he at all from whom all this transparency and visibility proceeded.

I have lived in southern countries, and I have travelled rather far for a single lifetime. Like an epic stretch my memories into dim and ever receding pasts. I have drunk full and deep from the cup of creation.

The Southern Cross is no strange sight to my eyes. I have slept in the desert close to my horse, and I have walked on Lebanon. I have cruised in the seven seas and seen the white marvels of ancient cities reflected in the wave of incredible blueness. But then I was young. When the years began to pile up, I longed to stake off my horizons, to flatten out my views. I wanted the simpler, the more elemental things, things cosmic in their a.s.sociations, nearer to the beginning or end of creation. The parrot that flashed through "nutmeg groves" did not hold out so much allurement as the simple gray-and-slaty junco. The things that are un.o.btrusive and differentiated by shadings only--grey in grey above all--like our northern woods, like our sparrows, our wolves--they held a more compelling attraction than orgies of colour and screams of sound.

So I came home to the north. On days like this, however, I should like once more to fly out and see the tireless wave and the unconquerable rock. But I should like to see them from afar and dimly only--as Moses saw the promised land. Or I should like to point them out to a younger soul and remark upon the futility and innate vanity of things.

And because these days take me out of myself, because they change my whole being into a very indefinite longing and dreaming, I wilfully blot from my vision whatever enters. If I meet a tree, I see it not. If I meet a man, I pa.s.s him by without speaking. I do not care to be disturbed. I do not care to follow even a definite thought. There is sadness in the mood, such sadness as enters--strange to say--into a great and very definitely expected disappointment. It is an exceedingly delicate sadness--haughty, aloof like the sun, and like him cool to the outer world. It does not even want sympathy; it merely wants to be left alone.

It strangely chimed in with my mood on this particular and very perfect morning that no jolt shook me up, that we glided along over virgin snow which had come soft-footedly over night, in a motion, so smooth and silent as to suggest that wingless flight...

We spurned the miles, and I saw them not. As if in a dream we turned in at one of the "half way farms," and the horses drank. And we went on and wound our way across that corner of the marsh. We came to the "White Range Line House," and though there were many things to see, I still closed the eye of conscious vision and saw them not. We neared the bridge, and we crossed it; and then--when I had turned southeast--on to the winding log-road through the bush--at last the spell that was cast over me gave way and broke. My horses fell into their accustomed walk, and at last I saw.

Now, what I saw, may not be worth the describing, I do not know. It surely is hardly capable of being described. But if I had been led through fairylands or enchanted gardens, I could not have been awakened to a truer day of joy, to a greater realization of the good will towards all things than I was here.

Oh, the surpa.s.sing beauty of it! There stood the trees, motionless under that veil of mist, and not their slenderest finger but was clothed in white. And the white it was! A translucent white, receding into itself, with strange backgrounds of white behind it--a modest white, and yet full of pride. An elusive white, and yet firm and substantial. The white of a diamond lying on snow white velvet, the white of a diamond in diffused light. None of the sparkle and colour play that the most precious of stones a.s.sumes under a definite, limited light which proceeds from a definite, limited source. Its colour play was suggested, it is true, but so subdued that you hardly thought of naming or even recognising its component parts. There was no red or yellow or blue or violet, but merely that which might flash into red and yellow and blue and violet, should perchance the sun break forth and monopolize the luminosity of the atmosphere. There was, as it were, a latent opalescence.

And every twig and every bough, every branch and every limb, every trunk and every crack even in the bark was furred with it. It seemed as if the h.o.a.rfrost still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall.

And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in between. There was such an air of fragility about it all that you hated to touch it--and I, for one, took my whip down lest it shook bare too many boughs.

Whoever has seen the trees like that--and who has not?--will see with his mind's eye what I am trying to suggest rather than to describe. It was never the single sight nor the isolated thing that made my drives the things of beauty which they were. There was nothing remarkable in them either. They were commonplace enough. I really do not know why I should feel urged to describe our western winters. Whatever I may be able to tell you about them, is yours to see and yours to interpret. The gifts of Nature are free to all for the asking. And yet, so it seems to me, there is in the agglomerations of scenes and impressions, as they followed each other in my experience, something of the quality of a great symphony; and I consider this quality as a free and undeserved present which Chance or Nature shook out of her cornucopia so it happened to fall at my feet. I am trying to render this quality here for you.

On that short mile along the first of the east-west grades, before again I turned into the bush, I was for the thousandth time in my life struck with the fact how winter blots out the sins of utility. What is useful, is often ugly because in our fight for existence we do not always have time or effort to spare to consider the looks of things. But the slightest cover of snow will bury the eyesores. Snow is the greatest equalizer in Nature. No longer are there fields and wild lands, beautiful trails and ugly grades--all are hidden away under that which comes from Nature's purest hands and fertile thoughts alone. Now there was no longer the raw, offending scar on Nature's body; just a smooth expanse of snow white ribbon that led afar.

That led afar! And here is a curious fact. On this early December morning--it was only a little after nine when I started the horses into their trot again--I noticed for the first time that this grade which sprang here out of the bush opened up to the east a vista into a seemingly endless distance. Twenty-six times I had gone along this piece of it, but thirteen times it had been at night, and thirteen times I had been facing west, when I went back to the scene of my work. So I had never looked east very far. This morning, however, in this strange light, which was at this very hour undergoing a subtle change that I could not define as yet, mile after mile of road seemed to lift itself up in the far away distance, as if you might drive on for ever through fairyland. The very fact of its straightness, flanked as it was by the rows of frosted trees, seemed like a call. And a feeling that is very familiar to me--that of an eternity in the perpetuation of whatever may be the state I happen to be in, came over me, and a desire to go on and on, for ever, and to see what might be beyond...

But then the turn into the bushy trail was reached. I did not see the slightest sign of it on the road. But Dan seemed infallible--he made the turn. And again I was in Winter's enchanted palace, again the slight whirl in the air that our motion set up made the fairy tracery of the boughs shower down upon me like snow white petals of flowers, so delicate that to disturb the virginity of it all seemed like profaning the temple of the All-Highest.

But then I noticed that I had not been the first one to visit the woods. All over their soft-napped carpet floor there were the restless, fleeting tracks of the snowflake, lacing and interlacing in lines and loops, as if they had been a.s.sembled in countless numbers, as no doubt they had. And every track looked like nothing so much as like that kind of embroidery, done white upon white, which ladies, I think; call the feather st.i.tch. In places I could clearly see how they had chased and pursued each other, running, and there was a merriness about their spoors, a suggestion of swiftness which made me look up and about to see whether they were not wheeling their restless curves and circles overhead. But in this I was disappointed for the moment, though only a little later I was to see them in numbers galore. It was on that last stretch of my road, when I drove along the dam of the angling ditch.

There they came like a whirlwind and wheeled and curved and circled about as if they knew no enemy, feeding meanwhile with infallible skill from the tops of seed-bearing weeds while skimming along. But I am antic.i.p.ating just now In the bush I saw only their trails. Yet they suggested their twittering and whistling even there; and since on the gloomiest day their sound and their sight will cheer you, you surely cannot help feeling glad and overflowing with joy when you see any sign of them on a day like this!

Meanwhile we were winging along ourselves, so it seemed. For there was the second east-west grade ahead. And that made me think of wife and child to whom I was coming like Santa Claus, and so I stopped under a bush that overhung the trail; and though I hated to destroy even a trifling part of the beauty around, I reached high up with my whip and let go at the branches, so that the moment before the horses bolted, the flakes showered down upon me and my robes and the cutter and changed me into a veritable snowman in snow white garb.

And then up on the grade. One mile to the east, and the bridge appeared.

It did not look like the work of man. Apart from its straight lines it resembled more the architecture of a forest brook as it will build after heavy fall rains followed by a late drought when all the waters of the wild are receding so that the icy cover stands above them like the arches of a bridge. It is strange how rarely the work of man will really harmonize with Nature. The beaver builds, and his work will blend. Man builds, and it jars--very likely because he mostly builds with silly pretensions. But in winter Nature breathes upon his handiwork and transforms it. Bridges may be imposing and of great artificial beauty in cities--as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge--but if in the wilderness we run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it that they reconcile by their overweening boldness, by their very paradoxality--as there is beauty even in the hawk's bloodthirsty savagery. To-day this bridge was, like the grades, like the trees and the meadows furred over with opalescent, feathery frost.

And the dam over which I am driving now! This dam that erstwhile was a very blasphemy, an obscenity flung on the marshy meadows with their reeds, their cat-tails, and their wide-leaved swamp-dock cl.u.s.ters! It had been used by the winds as a veritable dumping ground for obnoxious weeds which grew and thrived on the marly clay while every other plant despised it! Not that I mean to decry weeds--far be it from me. When the goldenrod flings its velvet cushions along the edge of the copses, or when the dandelion spangles the meadows, they are things of beauty as well as any tulip or tiger-lily. But when they or their rivals, silverweed, burdock, false ragweed, thistles, gumweed, and others usurp the landscape and seem to choke up the very earth and the very air with ceaseless monotony and repet.i.tion, then they become an offence to the eye and a reproach to those who tolerate them. To-day, however, they all lent their stalks to support the h.o.a.rfrost, to double and quadruple its total ma.s.s. They were powdered over with countless diamonds.

It was here that I met with the flocks of snowflakes; and if my joyous mood had admitted of any enhancement, they would have given it.

And never before had I seen the school and the cottage from quite so far! The haze was still there, but somehow it seemed to be further overhead now, with a stratum of winterclear air underneath. Once before, when driving along the first east-west grade, where I discovered the vista, I had wondered at the distance to which the eye could pierce.

Here, on the dam, of course, my vision was further aided by the fact that whatever of trees and shrubs there was in the way--and a ridge of poplars ran at right angles to the ditch, throwing up a leafy curtain in summer--stood bare of its foliage. I was still nearly four miles from my "home" when I first beheld it. And how pitiably lonesome it looked! Not another house was to be seen in its neighbourhood. I touched the horses up with my whip. I felt as if I should fly across the distance and bring my presence to those in the cottage as their dearest gift. They knew I was coming. They were at this very moment flying to meet me with their thoughts. Was I well? Was I finding everything as I had wished to find it? And though I often told them how I loved and enjoyed my drives, they could not view them but with much anxiety, for they were waiting, waiting, waiting... Waiting on Thursday for Friday to come, waiting on Wednesday and Tuesday and Monday--waiting on Sunday even, as soon as I had left; counting the days, and the hours, and the minutes, till I was out, fighting storm and night to my heart's content! And then--worry, worry, worry--what might not happen! Whatever my drives were to me, to them they were horrors. There never were watchers of weather and sky so anxiously eager as they! And when, as it often, too often happened, the winter storms came, when care rose, hope fell, then eye was clouded, thought dulled, heart aflutter... Sometimes the soul sought comfort from nearest neighbours, and not always was it vouchsafed. "Well," they would say, "if he starts out to-day, he will kill his horses!"--or, "In weather like this I should not care to drive five miles!"--Surely, surely, I owe it to them, staunch, faithful hearts that they were, to set down this record so it may gladden the lonesome twilight hours that are sure to come...

And at last I swung west again, up the ridge and on to the yard. And there on the porch stood the tall, young, smiling woman, and at her knee the fairest-haired girl in all the world. And quite unconscious of Nature's wonder-garb, though doubtlessly gladdened by it the little girl shrilled out, "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, did du see Santa Claus?" And I replied l.u.s.tily, "Of course, my girl, I am coming straight from his palace."

FOUR. Snow

The blizzard started on Wednesday morning. It was that rather common, truly western combination of a heavy snowstorm with a blinding northern gale--such as piles the snow in hills and mountains and makes walking next to impossible.

I cannot exactly say that I viewed it with unmingled joy. There were special reasons for that. It was the second week in January; when I had left "home" the Sunday before, I had been feeling rather bad; so my wife would worry a good deal, especially if I did not come at all. I knew there was such a thing as its becoming quite impossible to make the drive. I had been lost in a blizzard once or twice before in my lifetime. And yet, so long as there was the least chance that horse-power and human will-power combined might pull me through at all, I was determined to make or anyway to try it.

At noon I heard the first dismal warning. For some reason or other I had to go down into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the school. The janitor, a highly efficient but exceedingly bad-humoured c.o.c.kney, who was dissatisfied with all things Canadian because "in the old country we do things differently"--whose sharp tongue was feared by many, and who once remarked to a lady teacher in the most casual way, "If you was a lidy, I'd wipe my boots on you!"--this selfsame janitor, standing by the furnace, turned slowly around, showed his pale and hollow-eyed face, and smiled a withering and commiserating smile. "Ye won't go north this week," he remarked--not without sympathy, for somehow he had taken a liking to me, which even prompted him off and on to favor me with caustic expressions of what he thought of the school board and the leading citizens of the town. I, of course, never encouraged him in his communicativeness which seemed to be just what he would expect, and no rebuff ever goaded him into the slightest show of resentment. "We'll see," I said briefly "Well, Sir," he repeated apodeictically, "ye won't." I smiled and went out.

But in my cla.s.sroom I looked from the window across the street. Not even in broad daylight could you see the opposite houses or trees. And I knew that, once a storm like that sets in, it is apt to continue for days at a stretch. It was one of those orgies in which t.i.tan Wind indulges ever so often on our western prairies. I certainly needed something to encourage me, and so, before leaving the building, I went upstairs to the third story and looked through a window which faced north. But, though I was now above the drifting layer, I could not see very far here either; the snowflakes were small and like little round granules, hitting the panes of the windows with little sounds of "ping-ping"; and they came, driven by a relentless gale, in such numbers that they blotted out whatever was more than two or three hundred yards away.

The inhabitant of the middle lat.i.tudes of this continent has no data to picture to himself what a snowstorm in the north may be. To him snow is something benign that comes soft-footedly over night, and on the most silent wings like an owl, something that suggests the sleep of Nature rather than its battles. The further south you go, the more, of course, snow loses of its aggressive character.

At the dinner table in the hotel I heard a few more disheartening words.

But after four I defiantly got my tarpaulin out and carried it to the stable. If I had to run the risk of getting lost, at least I was going to prepare for it. I had once stayed out, snow-bound, for a day and a half, nearly without food and altogether without shelter; and I was not going to get thus caught again. I also carefully overhauled my cutter.

Not a bolt but I tested it with a wrench; and before the stores were closed, I bought myself enough canned goods to feed me for a week should through any untoward accident the need arise. I always carried a little alcohol stove, and with my tarpaulin I could convert my cutter within three minutes into a windproof tent. Cramped quarters, to be sure, but better than being given over to the wind at thirty below!

More than any remark on the part of friends or acquaintances one fact depressed me when I went home. There was not a team in town which had come in from the country. The streets were deserted: the stores were empty. The north wind and the snow had the town to themselves.

On Thursday the weather was unchanged. On the way to the school I had to scale a snowdrift thrown up to a height of nearly six feet, and, though it was beginning to harden, from its own weight and the pressure of the wind, I still broke in at every step and found the task tiring in the extreme. I did my work, of course, as if nothing oppressed me, but in my heart I was beginning to face the possibility that, even if I tried, I might fail to reach my goal. The day pa.s.sed by. At noon the school-children, the teachers, and a few people hurrying to the post-office for their mail lent a fleeting appearance of life to the streets. It nearly cheered me; but soon after four the whole town again took on that deserted look which reminded me of an abandoned mining camp. The lights in the store windows had something artificial about them, as if they were merely painted on the canvas-wings of a stage-setting. Not a team came in all day.