Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 12

We arrived on a beautiful evening at Algoma, a spot as delightful as a Cornish village, on the beach of that inlet of Lake Huron called Georgian Bay. We walked in the astonishing quiet of the evening through the tiny place, and along the deep, sandy road that has not yet been won from the primitive forests, to where but a tiny fillet of beach stood between the spruce woods and the vast silence of the water.

From that serene and quiet spot we looked through the still evening to the far and beautiful Islands.

In the wonderful clear air, and with all the soft colours of the sunset glowing in the still water, the beauty of the place was almost too poignant. We might have been the discoverers of an uninhabited bay in the Islands of the Blessed. I have never known any place so remote, so still and so beautiful. But it was far from being uninhabited. There were rustic picnic tables under the spruce trees, and there was a diving-board standing over the clear water. The inhabitants of Algoma knew the worth of this place, and we felt them to be among the luckiest people on the earth.

The islands we saw far away in the soft beauty of the sunset, and between which the enigmatic light of a lake steamer was moving, are said to be Hiawatha's Islands. In any case, it was here that the pageant of Hiawatha was held some years back, and across the still lake in that pageant, Hiawatha in his canoe went out to be lost in the glories of the sunset.

II

On the morning of Tuesday, September 4th, the train skirted Georgian Bay, pa.s.sing many small villages given over to lumber and fishing, and all having, with their tiny jetties, motor launches and sailing boats, something of the perfection of scenes viewed in a clear mirror. By mid-morning the train reached Sault Ste. Marie.

"Soo" is a vivid place. It is a young city on the rise. A handful of years ago it was a French mission, beginning to turn its eyes languidly towards lumber. It is on the neck that joins the waters of Superior and Huron, but the only through traffic was that of the voyageurs, who made the portage round the stiff St. Mary's Rapids, that, with a drop of eighteen feet in their length, forbade any vessel but that of the canoe of the adventurer to pa.s.s their troubled waters.

Then America and Canada began to build ca.n.a.ls and locks to link the great lakes, in spite of the Rapids, and "Soo" woke. It has been awake and living since that moment. It has been playing lock against lock with the Michigan men across the river, each planning cunningly to establish a system that will carry the long lake vessels not only in locks befitting their size, but in locks that can be handled more swiftly than those of the rival.

At the moment the prize is with Canada. It has a lock nine hundred feet long, and can do the business of lowering a great vessel from Superior to Huron with one action, where America uses four locks. The Americans have a larger lock than the Canadian, but the Canadians are quicker.

And this means something. The traffic on these lakes is greater than the traffic on many seas. Down this vast water highway come the narrow pencils of lake-boats carrying grain and ore and lumber in hulls that are all hold. They come and go incessantly. "Soo," indeed, handles about three times the tonnage of Suez yearly, and there is the American side to add to that.

With this brisk movement of commercial life within her, "Soo" has thrived like a cold. Where, in the old days, the local inhabitants could be reckoned on the fingers of two hands, there is now a city of about twenty thousand, and it is still growing. It is a city of graceful streets and neat houses climbing over the Laurentine Hills that make the site. It is breezy and self-a.s.sured, and draws its comfortable affluence from its shipping, its paper-mills, its steel works, as well as from lumber, agriculture and other industries.

It met the Prince as becomes a youth of promise. Crowds ma.s.sed on the lawns before the red sandstone station, and in all the streets there were crowds. And crowds followed his every movement, however swift it was, for "Soo" has the automobile fever as badly as any other town in Canada, and car owners packed their families, even to the youngest in arms, into tonneaux and joined a procession a mile long, that followed the Prince about the town.

It is true that some of the crowd was America out to look at Royalty.

Americans were not slow to make the most of the fact that they were to have a Prince across the river. From early morning the ferry that runs from Michigan to the British Empire was packed with Republican autos and Republicans on foot, all eager to be there when Royalty arrived.

They gathered in the streets and joined in the procession. They gave the Prince the hearty greeting of good-fellows. They were as good friends of his as anybody there. They did, in fact, give us a foretaste of what we were to expect when the Prince went to the United States.

There were the usual functions. They took place high on a hill, from which the Prince could look down upon the blue waters of the linked lakes, the many factory chimneys, the smoke of which threw a quickening sense of human endeavour athwart the scene, and the great jack-knife girder bridge, that is the railway connection between Canada and America, but above the usual functions the visit to "Soo" had items that made it particularly interesting.

He went to the great lock that carries the interlake traffic. He crossed from one side of it to the other, and then stood out on the lock gate, while it was opened to allow the pa.s.sage of several small vessels. From here he went to the Algoma Railway, at the head of the ca.n.a.l, and in a special car was taken to the rapids that tumble down in foam between the two countries.

The train was brought to a standstill at the international boundary, where two sentries, Canadian and American, face each other, and where there was another big crowd, this time all American, to give him a cheer.

He then spent some time visiting the paper mill that helps to make "Soo" rich. He went over it department by department, asking many questions and showing that the processes fascinated him intensely. In the same way he went through the steel works, and was again intrigued by the sight of "things doing." It was, as he said himself, one of the most interesting days he had spent in the Dominion.

III

"Soo" let us into a wonderful tract of country.

Still in the sumptuous C.P.R. train, we swung north over the Algoma Railway track into a land so wildly magnificent and yet so lonely, that one felt that the railway line must have been built by poets for poets--we could not imagine it thriving on anything else.

As a matter of fact, it does link up rich mining and other territory, and, in time, will open a land of equal value, but just now its chief a.s.set is scenery.

The scenery is superb. Its hills are huge and battlemented. They leap up sheer above the train, menacing it; they drop down starkly, leaving the line clinging to a ledge above a white, angry stream on a white rock bed. They crowd the line into gorges, from which the sun is banished, and where the moveless firs look like lost souls chained in the gloom of Eblis. They expand abruptly, suddenly, into swinging valleys, on whose great flanks the spruce forests look like toy decorations hanging above floors of shining sapphire--lakes, of course, but one could not think that any lake could be so blue.

Lakes fretted into lagoons by thin white slivers of shingle; rivers full of tumbled and dishevelled logs; forests in green, in which the crimson maple leaf burns brightly; vast amphitheatres of cliff-like hills; mounds of the stark Laurentine rock pushing up through trees like bald heads through the spa.r.s.e covering of departing hair; miles of blanched trees and black trees standing like skeletons or strewn all-whither, like billets of stick--acres of murdered stumps, where evil forest fires have swept along; and we had even an occasional glimpse of that scourge of Canada seen smoking sullenly in the distance--all this heaped together, piled together in a reckless luxuriance makes up the scenery of the Algoma country.

Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man and his works.

On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a disconcerting b.u.mp. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing--only that particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.

When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees--the depth one is going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places.

And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the bridge could hold it.

He said he thought so, but it had never been tested by such a weight before.

From the way he said "thought," we gathered he meant "hoped."

Somebody had wanted to show the Prince the view. It was a fine view, but we were not sorry it wasn't permanent. With the view, the Prince took in a little shooting at clay pigeons in view of the days he was to spend in sporting Nipigon.

We ran straight on to Nipigon, only stopping at Oba, and that in the night. But before the night came Canada and Algoma gave us an exquisite sunset. We saw the light of the sun on a vast stretch of hummocks and hills of bald rock. They had been clothed with forest before the fires had pa.s.sed over them. As the sun set, an exquisite thin cherry light shone evenly on the hills and bluffs, and on the thin and naked trees that stood up like wands in this eerie and clarified light. In the distance there was a faint vermilion in the sky, and where the tree stumps fringed the bare hills, they gave the suggestion of a band of violet edging the land. And all this in an air as clear and shining as still water. It seemed to me that Canada was waiting there for a painter of a new vision to catch its wonder.

Even in the loneliness we were never far away from the human equation.

During the afternoon we had a touch of it. It was discovered by the Prince that his train was being driven by a V.C., or, rather, one of the men on the engine, the fireman, was a V.C. This man, Staff-Sergeant Meryfield, had won the distinction at Cambrai, and had returned to his calling in the ordinary way. He came back from the engine cab through the train, a very modest fellow, to be presented to the Prince, who spent a few minutes chatting with him.

CHAPTER XII

PICNICS AND PRAIRIES

I

Early on the morning of Friday, September 5th, the train pa.s.sed through the second tunnel it had encountered in Canada, and came to a small stopping-place amid trees.

It was a lady's pocket handkerchief of a station, made up of a tool shed, a few houses and a road leading away from it. Its significance lay in the road leading away from it. That road leads to Nipigon river and lake, one of the finest trout waters in Canada. Even at that it is only famous half the year, for it hibernates in winter like any other thing in Canada that finds snow and remoteness too much for it.

At this station--Nipigon Lodge--the Prince, in shooting knickers and a great anxiety to be off and away, left the train at 8.30, and walking along the road, came to the launch that was to take him down river to the fishing camp where he was to spend a week-end of sport.

Leaving this little waterside village of neglected fishermen's huts, for the season was late and the tourists that usually fill them had all gone, he went down the beautiful stream to the more than beautiful Virgin Falls. Here he met his outfit, thirty-eight Indian guides, all of them experts in camp life and cunning in the secrets of stream and wood.

In the care of these high priests of sport, he left civilization, in the shape of the launch, behind him, and in a canoe fished down stream until the lovely reaches of Split-rock were attained; here, on the banks of the stream, amid the thick ranks of spruce, the camp was pitched.

At first it had been the intention to push on after a day's sport to other camping-places, but the situation and the comfort of this camp was so satisfactory that the Prince decided to stay, and made it his headquarters during the week-end.

It was no camp of amateur sportsmen playing at the game. It was not, perhaps, "roughing" it as the woodsman knows it, for he lies hard in a floorless tent (if he has one), as well as lives laboriously, but it was certainly a rough and ready life, as near that of the woodsman as possible.

The Prince slept in a tent, rose early, bathed in the river and shaved in the open in exactly the same manner as every one else in the party.

He took his place in the "grub queue," carrying his plate to the cook-house and demanding his particular choice in bacon and eggs, broiled trout, flapjacks, or the wonderful white flatbread, which the cook, an Indian, Jimmy Bouchard, celebrated for open-fire cooking, knew how to prepare.

Sometimes before breakfast the Prince indulged his pa.s.sion for running; always after breakfast he set out on foot, or in canoe for the day's fishing, returning late at night hungry and tired with the healthy weariness of hard exertion to the camp meal. There were spells round the big camp fire burning vividly amid the trees, and then sleep in the tent.

The fishing was usually done from the ba.s.s canoe, two Indian guides being always the ship's company. And fishing was not the only attraction of the stream and lake. There is always the thrilling, placid beauty of the scenery, the deep forests, the lake valleys, and the austere, forest-clad hills that rise abruptly from the enigmatic pools. And there is the active beauty of the many rapids, those piled-up and rushing ma.s.ses of angry water, tossing and foaming in pent-up force through rock gates and over rocks.

He tried the adventure of these rapids, shooting through the tortured waters that look so beautiful from the sh.o.r.e and so terrible from the frail structure of a canoe, until it seemed to him as though not even the skill of his guides could steer through safely. He got through safely, but only after an experience which he described as the most exciting in his life.