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 callThe 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 inAlice 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.
"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 ofThe Wandering Voicewas 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 isnotBurney (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 theMistahay 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 wordroche, meaning "rock," andmiettewhich 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!
I love the hills and the hills love meAs 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 onThe map's deserted spot,Or staking out an empire inThe 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, calledYu-hai-has-kunby the Indians, meaning thereby a high, winding road. The Alpine Club of Canada intend, one of these times, to erect a châlet 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 noblessein 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 seeThe 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 starkSo far they seem as near.
But could ye know, and forever knowThe 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."