Over Prairie Trails
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Frederick Philip Grove >> Over Prairie Trails
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OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS
By Frederick Philip Grove
Contents
Introductory
1 Farms and Roads
2 Fog
3 Dawn and Diamonds
4 Snow
5 Wind and Waves
6 A Call for Speed
7 Skies and Scares
Introductory
A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching
school--kept me during the week in a small country town
in the centre of one of the prairie provinces while my
family--wife and little daughter--lived in the southern
fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very
far from the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like
the plucky little woman she is--in order to round off my
far-from-imperial income had made up her mind to look
after a rural school that boasted of something like a
residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went "home"
on Fridays, after school was over, to return to my town
on Sunday evening--covering thus, while the season was
clement and allowed straight cross-country driving, coming
and going, a distance of sixty-eight miles. Beginning
with the second week of January this distance was raised
to ninety miles because, as my more patient readers will
see, the straight cross-country roads became impassable
through snow.
These drives. the fastest of which was made in somewhat
over four hours and the longest of which took me nearly
eleven--the rest of them averaging pretty well up between
the two extremes--soon became what made my life worth
living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have lived
for several years "on the tramp"--I love Nature more than
Man--I take to horses--horses take to me--so how could
it have been otherwise? Add to this that for various
reasons my work just then was not of the most pleasant
kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the
school board was sluggish and unprogressive, there was
friction in the staff--and who can wonder that on Fridays,
at four o'clock, a real holiday started for me: two days
ahead with wife and child, and going and coming--the drive.
I made thirty-six of these trips: seventy-two drives in
all. I think I could still rehearse every smallest incident
of every single one of them. With all their weirdness,
with all their sometimes dangerous adventure--most of
them were made at night, and with hardly ever any regard
being paid to the weather or to the state of the roads--
they stand out in the vast array of memorable trifles
that constitute the story of my life as among the most
memorable ones. Seven drives seem, as it were, lifted
above the mass of others as worthy to be described in
some detail--as not too trivial to detain for an hour or
so a patient reader's kind attention. Not that the others
lack in interest for myself; but there is little in them
of that mildly dramatic, stirring quality which might
perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard beyond
my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the
seven is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of
going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled
my senses. Or maybe, since I was returning over the same
road after an interval of only two days, I had exhausted
on the way north whatever there was of noticeable
impressions to be garnered. Or again, since I was coming
from "home," from the company of those for whom I lived
and breathed, it might just be that all my thoughts flew
back with such an intensity that there was no vitality
left for the perception of the things immediately around me.
ONE
Farms and Roads
At ten minutes past four, of an evening late in September,
I sat in the buggy and swung out of the livery stable
that boarded my horse. Peter, the horse, was a chunky
bay, not too large, nor too small; and I had stumbled on
to him through none of my sagacity. To tell the plain
truth, I wanted to get home, I had to have a horse that
could stand the trip, no other likely looking horse was
offered, this one was--on a trial drive he looked as if
he might do, and so I bought him--no, not quite--I arranged
with the owner that I should make one complete trip with
him and pay a fee of five dollars in case I did not keep
him. As the sequence showed, I could not have found a
better horse for the work in hand.
I turned on to the road leading north, crossed the bridge,
and was between the fields. I looked at my watch and
began to time myself. The moon was new and stood high in
the western sky; the sun was sinking on the downward
stretch. It was a pleasant, warm fall day, and it promised
an evening such as I had wished for on my first drive
out. Not a cloud showed anywhere. I did not urge the
horse; he made the first mile in seven, and a half minutes,
and I counted that good enough.
Then came the turn to the west; this new road was a
correction line, and I had to follow it for half a mile.
There was no farmhouse on this short bend. Then north
for five miles. The road was as level as a table top--a
good, smooth, hard-beaten, age-mellowed prairie-grade.
The land to east and west was also level; binders were
going and whirring their harvest song. Nobody could have
felt more contented than I did. There were two clusters
of buildings--substantial buildings--set far back from
the road, one east, the other one west, both clusters
huddled homelike and sheltered in bluffs of planted
cottonwoods, straight rows of them, three, four trees
deep. My horse kept trotting leisurely along, the wheels
kept turning, a meadow lark called in a desultory way
from a nearby fence post. I was "on the go." I had torn
up my roots, as it were, I felt detached and free; and
if both these prosperous looking farms had been my
property--I believe, that moment a "Thank-you" would have
bought them from me if parting from them had been the
price of the liberty to proceed. But, of course, neither
one of them ever could have been my property, for neither
by temperament nor by profession had I ever been given
to the accumulation of the wealth of this world.
A mile or so farther on there stood another group of farm
buildings--this one close to the road. An unpainted barn,
a long and low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging
slidedoors that could no longer be closed, stood in the
rear of the farm yard. The dwelling in front of it was
a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a rather
loud green with white door and window frames. The door
in front, one window beside it, two windows above,
geometrically correct, and stiff and cold. The house was
the only green thing around, however. Not a tree, not a
shrub, not even a kitchen garden that I could see. I
looked the place over critically, while I drove by.
Somehow I was convinced that a bachelor owned it--a man
who made this house--which was much too large for him
--his "bunk." There it stood, slick and cold, unhospitable
as ever a house was. A house has its physiognomy as well
as a man, for him who can read it; and this one,
notwithstanding its new and shining paint, was sullen,
morose, and nearly vicious and spiteful. I turned away.
I should not have cared to work for its owner.
Peter was trotting along. I do not know why on this first
trip he never showed the one of his two most prominent
traits--his laziness. As I found out later on, so long
as I drove him single (he changed entirely in this respect
when he had a mate), he would have preferred to be hitched
behind, with me between the shafts pulling buggy and him.
That was his weakness, but in it there also lay his
strength. As soon as I started to dream or to be absorbed
in the things around, he was sure to fall into the slowest
of walks. When then he heard the swish of the whip, he
would start with the worst of consciences, gallop away
at breakneck speed, and slow down only when he was sure
the whip was safe in its socket. When we met a team and
pulled out on the side of the road, he would take it for
granted that I desired to make conversation. He stopped
instantly, drew one hindleg up, stood on three legs, and
drooped his head as if he had come from the ends of the
world. Oh yes, he knew how to spare himself. But on the
other hand, when it came to a tight place, where only an
extraordinary effort would do, I had never driven a horse
on which I could more confidently rely. What any horse
could do, he did.
About two miles beyond I came again to a cluster of
buildings, close to the corner of the crossroads, sheltered,
homelike, inviting in a large natural bluff of tall,
dark-green poplars. Those first two houses had had an
aristocratic aloofness--I should not have liked to turn
in there for shelter or for help. But this was prosperous,
open-handed, well-to-do middle class; not that conspicuous
"moneyedness" that we so often find in our new west when
people have made their success; but the solid, friendly,
everyday liberality that for generations has not had to
pinch itself and therefore has mellowed down to taking
the necessities and a certain amount of give and take
for granted. I was glad when on closer approach I noticed
a school embedded in the shady green of the corner. I
thought with pleasure of children being so close to people
with whom I should freely have exchanged a friendly
greeting and considered it a privilege. In my mental
vision I saw beeches and elms and walnut trees around a
squire's place in the old country.
The road began to be lined with thickets of shrubs here:
choke cherry bushes, with some ripe, dried-up black
berries left on the branches, with iron-black bark, and
with wiry stems, in the background; in front of them,
closer to the driveway, hawthorn, rich with red fruit;
rosebushes with scarlet leaves reaching down to nearly
underfoot. It is one of the most pleasing characteristics
of our native thickets that they never rise abruptly
Always they shade off through cushionlike copses of
smaller growth into the level ground around.
The sun was sinking. I knew a mile or less further north
I should have to turn west in order to avoid rough roads
straight ahead. That meant doubling up, because some
fifteen miles or so north I should have to turn east
again, my goal being east of my starting place. These
fifteen or sixteen miles of the northward road I did not
know; so I was anxious to make them while I could see.
I looked at the moon--I could count on some light from
her for an hour or so after sundown. But although I knew
the last ten or twelve miles of my drive fairly well, I
was also aware of the fact that there were in it tricky
spots--forkings of mere trails in muskeg bush--where
leaving the beaten log-track might mean as much as being
lost. So I looked at my watch again and shook the lines
over Peter's back. The first six miles had taken me nearly
fifty minutes. I looked at the sun again, rather anxiously
I could count on him for another hour and a quarter--well
and good then!
There was the turn. Just north of it, far back from both
roads, another farmyard. Behind it--to the north, stretched
out, a long windbreak of poplars, with a gap or a vista
in its centre. Barn and outbuildings were unpainted, the
house white; a not unpleasing group, but something slovenly
about it. I saw with my mind's eye numerous children,
rather neglected, uncared for, an overworked, sickly
woman, a man who was bossy and harsh.
The road angles here. Bell's farm consists of three
quartersections; the southwest quarter lends its diagonal
for the trail. I had hardly made the turn, however, when
a car came to meet me. It stopped. The school-inspector
of the district looked out. I drew in and returned his
greeting, half annoyed at being thus delayed. But his
very next word made me sit up. He had that morning
inspected my wife's school and seen her and my little
girl; they were both as well as they could be. I felt so
glad that I got out of my buggy to hand him my pouch of
tobacco, the which he took readily enough. He praised my
wife's work, as no doubt he had reason to do, and I should
have given him a friendly slap on the shoulder, had not
just then my horse taken it into his head to walk away
without me.
I believe I was whistling when I got back to the buggy
seat. I know I slapped the horse's rump with my lines
and sang out, "Get up, Peter, we still have a matter of
nearly thirty miles to make."
The road becomes pretty much a mere trail here, a rut-track,
smooth enough in the rut, where the wheels ran, but rough
for the horse's feet in between.
To the left I found the first untilled land. It stretched
far away to the west, overgrown with shrub-willow,
wolf-willow and symphoricarpus--a combination that is
hard to break with the plow. I am fond of the silver
grey, leathery foliage of the wolf-willow which is so
characteristic of our native woods. Cinquefoil, too, the
shrubby variety, I saw in great numbers--another one of
our native dwarf shrubs which, though decried as a weed,
should figure as a border plant in my millionaire's park.
And as if to make my enjoyment of the evening's drive
supreme, I saw the first flocks of my favourite bird,
the goldfinch. All over this vast expanse, which many
would have called a waste, there were strings of them,
chasing each other in their wavy flight, twittering on
the downward stretch, darting in among the bushes, turning
with incredible swiftness and sureness of wing the shortest
of curves about a branch, and undulating away again to
where they came from.
To the east I had, while pondering over the beautiful
wilderness, passed a fine bluff of stately poplars that
stood like green gold in the evening sun. They sheltered
apparently, though at a considerable distance, another
farmhouse; for a road led along their southern edge,
lined with telephone posts. A large flock of sheep was
grazing between the bluff and the trail, the most
appropriate kind of stock for this particular landscape.
While looking back at them, I noticed a curious trifle.
The fence along my road had good cedar posts, placed
about fifteen feet apart. But at one point there were
two posts where one would have done. The wire, in fact,
was not fastened at all to the supernumerary one, and
yet this useless post was strongly braced by two stout,
slanting poles. A mere nothing, which I mention only
because it was destined to be an important landmark for
me on future drives.
We drove on. At the next mile-corner all signs of human
habitation ceased. I had now on both sides that same
virgin ground which I have described above. Only here it
was interspersed with occasional thickets of young
aspen-boles. It was somewhere in this wilderness that I
saw a wolf, a common prairie-wolf with whom I became
quite familiar later on. I made it my custom during the
following weeks, on my return trips, to start at a given
point a few miles north of here eating the lunch which
my wife used to put up for me: sandwiches with crisply
fried bacon for a filling. And when I saw that wolf for
the second time, I threw a little piece of bacon overboard.
He seemed interested in the performance and stood and
watched me in an averted kind of way from a distance. I
have often noticed that you can never see a wolf from
the front, unless it so happens that he does not see you.
If he is aware of your presence, he will instantly swing
around, even though he may stop and watch you. If he
watches, he does so with his head turned back. That is
one of the many precautions the wily fellow has learned,
very likely through generations of bitter experience.
After a while I threw out a second piece, and he started
to trot alongside, still half turned away; he kept at a
distance of about two hundred yards to the west running
in a furtive, half guilty-looking way, with his tail down
and his eye on me. After that he became my regular
companion, an expected feature of my return trips, running
with me every time for a while and coming a little bit
closer till about the middle of November he disappeared,
never to be seen again. This time I saw him in the
underbrush, about a hundred yards ahead and as many more
to the west. I took him by surprise, as he took me. I
was sorry I had not seen him a few seconds sooner. For,
when I focused my eyes on him, he stood in a curious
attitude: as if he was righting himself after having
slipped on his hindfeet in running a sharp curve. At the
same moment a rabbit shot across that part of my field
of vision to the east which I saw in a blurred way only,
from the very utmost corner of my right eye. I did not
turn but kept my eyes glued to the wolf. Nor can I tell
whether I had stirred the rabbit up, or whether the wolf
had been chasing or stalking it. I should have liked to
know, for I have never seen a wolf stalking a rabbit,
though I have often seen him stalk fowl. Had he pulled
up when he saw me? As I said, I cannot tell, for now he
was standing in the characteristic wolf-way, half turned,
head bent back, tail stretched out nearly horizontally.
The tail sank, the whole beast seemed to shrink, and
suddenly he slunk away with amazing agility. Poor fellow
--he did not know that many a time I had fed some of his
brothers in cruel winters. But he came to know me, as I
knew him; for whenever he left me on later drives, very
close to Bell's corner, after I had finished my lunch,
he would start right back on my trail, nose low, and I
have no doubt that he picked up the bits of bacon which
I had dropped as tidbits for him.
I drove and drove. The sun neared the horizon now It was
about six o'clock. The poplar thickets on both sides of
the road began to be larger. In front the trail led
towards a gate in a long, long line of towering cottonwoods.
What was beyond?
It proved to be a gate indeed. Beyond the cottonwoods
there ran an eastward grade lined on the north side by
a ditch which I had to cross on a culvert. It will
henceforth be known as the "twelve-mile bridge." Beyond
the culvert the road which I followed had likewise been
worked up into a grade. I did not like it, for it was
new and rough. But less did I like the habitation at the
end of its short, one-mile career. It stood to the right,
close to the road, and was a veritable hovel. [Footnote:
It might be well to state expressly here that, whatever
has been said in these pages concerning farms and their
inhabitants, has intentionally been so arranged as not
to apply to the exact localities at which they are
described. Anybody at all familiar with the district
through which these drives were made will readily identify
every natural landmark. But although I have not consciously
introduced any changes in the landscape as God made it,
I have in fairness to the settlers entirely redrawn the
superimposed man-made landscape.] It was built of logs,
but it looked more like a dugout, for stable as well as
dwelling were covered by way of a roof with blower-thrown
straw In the door of the hovel there stood two brats--poor
things!
The road was a trail again for a mile or two. It led once
more through the underbrush-wilderness interspersed with
poplar bluffs. Then it became by degrees a real "high-class"
Southern Prairie grade. I wondered, but not for long.
Tall cottonwood bluffs, unmistakably planted trees,
betrayed more farms. There were three of them, and,
strange to say, here on the very fringe of civilization
I found that "moneyed" type--a house, so new and up-to-date,
that it verily seemed to turn up its nose to the traveller.
I am sure it had a bathroom without a bathtub and various
similar modern inconveniences. The barn was of the
Agricultural-College type--it may be good, scientific,
and all that, but it seems to crush everything else around
out of existence; and it surely is not picturesque--unless
it has wings and silos to relieve its rigid contours.
Here it had not.
The other two farms to which I presently came--buildings
set back from the road, but not so far as to give them
the air of aloofness--had again that friendly, old-country
expression that I have already mentioned: here it was
somewhat marred, though, by an over-rigidity of the lines.
It is unfortunate that our farmers, when they plant at
all, will nearly always plant in straight lines. The
straight line is a flaw where we try to blend the work
of our hands with Nature. They also as a rule neglect
shrubs that would help to furnish a foreground for their
trees; and, worst of all, they are given to importing,
instead of utilising our native forest growth. Not often
have I seen, for instance, our high-bush cranberry planted,
although it certainly is one of the most beautiful shrubs
to grow in copses.
These two farms proved to be pretty much the last sign
of comfort that I was to meet on my drives to the north.
Though later I learned the names of their owners and even
made their acquaintance, for me they remained the "halfway
farms," for, after I had passed them, at the very next
corner, I was seventeen miles from my starting point,
seventeen miles from "home."
Beyond, stretches of the real wilderness began, the
pioneer country, where farms, except along occasional
highroads, were still three, four miles apart, where the
breaking on few homesteads had reached the thirty-acre
mark, and where a real, "honest-to-goodness" cash dollar
bill was often as scarce as a well-to-do teacher in the
prairie country.
The sun went down, a ball of molten gold--two hours from
"town," as I called it. It was past six o'clock. There
were no rosy-fingered clouds; just a paling of the blue
into white; then a greying of the western sky; and lastly
the blue again, only this time dark. A friendly crescent
still showed trail and landmarks after even the dusk had
died away. Four miles, or a little more, and I should be
in familiar land again. Four miles, that I longed to
make, before the last light failed...
The road angled to the northeast. I was by no means very
sure of it. I knew which general direction to hold, but
trails that often became mere cattle-paths crossed and
criss-crossed repeatedly. It was too dark by this time
to see very far. I did not know the smaller landmarks.
But I knew, if I drove my horse pretty briskly, I must
within little more than half an hour strike a black wall
of the densest primeval forest fringing a creek--and,
skirting this creek, I must find an old, weather-beaten
lumber bridge. When I had crossed that bridge, I should
know the landmarks again.
Underbrush everywhere, mostly symphoricarpus, I thought.
Large trunks loomed up, charred with forest fires; here
and there a round, white or light-grey stone, ghostly in
the waning light, knee-high, I should judge. Once I passed
the skeleton of a stable--the remnant of the buildings
put up by a pioneer settler who had to give in after
having wasted effort and substance and worn his knuckles
to the bones. The wilderness uses human material up...
A breeze from the north sprang up, and it turned strangely
chilly I started to talk to Peter, the loneliness seemed
so oppressive. I told him that he should have a walk, a
real walk, as soon as we had crossed the creek. I told
him we were on the homeward half--that I had a bag of
oats in the box, and that my wife would have a pail of
water ready... And Peter trotted along.
Something loomed up in front. Dark and sinister it looked.
Still there was enough light to recognize even that which
I did not know. A large bluff of poplars rustled, the wind
soughing through the stems with a wailing note. The brush
grew higher to the right. I suddenly noticed that I was
driving along a broken-down fence between the brush and
myself. The brush became a grove of boles which next
seemed to shoot up to the full height of the bluff. Then,
unexpectedly, startlingly, a vista opened. Between the
silent grove to the south and the large; whispering,
wailing bluff to the north there stood in a little clearing
a snow white log house, uncannily white in the paling
moonlight. I could still distinctly see that its upper
windows were nailed shut with boards--and yes, its lower
ones, too. And yet, the moment I passed it, I saw through
one unclosed window on the northside light. Unreasonably
I shuddered.
This house, too, became a much-looked-for landmark to me on
my future drives. I learned that it stood on the range line
and called it the "White Range Line House." There hangs
a story by this house. Maybe I shall one day tell it...
Beyond the great and awe-inspiring poplar-bluff the trail
took a sharp turn eastward. From the southwest another
rut-road joined it at the bend. I could only just make
it out in the dark, for even moonlight was fading fast
now. The sudden, reverberating tramp of the horse's feet
betrayed that I was crossing a culvert. I had been absorbed
in getting my bearings, and so it came as a surprise. It
had not been mentioned in the elaborate directions which
I had received with regard to the road to follow. For a
moment, therefore, I thought I must be on the wrong trail.
But just then the dim view, which had been obstructed by
copses and thickets, cleared ahead in the last glimmer
of the moon, and I made out the back cliff of forest
darkly looming in the north--that forest I knew. Behind
a narrow ribbon of bush the ground sloped down to the
bed of the creek--a creek that filled in spring and became
a torrent, but now was sluggish and slow where it ran at
all. In places it consisted of nothing but a line of
muddy pools strung along the bottom of its bed. In summer
these were a favourite haunting place for mosquito-and-
fly-plagued cows. There the great beasts would lie down
in the mud and placidly cool their punctured skins. A
few miles southwest the creek petered out entirely in a
bed of shaly gravel bordering on the Big Marsh which I
had skirted in my drive and a corner of which I was
crossing just now.
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