CHAPTER IV
BEHIND THE HILLS.
"Behind the hills, that's where the fairies are,
Behind the hills, that's where the sun goes down."
I fell asleep in the cupola of the caboose and dreamed that my head was a rubber band holding too many notes, and that it was going to snap any second. "Hit's the bloomin' haltitude in your 'ead, Ma'am," explained a Cockney later, and I expect he was right, for we have made an ascent of over one thousand feet since leaving Edmonton.
When I awake the train is standing stock-still. Here is the trouble! the heavy rains have been playing havoc with the newly-made grades that have hardly been shaken down to stay, and progress is necessarily slow till the proper ballast has been laid on. Outside, on the grade, the fireman is swearing with remarkable precision. His language is not exactly that described by the Prayer-book as "comfortable words," but then, a man who fires up with slack coal when the thermometer is sometimes thirty degrees below zero naturally becomes proficient in the use of secular expletives.
I open my window above him and say very distinctly, "Wicked man! swear not by the Lord Christ." Then I lean back so that he may not see me. It must have surprised him to hear such a reproof in this no-woman's land. Out he goes and looks up and around, and up again, but I keep well hidden. That writer who conceived the horror of The Wandering Voice was no nid-noddy fellow, I can tell you.
As I was thinking this very thing, a voice close behind said to me, "Wicked woman! play not the oracles," and almost I fell out of the cupola with fright. It was the glorious tall stranger, and he was laughing mightily. I almost hated him. Indeed, I quite hated till I saw the joke and laughed too.
He had been reading in the opposite bunk and, incidentally, watching so that I might not roll out, for it is a high climb to the cupola bunk, and there are no sides to it. He says that he is an engineer and that the boys who left the train at Bickerdike gave him instructions to see that I got through all right. Did I say mean things awhile ago about certain northern men? Did I? Well then, I am a spiteful jade and my tongue should be split.
He has yellow fruit for me, and cherries, but hands them out carefully, for the smell of steam from the stove shows that dinner is deliciously imminent. The cook is turning cakes on a pan with a spat like the sound of clog-dancers on the stage. He turns them with a grace and intelligence which I may never hope to equal. I have an idea his elbow and wrist work on ball-bearings.
The glorious tall stranger whose name is not Burney (but it will do as well as any other) tells me he was reared down by the Miramichi River. He went back East to see his mother last Christmas, but it took her some days to get used to the grown man who had left home a lad. I can see this thing in my mind's eye. His mother is very clever and has a beautiful face. He need not have told me this. It is true of every man's mother "back home."
Burney was among the first men who scouted for the railway to the West and helped run the try-lines. Falling into the pose of the raconteur—one very natural to the northman—he tells me tragic things, and some that are both tragic and humorous.
One of these was about a Mounted Policeman who was sent out from his post to bring in a murderer. It was terribly cold weather, the mercury almost falling out of the tube. Now, the wanted murderer is the wariest game in the world, and to take him in those mountains one needs boldness and caution in the right proportions—that is to say ninety-nine per cent. of the former, and one per cent. of the latter. The policeman who was sent out was only a stripling, but there was no yellow in him save the streak on his trouser-legs. The round journey was one hundred and twenty miles, but, alone and unaided, he brought in his man, not even waiting to sleep. Almost immediately on a fresh mount, he again started out from the post, but this time to bring in the corpse. The second hundred and twenty miles were terribly long and arduous ones, and the cold cut like a blade. By shutting your eyes you can see and feel this thing: the two frost-covered horses plodding through the bleak and sterile mountains that are grim as eternity—no sound save the cry of starveling wolves, or the white whine of the sleepless wind, these and the sharp-drawn breath of the men. No! we must be mistaken. Only one man breathes, the other seems strangely still, and his lips are tight shut. There is something peculiarly defective in his stony eyes and stony face. If you look closer you can see he is roped close to the horse, and that he doesn't give to the lope.... God of men and beasts! that is a dead man that rides through the snow, and he rides to confront his slayer.... And when the two reached the police post, the live dare-doing man was found to be terribly exhausted from hunger, lack of sleep, and the long, long ride, so that his brittle nerves were like to snap in two. This was how they came to give him the stimulants which in some way (it is not for a tattling civilian to say the way) had not entirely worn off when he was summoned to give evidence at the inquest.
The auditory consisted of engineers, and chainmen from the residencies who resented this grim sitting with a murderer, a judge and accuser, and the white, stark man on the table, whom presently they would put to bed with a spade. They were sitting austerely upright with grave faces as became the occasion, when it came upon them suddenly that the police stripling was intoxicated. It is true he faced the judge with an uncompromising attitude and stood erect, and "at attention" as if a perpendicular rod braced his body from his crown to his heels, but when the judge's glance wandered for the fraction of a moment, the stripling would wink prodigiously at the engineers, and in an unholy manner that threw them into suppressed convulsions. The thing was grievously grotesque. It was as though a stone altar-saint had suddenly awaked and had put his fingers to his nose in a way that was sinister. Comedy with her wry face was peeping through a tragic mask. It is a way of hers.
It was not until the judge observed the policeman constantly dropping his papers and picking them up in a stiff unjointed way, that the reason of the court's commotion became apparent to him.
"What is the rest of the story?" you ask. I do not know. I am a reviewer of books and never go so far as the end.
Sirs and Mesdames, but it is an athletic feat climbing out of the cupola of a caboose. I stepped on the shoulder of Burney, who is admirably strong, and then down to a chair. The brakesmen enter the cupola off the roof and have a way of sliding to the floor backward. It looks easy, and if I were alone, I would surely try it.
There were four of us for dinner, and we had pork and beans, beefsteak, potato-cakes, rolls, peaches and coffee. The butter was tinned, but withal toothsome, and so was the milk. The butter is shipped here from Nova Scotia, and is supplied to all the camps on the road. I help the cook clear away the dishes, but he thinks me rather unhandy, for I upset both the sugar and salt. He comes from Kilmarnock in Scotland, and is a nice lad, I can see that. He has a thicket of hair that stands erect from his head like a growth of young spruce, and he always looks as if he had just heard some good idea. His latest idea, he confides, is a job with the purveyors who contract for the supplies for all the grading camps on the line.
Hitherto, I have always looked upon a caboose as something commonplace, but now, I know it may be truly a Castle of Indolence. I have a sweet tooth for this kind of life, and have no objection to continuing it for a month. Journalists, and important people with stamped passes, go on private cars, but the advantage of mediocrity is that you can travel in a caboose and need not view the scenery as a commercial commodity. When I can think of what to say, I will write a story called "The Romance of a Railway Van." Its setting will be in the hills. The heroine will be a southern girl of probably twenty summers (with a corresponding number of winters). She shall be no fine die-away lady, but middling strong and built to go out in all weather. Each move of the romance will be made by invisible kelpies, ogres and dryads, who will say "Ha! Ha!" and "Ho! Ho!" and who will clap their hands when the wicked flourish, or valour wins against the odds. But I never could think this story out, so I pass it on to you.
At the McLeod River the grades begin to spy into the mountains. These mountains have all the bewilderment of an elusive dream, and in the thin northern air seem nearer than they really are. There is a come-hither look about them. It is well, at first, to thus see from a distance, for to stand against a mountain is to lose one's sense of proportion and symmetry.
At Prairie Creek the road runs high up on a ridge to the south of the Athabaska Valley, so that it looks like a ribbon of steel basted on to the hills. The Athabaska River is wide and swift here, and has what the Japanese call the language of line. The Cree Indians call it the Mistahay Shakow Seepee, meaning thereby the great river of the woods. A semi-spectral mist rises off its waters, as if it were an incense to the mighty spirit, Manitou.
It would be well if I, one of the first of the tourists who, world without end, will travel through these hills, could tell how they impress me, but I am crushed into a wordless incompetency. I cannot speak the language of this land nor interpret its spirit. These hills of White Alberta have something to say, but they will not say it. It must be true what the essayist wrote, that you cannot domesticate mountains.
There appears to be no life here, nor any form of sentience, but when it is dark, the grizzly bear, the lynx, the moose, and other night-things, will move out for purposes of life or death.
Alexander Mackenzie, who entered these defiles one hundred and twenty-five years ago, wrote down that the Atnah Indians believed all this land was made by a mighty bird whose eyes were fire, the noise of his wings thunder, and the glances of his eyes lightning. This bird created all things from the earth except the Chipewyans, who were made from dogs. Now the Chipewyans and the Atnahs were not on borrowing terms.
These were the times when the Indians were as plentiful in the Athabaska Valley as dandelions in a meadow, and they told this Mackenzie of Inverness how, in the good old days, their ancestors lived till their throats were worn out with eating and their feet with walking.
The Athabaska Valley is enclosed by a circle of the hills, the two most prominent of these being Roche Perdrix, or Folding Mountain, and Roche Miette. The latter peak takes its name from the French word roche, meaning "rock," and miette which is the Cree for sheep, this because of the mountain-sheep which make it their home. It is 8,000 feet high (I give you the height because it is not legal to go down the line without so doing). Somewhere, near here, at Fiddle Creek, at a height of 1,200 feet above the railway, there are wonderful hot springs concerning which Burney talks learnedly. I pretend to understand all about sulphuric anhydride, and carbon dioxide, and 127 degrees Fahrenheit, but do not really know if there are things which should be remembered or forgotten.
Other of the peaks which enclose the Valley are Roche Ronde, Roche Jacques, Bullrush and Roche Suette. Off to the west, the range of hills silhouetted against the sky is known as the Fiddle Back Range. These are crowned with snow, but as the sky changes, take to themselves its moods—coral-red, opal, stone-blue and a mellow, purple glow, which blend and shift like the weird fantasy of the auroral lights.
It is an idea of mine that these hills are the lair of the running winds which for past eons have swept in bitter streaks across the prairies, winnowing them like a thresher would winnow grain. Seven-leagued boots have they and no man has tracked them down. How could a man when they fling dust in his eyes? They are the bitter scouts of the North who fight as they go. I have no doubt their home is hereabout. It might be found if we had time to stay, but this would take too long, for you must surely understand these winds are non-resident to a degree that is nothing short of scandalous.
At this point, we ought in all propriety to talk about Brule Lake, which is not a lake at all, but an enlargement of the river. We should nudge each other and remark that this is Jasper Park; that it consists of 5,450 square miles, and that it is held in perpetuity for the nation. I should ask, "Why do they call it Jasper Park?" and you, my fine fellow-farer, should tell me how old Jasper Hawes was one of "the gentlemen adventurers" of the Hudson's Bay Company, and doubtless a purposeful man and clever. "But why do they call this defile 'the Yellow Head Pass?'" I should further query, whereupon you ought to reply, "I perceive you are an untaught person else you had heard how this Jasper Hawes had hair the colour of September wheat in the sheaf, so that the Indians called him 'Tete Jaune' or 'Yellow Head,' much after our mischievous manner of turning about on the street to look after a lady who is flaxen."
Yes! we should say all this, and more, but it might sound like the private car "write-up," so we had better not. Besides, our engine has come to a sit-still and will not go a step farther. The gossip we heard at Bickerdike about the wash-out has been verified. The officials in the private car are in no very graceful temper over this landslide, and some of the men on the firing-line who dug and blasted and built the grade, are going to have their hearts cut out because of it.
The trouble is that these vastly particular officials conceive of the mountain into whose body they have slashed as a dead thing—dead as pickled pork—whereas it is splendidly alive. Because of the malapert efforts of the builders, the mountain has shaken its monstrous sides with laughter till the tears ran adown its face and washed out their puny sticks and stones. One might hint this to the officials, but one is scared to. They belong to the unamiable sex and are showing an anger highly disproportioned to the cause. Indeed, I saw a very special official put the hot end of his cigar in his mouth. Sometime to-night, a few flat cars will come from the End of Steel to convey the gang thither. The gang will climb up one side of the wash-out and down the other, and I will too, if the train's agent will let me, but from his hard-baked, non-committal manner, I glean he is predetermined to take me back to Edson in the caboose.
The men have lighted a fire in the hills, and this fire seems to be the kernel of the land. Strange elemental figures appear and disappear in the darkness as though they were performing unnamed, unholy rites. They seem human but, perhaps, they are spirits, for I have some splendid clues that these mountains are the haunted house of the world.
Here, there are eyes that watch you all the time, but they are hidden; and if you have a listening ear you may hear voices that call. The gods come close in the hills. They go whispering about in the night and calling your name.
Foolish folk there are who say that the world is old, and that all its songs are sung. There is a new song that can never be told, else I would tell it to you. Only it may be heard.
A man whose face is covered by the dark is spinning a yarn about an engineer lad on this grade who truly loved an Indian girl. This is what he says—
"She died a week ago, and the lad was with her. It is a beautiful story, but I know another like hers. It is about a butterfly that had specks of gold on its wings."
I did not see the gang climb down the crevasse and up the other side, but I heard the low lorn echo from the train roll up along the crags and die away in the snows. The train's agent said I could go to the End of Steel if I insisted, but I was not to insist. This is why I am travelling back to Edson. Only I am disappointed much, but he says I may come again soon, when no one shall disallow me. It would have been all right for me to go with the gang, and I could have taken care of myself: any woman could who has been years and years "in society."
The agent and the Scotch boy have made a bed for me on a wide bench with my blankets and cushions. If little private, the bed looks wholly comfortable.
"You'll be after loosenin' your collar," says the young person from Kilmarnock as he fluffs up another cushion, "an' ye 'ull be takin' off baith your shoes an' your stockin's. I'll be keepin' the daftie loons out o' the car till ye get a bit o' sleep."
For the benefit of the nervous readers I may add he does not say, "ye'll be layin' off your bloose," but these are such nice lads I could do so with absolute propriety.
And they turn the lamp low and shade it with paper while I am asking my prayer. And I pray, "Spirits of the Mountains and Rivers, be not angry with me for talking in the hills. Gods of the North, strong Gods who watch over little children and us older ones, let me sleep in quietness this night, and at last bring me home in safety where all the lights be white ones."
And I press my lips to the palm of my heart-hand to say "Amen," and to let the gods know I love them. To let them know I love them!