CHAPTER XXIV
THE PLAYGROUNDS OF THE WEST
Come, my love, and let us wander
Cross the hills and over yonder.—CY WARMAN.
Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, has been so often called the playgrounds of the West, that the words have become trite and fail to carry their true significance. This fact is inevitably borne in on the Canadian who visits the place, and he wonders to himself why he has failed to understand it before.
Assuredly this is my experience as I ride around Tunnel Mountain this beautiful August day. The road is seven miles long, and from its winding ascent, one may look across the hills and down the wide valley where the green waters of the Bow River foam into white over the rocks. This is the full-robed, full-voiced choir of the mountain temple, but I do not know what it sings.
The Valley of the Bow River with its amphitheatre of hills is the wonder picture of the Rockies, combining, as it does, all that is most beautiful in are and nature. [Transcriber's note: because of the oddness of the grammar of this sentence, it may be that one or more words are missing.]
Across it, on Tunnel Mountain, is the splendid hostelry of the Canadian Pacific Railway; warm sulphur springs that bubble up out of the earth, and a cave of waters which is an extinct geyser, but might be the matrix of the hills themselves.
Geologists say that the eastern ranges of the Rocky Mountains are of the Eocene Age, and that the western ridges are Pliocene, and eons younger. But these revelations of science are almost as overwhelming as our ignorance. They tell of the immensity of time but do not sound it. It is not possible to level them to our mental capacity.
A wealthy Sheik who once lived in the Land of Uz told us how God challenged him to answer certain questions about the mountains.
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"
"Who hath stretched the line upon it?"
"Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of the waters?"
But Job could not answer so much as one question, and he said, "Behold I am vile; what shall I answer Thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth."
This Job, it would appear, was no ordinary sort of man, and one who was very wise.
And ever since, mankind has puzzled itself with these riddles, even as you and I are puzzled. Sometimes we do not so much as believe in the great Lord, who is thought to have made this world, and we say, "Aha!" and other scornful words that are wicked exceedingly. But, up in the hills, we comprehend God without so much as an effort. He is natural here. These scenes of sublimity break in on our life's dead level and show us depth within ourselves unsounded before. Impulses which have been informulate, and aspirations which the years have strangled are brought to life and sentience. "Blessed be the hills," say I, and you must reply, "Amen and Amen."
This road twists upward easily, but, in one place, they have made it into stone stairways, with each tread many feet wide so that the horses can find firm footing. This stairway looks to be a hundred feet in height. All the horses must go one way round the mountain, and not turn backwards, for there is no room to pass on the trail. Every little while, you stop to look at the savage rock forms which surround you, or at their colours. It was no stinting brush that laid them on. Opal and wine-red, purple and ochre, splash the rocks with living hues of wonderful beauty. It is a pity we have not more lavish words for these transfiguration scenes of Nature. It is foolish to try and explain them with our worn-out ones. Every traveller realizes this. For my part, in the mountains, I always feel like that Eton boy of fourteen, who was at the Battle of Waterloo. His first letter home was to this effect: "Dear Mamma: Cousin Tom and I are all right. I never saw anything like it in my life."
There are few birds hereabout. I have only seen a robin and a hawk. The hawk hovered above as if undecided what to do and then fell as if he had been dropped from a plummet. This bird has an instinct for the straight line that might shame even a Dominion land surveyor. This and the fact that the hawk has been known to eat mosquitoes, are his only claims to our attention or respect. All the world knows him for a predaceous bird, and that his heart is a fierce furnace.
A nice-seeming man who is working on the road tells me there are many kinds of animals in the Banff Park, but that they are all preserved. In the corral there are eighty buffaloes. The corral consists of two thousand acres. The white-tailed deer are so tame they come up to the village. There are wolverines, too, and these animals are of so covetous a nature they will steal even a frying pan. The Indians call them carcajous, which means "the gluttons."
This man says he was formerly a fur-pup, by which expression he means a trapper. He left the trap-line because his partner was always objecting to bacon for dinner. Huh! Huh! to hear him complain, one might almost think the Lord grew bacon for consumption at breakfast only.
Riding up the hill through the green trees, I feel as if I were in the opening paragraph of a story, and an half expecting at each bend of the road to meet a knight in armour with a retinue of servants. As he fails to appear I talk to Swallow, my mare, and she twitches her ears as though she understands. Indeed, there is little doubt but that she does.
"Let us stay awhile here," say I, "and look at this gay young squirrel. He is enlarging his burrow as if he intended finishing it in five minutes. He is no hireling squirrel. What say you, Swallow?"
If a mare can laugh, this one does, but maybe it is only her way of coughing.
"And I have an idea, Swallow, that she is inside with four or five baby squirrels, who think the world is lined with fur and that life consists in drawing nutriment from a warm breast. This must be the way of it."
"Step along, my pretty one, and may it happen we shall find the Knight round the next turn. Do you notice how the green trees grow like a mane on the hills?"
Swallow thinks differently. It is her opinion that the dark needle-like pines stand erect in the same way as the fur on a grizzly's back. I know this, else why does she shy violently as we make the turn?
"You are wrong, my pretty one," say I. "These pine-trees are very religious and much too dignified to attack you and me. Besides, the needles of the pines drive devils away, and if you carry a sprig of spruce with you in the woods, no ill-luck will ever come to you. Théophile Trembly, who is a woodsman and a ranger, told me this.
"Do not linger, Sweet-o'-my-Heart; the world is young and you and I may ride forever.
"These are juniper-bushes, any one can see. Maybe if I were to lie under one, like the Tishbite did, an angel might touch me. And maybe I should also find 'a cake baken with coals', and a cruse of water. I would tell you, Swallow, how it tasted in my mouth, for the Tishbite forgot this thing. And I would mention where the angel got the coals. They must have been the 'coals of juniper' of which King David wrote, for these are, to this very day, the best charcoals in all the world. Where the divine visitant found the match to kindle the coals...
"Ah, well! I'll ask the Padre about this, but like as not he'll say, "An irrevelant and irreverent question, M'Dear!" although it is neither one nor the other, for it argues well for humanity that an angel, who is generally portrayed as a rather offish being, should know where to find a match and how to use it. A lot could be said on this very point. It pleasures me not a little that an angel from the skies built a fire out of doors and cooked cakes on it. This surely means that when the angels take recreation they play at being men and that they have a kindly feeling for us. It might be that there are more of them around about than we have any idea, neighbourly-like angel of sap and sinew, who occasionally bear a hand in our work and who loaf around of evenings by the campfire. If an angel can cook on an out-door fire, he must know how to hang a blanket to the windward side, and an angel who knows this is no nidnoddy fellow, I can tell you.
"If you were listening more attentively, Swallow, and if I were not afraid of the Padre finding out, I would push this idea further and say that, when the angel was through with his meal, he would in all likelihood be humanely tired and would fall asleep on a heaped up mattress of fir needles and dried juniper leaves. These, as is their wont, would whisper immemorial secrets to him, so that he might come in time to be a little more tolerant of our failings and to wonder if it were altogether fair that the soul of a man should be damned for his body's needs. He might even think the same about a woman's soul. It cannot fail to vastly affect an angel's opinions when, instead of looking down from the sky, he lies on a bed of leaves and looks up at it. The whole colour and texture of his ideas must be altered. I believe he would come to feel that religious truths should vary to suit the needs of humanity, as those needs change, and that religion should serve men rather than men religion.
"A young god-man said something about this one day in a wheatfield, but he was reproved by his wincing hearers whose descendants are with us to this very day."
This conversation has become too philosophical for Swallow, whose ears are sweetly holden and who shows her wish to change my thought by single footing whenever we come to a level stretch. Doubtless, she hopes to draw my attention to her easy and right pleasant gait. If I owned her we might become great cronies.
On the top of the mountain to which we have come, the leaves on the deciduous trees seem smaller and about the size of rabbits' ears. On my way hither, I passed bluebells, ferns, heather, roses, wild cotton, and painter's brush, the plant which combines colour with heat. From several thousand feet below comes up to me the bellow of the train's engine, that makes long hollow echoes among the peaks. A peculiarity of the north is that the sounds seem only to emphasize the silence and loneliness. This engine makes an ill-noise, but without the railway, these mountains must have remained unseen to all except a hard-muscled and adventurous few. For this reason, we must feel something of the gratitude of the Chief of the Blackfeet Indians, who, in 1885, because of the friendly spirit of his tribe towards the builders, was given a pass ticket over the Canadian Pacific Railway by the President thereof. The ticket was given him in a carved frame. The letter in which he acknowledged the courtesy read like this: "I salute you, O Chief, O great One! I am pleased with railway key opening road free to me. The chains and rich covering of your name writing; its wonderful power to open the road show the greatness of your chieftainship. I have done.
his
"Crow X Foot,"
mark.
Standing on this hill and looking off into the sky, I and my horse seem poised in mid air. It wouldn't be so hard to fly. Hitherto, I have been following pleasure as something to be caught, and, of a sudden, I have ridden into it. Don't you know me? I am Columbine pirouetting on the white horse of the North.
Don't you know this is summer time on the hills where Nature has wealth to spill like a mad-woman and spills it? On this mountain-top, there is a wandering wind soft as a child's caress. I must make the best of it and of the fierce radiance of the sunshine, for, sooner than we bargain for, the Lord in his derision may send a cutting blizzard and it will be cold, so cold.
As I ride homeward down the trail, I lift up my voice and hallo to the sun for joy. You may call this mountain madness if you care to. Don't you know that it matters not a finger's fillip what any one says about a climber's mood or manner once she has reached the heights? Barbed arrows fall off in this rarefied air, and this, I take it, is the great reward of the climb.
There are other compensations on the heights. You may shut your eyes and have a vision of the land that lies beneath you ... let us say a vision of Mother Canada and her nine daughters, and of the part they are destined to play in history. You may open your eyes again to ponder how they will grapple with the problems of race assimilation; of arbitration and war; of morals and politics; and of labour and capital. You will conclude that nothing unfair can exist long in this land of wide spaces, and that Canada is sure to think and act greatly. And right here is a good place to repeat her prayer which it rests with each of us to answer—
"Bring me men to match my mountains;
Bring me men to match my plains;
Men with empires in their purpose
And new eras in their brains."
When you are come down off the mountains there are other things to be seen at Banff, like the golf-links, the aviary, and the museums, but you will enjoy the water pastimes best, that is, if you are a Canadian or an American. The European will be shocked to see the sexes bathing together at this famous spa, for in Europe, it is their wish to bathe privately even in the ocean.
The outdoor swimming pool is a sulphur water, and comes up from the hot underworld. The pool is set in a splendid quadrangular court of grey stone, open to the sky, but shielded to windward with glass. Red-lipped flowers drip over its pillars, adding vastly to the charm of the scene. The pool is flanked on the hotel side by retiring-rooms which are as luxurious and sleep inviting as those of ancient Rome or Pompeii. Overhead, the guests may look down into the green waters and watch the bathers spring from the diving-boards or cavort about like young dolphins, tritons, or lightsome naiads. No matter how phlegmatic you may be, you will wish to tarry here indefinitely and to rest from your labours, for a voluptuous languor slides into your veins till even the mountains round about seem illusory and unreal. Here it is "Paradise enow." With this alchemy of water and sun and these electric currents of earth and sky, you could hardly expect aught but healing and enchantment.
But the attendants will not let you stay too long in the water, for it is not wise to accumulate any more sulphur on your person than is necessary to strike a light, for, owing to our proximity to the magnetic pole, most of us are already dynamos.
At the fall of day, a storm rises in the hills. These seem to come close together and whisper, and the sound is like the whirr of swords.
Many people who are wise talk about storm spirits, so there must be such ... poor distracted beings who wring their hands and moan in black discord. It may be they are the souls of murdered folk, and those who have been executed, and they cry curses on all who live and love and laugh. You must be afraid of them if you are like me. My windows look down on the Valley of the Bow and out upon a riot of hills. There is nothing more beautiful in the girth of the Seven Seas, but, to-night, this scene is awesome and full of strangeness. The black clouds are laced with streaks of lightning, or it may be that the spirits thrust out red tongues in derision.
Lord, how it blows! and I am afraid of this thunder and the shouting of the storm. The wind grapples with the trees as though they were living creatures and it makes no difference that they crouch and cry for mercy. It is Bendan, the Pine Wrestler, who is out there, and when angry he can pluck up a young tree with his little finger or break it with a push of his shoulder. But he does not do this often; he only wrestles to make them strong.
It is better for a woman to go down to the great stone dining-hall with its yellow floor, where there is music, and dancing, and love-making. It is a pretty play even to the onlooker. Or in the big central rotunda, which is the heart of this hostelry in the hills, she will find "there is always fine weather," and "the good fellows" are from all over the world and have strange stories to tell Canadian folk who stay in the North. In the cavernous fireplace, spruce logs burn redly, and by their light you may decipher the words on the mantelpiece: "The world is my school; travel our teacher; Nature our book, and God our friend." Overhead, in the fourth gallery, a deep-voiced singer is taking us into captivity. Listen, then, for it is only in music that critics are taken captive: literature has no such thraldom. It is about a perfect day that the singer sings, and this is what she says—
"And this is the end of a perfect day,
Near the end of a journey too;
But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
With a wish that is kind and true.
For Memory has painted this perfect day
With colours that never fade,
And we find at the end of a perfect day
The soul of a friend we've made."