A roughish chap in his talk was he,
And an awkward man in a row;
But he never funked, and he never lied,
I guess he never knowed how.
CHAPTER XIII
WINTER COMES WITH THE 'WAVIES'
The loss of Tony was a loss which the whole ranche felt. Had he died in the full swing of work, the machine must almost have broken down. But Toby never wanted his spell of rest except when there was nothing much to do, and he had chosen to take his 'big spell of rest' in the same way. Still, even in the winter season, his loss made a great deal of difference to Snap. With Tony the ranche was full-handed, and the boy was really more or less superfluous. Now he had his hands full. There was a man's place to supply, and he worked hard and uncomplainingly to fill it. There are a thousand things to be done about a ranche in winter: cattle to feed and water, wood to hew, repairs about the ranche which want attending to, supplies to be fetched from the nearest town. At all these things Snap took his turn. No one cares to turn out first in the morning with a bitter frost outside and make up the fire for the benefit of the rest. Even strong, hard men will lie watching to see if someone else won't volunteer, and hug themselves for their smartness when someone else turns out before them, so that they may get up in the glow of a fire which others have made. The 'boys' might well have insisted on Snap's doing this, but he was popular, and no one fagged him. They knew he was a good plucked one, so nobody bullied him. That being so, Snap set himself the work to do, and nine mornings out of ten it was Snap who raked up the ashes and blew the fire into a blaze, who woke the sleepers with a joke, and had coffee ready for the elder men. It was Snap, too, who sang the best song round the wood-fire at night; and be sure there was nothing that went straighter to the hearts of the cowboys than his fresh young voice rattling out the well-remembered words of 'The Hounds of the Meynell' or Whyte Melville's 'Place where the old Horse died.'
Some of the boys had never been in England, and knew nothing of fox-hunting, but all loved a good horse and entered heartily into the spirit of the song. And so it was that in the early morning, and late in the fire-lit evening, Snap won his way to his companions' favour. Though gently bred, they recognised him as being not only game to the backbone, but ready and willing to do a man's work. That once understood, they were his friends through thick and thin, always ready to teach him anything, to make room for him in a hunting-party, or to chaff his head off if he made a hash of either work or play. By spring Snap was in a fair way to be a useful hand upon the ranche.
And now winter was coming down upon Rosebud in real earnest. The first 'cold snap,' as it is called, had caught our friends as they crossed the Rockies, and, intensified by the height at which they were travelling, had seemed very bitter indeed. After the cold snap, which only lasted from a week to ten days, came as it were an aftermath of summer, a second season of sunshine and delight, which the natives call the Indian summer. Snap began to think that the severities of a Canadian winter were all bunkum, invented as a background for all the terrible stories of the fur-traders of old days. This Indian summer was just the loveliest October weather which a healthy man could wish for, a little crisper and keener at night than our own Octobers, but in the day so bright, so clear, so sunny, that life (however hard the work) seemed to go to dance-music all day long. Later on, however, there began to be signs of a change. One by one and in little groups all the cattle had come in of their own accord from the distant ranges. Some of them had been feeding above the foot-hills on the sweet grass of the mountain slopes, where in two months' time even the bighorn would not be able to exist. As Snap rode out to shoot for the pot, or on any work about the ranche, he would meet fresh companies of them, feeding slowly downhill towards the low land and the river bottoms. They were in no hurry, picking the tenderest 'feed' as they strolled along, and camping every night wherever they happened to find themselves, but still pressing steadily on to the warmer lands below. As the beasts stopped and stared at the boy with great, solemn, brown eyes of inquiry, he used to wonder at them at least as much as they at him. How came it, he thought, that they knew the bitter white winter was coming, although the sun was still so bright, and the uplands flooded with golden light? Who told them? or did they remember from the years before?
Nature, too, had put on her last robe but one. In a month, save for the dark green of the funereal pines, it would be white everywhere. Now, just for a season, there was colour everywhere as bright as rainbow tints, and as short-lived. The maples were clear gold or vivid crimson; the sugar maples often showing both colours side by side in one gracefully pointed leaf. The hazels were red and gold, or, like the long oval leaves of the sumach-bush, had already turned from brilliant lake to a dull, blackish purple. They were all ready to drop and die, but their death would be as beautiful and becoming as their birth in spring-time, when birds were mating and woods a tender green, or as their life among the flowers and cool, green shadows of the luxurious summer.
As Snap lay awake at night he heard far up among the stars the clang, it seemed to him, of trumpets, as if an army passed by to battle; or, again, a strange, solemn cry, not from quite such a height, smote his ear: 'honk, honk, ha, ha,' it seemed to say—a strange, unearthly call, from things passing and unseen.
At morning, too, before dawn, he heard these cries, and a strange, swift, whistling sound would rush over the roof of the log-house. The sky seemed haunted in these late autumn days. One morning as the mists rose Snap got a glimpse of these passing armies of the air. Far away up in the clouds was a great V-shaped body of birds, the point of the V a single swan cleaving his way westward from his summer haunts in the Arctic Circle to the warmer regions of British Columbia and the mud-flats of the mouth of the Frazer River. On other days he saw Canada geese in thousands, and snow geese (or wavies) in hundreds of thousands, all passing on the same great high-road from Hudson Bay to the West.
'Snap,' said old Wharton one morning, 'hurry up, I've just seen a gang of wavies go up the crik, flying pretty low down. I reckon they aren't going far, and young wavy is mighty good eating.'