Beyond Rope and Fence

by David Grew

The sound died out and did not come again, but an attenuated cloud of smoke swept across the valley. Though the rest of that night was undisturbed and the air, from then on, was clear, they kept awake and fearfully restless. At dawn they abandoned the valley though they saw nothing that was alarming; and as they moved northward, they came upon a railroad track.

On the other side of the track the land stretched away silent and desolate, merging at the northern horizon in a long, narrow shadow, as of woodland. The tracks remained perfectly motionless and the herd slowly ventured near them. While some of the horses looked on curiously, some of the headstrong young colts to the dismay of their mothers, walked upon the tracks and sniffed at them. Seeing that nothing happened to them, the herd started at once to cross.

Half a mile north of that they came upon another elongated slough which had been hidden by a hill. Always glad to see water, they trotted down in concert and took possession, once more intending to end the journey. But toward evening while the colts were expressing the joy of life in a gambol about the water, they were startled by another shriek like the one of the night before, and associating it somehow with the tracks, they tore up the slope to see what it was.

In the distant east glowed a light, like the harvest moon. It gleamed from the centre of a black, fear-inspiring object from which clouds of smoke poured into the air and streamed backward into space. They gazed upon it for a few moments as if transfixed, then when they realised that it was coming rapidly nearer, they broke down into the valley, splashing through the slough and sped up the other slope. On the top of that hill, they stopped to look back. The thing was already thundering past them, shutting away the whole of the south with a long, black line of smoke in which sparkled a thousand star-like eyes of fire.

Had they remained to look at that line of smoke, they might have lost the fear of it. Within a few minutes it went as it had come. The sweet evening air cleared and settled down to the silence they loved. But such is the way of destiny that a thing of smoke and illusion may wield a power greater than that of iron or mind.

They did not wait long enough to see what it really was. An impassable wall had arisen behind them. A guard of ferocious beasts had rushed across their path, shutting from them forever the old south world they knew so well. To Queen it was, in the vaguest sense, somewhat more than that. The apprehensions of the moment were dispelled by the widening distance between them and this weird thing they feared; but a new anxiety crept into Queen’s heart, like a snaky creature, and grew bolder there as the danger it forecast approached. It was the fear of the hunted for the cage. It was as if she had entered an enormous trap and had seen the door shut upon her.

They instinctively kept to a strip of wild prairie several miles in width. On the eastern and western horizon they saw from time to time shacks and barns and fences and huge squares of black, plowed earth; and from the distances came at long intervals the muffled barking of dogs. The feel and the smell of man was in the air, and they found that air hard to breathe. They grazed when hunger asserted itself and rested when the younger colts refused to go on, but continued their migration.

They came to a country where there were no shacks and no fences, where the evenness was broken only by promising patches of woodland. There the earth seemed destitute of living things and in the moaning of the winds as they blew through the swaying trees, the spirit of loneliness assured them of safety. The grass on the open spaces grew high as if no living thing had ever touched it, and swaying with the trees, it subtly testified to the authenticity of that assurance. In Queen’s mind, however, the shacks and the fences and the barking of dogs were as yet too distinct to allow her to feel entirely secure; and she continued the flight, fear urging her to go on till the last trace of man had faded from the air and a wall of solitude and wilderness had covered it. But they came one day to a very steep slope. Tall trees rose from the foot of the slope and beyond their tops Queen saw the reflecting waters of the Saskatchewan pouring along rapidly from west to east.

The river was very wide and the darker waters beneath the brighter surface indicated a perilous depth. The fear of the trap that had been vague in Queen’s mind now became distinct as she gazed at the obscure distance from which the river came and at the shadowy spaces into which it rushed. Her faith in the north had given her a decade of precarious freedom and had taken her two hundred miles from her birthplace. The sight of those impassable volumes of water staggered that faith. She grew nervous and restless and when the herd had drunk the treacherous water, she led them away to the west.

A half day’s journey brought them to where the Vermillion River tearing along between high banks comes pouring down from the south and the west and breaks into the Saskatchewan, with a threatening roar. Again Queen felt that she had come to another wall of the trap and turning, led the herd back toward the east. A few days of grazing and moving east along the Saskatchewan brought them to a barbed wire fence that ran down the banks to the very edge of the river. Ever as she had followed the slightly winding river, she had searched in vain for a ford. The doors of the north, too, had closed to them, and their freedom now depended upon a battle of wits, the wits of the herd in the limited wilds against the wits of man in his protecting civilisation.