As he went out again, Walter paused on the threshold to stare in amazement. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but the whole world had changed. He seemed to be standing in the center of a vast bowl. On every hand the country appeared to curve upward. And the distance was no longer distant! Groves of bare branched trees, streams, heights of land that he knew to be miles away had moved in around the settlement until they seemed only a few rods distant. To the west the line of hills,—Pembina Mountains,—that he had never glimpsed, even on the clearest day, as more than a faint blue line on the horizon, loomed up a mighty, flat-topped ridge. Once before, in December, Walter had seen the landscape transformed, but it was nothing to compare with this. Louis, familiar from childhood with the mirage of the prairie, declared he had never known such an extraordinary one.
Awed and wondering, the two lads stood gazing about them. Turning to the east, they watched a spreading ray of crimson light mount the sky from the soft, low lying, rose and gold bordered clouds at the horizon. The sun was coming up. As the horizon clouds reddened and the rim of the glowing disk appeared, an exclamation from his companion caused Walter to wheel about.
Louis was pointing at two men and a dog team gliding through the air,—upside down! Every detail was startlingly clear, capotes with hoods pulled up, sashes, buckskin leggings, snowshoes. The driver with the long whip looked very tall. He belabored his dogs cruelly. It seemed to Walter that he ought to hear the man’s shouts and curses, the howls and whines of the abused beasts. He could see their tracks in the snow, and a fringe of trees beyond them,—everything inverted as if he himself were standing on his head to watch men and dogs moving across the prairie. As he watched, the figures grew to gigantic stature, the outlines became indistinct. They vanished altogether. The sun was above the clouds now. The distance grew hazy. Only part of the chain of hills was visible. Louis turned to Walter, excitement in his voice.
“I think those men go to the mountain too,” he said. “Do you know how far away they are?”
Walter shook his head. He felt quite incapable of estimating distance in this fantastic world, where things he knew to be miles away were almost hitting him in the face.
“At least fifteen miles,” declared Louis impressively.
“Impossible. We couldn’t see them so plainly.”
“And yet we have seen them. The mirage is always unbelievable.”
“What is it anyway, Louis? What causes it?”
The Canadian lad shrugged his shoulders. “The Indians say the spirits of the air play tricks to bewilder men and make them wander off the trail to seek things that are not there. Once I asked Father Dumoulin and he said the spirits had nothing to do with it. He called it a false effect of light, but that does not explain it, do you think?”