CHAPTER VII
THE PRAIRIE TRAILS
The prairie trails are simply earth roads, it being impossible to get stone for them. The very best trail is much like the worst cart road in England. The trail is made by scooping out the earth on either side of a wide track, and throwing it into the middle, where the clods are baked as hard as bricks by the sun. These clods would knock the bottom out of any car which had not a high clearance—the more so as a used trail has ruts about two feet deep. Trail-making is usually done by a scoop drawn by two horses, but in some places a kind of motor-plough is used. In dry weather a simple track across the prairie made by carts and horses is much easier going, but these tracks are impossible when the snow is melting, or after the heavy thunderstorms of summer. Therefore all the main trails have to be raised in the middle to let off the water, which would otherwise stand till it formed sloughs. When once on the trail you have to keep there, as it is either bordered by a three-foot bank whence the earth was dug, or else it slopes straight into a slough. These sloughs are like great ponds, their bottoms are covered with deep mud, and if it once gets in, a car sinks deeper and deeper, and cannot be got out. The sloughs are very beautiful, reflecting the wonderful blue of the sky, or the marvellous colours of sunset. A prairie sunset is quite beyond description. I have never seen such colours in England.
The flowers on the prairie are lovely, forming a changing kaleidoscope of colour throughout the summer months. They border the trails and the sloughs, and grow in riotous profusion on unbroken ground. When we first took the trail I specially noticed a lovely little pale mauve anemone.
There are also many beautiful birds on the prairie, the most striking being the red-winged blackbird—a very big blackbird with glinting red feathers on the top of his wings. There was also a robin about twice the size of his English cousin, and a yellow-breasted bird which sang a very sweet little song, but never seemed to finish it. There were prairie chickens of a greyish brown, wild duck and large snipe, and a sort of water-hen.
The jack-rabbit was a very ubiquitous person, always jumping across the trail. He is really a hare, greyish-brown in summer and white in winter. Another local inhabitant who made his presence felt was the gopher, which looks like a cross between a squirrel and a weasel. They make their holes in the wheel-ruts of the trails, as we found by bumping violently over their excavations. Badgers adopt the same inconvenient habit, as we discovered to our cost when shot suddenly to the roof of the caravan. Fortunately, they are not so common as gophers. The latter do a great deal of damage to the wheat, so that the farmers are obliged to poison them and the children are given so much per tail; consequently I had little compunction in running over one occasionally when it sat up in the middle of the trail just in front of the wheel. At first I wondered why these beasties chose the trail for their burrows when they had all the enormous prairie at their disposal, until it was explained to me that the hard ground formed a better front door to their holes, as in soft ground the soil would fall in.
We were interested in watching the farming operations en route. They were disking and ploughing and sowing, generally driving six horses abreast. The machines were immensely wide, too large to pass through our widest gates, and it was a heavy alluvial soil, thus needing much horse-power. We also saw a large number of motor tractors in use.
All the main trails are bordered with telephone poles, and a red blaze on these poles indicates the way—i.e., an R or an L tells you when to turn to the right or left. At least, it is supposed to tell you, but as both letters are usually on the same side of the pole, it is up to you to guess whether you turn to the right to go to Winnipeg or to Regina. The matter is further complicated by the letters being made of paper on some trails, in which case they are generally half torn off.
The trails, like the towns, are laid out in squares. In a town the avenues run east and west and the streets north and south. On the trail, when you are running north and south you find a trail running east and west every two miles; and when you are running east and west you find a trail going north and south every mile. But this arrangement is complicated as you draw near to the Arctic Circle, because as the trails are laid out in squares, these squares grow narrower in this direction and so an extra trail, called a correction line, is added at intervals. Also now and again an old Indian trail upsets one's calculations. You never talk of right and left on the prairie, but always of the points of the compass, and these points form the first lesson which a child learns. Yet the actual compass is of no use on these rough roads, as it gets out of order. One learns to steer by the sun and stars.