It is useless to ask for directions, you will merely be told "Go five miles north, and three miles east and one mile south and four miles west, and then look for the elevator at So-and-So. Ye can't miss it." But you can miss it, very easily. Again, you are often told that a place is "quite close" and find it to be at least five miles away.
There are no landmarks on these trails, except the elevators in the towns near the track. The sections are marked by a small heap of stones at their corners. There is scarcely a fence on the prairie, there being no stock to speak of and no wood at hand for posts. There are also no sign-posts or danger signals, and for lack of the latter we had a narrow escape of finishing our tour before it had well begun. Soon after we left Winnipeg, running through the main street of a little town, we suddenly saw a great C.P.R. train cross the road in front of us with no warning whatever. Had we been a minute or two sooner we must have been killed. It is no unusual thing for the track to cross the trail, but in this instance the houses prevented us from seeing the approach of the train.
Meeting another car was an awkward matter as it meant climbing out of the ruts and running with one wheel in the gutter. Sometimes, in trying to avoid a mud hole or something, we ran at such an angle that I only kept my seat by clinging to the steering-wheel, and how Winifred kept hers is a mystery. Straw and sand are sometimes thrown into these mud holes, in a vain endeavour to fill them up. When stuck fast in one it was little consolation to be told that it was probably an old buffalo wallow.
This is how Winifred described the trail in one of her letters: "The road was long, the ruts were deep, the sloughs were lined with mud. The road was narrow, and on each side those watery sloughs did gleam with tempting sunset gleams of cherry, pink and gold, a warm, warm glow. They said 'Oh, guide your car into our gleams and spend the night with us.'"
CHAPTER VIII
FROM WINNIPEG TO REGINA
The first night we camped near a farm-house so as to be able to get water. We did this whenever it was possible. Going to bed in a caravan proved to be an acquired art. First we had to put all the camping equipment, etc., either in front of the driving seat or outside the van covered over with a waterproof sheet (there was always a very heavy dew at night); then we let down the mattresses and arranged the bedding. Next came the difficulty of undressing, there being barely 12 inches between the mattresses when they were let down. We could not make a dressing-room of the prairie because we generally camped near a farm, and anyhow the clarity of the atmosphere and the flat ground made one visible from a long distance. This first night we sat on our mattresses and wriggled out of our clothes, there being no room in the van to stand upright. Afterwards we adopted the plan of going to bed one by one. We put up the tent for a second room whenever we stayed long enough in a place to make it worth while. We had been obliged to do this trip without our sleeping-bags, and so were very cold at night, as the temperature then falls very low even in the summer. You really need a sleeping-bag as well as blankets on the prairie. Our excellent health throughout the tour was probably largely due to our precautions in this matter. My sleeping-bag had already done much service, having been lent me by a cousin who had used it on the French and Italian fronts, and my mosquito net was a loan from a padre who had served at Salonica. This preserved me from much discomfort and blood-poisoning, as later in the summer the mosquitoes were very ferocious, especially to us newcomers.
We started on our tour with a due regard for appearances, both of us armed with travelling looking-glasses. But these soon got smashed in our bumpy progress, and henceforth we contented ourselves with tidying our hair from our shadows cast on the ground or our reflections in the wind-screen, or, Hyacinth-like, gazed fondly into the sloughs.
I turned out first in the morning, as I was going to cook the breakfast, and found it decidedly cold. When I went to the farm for milk and eggs the nice woman would not let me pay for them. We found great generosity wherever we went. We had brought sufficient water from Winnipeg in the ferrostate flask for tea, but this was too precious to use for washing up, so we had our first experience of getting water out of a prairie well. This shortage of water and the expense of boring very deep wells is one of the farmers' great trials. In certain places you have to go down forty feet for water. If there is no gasolene engine or windmill it has to be drawn up with a bucket and rope. This is by no means easy, the problem being to prevent the bucket from floating empty on the surface of the water. To avoid this you have to swing the bucket so that it falls in sideways and fills itself, but if you are not very careful when drawing it up it will sway violently and spill half the contents. On this first occasion, having proudly drawn up my water, I essayed to take it away in our canvas bucket, but not knowing the habits of the latter it turned over just as I had got it filled. Afterwards I circumvented it by weighting it with a stone or propping it up.
When at last we were all ready to start, the engine unfortunately wasn't. I thought that the sparking plugs had probably got damp with the heavy dew, or had got oily, so I took them out and cleaned them and also cleaned the carburetter. In the meantime Winifred went off to the neighbouring town to fetch help from a garage, but they were all too busy with motor tractors to come. Presently two farm men came and talked to me and helped to undo screws, but did not seem to know much about a car. The small boy from the farm saved the situation by his cheerful chatter. He kept telling me that the radiator was like a letter-box.