Over Prairie Trails

by Frederick Philip Grove

I began to watch the fog. By bending over towards the dashboard and looking into the soon arrested glare I could make out the component parts of the fog. It was like the mixture of two immiscible liquids—oil, for instance, shaken up with water. A fine, impalpable, yet very dense mist formed the ground mass. But in it there floated myriads of droplets, like the droplets of oil in water. These droplets would sometimes sparkle in a mild, unobtrusive way as they were nearing the light; and then they would dash against the pane and keep it dripping, dripping down.

I leaned back again; and I watched the whole of the light-cone. Snow white wisps would float and whirl through it in graceful curves, stirred into motion by the horses’ trot. Or a wreath of it would start to dance, as if gently pulled or plucked at from above; and it would revolve, faster towards the end, and fade again into the shadows behind. I thought of a summer in Norrland, in Sweden, in the stone-and-birch waste which forms the timberline, where I had also encountered the mist pools. And a trip down a stream in the borderland of the Finns came back with great vividness into my mind. That trip had been made in a fog like this; only it had been begun in the early morning, and the whole mass of the mist had been suffused with the whitest of lights. But strange to say, what stood out most strikingly in the fleeting memory of the voyage, was the weird and mocking laughter of the magpies all along the banks. The Finnish woods seemed alive with that mocking laughter, and it truly belongs to the land of the mists. For a moment I thought that something after all was missing here on the prairies. But then I reflected again that this silence of the grave was still more perfect, still more uncanny and ghostly, because it left the imagination entirely free, without limiting it by even as much as a suggestion.

No wonder, I thought, that the Northerners in their land of heath and bog were the poets of elves and goblins and of the fear of ghosts. Shrouds were these fogs, hanging and waving and floating shrouds! Mocking spirits were plucking at them and setting them into their gentle motions. Gleams of light, that dance over the bog, lured you in, and once caught in these veils after veils of mystery, madness would seize you, and you would wildly dash here and there in a vain attempt at regaining your freedom; and when, exhausted at last, you broke down and huddled together on the ground, the werwolf would come, ghostly himself, and huge and airy and weird, his body woven of mist, and in the fog’s stately and leisurely way he would kneel down on your chest, slowly crushing you beneath his exceeding weight; and bending and straightening, bending and stretching, slowly—slowly down came his head to your throat; and then he would lie and not stir until morning and suck; and after few or many days people would find you, dead in the woods—a victim of fog and mist...

A rumbling sound made me sit up at last. We were crossing over the “twelve-mile bridge.” In spite of my dreaming I was keeping my eyes on the look-out for any sign of a landmark, but this was the only one I had known so far, and it came through the ear, not the eye. I promptly looked back and up, to where the cottonwoods must be; but no sign of high, weeping trees, no rustling of fall-dry leaves, not even a deeper black in the black betrayed their presence. Well, never before had I failed to see some light, to hear some sound around the house of the “moneyed” type or those of the “half way farms.” Surely, somehow I should be aware of their presence when I got there! Some sign, some landmark would tell me how far I had gone!... The horses were trotting along, steaming, through the brewing fog. I had become all ear. Even though my buggy was silent and though the road was coated with a thin film of soft clay-mud, I could distinctly hear by the muffled thud of the horses’ hoofs on the ground that they were running over a grade. That confirmed my bearings. I had no longer a moment’s doubt or anxiety over my drive.

The grade was left behind, the rut-road started again, was passed and outrun. So now I was close to the three-farm cluster. I listened intently for the horses’ thump. Yes, there was that muffled hoof-beat again—I was on the last grade that led to the angling road across the corner of the marsh.

Truly, this was very much like lying down in the sleeping-car of an overland train. You recline and act as if nothing unusual were going on; and meanwhile a force that has something irresistible about it and is indeed largely beyond your control, wafts you over mile after mile of fabled distance; now and then the rumble of car on rail will stop, the quiet awakens you, lights flash their piercing darts, a voice calls out; it is a well known stop on your journey and then the rumbling resumes, you doze again, to be awakened again, and so on. And when you get up in the morning—there she lies, the goal of your dreams-the resplendent city...

My goal was my “home,” and mildly startling, at least one such mid-nightly awakening came. I had kept peering about for a landmark, a light. Somewhere here in those farmhouses which I saw with my mind’s eye, people were sitting around their fireside, chatting or reading. Lamps shed their homely light; roof and wall kept the fog-spook securely out: nothing as comfortable then as to listen to stories of being lost on the marsh, or to tell them... But between those people and myself the curtain had fallen—no sign of their presence, no faintest gleam of their light and warmth! They did not know of the stranger passing outside, his whole being a-yearn with the desire for wife and child. I listened intently—no sound of man or beast, no soughing of wind in stems or rustling of the very last leaves that were now fast falling... And then the startling neighing of Dan, my horse! This was the third trip he made with me, and I might have known and expected it, but it always came as a surprise. Whenever we passed that second farm, he stopped and raising his head, with a sideways motion, neighed a loud and piercing call. And now he had stopped and done it again. He knew where we were. I lowered my whip and patted his rump. How did he know? And why did he do it? Was there a horse on this farmstead which he had known in former life? Or was it a man? Or did he merely feel that it was about time to put in for the night? I enquired later on, but failed to discover any reason for his behaviour.

Now came that angling road past the “White Range Line House.” I relied on the horses entirely. This “Range Line House” was inhabited now—a settler was putting in winter-residence so he might not lose his claim. He had taken down the clapboards that closed the windows, and always had I so far seen a light in the house.

It seemed to me that in this corner of the marsh the fog was less dense than it had been farther south, and the horses, once started, were swinging along though in a leisurely way, yet without hesitation. Another half hour passed. Once, at a bend in the trail, the rays from the powerful tractor searchlight, sweeping sideways past the horses, struck a wetly glistening, greyish stone to the right of the road. I knew that stone. Yes, surely the fog must be thinning, or I could not have seen it. I could now also dimly make out the horses’ heads, as they nodded up and down...

And then, like a phantom, way up in the mist, I made out a blacker black in the black—the majestic poplars north of the “Range Line House.” Not that I could really see them or pick out the slightest detail—no! But it seemed to my searching eyes as if there was a quiet pool in the slow flow of the fog—as the water in a slow flowing stream will come to rest when it strikes the stems of a willow submerged at its margin. I was trying even at the time to decide how much of what I seemed to divine rather than to perceive was imagination and how much reality. And I was just about ready to contend that I also saw to the north something like the faintest possible suggestion of an eddy, such as would form in the flowing water below a pillar or a rock—when I was rudely shaken up and jolted.