“No,” say they both, most emphatically, “we’re Canadians now.”
After a friendly meal of bread and bacon, we leave the good men behind, and with them leave the modern world. The ancient world opens up around us as we [a]Birds and Beasts] ride away to the north—the ancient prairie as it was, as it is, and never-more shall be.
Bathed in a glorious flood of sunshine, a glorious flood of air, the rolling plain spreads limitless to far horizons. Space, never-ending space, all round; and silence, but for the music of our horses’ hoofs.
High overhead fly steadily a flock of cranes, in perfect arrow-head formation, two long lines converging on the leader. Wild duck fly, straight but scattering, from slough to slough. The little greyish lark hops everywhere.
The gopher sits bolt upright on the edge of a hole, vanishing downward like a shot when he thinks audacity has reached fool-hardiness. Twenty yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouts up where a big striped badger is digging himself a home. He turns and stares at us, motionless, till we also stop, when he too disappears. Now and then a snake slips across the trail, a greenish-yellow innocent.
On the crest of a knoll, outlined against the sky, a great buzzard sits watching us till we come near, then soars away on the other side. A coyote steals swiftly over the plain, turning round and stopping now and then for a good look at us. Again and again, rounding a hillock, we startle a bunch of antelope; they make off in a leisurely-seeming way, but their graceful leaps take them out of range with the speed of a fast train. When the railway later on had to fence its track, the antelope at first would stop, distressed and puzzled by the mysterious obstacle to their migration; but they soon learned to clear the barrier at a bound. . . .
Suddenly we spy a house—then a second house, and [a]Thin Thread of Settlement] a little sod shack—the only sign of settlement between the South Saskatchewan and the Battle River valley. It looks like an isolated knot of dwellings, but we are really cutting across a long thin line. The newcomers left the railway at Saskatoon—the Canadian Northern, which before the end of the year will be through from Winnipeg to Edmonton—but, finding the land near the railway taken up, they have driven on and on to the south-west, till at last, after 85 miles, they have reached land without an owner. Others following them have gone on in the same direction, till now the thread of settlement stretches out to a length of a hundred miles from the railway.
Antelope on the Alert
The sod shack is the first western home of a farmer from Ontario, whose family will not be coming up till spring. On the next homestead is a good frame house, an unpainted and unvarnished shell so far, but showing taste and means which scorn to shelter even for a time [a]Hospitable Métis] within rough comfortable walls of turf. This, too, belongs to a born Briton from Ontario. The third settler is a cheery Perthshire Highlander. He has spent twelve years in Manitoba, sold his farm at a profit, and come far afield for a free homestead. He has already got 50 acres broken for next year’s crop, and finds time to act as baker for the settlers “baching it” around him.