The Fair Dominion: A Record of Canadian Impressions

by R. E. Vernède

ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY.

'Oh, but I'll give you a slicker,' said the manageress. 'You see there's no run on the ponies at present, and I'll ask the man to give you his very best. He'll just get you there and back in time.'

I thanked her and said I would try the slicker; and, half an hour later, the slicker and I were skirting the wooded shore of the Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain pony, quite a fast trot. We were alone together. There were a few guests at the chalet, but the lateness of the season and the snow-clouds that loomed on the horizon had deterred any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley trip that day. Earlier in the year, there would have been quite a party riding together with a guide in the direction I was taking, for there are four camps in the valley, placed at picturesque points an easy day's ride apart, where you may rest and sleep, one night beneath a waterfall, the next on the edge of a glacier, with the ponies tethered round, and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so that you feel that you are pioneering, but pioneering luxuriously.

But now, as I have said, it was late in the season, and the snow-clouds were holding themselves in the sky ready for further attacks, and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so that no one else thought the Yoho Valley tempting enough, and it was certain I should have it all to myself if I got there.

The trail was not difficult to follow. There, at the end of the lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake; he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp, green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles); and he trotted up the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide. The trail was less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling stones, and though it wound continually, its most generous spirals left it, to my fancy, almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders and hanging trees and little cataracts that shot through air from some invisible lips of stone above—between shadowy crags and over unprotected places where the sun glared. In the end the slicker brought me to the pass itself, and we rode into a dark wood there, and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and the trail grew stickier and stickier, and the pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far below, was the Yoho Valley.

The story of the boy who cried 'wolf' when there was no wolf is a familiar one, but much more familiar in everyday life is the story of the man who cries 'lion' when there is no lion. You know him and you don't believe him. You know that, moved by the immoderate enthusiasm which is the chief qualification for the profession of writing, he is doing his level best to make you believe that the object he is presenting to you is a lion, for the simple reason that if you believe it, you will be more attracted by it and him. Canada, being a much-advertised country at present, is full of lions. 'The finest view in Canada. Yes, sir.' How often I heard that remark! How often it turned out to be an overstatement. How distrustfully I came to listen to it.

Was it, then, that for some months I had imbibed the Canadian air, that when I reached the Rockies I too was carried away, and became as immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian? I do not know. I merely have to confess that I was carried away, that I have already cried 'lion' more than once, and that I must do so once again now that I have got to the Yoho Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity—and that of literature—by using an asterisk at these critical points, or two asterisks if his emotions are very poignant. But I, who have to fill paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid of exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho. This valley of enormous trees spiring up from unseen gorges to wellnigh unseen heights; of cataracts that fall in foam a thousand feet; of massed innumerable glaciers; this valley into which it seems you could drop all Switzerland, and still look down—is not easily overpraised. The difficulty is to praise it at all adequately.

It seemed to me as I rode on along the high trail that sometimes edged out to the gulf below and sometimes swerved back from it, that one of the wonders of the valley was a thing that in smaller places would have made for disappointment, and that is that it lies, and always has lain, outside the human radius. It has none of those connections with men that set us thrilling in other parts. No Hannibal ever led his army by this route across these mountains. No hardy tribesmen watched the approach of an enemy among its crags, or bred among them a race of mountaineers. No gods dwelt on its heights, and no poets ever came near to sing them. History has nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little valleys have their stories and their songs, their memories and their miracles. They are haunted still with those forgotten mysteries which stir men's fancies more deeply than things remembered or discovered can. This valley walled about with mountains has been above and beyond men's ken from the beginning of the world: and now that men have come into it, they find nothing to discover in it except its vastness and immunity from the touch of men. It strikes one even now as not only devoid of human adjuncts but needless of them. A man no more looks for legends there than he would look for them in the centre of a typhoon.

I suppose that men did pass through it—even before the valley became a known part of the world, and even a sight for tourists. It was not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by the foot of man. A few prospectors must have passed this way from time to time many years ago. Some may have died there for all one knows. Indian hunters, too, would enter the valley in pursuit of game. But no one possessed it; no one gave it the human air: or, if they did, the records are lost. Prospectors tell us only of their finds, nothing of their lives. Of the Indians, some one someday may, perhaps, find some traces. At present their white brothers are little troubled by them or their history or their origin. Canadians are content to think of them as a primitive, decaying people who came from God knows where to a country they never realised was God's. It will be easier to forget them than to understand them, these strange men with faces no more expressive than wood, who, if they ever came to the Yoho Valley, must have passed through it more like trees walking among the trees than like men that stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and a name.