Over Prairie Trails (13 page)

I thought of my wife, and of how she would have felt had she been able to follow the scenes in some magical mirror through every single vicissitude of my drive. And once more I saw with the eye of recent memory the horses in that long, endless plunge through the corner of the marsh. Once more I felt my muscles a-quiver with the strain of that last wild struggle over that last, inhuman drift. And slowly I made up my mind that the next time, the very next day, on my return trip, I was going to add another eleven miles to my already long drive and to take a different road. I knew the trail over which I had been coming so far was closed for the rest of the winter – there was no traffic there – no trail would be kept open. That other road of which I was thinking and which lay further west was the main cordwood trail to the towns in the south. It was out of my way, to be sure, but I felt convinced that I could spare my horses and even save time by making the detour.

Being on the east side of the dam, I could not see school or cottage till I turned up on the correction line. But when at last I saw it, I felt somewhat as I had felt coming home from my first big trip overseas. It seemed a lifetime since I had started out. I seemed to be a different man.

Here, in the timber land, the snow had not drifted to any extent. There were signs of the gale, but its record was written in fallen tree trunks, broken branches, a litter of twigs – not in drifts of snow. My wife would not surmise what I had gone through.

She came out with a smile on her face when I pulled in on the yard. It was characteristic of her that she did not ask why I came so late; she accepted the fact as something for which there were no doubt compelling reasons. “I was giving our girl a bath,” she said; “she cannot come.” And then she looked wistfully at my face and at the horses. Silently I slipped the harness off their backs. I used to let them have their freedom for a while on reaching home. And never yet but Peter at least had had a kick and a caper and a roll before they sought their mangers. To-day they stood for a moment knock-kneed, without moving, then shook themselves in a weak, half-hearted way and went with drooping heads and weary limbs straight to the stable.

“You had a hard trip?” asked my wife; and I replied with as much cheer as I could muster, “I have seen sights to-day that I did not expect to see before my dying day.” And taking her arm, I looked at the westering sun and turned towards the house.

W
hen I awoke on the morning after the last described arrival at “home,” I thought of the angry glow in the east at sunrise of the day before. It had been cold again over night, so cold that in the small cottage, whatever was capable of freezing froze to its very core. The frost had even penetrated the hole which in this “teacher’s residence” made shift for a cellar, and, in spite of their being covered with layer upon layer of empty bags, had sweetened the winter’s supply of potatoes.

But towards morning there had been a let-up, a sudden rise in temperature, as we experience it so often, coincident with a change in the direction of the wind, which now blew rather briskly from the south, foreboding a storm.

I got the horses ready at an early hour, for I was going to try the roundabout way at last, forty-five miles of it; and never before had I gone over the whole of it in winter. Even in summer I had done so only once, and that in a car, when I had accompanied the school-inspector on one of his trips. I wanted to make sure that I should be ready in time to start at ten o’clock in the morning.

This new road had chiefly two features which recommended it to me. Firstly, about thirty-eight miles out of forty-five led through a fairly well settled district where I could hope to find a chain of short-haul trails. The widest gap in this series of settlements was one of two miles where there was wild land. The remaining seven miles, it is true, led across that wilderness on the east side of which lay Bell’s farm. This piece, however, I knew so well that I felt sure of finding my way there by night or day in any reasonable kind of weather. Nor did I expect to find it badly drifted. And secondly, about twenty-nine miles from “home” I should pass within one mile of a town which boasted of boarding house and livery stable, offering thus, in case of an emergency, a convenient stopping place.

I watched the sky rather anxiously, not so much on my own account as because my wife, seeing me start, would worry a good deal should that start be made in foul weather. At nine the sky began to get grey in spots. Shortly after a big cloud came sailing up, and I went out to watch it. And sure enough, it had that altogether loose appearance, with those wind-torn, cottony appendages hanging down from its darker upper body which are sure to bring snow. Lower away in the south – a rare thing to come from the south in our climate – there lay a black squall-cloud with a rounded outline, like a big windbag, resembling nothing so much as a fat boy’s face with its cheeks blown out, when he tries to fill a football with the pressure from his lungs. That was an infallible sign. The first cloud, which was travelling fast, might blow over. The second, larger one was sure to bring wind a-plenty. But still there was hope. So long as it did not bring outright snow, my wife would not worry so much. Here where she was, the snow would not drift – there was altogether too much bush. She
– not having been much of an observer of the skies before – dreaded the snowstorm more than the blizzard. I knew the latter was what portended danger.

When I turned back into the house, a new thought struck me. I spoke to my wife, who was putting up a lunch for me, and proposed to take her and our little girl over to a neighbour’s place a mile and a half west of the school. Those people were among the very few who had been decent to her, and the visit would beguile the weary Sunday afternoon. She agreed at once. So we all got ready; I brought the horses out and hooked them up, alone – no trouble from them this morning: they were quiet enough when they drank deep at the well.

A few whirls of snow had come down meanwhile – not enough, however, as yet to show as a new layer on the older snow. Again a cloud had torn loose from that squall-bag on the horizon, and again it showed that cottony, fringy, whitish under layer which meant snow. I raised the top of the cutter and fastened the curtains.

By the time we three piled in, the thin flakes were dancing all around again, dusting our furs with their thin, glittering crystals. I bandied baby-talk with the little girl to make things look cheerful, but there was anguish in the young woman’s look. I saw she would like to ask me to stay over till Monday, but she knew that I considered it my duty to get back to town by night.

The short drive to the neighbour’s place was pleasant enough. There was plenty of snow on this part of the correction line, which farther east was bare; and it was packed down by abundant traffic. Then came the parting. I kissed wife and child; and slowly, accompanied by much waving of hands on the part of the little girl and a rather depressed looking smile
on that of my wife, I turned on the yard and swung back to the road. The cliffs of black poplar boles engulfed me at once: a sheltered grade.

But I had not yet gone very far – a mile perhaps, or a little over – when the trees began to bend under the impact of that squall. Nearly at the same moment the sun, which so far had been shining in an intermittent way, was blotted from the sky, and it turned almost dusky. For a long while – for more than an hour, indeed – it had seemed as if that black squall-cloud were lying motionless at the horizon – an anchored ship, bulging at its wharf. But then, as if its moorings had been cast off, or its sails unfurled, it travelled up with amazing speed. The wind had an easterly slant to it – a rare thing with us for a wind from that quarter to bring a heavy storm. The gale had hardly been blowing for ten or fifteen minutes, when the snow began to whirl down. It came in the tiniest possible flakes, consisting this time of short needles that looked like miniature spindles, strung with the smallest imaginable globules of ice – no six-armed crystals that I could find so far. Many a snowstorm begins that way with us. And there was even here, in the chasm of the road, a swing and dance to the flakes that bespoke the force of the wind above.

My total direction – after I should have turned off the correction line – lay to the southeast; into the very teeth of the wind. I had to make it by laps though, first south, then east, then south again, with the exception of six or seven miles across the wild land west of Bell’s corner; there, as nearly as I could hold the direction, I should have to strike a true line southeast.

I timed my horses; I could not possibly urge them on today. They took about nine minutes to the mile, and I knew
I should have to give them many a walk. That meant at best a drive of eight hours. It would be dark before I reached town. I did not mind that, for I knew there would be many a night drive ahead, and I felt sure that that half-mile on the southern correction line, one mile from town, would have been gone over on Saturday by quite a number of teams. The snow settles down considerably, too, in thirty hours, especially under the pressure of wind. If a trail had been made over the drift, I was confident my horses would find it without fail. So I dismissed all anxiety on my own score.

But all the more did the thought of my wife worry me. If only I could have made her see things with my own eyes – but I could not. She regarded me as an invalid whose health was undermined by a wasting illness and who needed nursing and coddling on the slightest provocation. Instead of drawing Nature’s inference that what cannot live should die, she clung to the slender thread of life that sometimes threatened to break – but never on these drives. I often told her that, if I could make my living by driving instead of teaching, I should feel the stronger, the healthier, and the better for it – my main problem would have been solved. But she, with a woman’s instinct for shelter and home, cowered down before every one of Nature’s menaces. And yet she bore up with remarkable courage.

A mile or so before I came to the turn in my road the forest withdrew on both sides, yielding space to the fields and elbow-room for the wind to unfold its wings. As soon as its full force struck the cutter, the curtains began to emit that crackling sound which indicates to the sailor that he has turned his craft as far into the wind as he can safely do without losing speed. Little ripples ran through the bulging canvas. As yet I sat snug and sheltered within, my left shoulder
turned to the weather, but soon I sighted dimly a curtain of trees that ran at right angles to my road. Behind it there stood a school building, and beyond that I should have to turn south. I gave the horses a walk. I decided to give them a walk of five minutes for every hour they trotted along. We reached the corner that way, and I started them up again.

Instantly things changed. We met the wind at an angle of about thirty degrees from the southeast. The air looked thick ahead. I moved into the left-hand corner of the seat, and though the full force of the wind did not strike me there, the whirling snow did not respect my shelter. It blew in slantways under the top, then described a curve upward, and downward again, as if it were going to settle on the right end of the back. But just before it touched the back, it turned at a sharp angle and piled on to my right side. A fair proportion of it reached my face which soon became wet and then caked over with ice. There was a sting to the flakes which made them rather disagreeable. My right eye kept closing up, and I had to wipe it ever so often to keep it open. The wind, too, for the first and only time on my drives, somehow found an entrance into the lower part of the cutter box, and though my feet were resting on the heater and my legs were wrapped, first in woollen and then in leather leggings, besides being covered with a good fur robe, my left side soon began to feel the cold. It may be that this comparative discomfort, which I had to endure for the better part of the day, somewhat coloured the kind of experience this drive became.

As far as the road was concerned, I had as yet little to complain of. About three miles from the turn there stood a Lutheran church frequented by the Russian Germans that formed a settlement for miles around. They had made the
trail for me on these three miles, and even for a matter of four or five miles south of the church, as I found out. It is that kind of a road which you want for long drives: where others who have short drives and, therefore, do not need to consider their horses break the crust of the snow and pack it down. I hoped that a goodly part of my day’s trip would be in the nature of a chain of shorter, much frequented stretches; and on the whole I was not to be disappointed.

Doubtless all my readers know how a country road that is covered with from two to three feet of snow will look when the trail is broken. There is a smooth expanse, mostly somewhat hardened at the surface, and there are two deep-cut tracks in it, each about ten to twelve inches wide, sharply defined, with the snow at the bottom packed down by the horses’ feet and the runners of the respective conveyances. So long as you have such a trail and horses with road sense, you do not need to worry about your directions, no matter how badly it may blow. Horses that are used to travelling in the snow will never leave the trail, for they dread nothing so much as breaking in on the sides. This fact released my attention for other things.