Over Prairie Trails (5 page)

As I said, I was reminded of those mist pools in the north when I approached the cliff of the fog, especially of that “waterfall” of mist of which I spoke. But besides the difference in composition – the fog, as we shall see, was not homogeneous, this being the cause of its wetness – there was another important point of distinction. For, while the mist of the pools is of the whitest white, this fog showed from the outside and in the mass – the single wreaths seemed white enough – rather the colour of that “wet, unbleached linen” of which Burroughs speaks in connection with rain-clouds.

Now, as soon as I was well engulfed in the fog, I had a few surprises. I could no longer see the road ahead; I could not see the fence along which I had been driving; I saw the
horses’ rumps, but I did not see their heads. I bent forward over the dashboard: I could not even see the ground below. It was a series of negatives. I stopped the horses. I listened – then looked at my watch. The stillness of the grave enveloped me. It was a little past five o’clock. The silence was oppressive – the misty impenetrability of the atmosphere was appalling. I do not say “darkness,” for as yet it was not really dark. I could still see the dial of my watch clearly enough to read the time. But darkness was falling fast – “falling,” for it seemed to come from above: mostly it rises – from out of the shadows under the trees – advancing, fighting back the powers of light above.

One of the horses, I think it was Peter, coughed. It was plain they felt chilly. I thought of my lights and started with stiffening fingers to fumble at the valves of my gas tank. When reaching into my trouser pockets for matches, I was struck with the astonishing degree to which my furs had been soaked in these few minutes. As for wetness, the fog was like a sponge. At last, kneeling in the buggy box, I got things ready. I smelt the gas escaping from the burner of my bicycle lantern and heard it hissing in the headlight. The problem arose of how to light a match. I tried various places – without success. Even the seat of my trousers proved disappointing. I got a sizzling and sputtering flame, it is true, but it went out before I could apply it to the gas. The water began to drip from the backs of my hands. It was no rain because it did not fall. It merely floated along; but the droplets, though smaller, were infinitely more numerous than in a rain – there were more of them in a given space. At last I lifted the seat cushion under which I had a tool box filled with ropes, leather straps and all manner of things that I might ever be in need of during my nights in the open. There I found a dry spot where to strike the needed match. I got the bicycle lantern started.
It burned quite well, and I rather admired it: unreasoningly I seemed to have expected that it would not burn in so strange an atmosphere. So I carefully rolled a sheet of letter paper into a fairly tight roll, working with my back to the fog and under the shelter of my big raccoon coat. I took a flame from the bicycle light and sheltered and nursed it along till I thought it would stand the drizzle. Then I turned and thrust the improvised torch into the bulky reflector case of the searchlight. The result was startling. A flame eighteen inches high leaped up with a crackling and hissing sound.

The horses bolted, and the buggy jumped. I was lucky, for inertia carried me right back on the seat, and as soon as I had the lines in my hands again, I felt that the horses did not really mean it. I do not think we had gone more than two or three hundred yards before the team was under control. I stopped and adjusted the overturned valves. When I succeeded, I found to my disappointment that the heat of that first flame had partly spoiled the reflector. Still, my range of vision now extended to the belly-band in the horses’ harness. The light that used to show me the road for about fifty feet in front of the horses’ heads gave a short truncated cone of great luminosity, which was interesting and looked reassuring; but it failed to reach the ground, for it was so adjusted that the focus of the converging light rays lay ahead and not below. Before, therefore, the point of greatest luminosity was reached, the light was completely absorbed by the fog.

I got out of the buggy, went to the horses’ heads and patted their noses which were dripping with wetness. But now that I faced the headlight, I could see it though I had failed to see the horses’ heads when seated behind it. This, too, was quite reassuring, for it meant that the horses probably could see the ground even though I did not.

But where was I? I soon found out that we had shot off the trail. And to which side? I looked at my watch again. Already the incident had cost me half an hour. It was really dark by now, even outside the fog, for there was no moon. I tried out how far I could get away from the buggy without losing sight of the light. It was only a very few steps, not more than a dozen. I tried to visualize where I had been when I struck the fog. And fortunately my habit of observing the smallest details, even if only subconsciously, helped me out. I concluded that the horses had bolted straight ahead, thus missing an s-shaped curve to the right.

At this moment I heard Peter paw the ground impatiently; so I quickly returned to the horses, for I did not relish the idea of being left alone. There was an air of impatience and nervousness about both of them.

I took my bicycle lantern and reached for the lines. Then, standing clear of the buggy, I turned the horses at right angles, to the north, as I imagined it to be. When we started, I walked alongside the team through dripping underbrush and held the lantern with my free hand close down to the ground.

Two or three times I stopped during the next half hour, trying, since we still did not strike the trail, to reason out a different course. I was now wet through and through up to my knees; and I had repeatedly run into willow-clumps, which did not tend to make me any drier either. At last I became convinced that in bolting the horses must have swerved a little to the south, so that in starting up again we had struck a tangent to the big bend north, just beyond Bell’s farm. If that was the case, we should have to make another turn to the right in order to strike the road again, for at best we were then simply going parallel to it. The trouble was that
I had nothing to tell me the directions, not even a tree the bark or moss of which might have vouchsafed information. Suddenly I had an inspiration. Yes, the fog was coming from the northeast! So, by observing the drift of the droplets I could find at least an approximate meridian line. I went to the headlight, and an observation immediately confirmed my conjecture. I was now convinced that I was on that wild land where two months ago I had watched the goldfinches disporting themselves in the evening sun. But so as not to turn back to the south, I struck out at an angle of only about sixty degrees to my former direction. I tried not to swerve, which involved rough going, and I had many a stumble. Thus I walked for another half hour or thereabout.

Then, certainly! This was the road! The horses turned into it of their own accord. That was the most reassuring thing of all. There was one strange doubt left. Somehow I was not absolutely clear about it whether north might not after all be behind. I stopped. Even a new observation of the fog did not remove the last vestige of a doubt. I had to take a chance, some landmark might help after a while.

I believe in getting ready before I start. So I took my coal-oil lantern, lighted and suspended it under the rear springs of the buggy in such a way that it would throw its light back on the road. Having the light away down, I expected to be able to see at least whether I was on a road or not. In this I was only partly successful; for on the rut-trails nothing showed except the blades of grass and the tops of weeds; while on the grades where indeed I could make out the ground, I did not need a light, for, as I found out, I could more confidently rely on my ear.

I got back to my seat and proceeded to make myself as comfortable as I could. I took off my shoes and socks – keeping
well under the robe – extracted a pair of heavy woollens from my suitcase under the seat, rubbed my feet dry and then wrapped up, without putting my shoes on again, as carefully and scientifically as only a man who has had pneumonia and is a chronic sufferer from pleuritis knows how to do.

At last I proceeded. After listening again with great care for any sound I touched the horses with my whip, and they fell into a quiet trot. It was nearly seven now, and I had probably not yet made eight miles. We swung along. If I was right in my calculations and the horses kept to the road, I should strike the “twelve-mile bridge” in about three-quarters of an hour. That was the bridge leading through the cottonwood gate to the grade past the “hovel.” I kept the watch in the mitt of my left hand.

Not for a moment did it occur to me to turn back. Way up north there was a young woman preparing supper for me. The fog might not be there – she would expect me – I could not disappoint her. And then there was the little girl, who usually would wake up and in her “nightie” come out of bed and sleepily smile at me and climb on to my knee and nod off again. I thought of them, to be sure, of the hours and hours in wait for them, and a great tenderness came over me, and gratitude for the belated home they gave an aging man….

And slowly my mind reverted to the things at hand. And this is what was the most striking feature about them: I was shut in, closed off from the world around. Apart from that cone of visibility in front of the headlight, and another much smaller one from the bicycle lamp, there was not a thing I could see. If the road was the right one, I was passing now through some square miles of wild land. Right and left there were poplar thickets, and ahead there was that line of stately cottonwoods. But no suggestion of a landmark – nothing
except a cone of light which was filled with fog and cut into on both sides by two steaming and rhythmically moving horseflanks. It was like a very small room, this space of light – the buggy itself, in darkness, forming an alcove to it, in which my hand knew every well-appointed detail. Gradually, while I was warming up, a sense of infinite comfort came, and with it the enjoyment of the elvish aspect.

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.