Title:      The Flying Years (1942)
Author:     Frederick Niven
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Date first posted:          March 2004
Date most recently updated: March 2004

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DEDICATORY LETTER

to

A. RICHARDS

My dear Richards,

There is no need to remind you--far in terrestrial space though the Columbia Valley may be from Magdalene College--of September, 1933. "A magic gets hold of some days and they remain with you forever . . ." So I read--a reference to certain days in that September--in one of those welcome letters that Dorothy and you collaborate upon.

The sage-brush, as you will remember, was in full yellow bloom on the slopes of the foothills and the peaks you were going to climb were austere in distance. The saddle-horses and the pack-horses that were to carry you to your base camp had gone out on their way to the road's end, and in Wilmer, all sunlight and the ricochetting of a clicking grasshopper or two, you waited for the car in which you were to follow them. There, after talk of this and that, you asked me: "And what are you doing just now?" So I outlined to you The Flying Years of which not a word was written then. I will not excessively say that you upheld me from falling and strengthened my feeble knees. I was not so hopeless as all that either of being able to tell something of them or of finding ears, somewhere, to hear; but I did have, at the back of my mind, a melancholy whisper of "Who cares?" Your interest, your enthusiasm, silenced it. The day came of "All set." There was the car spinning away, and you called through its dust that was enveloping me, for a parting word: "Don't let the years fly too long."

I can't tell you how I appreciated that nor how memory of it has heartened me in the writing of this book that I am dedicating to you--in the hope that you will find it not too grievously lacking in what, as I outlined it to you, you felt it should contain and convey.

Yours,

Frederick Niven.

Apart from the historic characters in this novel no portrait is intended of any person.

Memory, as the years slipped past, always served Angus Munro with Loch Brendan through a web of yammering gulls, but his mother remembered it through a mist of tears.

There had come to her no omen that the Munros were to leave there. An omen would have hinted the Hand of God in it, however strangely, whereas there seemed to be only the callousness and rapacity of man. Not that any supernatural warning was needed in face of the bitter evidences, but her folk were prone to omens. Her grandmother, as she often told, when recounting the stories of the land, had been waked one night in the '45 by her brother who was, as they said, out. She had sat up in bed, staring at him in the dusk of the kitchen. The smouldering seed of the fire had blazed to a sudden puff of air--and he it was, without doubt, in that flicker of light. He shook his head to her, forlorn-like, as in a sign that something had miscarried, and then was gone. "So you see," Angus's mother would say, "my granny was fully prepared when the news came that her brother was dead on Culloden Field."

As for herself, when the news came that Angus's brother, Robin, had been drowned in the Sound, she was prepared. She took it as his father did not. Daniel Munro seemed to lose his reason for awhile, marching to and fro like a soldier on sentry-go, back and forth. At each sudden advance he appeared to be going for help; then he would halt, aware that there was no help, stand dazed a moment, wheel, and stride off again--back and forth. But Mrs. Munro spoke slowly:

"That was the death candles burning over the Sound last night," said she. "I should never have let him go this day. I was warned."

She was intimate with ghosts. Shadows, by the way, was the word for them among another folk in another land to which they were all going--the father grimly, the mother in tears, the lad with a sense of adventuring.

They were no great readers in Brendan in those days, though in the winter great story-tellers, while sleet scoured the window and night gave a hollow moan in the chimney, with narratives of the old days, myth and truth: of King Hakon; of the Norse woman with the flame-coloured hair; of Cromwell's soldiers that bided in Inverness after the wars and, surrounded there by the Gaelic speech, kept pure amongst themselves their own tongue and passed on to their bairns the fine language of their time, so that, in after years, Sassenach philologists would comment on how beautiful was the English the folk of Inverness spoke; of Prince Charles Stuart; of Cluny in his "cage" on Ben Alder when it was supposed by most that he was long since in France; of the smoking out of the Macdonalds in the cave of Sciur; of the pixies and the kelpies.

Angus's father saw the change coming and was for the boy conning his book. The English they had was thus book-English, their natural speech being the Gaelic. Even Mrs. Munro learnt to speak it--and with the prettiest lilt. But the point here is that between his mother's old stories and the books that his father got for him, and a bent he had for knowing what was happening on the hills and the lochs and the sea--a sort of living with the weather--the boy (sixteen then) had his own kind of private excitement and happiness in life. He had his own gossip, too. He would sooner hear of a whiskered seal flapping onto the Black Rocks with gruff bark like an old man's cough, than any yatter of human follies and failings.

The eviction at Brendan was quieter than some. The Munros expected it. Daniel possessed a booklet--Information for Emigrants to British North America. PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY (that on the title-page gave them deep confidence in it), Price Sixpence--and he and Angus assuredly conned it, reading all its information on New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward's Island, on Eastern (Lower) Canada, on Western (Upper) Canada, and were a little troubled that the Western Canada it touched upon was not the west to which they were going. They were going even beyond "Western (Upper) Canada." They made themselves acquainted, hopefully, with the value out there of the sovereign and the guinea, and discovered what an American Eagle was worth, a Spanish minted doubloon, a Spanish milled dollar, and what was a pistareen. A great mixture of coins there seemed to be in the Canadas, from the French five-franc piece to the Mexican dollar. They learnt that there were Emigrant Sheds at the landing-place for those who could not "incur the expense of lodging," in which they could sleep a night if necessary, and they made computation of how much food they should cook in preparation for their further journey into that west beyond the tabulated west of the booklet. It was cheering to note that the further one went the higher were the wages paid for labour.

Folk ate well in the Canadas by all accounts, never there, as in Scotland, on the edge of starvation. A man could kill his deer without by your leave of any, and there were crops other than of poor oats and potatoes. There was even a sugar tree! Now, there was a land for you! Think on it! Yes, there was a lot of talk of "the Canadas" before they were, indeed, started on their way thither.

Their neighbours, the Grants (Jessie Grant was the lass of Angus's calf-love), were also leaving Brendan, but not for the Canadas. There were but Jessie and her mother, the father having been drowned in the boat accident that took Robin Munro. They were going to Glasgow to live with Mrs. Grant's sister, married to an ex-soldier, Cameron by name, a big-hearted man who had set up as a smith, was doing fine there, and had offered, himself, to look after them.

The events of the Highlands and the isles of that period put a kind of dolour into even the young, ageing them somewhat, gave them too soon, a sense of distrust in Life. Happiness and trouble were blent in their eyes and the elders seemed always to be admonishing them in this fashion: "There's no one can go courting these days." "There's no lad can plight troth with a lass these days."

Nevertheless, there they were--Jessie and Angus--in the silver-green shade of a birch wood by Loch Brendan, betwixt Brendan and the point, on the morning of the day of departure. To each the proximity of the other was a rare, blessed, mysterious and secret anodyne for the public woe that they could not escape.

"If I make a way in the Canadas--" Angus began.

Jessie interrupted him.

"I'm sure of myself but I'm not sure of you," she said.

What, exactly, did she mean? What was it in him, he wondered, that she was not sure of?

"Would you wait for me?" he asked her.

"I'll not say yes," she answered, "because--" she left the rest in air.

"Because of what. Jessie?" He repeated her name, urgently: "Jessie, Jessie . . ."

She sighed his name for the only reply, held her face up to him. As he bent kissing her she turned it away in some young distress, then suddenly drew him close, responding to his caresses. Next moment she abruptly disengaged herself, shook her head, her cheeks pallid.

"No promises!" she implored. "I'm sure of myself but I'm not sure of you. There's mother calling."

She pressed a hand against his breast and ran from him as though she were running also, in agitation, in deep distress, from herself. At the bend of the road she halted and looked round. There they stood looking one to the other--for an eternity, it seemed: then she turned and was gone from sight and he walked home by the loch-side, the incoming Atlantic tide toying with the seaweed fringe of Scotland along the rocks.

By the door stood a group of men, talking. It was the old talk (repetitive as that of the young lovers on their uncertainties), talk upon the plight of the people in that grandly beautiful land that the Munros were leaving.

"Yes, that is so. Join the army! Join the army!" one was saying to Daniel. "That's all for some of them."

"It's a poor consolation for a lad," he replied, "sticking his bayonet into the belly of a Rooshian, to imagine that he is fighting for his own and stabbing into his real enemies, the men who have put him and his out of house and home. The army! It might be ordered against the French next, instead of to help the Turks against the Rooshians, for all we know as it was when I was a lad. And the French were good friends to the Scots in the '45."

The old talk, the old talk. Another spoke.

"They say it's not to make room for the deer that we must go," he said. "They say that never was any thrust out to make room for deer for them to shoot. Quibbles! Quibbles! To make room for sheep it is--and then the sheep make room for the deer. They'll bring up that lie if ever we get the Commission of Inquiry that some talk of."

"Yes, and it's been going on since the '45," declared Munro. "It was different, though, when it was the Sassenach that came with fire and sword. When a man's foes shall be they of his own household it is bitter!"

Angus sidled past them into the house. Just then, from one of the further cottages up near the bracken and the heather (that soon would encroach everywhere there), came the preliminary sounds, the intermittent drones, of a bagpipe. Who could be thinking of piping over the tying of the last symbolic knots on the ropes round tin trunks and boxes? There was Mrs. Munro plucking and plucking at her under-lip, looking out of the window, perhaps at Ben Chatton or perhaps at a lone magpie veering by with some significance for her superstitious mind.

"They tell me there are places where they do not dare to do it," Angus heard his father say, "even with the rent far in arrears. And why? Because clear it is that there would be blood shed if they tried. They tell me that at some places they have answered the threat of eviction by driving the deer into the sea. Ah, well, by the grace of God some have bowels of compassion. There is a Macleod, now, when the potatoes failed, who fed his people himself to tide them over instead of turning them out. There would be no faith in any landlord left if it wasn't for one or two like him. But they are not in the majority. 'It's my land to do with as I please.' That's the usual. It's bitter! First of all driven off the good lands onto poor, and then we have it flung at us, 'Would you not be better to go to a new country instead of trying to live on land like that--and be grateful if you have your passage money given you?' Well!" He came indoors. "Give me a hand, Angus, with this trunk."

They carried it out. When they went in again, Mrs. Munro had ended her reverie at the window and was drying her eyes.

"I remember a story my mother told me of a Highlander in Quebec," she said, speaking as out of a dwam.

Her husband stared at her in amazement, thinking she was about to launch a tale of some omen, but it was not so.

"It was in the days when the colonists in America rebelled against the arrogance of King George the Third," said she, "'75 or thereby. A Cameron he was. He had not joined the Royal Highland Emigrants' Regiment there but when the rebelling colonists came to assault Quebec he did do his part in the repulsing of the attack, whatever. So he was offered pay after the fight for his services. Says he, this Cameron lad who had gone to the Canadas after the '45, says he, 'I will help to defend the country from the invaders but I will not take service under the House of Hanover.' That was the spirit! Now, what was I telling you this for?" she asked herself. "Oh, yes, I know--the spirit in that. Yes, we are going, but we'll go proud."

She raised her head and with a glare dared the tears to come again.

"Perhaps the clergy are right," she exclaimed suddenly, over another thought.

"In what way?" asked Daniel.

"When they tell us it is the will of God that we go as a punishment for sins, and that any who offer resistance are in danger of hell-fire forever."

"The clergy," said Daniel, "have their livings from the landlords. They know who butters their bread."

"That sounds like profanity!" she cried out.

"I'm not talking of the Almighty," said he. "I am talking of the clergy--an entirely different consideration. They call me a heretic, and if trying to educate yourself and your issue is heresy, then heretic I am. But I'm not talking profanity."

She looked at him, troubled. His thoughts were sometimes beyond her.

The blast of a siren sounded and Angus peered out of the doorway. There was the boat on which they were to embark, splitting the dark water as a plough's coulter the dark spring loam. The high corries answered with their echoes to her bellow, the gulls rose and volleyed in air, their silver reflections flickering among the loch's reflection of the hills.

Silently they looked their last on the shell of the home. Afternoon having come, an interior dusk was already in corners. It was as if they were ghosts visiting the place where once they had been part of the active life of earth.

"Scotland," said Munro, and again, "Scotland. Just a few sad songs and old ballads! That's all. I see it getting worse every year. God knows what the end will be. And yet--and yet--we'll take Scotland with us: a kingdom of the mind."

He stooped at the rear window. His wife stepped over and stood beside him, and he put an arm round her. By the way they bowed Angus realized that they were looking toward the graveyard where Robin lay, he who was drowned the day after Mrs. Munro saw what she called the death candles out at sea. Though he was but sixteen, Angus had some sense in him and hurried out, left them, so that when they turned they would not find him there indecently staring like a gowk of no understanding.

The surge of waves broke out on the rocks, an orderly smashing pulse of water from the steamer's wake. She was out there, come to rest, waiting for them. It was then that Daniel Munro lost his control after that grand thought of how they would take Scotland with them, a kingdom of the mind.

"To hell with Scotland!" he broke out.

There was a silence then like the silence left when the wind passes through a wood of pines. It was as if Nature held breath, as if the spinning of the world ceased a moment--a moment that belonged to horror as over a sin against the Holy Ghost.

"You should not have said that," Mrs. Munro whimpered.

"No, I should not have said that," he whispered. "I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it."

And as for Peter came the crowing of the cock, there rose the sound of the bagpipes through Brendan, in the slow measure of a coronach.

The odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to meet them through a white mist over the sea, odours of robustiously scented forests. The steamer crawled on, calling and calling with her siren till the vapour was dazzlingly infiltrated with sunlight and then, by the sunlight, dissipated away--and there were rocky promontories glittering a welcome.

Further than Lower Canada, further than Upper Canada they were going because of friends in the country beyond, freends, indeed--which is to say, in the Scots sense, relatives. Had it not been for these the Munros would have been much in the condition of some of their fellow voyagers who had merely had their passage paid for them. Landing with scarcely a penny and bound chiefly for the neighbourhood of Toronto (that used to be called York when Angus's mother was a girl), most of them with no word of English, nothing but the Gaelic, they were in anxious plight. By the charity of their compatriots in the land, given in such a way that the name for it was changed to hospitality, these went on to their journey's end.

The Munros' freends in the Red River Settlement--the Frasers--had sent them some financial assistance. In return for that Daniel, before taking up his own land, was to help Ian Fraser on his; and Angus, no doubt, would be working out the while for wages--or such was the suggested plan.

Of the Red River Settlement Mrs. Munro had some woeful stories. She would narrate how the first Highlanders that went there had been hardly used, ordered back by the Northwest Fur Company's representatives, and might have been all homeless again had it not been for a Macleod--a smith--who made shot out of some chains, loaded it into an old cannon he found there, and defied those who would turn them back, with a handful of men at his side. Her husband had to remind her that that was a while back, in her grandmother's day, and that the Settlement had vastly changed since then--that here was 1856 and not 1815.

They went by train (not by such wilderness waterways as those people of two generations back had gone, from Hudson's Bay to Lake Winnipeg), by train to Minnesota, sleeping on the train, eating on the train, a basket of provisions with them for the journey. A young man walked through the coaches now and then with boxes of a crisp sort of biscuit new to them called crackers, and with fruit. Mrs. Munro, after one sampling of his peaches, would resolutely turn her eyes away on hearing him chant his seductive wares. So juicy were these peaches that she had to spread her handkerchief--her pocket-napkin--on her knees when eating them. Never had she known such lusciousness.

"Pea-ches! Or-an-ges!" came the young man's cry, and her head would turn and she would stare hard out of the window.

"We have our basket of sufficient food," said she, "and if I succumb to the temptation of these fruits, and this craving for them, we will have to spend all ere we come to journey's end, whatever!"

Leaving the train at St. Cloud they went on by stagecoach, a four-horse coach, clip-clopping along in a rhythm that at times made the lids droop, sleepy, over eyes that would fain see all the way, clip-clopping and swaying through forests the heady odour of which excited young Angus, and across clearings where stumps smouldered, and by the side of lonely rushy lakes like dropped fragments of blue sky. Minnesota, the driver told Mrs. Munro, was a Sioux Indian word meaning "sky-reflecting water." Each night they stopped at some rest-house by the wayside. Some of the men at these places Mrs. Munro thought the most fearsome she had ever seen, grim of visage and with revolvers at their belts in big holsters. But if ever she and one of them came face to face in a doorway it was always, "Pardon me, ma'am," and hats off. And "Ma'am" it was at the tables when they passed her the cruets. They did not wear their armaments when eating, always, she noticed, before they came into the dining-room, as casually as they hung up their hats, handing to the proprietors of the places their ammunition belts with the pistols attached, as in some usage or courtesy of the country.

As she whispered to him her comments on the ways of this region, Daniel thought she was beginning to be eased of the sense of being far from home which clearly had shadowed her hitherto. But when they came to Abercrombie on the Red River and she discovered that there they had still further to go, aboard a boat, she came near to breaking down. Every roll of the train wheels, the drumming of the stage coach horses' hoofs, the thrashing of the big stern-wheel on the river boat, told her the same refrain--A far cry to Loch Brendan.

As for the Settlement: each of them on arrival promptly observed it in a different way, and in that difference you have all three measured and weighed. Mrs. Munro saw the houses as alien, they being built of logs. Munro saw them as not altogether strange, they being thatched; and Angus saw them as romantic, they being of log with thatch. The lack of a mountain-side on which to rest their eyes was dreadful to Mrs. Munro, to Mr. Munro odd, to Angus novel and exciting.

Their freends, the Frasers, welcomed them warmly. Ian Fraser, the father, was working out at the time with a wheelwright for wages, toward getting money instead of getting exchanges of goods for his produce. On the steamship International, which had brought them there, he found a job for Angus as deck-hand. Daniel, according to their agreement, began to work on the farm.

A happy family--Fraser and his wife, Hector, the son, about eleven then, Fiona, between five and six, and little Flora, age four, named after her mother. There was no impression of a cloud over life there as at Loch Brendan, but a sense of freedom to the point of wildness. With the family increasing they had added to the original house, and with a little contrivance there was room for the Munros.

Several times during the days that followed his arrival there, young Angus remembered how his father had spoken of a kingdom of the mind--Scotland, a kingdom of the mind. Surely it was so here, with the Gaelic round them, the burr of the Scots voices, and often the pipes playing about the place from one house to another. Yet looking back on those days later, there was no doubt in his mind at all that as he recalled and was aided by that phrase--a kingdom of the mind--his mother was haunted and vexed by her husband's cry of To hell with Scotland! Not a word of that had they from her, but she had not forgotten it, and being of a superstitious turn it gnawed in her, first like a recurrent and then as she did not rout it, like a chronic sickness. Indeed, she was not, as they used the word there, a well woman. It was all, for her, despite the Gaelic and the pipes, far from home.

For Angus one of the great pleasures in the change from Loch Brendan was in the food. One never had to say here, "If that's my dinner I've had it!" They were not limited to potatoes and them, perhaps, none too good because of a wet season. Fine trout could be fished, and all round about they could shoot the prairie chickens, while venison was everybody's. Hunters came in from the Great Plains with buffalo meat, and Mrs. Fraser taught Mrs. Munro both how to prepare it and to preserve it (as the French and Scots half-breed hunters had learnt from the Indians, beating in with it various berries) so that it would keep for months--for years, if need be, they said. When Ian was reading the Scriptures aloud one night and came to the words Shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, they meant to Angus the new land. He was not going to be one of those who make a god of the wame, but it was good to rise from the table satisfied.

In some ways the people were wilder than at home, in others more kind. A man was much more his brother's keeper, if ever there was occasion for brotherly help. None asked servility but most practised courtesy. On Sunday there were church services--all in their braw clothes. You would see silks then, silk gowns, and below them the feet that peeped in and out were in moccasins as often as not, moccasins heavily beaded, that could be got in trade with the Indians for a twist of tobacco. Some folks in the Scots settlement had the blinds down all Sunday, but neither the Frasers nor the Munros believed in that.

"Keep the good light of God out on the Sabbath day? Na, na," said Mrs. Fraser.

There was not much money in the place, though wages were higher than in the east. Almost all was done in Trade--which is to say exchange or barter. It was towards getting money against the time when they would be taking up their own land, and building on it and living apart from the Frasers, that Angus had gone to work on the river boat--the International. A month or two later he was offered, and accepted, other work--on what they called the flat boats--with a Captain Buchanan, from Ayrshire. It was not but an honorary or whimsical title. He had been a blue-water sailor and captained ships round the Horn and there he was, far inland, caught by some call of this great continent's interior. In Minnesota there was wood and with the Red River settlers there was a scarcity of it, so there was a brisk trade in bringing timber from south of the line. The method of transport was to lash it together into a sort of boat in which a load of freight would be carried. On arrival at the settlements the freight was delivered to the consignees and then the boat taken apart and sold for building material. On the flat boats, with Buchanan, Angus worked till the river froze.

In the winter there were dances even those who did not dance at home in Scotland (such as some of Lowland birth, descendants of old Covenanting families) dancing out there. You would hear the fiddles going and from the doorways the voices of those who called the dances: First lady and first gentleman--balance; first lady and first gentleman--both hands; first couple down the line; and wildly went the fiddles. Second couple down the line; and merrily went the fiddles. All hands round--gaily they danced by Red River then. Strathspeys and reels, the Highland schottische and quadrilles they danced, wearing their tartans (that had been prohibited in Scotland in the '45 but were still worn a hundred years later), and glancing to the door sometimes you would see the dark faces of Indians looking in, coveting the colours. There was a wild jig, the Red River Jig, a great favourite with the Métis--French half-breeds. And now and then some Indians would give their own dances, and when the drums beat and their feet thudded out the rhythms, the queerest thoughts and emotions would come to Angus. He could hardly put a name on it. It seemed he had heard these lilts, and danced to them, too, in a time forgotten that the sound of them set him struggling inwardly to remember--which was a feeling, thought he, too ridiculous to tell to any.

All the winter Mrs. Munro had been none too well, which was a regret to them all--for most people newly arrived found the air a tonic, had a fresh joy in life. She, on the contrary, seemed to lose hold of it. Daniel suspected that much of her trouble was mental. Surreptitiously she brooded, he believed.

"I think," said he to her one day, "you have never forgotten, Kate, what I said when we were leaving--"

She interrupted him with a catch in her voice.

"What makes you think that?" she cried out. "I have never said."

"It's just a thought I have," he replied. Today he might have called it telepathy. "I believe you brood upon it."

"If the coronach had not begun right on the heels of your crying out so--" she said, admitting he was right in his surmise, but stopped there, left the rest in air.

They did not know Angus had entered, and he, hearing this, backed out, left them, much as he had retreated from them that last day at Brendan when he came on them side by side bowed to the window, peering along the slopes.

In the spring, after the ice had broken and was tinkling and crashing away down river, when the snow was off the plains and flowers were showing, Mr. Munro thought a jaunt or two might help his wife, put the colour in her lips again. So they went, all three, driving west to visit a further Scots settlement out on the prairies. The land was still wet from the thaw, the wheels drawing up mud as they revolved, and it fell in gobbets with a clapping sound, but there was nothing of the snell in the air. A fine fresh day it was to breathe. "This," thought Daniel, "should do her good."

Over a little rise (for rises there were, as they discovered on travelling, waves in that sea of grass) they came suddenly to a small lake of the kind called slough. It was not the usual ducks that clucked there but some birds, gray-blue and white, that rose, yammering. Sea-gulls here--and so far inland! Mrs. Munro put chin on chest to hide sudden tears, but her shoulders shook with sobbing.

"What is the matter?" her husband exclaimed, drawing rein. "Are you in pain, Kate? What has taken you?"

"Nothing," she answered.

"But it must be something," he insisted.

She looked up at him, biting on her lips and trying to stem the flow by pressing her eyelids closer. That was one of the last pictures Angus had of her--crying like a bairn. Here was a sad downfall for the woman who had talked of going proudly, but a far cry it was for her to home and the sea gulls weaving their silvery reflections in the waters of Loch Brendan. The life at Brendan had been hard--but it was home, and there was an end of it! She seemed like a little girl in grievous trouble.

"The gulls took me by surprise," she said in a small voice.

No need to explain why the surprise of these birds caused her to sob. Her husband and son both knew the picture that would be in her mind. Daniel put an arm round her.

"If we made money enough we might take you back again," said he. "It won't be Loch Brendan, but somewhere in Scotland--in the old land."

"No, no," she said, "you should be angry with me, not kind to me. I'm a child and should be whipped!"

That night Angus dreamt that all the blinds were down at the windows and he was trying to raise them but they would not budge. In this dream he went from one to another, from room to room, and for all his trying not a blind could he raise.

The malady that carried her off would today be called pernicious anaemia. She had no appetite, and nothing that she forced herself to eat gave her sustenance. She was always tired, though she never complained of it.

Angus, as soon as the river was open again, only a few days after that drive, had gone back to the flat-boat work, and it was but on the third or fourth trip that he knew, as they sculled into the bank, that something was wrong. It was a boy with a fishing-rod--or a fishing-pole, as they used to say, a slender, sappy tree branch with line and hook pendant--who broke the news to him, the Fraser boy, Hector, tuft of hair sticking out of a hole in his hat. He dropped the fishing-pole as the flat boat was sculled close to the bank and stared with wide eyes, no smile in response to Angus's wave. Then he clapped hands to mouth, trumpet-fashion, and began to shout:

"You're to come home at once! You're--to--come--home--at--once! I've been watching for you yesterday and today, too!"

"Something wrong," said Buchanan.

"Something wrong," said Angus.

"You're to come up at once," shouted Hector excitedly.

"What's the matter?" asked Angus as they pulled in and he made passes with a boat hook at their jetty.

"It's your mother. You're to come at once."

"You go," said Buchanan.

Angus leapt ashore and climbed the bank, Hector leaving his home-made fishing-rod lying there and hurrying after him. On the point of asking the boy for more detail Angus let the inquiries go. Hector seemed to be both youthfully elated over his task of herald and youthfully perturbed. The slapping of his bare feet and, anon, his panting, died away as Angus hurried to the house. At the door was Mrs. Fraser, head lowered, shading her eyes from the low blinding rays of the setting sun. She stepped back as he drew near.

"Go right in to her," said she, with no greeting save that. "I've had Hector waiting for you since yesterday lest you came early."

He did not ask why she was so anxious for his return. Her face told him. His mother, thought he, must be dying. The bedroom door was ajar, and as he stepped in, his father, sitting by the bed, looked up at him, his life's great agony in his eyes. Standing at the bed-foot was the doctor, a commiserate man, pity in his bearing, distress.

Mrs. Munro was in the article of death.

"She will tak' nae nourishment," the Scots physician's voice came huskily. "If she could but have taken into her blood some nourishment . . ." His voice dropped, and in a tone of sad complaint he ended, "but she will not assimilate."

She seemed to be in a coma and yet, thought Angus, there was a recognition in her eyes through the new opacity that he could not but observe with piercing concern. It was as though the candle of her life guttered, flared--and sank. She drew a breath of content, or of restfulness, then another, desperately.

"Can ye lift me?" she asked in the merest whisper. "Can ye lift me that I could see the hills?"

Munro looked at his son. Angus looked at his father. To see the hills! They bent over her to do as she asked. As they raised her she had again knowledge of where she was, lost, apparently, these last moments.

"There are no hills," she murmured. "I forgot I was here," and tears came to her eyes.

It was then, as they laid her back, that her spirit, her shadow passed, tears in her eyes that she could not see the hills of home. Someone at a distance began an evening's practice on the pipes. Perhaps she heard it and, slipping away toward unconsciousness thought that she was back in Brendan and falling asleep there.

It had been their intention on arrival, after discussion of plans with the Frasers, to take up their own land that spring, but the death of Mrs. Munro caused that to be deferred. Daniel had no heart, as well they realized, to go on with that matter for some time. So, though Ian had not continued with the wheelwright, Daniel continued to work on the Fraser farm. There was enough for them both to do.

But Munro was never to take up land there, no more than six feet of it beside his wife. Only three months after Kate had gone her husband followed her. Just a year to the day from the day of their arrival he passed away after a stroke in the hot field where he was working.

The bearers, at his funeral, made up for the abstemiousness with which, in deference to her views, they had carried Kate kirkward. There were but four of these bearers, two to a side, and with them walked four others to relieve them from time to time. Seldom was a coffin taken in a cart and the Fraser home was some way from the church. There were oatcakes and whisky before the start, and when they carried him out all were rosy. Daniel was a big man, and sooner than usual Ian Fraser, master of the ceremonies, seeing the bearers were hunched to the handles, gave the cry:

"Relief!"

The two on each side who had been but keeping slow step took their places, and the four who fell out had their dram before all moved on again. A few hundred yards on there was again the chant:

"Relief!"

The bearers fell out, and had their dram, as did the mourners, halted behind, and on went the procession once more.

"Aye, he was a great man," one remarked. "I believe he weighed twa hunner wi' the breath o' life in him; and with the kist weighing--"

"Wheesht!"

It did not matter to Angus, though. Even then there was that in him which developed in the years till the time came when he could hear what would have irked, angered, or hurt him as a lad and pay no heed.

"Relief!"

"No, no, I'll have nae mair now till we get him bedded. For the credit of the corp I mauna stagger."

"Wheesht!"

There was a great turnout, of Highland and Lowland, and when they met any French half-breeds upon the way these stood to one side and, uncovering, crossed themselves. Even some Indians, encountered riding into the settlement, reined in and sat by the road wrapped in their blankets, like men turned suddenly to painted effigies, with heads all bowed.

"Relief!"

There were two pipers ahead, at the kirk gate, and as the procession drew near they began to play. Angus felt he might have been spared that. To him death needed no pageantry, no music. He feared then that he was about to make a fool of himself, but there came into his mind, "We'll go proudly," and he took hold of himself and saw his father to rest like a man, then came away to a consciousness--temporarily muted, as a new wound is often accompanied, at first, by a stunning of the nerves--of being alone (father and mother taken from him within three months), which, many friends though he had, was never rightly to leave him all his days.

The first to speak to him was Captain Buchanan, for whom he had been working on the flat-boats. Buchanan was very drunk and when he was drunk he seemed to be aware of all the sadness of life. Never did Angus see him taciturn in liquor, only plaintive and fuddedly compassionate, never what they call greeting fou. He came with a lurch alongside of Angus, who was walking home with Ian Fraser, and said he, with a hiccup:

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. We have all got to come to it. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Aye. But what I want to say tae you is something practical."

He flapped a hand in air before his eyes.

"Some other time maybe, whatever," suggested Ian gently.

"You're richt! This is not the moment," said Buchanan. "I'll come and see you the morn's morn. I want to see you special."

With a hiccup he dropped behind again. In silence Angus and Ian walked on, a faint murmur, a faint whisper of voices and shuffle of feet in the dusty road to rear. Ever and again came also the hiccup of Captain Buchanan, and when that sounded, Fraser would glance at Angus and mutter, embarrassed, "Aye--aye," or "Indeet, indeet. Yess, yess," very sad for the lad's sake.

Ian Fraser had fancied that Buchanan was so fuddled at the funeral that his promise to call and see Angus would be entirely forgotten by him, but there he was, next day, speiring, as he would say, for the lad.

Angus was out by. He was dimly at work on some tinkering, alone in the tool shed, and there Buchanan found him, coming in at the door very sober and sedate, looking as though he had suffered personal loss, but managing, with gaze on the floor or in distance, to come speedily to the business that brought him there. He had received an offer, he explained, sitting down on a keg of nails and filling his pipe with deliberation, to go to the far end of these plains that lay to west of them--"to the boat-building there," said he.

Angus thought for a moment that his caller was not sober as he seemed. Boat-building away inland on those prairies! Then he remembered that through that West country rivers ran, and that they were great enough and sufficiently free of rapids for long distances for heavier craft to ply on them than the canoes of the company--these buoyant canoes that were paddled and portaged from Hudson's Bay and from Fort William (by Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods) to Fort Garry, and by Portage la Prairie away into the chain of rivers toward remote Swan Lake and beyond.

Buchanan was to take a man or two with him, he explained, able at the work; the pay, he added, was good.

"It would be a change for you," he declared, with a nod and a quick glance. "It would take your mind from--aye," he ended. "What say ye?"

Angus told him he appreciated his thought and his kindness. At that Buchanan rose, and staring out of the window remarked that he would like fine if they could start on Thursday morning.

"Here's Tuesday," said he, wheeled, and walked to the door.

Angus followed him. They stood there a moment or two.

"Yes, I'll be ready," said Angus.

"That's fine, then," replied Buchanan, and departed, leaving the young man to his tinkering and his thoughts.

With his employer going away from Red River he--were he to remain--would have to seek a new job, and there had always been a spell for him in that curve of sky over the space to west, as if with a still small voice it called him. He would be sorry to leave the Frasers. He had come to look upon them as close kindred rather than as the "forty-second cousins" that they were. The children had called his father uncle. He liked the callant Hector. He liked the baby Flora, and very greatly he liked Fiona, who would come to him in the evenings, book in hand, and say "Will you hearken me my lessons?" There was a Sunday when she had asked him to hearken her a psalm.

"Thus spake the sheriff--" she began.

"The seraph," Angus had corrected.

"Thus spake the sheriff--"

"The seraph."

"Oh! Thus spake the seraph and forthwith appeared a shining throne--"

"A shining throng--throng."

"Oh! Thus spake the sheriff--I mean seraph--and forthwith appeared a shining throng. Perhaps I had better know, if you please, what a seraph is. That might help."

Yes, he would miss the family life of the Frasers.

There was a ring that Mrs. Munro had worn on her third finger, in the collet the hair of her husband's mother. Daniel's father had had it made, a fine piece of work by an Edinburgh goldsmith after his wife's death--on its inner surface the initials of his and her Christian names in monogram--and Daniel, inheriting it, had given it to Kate as wedding ring. When she died Mrs. Fraser had taken it from her hand and kept it to give to Daniel later. He, however had not worn it, put it away; but alone in the world, Angus--finding it among his father's few treasures--put it on his little finger. He had no near kin left, but the sight of that ring, the feel of it, to turn it round sometimes on his finger in those days of desolation, seemed to help, mitigated the sense of solitariness somehow. It gave him two generations of his folk for secret company.

The party consisted of Mr. Buchanan, two half-breeds (of French and Saulteaux blood), who were known only by their Christian names of Pierre and Aloysius, Tom Renwick, a fellow-worker on the flat-boats with them, Sam Lovat Douglas, and Angus.

Douglas--he who was later to become Sir Samuel Lovat-Douglas--had just arrived at Fort Garry on his way to Fort Edmonton, with a wallet of letters of introduction to factors and such throughout the land (to William McTavish, the governor of Assiniboia for the company, Mackay of Fort Ellice, Lillie of Fort Carlton, Chantelaine of Fort Pitt, Hardisty of Fort Edmonton, Macaulay of Jasper House, and Colin Fraser of St. Ann's), and hearing that Buchanan was westward bound had made arrangements with him to go with them. Douglas, in his early twenties Angus judged, was heavily built at that time, with a powerful frame--and a geniality of manner somehow suggesting rather the plausible than the candid. Clearly he was in the country on business bent, but to ask direct questions of a man was not the usage in those days. As a matter of fact Angus was not curious. If a man had no desire to disclose his affairs--then it was nothing to do with him. Yet it was to Angus that Douglas revealed the object of his journey. It was on the night they stopped at the Touchwood Hills post--that shortly afterwards was abandoned by the company and left to crumble in the weather and the seasons.

"I'm verra glad," said Douglas in that friendly way of his, "to have your company on this odyssey--and I hope you mak' weel at the boat-building. Some fools tell me that in a new land a man should take the first job that turns up. Well there may be something in that; but I'm no' eager to take the first job lest I stay in it. You see what I mean? Man, I'm ambeetious!"

The others were over at the post for company and a chat there (to the official in charge at the Touchwood Hills House, Douglas had no letter), and they were alone at the night fire. Its flames illumined the heavy forehead, the heavy jowl, the dancing and genial eyes of Sam Douglas.

"Do you know what I'm here for?" he asked. "I'll tell you. You haven't tried to pump me to find out, so I'll tell you," and he laughed. "This country is going to open up--to develop. What have we seen so far? Buffaloes by the hundred, and these two half-breeds whooping Voila les boeufs! Voila les boeufs!"

"An odd fellow," thought Angus. "He seems to be acting." (Not but what he had already a liking for Sam.) "Even his Scots burr he seems to accentuate deliberately at times--as now, when we are alone together, for example. Something a trifle humbugging about him, is there? Something of insincerity in his ingratiating manner? And yet, isn't it easier to get along with one who would fain be a good fellow than with one who is sulky and taciturn?"

Thus was Angus thinking as Douglas paused there by the fire beside him on a buffalo robe, gazing into the flames.

"Aye, buffaloes," Sam went on after a pause. "And antelope louping over the prairie, and a few bit villages of the Crees in their leather tents. But consider how the buffalo are being killed off. They are no' just for the sustenance of the Indians now. The trade that has sprung up in their robes as they call these pelts," and he stroked the one on which he sat, "is going to exterminate them; and the railroad builders down in the States are feeding the navvies on buffalo meat. Mark my words. Man, man, my mind is of the kind that is aye just a jump ahead--maybe twa jumps. There's going to be cattle grazing on these buffalo pastures before long. And there are going to be fixed habitations--fixed habitations. But what are the folks going to burn to keep them warm in wintertime? It's a cold winter here. Buffalo chips? Na. And there's not sufficient wood in the river bottoms to last them long when they come in here in great numbers, as come they will. I'm looking for coal. My mind is of the kind that goes jumping ahead! Aye, burning rocks. I heard of burning rocks from an Indian on the Missouri. They have coal there; and he told me there were burning rocks up here to north also. But it's no' safe to travel up through the Blackfoot country, as ye ken, so I went back doon the Missouri and over to the Red River and Fort Garry, and I'm going to see these burning rocks in the north. That's what I'm here for, sir. I'm thinking of the future. I'm planning big."

It was young man's talk, perhaps, and as the years passed he might be more minded to keep his own counsel; but many were the young men in the land, then, engaged on affairs onerous and dangerous--factors and explorers of the company hardly more than striplings. All the difference between them and him was that they were in the service of others, and he already was, as they say, playing a lone hand.

Doubt in him suddenly intruded unhappily into Angus's liking for him when, after a lull in talk during which they but sat smoking there by the fire, the talk resumed came somehow to the subject of the stipends paid by the Hudson's Bay to its factors and clerks.

"A small stipend," declared Douglas, as though he were an aged promoter and experienced financier, "and the promise of a fair pension is the idea. You see, it makes a man work well to know his old-age is provided for if he behaves himself--and, actually, he may never live to have the pension. If I was head of a big company I'd run it on those lines. It would be benevolent, you see, to arrange for the pension--and, as I say, only a percentage would get one. That's to be considered."

"You would not, then, pay the pension to widows of your employees?" asked Angus.

Sam Douglas rubbed a hand over his face.

"That would have to be thought over," he replied, and dismissed the subject by rising to prepare his blankets for the night, the sound of the fumbling steps and the voices of the others drawing near them from the direction of the post.

Rumours of Blackfeet raiders in the region when they reached Fort Carlton ordained a continuance together toward Edmonton, with the intention of passing southward, thence, to the Mountain House; but at Fort Pitt there was a dark-eyed young man, the half-breed son of one of the factors, who was setting out across country for Rocky Mountain House. He was known to the Blackfeet. (His mother was, in fact, a Piegan woman--which is to say Blackfoot, the Blackfeet being, as Angus had it explained to him, a tribe in three parts: the Blackfeet proper, the Bloods, and the Piegans, all speaking a common tongue.) So there they said farewell to Douglas and the half-breeds, striking out west, south of Beaver Lake, by the Dried Meat Hills, Buffalo Lake, the Red Deer River's upper waters, and Gull Lake--new names to Angus, with the life of the land in the sound of them.

For some reason or another Douglas's parting remark remained hauntingly in the young man's ears.

"I hope you mak' weel at the boat-building," said Sam.

"And I hope you find your coal that you are going to make a fortune over--by and by," replied Angus.

"Oh, sooner than you think!" Douglas told him.

There seemed at the time and in the remembrance as he rode on to be an ironic note in the words, I hope you mak' weel at the boat-building. Did Douglas want, all friendly at parting, to spur Angus on, to make him think further than the day's board and bed? "Some folks tell me that in a new land a man should take the first job that turns up, but I'm no' eager to take the first job lest I stay in it." That also Douglas had said. He may have intended, at parting, a jog to his new friend toward looking ahead, planning big.

It was a little way beyond Gull Lake, coming to an eminence, that Angus had one of his experiences, these experiences that he told to no one but that went (more than other ones apparently less airy, less unsubstantial) to the making of what he was to become in the drift of the years. It was an experience of the spirit kin with that which had privately befallen him over a year before when the odours of the new land, before they had sighted it, came out to meet them through a white vapour over the sea, into which the steamer's siren bleated. By the olfactory nerves had come that one. By the eyes came this, with the gift of a secret ecstasy.

Before him the Rocky Mountains were suddenly revealed beyond belts of colour that were of woods, parklands, wedges of sky-reflecting water, twist of river, fragment of distant lake. Very much as it was with him when listening to music was it with him then, gazing on the scene before him. Music would pick and choose through the past years of his life, recover and toss to him this, that and the other: the tone of a voice, the light on a pebble, a forgotten wail of wind in a chimney from a winter storm of years back, the glance of eyes (Jessie's, no doubt), the gleam through water of a herring shoal--and leave it to him to make something of the medley.

He thought of his father's remark--Scotland, a kingdom of the mind. Scotland was not his. They would not have him there. Well, he had Scotland still, the bark of seals on the Black Rocks, the remembered smell of sun-scorched bracken, of peat-smoke beaten down in the gales. He thought of the vast Atlantic swaying like a compass disc betwixt the rise and fall of Scotland's seaweed fringe and the scent of pines, firs and cedars in the mists off Newfoundland. Of the curve of the Milky Way he thought, seen from their prairie camps at night, a whirl of sparks from the Arctic shores to the Caribbean. Of the columns and whip-lashes of light, up to the zenith and gone, of the Aurora Borealis, seen after hot summer days of their journey (not only in winter as many believed), he thought as he reined in his horse and sat motionless staring from that butte beyond Gull Lake at the revelation of the Rocky Mountains.

Something happened to him beyond his power to express; something happened, wordless, like music. As though the blue of the sky had run and thickened roughly at the base, there lay the ranges, low in contrast with the height of that space of blue but--he aware of how far off they were--majestic in their serene extent. They dropped away to south, they dropped away to north, as into a quiet eternity. Here and there slashes of white showed among their purple. Here and there rocky gables twinkled like mirrors, and at one place, far in, there was a dun seething, peaks turning to cloud and clouds solidifying into peaks. A lightning flash was drawn in quick gold on that portion where peaks and clouds fused, and then came a distant sound, the faintest rumble.

But he could not stay there all day, his spirit and the sighing of the wind in the grass blending as sky and mountains blent in that section of storm on the ranges. Men and horses ahead were dwindling to the size of ants, passing away in a steady jig-jog with the rhythmic swing of long tails, the slight sway of the riders' shoulders and of the balanced packs. After that vision they would soon be at journey's end.

It was, in fact, next morning, just one calendar month from the day they started out from Red River that, cresting a knoll, they saw beyond a twist of river the towers of Rocky Mountain House.

It was as the summer changed into autumn in the year '57 that Angus came to Rocky Mountain House and already the place had its history, though the signs of it were splintered in wood instead of being chiselled in more ancient stone. Here were no granite peel towers, only those wooden watch bastions. Here was no Roman Wall such as crumbled through the centuries betwixt Clyde and Forth, no ruined keep such as sat by the side of the Wee Cumbrae, gazing hollow at its double on the mainland. But in the logs of Rocky Mountain House already, when young Munro came there, was a silver gray veneer of the weather that silently told him dead men's hands had hewn them and set them up. The scene in which the fort sat--with its history, recent in comparison with the history of his homeland--spoke beyond record, it seemed, spoke from the beginnings of the world, prehistoric days, the early ages. There lay the eternal mountains--higher than Grampians, if obvious comparisons were to be made--and in the twilight the bay of a timber wolf came as it were from a time before Bruce, before Hakon, of whom his mother had known the legends.

Here had come one Pangman, and on an old pine close by had cut his name and hewn the date: Peter Pangman, 1790. Here, in the days before the amalgamation of the Hudson's Bay Company (the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay) and the Northwest Fur Company, Alexander Henry of the latter (known as Alexander Henry the Younger, to distinguish him from his roving uncle) had fuddled a party of Piegan Indians with whisky into which he decanted laudanum, making them incapable of going on toward the Rockies to intercept David Thompson, who was then on his way to trade with their enemies through the passes. And what would David Thompson, Angus wondered, have thought of these methods, listening to it all and hearing, anon, of that curious man of brain, heart, and sinew who refused to serve liquor to the natives?

The factor of the house entertained them often with these old stories as the evenings drew in, telling of how Thompson once, importuned by his friends to take kegs of rum to trade away off in the land of the Kootenays, stampeded the horses so that they dashed under tree branches, smashing the barrels, then wrote a letter--that would get back to his partners he knew not when, nor by what hands--telling of the accident and, glad that he had found a way not to debase the natives with fire-water, sat down to his lonely evening fire in the glow of resinous pine-knots to read a chapter from the pocket Bible he carried along with him. There was a legend of him having arrived at the Mountain House once from one of his expeditions beyond the mountains, that had been in winter, downcast greatly at the treatment accorded to the sledge-dogs--a humane man.

"What was he like to look at?" Angus asked, and was given a description of him--broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, high forehead and across it his fair hair cut bang-fashion.

The ghost of David Thompson, the shadow of David Thompson, moved for him always thereafter against the background of these silver-gray logs. There was also a peppering of history in them, gouged holes that had been made by no woodpeckers' beaks but were souvenirs of occasions when Cree and Blackfeet, unhappily arriving simultaneously, fought round its walls.

At the fort they had fires of coal--which Douglas had gone seeking; and there were men whose duty was to go to the outcrop a little way back and pick it out, pack it to the House. As for the burning rocks: Angus discovered that the Indians called them so not because they at any place, so far, mined and burned coal themselves, but because there were certain areas ignited no doubt by bush fires, that smouldered away, glowing by night in deep crevices and raising their pillar of smoke by day. Had Sam Douglas read more in the journals of the old explorers he would not have needed an Indian's account of burning rocks to send him on his quest. That coal was in the land had been known and noted by travellers long ago--Franklin, Peter Fiddler and Mackenzie among them. Seams had been smouldering to the knowledge of white folk for a hundred years, and according to the legends before that, time out of mind.

Less was Angus impressed by any feeling of lack of history in the land than by the sense of the prehistoric there.

News of the outer world--near and far--they heard and discussed. The territory of Kansas was still, it seemed, a troubled place to live in with the settlers from the free and those from the anti-slavery states at loggerheads, drawing their guns over their differences. There was trouble in Europe, as always. There was war between France and Sardinia, France and Austria. There were wranglings over the provinces of Nice and Savoy. They heard of that fracas and, anon, that it was over, then that another was brewing in Sicily; and Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi were discussed on the banks of the Saskatchewan. More distant, sometimes, seemed to Angus the people of these discords and bloodshed than the folk of Venus (if folk there were on that planet), setting in a clear sky beyond the Rockies.

When the Blackfeet came north to trade there was ceremonial, the factor going out to meet them with a gift of tobacco. As sharing salt to the Arab was whiffing from the same pipe to them. The chief would accept the gift, fill his sacred pipe, and the sub-chiefs and the factor would smoke, with a dignified observance in the pointing of the stem, even in the manner of handling it and in the direction of its circuit--with the sun--"Much as we white men," remarked the factor, "have a ritual in the birling of the wine round the table."

In the earlier days--of the Northwest Fur Company, when rum was much used in trade--there was great care exercised in letting the Indians, of whatever tribe, into the Fort. A few at a time they passed into the trade-room and up in the galleries company employees were secreted with primed rifles at hand. When the rum was in the tomahawk was often out. The Indian had to be taught to like the spirit, and when the extensive use of it was discontinued he had a grievance--that he was not given it. He would demand, with murder in his eyes. Dreadful and dowie doings there had been in that place of lonely grandeur. To avoid these clashes of tribes at enmity the company's officers tried to keep the trade of the Plains Cree to Forts Edmonton, Pitt and Carlton (the woods Crees went chiefly to Carlton and à-la-Corne), of the Eastern Assiniboine to Qu'Appelle, of the Saulteaux to Forts Ellice and Pelly. Rocky Mountain House, by the company's desire, was for the Blackfeet confederacy and for the Sarcees (who seemed, by their speech, to be a southern band of the Chippewyans--the Tinnhes--of the northern lakes), and the Western Assiniboines, generally called the Stonys. But Crees still came there at times, even as roving Sarcee and Blackfeet would dare to go as far as the core of their northern enemy's lands--Fort Edmonton.

Never, so far, either at Red River or at the Mountain House, had Angus been homesick for Brendan, because of the melancholy of crushing conditions of the life of his people there. Yet a day came on which, at the sound of a place-name, he had--if but for a moment--a pang at his heart, a realization of being far from home, and he understood how his mother would ache for Scotland despite their misery there. There arrived at the Fort a man with a marked Highland accent who, on being asked whence he came, replied "Dunvegan," which Angus took for Dunvegan in Skye, and had a vision as of all the Hebrides with trailing mists, quiet glens, and sea lochs huzzaing with a homing tide.

"Dunvegan," said he--homesick.

"Yess--north of Fort Edmonton, on the Peace River it iss."

"Oh, I thought you meant Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye."

"No, no, I've never been in Scotland. I was born in Glengarry--Upper Canada," he added quickly, with a laugh, noting a look of puzzlement on Angus's face.

He was descended, no doubt, from others cast out of their homes as his folk had been--and the brief homesickness passed.

In talk of those who had been before him in these parts he learnt much of their marital affairs--their blanket marriages, their prayer-book marriages, their registered unions: the varieties of marriage observances and plain concubinage. High-placed men, he heard, in the service of all the trading companies--the old Northwest Fur Company, the X.Y. Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, had taken Indian women as wife or as concubine--and some, when their time of living in the west was finished, left women and half-breed weans behind, while others took theirs east with them.

Tom Renwick voiced plump and plain the view that if a man must have a woman he might as well visit the Indian camps and find some temporarily obliging and clean squaw without any legal proceedings whatever. There were older men present and Angus wondered how such a suggestion struck them. There was a marked silence--and it occurred to him that perhaps they were considering that Tom's view was a sound one, but that it would have been better for a junior not to have expressed it.

"This young man's dogma," said the factor, wagging his head at Renwick, "is apt to lead to trouble. You be careful, Tom, of acting upon that conception in some of these Indian villages."

"I wasn't thinking of it personally, sir," replied Renwick.

"Hum!" said the factor.

"I believe that with a white-man marriage," Buchanan remarked, "a squaw has a tendency, as time slips along, to be dictatorial. Marry one according to their own rites and it's no' so bad. I'm told. She'll be aye a wee bit uncertain if the white man feels wholly bound. Give them a ceremony before a priest or a clergyman and there is, I doot, that tendency. A squaw with a marriage certificate in her hand is apt to become heap big chieftainess."

"That applies," the factor pointed out, laughing, "to some white women, too. I doubt if it is typical."

"They are, of course, savages--les sauvages," said Buchanan.

"Daniel William Harmon said--" began the factor.

Daniel William Harmon: Angus had never so much as heard the name, yet the factor spoke it as though almost to quote an authority. Some, in Angus's position, might have damned Mr. Harmon and his opinions at a venture, but instead of that he reminded himself that little did he know of this west to which he had come; and desiring to know more he was all ears and his gaze was eager on the speaker's face.

"Daniel William Harmon said that hospitality to strangers he had found to be among the Indian virtues, and that he had been treated with more real politeness by them than is commonly shown to strangers in the so-called civilized world."

"Well, Harmon certainly knew both," said one of the clerks.

The factor went on to talk of one and the other--giving them their names, Harmon and Sir Alexander Mackenzie among them--who had married Indian women, and these not eastern Indians long in touch with white people, but Indians of the Great Plains; and that talk sooner than he had any premonition (premonition, in fact, he had none) was to be turned over and over in Angus's mind.

When the snow was beginning to creep down on the range of the Rockies westward with that amazing straight line as though ruled along the mountains where upper whiteness and lower green met, Buchanan, Renwick and Angus went off to the hunting of white-tailed deer in the wooded country.

Over gray and brown pebbles a stream came down through the forests. The place belonged to antiquity. The stands of deciduous trees among the evergreen conifers were yellowing, autumn having come, and Indian summer might hold all in exquisite trance for a month or more. As they rode down to that stream, their pack-horses laden with the kill of deer, there was an odour of burning wood, red-willow smoke. There, in a natural meadow, a green gusset by a curve of the hurrying water, was an Indian encampment, a cluster of tepees, the leather ones of that epoch.

There had, by the signs, been a meal recently eaten in the open. No smoke came from the tepees, but a fire crumbled into ash before them, sending up, as is the way of red-willow well alight, more of odour than of smoke into the air. A mere sift of blue, a haze of blue, ascended from that natural meadow in a thin long wisp, and was caught by the draught of the stream's passage, drawn away trembling above its flow, a pennant of blue twining above the twinings of the creek so that its further course could be traced some distance by that gauzy riband among the tree-tops. Little did Angus realize how even that, remembered in days to come, would importune him till it was as though a voice called in his dreams, Come back.

He and his two companions rode down to the water's edge. The Indians had been hunting also and in the creek-bed were many hides held down by stones. Others, pegged to the ground, or stretched upon upright wicker frames, the women were scraping clean. By the lodges sat the men, some idling after the hunt, one making arrows--running the shafts back and forth, to assure them straight, through a stone in the centre of which was a circular hole. The horses of the white men whinnied to the horses of the Indians. The horses of the Indians answered back, looking up from their grazing, displaying white splashes on broad foreheads and Roman noses--these descendants of Arab sires.

The Indians scarce looked up. They might, by their manner, have been unaware of indication that anyone was coming, going on with the straightening of arrow shafts, the chipping of fat from hides. The three men paused at the creekside, their pack-string loping ahead and craning necks to drink, then the saddle horses craning down, so that the riders sat forward, hands extended with the reins. They knew these people and, as the animals drank, when one or another of the band glanced toward them they raised their hands in the customary signs of greeting, either the palm held upward--the sign of peace (a hand with no weapon in it)--or with the first two fingers elevated and slightly oscillated, the sign for two people, friends, together.

The pack horses, having drunk, waited with dripping muzzles for direction, and were driven by Tom Renwick through the stream on to the meadow and across it, past the camp to the further ford. Buchanan reined in a moment to hail an elderly man, Chief Red Shield.

"Hullo, Chief!" he called. "You get deer?"

"You bet!" replied Red Shield, his face wrinkling in a smile.

Buchanan rode on, pointing a finger at two children that balanced at the lodge door sucking their thumbs, staring at him, and--"Boo, boo!" he chanted at them, an old squaw looking from the solemn children to the jocund white man and rippling laughter.

That was the day when Angus first saw Minota.

In some impulse he glanced round and there, a little way up the creek, was an Indian girl dressed in the manner of the time, which was part native, part white, with fringed deerskin kirtle over deer-skin leggings, and a print flower-patterned bodice from the company's trade-rooms. Her head was bound with a blue bandana, thick plaits of hair hanging on either side. Hand on hip, head canted, she was watching him; and when their eyes met she did not look away.

Angus smiled at her and after a moment, when it seemed she was not going to respond, she did, then looked toward one of the elder women at work upon a hide. To her, then, Munro turned and was just in time to realize she had seen and was pretending utter engrossment in her task.

Quiet he was, following Renwick and Buchanan through the forest that flounced these slopes, aware of the smell of balsam in the dusky hush, seeing the tree shadows rippling over the backs of the two in front, rippling over the horses' haunches, keenly alive to scent and sound, the click of a hoof on a stone in the dust of the forest floor. The roar of the creek had fallen away. Surely the silence of that forest was older than the Roman Wall. As he rode he thought of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, of whom he had often heard with his Indian woman, and of Harmon, whose name was new to him, with his.

Next day when they were in camp the horses, tearing grass close by, became restless, raising their heads, snorting.

"Somebody coming," said Buchanan.

There between the tree boles above them was a movement. Laughter came down, rippling laughter of Indian women, the deep brief laugh of a man. It was their friends again, Red Shield's band. Pack ponies tittuped past, laden with rolled hides. Young men following them, swaying loose in their saddles, gave response with a waggle of two fingers to the salutes of the white men. A squaw rode slowly by on a deliberate piebald that had no doubt been as it were the nursery horse of many children. She smiled. Looking after her they saw a cradle hanging on her back, a small face there, eyes staring out at the receding landscape.

Anon came Red Shield, a fine figure, sitting erect, foursquare. He not only was a chief--he looked a chief in his fringed buckskins, and with his plaited hair (the braids), bound at the ends with little brass rings. He halted to talk to Buchanan, and as he did so the horses of those behind behaved as usual when one stopped ahead--immediately took the opportunity to turn aside and snatch at the special herbage of their fancy.

There was the girl of Angus's admiration and considerations--swinging out her rein-hand to ride past Buchanan and Red Shield.

"Your horse wants to stop and eat," Angus said.

"Yes," and she showed white teeth in a smile.

That was all. He wondered if that was all she knew of white-man speech, yes and no.

"Your people seem to have got plenty deer for moccasins," he remarked.

"Yes--and the skins are very good this year," she replied.

The clarity of her voice, the precision of her utterance, made him glad he had not spoken to her with the usual sort of pidgin-English.

"What is your name?" he asked.

"Minota," said she. "My father is Chief Red Shield," and she inclined her head toward him.

"Oh, your father is Chief Red Shield. I have seen him once or twice at the Mountain House."

He was suddenly aware of a young man manoeuvring a half-broken horse past them. It seemed to him that there was anger on the rider's face. He stepped aside to give more room, said "How-do," but the Indian was surly.

"He does not speak English," explained Minota.

"Where did you learn it?" Angus inquired.

"My father taughted me," she answered, and then in her eyes was shadow of a doubt of her pronunciation.

To him it was well enough. Red Shield, he had been told, was one of the ablest chiefs of the Crees thereaway.

The old lady who had observed their exchange of smiles the day before was upon them then. Minota flicked the rein ends over her horse's haunch and it moved on.

"How do you do?" said Angus to the old lady.

"How--do--you--do?" she responded, stately.

"I hope we will meet again," Angus said, turning to Minota.

"I expect so," she said.

The chief shook his lines and the cavalcade passed, leaving an odour of new-tramped, new-crushed pine, fir and tamarack needles, an odour of horse-flesh.

"A fine old fellow that," said Buchanan.

"And Angus is thinking a fine young lass," said Tom Renwick, sitting on his heels by the fire. "Eh?"

"Yes. Not bad," admitted Angus.

I expect so: what, precisely, did she mean by that? Had she seen in his eyes what Tom Renwick had evidently seen? Did she mean only that wide though the land through which they roamed they would no doubt forgather again? He was surely in love to be probing for deep implications in casual remarks.

They did meet again, at the Port, several times before the snow fell, and on each meeting the deeper was Angus enamoured of his copper-coloured maid with the dark, lustrous, candid and somehow pathetic eyes.

A letter from Ian Fraser, received just the day before one of these visits of the Indians, for some reason--he could not tell how or why--had the effect of restraining him, though but temporarily. He was back, in memory, with that happy family, saw the plates in their racks round the kitchen that was like an old Scots interior, heard again Ian at his work singing in his fine natural voice the old ballads; hearkened Fiona her lessons--and her psalm!--and was doubtful if he should act as he was here moved to. He had seen enough of Minota to believe that all he had to do was to ask her, and she would be his woman. He turned about and about on his finger the ring that had been his mother's, the hair of his grandmother in its collet, and asked himself (asked, almost it seemed, the ghosts of his people) if he was wise.

He did indeed believe that, by an Indian's view, by an Indian's ways of courtship, he had gone far already. He had seen the young men at the preliminaries of their courting, which was but making eyes at the girl of their choice till she either too often turned her back with a finality of disdain or indifference and it was realized as hopeless to proceed, or raised her eyelids in passing and smiled, when the next step was to waylay her in the dusk and cast a blanket round her. There they would stand, these young lovers, by the hour, no one paying any heed, not even the wild striplings of the village.

Yes, in all the meetings he had had with Minota her eyes (after the first talk) had told him with a lovely darkening or misting in them, like the darkening of pools of water under a passing cloud. She gave herself to him in that misting of her dark eyes.

The end of it all was that in the spring young Angus Munro (just nineteen then) took his woman--it was never my wife; my woman it was--to the factor, her father and mother with them, to have an entry made of his union with Minota Red Shield in the company's books.

He did not ask himself insistently why that was all, why he did not go to the mission and have a white man's marriage. He silenced the inquiry by telling himself that some white men took their woman to wife without even the formality of an entry in the books, no more formality than the present of a gun or a few horses to the father.

What was the depth of his love? What was the depth of hers? Her eyes had clouded when, her promise to be his woman given, he had said that they had better have it written down at the Fort; but she had not asked, instead, for a prayer-book ceremony. Minota would have gone with him even without that. He offered neither gun nor horses to old Red Shield. She did not want that; her father, she said, did not want that. That savage, Chief Red Shield, and his squaw looked upon it as an honour to have their daughter wed to a white man. Minota's mother was a sonsy woman, coming to the age when those of her race have a tendency to broaden in a very definite "middle-age spread," a sonsy woman with genial eyes and a happy laugh. She was a Stony (which is to say an Assiniboine of the west, a Rocky Mountain Assiniboine) whom Red Shield had met once at the House when both her tribe and his were camped close-by there to trade.

No--no gun, no horse for the girl but, not as the purchase price, merely as a gift--as the phrases went, a prairie gift, a gift cut off, a gift in itself, meaning not given in hope of any return or exchange--he presented Chief Red Shield (on the sober advice of Captain Buchanan) with a silk hat, a secondhand top hat, with a second-hand ostrich feather round it, for the trade-room at Rocky Mountain House had a queer miscellaneous stock of goods.

Within the palisades were two or three cabins from an earlier period, uninhabited, and in one of these, new-caulked in chinks between the logs, with a Franklin stove from the trade-room, Angus took up house with Minota, making the third at that time in the Fort with an Indian woman. He had moved, as it were, another step away from Loch Brendan. This log cabin was not like those at Red River, thatched, but had a roof of split cedar--cedar shakes.

Speedily his Cree talk improved. He discovered that there was not only pidgin-English but pidgin-Cree, and that many white people who imagined that they spoke Cree spoke only that. Minota unfolded for him the tenses of the verbs, and he learnt how pliant were the sentence formations, how full the vocabulary, and that often with one word could be conveyed what necessitated the use of half a dozen English to express. He came to respect les sauvages more and more.

As she taught him her language his mind often went back to Sabbath evenings in Scotland, Sabbath evenings at Red River, and the voice of his father (or of Fraser) would be with him again, reading in the Scriptures. For to the same simple, elemental, eternal things did the Crees go for imagery as the Hebrews. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds is come and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land, might have been one of Minota's songs. Like as a hen gathering her chickens under her wings was pure Cree, it struck him. When she taught him the sign language even more did he recall the voice of his father rolling out the Hebraic metaphor in the candlelight at Brendan. If one would signify in the sign language I am happy, so Minota showed him, one made the signs for day and my heart, meaning: The day is in my heart. There seemed to be no giving of orders in the talk of the hands. There was no Do that, no Do not do that. Instead there was I think it good for you to do that, or I think it not good to do that.

The names of the months, the moons, she told him, beginning with the moon before winter; the moon when the leaves fall: the moon when deer rut; the moon when deer shed their horns; the moon that is hard to bear; the moon when the buffalo cow's foetus is large; the moon of sore eyes (because of the sunlit snow then); the moon when the geese lay eggs; the moon of growing grass; the moon when strawberries ripen; the moon when the buffalo bulls are fat; the moon when the buffalo cows are in season; the moon of red plums. She showed him games, gambling games with little pegs, peeled wands: and one that was simply cup-and-ball Indian fashion.

Well though she could speak English she could read neither print nor script, nor did she know the Cree syllabics devised at Norway House by the Methodist missionary there, James Evans, for her people. Pictograph she could have translated, with the symbolic colourings among the figures represented, but not these symbols. The Woods Crees speedily learnt them but the Plains Crees, roving about in bands, buffalo hunters chiefly, had not the same need to leave missives behind as those who split up into small parties and families for their hunting and trapping in the Land of Little Sticks. The day was to come when Angus would regret that he had not taught her to write.

Like most white men he had looked upon savages as signifying something ceaselessly vindictive and treacherous. Red River had corrected that. Like most white men he had looked upon the religion of his people as the only true faith--and discarded that view while living with Minota. Very tenderly he came to think of her as she lost her shyness before him and revealed what lived behind these dark, deer-like eyes, behind that soft-moving and graceful exterior. She reminded him at times, by reason of her innocence, her naïveté, of his mother, and occasionally, with her heresies, of his father. She could not understand, for example, simple though it is to the civilized mind, how the company that sold firearms to the Crees was the same that sold firearms to the Blackfeet, Blackfeet and Cree being hereditary enemies. The shareholders in armament firms that gaily, in our days, manufacture lethal weapons for any who will buy she could not have understood.

There were moments when, in place of feeling that he had condescended, or descended, in this alliance, he felt that he was in the presence of something far superior. She was credulous, pathetically so, he thought often, but that credulity, he realized, was from her honesty and truthfulness. She told him of the Blackrobe that came to the Piegans southward with what was called the seventh day ceremonials.

"And one day," said she, "a Piegan went out to hunt, and the Blackrobe saw him going and called to him that it was the Rest Day. The Indian laughed at him and--" her eyes were solemn as she continued, "he was killed that day by a grizzly bear. So the Blackrobe stood up before all the people and told them that God had sent the bear to punish that man, and the next time he rang his bell and called that it was the Day of Rest he had a great gathering in his lodge for the ceremonial. Do you think," she ended, "that God would send a grizzly to kill the man for not resting on His Day?"

Angus shook his head slowly, saying nothing.

"After that Blackrobe left them he went through the Flathead country and there he baptized a great many, all under the water in a river. And after he had baptized them they went on a war party against the Crows and got many horses, without any being killed. The Blackfeet heard of it and waited for him to come back and got him to baptize a lot of them, and then they went out horse-stealing into the Gros Ventre country, and it was the most successful raid they had had for many snows."

She looked into his eyes.

"You think there is nothing in it?" she asked, trying to read his thoughts.

He was in a quandary similar to that of parents who have had formal religious upbringing and wonder, grown to years of questioning, whether they should bring their children up to a belief in all the old stories or not. She pressed the point.

"You think there is nothing in it?" she repeated.

"I do not know," he said.

It was clear to her he would not say any more than that. Of her own people's medicine men she had been rendered somewhat skeptical. They demanded much when they came to shake their rattles, beat their drums, blow their whistles and sing over sick people. She thought that many men and women could do more for illness with herbs and certain roots made into plaisters. Not but what she herself knew of a medicine-man who did a wonderful thing. He cut with a flint a crack in the side of an ailing woman, sucked some of the bad blood there, spat it forth, and lo, he had sucked a little frog from her inside.

"Did she recover?" Angus asked.

"Yes, she recovered at once, and her man gave the medicine-man ten ponies, for he was very fond of her."

She told him the medicine-men were paid chiefly with ponies and buffalo robes. But when anyone was dead their powers ended. The good Father Lacombe at Fort Edmonton had power even after men died. That beautiful black horse he rode he had received from a widow for getting the soul of her dead husband out of purgatory.

"All round us is mystery," said Minota.

Angus nodded slowly, listening.

"Yes," he replied.

"We have the same belief," she said.

There came to Rocky Mountain House news of the Sepoy Mutiny. What was it all about? they wondered. The first emotion was, no doubt, that whatever its cause, enemies of Britain, and rebels, must take their punishment. But soon there was sympathy at the Fort with the mutineers when they heard more. Living among a people prone to superstitions and respecting these if for no other reason than that the amenities might continue and Trade go well, the general view was that British arrogance had made a mess among the Sepoys. Angus, after hearing the talk, explained to Minota thus: Much as in the way that the Crees will eat dog, a dish that is abhorrent to the Blackfeet, it was bad medicine to some of the people away off there to touch pig and to others the cow was sacred. A new sort of rifle was issued to these people, the cartridges of which needed to be greased, and they had found out that the grease used was that of pig and cow. They objected, and their objection was unheeded--hence the Indian Mutiny.

"Could they not have let beaver fat, or some other fat, be used?" asked Minota. "That would have put the matter well."

"They would never think of that," replied Angus, deep in him a hatred of tyranny, of the arrogant.

He would talk to her of his early home on Loch Brendan, of how his people had been driven first from fruitful soil to barren soil by the salt-water edge, and then harried even from that. Her eyes had fear in them.

"There are some of my people," said she, "who think that the day will come when we will be treated that way by yours, but I cannot think so. I think there are many more good than bad white people, enough good to keep the bad from doing that to us. I think if they tried to my people would die fighting. Did your people fight?"

"Not where I was. Our medicine-men said we were to go and that if we offered resistance we would sizzle in hell."

"You do not believe in hell fire?"

"I--do--not!" he replied.

The year slipped past. There came the moon when the deer shed their horns, December, and preparations were made for Christmas Day (Big Sunday) with Oregon grape branches in place of holly. The doings of Big Sunday somewhat puzzled the innocence and directness of Angus's woman. According to an old usage of his Highland home he set a lit candle in the window on Christmas eve, and hearing the significance of that--a light for the dead to see--Minota took it much more seriously than he. All night she was hushed, thinking of, as she called them, the shadows seeing that signal--his father, his mother, his brother who had been drowned in the big water. Angus had difficulty in explaining to her that he was not sure if the shadows would really see. She thought they would--and they left it at that.

At the Fort the Nativity was celebrated in the usual way. Braw claes were worn as they had been worn on high-days and days of celebration all across that land, from the Great Lakes and from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, from the beginnings of the fur trade. A prospector from the mountains (there were many such in the land, much gold having been found the year before far west in the Cariboo Country, by white men who had wandered all that way from California) drank so much rum that he died of alcoholic poisoning next day. Minota was troubled over that.

"Did they get drunk," she asked, "at the last feast before He was nailed up on the cross?"

"I should hardly think so."

"My father once got drunk and spewed in the lodge and was very much ashamed. I think Jesus Christ would not like His friends to get drunk and be sick on their last feast together. It was a cruel way to kill Him," she added. "That is a sad story."

The new year came and the new year slipped along. The moon of the sore eyes was none too bad because of a warm wind (the Chinook) which wiped the snow away. The moon when the geese lay eggs came, geese and ducks honking over, driving their wedges into the north: and Minota sang:

"The ice has broken in the rivers,
The geese and the ducks fly over,
All day--and even at night."

 

But with the spring she grew restless. Her people were moving out of their winter camps, setting up sweat lodges by the river sides and taking baths both wet and dry, as she explained--that is to say, steaming themselves in the low brush cages (the sweat lodges), with hot stones thrust in to them, and then either cooling outside wrapped in blankets (a dry bath) or plunging into the river afterwards (a wet bath).

The desire to move was agony to Minota. One morning she asked Angus if he would object if she went on a visit to her people who were going from the woods to the plains soon.

"Why, no," said he.

She was troubled lest he should think she loved them more than she loved him, but after more parley and mutual assurances of devotion, and assurance of understanding from him, she took off her white woman's clothes, attired herself in the deerskin kirtle and leggings, wrapped herself in a blanket, and prepared to go. On the point of departure almost she remained. Her people, said she, would come into the Fort some day, and she could see them then. So it was his part to beg her to go and tell her he knew how she felt. As he spoke she looked long in his eyes, loving and troubled.

After she had gone, Tom Renwick must needs chaff him about his woman.

"Well, your woman has gone back to the blanket!" he said.

Angus felt he had either to take that remark as friendly jest, or to fell him. He wished that Tom's smile had been pleasanter as he spoke, to make the acceptance of his speech as a joke more easy.

"That's it," he answered, "that's it," and lightly laughed as one does when humouring another with whom for this or that reason he has to associate and would bide with amicably, though at heart he would fain see far.

Minota came back within a month, after many sweat-baths, smelling of sweet-grass which she carried in a little sack hanging from a thin raw-hide string round her neck.

In the moon when the strawberries ripen there was a suggestion by Buchanan that they might soon have finished all their work there and have to go to Fort Edmonton; and then arrived at Rocky Mountain House--Sam Douglas. He had been far beyond Edmonton into the mountains by the Howse Pass and Tête Jaune Cache Pass. He had made thorough survey of the foothill country between the ranges and Edmonton, wintering (for his first year) with Macaulay at Jasper House and (for his second) with Colin Fraser at St. Ann's. He was well content. There was coal "almost anywhere," said he. He was going back to the Old Country to "interest capital," and had come to Rocky Mountain House because he had been told there might be those there who could convoy him to Fort Brenton on the Missouri River.

No! Impossible! Attempts had been made to open a transport route that way--and failed. The Blackfeet to the south contested the passage of all. Even in mid-summer when they would be out on the plains none could risk that traverse. Angus could see, at that, that Douglas was perturbed. He evidently had no desire to cross the thousand miles to Fort Garry alone. The Crees were friendly, but there was always the risk of coming on some Blackfoot raiding party in their country. He smoothed a hand over his head, meditating. Angus laughed, surmising Douglas's cogitations.

"Yes," said he, "you have a fine, fair scalp-lock trophy there to deck the lodge of a Blackfoot on the South Saskatchewan!"

"That's just the trouble," said Sam, "that and the loneliness. I am not a man that can live alone. I've been alone enough of late, since last we parted. I was alone in the mountains till I heard voices there. Oh, man, man, I have heard the water-kelpies--and no use to assure me it was but a boulder rumbling down in the spate, or the freshets, as some of them say here, or the rise and fall of a wind that made the creeks cry loud and then hush. No, I canna thole the loneliness."

"When the voices of the dead are heard," explained Minota, "those who have been to the Catholic Mission make this sign," and she showed him. "The Methodist ones just pray without a sign. We pray and make the sign of I pity you to them, like this--or like this, I bless you."

The grace of her motions held Douglas's eye with admiration, and then--

"Aye," said he. "Well, I think I would make all the signs."

She agreed to that suggestion.

"The more signs the better," said she.

"Would you," began Sam, turning again to Angus, "think of accompanying me across the plains? In fact, I was wondering if you would come all the way with me, seeing the boat-building is nearly finished. Since seeing the coal fires here I have been thinking that evidence of a person living here would be of great help. They might look upon me as a mere promoter, ye ken, but if I had one of the men of the land wi' me--"

There came to Angus what, in Minota's absence with her people that spring, had often come to him. He saw, he heard, he smelt the old land. Often, while she had been away, he had looked at the Rockies to west and seen a peak there like Ben Chattan that stands over the head of Loch Brendan. The forests along the slopes he had, by half shutting his eyes, turned into heather and moors. At Douglas's suggestion he saw, in memory, the seaweed fringe of Scotland undulating to the tides that pound in from the Atlantic, in his reverie saw the silver reflection of the weaving gulls in the dark waters of the loch. The wood smoke and coal smoke odours of the Mountain House were changed to the smell of smouldering peat.

"I would pay all expenses," said Douglas. "We could even arrange something in the manner of a stipend. You have conned your book"--(it was his father's phrase too,)--"and you could be of great service secretarially, too, I have nae doot." He always broadened his speech when he was engaged upon a special pleading.

Angus turned to his woman.

"Minota," said he. "It is as you felt in the spring when you had to go and see your people."

"I know it," she replied.

"If I went, what would you do till I came back?" he asked her.

She did not answer at once and Sam, with a manner as of stealth, clearing his throat, stepped to the door, looked out, the girl's dark eyes gazing after him--reproachfully, it seemed.

"I could arrange for you to have everything here you would want while I was away," said Angus.

She shook her head.

"No. It would be easier with my people. Here--" she hesitated.

Douglas went strolling out, his hands clasped behind his back.

"Some of the white men while you were away," she began, then hesitated again. "I could wear a protection string," she said, "though with my people I think my conduct would be enough; no one would ever learn that I wore one. With the white men--some of them--especially on Big Sunday, or at the new year, well, they would not then respect even a protection string. No, I would go to my people until," she looked at him with doubt in her eyes, he thought, "you come back."

Angus wondered if among her people would be some, like Tom Renwick, who would jest at her that her white man would never return. That look of doubt on her face hurt him. He had an inspiration how to wipe it away. On the impulse he withdrew the collet-ring of his forebears and, taking her hand in his, put it on her third finger. He had compromised between a Blackrobe ceremony and the less ritualistic Indian ceremony of marriage--which was none at all, unless the delivery of a string of horses at the father's door be called ceremony. He had only had the union entered in the Company's books. If she had desired more, now did he abruptly atone.

She was surely his by the light in her eyes then. Had he never before realized how deep was her devotion--her fealty--he knew it at that moment.

"I will wait for you." she said, "till you come back from the country of your people. I will wait for you--with my people."

So there he was, a mere satellite for the time being, it seemed, of Sam Douglas, that young man of far-seeing plans, aware of little but the misery of farewells and that it was too late to change his mind.

The horses (it had pleased Sam to hear, while Angus was busy on the packing, that they could be sold at Red River with profit) stepped out briskly. Soon, as the ocean encompasses a ship, land dropping astern, the rolling country received them and that Backbone of the World, the Rockies, was dwindling down the sky to west. Their route was to be southeast, toward the great plain across which, picking up the loom of the Eagle Hills like a guiding pharos, they would pass on by the elbow of Battle River to the old Fort Garry-Fort Edmonton cart-trail.

Like Lot's wife was Angus that first day out, constantly slewing in the saddle, hand on his horse's haunch, to watch the sinking of the mountains. These undulating belts, the colour of smoke, along the foothills he had ridden through. He knew them for what they were. Always in this land there was an impression, whether on flat prairie, rolling foothills, or among the mountains, of immensity. It was not due merely to the scope of the immediate view, for in the forests were often narrow gulches in which one could only see, between tree trunks, trees on the further slope set precipitately and densely. Nor was it the result of studying maps of the continent. The prairie wind whispered of space and space again beyond where the blue crystal cupola rested lightly on the horizon; and in the ranges there was the consciousness, in every dell where a creek shouted under debris of fallen trees and moss hung in tassels on the branches of living ones, that there were a million such dells, scented so of cedar or of balsam, on and on, terrain of the deer, the bear, the beaver.

Angus recalled, when they came to the headwaters of Red Deer River, queer legends that Minota had to tell. Away down there near where Red Deer River flows into the South Saskatchewan, she had said, there were strange stone animals of enormous size, huge lizards of rock that were sometimes partially exposed after a gale that sifted the sand from them, or a cut-bank crumbled. Odd the inventions of les sauvages, he had thought--and would remember those stories of hers on a day to come, hearing of the discoveries of geologists there. At the time, memory of her talks about those queer creatures merely added, to the sense of spaciousness, that of mystery, as they rode on, drawing near to the swerve of land called High Butte.

They had been advised at the Mountain House to swing to the north of the butte, coasting round its base, but Angus sent the pack-horse up athwart its southern slope, looking back as he followed them to see the Rockies bobbing upward again. Near the summit in the thin whistle of the wind he halted for some moments.

Sam Douglas, no doubt, realized the cause of his companion's meditative silence there.

"It's no place for a woman," Douglas suddenly declared. It was a statement beyond question by his tone.

Angus was about to reply. "You mean a white woman?" but that would have been foolish. Obviously that was what was meant by Douglas, who then plunged into a rambling dissertation on the life of the forts where he had been, and of the settlements in their neighbourhood. There was no law, or if there were law there was no one to enforce it. Up at Edmonton murderers had been pointed out to him, murderers free and unconcerned said he. There was a Cree there, for example, who had slain two Sarcees that had been visiting his family. They had fallen in love with his daughter--"Or his sister, was it?" rumbled Sam. "Anyhow, the fellow's name was Tahakooch, and when these Sarcees prepared to leave he went out on the trail with them, dropped behind, shot them both, and came back to brag of it, swagger of it before whites as well as before Indians."

Then there was a raid he had heard of in which a band of one tribe of Indians had killed one entire band of another, men, women, and children, except one or two young women whom they had carried off. And the prospectors who were washing for gold dust on the Saskatchewan headwaters, and even over by the Peace River, when they came in--"Well, some of them," said he, and paused. "I like a dram whiles. I can tak' a dram. But drinking! Hech, sirs! I've seen drinking now. No, no place for a woman--" he paused again, "yet," he added, "but twenty years to come--you mark my words."

"Uh-hu," said Angus, and turned his back on the scene for which he had deflected the horses upward there. With lowered heads the string went dropping down the eastern slope of High Butte.

They passed on into that sea of grass in which for days on end, in a phrase of the plainsmen, they were out of sight of land, no lone butte even raising far off a purple knob in the immensity. Angus had a mental image: a great hand was dropped in water and made a wide gesture in air, flicking down the drops of Fort Ellice, Fort Pelly, Touchwood Hills Post, Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt, Fort Edmonton, with three sprayed residual drops at the end, of St. Ann's, Jasper, and the Mountain House--in a sweep across a thousand miles.

There were days when they saw--as far as eye could reach--humped dots moving slowly by the hundred all in the one direction, and they even rode through these herds of buffalo without creating a stampede. There were days when they travelled, with a flirt-flirt and frou-frou of saddle leather, between western sky and eastern sky and at night looked not only up but forth at the stars as do sailors at sea. Once or twice they came upon parties of the buffalo-runners from Red River and Qu'Appelle, Scots and French half-breeds. Once or twice they came to camps of Cree Indians upon their summer hunt, the tents all set up like white candle extinguishers in the long wrinkle of some coulee, the horses grazing round about--bays and buckskins (with or without the prized black streak down the spine), blue horses (the kind called smokies), pintos (skewbald and piebald), horses glossy black and horses silver gray. Or they met bands on trek, travelling villages jogging along with trailing travois raising the dust. These encounters were the chief interest of the traverse for Angus.

For Sam Douglas the most interesting episode had to do not with any met or overtaken on the way, but with a cloud. No bigger than a man's hand it seemed at first, sailing serene, how near or how far hard to compute, ahead of them one blazing day.

"An odd cloud that," he remarked, "different from the others."

A long gaggle of geese served to show that it was far off for these distant pin-points in none of their divagations disappeared into that cloud. What they were about it was difficult to conjecture. They appeared to be but exercising their wings above that segment of the world. Now they showed as an immense arrow, moving definitely to north, then suddenly they changed to a mere thread wavering irresponsibly in the ether. They were not travelling anywhere, had either risen in alarm or but for the pleasure of flight. The thread undulated in another direction, was again arrow-shaped; and always, beyond, was that cloud, the hue of which differed from that of others adrift and, by reason of the difference, seemed ominous.

It dipped to the prairie's edge and there it broke in a glittering descent, a thousand flashing points of light. They talked about it in their camp that night; and in their camp next day they talked again of it, having come to an area of the plain where the grass was beaten into the earth. Arrived at Fort Ellice, chatting of their experiences with the factor, Mackay, and Chantelaine of Fort Pitt (who was there for a night on his way back after a visit to Fort Garry), Douglas spoke of that region of bruised and beaten land.

"That was hail," said Mackay.

"There must have been a midsummer hail-cloud emptying itself there," said Chantelaine.

Douglas turned to Angus.

"That was yon cloud!" said he solemnly.

He had many questions to ask regarding these hailstorms on blazing August days.

"I have heard of the stones," said Chantelaine, "as big as marbles, even as big as bantams' eggs."

"It would hurt to get a crack on the head with one!" observed Douglas. "Do they happen often?"

Not often, he was told, and both men were of opinion that only certain districts were thus afflicted.

"Lots of people in the country for years have never seen one," said Chantelaine.

"Well, that's good hearing," declared Sam. "I suppose the buffaloes' shaggy foreparts protect them if they don't know the weather signs and clear away. But their hindquarters are not so well covered. I should think ordinary cattle--"

"They don't last long," said Mackay. "It is just a cloudburst of hail and over."

"But look what one storm can do in the time! Suppose hail came down like that in a wheat-field--"

"There are no wheat-fields here," said Chantelaine.

The subject was in Sam's mind next day as they rode on by Snake Creek toward Bird Tail Creek.

"Hail insurance," he suddenly boomed.

"What's that?" asked Angus. "What are you talking about?"

"I was just thinking that some day all these plains will be what they call smiling farms! Look at how the land has been manured through ages by the buffalo. Look at the grand, growing soil, man. It's too good for cattle, I'm thinking, a grand country like this. And when that day comes an insurance against damage to crops by hail--the way they have marine insurance and life insurance--would be a good thing. No doubt lots of people would say they would take the risk without paying insurance. These men back there said the midsummer storms are localized and don't happen often. But a fright or two, here and there, for one or another of the smiling farmers, would make them listen to a man of a persuasive turn. Aye, that's far ahead, however, but to be taken a brief of in the notebook so to speak."

"You are jumping ahead again," remarked Angus.

"Yes, a jump or two--as always. But those days are not so far off as some might imagine. I'm going to tell you something between ourselves. Last year there was a man--by the name of Hector--a civil engineer--away back there in the mountains looking for a way through for a railway. And the winter before there was another man, Palliser by name, who spent the whole winter (and he must have his courage) with the Blackfeet Indians, so that they could become friends and he could move about through their country at his ease--and he was on the same job. All last year he was at it, looking for a route for a railway."

"We heard rumours to that effect at the Mountain House," Angus began, "but--"

"But! Oh, yes, there will be but upon but for awhile, I have no doubt, but it's coming. You and me, Angus, if we live, are going to see changes in these parts."

Leaving Ellice, they went by the valley of the Assiniboine which flows into the Red River at Fort Garry, and so anon came to that small settlement to which, two years before, Daniel Munro, Kate and Angus had driven in the spring, the mud dragged up by the wheels and plip-plopping behind as the horses squelched on the way--passed near the settlement (the hoofs of their horses leaving a pennant of dust that day), coasted the slough where the unexpected gulls had been too much for Mrs. Munro. On the traverse they had, as was easy enough, lost track of a day, neither of them sure as they rode down the Assiniboine valley whether here was Saturday or Sunday. When houses began to show ahead, rectangular scrabblings on the low skyline, the sound of a kirk bell came to them on a light wind out of the east.

"So it is the Sabbath Day," said Douglas. "I wish I had taken a bet on't!"

Together they rode to the Fort to discover when the International was to go up the river. Hearing that she was not expected down for two days, Douglas remained there with the officer in charge (to whom had been one of his letters of introduction), while Angus started out upon the road for the Frasers'.

It was growing dark by Red River, scents and sounds stronger than the visible, but along the road day lingered as though the dust held it. Lights were beginning to show in windows and stars in the sky when he came to the old place. He had the impression as of having been dreaming, lying out under a tree somewhere, or in a haystack--a strange dream of broad prairies, of boat-building by a distant river, of the singing of an Indian girl in a cabin there--as a voice came out to him, Ian in the porch tapping the beat with a stick:

"A vine from Egypt thou hast brought,
   Thy free love made it thine;
And drov'st out nations, proud and haut,
   To plant this lovely vine.
"Thou didst prepare for it a place,
   And root it deep and fast,
Then it began to grow apace,
   And filled the land at last.
"With her green shade that cover'd all,
   The hills were--"

 

The singing and the tapping ceased as Mr. Fraser rose to meet the tall shadowy form that advanced. A light from within shone on Angus's face.

"Well, well, it's Angus Munro! Come and see who's here!"

There they all were again, Mrs. Fraser unchanged in the pleasure of the meeting gathering him to her and kissing him as though he were a son.

"How you young folks do grow!" exclaimed Angus, but twenty himself. "Fiona, Fiona! If you go on like this they'll have to train you to a bean-pole! Let me see, how old are you now?"

"Nine."

"Not too old for me to kiss?"

She leapt to him in her lithe, quick way, kissed him, then linked her hands over one of his shoulders while Flora embraced him and hung, and swung, to the other side.

They passed indoors to the remembered twinkle of the homemade candles shining on the plates in their racks. At that Hector came in.

"Here's Hector," said Mr. Fraser. "He's the foreman now! That's what his mother calls him, whatever."

"Oh, yes, they are shooting up. Let me see, it is just two years since you've been gone."

"Just two years," replied Angus as they sat down--and marvelled at how much had been in his life in that time, back here at this little settlement that looked out on the curve of western sky and the plains as the shore-side villages look out to sea. He had been to the end of it and was back again.

His eyes rested on Fiona, blindly it seemed, as the thought came to him how far away was Rocky Mountain House. Where, he wondered, was Minota then, as the dusk which had deepened to night here at Red River ran beyond Assiniboia, Saskatchewan--and on.

"You must have a lot to tell us of where you've been and what brings you back," said Mrs. Fraser.

One thing, he considered, he could not tell. There were unions of white with red folk round them there to be sure. Even the tallow of the candles lighting this scene came to them from the half-breed buffalo hunters. And yet--he imagined himself talking about Minota: a shadow would come in Mrs. Fraser's eyes and she would turn to her husband while he, to hide his stare of regret or unbelief, would look at the floor. There would be a silence broken only by Ian's unconscious whistling, or hissing between his teeth, of some ballad or psalm tune, in a way he had when pondering something sad, calamitous, beyond mending.

Next day Angus took an opportunity to slip away alone to the kirkyard of Kildonan to see the stone that (as he had arranged before going west) had been set up for his father and mother--a melancholy occasion. Standing there he felt again a deep loneliness--and thought of Minota. Voices had a way of haunting him, and hers was with him then, singing one of her short repetitive chants, about the grass sprouting, the geese and the ducks flying over--all day and even at night. There rose in him--there rose in him--a wish that he had for wife one of his own race. Little more than a month ago he had left her, loving her, yet here came this thought surging up and angering him with its shabby disloyalty.

"It seems he has something on his mind," Mrs. Fraser said to her husband that night.

"He went out this afternoon to the kirk where his father and mother lie," answered Ian.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" said she.

Had anyone told Angus Munro during that last winter at Rocky Mountain House that in the next year he would be hearing the carts rattle in the streets of Edinburgh, and seeing the room of a Lothian Street lodging hazed with a penetrating night mist, he would have known that the runes were being read awry!

First he had been in Glasgow, where Sam Douglas had interviewed many wealthy bodies, bailies and merchants, toward financing his confident coal-mining project, and at most of these meetings Angus was present.

"We have been bitten already by that country," said one shrewd Glaswegian, shaking his head, and began to talk of a transport company that was to take emigrants into the Cariboo gold-fields--a hollow fraud, he called it. "I came near to having the ignominy of being upon the board of that company," he went on, "but did not like the look of it. It had its map of the western continent, with a line showing the route from Ottawa to Minnesota and the Selkirk Settlements--Red River--and on across these prairies o' yours to the Rocky Mountains, and through them to some river flowing west."

He opened a drawer and searched in it.

"I thought I had their map," he said, "but I must have destroyed it in disgust. Their stage-coaches, they proclaimed, ran from the Red River to the mountains, and beyond that they had boats. What was the end of it? Suits against the company by folks who had found there was not a conveyance for them beyond Selkirk. I've just heard an extraordinary story about one party that they bamboozled and that didn't come back to take them to law." (Sam seemed to be all attention). "At their own expense they went on across the plains, through the mountains, and there had their own boat--made it, mark you--and they had to do what's called portaging: you'll both ken what that is, acquaint with that speculative country. At one place between close banks they decided that two might venture down with the boat lightened, instead of dragging it over land, and the others portage. Well, these got to the end of their carry and there was the boat, smashed to bits. One of the two men that had dared to run down was clinging to a rock, and him they rescued. The other was lost. When they came to look through his things for his relatives' address they found that he had his log-book entered up in full, aye to the very end. The last entry was, Arrived at the cañon--and was drowned."

The bailie's contempt for the humbugging company was forgotten as he talked by reason of his interest in that strange story.

Sam Douglas was but half listening, despite his rapt air. Stage-coaches! Why not? Why not stage-coaches across the great plains? The Sam Douglas Transport Company; or The Great Northwest Express Company: he tried over to himself various names as he sat there and the bailie talked himself down a side-turning to the end.

"Ah, weel," said Douglas, "let us get back to the coal-developing project. There is nothing fraudulent in that."

"I'm not saying there is," the other retorted, "but there is plenty of time before we invest in it."

"I'm no' so sure," said Sam. "I think you'll be coming to me sooner than you have the faintest thought, and wheedling me to get you in on't. However, however, I'm no' here to plead. I'm here to give you a chance to be in on a good thing. We'll no' tak' up your time, seeing how you feel."

There were many incidents of that sort, weeks slipping by, and no one jumping at the chance that Sam brought them. At the end of three months Angus considered how many of Douglas's letters to likely investors he had copied, and examination of the file he kept was depressing. Here was many a cast and never a bite.

They had been back close on half a year when Sam went on a visit to some relatives (like Angus, he had no near kin), and Angus thought to take passage on The Clansman while he was gone and revisit Loch Brendan, but, instead, stayed in their lodgings writing to the Frasers, to all his friends at Mountain House, and to Minota--her letter addressed care of the factor, who would read it to her.

Sam came back from his rest with renewed eagerness and his notebook full of names of "likely folk" in the capital. But after another few months in Edinburgh, where Douglas had no better luck, Angus began to feel as though imposing upon his good friend's hopes. Yet, not himself unhopeful, remembering the coal fires at the Mountain House, his faith revived on hearing that several of those whom Sam sought to interest in his plans had also heard that a railway route was being sought for out there. "Oh, yes, we admit that!" they would say.

There is no place like Edinburgh for book-shops, and when left to himself Angus spent much time in them, or turning over the volumes in the dips at their doors, needing no recollection of his father's advice to con his book. He had learnt the love of reading. A whole year fled thus, with an astounding celerity, Douglas and he back in Glasgow again with two offers of splendid chances for those seeking sound investment. One of these was for immediate not a postulated early reaping: The Great Northwest Express Company--to be going on with.

"These bodies have nae ambition beyond keeping their money in the bank," said Sam at last. "It's a wonder they trust it there and don't keep it in an au