Emily F. Murphy

“ Look well at our black soutanes, scarlet coats, grey homespuns, and yellow moose hides, for we are proud this day and wear our finest feathers. It is not well to be disturbed by the untamable naughtiness of our horses, for the northern trailer, you must have heard, has no stomach for glitter of trappings, neither does he like the feel of neighbours. As we ramble down a white aisle of birch and poplar, the feet of our horses tread out for us the odour of leaf mould, which odour is the panacea of the world. ”

“ An unsavoury mess of entrails is stewing in a black pot and filling the house with an unpleasant odour. I try not to show my repugnance lest my hostesses consider the white woman to be proud-stomached with no proper appetite for lowly faring. I tell them as I take down the blanket from the door—not untruthfully you understand, but as a small matter of immediate expediency—how it is light one desires rather than fresh air, and that it is hard to see aright when one has been walking in the sunlight. ”

“ All the horses must go one way round the mountain, and not turn backwards, for there is no room to pass on the trail. Every little while, you stop to look at the savage rock forms which surround you, or at their colours. It was no stinting brush that laid them on. Opal and wine-red, purple and ochre, splash the rocks with living hues of wonderful beauty. It is a pity we have not more lavish words for these transfiguration scenes of Nature. It is foolish to try and explain them with our worn-out ones. Every traveller realizes this. ”

“ Aye! but the summer winds are honey-mouthed.
Aye! but the skies are star-enchanted, and there are fair stories I might tell about yellow grain fields and of red lilies like blown flame, but none save those who are prairie rangers would understand aright.
Besides, there are woolly-mouthed men and chattering daws who say secretly that we of the North are boasters, and that we tell ill tales.
But though we are impeached, yet will we say that our song is tinged with no lie. We are young men, and sowers of grain, and it is pleasant to glorify the largess of our harvest. ”

“ These lamps are the footlights the miners hold up to Old King Coal as they pierce his sides with their electric drills, and wrench open his wounds with their ripping charges of dynamite. They call this shooting the coal, so it is just as well to keep your peculiar fantasies to yourself.
In a coal-mine one loses his sense of direction, for there is no heaven above, no earth beneath—nothing but silence and black impenetrableness. ”

“ By six o'clock we are again on the road, and passing through a rolling park-like country dotted with clumps of cottonwood, birch, poplar, and spruce. Sometimes, we pass lush meadow upon which graze full-fleshed cattle and comfortably rotund sheep. On one farm, a man is burning dead brushwood. There is no keener pleasure than, here and there, to thrust a core of fire into long grass or brushwood, and to watch the red tongues of flame as they greedily lap it up. As yet, no farmer has written about it, but this is only because farmers are afraid of literary critics. ”

“ All the way along we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and mystery, and perhaps of fear. Here our eyes are pleasured with an illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a glacier—a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun. ”

“ In the morning, soon after sunup, we continue our joyous journey on the Athabasca, but the birds are out and about before us. An occasional duck rises off the water sharply with a whir of wet wings, but generally they are self-complacent and play at last across the road with the ship, just as if they sought trouble and despised it. The young ducklings, who have only taken to water these few days agone, form themselves into tiny rafts and one might almost expect to see a fairy step aboard them. ”

“ This would seem to be a kind of big game shooting which has all others vanquished into nothingness. This is a wonderful trail through the mountains—the pass called the Yellowhead—a level ribbon of land along which the steels are laid for most of the way. But in some places, a road has been blasted out just to show how the mountains can be beaten. These lords of earth and sky, when called upon, must bow their unwilling necks to the yoke of steel. And no proper-spirited person can stand in this pass without feeling the challenge of the hills and without an immutable desire to conquer them. ”

“ Like the ascetics who of old-time went into the wilderness and found themselves dreaming of scarlet lips and white arms, so these fine fellows are ever fancying a comely woman gliding across their trail; a distressed damsel who needs to be fed and carried for long, long distances and sheltered in a low-built house of logs that is well-warmed and well-provisioned, with no other bachelor nearer than a hundred miles. ”

“ Don't you know this is summer time on the hills where Nature has wealth to spill like a mad-woman and spills it? On this mountain-top, there is a wandering wind soft as a child's caress. I must make the best of it and of the fierce radiance of the sunshine, for, sooner than we bargain for, the Lord in his derision may send a cutting blizzard and it will be cold, so cold. ”

“ He declares the sound to be a screeching crescendo that has its origin in an implacable quarrel between the wind and the pines. The wind is a suffragette, a woman of determined grievance, who would be better of bit and bridle and possibly of gag. She makes the pine a butt for her insult and ridicule and a target against which she lashes the hail and drives her shrewish snow. When not grappling his throat with her plaguing, pestilent fingers, it is only because she is recoiling to strike again. ”

“ Of all our Canadian legends, I like it the best, and it may happen that you will too. It tells how on each New Year's Night the spirits of the woodsmen and rivermen are carried in phantom canoes from these lonely northlands back to the old homesteads in the south, where, unseen and undisturbed, they mingle with their friends. The father embraces his children; the lover his maiden, the husband his wife, and once more the son lays his head on his mother's lap. All of the voyageurs join the feast, the song, and the dance, so that no man is lonely in those hours, neither is he weary or sad. ”

“ The rivers cease their singing; the birds are silent, and all is stilled to the bounds of the world save only the sonorous wind which is the breath of Claeg, the Bound One, who is the earth. Here, the north-east wind is Lord Paramount, and the Crees and Chipewyans have long known that Death comes from his direction.
Listen! I made an error, to say that all is stilled, for, of occasion, there is the mewl of the lynx; the yap of the timber wolf as he gives tongue in pursuit of ah-pe-shee moos-oos, the jumping deer; the howling infamy of the huskies seeking their meat from God ”

“ The first men we meet are the civil-engineers. Nearly every one surveys here, and even the wild geese run lines along the sky. These engineers are pleasant-spoken men of proper spirit, who have been hammered into hardihood by work and weather. Nearly all of them invite you to eat in their camps: "Come over to my stamping-grounds," says a youth who looks like a walking pine-tree. There is no doubt in the world he is lonely for his women-folk whom we happen to know "down home," for when we accept he smiles and says "Heaven bless you endlessly!" ”

“ From this time forth, the men who travel the trail will work for a wage. They will forget the feel of frozen bread in the teeth; the hard earth underneath them and the rough blanket against their chins. Yes! and they will also forget the fine elemental thrill that comes from hitting a running moose at long range, or a slithering wolf that lurks privily in a covert of kinikinnic. The pity of it!
No longer will our trail know the tired huskies, and still more tired runners, who each year, come February, make this homestretch to the old fur-market. ”

“ These are no æsthetic feeblings, these merry gentlemen, but a sturdy breed, upstanding and handsome, with skin like the colour of well-seasoned saddles and a smell of burnt poplar in their hair. I think the rough clothes they wear throw their good looks into relief. Or it may be that the people are better looking in the North and have better physiques. It must be so, for the South has in all ages drawn upon the northern blood for rejuvenation just as, in these days, they need hard wheat to tone up their softer varieties. ”

“ And, here where I write at Edmonton under the aurora, these men of the Southern Provinces have assembled with our lads of the North and West who are leather-fleshed and hard-sinewed, but withal, comely. This is Edmonton on the Saskatchewan, which the bow-bearers call by another name, meaning the great river of the plains. This is the stranger-thronged city of the North; the city that has merited a cheer. It is here our glorious Lady of Alberta has placed her throne whereunto all her sons come up that they may pay her tribute of honour. ”

“ You must needs see them before Passion Week when the gardeners cut and send them to a large hungry place called down the line, where, in prairie churches of tin and pine and sod, the Eastertide worshippers consider the lily and sing songs about death and life.
Not an inch of space is lost in the long lines where, tall and lissome, the stalks bend and curtsy to the passer-by. The glory of the lily is short-lived, for always they are cut off in maturity. The message they give is not one of prophecy and resurrection as the writers have ever taught. ”

“ Probably no industry has suffered so keenly from car shortage as that of coal-mining. The only people who have received windfalls from this regretable state of affairs were the dishonest yard-masters who, unknown to the railway officials, did a secret but withal brisk business with the rival coal companies that bid for cars. It took a goodly slice off the profits of each car of coal to grease the large palm of the yard-master. And who in this pushful, practical age has ever heard of a car spotter in the railway yards buying a ton of coal? ”

“ It is a trail of lean hunger and bleeding feet, one that has ever been prodigal of promise, but wary of accomplishment. Surely this is so, for once over it stumbled and swore those half-mad men known as the Caribou Stampeders—these, and other unwept, unhonoured fellows who fared into the wilderness for what reasons even the wise Lord knoweth not. If the bones of the red and white folk who have travelled this long, long street were stood upright, I doubt not they would make a fence of pickets for us all the way. ”

“ On the trail, on the river, in the woods, you may glean from the Redmen and their mate-women tales that are well veined with the fine gold of poetry, but which, as a general thing, are inconclusive and do not serve aright the ends of justice. As you search into the untaught minds of these Indian folk and pull on their mental muscle, you must perforce recall the amazing sensation of the gentleman who took the hand of a little ragged girl in his and felt that she wanted a thumb. ”

“ I am very sorry I must die some day and miss these wilding joys and the odour of the trees and flowers, but it is my comfortable hope that when I return to Claeg, the Round One, who is called the earth, I shall be evolved into a pine-tree and grow happily in this mountain pass. Then will other people come to, even as I come to these trees, and say, "Good morning, my friend! I have been lonely for you."
The pines are our fellow-creatures and more closely related to us than anything that has roots in the earth. They speak to our inmost being. ”

“ Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?
She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage bags—young fellows all in the full force of life—these, and "the gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging—that is going—for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the city meet the gang coming out. ”

“ And why should men complain of the stabbing cold and of the unrestricted range of the young winds? Why do they wish to regulate God's snow and rain? What could be more hateful to men than unfaltering sunshine and ever-flowering fields?
In the winter of the fortressed North, animals turn white as do the birds and the very earth itself. ”

“ When the road is clear, the car spreads her wings and flies. Her gentle pliancy seems incompatible with her hurtling force. Each moment, she accumulates momentum so that we feel a sensation of tremendous power without pity. For the nonce, we are potential murderers and pigmy men had better have a care how they lounge across our paths. This mad car doesn't know a hill when she comes to it and even sings a long-metre song on the ascent. ”

“ We shall have breeze and sun in our eyes, and breeze and sun in our hearts. If you like not the prospect, pray, come no further, for we be contrary the one to the other and no way-fellows.
As we climb on the train this morning, it seems as though our quest for quiet is to be cheated by the wallowing wave of humanity that threatens to submerge us. ”

“ I would have said that the Anglo-Saxon hungers for heroes, but that the heroes were rare—that this was why the raw, ragged wolf-land lying about the Hudson Bay and along the stretches of the Mackenzie River was of deep and peculiar interest, in that it had the distinction of producing crops of heroes and that the breed never seemed to run out.
I would have said that the story of the northern priest is the story of a man with an ideal, or, if you will have it so, with a dream; that the dream is one that disturbs his ease and leads him in perils often. ”

“ You feel as if you were the last survivor in a dead world. But presently, a strong hand will take yours in his and lead you through the Stygian darkness till your eyes become habituated to the gloom, when you will become aware of two tracks stretching away in the channel which has been hollowed out of the coal. Then you will be warned to step aside and keep close to the wall while a stocky-car holding probably three tons is, with a vast grinding of wheels, whirled by you to the cage, there to be hoisted to the tipple. ”

“ It is an idea of mine that these hills are the lair of the running winds which for past eons have swept in bitter streaks across the prairies, winnowing them like a thresher would winnow grain. Seven-leagued boots have they and no man has tracked them down. How could a man when they fling dust in his eyes? They are the bitter scouts of the North who fight as they go. ”