Chapter XII: Tragi-Comedy in an Alkali Flat

The Traileys, with Sam and Bert, stayed at the marquee camp a week. At the end of that time, the snow had disappeared; also Trailey's foot was doing nicely. Nevertheless, that gentleman arranged for Bert to do his driving for him. To this no one objected, not even Esther.

Trails were now made doubly treacherous by the water from the melted snow. Every few miles one or other of the wagons sunk to its axles. Sometimes they wriggled from the grasping clutch of the sticky morass by doubling-up; but much oftener by unloading. And because of the strangeness of the tasks they were constantly faced with, and the weirdness of the methods they employed for their accomplishment, at least one-half their truly prodigious efforts was so much time and labour wasted.

About one day's travel, roughly speaking, from Battleford, they ran into a screamingly comic incident, one of the kind which anyone except an old-timer, familiar with the peculiarities of the Barr Colonists, may possibly pooh-pooh at, or quite likely regard as pure myth. It is no trick to wrench credulity in these sceptical times. Indeed, it seems the more people know, the less they believe.

However, an alkali flat of immense length, and probably two or three hundred yards wide, was the pastoral setting chosen by an inscrutable Fate for the production of a pathetic little scene. To the right were the rounded hills marking the giant Saskatchewan's mile-wide meanderings towards Lake Winnipeg. On the left, the perfectly-level alkali plain strung itself out to the limit of vision. In front, more rounded and wooded hills; and, behind, a gently-rolling country disappearing into black perspective, with a ridge in the foreground upon which grew a long, straggling curtain of leafless poplars.

Only their axles, and boxes, had prevented the greyish, viscid, oozy alkali (in consistency a sort of cross between wet concrete and quicksand) from almost engulfing not only half a dozen colonists' wagons, but the oxen and horses as well.

The animals had plunged and struggled till they could do so no longer. As fast as one leg was withdrawn from the sticky stuff--with a plop like a huge cork shooting out of a bottle, deeper and yet deeper sank the other quivering limbs. Enervated as they were by hardships and neglect, yet the horses were sufficiently alive to throw themselves about in terror as they felt themselves being inexorably drawn downwards. Fortunately, their bellies, empty as most of these were, prevented them from being completely swallowed up.

Thinking to find firmer ground, each driver had steered his wagon into the great, wide flat (which, by the way, it was impossible to avoid)--striking out a course of his own, only to meet the same sort of disaster which had overtaken the others.

Before rushing into the prairie's shallow, saucer-like, gluey plain, where it waited patiently like a huge trap beneath a covering of waving, reedy grass, Sam and Bert first did some scouting. With infinite care, as they thought, they chose a beautifully-camouflaged, innocent-looking place to cross.

So firm did the ground appear, that in the heat of the sun it had begun to turn snow-white with the absolute purity of its behaviour. In a very few minutes, they discovered that it was trouble of the most acute kind, and lots of it, which was causing the alkali flat to turn white, like salt.

They both steered their teams from afoot, a method green Englishmen invariably choose. The Trailey family were also walking.

As soon as the wagons sunk down, which they quickly did, and before the horses were able to do much struggling, Sam and Bert promptly unhooked all the traces. Finding themselves at some liberty, the half-starved creatures at once began biting greedily at the heaven-sent pasturage, all the while cunningly lifting their feet--like a cat does on a wet floor--as these were sucked in by the insatiable ooze.

Fifty yards or so to their right, another wagon was sitting peacefully on its axles. A man and a woman and a young girl seemed to be conducting themselves rather queerly--even for Barr Colonists.

"There's somethink up wiv that party over there," remarked Sam the sympathetic, as he gazed curiously at the little group. "Lissen ter the kid sobbin'! She's fair broken-'earted."

Bert, too, was human enough to forget his own troubles for a short time when brought face to face with the minor tragedies of fellow-colonists. "Let's go and investigate, Sam," he said, at once commencing to walk across.

A thinnish, weedy man, wearing tweeds of shabby aspect, was standing alongside a hole in the alkali which he had evidently only recently dug. Plainly he was not by profession a navvy, nor a sexton, nor of any other occupation whose chief tool is the lowly spade.

The hole in the ground looked as if it had been excavated by a very incompetent fox terrier. Most of the gummy soil was sticking to the man's boots, with here and there a little adhering lovingly to his face and clothes. The rest clung fondly to the spade--mostly about the handle. Another thinnish person, a woman, enveloped in a waterproof coat of a light fawn colour, was seated close by in the long grass, which hereabouts was profuse--a godsend the party's rack-like, black-and-white-spotted oxen lunged strenuously forward from their bogged position to investigate.

"Wot's up?" asked Sam of the little girl, who was convulsed with grief. The woman on the ground wiped a tear from her left eye, snuffled slightly, squeezed her handkerchief into a damp ball, put it in the pocket of her coat, then turned her face away, apparently to hide its misery.

"Fa--Fa--Fanny's d-dead," gulped the little maiden, who was perhaps about ten.

The man turned dreary eyes on Sam, who noticed, stretched out beside the freshly-scooped-out hole, stark and stiff in death, a young pig. The man wiped his perspiring brow with the sleeve of his coat and sighed.

"Yes, Fanny's gone," he echoed dismally; then, pulling his watch out and looking at it, he said: "Five o'clock when she left us--to the very minute," and his voice, a high-pitched, clear falsetto, went fluttering out into the void like a choir-boy soloist's tones dying away among the rafters of a lofty cathedral.

Catching the extreme solemnity of the occasion, Sam murmured:

"Pore Fanny."

Bert coughed sympathetically. Esther, who had also come across to see what was the matter, emitted a soft little sigh at Sam's words. She was a very tender-hearted girl, with the Englishwoman's love of animals.

"Wot killed it?" asked Sam, as he surveyed the fortunate pig, in the same glance instantly comprehending that "Fanny" was in reality a little boy porker.

"We do--on't kn--o--ow; o--h o-o-h," wailed the little girl.

"Stomach pains, I fancy," said the man in his sing-song voice.

A smothered blubber came from the woman on the grass, with whom, woman-like, Esther had been commiserating tenderly.

"Belly-ache," she vouched confidently between the emission of a couple of small-sized tear-drops, which just then trickled from her reddened eyes, grazed her chin, and fell splashing on her rain-coat. "I fed 'er reg'lar, an' all. In fact, she lived just like one of us."

A second, and closer, inspection revealed to Bert that the dead porker's ears were in a shocking state. They were mangled, and almost non-existent. Indicating them with the toe of his boot, he said: "What did that?"

"She used to play with Daisy a lot--in the box there," the man observed, and he nodded towards a little cage arrangement which was suspended to the back of the wagon by means of a length of rope. "Got a bit rough with one another at times," he added.

"Daisy's ears's the same," snuffled the woman on the ground.

Bert and Sam walked round to the cage to inspect Daisy, whilst Esther comforted the grieving females. Sure enough, the ears of the surviving piggy were chewed almost completely off.

"Started to eat one anuvver, my Gawd if they didn't!" Sam exclaimed. "Pore little bleeders!"--then, turning to the man, he said: "Buy 'em at Sarskatoon?"

"Yes--at a farm just this side. Five dollars each. And them three fowls there, a dollar apiece."

Slung from the rearmost hoop of the schooner-top, the sheet of which was removed, presumably to give free play to the relatively cooling breeze, for the day had been blisteringly hot, was a second cage. This held in close captivity three speckled farmyard birds.

"Plymouth Rocks," the man explained proudly as Sam and Bert stared up at them. What little could be seen of the birds seemed to indicate that they weren't very ancient--not above seven or eight, perhaps.

"Gettin' any eggs?" queried Sam, materialistic as usual.

"Not yet. My wife says they swing about too much. She says it makes 'em seasick. What d'you think yourself?"

"Shouldn't wonder," said Bert, thoughtfully.

"But when we get to our land," went on the man, "I think they'll give us a few."

As though in protest, a couple of the fowls cocked their heads up, and, with bursting throats and wide-open beaks, proclaimed to their ingenuous owner their unimpeachable masculinity in a pair of the lustiest and most competitive cock-a-doodle-doos that ever resounded across an astonished prairie.

"Does that uvver one do that?" Sam questioned suspiciously.

"No."

"You ain't alf lucky."

"Oh, why?"

"Them fowls wot just crowed is cocks--but the uvver's an 'en."

This piece of highly-informative news gradually seeped into the man's rather one-sided intelligence. He had been a draper's assistant back home in England--in Manchester, to be exact, where he had excelled in the manly art of selling calico, and corsets, and cotton stockings.

In those days--at any rate, it was so among the Barr Colonists--the very first thing a man did to his stock (even before feeding them) was to endow them with names. People with classical educations christened their animals Plato, Virgil, Psyche, and such like appellations. Those with biblical proclivities and training resorted to Pharaoh, Esau, Mordecai, and similar titles; whereas the common people fell back on Bill, and Sally, and Prince, and other every-day names.

Quite early in the game, Sam had remarked this trait. Was not their own team bearing up bravely under the burden of "Tempest" and "Kruger"? And weren't Trailey's nags nicknamed "Arthur" and "Freddie"? All round him--on the trail, in camp, at Saskatoon, had he not listened to vapid oxen being frantically inveigled with "Sissy," and "Carl," and "Seneca," and terribly frequently, also, with long-drawn-out strings of curses, which were fast dooming otherwise good-living young Englishmen to everlasting perdition? One colonist, an ex-schoolmaster and classical scholar, actually named his oxen "Aristophanes" and "Euripides." His explanation was that the former ox, possessing very long horns, was always hooking his mate, which, because of having no horns at all, was very docile.

"Wot's their nymes?" Sam asked of the man, nodding at the fowls.

The proud owner instantly waxed enthusiastic. "That one with only one toe on its right foot--you can't see it from here; well, that's called Phyllis, after my wife's sister. The other one, the one that doesn't crow, I've named Susie--to remind me of my first wife, the mother of my little girl there. That other beggar, the one with its eye pecked out, we call Amos, on account of my once having an uncle named Amos, who came home from the Indian Mutiny with only one eye. He was a canteen sergeant."

"Yes, it's very 'andy to 'ave only one eye in the harmy," observed Sam with the innocent manner of a conjurer about to produce three or four hundred yards of linoleum out of a silk hat.

"Oh, why?" demanded the ex-draper, biting hugely.

"Why, because," replied Sam, winking wickedly at Bert, "when a sodger wiv only one eye charges the henemy, it cuts the barsteds in 'alf."

Bert crumpled up in a sort of fit, as though he'd been smitten with sudden colic. "I never thought of that," laughed the other man.

"Very smart nymes you've gev them fowls," said Sam, whose face was as straight and as hypocritically solemn as an undertaker's at a dead rival's funeral.

"Yes, an' they all answer to 'em, too. You ought to see Amos there, when the wife calls to him an' says, 'Amos, you rascal, when are you going to lay us some eggs?' He just sticks his head on one side an' makes a noise in his throat like as if he was quietly chucklin' to himself. He's a knowing bird, that."

"Jus' like an 'uman bein'--eh?"

"Yes."

Sam was anxious to learn how an obvious town-dweller could be so well up in farmyard lore, so he said: "Where d'yer come from?"

"Manchester--but my wife's from Birmingham."

Sam adopted a slightly supercilious manner not at all uncommon with individuals of his class, who either openly or secretly, or both, despise all provincials.

Bermondsey, from its superior heights of cunningness, looked down scornfully upon poor little simple Manchester. "That there Amos cock'll be layin' eggs fer yore missis when Burning'am's a holiday resource," mocked Sam.

Bert grinned and strolled off to join Esther, who had apparently succeeded in diverting the woman's thoughts from the grief of an unexpected bereavement to more pleasant matters connected with their future life on the prairie, two hundred miles from anywhere.

"Yes, miss," the woman was saying, "my 'usband's goin' in for markit gard'ning. 'E loves stewed prunes, so 'e'll know all about clippin' branches off of roses, an' rodydendrums, an' things."

Esther smiled. She knew a little about pruning, herself. The Trailey's back garden wall in England had been draped with ivy, off which she often used to shave pieces in a worthy endeavour to persuade it to trail itself across an old-fashioned doorway.

"----And yer want ter feed that pig," Sam was advising the husband, who playfully commenced addressing a series of quaint, grunting noises to Daisy as she reclined disconsolate in the hindmost cage of the menagerie. "Nah it ain't got Fanny's ears ter chew at, it'll snuff it, as true as yore nyme's ... Wot is yer nyme, if it ain't arskin' too much?"

"Cox."

"Wot!"

"Cox. C-o-x, Cox."

For easily a whole minute Sam was struck completely dumb. That a man bearing such a name should be transporting two cocks and a hen to the distant Colony was too much even for sophisticated Sam.

"No wonder yer knows all abaht poultry," he said when he had recovered from the shock. Still wearing a look of astonishment, he added: "My nyme's Potts."

"Oh," said the ex-draper, "I have some cousins named Potts. Relations, perhaps," but observing that Sam's stature was at least a couple of inches less than his own, and that his features were far from classic, he said in a changed tone, from which all warmth had been carefully extracted, "it's likely to be very distant, though, if you are."

"I'm from the Big Smoke," returned Sam guilelessly. "Ain't got no relashuns up in the north, not as I knows of--leastw'ys, if I 'ave, they ain't farmers."

This rather subtle compliment pleased the Manchester man so much, that he called to his wife to ask where he might find a small crust of bannock with which to banquet the surviving pig, Daisy. "And you fetch that white stone from over there, Annie," he ordered his little girl, "an' we'll put it on Fanny's grave."

Annie broke out in fresh paroxysms of woe, but she obeyed. Then the future market gardener, spitting into the palm of one of his hands in the most approved fashion of English navvies working by the hour, started industriously to inter the porcine corpse. With fitting respect, Sam, Bert and Esther quietly left the stricken family to its obsequies.

Though the sun was rather more than half-way down from the zenith, the heat was almost overpowering. All round them colonists toiled and sweated; some digging in front of the buried wagon-wheels; some hooking two and three teams together in a long string, trying to overcome the immobility of a half-emptied load, only to see-saw their horses or oxen into impossible; knots; others laboriously transporting their stuff bit by bit on to hard ground, till their wagons were entirely unloaded.

The last-mentioned scheme was the one Sam and Bert decided to adopt. Systematically, they set about it, the ladies carrying the lighter articles, and the men the heavy goods. When the great gulf of the prairie night swallowed them up, with their heart-testing toil only partly done, they erected their tents and prepared a hasty supper over a cheery campfire; then, as the smouldering shadows wrestled more and more successfully with the fitful gleams from the dying embers, they retired to their roughly-improvised beds and almost instantly fell asleep.