1 The first horizon

The Dakota prairie was an infinity of darkness through which the buckboard rolled over the rutted trail with an eternal motion. To the small girl-child crouched on the floor boards beside her father’s legs, the darkness and the rolling motion seemed of infinite duration. It had started in a confusion of strange activities that shattered her familiar world, back in a blue dusk that lay in the back of her mind, weighted with perplexing mysteries. It had gone on and on and on in ever deepening mystery and darkening shadows to which there seemed no end. Except for the rumps of the horses, with their whisking tails that brushed the dashboard with a reedy sound, there was nothing to see and nothing to hear but the steady clop-clop of their pounding feet and the creaking noise of the wheels. Everything else was a wilderness dark, wrapped in a silence so heavy she was afraid to sleep.

It was all very queer. That morning, which now seemed such ages ago, she had wakened in a madhouse. The bed opposite her little cot where her parents slept was in pieces, the feather ticks and pillows lying in bundles on the floor. The kitchen was full of boxes. The big stove where she usually struggled into her little clothes to the comforting crackle of fire and the humming of the copper kettle, was cold and desolate. The baby, tied in the old black rocker, squirmed and whimpered unheeded, for mamma had eyes for nothing but the dishes she was hastily packing in the wash tub. And papa, equally preoccupied, was unscrewing the legs of the table. Even her brother, who might have been expected to find a teasing word of greeting, was out in the leanto busily stuffing sheep’s wool into a canvas sack. No one had paid her the slightest attention until, the dishes packed, her mother called out sharply:

‘Dress yourself, child! Don’t stand there like a stick!’

When mamma spoke in that tone of voice, you did as you were told and asked no questions. She had dressed, and a little later had eaten a cold egg, which she hated, and had obediently drunk a cup of milk, which was almost as bad. Eggs and milk and the long prayers she was obliged to say each night were a trinity of unavoidable trials. The eggs always made a sour taste in her mouth, and the prayers frightened her with their vague suggestions of yawning eternities. The milk had at least one element of comfort. If mamma was not looking, the cat could always be prevailed upon to finish the cup.

Oh, but that was the worst of all! The dear grey cat was gone, along with everything else stable and familiar. If only Tabby were here, purring on her breast, the darkness and the endless silence would not matter. Always, when something had gone sadly awry in her small world, it was to Tabby she carried her woe, and, in its inimitable way, the soft little creature had eased away the misery and filled her heart with comfort.

Blinking back tears, the child edged a little closer to her father’s legs. By some unerring instinct of intuition, she knew that her mother, sitting stiffly erect with the sleeping baby in her lap, was miles removed in consciousness, shut away from them all in a bitter world of her own. But her father, in whom a poetic temperament made the transition from gloom to gaiety an easy process, might perchance by a little nudge be made aware of her loneliness. If only papa would say something, in his warm, pleasant voice, everything might right itself, and even this sudden endless journey through the prairie might take on reasonable meaning. Papa could always make sense out of nonsense—even mamma admitted that.

But it was her mother’s voice, thin and strained, that cut the silence like a silver whip.

‘Can’t we go faster, Lars? It will soon be black as pitch.’

‘We’re getting there,’ her father replied amiably, flicking the reins.’ A slow gait is a sure one, my dear.’

‘I should not think you’d want to keep the Ericsons waiting up half the night for us,’ her mother retorted, and caught her breath sharply. For suddenly the night was full of weird sounds, high, shrill, intolerable yapping sounds that raced along the dark horizon as though the air itself had found a thousand tongues with which to lash the silence. The horses jumped in their traces, tossed up their drooping heads, and, snorting with fear, started off at a gallop. The wild lurch pitched the child against the dashboard, but her father’s hand shot out of the dark and drew her back to his knees. Shivering, she clung to those knees, too frightened for tears. Besides, now she understood why mamma had sat so straight and still. These awful noises were the terrors that haunted her nights and days. They were the wolves!

She had heard them before, though never so monstrously magnified, so terrifyingly close, and she remembered her mother’s blanching face and the bitter words she had flung at papa.

‘Now this I will not endure,’ she had said, with hard, quiet finality. Other things, too, she had said, which the child could not understand, but now she realized that this race through the night was an effort to get away from the things her mother would not endure. And somehow she knew it was not just the wolves her mother heard in this awful clamour, but the savage tongues of this dark land, itself the voice of the wilderness for which her mother had no heart and against which she fought with cold determined resolution.

‘There you are!’ her mother cried bitterly. ‘We shall be eaten alive! A fine finish to a brave venture.’

Her father laughed, not very brightly. ‘That would be history,’ he said. ‘A pack of coyotes attacking a team at full gallop. Use your sense, my dear—you are so proud of it. I have told you often enough there are no wolves left in this part of the country.’

‘You told me the lambs were safe last week. You know what happened.’

‘It’s a long time since you and I were lambs, my dear. There is a comforting thought,’ he rejoined, with a chuckle, that eased the strain in the little girl’s body. But her mother refused to be comforted.

‘If you had as much wisdom as wit, we should not be here,’ she said.

To which her father replied, ‘Well, we won’t be here long, Borga. And wit has a way of dying in the sweat shops of the city.’

A cry from the back of the buckboard, where her brother sat perched on top of bundles and boxes, put an end to the argument. ‘Look! Look! There’s a light!’ he shouted. ‘We’re all right now, mamma. That’s the house!’

—

So it was. Far ahead, in the midst of an ocean of darkness, two small jets of light stood out like candle flames braving the night. Why it should be so, I cannot say, but those wavering jets of yellow light marked a division of time for the little girl at her father’s feet. From that moment her little thoughts and starry impressions were distinctly individual, and she herself no longer just the little girl who existed as a small, obedient extension of her mother. Struggling to her numbed feet and leaning against her father’s knee, she stared in silent fascination at the nearing points of lights, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, a delightfully wicked thought popped into her head.

‘Even if it’s a troll’s house, I WON’T eat an EGG!’ she resolved. In which fine frenzy a predestined rebel was born—the rebel who is myself.

—

The Ericsons, I was to learn much later, were considered a queer pair. In those good old Victorian days, the slightest departure from the accepted conventions was sufficient to earn one a suspect reputation. To question the Trinity, fail to hang your clothes out on Monday morning, or give houseroom to a book of Thomas Ingersoll, any of these was enough to arouse the criticism of the righteous. So far as I ever knew, the Ericsons were innocent of such monstrous errors, but they kept a ‘heathen beast’ (of which more later) and they had no children. That, in itself, was a suspicious circumstance in an age of step-ladder families, and argued either the wrath of God or a wilful obstruction of His blessed favour.

Beyond that, it seems the queer pair behaved normally. They had come to Dakota with that fugitive band of Icelanders who, despite the remonstrances of the Canadian Government, had quit the fly-ridden marshlands of Manitoba, to which they were consigned, and, the men on foot, their women in ox-carts, trekked to the fertile plains across the border. They were industrious; the furrows lengthened year by year, and neither the grasshopper plague, the furious winds, nor the thieving wolves, had dampened their faith in the country. Indeed, it was this glowing faith, communicated over a mild glass of toddy, which had persuaded my impressionable father that the nearest approach to heaven-upon-earth was a sheep ranch in Dakota. To obtain this leasehold on bliss, a neat little cottage with a white picket fence around its patch of green garden was sacrificed, much against my mother’s will and better judgement. As for the ranch, it consisted of a log house for which my mother had an unreasoning hatred as the lowest habitation possible to men; I don’t know how many acres of unbroken scrub prairie; a dozen sheep; a cow.

But now the venture was over. Once again, penniless, and with nothing but the bedding, our clothes, and a few pieces of furniture, we were on the move, our immediate destination the sod-roofed cabin of the hospitable though queer Ericsons.

That visit stamps the beginning of memory—the first of a chain of unrelated events, insignificant in themselves, and yet each one having its ineradicable, subtle effect upon my future reaction to life. That I should remember so much of that visit after almost forty-four years is not particularly remarkable. Extremes of emotion leave indelible marks. And certainly that was a night of tragi-comic extremes.

The Ericsons, two bent gnomes peering anxiously into the darkness, were waiting in the open doorway. They had almost despaired of our coming that night, and were about to go to bed, when they heard the horses. They were pleased as children to be cheated of their rest, and bustled us into the house with embarrassing effusion. They were short and dark and leathery, and, to my childish eyes, differed in nothing, except that Mr. Anderson had a tuft of hair on his chin and was dressed in baggy brown homespun trousers, whereas Mrs. Anderson’s tuft was under her nose, and she wore a wide skirt, of the same material.

Their voices were high-pitched and thin—as though they had worn them threadbare calling to each other across the windswept fields. And when either one made a statement, it was referred back to the other, prefixed by a question:

‘Ha? Kvad heldur pú, Runa? Eh? What do you think, Runa?’

‘Ha? Pú sejir satt, Noni! Eh? You are right, Noni!’

The house was very hot and smelled of boiled mutton, for we had been expected for hours, and the stewpot still simmered at the back of the stove. There was a wall lamp with a tin shield behind it that dazzled my eyes and made me think of the fierce-looking angel in the story-book who stood at the gates of Eden brandishing a crooked sword.

A table was spread with plates of doughnuts, liver sausage, pickled sheep’s head, bread and butter, and the omnipresent, ever-heated eggs. A bureau with a marble top and a cracked mirror occupied a place of honour between the two small windows, and flaunted for all to see a fat, poison-green plush album with real brass clasps!

There my discoveries ended. Something agile and swift leaped from under the table where the cloth had kept it hidden, and, with the ease of a bird, settled on the back of the kitchen chair not a dozen steps from me.

My heart went out to the marvellous creature at once. He had eyes, black and bright as new shoe buttons, that stared at me out of a tiny yellow face no bigger than an apple, yet absurdly human. He capered about on the back of the chair, making the funniest chattering noises that made me think of hail on a window-pane, and a little of mamma when she was very cross.

I was rooted to the spot with mounting admiration. When Mrs. Ericson, having settled my mother and the baby in comfort before the fire, came to help me, I suffered myself to be peeled out of my little tight coat without hearing a word she said, nor remembering to hold my hand out politely. Even mamma’s voice gentle now, and full of concern, calling me to the fire, had no effect. I could not leave off watching the intriguing yellow creature.

Still in a daze, I found myself whisked to a milking stool, given a piece of sugar, and told to sit still like a good child and wait for my supper. The sugar slipped into the little pocket of my dress, for, though I detested everything sweet, all through childhood I had a squirrel’s instinct to hide such stuff away. But neither sugar nor supper occupied my puzzled thoughts. With what wit I had, I was trying to penetrate the mystery before me. How could anything so much like a baby be covered with fur? And, if it wasn’t a queer sort of baby, what was it scolding about? What sort of creature pulled faces like a boy, wagged its head like an old woman, and scratched its yellow stomach with tiny, pinkpalmed paws?

He was not a cat, nor was he a dog. And, of course, no ordinary baby was smart enough to perch on the back of a chair, to say nothing of bobbing about, flailing its arms. I could not think what he was, but when he suddenly hooked a long tail round a rung, and popped to the floor, and, quick as a cat’s wink, popped up again, an enchanting solution broke on my mind. Completely forgetting that nice little girls were seen and not heard, I shrieked out ecstatically:

‘Papa! Papa! It’s a king’s son in a cat’s skin! And I’m going to love him for ever and ever!’

Alas for budding genius! Gales of heartless laughter greeted my heroic invention. It was a bitter blow. Big people were little better than trolls, I thought. Indeed, they were very like them. In the stories that mamma read to me, Tröll-karls and Trollskessur were always roaring with laughter at the wrong moment. Papa, at least, might have remembered that it was he himself had told me the sad tale of the golden-haired princeling who was changed into a bear, and had to go roaring through the black pine forest for ever and ever—which, of course, meant until the woodcutter’s little daughter loved him in spite of the roaring and stole away his hide.

I subsided into humiliating silence, confused, but now convinced. The mystery still remained. The little yellow beast was in a fury because no one understood him, no matter how hard he talked. He jittered and stared accusingly, and sometimes, covered his tiny face in his funny wee paws, and shook pitiably. He could not be happy inside himself!

All through supper the alarming fancy grew on me that here was no mortal household; that Mrs. Ericson, with her blue moustache and nimble chatter, was a witch, and no woman at all. It really didn’t take much reasoning. You found her house, as you found all witches’ houses, after a terrifying gallop through the dark. On the doorstep she waited for you, with a crooked little man at her side, and a bright, blinding light at her back. It was so hot in her house you might fall asleep unawares, and be turned into goodness knows what sort of creature. And, most convincing of all, there was a huge black pot brewing and stewing on her huge black range!

More and more confused, more and more weary, it was perhaps not extraordinary that my behaviour should vex my mother. I not only refused to eat an egg when it was sprinkled with sugar, but I rudely pushed away the stew. No. No. I would not have it, I glowered. No. No. No. I could not and dared not explain that spells were brewed in black pots. I could only shove the dish away with disgraceful impoliteness. My father saved the situation by taking me on his knee and letting me dunk a doughnut in his coffee. The doughnut appeased the disagreeable gnawing under my breast bone, and the warm curve of my father’s arm comforted the crink in my back. If only I might have slept there, the scandalous business to follow might have been averted.

But I was snatched from this pleasant shelter. It was time to go to bed. To-morrow we were driving to Crystal, where a train would take us on to Winnipeg. None of which meant anything to me, except that I guessed it was a place mamma preferred to the sheep ranch, and papa, on the other hand, somehow dreaded. For, vaguely, I had become conscious of the conflict of ideas between my parents—a conflict which was never to end, and precluded any solid, satisfying home life, in the conventional sense.

I have no recollection of the bedroom as a bedroom into which my mother led me. But for years I relived in nightmares the terror of that room. There was a big bed in it piled with the usual feather tick and patchwork quilts, but, when my mother threw back the covers, I caught sight of something under the hay mattress that turned my skin to ice. It was a red, hairy hide! In fact, a cow-hide, spread over the home-made rope spring—to me, a hammur, the bewitched hide, waiting to swallow my little self. And, to further confuse my infant reasoning, I now remembered with horror an episode which had taken place a few days ago.

I had formed the odious habit of eating paper. No amount of scolding had cured me of the crime. But one morning, on following my mother into the lean-to, I saw stretched upon the wall the gory hide of the little calf which only the day before had been gambolling in the back yard.

‘Mammal’ I had shrieked, pointing to the hide, ‘that’s the little calf, rolled out—!’

‘Oh, I know,’ replied mamma, seriously, shaking her head. ‘You see, the poor thing ate paper.’

Well, I had not eaten paper since, but now it seemed my sins were finding me out. The cow-hide was a menace. The calf who ate paper, the little animal that resembled a baby but wasn’t a baby, the old woman with a moustache, and the bubbling black kettle, all combined to make a nightmare of fear in my tired child’s mind. When my poor distraught mother reached out to take me on her knee and undress me, I screamed and hit out like a little fiend. She was unaccustomed to such behaviour in her children. I was soundly smacked and severely shaken, all to no effect. Hysteria gave me the strength and viciousness of a wild cat. I fought and scratched and wriggled and squirmed, quite as determined to stay out of that bed as my mother was determined to put me into it.

In the end, after repeatedly flinging me into the feather tick, only to see me roll to the floor, it was she who gave up the battle. Worn out and unhappy, completely mystified by this sudden transformation of a peaceable, pudgy infant into a raging limb of Satan, she left me to sob out my meanness on the floor. All night I lay there, abandoned to wickedness, and only fell asleep when the grey morning light, stealing in through a small, barred window, fell on my cold little face like gentle, forgiving fingers.