by A G Street
That spring George had been given a mongrel collie pup, and most days this newcomer would journey up to the breaking with me. He was an awful fool—I do not remember any other dog in my life so lacking in gumption—but he was company, which was the great thing. He used to follow the plough up and down all day long. Any sensible dog would soon have discovered that I invariably returned to my starting point, and would have lain down to wait there, but not this fathead.
One day as he was following along, a coyote, or prairie wolf, came out of the scrub, and the two played together about thirty yards behind me. I had a ·22 rifle back in the wagon, which I carried across my knees for many turns afterwards until I eventually got a certain chance without hitting the dog, and I shot the wolf.
Later on in the day, I spied some ears pricking up over a mound some sixty yards off, and discovered a den of cubs in a badger hole. Next day I took up a pick and shovel, and dug out four cubs about the size of a small Sealyham dog. At that date the Canadian Government paid two and a half dollars for every prairie wolf killed, and twenty-five dollars for every timber wolf, but these latter were almost, if not quite extinct in our district. It was necessary to produce the heads in Beaver Lake to obtain this bounty, so we put them in a bag, and George took them in a few days afterwards. Years before one only had to show the ears, but apparently some artful individual conceived the idea of digging out cubs, cutting off their ears, and then letting them go to breed more cubs, so in my time heads had to be produced.
I got my bounty for these five heads, but they were never counted. The weather was very hot, and when George took the bag into the Government office in Beaver Lake, the official besought him to take them out quickly and he would pay anything in reason.
Although a quarter section contains a hundred and sixty acres, I could only find about eighty-five acres of open land to break, of which I got between sixty and seventy acres broken that first summer. It was a curiously shaped field. On only one occasion did I get a strike-out from end to end, as the landscape was broken up by sloughs and bluffs of willow scrub and poplar. Every now and again the plough would stick fast in a hidden root, and I had to haul it out backwards with the team. I always carried a logging chain and an axe on the plough, to deal with any interruptions. Sometimes I would come to a small tree or piece of scrub, hitch off the team from the plough and pull out the obstruction by the roots. The best method of pulling out a tree was to hook the chain as high up the trunk as possible, and hitch the horses to its other end. As they pulled I would see a root move in the ground, and sever it with the axe. Then, I would swing the team to pull in another direction, and repeat the process until the tree came out. Big trees and large patches of scrub were left to be pulled out in future years; the first thing was to bring into cultivation the open land between the bluffs and the sloughs.
I do not remember when I have been more satisfied and pleased with my lot; even to-day the memory of that job gives me great pleasure. In thinking about it now it has come upon me with rather an unpleasant shock, that as far as I can see, I have ploughed my last furrow, as my present farm in England is now all grass, and I do not possess any ploughs. This thought saddens me, for ploughing is the king of jobs. In itself it is all-sufficing and soul-satisfying. You English townsfolk, who sneer at Hodge plodding at the plough tail, do not realize that he pities you, in that you cannot plough and have never known the joy of ploughing.
‘But how monotonous and boring it must be,’ you will say, and in the saying you will display your ignorance, for ploughing is the most charming disguise that work can wear. The plough is a perfect implement. The coulter cuts the side of the furrow slice: the share cuts the under side; and the turn-furrow or mouldboard inverts the whole. Therefore, if you are a competent ploughman, you are performing a perfect operation, and since when has perfection been monotonous?
When once you have acquired the knack of it, it goes with the effortless urge of a sailing boat. The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character. In conjunction with your team of horses, it becomes a glorious galleon, which you steer proudly over the rolling fields like some mariner of old. It is no longer an ugly, awkward, inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch.
As you become intimate with it, you find that you have ceased to be the operator of a mere farm implement. You and the plough have become one, a common intelligence with but one idea only, to plough—on and on and on. Your mind stands calmly aloof, rejoicing in a thing in which it has no conscious part, noting with a detached satisfaction the perfect furrow which falls away on your right in an infinite ribbon.
A field-mouse, disturbed by the point of the share, goes scrambling over the moving furrow, only to be buried alive beneath it. You are sorry for him; you hope he will get out all right; but you are drunk with the urge of the plough and do not stop. Stop? Why, to stop would be absurd. You are no longer a man, you are a ploughman. The mouse must take his chance, and on you sail, unheeding—on and on and on.
Not that the poesy of ploughing is continuous. The length of the lines is determined by the headlands, it is broken into verses by each strike out, and, if you wish to continue the simile, into different poems by the different fields. Such a nuisance these breaks are. Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever without these petty hindrances? But, this being impossible, one is forced to turn, to let the plough grate clumsily along the headland, then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more. ’Tis true I am no physician, but I would suggest in all sincerity that three months’ steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous breakdown. For ploughing is a mental tonic of great power. The ploughman is master of the situation. Nothing can stop him. Little by little he changes the surface of the earth. The plough may be slow, but it is so very sure. As the strip of black on the east side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider and wider until it neared the west boundary, I was forced to marvel at the relentless power of the plough.
Possibly this rhapsody on ploughing will seem absurd to many people, but no one can doubt my competence to sing on so noble a theme. If there be any such doubting Thomas, I would refer him to that quarter-section of land in North-west Manitoba. There have I written my signature with the plough, a signature that will stand when I am long forgotten, a signature of which I shall never be ashamed. And if ploughing generally be conceded a pleasing thing to do, then to plough virgin land is pure joy. The thought that you are ploughing the land for the first time since the world began satisfies your innermost soul. Each furrow is such a definite little stride in the world’s history.
That piece of breaking is a thing to which I look back with considerable pleasure, and were it possible I would do it again gladly. But it is not possible, and as ploughing in this country seems doomed, I must be content to have these memories.
CHAPTER XI
I did not quite reach the west boundary of our new farm that summer, as haymaking put a stop to the breaking. That season was a particularly dry one, which meant that we had a much larger crop of hay. This may sound rather Irish, but it is absolutely true. There was very little land sown to cultivated grasses and clovers in our district, and practically the whole of the hay was natural or wild hay.
In the spring the snow water collects in the natural depressions, and the land is ploughed down to the edge of the water at spring level. As the summer advances the water in the sloughs evaporates, thus leaving a lot of dry land, which grows a heavy cut of natural grasses. At haying time you drive your mower round and round the slough until you come to the water line. In a dry season some sloughs dry right out so that you can mow the whole of them, whereas in a wet season the area you can mow is restricted.
Apparently no one in Manitoba knows anything about a hot hayrick. The procedure is to mow one day, rake it up and pook or coil the mown grass the next day, and carry it on the following day, quite green. And my word, it is heavy! We use
d to stack eight two-horse loads in a day, stacking it in long narrow ricks, made in benches much like an English thatch pile.
And there were only two of us. I think that was the most outstanding feature of Canadian farming as compared to the English type. Only the two of us! When one thinks of the multifarious laborious tasks that must be done, and done at the proper time, on any farm, it seems almost absurd, especially when added to the farm work were the domestic necessities of cooking, washing clothes, mending, and bread-baking. And I had come from a system of farming in which there were men innumerable.
As in most countries, haymaking ran on almost into harvest, and any day not occupied in haymaking was taken up in disking the new breaking: a monotonous, uninteresting job not to be compared to ploughing. It is at this season of the year that the Manitoba farmer dreads a hail storm, for it is possible for a year’s work to be demolished in a quarter of an hour. So dangerous was this risk that it was customary for most farmers to insure against it. I have never seen a very bad hail storm, but the following summer a storm swept the lower part of our home farm, and completely hailed out about forty acres of oats, which were cut off as with a scythe, while the farmers immediately south of us who caught the full brunt of the storm lost everything.
We were haying at the time, and hitched out the horses to drive them into a bluff of poplar trees for shelter. When they went into the bluff they were grey, almost white, Percheron horses, but when they came out they were green, owing to the hail driving the green leaves from the trees into their coats. I was wearing a pair of short horsehide gloves, and the top sides of my wrists were raw and bleeding by the time the storm was over. The horses were scared by the thunder and I was forced to hold tightly to the lines, thus exposing a hiatus of skin between my gloves and coat sleeves. It may sound queer for a farm labourer to be wearing gloves for pitching hay, but we rarely did any work with our bare hands. This was due to the fact that the intense cold in the winter made the wearing of lined mittens a necessity, thus making our hands as soft as a woman’s. To go straight into spring work with bare hands was asking for trouble, so we wore gloves all the summer.
However, this particular year the hail missed our neighbourhood, although we had several severe thunderstorms. The immediate need to start cutting corn put a stop to haying for the year, and we began the harvest. George drove four horses abreast on an eight-feet-cut binder, which was fitted with a sheaf-carrier to dump the sheaves in fours or fives at regular intervals. I stood the sheaves up in stooks of never more than eight sheaves, so that the stooks would quickly dry out for threshing.
Again George did the cooking and chores or odd jobs, as owing to the heavy dews he was unable to start cutting until about ten o’clock, stopping at 7 p.m. for the same reason. Accordingly, I was able to stook from six until twelve, and from one until eight. Although I ‘says it as shouldn’t’, I was a good stooker, for I kept pace with the eight-foot binder, and most of our oat crop was as long and heavy as any I have seen in this country. Farther south on the sandy wheat plains the corn crops are light and short in the straw, but in North-west Manitoba they are very heavy, and on new breaking oats will yield over one hundred bushes per acre. I often thought of our ‘hilers’ at home, ambling gently round the fields conversing amicably as they did so. For me there was no company save the blackbirds, which were innumerable and of all colours, black and red, black and yellow, black and white, red and yellow, and many other shades. But there were one hundred and eighty acres to stook, and no possible hope of anyone else doing it, so it was done.
The Canadian farmer makes a better job of stooking sheaves than any English farm labourer I have ever seen. He drives the butt of each sheaf so firmly into the ground that it will stand by itself, and each stook is built carefully to stand any weather conditions until the thresher comes to the farm, which may be six weeks after cutting. While his own crop is waiting for the thresher the Canadian farmer will have left his farm to work on the threshing gang, and any stooks which blow down have to remain down and spoil.
When cutting was finished, threshing started once again, and I realized that I had been away from home for a year. Threshing went better this year, as we had no early snow, and it was carried out under normal working conditions, but there was another great difference as compared to the previous year. When the gang came to thresh George’s crop, I was detailed to do the cooking for them, as Mrs. Henderson was not very well at that time.
Before I describe my efforts in the culinary line, I would like to pay a tribute to the wives of the farmers in Western Canada. They work. How much they work was brought home to me very forcibly, when Mr. and Mrs. Henderson returned from a holiday in England one winter, during which they had spent a week-end at my home. On their return Mrs. Henderson was telling me of their visit to my people, and asked me what the English farm labourer’s wife did all day, especially when she had few or no children.
I replied that I supposed that they did their housework. ‘But what is there to do?’ asked the good lady. ‘Their bread, meat, and groceries are delivered to their door. Their man goes off before seven in the morning, and does not return as a rule until after five o’clock, while their children are at school all day. Look at my life in comparison. I have a husband and three hired men in the house. I’ve three children who are all too young to go to school in the winter, and for five winter months it is too cold to let them play outside at all. I grant you I’ve a Galician girl to help, but all the cooking is done by wood firing, all the washing is done at home, we bake our own bread, and all the water has to be carried in in buckets from the well. In addition, I have to go five miles to Barloe for groceries and letters.’
I could make no adequate answer to her comparison. I do not think that there is one. The sentence about her children not being able to go out in the winter impressed me the most. It was perfectly true. To let them out even on the veranda unattended for a few minutes was risky, as a small child might pull off its mittens and get its fingers frozen in a very short time. I think that I am as fond of small children as most men, but the thought of being shut up in a house with them for five months rather appals me.
The rough hard life of Western Canadian farming has many compensations, such as hunting and shooting, for the men engaged in it, but for the life of me I can see very few, if any, for the women. The generally accepted idea that dress forms one of women’s chief interests did not seem to operate here. Henderson was well off, but, even if he had given his wife a Paris model, there was no opportunity for her to display it. Another lady, who had emigrated from England as a young bride, told me that during her first winter in Canada, when she and her husband lived in a log shanty, she often woke up in the morning to find her hair frozen to the pillow.
The male pioneers may have broken Canada’s prairies, but it was the women who made, and who are still making, farming possible in Canada, doing dreary monotonous work, chiefly cooking endless meals for cross, weary men.
This was borne in on me very much during that fortnight’s cooking for the threshing gang of sixteen men. How I dreaded a wet day, as even though the threshing ceased for a time, it meant one or two more days’ cooking.
Our shanty was eighteen feet long by fourteen feet wide, and contained our double bed and other furniture. When a rough table and benches to seat the gang were rigged up there was no room to spare. I gave them porridge and beef stew for breakfast, roast beef and potatoes for dinner, and beef stew for supper, all three meals being topped off with bread and corn syrup as a sweet. Breakfast was timed for 5 a.m., dinner for 12 noon, and supper at about 8.15 p.m., while tea and biscuits had to be taken to the thresher about four o’clock. I did not bake bread, but purchased that commodity with the meat at Barloe, whither I would journey in the buggy once daily.
And it was hot weather. The shanty was a veritable oven, filled with flies innumerable. By the end of a week I felt that at washing up and peeling potatoes I had no equal for speed if not for cleanliness. I do n
ot expect that anything I did was very clean, but the gang were fit and hungry, and as they only saw the finished product, a little dirt and cigarette ash did not matter. Anyway, none of them died, and what is perhaps more remarkable, I am alive to tell the tale.
On the last evening for supper I achieved one of the greatest triumphs of my life. I made a beefsteak and kidney pudding in a two-gallon bucket, and boiled it all day in a large swill pail. When I heard the hum of the thresher cease that evening, I took the pudding off the stove, and turned it out on a large enamel dish. It was a masterpiece. It turned out unbroken—oh, yes, I had well greased the bucket—and stood in glory upon the dish with a beautiful golden bloom upon its crust. The gang ate every bit of it that night, and its fame spread for miles.
Still, I was very glad when our crop was threshed, and I was back on the gang at other farms. Threshing may have been hard work, but there was something to show for it at the end of the day, whereas in this cooking business, one got no ‘forrader’; no sooner were the dishes of one meal washed, than it was time to get another one ready.
Threshing finished, we started grain-hauling once again. and it was about this time that I received a letter from my father, suggesting that it was about time to end up this Canadian foolishness and return home. And I found that I did not want to return home. No! Very definitely I wanted to stay in Canada where I was. But why, I asked myself, and tried to find adequate reasons. I argued the whole thing out one night when I was alone in the shanty and endeavoured to compose an answer which would explain to my father.