Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  Old man Barnes said I made more in one afternoon hunting than his son made in a month’s wages working for Millers.

  He grinned as he shifted gears and turned south on the mile-long trail leading from the road to the homestead. Scanning the nearest curving range of hills, he half expected to see the grey form of a coyote loping down a slope.

  He drove into the farmyard, parked the Model A by the shack and busied himself preparing the bins for the trucker. The grain still had to be shoveled from the dark dusty wooden granary into a pile to be scooped into the one-ton truck. He gave himself up to mindless physical labour. After weeks of struggling with unfamiliar and noisy machinery, the rhythm of scrape-scoop-dump was strangely soothing. The world shrank to a dim granary, the grain shovel and his strong young arms.

  Noon came, and he emerged sweating and grimy, disappointed that the truckdriver hadn’t yet arrived. He sat on the running board of the car and poured himself some coffee, bit into one of the turkey sandwiches his mother had packed for his lunch. The calm stillness of the morning had darkened, with clouds pushing in so thick and low that it felt like dusk. Eric squinted at the sky and stood up to study the horizon. He could hear the sudden wind before he felt it. A chilly blast snatched his breath away.

  Blizzard’s coming!

  What should I do? If Charlie comes now, we might get done before it hits. Or we might both be stuck here. But if I leave, and meet him on the way, we could both be caught out in the open when the storm hits.

  Better stay put. It might blow over quick. And if not, at least here there’s shelter. And a little food. And a stove.

  But as the first blinding blast of snow sent him scrambling for the shack, he realized, Yah sure I got a stove … but no wood!

  Within a few minutes, the air was thick with snow. He could no longer see across the yard. Driving the Model A back home was not an option. He was trapped here for the duration.

  By late afternoon the temperature had already dropped far below freezing and he had to admit to himself that the storm wasn’t going to let up before nightfall. He had to do something about the fuel situation. And there was only one thing he could do.

  He’d already lit the kerosene lamp and set it on the table near the window, giving some relief from the gloom and fierce cold. The blizzard roared in a rising and falling cadence as millions of individual ice crystals were tossed shrieking through the mile-deep cone of turbulent wind. He knew it was likely a big front, maybe extending all the way through Alberta, Montana, the Dakotas. But isolated and trapped, his world had shrunk to a prison cubicle exactly the size of the shack.

  He pulled his cap down over his ears and picked up the roll of baler twine and the axe. As soon as it seemed the wind had lulled and the dim outline of the barn materialized through the driving snow, he lunged out the door, bent double, braced against the stinging blast. As he ran the twine unrolled behind him, a line linking him to the uncertain security of the shack.

  Eyes stung shut, even behind his sheltering arm, he felt, rather than saw, the looming bulk of the barn. He fumbled along the wall and found the wooden door latch. It was even darker in the barn than it had been in the shack, but he did not need much light for the job at hand. First securing the twine to a nail protruding from the barn wall, so that he would not lose the end in the accumulation of snow drifting under the door, he grasped the axe and began swinging at the wooden stalls. Crack crack! With a splintering crash one section of the stall came down. He would take down chunks as big as he could carry. The pile of wood grew, and his body warmed as he swung the axe. It was good to hear another sound other than that incessant roar of wind and snow.

  He paused to catch his breath. Thump thump! What was that?

  The thump was repeated, and Eric realized the sound came from the opposite wall of the barn, where the sliding door opened towards the summer pasture. But that pasture is empty, they’d moved the cattle to the home place for the winter. Could a stray horse, pushed by the storm, have followed the fence line up to the barn?

  He kicked away the snow from the wooden track at the bottom of the door and managed to force the door open a few feet. The wind and snow roared in, and with it came the snow encrusted shape of a cowpony. As Eric shoved the door shut again, a figure half slid, half fell in a cascade of snow off the horse’s back.

  Afterwards, Eric was not sure how he got both the wood and the rider back to the shack. He recalled a confusing few minutes, exclamations of surprise from him and a few hoarse words of explanation from the visitor, and then they both lunged back into the storm. His arms loaded with chunks of the broken stall, Eric had grasped the twine and blindly followed it back through the stinging, breath-grabbing wind. The stranger, half frozen though he was, must have summoned the strength to hang on to his jacket.

  Tumbling through the door into the lamp light, letting the precious armload of wood crash to the floor, no mansion could have appeared more beautiful than that one room shanty with its meager furnishings.

  Snow melting in a pot sputtering on the stove. A few cans of beans dumped into another pan. He fed the fire with splinters of his precious store of wood, trying to calculate how many hours of heat he could squeeze out of it. His unexpected guest warmed himself in the chair by the stove, following his motions with a hawk-like gaze almost hidden behind shaggy white eyebrows. Eric handed him a steaming mug of tea.

  “Sorry, no sugar. But guess we’re lucky I left behind some grub from this summer.”

  “Lucky. Yes, I be very lucky. Lucky tat de horse followed ta fence to your place, lucky tat you were making tat gawd-awful racket that I could hear even through ta storm.” The old man took a long, noisy sip of tea. “Lucky to be drying out by your stove instead of freezing to ta ground under a snowdrift.”

  “What were you doing out there in our pasture?” Eric blurted. “Who are you, anyway?”

  The man looked familiar, but Eric’s mind refused to accept what his senses told him. This could not be the same mysterious stranger of his childhood. Old Jean-Jacques Laprairie must be …what? …. eighty years old? Maybe even older?

  The old man laughed and stretched, gingerly propping his feet on an up-ended pail and flexing his gnarled, stockinged toes in the heat.

  “What am I doing here, he asks. And where else should I be, eh? Was not dis land my people’s home long before you were a twinkle in your papa’s eye?”

  “But who are you? Are you the Laprairies’ Dad?”

  The old man nodded, his lips quirking in a grin.

  “So my Marie told me.”

  “I guess I met you once a long time ago when I was just a little kid.” Eric hesitated.

  “Yes, yes,” the old man nodded his shaggy head encouragingly, as though urging him to remember something. “We met once at my sons’ place. And once before dat. Both times, you were riding somewhere. I knew what family you belonged to, which farm.”

  Eric busied himself ladling the beans onto two tin plates. He suddenly felt disoriented. He had never told anyone about that second meeting, and the first seemed more like a dream than a memory. Neither had any place in the everyday reality of his life on the farm. And yet, the stories the old man had told him on that ride home through the hills had formed the background to his personal understanding of the land. An understanding that, he knew, was quite different from his father’s.

  “I’ve seen your sons, Pete and Jack, once in a while, out at Jacoby’s or at a rodeo. But I haven’t seen you since I was just a kid.”

  The statement was really a question. He was curious about the old man, amazed that he was still “alive and kicking,” as people say. And he was eager to hear more stories of the old days. He handed him one plate of beans and set the other down on the table for himself.

  “I’ve bin ‘round,” responded Jean-Jacques. “Not here often, can’t ride as far as I used to, but once, twice, in de spring of de year, de fall, tak a ride out here through ta hills. Stop in to say hello to de boys at de Pradera summer
camp or go see my boys on dere spread out west.”

  Jean-Jacques set his emptied plate on the table. “Heard you’d been hunting here some during the summer. But sure didn’t expect to find anyone today. Yeah, lucky, me, sure ting.”

  “You say this was your home, too. Did you have a homestead here once?” Eric had to ask.

  “Not a homestead, no, it was before dat time. My first wife and me, we lived with her people for a few years, after the buffalo were purty near gone. Times were hard, wars to the south, the Sioux and Nez Perce trying to push their way into Cypress Hills, chased by the U.S. army, lots of sickness, people starving. Dere was always grass and water here. The Blackfoot people, dey used to come here when I was a kid, but later on dey had troubles of dere own and dis land was open. So, we set up our camp by de river. Had a dugout shack dere for a few years. I hunted here, got lots of jack rabbit, fat antelope. We didn’t starve.”

  He paused and leaned forward in his chair. “Later on, I applied for scrip, got some land for myself, same as my sons, and my wife. Long time before your Dad and Grandpa and uncles came and filed on dis land. Before Pradera Ranch got dere grant. But after de fighting of ‘85, I had no trust in land agents and dat Englisher’s government. I wanted no one writing down my name, comin’ lookin’ for me!”

  “What happened in ‘85?” asked Eric. He had learned a little in school about the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. He knew someone with a French-sounding name had been hung – Louey Riel, that was it — and soldiers had marched west to put down the rebellion and punish the traitors. But he had no notion of the events leading up to that disturbance. What could any of that have to do with old Laprairie, anyway?

  Jean-Jacques’s dark eyes twinkled in the lamplight. His leathery face wrinkled in a grin. He answered Eric’s question with one of his own.

  “You’re American, right?”

  “No, Canadian!”

  “But you were born in de States?”

  “Well, yes, but …”

  “And what was your family before dey come to de States?”

  “They came from Norway, a long time ago.”

  Jean-Jacques laughed derisively. “A long time ago! Maybe your grandparents?”

  Eric nodded. In fact, his great-grandparents were the first generation of his family to live in America, but that didn’t matter. What was the old man’s point?

  “Well, boy,” he began, “some of my people have been here since de world was made. And dose dat came later, mes grandperes Canadiens, dey bin in Canada for six or seven generations before I came along.”

  “So, your family is half-breed?” blurted Eric.

  Jean-Jacques nodded. “French-Canadian and Cree. People around here try to pretend we are French, as though we should be ashamed of being Indian. It’s a lie. We are our own people. Even our language is our own. A Cree speaker would understand it.”

  “And we had a good life here along de Saskatchewan, for many years,” he continued. “Late summer, we had big buffalo hunts. Winters, we could go to our settlements further north along the river. Most families had a log house, ploughed fields. De women, dey grew gardens, some kept chickens or a few cows. Men hunted, worked for trading posts or had trap-lines of dere own, set nets for fish or ran wagon trains of goods from Red River to Qu’Appelle. Or south to posts on the Missouri.”

  He spat on the floor, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “But den, de surveyors, dey came. We’d heard what happened other places, when dey came with dere stakes and divided de land. No hope for Metis to keep his river lots. We knew, dis is Toussaint’s land, dis is Gabriel’s, but de surveyors say it all belong to the government, dey could give it to whoever dey want. Dumont and others, dey got Riel to come, tell dem what to do, write letters for dem. My mother’s people, up at Fish Creek, dey try to get papers for dere land. Nothing worked. Everyone knew something bad was coming. First de pox, den de buffalo gone, den de hungry winters, now dey take away our land with dere square survey. And dat is why de trouble started. And why me and my family, we lay low. Hunted a little, travelled a lot, stayed clear of Mounties and government agents.”

  His low voice stopped. He sat slumped forward with elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. The winter night closed around them as the blizzard raged. The fire burned low, but the stove threw off a comforting aura of warmth. They listened to the wind roar and sigh, buffeting the walls with snow. A mouse scurried across the floor.

  “I’m going to sleep now,” Jean-Jacques announced, as he stepped uninvited to the low cot. Rolling himself in the only blanket, he was snoring in no time. Eric wrapped his jacket tight around his shoulders and tried to find the least uncomfortable of the two positions possible on the wooden chair.

  There was no hope of the storm letting up next morning. The air was so thick with swirling snow, it was impossible to see more than a few feet in the feeble morning light. The twine he had stretched from shack to barn had disappeared beneath snowbanks, but Eric was able to free the first portion and felt confident he could pull the rest free of the drifts along the way to the barn. The wind was brutal, biting even colder than yesterday through his heavy jacket. He threw down hay from the loft for Jean-Jacques’s long-suffering gelding and brought back another big armload of smashed manger to feed the fire.

  There were still several cans of beans and a half pound of tea on the shelf over the stove.

  After a breakfast that duplicated last evening’s supper, Jean-Jacques dug through his pockets and produced a pipe and leather pouch of tobacco. He looked prepared to settle into a day of silent contemplation and smoking.

  “Tell me more about your family,” Eric asked tipping his chair back so he could lean against the wall. “You seem to know an awful lot about mine.”

  Jean-Jacques grinned at him. “You’ve met two of my boys, and I’ve got three more children in my second family. Which ones would you like to hear about?”

  “You know what I mean. Stories about the old times. There must have been some tough characters back in those days.”

  Jean-Jacques sucked on his pipe and nodded. “Everyone was tough. Had to be. Even the women. Most ‘specially the women.”

  “But I’ll tell you, one of the toughest old coots I ever knew was an Indian up by Battleford. One winter before the turn of the century, dey got pretty hungry. All through January, black cold and little food. Hunters couldn’t bag anything bigger’n a rabbit. Babies were dying, and old people. Den, dey hear from a traveller, big herds of antelope in de south, down by Cypress Hills. A bunch of dem, five or six hunters, started out with a sled and dogs.”

  “Day after day, and nothing but a skinny old buck and a few prairie chickens dey found frozen into the snow. Dey were near too weak to go on when dey found a herd of antelope, way south of de river. Dey shot all they could, packed de meat on de sled, and started back north. Plenty worried about dere families, too, ‘cause dey’d been boiling their moccasins for soup when dey’d left.”

  “A day’s journey on dere way back, dey were at the river, and one fellow took his gun and said he was going to follow some deer tracks. He got some good ways from de camp, tripped going down a gully, blew off part of his foot. Course dey didn’t know dat back at camp. Night fell and he didn’t come back. Den a storm blew in. Nothing but snow and wind for three days. When it finally let up, de others, dey were desperate to get dat meat back to dere folks, and figured de fella was dead anyways so dey just headed north as fast as dey could.

  “Well, of course he wasn’t dead. He had dug down into a snowbank under some trees, out of de storm. Managed to avoid freezing, waited for his friends to find him. dey didn’t come, didn’t come. So, after de storm lets up, he crawled around with his injured foot, set some snares, caught a few rabbits. Ate dem raw. Lived like dat for two months as he made his way along de river, crawling or limping a little ways day by day.

  Finally, he met up with some of his people just a half-day’s journey from dere camp. Dey didn’t kno
w him at first, den thought he was a ghost and almost left him. But no ghost could smell as bad as he did. Dey took him to de trading post, doctor had to cut off his foot. But he healed up good. His wife had died while he was gone, he married another woman and lived to see his grandchildren.”

  “He was a brave man,” remarked Eric.

  “Brave? Maybe. Him, he had to keep on. Or die. You can’t know how tough you are until dere is no choice but dat.”

  Jean-Jacques paused and then continued. “But I’ve known brave men, too. De bravest were dem who could have gone an easy path but instead took a hard way. Because it was right. Not for what dey could get. Not to make a name.”

  Eric waited. Jean-Jacques sat and smoked in silence for a few minutes. When he began to speak, his low voice seemed to blend with the rise and fall of the wind. When he stopped, night had fallen. And the storm was over.

  The next morning dawned bitterly cold on a world of eerily sculpted snow drifts, a sea of frozen waves gleaming in brilliant sunshine. Eric saddled Jean-Jacques’s horse and trudged beside him as far as the Hansen bachelors’ place. There they said goodbye, and Eric went inside to request the loan of a horse to ride home.

  It was a ride of beauty and horror. Trails obliterated beneath a surreal dead white landscape. Glowing blue sky mirrored in deep blue shadows. Huge snowy cliffs piled over the twisted carcasses of cattle where they had huddled tail to wind in fence corners.

  And all through the cruel cold ride home, as one part of his mind counted dead cattle and noted the location of survivors to inform their owners, another part of his mind played through the heroic stories told by the old man. Stories of sacrifice, mind-boggling courage and something else that he could not find a name for. It was that something else that grabbed him by the throat.