A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  On account of the hard seats and the changes, with the bother of extracting and reloading their luggage, the journey seemed to take far longer than Harry’s initial journey from Halifax had done a year before. Perhaps he was simply less patient than he had been, and so conditioned by a year’s outdoor labour that sitting inside for so long had become less tolerable. The rolling stock felt more basic, too, than even that crammed colonial with its stoves and fold-down tea-tray beds.

  Magnificently named, the Grand Trunk Pacific halted as often as any suburban service out of Waterloo, stopping at every siding, as the humble stops for new settlements were called. Compared to the railway chateaux at Regina and Saskatoon, most offered little more in the way of a conventional station than a simple signposted platform across which a family’s worldly possessions might fairly conveniently be loaded from crammed goods van to waiting ox cart.

  Troels was either full of talk or eating. (He was slow to share the picnic Mrs Jørgensen had entrusted him with, although Harry was sure it was intended for them both.) Or else he slept, leaning heavily against Harry’s shoulder. His talk, as ever, was scornful or self-aggrandising stuff, and he showed no great curiosity to hear about Harry’s year, rightly assuming it had been uneventful, and contenting himself with saying, only half mockingly, at intervals, ‘So old Jørgensen made a man of you?’ or ‘You didn’t marry one of the daughters, then?’

  Harry was curious to hear what had become of the English puppies from their boat. Most, as Troels had predicted, were having a high old time hunting, shooting, fishing and making no pretence of being there to farm. Some had evidently slipped beyond Troels’ control (scornfully dismissive noises here); others had proved less happy. One had died in the winter, falling off his horse when drunk and freezing to death in a snowdrift, where he had not been found (and then half eaten) until the recent thaws. Another had surprised his fellows by setting out to homestead properly, to the extent of fencing his hundred and sixty acres within the year, then had been defeated by cold, drink and the lure of a low native woman.

  ‘Which is how you, my friend, are about to come into a fine piece of land.’ The young Englishman in question was giving up – had been persuaded to give up – and was so short of money, having been cut off by his disgusted family on account of the Indian mistress, that he was prepared to file for abandonment if Harry would pay him for the cost of materials used for the fence. ‘Labour not included,’ Troels said with a chuckle.

  Although many homesteaders had abandoned the attempt and fled south across the border to what they thought would be easier conditions in the American prairies, plenty were arriving to replace them, and, as always, the thaw would bring a rush of new entries. There were often ugly scenes in the long queues outside a Dominion Lands Office, as a man could sometimes wait all day without being seen, only to return the next day to find himself once again near the queue’s end. And an entry had to be made in person. Proxies and agents were strictly unacceptable (here Troels pulled a face), so if a man were small or weak or easily jostled out of position, he could find himself beaten to the land he wanted. It was especially competitive for brothers, or for any group from the same Ukrainian village, say, who wanted adjoining properties. A story, possibly apocryphal, was circulating of a young man, little more than a boy, who repeatedly lost his place near the front of the queue until his five hulking brothers came along with him and bodily threw him over the heads of the competition the instant the office door opened.

  When he finally arrived in North Battleford, Harry was overwhelmed with fatigue, although it was still barely five in the afternoon. Having ensured his trunk could be kept for him at the station, he found he could be decisive in his single-minded pursuit of sleep. He took a small bag of necessaries to the nearest hotel, where he made Troels laugh aloud at the firmness with which he requested a room to himself. They agreed to meet again at breakfast.

  The room was tiny – a single-bedded cell where there was barely space for the washstand at the bed’s end. He washed his face, gulped down two glasses of icy water – the Jørgensens’ picnic had been full of salty cheese and pickles – and barely found the energy to strip to his undershirt and long johns before falling into bed. After a year of sleeping on thinly padded apple chests, it could have been a plump divan at the Ritz.

  Used now to farming hours, he awoke at five before remembering where he was and relaxing a little. He retrieved the envelope of wages from his jacket pocket and teased out Jørgensen’s note. Shelter matters more than anything, he read. Even food. You need a bell tent, ideally one with a chimney flap, and a simple stove. Matches. Good knife. Fry-pan. Fork. (You can eat from the pan!) Remember to have the flue outside before you light up or you’ll . . . Here he had failed to spell asphyxiate a couple of times and had written die instead. Don’t waste hours building a soddy unless the ground is very stony. Get on and dig a cellar – good for storm shelter, fire protection and storage – and build a lumber house right away if you can afford it. Soddies are for peasants and you would not last a month.

  From the train, Troels had pointed out newer sod houses than the ones near Moose Jaw. Constructed of rectangular sods packed together around a wood frame and, for the luckier, windows, they could be more or less sealed inside with layers of paper and whitewash. They were snug enough to keep out the wind and snow but were said to continue raining inside for days after the weather outside had dried up.

  While waiting for Troels to join him for breakfast, Harry took advantage of being briefly near a post office to send Phyllis a picture postcard of a buffalo and some Indians. When he strode in, Troels was in an ebullient good humour and soon let slip that he had found a woman the night before. ‘Blonde, German, built like a feather bed and very fond of her job.’ She had left him with a great hunger for chops and egg and, it seemed, a rapacity for the morning’s fierce business. ‘We must catch our prey promptly, even if we have to drag him out of bed,’ he said. ‘A weakling like that may have made the same promise to others.’

  ‘What about the . . . his Indian woman? What if he’s married her?’

  ‘He’s weak and lazy but he’s not a complete idiot. Yes,’ Troels went on eagerly to their waiter, ‘more coffee. More! We must get him to the Land Office before he changes his mind, Harry, and make sure that you are absolutely the next person to go in after him.’

  ‘Troels?’

  ‘Harry?’ The Dane turned on him an expression at once patient and mocking, as he gulped his coffee.

  The dining room had filled rapidly with other guests, all men, and become correspondingly noisy. Harry wondered how many of them were about the same business as he, were in fact his rivals.

  ‘Why are you doing all this for me?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I like you and believe in you.’

  ‘Forgive me for being indelicate, but . . . do you look for some kind of payment? A percentage of the sale, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh. That. That I will have from Varcoe when you pay him for his fencing. Most of the money will be mine.’

  ‘Ah.’ Still Harry didn’t understand. ‘But if the land is so good, why not take it for yourself?’

  ‘I’m not a farmer, Harry. I’m a businessman. Yes, yes, sleeping under the incredible stars, hunting duck, riding across a prairie: all that is good, a kind of adventure, but the rest, putting up fences, breaking that impossible prairie ground day after day, watching wheat grow, watching it get eaten by bugs and gophers or flattened by rain or burnt in a fire – this is not for me! But I can see that land, good land, is a good investment. When your three years are up and the land is yours – assuming you haven’t blown your brains out or been frozen to death in your cabin or eaten by bears – if you decide it’s not for you either, then you can sell it to me. How’s that?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  They shook hands across the little table.

  ‘Maybe by then I’
ll be ready to settle down,’ Troels added, and laughed at the idea.

  Varcoe was not living in a hotel, or a boarding house, or even in one of the little, low wooden houses beginning to cluster on building plots, but somewhere in the middle of a sea of mud, in an apparently unregulated district across the railway tracks, where scrawny children stared at them from the mouths of shacks and tents as they passed. Troels stopped at a wooden shed of a kind that back home might have been used to house a lawnmower, tennis things or a croquet set. A blackened tin chimney thrust out of what would have been a window at one end, the void about it plugged with bundled sacking. When Troels knocked on the door with his customary vigour, Harry thought instinctively of the tale of the three little pigs and the wolf.

  The native woman who opened the door was surely a far cry from the salacious imaginings of Varcoe’s English family. She was in a man’s gabardine, fastened with a stout leather belt, and what might have been visible of her legs beneath a mud-spattered skirt were thoroughly hidden in no less dirty woollen socks. Only when she half turned to call out, ‘Varcoe? Men wants you,’ over her shoulder and revealed the astonishingly black hair hanging loose down her back and a generous glimpse of well-filled bodice where buttons were missing on her coat could he see how she might tempt a man. As they waited, she raked him with her gaze and he felt something of power coming off her.

  Because of the way she had turned to call him, Harry had assumed Varcoe was in their little shed, possibly still in bed, so was surprised to see him approach from outside. His arms were full of waste wood: scraps of broken packing case and offcuts of lumber. Seeing Troels, he dropped the wood beside the door, brushed his hands clean on his jacket and told the woman, ‘I’m going with them.’

  She took his hat from a nail next to the door and handed it to him, an unsmiling echo of a loyal wife. She scorched Harry once more with her stare before turning back inside and shutting the door.

  Introductions were made and hands shaken and Troels led the way impatiently to the Dominion Lands Office, where the day’s queue had already formed.

  ‘Remember,’ he said to Harry, ‘not a word about your business while we’re waiting. There are bastards everywhere.’

  There was little danger of Varcoe chattering, except with fever. Twice on their way back into town he had been forced to a halt so as to give way to a racking cough that left spots of blood on his filthy handkerchief. From the little he let slip in nervy splatters of conversation as they walked, he had come to Canada after a brief, disastrous spell in his father’s cavalry regiment. He was younger than Harry, possibly even younger than Jack, but he looked ten years older. From his accent, his thoughtless good manners, his guileless, happy surprise on hearing Harry speak, he might have been one of Troel’s English puppies. Even were he cleaned up, however, given a trip to a Jermyn Street barber for a good haircut and to get rid of his uneven scarecrow beard, disease and hardship had wrought scarring changes in him. His polite phrases, the glimpses he gave of a sunnily untroubled Englishness, were the last twitches of a condemned limb. There was no risk of Harry falling into the clutches of a local woman, Indian or otherwise, or succumbing to the lure of alcohol or morphine, but he could not help look at the wreck of a man beside him as a terrible warning of what he too might become out here.

  As though reading his thoughts, Varcoe suddenly clutched his arm. ‘I say, old man. Are you sure this is what you want?’ he asked. ‘You don’t exactly look the type.’

  ‘Perhaps I should grow a beard,’ Harry told him, instinctively joking out of discomfort. ‘I’ve been farming near Moose Jaw all year actually. I liked it.’

  ‘But not on your own, I’ll bet. Gets pretty lonely out there.’

  ‘Oh, I expect I’ll cope.’

  Varcoe was shaken by another fit of coughing, which caused the men around them to step aside, and before long he was going through the door ahead of Harry.

  It was only as he was before the Dominion Lands agent himself, entering his claim on the acres for which Varcoe had just filed his deed of abandonment, that the rashness of what he was about – committing himself to three years on a hundred and sixty acres he had only seen on an entirely unhelpful map – was brought home to him. Most of the men who were entering claims would have spent days riding around, inspecting several possibilities before hurrying here to secure their considered choices. Or was that mistaken? Were there truly now so few good quarter-sections left, even in so vast a terrain, that he would have been insane to let this opportunity slip? Why else would there be such a crowd jostling for position outside? He pictured afresh the challenge in the native woman’s inky stare. Would Troels take so much of the sum Harry paid for the fencing that what was left would barely keep her and Varcoe in food for the month? Should Harry not buy the man a train ticket to Halifax at least?

  ‘Is there a problem?’ The clerk at the desk brought him back to his senses.

  Harry hastily apologised, and signed the next three years of his life away, receiving in exchange a precious slip of paper with the map co-ordinates of his new home: SW 23-43-25-W3. He shook hands with the clerk, who looked bewildered, so perhaps that wasn’t quite the thing, and found himself back outside, where Troels congratulated him and swept him off to buy supplies.

  Varcoe had disappeared. ‘I’ve paid him off,’ Troels explained airily. ‘You can pay me,’ he said. ‘He said to wish you good luck.’

  ‘Will he go home, do you think?’ Harry asked.

  Troels laughed but made no fuller answer.

  Harry had a great pile of possessions waiting at the station, of course, but apart from the camp bed, rubber bath, gun, blankets and books, that was largely clothes. The forbiddingly named Winter, his new nearest neighbourhood station, was fifteen stops away along the Grand Trunk Pacific line via Oban but would take two days to reach by horse and cart.

  From Indian traders on the edge of town, he bought a pair of horses – not the speedy, half-wild stock he had glimpsed enviously at points on his journey, but sturdy sisters, more Suffolk Punch than thoroughbred. The Indians assured him they were already well broken to both cart and plough. As if to prove their point, they threw a second-hand cart into the deal. Smaller than most, but big enough for his needs. Thus equipped, slightly giddy at the sudden freedom to drive instead of walking, he took the cart to an all-purpose agricultural depot near the station where, mindful of Jørgensen’s advice, he bought himself a tent big enough to shelter his trunk and camp bed and still leave him room to take a few steps. It had a flap expressly designed to take the little chimney of the stove he bought next. Excited from spending, after a year of punitive restraint, he bought tools: a scythe and whetstone, a mattock, a spade, a shovel, an axe and a simple walking plough as close in design as he could see to the one he had been using at Jørgensen’s. Then, as Troels, grown bored, went off to buy them beer, bacon, bread and cheese, Harry bought a sack of oats for his horses and, all important, a water bottle. Then a frying pan, a sharp knife and, because, pace Jørgensen, he could not quite imagine himself reduced to eating off a knife blade, a bone-handled fork. And then, because eating from a frying pan would be too depressing and he might, who knew, have company occasionally, he bought a second fork and two white enamelled tin plates and mugs to match.

  ‘Care for a tablecloth with those?’ the sales assistant asked and earned himself what Harry hoped was a most English look.

  He remembered just in time to add a good length of rope, initially to lash down his ground sheet over his cartful of bounty, and to halter the horses; a hammer for the tent pegs, and two boxes of cartridges for his gun. By the time all this was loaded, Troels had returned with a better humour, and as excited by the buying of food as an overgrown boy heading on a picnic. He had consulted among locals, one of whom had scribbled out the directions to Winter on the brown paper the cheese was wrapped in.

  BETHEL

  Fr
om North to South the princes meet

  To pay their homage at his feet.

  While western empires own their Lord,

  And savage tribes attend his Word.

  Isaac Watts, ‘Jesus Shall Reign’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Harry slept at the slightest opportunity. It was as though his mind was in retreat, like a wounded or frightened animal, turning in upon itself rather than risking the exposure of whatever wounds it had sustained.

  He was woken slowly by a gentle tapping. Still disoriented, he took a moment to recognise the young man at the door, dressed in a tasselled buckskin jacket, denims and a dark leather Stetson.

  ‘Sorry to wake you,’ he said, doffing the hat. ‘It’s time for your chore.’

  ‘You’ve changed,’ Harry said.

  ‘Ursula doesn’t go outside Bethel,’ the young man said with a wink.

  ‘You make a fine boy.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ve had practice. Oh, and don’t worry, I already signed you out on the register.’

  They headed up to the drive, where two plump dove-grey ponies and a cart were waiting. The ponies had been tethered ingeniously with ropes tied to heavy cookery weights.

  ‘Clever idea,’ Harry said, as the young Cree scooped up the weights before springing nimbly up to the driving bench and taking the reins.

  ‘It wouldn’t work if they weren’t this docile. I’ve never known a pair so placid.’

  ‘Must be the effect of watching the Athabasca all day,’ Harry said, climbing up beside him, and they laughed. It was disconcerting to feel a fluttering of desire for this man he had felt only respect for as a woman. ‘So if you’re not Ursula, what should I call you?’