Over Prairie Trails

by Frederick Philip Grove

  The horses bolted, and the buggy jumped. I was lucky, for inertia carried me right back on the seat, and as soon as I had the lines in my hands again, I felt that the horses did not really mean it. I do not think we had gone more than two or three hundred yards before the team was under control. I stopped and adjusted the overturned valves. When I succeeded, I found to my disappointment that the heat of that first flame had partly spoiled the reflector. Still, my range of vision now extended to the belly-band in the horses’ harness. The light that used to show me the road for about fifty feet in front of the horses’ heads gave a short truncated cone of great luminosity, which was interesting and looked reassuring; but it failed to reach the ground, for it was so adjusted that the focus of the converging light rays lay ahead and not below. Before, therefore, the point of greatest luminosity was reached, the light was completely absorbed by the fog.

  I got out of the buggy, went to the horses’ heads and patted their noses which were dripping with wetness. But now that I faced the headlight, I could see it though I had failed to see the horses’ heads when seated behind it. This, too, was quite reassuring, for it meant that the horses probably could see the ground even though I did not.

  But where was I? I soon found out that we had shot off the trail. And to which side? I looked at my watch again. Already the incident had cost me half an hour. It was really dark by now, even outside the fog, for there was no moon. I tried out how far I could get away from the buggy without losing sight of the light. It was only a very few steps, not more than a dozen. I tried to visualize where I had been when I struck the fog. And fortunately my habit of observing the smallest details, even if only subconsciously, helped me out. I concluded that the horses had bolted straight ahead, thus missing an s-shaped curve to the right.

  At this moment I heard Peter paw the ground impatiently; so I quickly returned to the horses, for I did not relish the idea of being left alone. There was an air of impatience and nervousness about both of them.

  I took my bicycle lantern and reached for the lines. Then, standing clear of the buggy, I turned the horses at right angles, to the north, as I imagined it to be. When we started, I walked alongside the team through dripping underbrush and held the lantern with my free hand close down to the ground.

  Two or three times I stopped during the next half hour, trying, since we still did not strike the trail, to reason out a different course. I was now wet through and through up to my knees; and I had repeatedly run into willow-clumps, which did not tend to make me any drier either. At last I became convinced that in bolting the horses must have swerved a little to the south, so that in starting up again we had struck a tangent to the big bend north, just beyond Bell’s farm. If that was the case, we should have to make another turn to the right in order to strike the road again, for at best we were then simply going parallel to it. The trouble was that I had nothing to tell me the directions, not even a tree the bark or moss of which might have vouchsafed information. Suddenly I had an inspiration. Yes, the fog was coming from the northeast! So, by observing the drift of the droplets I could find at least an approximate meridian line. I went to the headlight, and an observation immediately confirmed my conjecture. I was now convinced that I was on that wild land where two months ago I had watched the goldfinches disporting themselves in the evening sun. But so as not to turn back to the south, I struck out at an angle of only about sixty degrees to my former direction. I tried not to swerve, which involved rough going, and I had many a stumble. Thus I walked for another half hour or thereabout.

  Then, certainly! This was the road! The horses turned into it of their own accord. That was the most reassuring thing of all. There was one strange doubt left. Somehow I was not absolutely clear about it whether north might not after all be behind. I stopped. Even a new observation of the fog did not remove the last vestige of a doubt. I had to take a chance, some landmark might help after a while.

  I believe in getting ready before I start. So I took my coal-oil lantern, lighted and suspended it under the rear springs of the buggy in such a way that it would throw its light back on the road. Having the light away down, I expected to be able to see at least whether I was on a road or not. In this I was only partly successful; for on the rut-trails nothing showed except the blades of grass and the tops of weeds; while on the grades where indeed I could make out the ground, I did not need a light, for, as I found out, I could more confidently rely on my ear.

  I got back to my seat and proceeded to make myself as comfortable as I could. I took off my shoes and socks – keeping well under the robe – extracted a pair of heavy woollens from my suitcase under the seat, rubbed my feet dry and then wrapped up, without putting my shoes on again, as carefully and scientifically as only a man who has had pneumonia and is a chronic sufferer from pleuritis knows how to do.

  At last I proceeded. After listening again with great care for any sound I touched the horses with my whip, and they fell into a quiet trot. It was nearly seven now, and I had probably not yet made eight miles. We swung along. If I was right in my calculations and the horses kept to the road, I should strike the “twelve-mile bridge” in about three-quarters of an hour. That was the bridge leading through the cottonwood gate to the grade past the “hovel.” I kept the watch in the mitt of my left hand.

  Not for a moment did it occur to me to turn back. Way up north there was a young woman preparing supper for me. The fog might not be there – she would expect me – I could not disappoint her. And then there was the little girl, who usually would wake up and in her “nightie” come out of bed and sleepily smile at me and climb on to my knee and nod off again. I thought of them, to be sure, of the hours and hours in wait for them, and a great tenderness came over me, and gratitude for the belated home they gave an aging man….

  And slowly my mind reverted to the things at hand. And this is what was the most striking feature about them: I was shut in, closed off from the world around. Apart from that cone of visibility in front of the headlight, and another much smaller one from the bicycle lamp, there was not a thing I could see. If the road was the right one, I was passing now through some square miles of wild land. Right and left there were poplar thickets, and ahead there was that line of stately cottonwoods. But no suggestion of a landmark – nothing except a cone of light which was filled with fog and cut into on both sides by two steaming and rhythmically moving horseflanks. It was like a very small room, this space of light – the buggy itself, in darkness, forming an alcove to it, in which my hand knew every well-appointed detail. Gradually, while I was warming up, a sense of infinite comfort came, and with it the enjoyment of the elvish aspect.

  I began to watch the fog. By bending over towards the dashboard and looking into the soon arrested glare I could make out the component parts of the fog. It was like the mixture of two immiscible liquids – oil, for instance, shaken up with water. A fine, impalpable, yet very dense mist formed the ground mass. But in it there floated myriads of droplets, like the droplets of oil in water. These droplets would sometimes sparkle in a mild, unobtrusive way as they were nearing the light; and then they would dash against the pane and keep it dripping, dripping down.

  I leaned back again; and I watched the whole of the light-cone. Snow white wisps would float and whirl through it in graceful curves, stirred into motion by the horses’ trot. Or a wreath of it would start to dance, as if gently pulled or plucked at from above; and it would revolve, faster towards the end, and fade again into the shadows behind. I thought of a summer in Norrland, in Sweden, in the stone-and-birch waste which forms the timberline, where I had also encountered the mist pools. And a trip down a stream in the borderland of the Finns came back with great vividness into my mind. That trip had been made in a fog like this; only it had been begun in the early morning, and the whole mass of the mist had been suffused with the whitest of lights. But strange to say, what stood out most strikingly in the fleeting memory of the voyage, was the weird and mocking laughter of the magpies all
along the banks. The Finnish woods seemed alive with that mocking laughter, and it truly belongs to the land of the mists. For a moment I thought that something after all was missing here on the prairies. But then I reflected again that this silence of the grave was still more perfect, still more uncanny and ghostly, because it left the imagination entirely free, without limiting it by even as much as a suggestion.

  No wonder, I thought, that the Northerners in their land of heath and bog were the poets of elves and goblins and of the fear of ghosts. Shrouds were these fogs, hanging and waving and floating shrouds! Mocking spirits were plucking at them and setting them into their gentle motions. Gleams of light, that dance over the bog, lured you in, and once caught in these veils after veils of mystery, madness would seize you, and you would wildly dash here and there in a vain attempt at regaining your freedom; and when, exhausted at last, you broke down and huddled together on the ground, the werwolf would come, ghostly himself, and huge and airy and weird, his body woven of mist, and in the fog’s stately and leisurely way he would kneel down on your chest, slowly crushing you beneath his exceeding weight; and bending and straightening, bending and stretching, slowly – slowly down came his head to your throat; and then he would lie and not stir until morning and suck; and after few or many days people would find you, dead in the woods – a victim of fog and mist….

  A rumbling sound made me sit up at last. We were crossing over the “twelve-mile bridge.” In spite of my dreaming I was keeping my eyes on the look-out for any sign of a landmark, but this was the only one I had known so far, and it came through the ear, not the eye. I promptly looked back and up, to where the cottonwoods must be; but no sign of high, weeping trees, no rustling of fall-dry leaves, not even a deeper black in the black betrayed their presence. Well, never before had I failed to see some light, to hear some sound around the house of the “moneyed” type or those of the “half way farms.” Surely, somehow I should be aware of their presence when I got there! Some sign, some landmark would tell me how far I had gone! … The horses were trotting along, steaming, through the brewing fog. I had become all ear. Even though my buggy was silent and though the road was coated with a thin film of soft clay-mud, I could distinctly hear by the muffled thud of the horses’ hoofs on the ground that they were running over a grade. That confirmed my bearings. I had no longer a moment’s doubt or anxiety over my drive.

  The grade was left behind, the rut-road started again, was passed and outrun. So now I was close to the three-farm cluster. I listened intently for the horses’ thump. Yes, there was that muffled hoof-beat again – I was on the last grade that led to the angling road across the corner of the marsh.

  Truly, this was very much like lying down in the sleeping-car of an overland train. You recline and act as if nothing unusual were going on; and meanwhile a force that has something irresistible about it and is indeed largely beyond your control, wafts you over mile after mile of fabled distance; now and then the rumble of car on rail will stop, the quiet awakens you, lights flash their piercing darts, a voice calls out; it is a well known stop on your journey and then the rumbling resumes, you doze again, to be awakened again, and so on. And when you get up in the morning – there she lies, the goal of your dreams the resplendent city….

  My goal was my “home,” and mildly startling, at least one such mid-nightly awakening came. I had kept peering about for a landmark, a light. Somewhere here in those farmhouses which I saw with my mind’s eye, people were sitting around their fireside, chatting or reading. Lamps shed their homely light; roof and wall kept the fog-spook securely out: nothing as comfortable then as to listen to stories of being lost on the marsh, or to tell them…. But between those people and myself the curtain had fallen – no sign of their presence, no faintest gleam of their light and warmth! They did not know of the stranger passing outside, his whole being a-yearn with the desire for wife and child. I listened intently – no sound of man or beast, no soughing of wind in stems or rustling of the very last leaves that were now fast falling…. And then the startling neighing of Dan, my horse! This was the third trip he made with me, and I might have known and expected it, but it always came as a surprise. Whenever we passed that second farm, he stopped and raising his head, with a sideways motion, neighed a loud and piercing call. And now he had stopped and done it again. He knew where we were. I lowered my whip and patted his rump. How did he know? And why did he do it? Was there a horse on this farmstead which he had known in former life? Or was it a man? Or did he merely feel that it was about time to put in for the night? I enquired later on, but failed to discover any reason for his behaviour.

  Now came that angling road past the “White Range Line House.” I relied on the horses entirely. This “Range Line House” was inhabited now – a settler was putting in winter-residence so he might not lose his claim. He had taken down the clapboards that closed the windows, and always had I so far seen a light in the house.

  It seemed to me that in this corner of the marsh the fog was less dense than it had been farther south, and the horses, once started, were swinging along, though in a leisurely way, yet without hesitation. Another half hour passed. Once, at a bend in the trail, the rays from the powerful tractor searchlight, sweeping sideways past the horses, struck a wetly glistening, greyish stone to the right of the road. I knew that stone. Yes, surely the fog must be thinning, or I could not have seen it. I could now also dimly make out the horses’ heads, as they nodded up and down….

  And then, like a phantom, way up in the mist, I made out a blacker black in the black – the majestic poplars north of the “Range Line House.” Not that I could really see them or pick out the slightest detail – no! But it seemed to my searching eyes as if there was a quiet pool in the slow flow of the fog – as the water in a slow flowing stream will come to rest when it strikes the stems of a willow submerged at its margin. I was trying even at the time to decide how much of what I seemed to divine rather than to perceive was imagination and how much reality. And I was just about ready to contend that I also saw to the north something like the faintest possible suggestion of an eddy, such as would form in the flowing water below a pillar or a rock – when I was rudely shaken up and jolted.

  Trap, trap, I heard the horses’ feet on the culvert. Crash! And Peter went stumbling down. Then a violent lurch of the buggy, I holding on – Peter rallied, and then, before I had time to get a firmer grasp on the lines, both horses bolted again. It took me some time to realize what had happened. It was the culvert, of course; it had broken down, and lucky I was that the ditch underneath was shallow. Only much later, when reflecting upon the incident, did I see that this accident was really the best verification of what I was nearly inclined to regard as the product of my imagination. The trees must indeed have stood where I had seemed to see that quiet reach in the fog and that eddy….

  We tore along. I spoke to the horses and quietly and evenly pulled at the lines. I think it must have been several minutes before I had them under control again. And then – in this night of weird things – the weirdest sight of them all showed ahead.

  I was just beginning to wonder, whether after all we had not lost the road again, when the faintest of all faint glimmers began to define itself somewhere in front. And … was I right? Yes, a small, thin voice came out of the fog that incessantly floated into my cone of light and was left behind in eddies. What did it mean? …

  The glimmer was now defining itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and both beasts snorted and stopped.

  In a flash a thought came. I had just broken through a culvert – the bridge, too, must have broken down, and somebody had put a light there to warn the chance traveller who might stray along on a night like this! I was on the point of getting out of my wrap
s, when a thinner wave in the mist permitted me to see the flames of three lanterns hung to the side-rails of the bridge. And that very moment a thin, piping voice came out of the darkness beyond. “Daddy, is that you?” I did not know the child’s voice, but I sang out as cheerily as I could. “I am a daddy all right, but I am afraid, not yours. Is the bridge broken down, sonny? Anything wrong?” “No, Sir,” the answer came, “nothing wrong.” So I pulled up to the lanterns, and there I saw, dimly enough, God wot, a small, ten-year old boy standing and shivering by the signal which he had rigged up. He was barefooted and bareheaded, in shirt and torn knee-trousers. I pointed to the lanterns with my whip. “What’s the meaning of this, my boy?” I asked in as friendly a voice as I could muster. “Daddy went to town this morning,” he said rather haltingly, “and he must have got caught in the fog. We were afraid he might not find the bridge.” “Well, cheer up, son,” I said, “he is not the only one as you see; his horses will know the road. Where did he go?” The boy named the town – it was to the west, not half the distance away that I had come. “Don’t worry,” I said; “I don’t think he has started out at all. The fog caught me about sixteen miles south of here. It’s nine o’clock now. If he had started before the fog got there, he would be here by now.” I sat and thought for a moment. Should I say anything about the broken culvert? “Which way would your daddy come, along the creek or across the marsh?” “Along the creek.” All right then, no use in saying anything further. “Well, as I said,” I sang out and clicked my tongue to the horses, “don’t worry; better go home; he will come to-morrow.” “I guess so,” replied the boy the moment I lost sight of him and the lanterns.