We had given up hope of having anything special in the way of a house so were not too disappointed when we stopped at a shack

As before, the ‘few miles’ turned out to be much more than that and was, in fact, well over a hundred. Again our future employer would be at the station to meet us.

His name was Tom Jacobs. He owned a section of land (which we now knew meant a thousand acres) near to the railroad. The farm had no name, only a number.

We had another half hour to wait for the train going east. All aboard, once again, we settled down for what was to be a tedious journey. The vast expanse of land that we passed through was almost featureless. lt looked cold and forbidding under a leaden sky foretelling more snow.

Exhausted, I fell asleep lulled by the soporific swaying of the train. We’d been up late the night before packing. With Muller taking every last ounce of manpower possible from Ronald, he hadn’t finished work in the dairy until 10.30pm.

Nevertheless, in spite of the rush, everything was properly packed except for the coffee table. We just hadn’t time to nail it back into its crate. I quickly made a large bag for it out of a sheet to keep it from getting scratched and hoped it would make the journey unscathed. Survival

Now with thoughts of survival uppermost in our minds the value of objects, however much prized, was diminishing.

I woke to some one shaking my shoulder. “We’re nearly there,” said Ronald.

I looked out the window. The land still looked cold, white and almost featureless. It was snowing. In the distance, where the wave-like contours were straightening out into the table-flat prairies of Saskatchewan, a tall grain elevator appeared on the skyline.

There was little else to attract the eye apart from a ridge of low hills showing sand in places where the dry, feather-light snow had been blown away.

Almost at the border, I mused, which sent me pondering on the one bit of information about it that I had. There were no rats in Alberta. No rats had ever crossed the border into Alberta.

We’d been told this categorically. How did they know? What stopped them? How did the Albertans keep them at bay?

My mind shifted to the landscape again. There was no sense of grandeur here as there had been at Redwoods – no tall kingly spruce trees, no leaping oil flames – only emptiness and inconsequential patches of scrub birch and poplar.

It was April but Spring hadn’t come to this land. There was no hint of green anywhere. Back home, I thought wistfully, the daffodils will be dancing in our old orchard.

Leaves will be pushing out from pale green buds and a spindrift of white blossom covering the plum trees. Fields, down in the valley, would be emerald, so green that if nature had made flames green instead of red-yellow the fields would seem on fire.

The woo-oo-ooo of the train brought me back to the present. It gradually reduced speed and the brass bell clanged loudly in the cold air – we were at Sandyhills. Pleasant

Our new boss, Tom Jacobs, was there to meet us – a broad-shouldered man, wearing a wide-brimmed stetson and a fur lined parka stretched over a large stomach.

He was pleasant enough but this time we were reserving our judgement. He packed us all into his large car. On the way to our new home he chatted to us more than Muller had ever done.

I think we had given up hope of having anything special in the way of a house so we were not too disappointed or surprised when we stopped at a shack similar to the one we had just left.

This one was a bit bigger, however, and more substantial to look at. Again it was made from long slats of machined wood with the bark removed. The roof was ‘tiled’ with wooden shingles.

The shack had no porch this time. In its place was an open veranda (that we later learned to call a deck), four wide steps leading up to a platform of wood.

An outer wooden door and an inner screen door led directly into the kitchen. The latter resembled the one we had just left, except that it was furnished with table and chairs and boasted a large fridge.

The same black log-burning stove took up a large part of the kitchen, although it was not quite such a magnificent model as the one at Redwoods.

At one end of the cabin, there was a smaller room, furnished sparsely but with two beds for the boys.

The other half of the shack, facing south, looked onto a gravel road and was divided into two rooms – one furnished with a table of sorts and a few odd chairs and the other almost completely filled by an enormous and substantial white enameled bed that had seen better days.

The enamel was badly chipped in places and large patches of rusty iron showed through.

The only other piece of furniture in the bedroom was a tall filing cabinet, rather bashed about but with four roomy drawers that slid easily out and in.

The furniture certainly wasn’t up to much, but compared to our last house it was luxury.

This time we had arrived in our new home before daylight had quite faded and were able to get an idea of our surroundings. Attractive

The whole farm complex was arranged in much the same way as the lonely Hudson Bay forts had been in the last century.

It was not, however, surrounded by a tall picket fence culminating in high gates to keep out marauding Assineboine or Blackfoot Indians as it would have been in the old days. It was open to the prairie.

At the top end of a huge rectangle stood the farmhouse. A road ran past it. Our new home stood at the far end of one of the long sides close to an attractive Dutch barn.

A gravel road ran past it also. At the bottom end of the rectangle low willow trees screened off a small grass paddock which was surrounded by a fence of wooden slats.

On the side opposite to us was Mrs Jacobs’ kitchen garden and a large feed lot for cattle which when writing home to mother I called a corral, thinking it sounded more romantic.

Apart from the fixtures there were a number of large implements sitting out in the open, plus three monster tractors and an enormous combine. (More tomorrow.)