The Serial: Far From the Rowan Tree Day 27

Occasionally there wasn’t much to do at all but Jacobs never liked to waste a second of his hired man’s time

With these two matters settled, the doctor and the car, we felt a good deal happier. Jacobs was true to his word and one day took Ronald to a used car lot.

They came back proudly with a big pale green Chevrolet. Its windscreen was pitted, it had seen better days but Jacobs pronounced it sound and not bad for the money.

Most windscreens had a degree of pitting. Cars passing in a hurry threw up stones from the gravel ruts. It was unavoidable.

Apart from in Sandyhills itself no roads around here were paved, not even the major one to Edmonton.

“They haven’t gotten around to it yet,” Betty Jacobs told me, “except in Sandyhills itself and the reason for that is there is an army camp on the outskirts. We sure are lucky here.”

We saw what she meant when we visited another township, months later, after heavy rain. In the small township of Pioneer we slithered and slipped madly about, always fearful of sticking in a sea of mud.

The following week Betty Jacobs drove me to the doctor’s surgery. It was fortunate for us that the doctor, although born in Canada, had Scottish parents and a Scottish wife.

Shocked

He was a young man and like many Scots, not given to wasting words. He examined me, pronounced me fit and made another appointment for me in a month’s time.

He said he would book me into the local hospital. I suggested having the baby at home. “In Scotland mothers have their babies at home if they want to,” I told him.

He seemed rather shocked at the idea and said it just wasn’t done in Alberta. In fact it was against the law. I left it at that.

It wasn’t until a long time afterwards that we realised how fortunate we were to fall into the hands of that particular doctor. There were charlatans in the medical profession just as there were in car sales.

Betty Jacobs had been so kind I decided not to mention dentists just yet. Besides, my errant tooth had got a bit bored aching and had settled down a bit.

Ronald and I decided things were definitely looking up. True, there were things I missed about Redwoods. The landscape was really barren here.

There were no stately trees, no drumming woodpeckers, no friendly squirrel to greet us in the morning – nothing except the ominous croak of the raven and the howling at night of the ubiquitous coyote.

Winter was still hard on the land and showed little sign of letting up.

Jacobs had about 200 cattle in his feed lot. He kept them to use up the surplus grain that nobody wanted. The boom years in grain were gone.

To begin with Ronald spent much of his working day among the cattle as well as doing all sorts of odd jobs.

Occasionally, there wasn’t much to do at all but Jacobs never liked to waste a second of his hired man’s time.

Impossible

Once Ronald was sent to make holes for posts – an almost impossible task in winter for the uninitiated.

“It’s like chipping away at concrete,” he told me afterwards. “It’s frozen, virgin soil where, even in the summer, you don’t need to go far down before you reach permafrost, Jacobs told me!”

It was those kinds of discoveries that brought home to us how new this land was to any form of cultivation. The first white settlers who had come to people the Westlands had arrived only in the last century.

The first settlement began a good way east of Sandyhills, below Lake Winnipeg on the banks of the Red River. It was the brainchild of Lord Selkirk from Kirkcudbrightshire in Scotland, one of the heads of the Hudson Bay Company.

He brought over some of his own countrymen and women, whole families in fact, directing them to where he knew the virgin soil was good.

Many of the families who volunteered to come were from the Highlands and Islands. Landlords had given crofters notice to leave in order to make more room for sheep at a time when the latter were a profitable enterprise.

If the crofters didn’t go quietly they set fire to the thatched roofs of their stone-built cottages. It may have been easy to persuade these displaced persons with nowhere to go to take the plunge and emigrate to another country.

I wondered if they had any idea of the rigours and hardships that lay before them. Had they been told the whole truth, I doubt if many would have attempted it.

What must have been their thoughts when, after a long and arduous sea voyage, they arrived on the desolate shores of the Hudson Bay – men, women and children – to find that their journey was only beginning.

They had yet to cross a vast uninhabited terrain. They travelled mainly down river by canoe, oared by Swampy Cree Indians.

From time to time, when they came to rapids or impassable water, the canoes had to be taken out of the river and carried along the wild overgrown tracks hewn out by a few fur traders on their way south to Fort Garry.

Danger

Also at places where the water was too shallow, the passengers had to disembark and the canoes were pulled along empty. Sometimes these portages, as they were called, went on for miles and miles.

It was often tough going, wading up to their waist in muddy ooze, through muskeg or making their way over uncleared bushland, thick with scrub trees, the ground littered with fallen branches.

Always they were in danger of attack from an angry bear. Occasionally, a moose would cross their path, or a wolf.

Through the trees they might catch glimpses of shy martins or the swift cat-like lynx. When the opportunity arose they would try to shoot something for the pot to vary their meagre diet based largely on pemmican, an Indian preparation of buffalo meat.

If they were lucky they might bag a duck, goose or more rarely, a moose. Also they would doubtless find wild cranberries or saskatoons having that sharp sweet taste of the tundra. (More tomorrow.)