The Car Is Your Own, And With It The Service Of The
Porter.
Our porter, seeing things were slack, beguiled himself with a
guitar, which gave a triumphal and festive touch to the journey,
ridiculously out of keeping with the view.
For eight-and-twenty long
hours did the bored locomotive trail us through a flat and hairy land,
powdered, ribbed, and speckled with snow, small snow that drives like
dust-shot in the wind - the land of Assiniboia. Now and again, for no
obvious reason to the outside mind, there was a town. Then the towns
gave place to 'section so and so'; then there were trails of the
buffalo, where he once walked in his pride; then there was a mound of
white bones, supposed to belong to the said buffalo, and then the
wilderness took up the tale. Some of it was good ground, but most of it
seemed to have fallen by the wayside, and the tedium of it was eternal.
At twilight - an unearthly sort of twilight - there came another curious
picture. Thus - a wooden town shut in among low, treeless, rolling
ground, a calling river that ran unseen between scarped banks; barracks
of a detachment of mounted police, a little cemetery where ex-troopers
rested, a painfully formal public garden with pebble paths and foot-high
fir trees, a few lines of railway buildings, white women walking up and
down in the bitter cold with their bonnets off, some Indians in red
blanketing with buffalo horns for sale trailing along the platform, and,
not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a young grizzly
standing up with extended arms in their pens and begging for food.
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