CHAPTER I

Adventures Without a Man

HOW IS your own imagination, to-day?

I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now.

The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before the first man came.

Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale.

No human eyes ever saw them in life. No men lived here, or anywhere on earth, so long, long ago. But we ourselves can see those very beasts, their huge old bones and awful teeth; yes, the very pattern of their skin, printed on the soft mud they sank and died in,—mud now hardened into rock. Many of these monstrous skeletons have been put together and set up in museums. Every year more come into sight, as the river undermines its banks and the rock breaks up and wears away.

You can see these creatures, dead, with your eyes. Now set your imagination to work, and see them alive.

What a picture! A dense jungle, of waving horsetail reeds and rushes tall as our poplars, of spreading tree-ferns, of towering trees like tropical palms. Here and there, an open stretch of gleaming, stagnant water. Flitting overhead are curious birds with rows of sharp teeth in their long beaks, and still more curious reptiles of the air with fleshy wings, like overgrown bats. What are they looking down at? There is a stir among the greenery. A lizard, fifty feet long, is wallowing in his muddy bed; his head appears, with dull eyes looking out from a stupid little brain; then his neck, longer than any giraffe’s. We call him the Gigantosaurus, or giant lizard. He seizes a tree with his forepaws, bends it down, and begins to munch the leaves and twigs.

_Very Early Westerners,_ _Corythosaurus and Gorgosaurus_

Suddenly he stops, looks round in alarm, and dives. Too late. Another huge lizard comes crashing and splashing through the greenery,—not quite so big, but fierce and strong, his mighty jaws grinning with terrible fangs. It is the Tyrannosaurus. He throws himself on the poor leaf-eater, and bites and tears, and tears and bites, till the helpless monster lies dead in the swamp. A whole tribe of the conqueror’s family, and other flesh-eaters of all sizes and many curious shapes, creep up and share the feast, till nothing is left but the bones—for us to discover, a few million years later, and collect for our museums.

That was the most ornamental and spectacular age in the whole history of animal life on this earth. Nothing so fantastic has ever lived, before or since. One beast had a crest of many pointed plates jutting out of its high humped back from head to tail. Several had two or three horns, on forehead and snout. One had a full suit of bony armor plates, including a movable shield over each eye. Another had a bill like a duck, and a towering dome of a skull that gives an impression of high intellect; but his brain, like that of all the rest, was ridiculously small. There were hundreds of different kinds of these quaint animals roaming about here at the same time.

Even that is not the earliest scene of Western life we can see when we open the telescope of imagination and look back through the ages past.

Look back far enough, and we see the hot earth spinning through space, a soft and fluid ball,—red-hot, only we cannot see the color, for a thick cloud of vapor covers all. As the earth cools, it shrinks, wrinkling and crinkling. The parts of its skin that rise make continents and islands, the parts that sink make seas and lakes. It goes on shrinking, and its shape changes constantly. A sea-bottom rises, and becomes land; land sinks, and is covered by sea. Up and down, up and down, for millions of years.

Little beasts appeared in the sea. High up in the Rocky Mountains we find them by countless thousands—the trilobites, related to the crabs,—their shapes preserved and moulded in the solid stone. But that stone, when they lived and died, was soft mud at the bottom of the sea. There were no Rocky Mountains then. The oldest mountains in this part of the world are nearer the coast. They are worn down and rounded now; for as soon as a mountain is raised it begins to wear away, split by frost, falling in landslides, and washed down by rain. Even when the giant lizards browsed and played and fought in the jungle, there were no Rockies yet.

The giant lizards came, and passed away. The earth still shrank, and threw up more wrinkles,—the Rocky Mountains at last rising out of the sea. They are still so new that their ridges and edges and peaks have not yet lost their sharpness, yet so many thousand years old that their uppermost rocks, worn away to sand and carried down in rivers to the plain, have had time to bury the lizards many feet deep. They have buried, too, the tropical palms and ferns and reeds, and pressed them into coal, which we dig up and burn.

Millions of years pass,—and when we look through our telescope again the country has so changed that we cannot recognize it. Instead of being hotter than now, it is colder. Most of it, in fact, has disappeared, under an immensely thick sheet of ice. This icy mantle covers nearly all Canada, and a great part of the United States. Its edge advances, century after century, farther and farther south, slowly but surely, wiping out forests, grinding and grooving the rocks underneath, as glaciers always do. Then it slowly retires,—through more centuries,—advances again, and again withdraws to the north. A third time the land is covered before the final retreat of the Arctic ice.

How did this happen? Most likely by the surfaces of the earth and sea-bottom in these northern parts rising many hundred feet and then sinking, to rise and sink again and again. In some parts of the world even now the level of the land is rising, in others falling; and wherever the land is high enough to-day, with a considerable snowfall, we know it is always covered with snow and ice, summer and winter.

Let us take a look at our country as it was when the second ice-cap had melted and the last had not yet formed.

The monsters have gone, for ever vanished from the earth. Gone are the tree-ferns and towering palms. New birds have come, like those we know, and sing among trees and shrubs of the kind still growing around us. The hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the mastodon, thunder over the grassy plain. We see our northern musk ox grazing as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee.

We look for men and find none at all. Not one man, woman or child, in all these two vast continents. Fifteen million square miles, empty and waiting, all ready for man, but waiting for him in vain; perhaps till even the last and smallest of the ice-caps has disappeared.

Far away in the north-west the land comes to an end; but looking over the water we see the coast of Asia only sixty miles off, with a convenient little group of islands half-way over. There is nothing to prevent man from coming over in a canoe in summer, or on the ice in winter.

And there he is, coming!