CHAPTER XXV

AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VALLEY

We got back to Wilmer the following morning, and the problem then was--how to reach Golden again. The boat was due up the river some time in the day, but sandbanks do not encourage punctuality. I had my suspicions of that boat, and in any case, even if it arrived that day, it would certainly not start back again till the morning following. I did not want to wait for it at Wilmer, and decided instead that I would start walking down the valley at once and pick the boat up at Spellamacheen, forty miles downstream, some time next day. My friend was as suspicious of the walk as I was of the boat; and since he had heard that some men were likely to turn up that day in a motor from Golden who might give him a lift back in case the boat failed, he decided to wait for them.

So we parted, and rather late in the day--at {233} noon, to be exact--I set out on my walk. Forty miles is not much of a walk. It can be done in ten hours very easily--in eight if you make up your mind to it. I decided I would take nine hours over it and waste no time. I did not stop for lunch in Athelmer--where one crosses the Columbia--but merely bought some chocolate and a pound of apples, and hurried on.

About a mile out of Athelmer I ate the apples, because they were a nuisance to carry, and wished I could as easily get rid of my heavy overcoat, which had its pockets stuffed with toilet and sleeping accessories just like a suit-case. I also wished that I had on boots that I had ever tried walking in. Still I did six or seven miles in the first hour and a half, and then I realised that two things destructive to fast walking were about to happen. One was footsoreness and the other was rain. Both came upon me a few minutes later, and both increased steadily hour after hour. The valley which had looked so beautiful in all the reds of autumn, as we drove through it in the sunlight, was now filled with a clammy mist; and the road which had seemed a fine road for the horses in fine weather now struck me as offensively sticky, and my pace declined {234} to something under three miles an hour. I consoled myself for a little with the thought that I was getting an experience of autumn in the Columbia Valley. Afterwards I decided that I would gladly do without it. I could have imagined it just as well. The road was like glue and my coat had increased in weight several pounds. To balance this as far as possible, I sat on a wet spruce tree that had fallen by the side of the road and ate my packet of chocolate; after which I moved on at a very sober pace. I began to doubt if I should get to Spellamacheen that night; and the doubt soon increased to a certainty that I should not. Then I remembered that on the drive out we had passed a place called Dolans, only twenty-eight miles from Wilmer. I did some mental arithmetic which seemed to prove that even Dolans was a terrible distance off, and I tried a little running, but it was not of a kind to win a Marathon race. Running through glue when you are footsore is trying work. Nevertheless by six o'clock I calculated I was only about three miles from Dolans, which rejoiced me, until the horrid thought cropped up--if I got in after the supper hour, should I get any supper?

It was by no means certain in that valley.

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Providence a few minutes later sent a buggy, driven by a small, glum-looking man up behind me, and the glum-looking man said 'Care to drive?' I said 'Yes,' and found he was bound for Dolans like myself. We got there about seven o'clock. The rancher and his wife were in; also another wayfarer like ourselves, who had arrived a few minutes before us. He was an elderly man, with a great shock of iron-grey hair, who was driving into Golden in a farm-cart from some place several days distant. He had the strangest pair in his cart--a little brown mare of about fourteen hands, and a great lanky horse the height of a giraffe.

We were all given a good meal, and ate it in silence, and sat in silence to digest it. Canadians in these valleys are often that way; it is due not to unsociability but to disuse of their tongues. Possibly to ruminate is the better way, but silence can be oppressive, and if you start a conversation and the other people only reflect upon your words, they may be weighing them as if they were gold, but you are not sure enough of this to be elated. I was rather glad to be shown to my bed, which was in a barn (but the blankets were clean, Mr. Dolans said), pretty early. {236} Mr. Dolans sat on the bed for a bit, and advised me to buy the ranch. I promised to think the matter over, and went to sleep instead in a nice atmosphere of hay, and got up for six o'clock breakfast. The other two had already driven off; but the rain had ceased, and though the road was a mud slide, I started for Spellamacheen in high hopes of catching the boat in spite of being footsore.

I need not have worried myself, for when I got there at 12.30, I learnt that the boat had just passed on its way up to Wilmer, and was not likely to be down again for two or three days.

Spellamacheen consists of a rest-house ranch in full view of a semicircle of snowclad mountains, but I was a little disheartened in spite of the view. I particularly wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden to Vancouver, and now I realised that to do this I should have to walk the rest of the way--another forty miles. From two o'clock to twelve is ten hours. If I did four miles an hour, I should catch the train to a nicety.

When I am resting on a walk I am always singularly optimistic. I was stiff after lunch--partly from the unusual exercise, partly from sleeping in wet clothes, and my feet {237} were sorer than ever, but I set out for Golden, confident that I should catch that train. A young man with a bundle on his back, who had got into Spellamacheen just ahead of me, offered to hike with me. He also was for Golden, but thought twenty miles more that day would satisfy him.

He was a pleasant and conversational young man, and told me that he was from New Brunswick, but had for the last eight months been at work digging the ditches for the Columbia Valley Irrigation Company. He had had enough of it, he said; in fact too much. Compared with New Brunswick, British Columbia was no catch at all, and he meant to go back home. Frenchmen are not fonder of their 'patrie' than are the Canadian-born. He brimmed over, did that young man, with praises of New Brunswick--brimmed over very intelligently, telling me about the Reversible Falls of St. John and the conditions of farming in the province with a clearness which few Englishmen of his class could emulate. He said that he would only get one and a half dollars a day instead of two and a half, but then one and a half would go much further there than two and a half in British Columbia. You could live better on it, and life was easier {238} there. British Columbia was too rough: he allowed there was no pioneer about him. He had got tired of the Columbia Valley months before, and had started to come out of it in July, but had only got as far as Athelmer. There he had gone to a hotel for the night, and had got drinking, and somehow before he knew it all the money he had saved during his months of digging had been drunk. So he had gone back to the ditches. But he meant to get out of the valley this time. I gathered that even this time it had been a near shave, for having again got as far as the hotel, he had found a lot of fellows drinking what he called 'Schlampagne.' He supposed there must have been a hundred bottles of schlampagne drunk last night, and whisky afterwards, but he himself had been very careful and had taken gin instead. You never knew, he said, what the whisky would be made of, but if you drank from a bottle of gin marked English, it was all right. He felt a bit funny inside to-day, but seemed quite cheerful about it because he had won away from the hotel, and was pretty sure now to get back to New Brunswick, after which he would not go pioneering again. He doubted, however, if we were likely to get to Golden that day. There was {239} a place called M'Kie's we could put up at eighteen miles on, or if we felt like it, another called Petersen's--eight miles further. I said I wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden, and was going to walk on by night: at which he said he would do the same. He repeated that he was funny inside and footsore, but he thought he could do it. We would get to M'Kie's for supper, or rather get M'Kie to make us up a supper, which we would eat upon the road, and we should thus get into Golden in good time. He was sure we were going at least four miles an hour.

I was sure we were scarcely doing three, and by the time we did get to M'Kie's, just before dark, we were both so sure that a rest would do us good that we thought we would eat our supper there after all.

M'Kie's was a shack just off the road, with a huge puma-skin nailed to the verandah. Inside was a very old woman, who said that we could get our tea all right, but M'Kie wasn't in yet, and we'd better wait for him. So we sat down in the road, and I paddled in an icy creek that went foaming by the house door. Then the old woman asked us in and chatted to us while she cooked the meal. M'Kie turning up, we fell to, and {240} M'Kie entertained us with trapping stories. It seemed he was half-trapper, half-rancher, and the big skin we had seen outside he had got only a few days before. The mountain lion had come down right into the sheepfold, and his two dogs had treed it, and a single bullet had brought it down. It was the biggest skin that he had ever seen, and measured ten feet six from tip to tail. It certainly was a large skin, but a puma's tail counts for a good deal. M'Kie had also shot a bear in the sheepfold the week before, and he talked so much about cinnamons and grizzlies, which seemed very plentiful round there, that the New Brunswicker insisted on our having his opinion as to whether they ever attacked unarmed men walking by night. M'Kie thought not. So we started on again, somewhat reassured, along what promised to be an uncommonly dark road.

The sky was all clouded over, and it was now 8.30, and there was no chance whatever of my catching the midnight train, since twenty miles still remained to be accomplished, and our limp condition made even three miles an hour hard. But we walked on, mostly because I now wanted to get the morning train at eleven o'clock, and I felt that if we {241} went back to M'Kie's and stopped the night, I should be so stiff that I could not walk at all next day. The New Brunswicker sportingly said that he would go on for as long as he could anyhow, though he wasn't bent on any particular train; and for some four mortal hours we splashed along through mud and water in what was the next thing to pitch darkness. To add to the discomfort, a high, cold, and very wet wind began to blow, and there was every prospect of rain soon descending in torrents. It was at this point, I think, that our thoughts began to turn to Petersen's. The New Brunswicker remarked that if we had passed Petersen's there was nowhere to stop at between where we were and Golden; but if we had not passed Petersen's, we might rest there a few minutes and perhaps get some milk to drink. Soon after this we felt sure that we had passed Petersen's in the dark; and though neither of us admitted it, I think our respective hearts sank. We decided to rest a little, which we did, and we rested again a few minutes later without deciding to do it. As we got up from a brief smoke on a fallen log the rain began to pelt down, and we saw a light just off the road.

I own I should have wanted to stop at {242} Petersen's anyhow, even if the New Brunswicker had not confessed that he could not go any further: but I don't know that I should have had his perseverance in knocking Petersen's up. There certainly was a light there. But I was convinced that everybody inside was deep in sleep. The New Brunswicker thought somebody might be up, and after knocking vainly for ten minutes at the front door of the house he went round to the back, while I sat on the doorstep, wondering what fifteen miles in that black rain would be like.

A couple of minutes later, the New Brunswicker appeared triumphant. The Petersens, he said, were up--in their kitchen--and thither we limped, much relieved. They were the kindest people--Swedes, both of them, and kept a milk cow, and gave us milk and buttermilk. They said they were sorry they hadn't a bed to offer us, but we could have the kitchen. Fastidious travellers might have thought the kitchen untidy and stuffy, and even the New Brunswicker before he went to sleep on the floor on his blankets, with some old clothes that we found hanging on the walls over our legs--even he got a broom (after the Petersens had gone to bed) and swept a clean space {243} for us to lie on. But at least it was warm, and a haven of luxury compared with the road.

Personally, I know that I was very sorry to have to get up off that floor at 4 A.M., when that industrious old lady, Mrs. Petersen, came in again to relight the stove and to prepare breakfast. She was followed presently by her husband and son and a hired man, while from the barn there issued forth not only that shock-headed old man with the queer rig whom I had seen at Dolans, but no less than five other men who had been working in different parts of the valley, and were hiking out before the winter should come. These had all spent their night in the barn, which seems to be a privileged resting-place for travellers in this part of the country.

Mrs. Petersen had to get breakfast for some dozen people, and an odd company we were, all unkempt and unshaven, and most of us looking, truthfully enough, as if we had slept for some months in our clothes. We all did a wash before breakfast, however. Two of the men at table were socialists, and we had a desultory conversation on that subject while we were not occupied in eating Mrs. Petersen's bacon and eggs. Nobody seemed much to dispute the socialist position, but {244} this might have been because nobody was greatly interested in it. I remember that the socialists thought that capital ought to be done away with, but Mr. Petersen, who no doubt had a small amount himself and kept a hired man, thought it was a useful thing, and should be retained. Everybody went off directly the meal was finished, except ourselves, who lingered because the New Brunswicker had boldly requested the shock-headed old man to drive us in to Golden in his farm-cart, and we went to help harness the little mare and the big giraffe.

It was still raining heavily when we started, and it rained just as heavily all the way into Golden. I never was so damped in my life, and this was due not merely to the rain, but because the farm-cart was so full of the old man's things (he seemed to be moving his house in it) that the only place available in it for me was a sack of hay. The cart had stood out all night in the rain, and the sack of hay was wet through, which made it like a sponge, so that the more I dried off the top of it the more moisture I seemed to absorb from the under part. The little mare and the big horse made about two and a half miles an hour, and if I could have walked, {245} I should have done so, for now again the eleven o'clock train seemed in danger of getting off from Golden without me. Indeed it was half-past eleven before we got to Golden, and, resigned to despair, I accompanied the New Brunswicker into an inn, where I thought I should have to wait again for the midnight train. We ordered beer in the bar, and as I was explaining to the proprietor what a nuisance it was to have missed the train, he put down his glass and said, 'Wait a minute,' and went to the telephone. He came back to inform me that the train had just been signalled, being very late. He thought I should just have time to catch it if I rushed.

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