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.
{235}
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.
{246}