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“Oh, my God, you didn’t!” she said.
She sat down and took me on her knee. I’d never loved her so much, or had such a feeling of relief.
“I was sitting out here,” she said. “I’d run out of cigarettes. I’m afraid I was crying. I felt so lonely and scared. And that very sweet man came out and sat with me and I told him – about Daddy and how I didn’t know what we were going to find in Saskatoon – and when the train stopped at that little town, to take on water, he took me for a cup of tea to the tiniest café you ever saw … It was all made of logs … He even bought me some cigarettes – look, they’re called Black Cat! I knew the train couldn’t leave without him. I never dreamed … Oh, my poor little poppet, you must have been so frightened!”
She slept the rest of the night in my berth, tops to tails, with the blind up on the window so the moon could shine in.
Hank was travelling alone, and at meals we talked. He lived in Calgary, which was even further west than we were going. We asked him what it would be like, in Saskatoon.
“When you get to your host’s house,” he told us, “the first thing he’ll ask you is, ‘Do you ride horseback?’”
“Well, we do,” said Cameron eagerly.
“Y’see, out west, the folks want to keep some of the old pioneering ways. They don’t want to get soft and citified, even if they’re not ranchers and trappers any more. So, they eat regular meals, like those spoilt easterners, except for one, and that’s breakfast. For breakfast they keep up the old traditions.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, they go out and catch their own breakfasts.”
Cameron’s mouth fell open.
“You mean, they go hunting, on horseback?”
“Sure do. Can you shoot?”
“No.”
He sucked in his lips. “Gotta learn to shoot. You start with a BB gun. Course, you can’t shoot anything big with those, but you can get a few gophers.”
“What’s a gopher?” Cameron and I asked at once.
“You don’t have gophers in England? They’re little critters about this big – ” He held his hands about eight inches apart – “They live on the prairie, in holes. Millions of ’em. You shoot a couple, fry ’em up – makes a dandy meal on toast. Of course you gotta skin ’em and gut ’em first.”
Mummy had her nose in her hands. I looked at her. Then back at Hank. He looked completely serious.
“What about girls? Do they have to shoot gophers too?”
“Well, no, girls are let off shootin’ if they don’t like it. But they do have to ride out on the prairie, and then they can catch their breakfast another way.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you. You make a loop in a long piece of string, and put it around a gopher hole. Then you wait. When he puts his head up, you jerk the loop tight round his neck, and there’s your breakfast.”
I made a face.
“Of course,” Hank went on, “if you got a soft heart and don’t wanna eat him, you can have him for a pet.”
I thought of my pet rabbit, Moley, left behind. “How do I catch him?”
“Gophers are crazy about condensed milk.”
Mummy gave a stifled snort.
“So what you do is, you take your tin of condensed milk. You punch two holes in it, top and bottom, and then you use that same length of string with the loop in it to drag the tin across the prairie. The gopher comes along and starts licking up the milk, and by the time the tin’s empty, he’s a-layin’ there on his back with his belly full of his favourite food, and you can ride back and pick him up, and he’s yours. For life.”
I listened, entranced. I could see it all! My own pet gopher!
“I’ll eat cereal for breakfast!” I exclaimed.
Mummy couldn’t contain herself. She bent over her knees and exploded.
“And what about me?” she managed to choke out. “I can’t ride and I can’t shoot and I refuse to strangle little things to death.”
Hank seemed to think about this. “Well, maybe on account of you’re all fresh from the Old Country they may let you off and give you bacon and waffles for a few days, till you settle in. But I’m sure relieved you kids can ride horseback, because maybe they won’t, and you’ll have to go out and shoot something to eat on the first morning. Enough for your mom as well.”
“I could do it. I bet I could,” said Cameron. “I’ve hunted foxes and got the brush. I was in at the kill. I got blooded!”
So then he explained very seriously to Hank about fox hunting and Hank said, “You mean they smear fox blood on the kids’ faces and give ’em the fox’s tail? Are you telling me a tall story, by any chance?”
The last part of the train journey got us seriously worried. The windows were now so dirty that if we wanted to see out properly we had to sit on the observation platform. The interesting countryside we’d seen earlier, changed. It was no longer full of lakes and hills, pine forests sprinkled with little towns and the occasional log cabin, not to mention exciting wildlife – Cameron had seen an eagle, and I’d seen a huge thing with strange antlers that Hank told us was a moose. Now the landscape was flat. No trees. No lakes or rivers. Just flat, flat, flat land under a swaying sea of yellow wheat. There were few signs of life. Only some farms, miles apart – hours apart.
“What are those things?” Cameron asked Hank, who was sitting with us pretty much full-time now.
“Grain elevators,” said Hank. “When the wheat’s harvested they bring it to the railheads and store it in those big square towers. Then they load it on to the trains to take it all over Canada.”
“But aren’t there any towns – proper towns?”
“Sure there are. Saskatoon is a big town. Population forty-odd thousand.”
“That’s not big,” said Cameron. “London’s got millions of people.”
“Ah well, I’m not saying it’s a big city. Though that’s what they call it. The Hub City of the Prairies.”
“How old is it?” Mummy asked.
“Not old. Maybe sixty, eighty years. Might still be some old-timers living there who remember when it was nothing but an Indian settlement.”
I pricked up my ears. “Indians? Real Red Indians?”
Hank looked a bit uncomfortable. “Well you know, they aren’t red, and they’re not Indians. We Anglos call them that, because we made a mistake when we first got here, thinking we’d arrived in India! But if you ever meet one, you don’t want to say, ‘Gee, are you an Indian?’”
“So what should we call them?” Cameron asked.
“By their tribe, maybe. Around Saskatchewan, it’s Cree. And other tribes. But mostly Cree.”
“Where are they? Can we see them?”
“They’re all on reserves now.”
Later, when I got Cameron alone, I said, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we really had to ride across the prairie and we met some Crees!”
“What if they were Apaches? Or Navajos? There are hundreds of different tribes. There must be a generic name for them if we can’t call them Indians.”
Cameron and his lovely long words! Generic. I got it. Something for all of them, instead of Indians. But for the moment I forgot about them, whatever they were called.
“Look at it,” he said. “It’s all wheat. How could we ride through that? It’s weird.”
If ‘weird’ means strange, unknown, utterly different, then he was right about where we were going. Or, as Hank taught us to say, “He sure slobbered a bibful.”
(#ulink_5b94de52-8753-5964-87be-3d3121bfa6c2)
We reached Saskatoon at six o’clock in the morning. Mummy woke us early, when there was hardly any light coming through the window of my berth – just enough to see the endless wheat fields rushing by. She took us along to the cramped, smelly washroom at the end of the carriage and produced some clothes she’d been saving for us to make a good impression when we arrived. My frock was very creased but at least it was clean. Cameron wore his school blazer, even though it had been getting hotter every day.
“Shall I wear a tie?” he asked.
“I don’t know … We should have asked Hank,” said Mummy.
She was putting make-up on. She hadn’t worn much on the journey, just lipstick and some powder, but now she put on eye shadow and mascara, and earrings. I thought she looked beautiful, and actress-y.
She wore a very pretty dress I hadn’t seen before, and stockings, and shoes with a bit of a heel. She wrapped her lovely blonde hair in a sort of turban. She looked like at home when she was going out for lunch. We bundled all the rest of our things into our suitcases as the train rocked the last few miles to our destination.
We stood near the exit door. Mummy smoked. She said, “I remember feeling just like this before I went on stage on a first night to play a big part.”
I’d once acted a big part in a school play – a queen. I suddenly remembered standing in the wings in my red dress with my hair down my back, with such a sudden terror of forgetting my lines that I nearly ran away. Yes. It was like that now.
Only Cameron seemed completely calm. “I wonder if they’ll come to meet us in a horse and buggy,” he said.
Just as the whistle blew for Saskatoon, Hank turned up. He must have got up early to say goodbye.
“You’ve been quite wonderful,” said Mummy. “A lifesaver.”
He shook hands with her, but she suddenly kissed his cheek. She had to stand on tiptoe.
“You’re welcome,” said Hank.
We’d never heard that phrase before. Mummy stared at him.
“What a very nice thing to say,” she said.
“Here’s my address in Calgary,” he said, giving Mummy a card. “Let me know if you need anything. Be good kids for your mom, now.” He shook Cameron’s hand and gave me a hug. “Go git them gophers!” he said. “Oh! I forgot to tell you – you want some pocket money, the government pays a bounty for every tail!”
The train pulled into the station. Right opposite where we stood, hung the sign that read ‘SASKATOON’.
“Is that an Indian name?” my clever cousin asked.
“Yep,” said Hank. “It’s the name of a berry. And ‘Canada’ is an Indian word too. It means ‘Big village’.”
Mummy and I were hanging out of the doorway, looking up and down the platform. There were lots of people waiting. But suddenly Mummy said, “There they are. Look. Those three down there, the white-haired man and the man and woman. Bet you.”
The train hissed to a stop and people started forward to get on or to greet people. ‘Our three’ were staring anxiously at the doorways. Mummy stepped out, waved, and called quite loudly, “Uncle Arthur!”
The older man turned quickly. Then, with the help of a walking stick, he came hurrying towards us, his face alight.
I didn’t know him at all, only that he was Mummy’s uncle, that he lived alone, that he was a retired bookkeeper. That he’d taken the trouble to find us some people to live with. But when I saw his face for the first time, warm with welcome as he strode towards us, I knew at once that I would love him.
He clasped Mummy in his arms, his stick falling to the ground. Cameron jumped down and scooped it up. We stood beside them, waiting. I happened to look up and saw Hank in the train doorway. He lifted our suitcases down and Cameron took them one by one. He looked at Mummy with a funny, soft look, and gave us a tiny wave. Then he disappeared, and we were smothered in a mass hug from Uncle Arthur, who smelled of pipe tobacco and welcome.
There was a lot of bustle all around us, but I felt someone close behind me. I turned, and faced a stranger with dark hair and glasses and a beaming smile.
“I know who you are! You’re Lindy!” he exclaimed. “I’m Gordon! I’m your new Poppa, the guy you’re coming to live with! Gee, this is great! Can I give you a li’l hug?”
I let him. He smelled strange. It was a smell I knew, but it was out of place here. Then he turned and a woman with hair too white for her face came forward rather shyly.
“This is Luti, my wife. Mrs Laine – Momma! – meet our little girl! And this—” he almost pulled Cameron forward with a hand on his shoulder, “this must be Cameron!”He wrung Cameron’s hand, pumping it up and down. “Gee whizz, you’re such a big boy, I didn’t expect – I thought you’d be about this size!” He put his hand about a foot from the ground.
Luti said softly, “Don’t be silly, Gordon.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Welcome to Saskatoon, Lindy.”
Mummy had turned towards us, still holding Uncle Arthur’s hand. There were introductions and more handshakes.
Mummy said, “We must go and see to our big luggage.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that!” Gordon said heartily. “They’ll have it off the train by now. Our railways are wonderful! Don’t you folks just love Canada? C’mon kids, let’s go find your bags!”
I noticed Cameron had peeled off his heavy school blazer. It was sweaty hot at seven in the morning.
Uncle Arthur called a taxi for him and Mummy and some of the luggage. Cameron and I drove to our new home in the Laines’ car. Cameron, who knew all about cars, hissed to me in the back seat that it was a Hillman Minx. He sounded surprised. Later he explained, “I thought they’d be rich.” Hillman Minxes weren’t, it seemed, what rich folks bought, at least not in England.
Gordon chatted the whole way.
“It’s gonna be so great to have kids around the place, huh, Mrs Laine? I mean Momma? I can’t wait to get started being a poppa! Look, kids, there’s our river! Bet you didn’t expect it to be so big, huh?”
We hadn’t expected it to be, at all. It was certainly the most exciting thing we’d seen for twenty-four hours of prairie. It was wide and had waves and steep banks, and rushed under the big bridge we were crossing.
“The city of bridges! That’s what we call Saskatoon! This one’s called Broadway Bridge. You’ll soon be criss-crossing it on the streetcar, to get downtown to the movies, I bet! We’ve got five movie theatres! Waddaya think of that? Almost like London, eh?”
“Of course it’s not like London,” said Luti in her quiet little voice.
“Only kidding,” said Gordon.
The car pulled up in a curved street with some pleasant-looking houses on each side. The house where we were going to live had a lawn that came down to the pavement, and as soon as we opened the car door, a dog came rushing to meet us. I could feel Cameron’s mood changing. He just couldn’t help himself.
“Here comes Spajer to say hi to you!” said Gordon.
Spajer was a golden cocker spaniel with long, silky ears. He jumped all over us. He was a lovely dog and Cameron couldn’t resist patting him, but I sensed he felt a bit disloyal to Bubbles.
“Is Spajer an Indian name?” asked Cameron.
Gordon roared with laughter, but Luti said, “We had another dog before him called Jasper.”
