Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 14

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In a mustard-coloured dusk of gas-lit Glasgow (much like that one in which I was introduced to Fortuny) my father brought home to me, from the Athenæum Library, Catlin's North American Indians and McLean's The Indians of Canada.

Thereafter was a change in the neighbourhood of my week-end playground. The hill of Ballygeoch was no longer the knob of rock on Robinson Crusoe's island whence I searched an imaginary sea for a sail. Ballygeoch became a butte of the Western plains where I looked out over the domain of Blackfoot and Cree.

That I might have more data for my play I begged for more books to a like tune. Thus Ballantyne and Butler—of The Great Lone Land—came my way. A serial story in a Boy's Own Annual of that period, called The Silk-Robed Cow (which was a buffalo cow), helped. The old family atlas made me conversant with the whereabouts of the far-scattered trading-posts—from the frontier posts of Millbrae, by way of the Bad Lands of Giffnock Quarries, to the Mearns Moors—which were the rolling prairies of the far west.

According to accounts that I read of that company known as The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay it seemed that they had their adventuring done for them chiefly by Scots; and the annals of their rivals, the North-West Company and the X.Y., were starred with such names as Findlay and Fraser, Stewart and Mackenzie, Livingston and MacDougall, Angus Shaw and Donald McTavish.

In my late teens, at the urge of a restlessness both national and of my family (all my folks, on both sides, were world wanderers), I got leave of absence—deaving them near to death till I got it, I fear—and within two weeks of dropping Rathlin astern (not without a gulp in my throat) I saw a camp of veritable Blackfeet, saw the smoky-topped tepees, the herds of their horses, blacks and greys, roans and pintos, sorrels and blues.

For a year or two I wandered in the West, no settler, working in lumber camps and railroad camps—arduous work, enough to make or break one. Briefly I ran a store for a man too lazy, or too fond of beer and skittles and sitting around with the boys, to run it himself. The confinement between walls was irksome, however, so again it was roll and go. I went into the hills on old Indian trails and had my introduction to the odour of red-willow smoke.

Then, homesick, I suppose, I turned east. At Montreal I shipped in a cattle boat which sprang a leak in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and helped to comfort frightened long-horned steers and perturbed bulls while a steamer, fortunately sighting us (for that was before the days of wireless) stood by, and another, called out of the horizon by the blasts of our duetting sirens, went for assistance.

At last it came. Tugs towing enormous salvaging scows thrashed down the gulf to us. On one of these (with the steers and the bulls) I returned to Montreal. Back there, I reconsidered the notion of returning to the Old Country, tossing a coin for a decision; and on another cattle boat (laden with steers and bulls, stallions and sheep), with a return ticket guaranteed, I saw, for the second time in my life, the land of my forefathers loom up through mists.

It was not till some years later that I tried, in my book, The S.S. Glory, to give an account of life on these old cattle boats that brought meat on the hoof instead of in refrigeration across the Atlantic; but immediately on my arrival in Scotland I wrote a series of sketches dealing with those youthful stravaigings and it seemed that the editor (of the Glasgow Weekly Herald) who accepted them was, unaware, to cancel what my father had set agoing—for the publication of these sketches led to the offer of a job on the staff of a newspaper. So I remained in Scotland instead of returning to the West, and journalism carried me from Glasgow to Edinburgh, to Dundee, to London. That hegira of my teens was of the past, almost as dream-like as my hobbledehoy flights to the Blackfoot country of the Mearns Moors.

A few years later I was offered a roving commission through Western Canada—that I had not even expected to see again. Of course I went, and what changes I found! Wheat was ousting cattle. The great lone land had become the great loan land with real estate men more in evidence than Hudson's Bay Company factors. The buffalo-wallows (those dimples in the prairies in which once the buffalo took their mud-baths) were ploughed under. The buffalo had gone before my first visit; the wallows were gone on my second. But there was still romance in reality there for me. And still, from lieutenant-governors in the land to brakesmen on the trains rolling through it, name after name was of the heather—such as Bruce and Wallace.

I have met visitors to that region who complain that it has "no history," but I had read some of its history, had read it in the old Mitchell Library in Glasgow, and in the British Museum in London. In the Public Library of a changed Calgary I read more on that return. Human history, I grant, does not go back there so far as in the Old Country, but in relatively brief time it is packed and rich, and to a Scot especially so. The Douglas firs were named after a young gardener of Perth who went to Kew Gardens and there was asked to go West to make a collection of the flora. From old Fort Colville in Washington (that used to be Astoria) to the middle of British Columbia (that used to be New Caledonia) he wandered alone with his vasculum, a buffalo-robe for bed. Fraser River, Mackenzie River lapsing north, received their names from Scots explorers paddling their canoes, cutting their trails, into unknown land. Place-names there, instead of mossy walls, hint of history—and that history continued to fascinate me. My hobby was the collecting of volumes on it and on what the booksellers' catalogues style Amerindiana.

After the war, free again, much as when I used to tramp out to the Mearns Moors, I returned to the West. I went to a country fair in Saskatchewan where kilted pipers opened the proceedings; attended a Hogmanay celebration in Alberta at which fiddlers played for us strathspeys and reels, schottische and petronella; was asked, the year after that, to "say a few words" at a St. Andrew's dinner, and wished I had some Gaelic, for the Gaelic speech was round me, though those who spoke it had never seen Scotland—sons and daughters, born in Canada, of those cast out during the Clearances.

"What do they know of England who only England know?" Kipling once asked. Scotland, thought I, is a kingdom of the mind. I thought so again, a year or two later, at a Highland gathering at Banff—the one in Alberta, not in Scotland. When Robert Burnett gave us his rendering of the ballad Edward, and Jeanne Dusseau and Mary Stuart sang (although it was Bow River, not Deveron, that rippled outside the windows in the moonlight), Scotland was with us.

I went to a Burns' nicht gathering. Pipers piped in the haggis. I talked with old men who remembered the days of the buffalo, who remembered the Red River cart brigades and how the screaming of their wheels sounded over the horizons before they appeared in the still immensity, elderly men who recalled also how the Hudson's Bay Company factors donned the kilt—the garb of old Gaul, jabot, ruffles, and all—on days of celebration in the heart of the wilderness.

What a cavalcade! What a pageant! Alexander Ross with his Okanagan Indian wife, who became quite the grande dame when they retired at Fort Garry; Macaulay at Jasper House with his library; Mackay at Fort Ellice; Colin Fraser at St. Ann's; William MacTavish, governor of Assiniboia; Colonel MacLeod, coming West with the Red-Coats to save the aborigines from the whisky peddlers and naming his fort Calgarry, later to be called Calgary, after his birthplace; an engineer of the name of Fleming surveying the railway route; Scots foremen from Bruce County and Glengarry, Ontario, bossing the track-layers.

But I have wandered far from that happy fog-enfolded and entranced evening in Glasgow when my father brought home for me, from the Athenæum Library, Catlin's North American Indians and McLean's book.