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Title: Over Prairie Trails
Author: Frederick Philip Grove
Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6111]

[This file was first posted on November 10, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS ***

5 Wind and Waves
6 A Call for Speed
7 Skies and Scares

A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching
school--kept me during the week in a small country town
in the centre of one of the prairie provinces while my
family--wife and little daughter--lived in the southern
fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very
far from the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like
the plucky little woman she is--in order to round off my
far-from-imperial income had made up her mind to look
after a rural school that boasted of something like a
residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went "home"
on Fridays, after school was over, to return to my town
on Sunday evening--covering thus, while the season was
clement and allowed straight cross-country driving, coming
and going, a distance of sixty-eight miles. Beginning
with the second week of January this distance was raised
to ninety miles because, as my more patient readers will
see, the straight cross-country roads became impassable
through snow.

These drives. the fastest of which was made in somewhat
over four hours and the longest of which took me nearly
eleven--the rest of them averaging pretty well up between
the two extremes--soon became what made my life worth
living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have lived
for several years "on the tramp"--I love Nature more than
Man--I take to horses--horses take to me--so how could
it have been otherwise? Add to this that for various
reasons my work just then was not of the most pleasant
kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the
school board was sluggish and unprogressive, there was
friction in the staff--and who can wonder that on Fridays,
at four o'clock, a real holiday started for me: two days
ahead with wife and child, and going and coming--the drive.

I made thirty-six of these trips: seventy-two drives in
all. I think I could still rehearse every smallest incident
of every single one of them. With all their weirdness,
with all their sometimes dangerous adventure--most of
them were made at night, and with hardly ever any regard
being paid to the weather or to the state of the roads--
they stand out in the vast array of memorable trifles
that constitute the story of my life as among the most
memorable ones. Seven drives seem, as it were, lifted
above the mass of others as worthy to be described in

some detail--as not too trivial to detain for an hour or
so a patient reader's kind attention. Not that the others
lack in interest for myself; but there is little in them
of that mildly dramatic, stirring quality which might
perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard beyond
my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the
seven is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of
going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled
my senses. Or maybe, since I was returning over the same
road after an interval of only two days, I had exhausted
on the way north whatever there was of noticeable
impressions to be garnered. Or again, since I was coming
from "home," from the company of those for whom I lived
and breathed, it might just be that all my thoughts flew
back with such an intensity that there was no vitality
left for the perception of the things immediately around me.

At ten minutes past four, of an evening late in September,
I sat in the buggy and swung out of the livery stable
that boarded my horse. Peter, the horse, was a chunky
bay, not too large, nor too small; and I had stumbled on
to him through none of my sagacity. To tell the plain
truth, I wanted to get home, I had to have a horse that
could stand the trip, no other likely looking horse was
offered, this one was--on a trial drive he looked as if
he might do, and so I bought him--no, not quite--I arranged
with the owner that I should make one complete trip with
him and pay a fee of five dollars in case I did not keep
him. As the sequence showed, I could not have found a
better horse for the work in hand.

I turned on to the road leading north, crossed the bridge,
and was between the fields. I looked at my watch and
began to time myself. The moon was new and stood high in
the western sky; the sun was sinking on the downward
stretch. It was a pleasant, warm fall day, and it promised
an evening such as I had wished for on my first drive
out. Not a cloud showed anywhere. I did not urge the
horse; he made the first mile in seven, and a half minutes,
and I counted that good enough.

Then came the turn to the west; this new road was a
correction line, and I had to follow it for half a mile.
There was no farmhouse on this short bend. Then north
for five miles. The road was as level as a table top--a
good, smooth, hard-beaten, age-mellowed prairie-grade.
The land to east and west was also level; binders were
going and whirring their harvest song. Nobody could have
felt more contented than I did. There were two clusters
of buildings--substantial buildings--set far back from
the road, one east, the other one west, both clusters
huddled homelike and sheltered in bluffs of planted