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
