It is Wednesday night, but as recently as Sunday the north-east gales were roaring down from the Hudson’s Bay, cutting through an atmosphere for which zero is a moderate term. The great prairie provinces were shut in a silence of speechless snows, of voiceless ice; the long, long winter refused to be dethroned. But on Monday morning one awakened with the odd desire to tear the double windows from their frames, and get a breath of the great outside. Something unseen, unanticipated, had happened through the night hours.
You hasten out of bed, amazed that your teeth do not chatter together, as they have done for the last four months while you have scrambled through a hurried sponge in harsh alkali water. As you descend the stair you notice that the front door stands open, and for the first time in many weeks you dare to pass through it without innumerable clumsy wraps. Once outside, your arms instinctively outstretch themselves towards the further golden west. A warm, velvety, blowing world envelopes you. You cry out in a delirium of relief, grasping it by the armful, the palmful; for it is a tangible thing that you clutch with hungry fingers—clutch and keep, to absorb through every pore, inhale through every valve—it is the blessed, blessed chinook wind. Before its exquisite softness, the unrelenting winter capitulates within an hour. Its ermine garments melt to nothingness, its icy fortresses crumble and fade, its dynasty is doomed, and Spring, the Conqueror, is marching up the south-western trails with her flower-bugles blowing, and the music of a thousand wings heralding her approach.
On Monday day vanished between two blazing sun-dogs. Upright they stood in the west—two brilliant bars of green, bordered with orange, and flanked with crimson—while the yellow sun dropped down between them, and the eastern horizon lay, belted with that translucid blue, crested with that inimitable rose that is never seen except in the Prairie Provinces. Then night crept over the plains.
The harsh nip of her erstwhile freezing teeth has given place to the soft pressure of her chinook-chastened lips; she slips about silently, kissing this little snowy hummock, caressing that little icebound slough, and the far horizon showing ridges of warm russet prairie earth, the sloughs circled with rims of white alkali in place of snow and ice, the trails, black and bare, wandering into the distant sky-line.
“And the dawn comes up like thunder.” Was Kipling writing of the spring in Saskatchewan? For that is the way it arrives, sailing in on the wings of the chinook wind as a beautiful sea-bird sails home at sunset. Here no dreary rainy season mars the incoming of April. There are no days of inertia, or lassitude. Spring bursts upon you like a storm, and its exhilaration sweeps you into the mad beauty of its career down the prairies, until you feel yourself one with the awakening world, and realize that not only these countless leagues of level lands have been in repose for many moons, but that you too have been asleep.
And as mid-day climbs into the zenith, spring puts its seal on the world about you, its royal hallmark of permanency—the prairie mirage—that crystal wonder, which hedges you in on all sides with a loveliness no eastern eye will ever behold in the Land of the Morning. A calm, still lake lies between you and this horizon. It is violet-tinted, and limped as a child’s eyes. About its borders crowd tall straight trees, whose tops melt into the skies far overhead. You may travel through numberless hours over hopeless miles, but the lake lies ever before you—you will never reach its shores. It is the spring land of the vision—unreal, unattainable, but none of the less lovely for its being always just beyond us.
And this golden morning, just three days after the first sweep of the chinook wind, we found beautiful little coral coloured flowers looking up at us from the open prairie, and a little further on some starry, purple blossoms down near an oozing muskeg. Later on these will be replaced by the rarely delicate “prairie orchid,” whose mauve pitcher will be dotted with brown velvet disks, its perfumeless lip lined with golden satin, and its vandyked collar dyed in green and cloudy grey. Near by it the holy-willow will exhale its exquisite fragrance, and beyond the Saskatoon berries will form into tiny clusters, awaiting the ripening suns of summer. Out on the banks of the South Saskatchewan the flat blades of cactus are flattening their winter-wrinkled sides; their snow-bleached thorns are resuming a robust brownness. In a few weeks yellow and salmon coloured flowers will envelope these forbidding growths, and within a stone’s throw of them will arise a tent-like field of mushrooms, pearly and pink as a shell.
Within the bubble of the foothills the wild crocus is already showing its purple buds within a filigree cobweb of green, and up in the Rockies the clustering masses of wild syringa bushes are drawing their sap into the furthermost tips of their pent-up branches. They are preparing for the glory of the late springtime, when their wealth of flower and fragrance will almost brush the windows of the great transcontinental trains. The little prairie blossoms come earlier than mountain glories, perhaps because the winter has driven us with such untempered lashes that we need the solace of the spring more sorely. The shackman is already unbanking the sods from about the foundations of his little homestead, for ploughing will begin next week, and his time may not be spent making household improvements; his corner of the world’s granary must be supplied. The work hour of his year has arrived, and with it his bunch of shaggy horses that have wintered along the poplar bluff, toughening their hides to the open prairie, and growing a two-inch coat of hair that must now be curried out if they are to be in shape at harvest time.
But to one man only does the chinook wind come as a death knell. It is he, in the far north, who is driving a dog-train into one of the many Hudson’s Bay posts. At the first hint of brown earth through the snow, he urges on his lean pack of huskies, driving them for every ounce of speed they possess. His pack sled is laden with the richest furs of the north, and the day the show goes hope of reaching “the post” goes also. To him the brilliancy of the sun-dogs, the warmth of the chinook wind are as things accursed. He drives, coaxes, curses, lashes, and pets his huskies. He stops for but a fraction of the specified time for food and sleep; his animals grow lean, gaunt, snappy, and uncertain-tempered. The trail grows soggy, the sun warmer, the miles longer, until at last the dogs, bleating and exhausted, pull a dead weight of a pack over bare ground into the “H.B.C.” and a well nigh beaten driver explains to the chief factor that “The cursed chinook wind caught me.”
But to-night just after sundown, the chinook wind caught something else, caught it in its zephyrous arms and swept it far above us, overhead; it is the first band of wild geese winging into the north, the unfailing promise of our prairie spring.