Free Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson Page A

men working in the old construction days. Couldn’t a been folks from real places like Lytton or Ashcroft because they’d a been taken back there for burial.” He said “burr-yal.” “Kinda lonely, but kinda nice there.”
    Yes, thought Maggie, it was lonely but it was nice there. The picket fence and the crosses would be covered by snow in the winter. Then the spring sunshine beating on the hillside would melt the snow, and the snow would run off, and the crosses would stand revealed again. And in the spring the Canada geese would pass in their arrows of flight, honking, honking, high over the silent hillside. Later in the season, when the big white moon was full, coyotes would sing among the hills at night, on and on in the moonlight, stopping, and then all beginning again together. Spring flowers would come – a few – in the coarse grass. Then, in the heat of the summer, bright small snakes and beetles would slip through the grasses, and the crickets would dryly sing. Then the sumac would turnscarlet, and the skeins of wild geese would return in their swift pointed arrows of flight to the south, passing high overhead between the great hills. Their musical cry would drop down into the valley lying in silence. Then would come the snow, and the three wooden crosses would be covered again. It was indeed very nice there.
    Suddenly Maggie saw three or four bluebirds, as blue as forget-me-nots in flight. They flew with dipping flight and were out of view. “Oh,” she said, “did you see that?”
    “Bluebirds?” said the man. “They sure are pretty.” The hills fled past.
    Soon the man beside her spoke again. “You wouldn’t think,” he said, diffidently, “that once there was camels treading them mountain sides.”
    “Camels
!” exclaimed Maggie. “Not
camels
!”
    “My grandfather seen em. He could certify. Smelt em too.”
    “
Where
did the camels come from? What for?”
    “My grandfather never heard where they got the camels. But they figured they’d use em for transport to the gold mines. And they did, for a bit. But them rocks played old nick with the camels’ feet and they smelt so high they stampeded the horses and mules every which way. My grandfather said it was fierce. I heard there was one stayed up somewheres near Cache Creek but I never seen it myself. Funny isn’t it when you come to think.” And it was funny.
    Maggie and her neighbor lapsed into silence. Then “Was that sagebrush?” she asked.
    “Didn’t see it. Mighta been. The sage begins round about here. You’ll see plenty that before you get to Kamloops.”
    Soon the sage began in good earnest, and Maggie saw that the aspect of British Columbia had changed. They wereleaving the mountains. Hills and great rocky eminences lay back of the sagebrush. Here and there was an Indian rancheree.
    Maggie opened a map upon her knee. What will it mean, all this country? Flowing, melting, rising, obliterating – will it always be the same … rocks always bare, slopes always bare except for these monumental trees, sagebrush country potential but almost empty, here, except for the sage and the wind flowing through the sage. The very strange beauty of this country through which she passed disturbed Maggie, and projected her vision where her feet could not follow, northward – never southward – but north beyond the Bonaparte, and beyond the Nechako and the Fraser, on and on until she should reach the Nation River and the Parsnip River and the Peace River, the Turnagain and the Liard, and north again to the endless space west of the Mackenzie River, to the Arctic Ocean. What a land. What power these rivers were already yielding, far beyond her sight. Even a map of this country – lines arranged in an arbitrary way on a long rectangular piece of paper – stirs the imagination beyond imagination, she thought, looking at the map, as other lines differently arranged in relation to each other have not the power to stir. Each name on the map