uing it for
a month. Journalists, and important people with stamped passes, go on
private cars, but the advantage of mediocrity is that you can travel in
a caboose and need not view the scenery as a commercial commodity.
When I can think of what to say, I will write a story called "The
Romance of a Railway Van." Its setting will be in the hills. The
heroine will be a southern girl of probably twenty summers (with a
corresponding number of winters). She shall be no fine die-away lady,
but middling strong and built to go out in all weather. Each move of
the romance will be made by invisible kelpies, ogres and dryads, who
will say "Ha! Ha!" and "Ho! Ho!" and who will clap their hands when
the wicked flourish, or valour wins against the odds. But I never
could think this story out, so I pass it on to you.

At the McLeod River the grades begin to spy into the mountains. These
mountains have all the bewilderment of an elusive dream, and in the
thin northern air seem nearer than they really are. There is a
come-hither look about them. It is well, at first, to thus see from a
distance, for to stand against a mountain is to lose one's sense of
proportion and symmetry.

At Prairie Creek the road runs high up on a ridge to the south of the
Athabaska Valley, so that it looks like a ribbon of steel basted on to
the hills. The Athabaska River is wide and swift here, and has what
the Japanese call the language of line. The Cree Indians call it the
_Mistahay Shakow Seepee_, meaning thereby the great river of the woods.
A semi-spectral mist rises off its waters, as if it were an incense to
the mighty spirit, Manitou.

It would be well if I, one of the first of the tourists who, world
without end, will travel through these hills, could tell how they
impress me, but I am crushed into a wordless incompetency. I cannot
speak the language of this land nor interpret its spirit. These hills
of White Alberta have something to say, but they will not say it. It
must be true what the essayist wrote, that you cannot domesticate
mountains.

There appears to be no life here, nor any form of sentience, but when
it is dark, the grizzly bear, the lynx, the moose, and other
night-things, will move out for purposes of life or death.

Alexander Mackenzie, who entered these defiles one hundred and
twenty-five years ago, wrote down that the Atnah Indians believed all
this land was made by a mighty bird whose eyes were fire, the noise of