CHIEF To ride a train was beyond anything I had experienced. Forget about horses and wagons on dirt roads, or a slow car or jerky bus grinding over gravel, lurching around holes and mud; this amazement of leaning back in a cushioned seat beside an immense window while the world whirled past without so much as a bump or twitch, you could choose it coming at you or going away, fast as lightning, always the shoulder of the railroad embankment at the lip of the window and the hard clickity-click of steel coming faster and then, suddenly! you flew off a cliff, there was no earth under you, the train ran out on air—the North Saskatchewan, that must be it!—far below the thick and braided river, wide water, and in a flash poplars there bristling like weeds and wuhh! cliffs leaped up into solid earth under you again and the steel sound ran deeper, carrying you faster—all this just leaving the river hills and bush of North Battleford. Vancouver beyond mountains by the ocean would be—your eyes were too full to imagine.
