Part 8
The first school I attended was a two room wooden shack, but imagine my shock on the very first day, following the other boys out of the classroom at recess into a shed, to see a boy of about my own age take out a revolver – I learned afterwards that it was a Colt 32! - and start shooting with live bullets at a block of wood. Scared stiff, I quietly slipped away out of the shed.
We had great fun in winter and from the beginning I entered into it with enthusiasm – skating, tobogganing, sleigh riding. In those days, Calgary was a city that lay in a great bowl, surrounded by hills and we tobogganed down the hills. Once I was spilled off a toboggan and run over but suffered only a little bruising which, out of sheer bravado, I ignored. On my visit to Canada in Centennial Year 56 years later, I found the hills had all disappeared, town planning had streamlined the landscape.
I remember with excited impatience, waiting up through a long night during that first winter to see Sir Wilfred Laurier, the Liberal ex-Prime Minister, who arrived in a snowstorm, hours late, his train having been held up by snow drifts. He had come to address a series of electioneering meetings, being conducted from one hall to another where the meetings had been arranged to take place. I do not remember after all these years, which particular hall I waited in, but I have a perfect memory of all the Calgary citizens and old timers giving the veteran statesman an upstanding welcome as his tall, straight figure strode up the aisle, clad in a long fur coat that nearly reached the floor.
I thought of this incident when attending a conference at the Liberal Club in London, England, between the wars as a prospective candidate for parliament. After the war, I was asked to choose a constituency to fight as a Liberal candidate at the next election, but rightly or wrongly, I decided against this.
We soon moved out of the suburb onto the Alberta prairie and I revelled in the open free life, roaming where I would. Our little four roomed wooden house, built by father and elder brothers, was on the Edmonton Trail, and I had a three mile walk each day down the Trail to and from school.
Sometimes I slightly varied the direction and went through a little valley, but one day I was warned that a lynx had been seen in the vicinity, undoubtedly having come in from the Rocky Mountains, a distance of about sixty miles, for food. Returning home through the valley one day, I saw the vicious animal slinking stealthily through some bushes in my direction. I raced for my life and was relieved to see a man coming towards me. I called out “There’s a lynx coming”. “yes” he said, “I’ve come to get him before he gets you”, and then I noticed the gun he was carrying. A moment later I heard a shot and turned to see the man walking up to the dead animal.
The next day I went into Calgary to see the lynx exhibited in a shop window on Eighth Avenue. I was gazing at the dead animal through the shop window, transfixed by the memory of the previous day, when a man standing next to me said “How would you like to meet that on the prairie without a gun?” I turned slowly and looked up at the man, then said “That’s just what I did”. The man looked at me incredulously, then exclaimed, “Bless me, it’s the boy himself!” I recognised the man who shot the lynx.
Father decided it was necessary to have a small rifle in the house, mainly in case of visits from wild animals, particularly coyotes, as when driven out of the wild by hunger, these wolf-like animals could be dangerous. So we had a .22 rifle which could fire either bullets or BB pellets. Apart from its use as protection in case of need, we used it to shoot prairie chicken and wild duck in flight on the rare occasion we had the opportunity.
I recall how afraid we all were of meeting the outlaw killer who, having murdered several people, was being hunted by the Mounties and had made his way to the outskirts of Calgary, hiding in the basement of an empty bungalow, north of Crescent Heights. He was traced and the bungalow was surrounded by armed Mounties. A staircase led down to the basement, the entrance being through a trap door, which was the only way down to the killer. One of the Mounties volunteered to open it and, if the outlaw would not come out, he would go downstairs and make the arrest.
It was thrilling just to read in the Calgary Daily Herald how the Mountie pulled open the trap door and challenged the murderer to come out and give himself up. And I found it even more thrilling to read that the outlaw killer proved game enough to do just that. For when afterwards the Mounties went down to investigate, they found enough food and drink to keep the man alive for many weeks and sufficient ammunition to withstand a siege for a very long time.
We were more afraid of prairie fires than of wild animals, for the great heat of the summer sun, shining through a piece of glass on the dry grass prairie, often quickly started a fire and, once started, it spread with amazing speed. We used to wet sacks to put out the fires, and to protect the house, we dug a wide trench around the outside.
The thing I most liked doing was just wandering with my younger brother, Cecil, over the prairie, breathing its clean, fresh air and pretending to be cowboys and Indians. The favourite place we made for was a gully about a mile away, where we found skeletons of buffaloes, our pleasure being greatly enhanced by our imagination, which took us back into the days – not so long before, when these great animals with their massive, majestic heads, roamed the prairie as free as the Indians did before the white man came.
