Otherwise Read Online Free Page B

”rumble seat” in rear.
    The canvas hood was seldom used. Angus preferred driving with the wind in his hair and the sun (or, as the case might be, the rain) in his eyes. Since he was indisput ably the captain, his passengers had no choice but to follow suit. Once, when Helen remonstrated with him, he told her flatly:
    ”We’d all be far healthier if we still travelled under sail. We can’t always do that now, more’s the pity, but
no
, I will
not
put up the top!”
    When, in April of 1937, he celebrated his new job by buying a spiffy new Dodge, he again chose a convertible with a folding roof and no provision for sheltering the occupants of the rear seat.
    Mutt and I generally occupied the rumble seat but for the journey back to Ontario we had to share it with Annie, an uninhibited nineteen-year-old farm girl who had come to Saskatoon looking for a job and found one as the Mowat family’s housemaid.
    One vibrant mid-June morning we departed from Saskatoon towing our homemade caravan. Angus and Helen had the car’s front seat to themselves, which left the rest of us to squeeze into the rumble. I tried to make Mutt sit between Annie and me but he insisted on occupying the outer edge of the seat where he could balance himself with his forepaws on a back fender while thrusting his head far out into the slipstream. Perhaps he felt he was doing me a favour by forcing Annie and me into one another’s laps, but I was intimidated by her, and especially by her forthright approach to sex, for I was still very much a virgin, and a somewhat priggish one to boot. Although Annie did her best to make a man out of me during the long journey east, I was unable to cooperate because I was terrified my parents would twig to what was going on in the rumble seat.
    Our first day’s travel ended abruptly about a hundred miles south of Saskatoon when both of the caravan’s wooden-spoked wheels disintegrated, dropping it onto the gravel road as heavily as if it had been felled by a bullet through its heart.
    Angus unhitched the Dodge and drove back to Saskatoon for a new set of wheels, leaving the rest of us to amuse ourselves watching legions of gophers at play in the rippling sea of newly sprouted wheat surrounding us.
    There was little evidence of human life except for a grain elevator looming on the distant horizon. Usually two or three of those stark wooden structures presided over a one-room railway station, a shabby false-front café, a garage-cum-blacksmith’s shop, a general store, a farm implement agent, and a few unpainted, weather-worn wooden houses that together formed one of the forlorn little hamlets scattered disconsolately across the immensity of the Great Plains.
    Next day Angus returned with new wheels, and we set off again. Since no Trans-Canada Highway then existed we had to make a huge semicirclular sweep through the northern tier of the United States, swinging back into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie. The roads were mostly gravel-or dirt-surfaced so we seldom managed to cover even as much as a hundred miles a day. Each evening we would camp, preferably beside a lake or river. Angus and I would erect a bell tent for Annie and Mutt. Sometimes the two women cooked supper on the caravan’s kerosene stove; more often they did so over an open fire.
    Since no hordes of summer trippers clogged roads and campsites in those times, we seldom had human neighbours. We did, however, encounter many of the Others. Deer, black bears, skunks, and foxes checked out our camps, as did innumerable birds, squirrels, gophers, and rabbits. Once an inquisitive coyote snuffled his way through the door flap of the tent and gave Annie ”conniptions,” until he was chased off by Mutt.
    Unable to resist the lure of the road least travelled, Angus was forever taking shortcuts. These sometimes stranded us miles from anywhere until a friendly farmer with a team of Percherons or, rarely, a tractor might come along to haul us out of a ditch or a pothole