Not that I imagined it would be a very exciting experience.
A moose, from what I’d seen in photographs, was simply a big, ungainly type of deer. So ugly, with its football nose, as to look like a caricature. So plentiful, from what I’d read, that it populated the country like cattle. Only the fact that 83
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The Coming of Saska we hadn’t seen one made the sighting of it important...
until the memorable day when we did.
We had covered a lot of ground by this time. Been into British Columbia and out again. Crossed the Great Divide and the Kicking Horse River and walked, in the wake of history, the stretch of railway track that sweeps like a sleigh-run down the rocky slopes of the Big Hill. So often we’d sung ‘The run-away train ran down the hill and she blew, she blew,’ without for a moment realising that it was about a real train on a mountainside in British Columbia and that one day we would stand on the track where it happened and see the overturned engine below. One of the engines, anyway. Apparently it had happened quite often.
Back in the 1880s, when the Canadian Pacific Railway was being laid across Canada, the engineers discovered lead zinc in the rock in the Kicking Horse Pass. Lead zinc, used in the manufacture of brass, was a very valuable commodity and a big mining camp sprang up there.
Together with the railwaymen’s camp it became one of the frontier communities one reads of – reckless, tough, a world completely without women, whose occupants spent their pay on drink and gambling.
Life was so cheap they gambled even on that. Whether the man who’d quit last week had set off the last lot of dynamite he’d put in before he finished. Whether the one succeeding him today was likely to hammer a spike straight into it if he hadn’t. Whether a driver bringing a train down the hill could stop it if it ran away. And, the favourite wager among the drivers themselves, how far they could get up the hill without refuelling.
Superseded now by a spiral tunnel cut inside the mountain, the Big Hill was one of the most dangerous 84
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stretches of track in the West. It was so steep there were three run-offs from the main track for the driver to use in an emergency. If the train came down too fast and his single hand-brake wouldn’t hold it, he attempted to turn the train on to one of the run-offs, the points to which were always kept open with a man on duty to watch them.
If the man judged the train was under control he closed the points and it went down the hill. If not, he left them open and the driver swerved off along a run-off. If the train was going really fast the run-off wasn’t much help in stopping it – the engine just rocked along it and derailed itself en route. But, as a local historian explained to us, ‘It kept ’em from muckin’ up the main track.’
He it was who showed us the rusted engine, still with its tall nineties funnel and the remains of its wooden cowcatcher, among the weeds at the bottom of the bank down which it had plunged. He it was who showed us the huge rock further back... split completely in two where yet another runaway engine had shot off the track and hit it, the scorch marks and oil stains still visible. He it was, too, who told us the story which never got into song, of the driver who took his engine up the hill in the most daring wager of them all.
Betting he would get to the top without stopping –
nobody had ever made it more than half-way up – he got up steam, screwed the escape valves down tightly... normally, the higher the steam-head rose the further one opened them up for safety... took another bet or two and set the engine at the hill.
‘How far did he get?’ I asked. ‘Further than he expected,’
was the reply. ‘Halfway up, the whole damned thing blew up. All they found was his gold watch, and that was three miles away.’
85
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The Coming of Saska This of course was before there were any passenger trains through the Rockies – back in the days when the line was being laid and these were the narrow-gauge engines they used in its construction. Even so, later there were several mining train accidents on the Big Hill and in 1905
they started the spiral tunnel through the mountain. It was finished in 1910 and it takes a train four minutes to traverse it, whistling an eerie warning as it goes. One of the most nostalgic sounds of Western Canada is of a train whistling its way through the Kicking Horse Pass. Charles remembers it still from when he was six years old, going from New Brunswick to visit his aunt in Vancouver.
We tape-recorded the whistle, found ourselves a rock-boring by way of a memento – a plug of polished limestone, like a stick of sea-side rock in marble, drilled out by miners making holes to put the dynamite in... and, our heads filled with thoughts of runaway trains, the poems of Robert Service and in Charles’s case the days when he was six, came back over the Kicking Horse River (so called because the man who named it was kicked into it by his horse), into Alberta, and almost immediately met up with a moose.
Just like that. ‘Always stop if you see a line of cars pulled up on the roadside ahead of you,’ a naturalist had told us back in Jasper. ‘It means somebody has seen something interesting.’
So when we saw three cars halted on the shoulder of the road to Banff, Charles slowed the camper and, while he was manoeuvring it into a safe position (it not being our vehicle he was very careful always where he parked it), I was out, armed with the camera, tiptoeing at top speed into the trees. I don’t know what I expected to see. Certainly not a bear – people would have been in their cars and all the 86
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cars were empty. A deer perhaps? A mother with a pair of spotted fawns? Out on the range one would never get near them, but they weren’t nearly so nervous in the parks.
Neither was the huge buck moose who, as I stepped round my second fir tree in, stood there in the clearing before me. Ugly indeed! Sleek, shining black, a good seventeen hands high and with hindquarters as slender as a racehorse, a moose is absolutely beautiful! Outside the park, a moose would have fled at once. Inside it too, for the most part.
But this one, obviously intelligent enough to have realised that in this place people only looked at him, stayed where he was and went on feeding.
He let me photograph him, taking no notice of the camera’s click; moving unconcernedly, like the monarch he was, through the grass. Charles, coming up behind me having safely parked the camper, whispered ‘For Pete’s sake what are you doing this close! You know you’ve been told they’re dangerous!’ And then, looking at the moose, posed now like a painting by Landseer – ‘Quick! We must have one like that! Let me have the camera!’
That was all right. So, as far as the moose was concerned, were the three or four other people who were now approaching cautiously through the trees, cameras raised to eye-level. We had been lucky. Stopping where Charles had done, I’d cut straight down through the trees and come upon the moose while the others were still creeping in at an angle.
Very lucky, because out in front of the still photographers came crouching a little fat man with a movie camera and when the moose heard that contraption whirring towards him, he moved away with leisurely dignity.
The little fat man went after him. The moose moved off again. The little fat man followed up, whirring ecstatically 87
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The Coming of Saska at about ten feet distant. ‘Lucky that’s a tame moose,’ said one of the more cautious ordinary photographers. ‘Boy, would Fatso have to run!’