A LETTER FROM THE ETHNOLOGY division of the Canadian Geological Survey, dated summer, 1907, asking if Miss Stuart would like to participate in field work among the Thompson, Okanagan and Shuswap tribes. Her photographic work has been recommended by Dr. Franz Boas in New York, and Dr. Edward Sapir has spoken highly of her data-collecting ability and mentions that her growing knowledge of the Thompson language will be of considerable value. The letter assures her that her fiancé will also be doing some work in the Spences Bridge area and can provide assistance if necessary.

The arrangements had been made. Margaret would travel to Spences Bridge with her father during the last week of November. From there she would take the train to Vancouver, then to Seattle, accompanied by relatives of Mr. Clemes in Spences Bridge who were returning home to San Francisco. Before leaving her, the relations would help her to board a transcontinental train that would take her to Chicago, then New York. Her concerns about the cost of such a trip had been dismissed by her father.

“When I inherited my father’s money, there was some left over after I’d paid off the ranch and purchased more cattle and horses. I invested it on the advice of my banker in Kamloops, and it has done reasonably well. Money must not be a factor in your decision. And it must be your decision, finally, to make. There are not many opportunities in this valley for a young woman. Nursing, perhaps, if you were interested in that. The Royal Inland Hospital has recently begun to train nurses.”

“No, Father, not nursing. I did think of teaching for a while, but I am really hopeful that I can do something useful with photography. Nicholas has said there will be a need for well-trained people to take accurate photographs for anthropology research. And perhaps I will even do commercial work, if I can find jobs. Miss Spencer has certainly made a name for herself in Kamloops and earns a good living doing something she loves.”

William took his daughter’s hand in his own and gave it an encouraging squeeze. “My dear, I think you will do exactly what you intend to. I am only sorry to see you leave us. Parents do not anticipate the going away of their children, and when the time comes, we feel bewildered. The house will not be the same, and I’ll miss your company around the ranch.”

“It won’t be forever, Father. I’ll be home in time to help take the cattle to the spring range, I’m sure.”

What was unspoken between them was the possibility that she might not come back, or at least not as she had left — an unmarried girl, an older sister living among her family. Or that she would return altered by her experience of New York and its institutions of higher learning, its concert halls, museums and art galleries, into someone unknown to them, remote.

Nicholas returned to his home by train in mid-October, in time to travel through changing landscapes of shorn fields, trees losing their red and golden leaves to the air, expanses of tallgrass prairie white with frost near Fargo, North Dakota. He had written almost daily, long letters filled with news of his courses, lectures he’d attended, an exhibit he’d seen of the work of a group of photographers calling themselves the Photo-Secession Society, and he sent some copies of the magazine Camera Work, edited by Alfred Stieglitz and featuring the work of individual photographers — Stieglitz himself, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence H. White — so Margaret could share his pleasure. Margaret pored over the magazines, wondering how the effects in particular photographs had been achieved. She loved the orchard photographs of White and the portraits of Kasebier with their simple, evocative arrangements of children and women. One issue of Camera Work from earlier that year had sixteen photographs by a man called Steichen, portraits perfectly composed, each detail brilliant and singular. She loved the look of the magazine itself, its green cover with artistic lettering, and sometimes a reproduction on fine Japanese paper that you could remove and frame if you wished.

One letter spoke of an opera Nicholas had attended, Dido and Aeneas, by Henry Purcell. “My French grandmother loves this opera, and I was so pleased to be able to write to tell her I’d finally seen it. It was wonderful. There’s a very moving final aria after Dido has said goodbye to Aeneas. She is about to die and sings,

When I am laid in earth,

May my wrongs create

No trouble in thy breast;

Remember me, but ah!

Forget my fate.

I think everyone in the concert hall was weeping at that point, including me. Everything I see and hear speaks to me of you. I have written to your grandmother asking if she would make a basket for my father, one of the flat-backed ones that I always thought would make a good fishing creel. Will you bring it with you if she finishes it in time?”

Nicholas’ mother had written a long friendly letter to the Stuarts. “We are so looking forward to having your daughter with us as long as it suits her heart. Please do not worry about her in our home. We already love her and will cherish her as her maman and papa do. We have been preparing a room, les petites sisters of Nicholas and I, making it pretty for the young lady to dream in. Our Nicholas is not the same young man who left us in the spring. He talks of horses and dried fish, telling us we would love both. Ah, la vie est belle when you are young, do you agree?”

The cattle drive went smoothly that year. After sorting, cutting out, and bringing the bred cows and yearling heifers down to overwinter at Culloden, the steers were taken to Kamloops over the Brigade Lake trail. Margaret rode the roan gelding and worked as hard as any of the hands. No stock wandered off to be given up as lost, none drowned, none ate the last blossoms of larkspur or milk vetch, and so they rode into Kamloops on the third morning with six hundred head of grass-fed steer to sell to the buyer, Pat Burns, who met them at the railyard corrals. Mr. Burns always sought out the Cottonwood beef for its consistent high quality and paid well — three and a half cents a pound that year for steers.

After the cowboys had loaded the cattle into the boxcars to be taken to Vancouver, they went to the nearest drinking establishment with the bonus William Stuart had paid them when he received his money. They would leave the next morning for the ranch, so they wanted to take advantage of their night on the town. Margaret and William had rooms at the Grand Pacific Hotel and planned to stay two nights in Kamloops, going back by stage with Angus Nelson after purchasing provisions for the ranch as well as the clothing Margaret needed to take with her to New York. She had made a list after talking to Mrs. Drake, a Nicola Lake resident who often spent her winters in Vancouver and who kindly gave her advice on what one wore in such surroundings and to the events Nicholas had mentioned they would attend — concerts, lectures, classes at the university. The first afternoon at the Grand Pacific, Margaret did nothing but bathe in the big tub, soaking off the dust of the trail, and then napped in the bed in the same room she had slept in the night of the Albani concert. (I know she listened to the creak of timbers beyond the dark ceilings as the building adjusted its weight, the peach-skin softness of the sheets on her shoulders . . .) So much had happened since then, too much to fathom as events remembered in clean singularity. Was she the same girl who had dressed in such excitement for the Opera House, who had spoken with the great singer, feeling shy as a meadowlark, and who had wondered what her future held as she rode the new mare along the sleeping streets of Kamloops at first light? The tree outside the window of her room, so shady and green in May, had shed its leaves but for a few which hung, withered and dry, in the autumn air.

While her father bought flour and supplies for mending harnesses, foot trimmers for the horses, and other items from a list he had prepared with Jenny, Margaret found the shop where she had bought trousers the previous May — John T. Beatton, Clothier — and bought dresses to supplement her rose muslin gown, one of dark blue and a simple green one of soft wool. The saleslady showed her some collars, one of lace, one of beaded silk, that could be worn with the green dress to make it versatile. Margaret also chose a grey wool skirt and jacket with black frogging and bought several yards of fine lawn to make into underclothes. The saleslady directed her to a cobbler, who fitted her with a pair of pretty black boots.

Her shopping completed, Margaret was free to spend an afternoon exploring the streets of Kamloops, which still held their allure. She wandered from street to street, looking at all the window displays, particularly the photographs in the window of Mary Spencer’s photographic studio. She would have entered, asked questions, examined each piece of equipment she could see on the shelves inside, but the shop was closed, a sign requesting those interested in make appointments to telephone the proprietress at the given number. Margaret had never used a telephone and didn’t feel courageous enough to ask at the hotel or post office how such a call might be made, so she contented herself with studying the photographs in the window as though they might tell her something of their origins. Wedding groups, portraits, a ceremony involving police officers, a shot of last year’s May Queen and her handmaidens in their fancy white dresses: she looked at each shot, hoping to decode the image’s individual elements, its composition and texture, the quality of light.

Meeting her father at dinner at the Grand Pacific, Margaret felt a pang of love for him, of gratitude that he was allowing her to try something new, undreamed of, unexperienced, of anticipated loneliness for his company during the next months. As if he knew what she was thinking, he patted her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“I remember the morning I left Astoria. It was raining, of course. It always rained in Astoria. My parents were still sleeping, and I crept past their bedroom and downstairs, leaving a letter for them on the dining table which was already laid for breakfast. I propped the letter against my father’s coffee cup. It was white porcelain, I won’t forget it, ever — the look of the letter against the cup, like something out of a novel, not a life. So I understand completely the desire you have to make something of yourself that is yours alone, not ours. Selfishly, however, I know how much I will miss you. You have been the best daughter a man could have, and never once did I regret that my first-born was not a son. You mean everything to us, and that is why we want you to go the way that you must.”

“Did you regret the way you’d left, Father?”

William answered without hesitation. “I have no regrets about what I have done with my life, and I don’t like to think of the man I’d have become had I not left my father’s house. But the blessing of my family would have made my leaving less lonely, and that is why we give you ours.”

Tears filled Margaret’s eyes, and she hastily wiped at them with her table napkin. “Remember the day we bought Thistle? We sat at this very table for breakfast, and you asked if I’d go with you to look at her. I wonder what her foal will be. I hope she throws a filly. You must write to me immediately and tell me, and promise you’ll allow me to name it.”

“Agreed. And now I’m going to order champagne to toast my daughter’s future.”

Letters, a narrative of letters, dated and telling a breathless story of landscapes and buildings, bitter cold, a single light burning in a farm house somewhere on the great plain of America. A welcoming brick house filled with flowers and light, its tiny garden a testament to joy (roses tucked in against winter, an apple tree with the remnants of a nest cradled in its high branches, a wooden bench, a sundial of bronze incised Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be . . .), descriptions of concerts, a visit to the Little Gallery on Fifth Avenue, classes at Columbia and workshops in photographic technique, the taking of anthropomorphic measurements, linguistics, the shy declaration of an engagement and the description of a ring, the announcement of a return to begin a photographic assignment. If this succeeds, and I am so hopeful that it might, I think we would like to live in the valley and work from there. With the telegraph and telephones becoming more common, it would be possible to keep in touch with the university and the American Museum of Natural History, for which Nicholas is doing some work. Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. I feel heavy with the sorrow of what is to come, though my lungs have taken in fine seeds with the dry air and I have slept in a tent dusted with pollen, my body heavy with its golden profligacy.

At Spahomin, Margaret and her grandmother were preparing for a sweat bath. They had spread boughs of fir on the floor of the sweat lodge with some sage mixed in, and juniper from a special place known only to Grandmother Jackson. Placing the hot stones in the pit in the middle of the floor, they squatted to put their attention to cleansing their bodies and minds. Margaret felt her lungs sear as the hot dry air entered her chest, and she felt light headed in the intense heat. Her grandmother chanted a prayer in the Thompson language, asking that Margaret go with protection on her journey, that her own guardian spirit watch out for the girl, and her grandfather’s, and all her ancestors at rest in the soil of the valley. A prayer had been said by Reverend Murray at Saint Andrew’s Church the previous Sunday, asking that the Lord keep Margaret safe during her time away from them, and after the service people she had known all her life came to wish her Godspeed. After their sweat bath, the old woman and the young one washed with cold water and dried themselves with rough towels fashioned from sugar sacks. Riding home, Margaret felt clean and strong and curiously peaceful for the first time since she had made her decision to go to New York. She had been excited about the prospect from the first, but never with this deep knowledge that what she was doing was a necessary part of her progress into the next chapter of her life.

The morning Margaret and her father set out was clear and cold. August came to drive them to Nicola Lake, where they would take the stage to Forksdale and then to Spences Bridge. Jenny Stuart stood on the porch and embraced her daughter, then held her at arm’s length to make sure she was ready to go. She stroked Margaret’s face, the curve of cheek she had known and loved for seventeen years, and smoothed the wisps of black hair that framed the young face, committing to memory its detail and texture. Blind, she would know this daughter forever, her fingers alive with the instincts of birds. She kissed Margaret on each cheek and adjusted the collar of her travelling jacket. Margaret turned to her sisters.

“Goodbye, Mary, goodbye, Jane. You must help Mother in my place now. And Tom, you may ride Daisy while I’m gone, and take good care of her, please, and help Father. If Mother and Father write to tell me that you’ve been a help to them both, then I shall buy you something special in New York City and bring it home in my suitcase.”

“A doll, Margaret, a doll, please?” Both sisters echoed the same wish.

“I don’t know yet that you’ve been helpful. But I’m certain there will be dolls aplenty, just waiting to belong to girls who have helped their mother and not argued with each other.”

And it was time to leave. Going along the lane that led out to the Douglas Lake road, Margaret tried to see everything at once — the barn, the chicken house, the cottonwoods with their remnants of magpie nests, the wide fields of Culloden dotted with the slumbering bodies of cattle among the bunch-grass and drowsy flies, horses watching the wagon as it commenced its journey, the family waving goodbye on the familiar porch, one of the ranch dogs running alongside, all of it knitted together by the wild clematis climbing up from the banks of the creek, fluffy seed heads blowing goodbye. If this was part of who she was, then what would she be without it? She had asked her grandmother the same question and was told that she must carry her home inside her. But she didn’t know if she did, or could, never having left before in this way. In her suitcase, though, was her buckskin jacket and a little pouch she had made, decorated with quills given her by Alice and filled with dried sage, some strands of bunchgrass with the seeds intact, the drinking tube found at the gravesite, and a twist of paper with a spoonful of soil inside, gathered from the side of the creek. It would have to be enough.

They arrived at Spences Bridge late in the evening and went directly to Mr. Clemes’s hotel, where rooms were waiting for them. They were introduced to the relations who would travel as far as Seattle with Margaret and spent some time drinking tea in the parlour, where a warm fire burned and a girl played the piano quietly while the talk went on about beef prices and progress. Mr. Clemes was an enthusiastic man, taking William out in the dark to admire again the red Woolsey he had arranged to have shipped from Paris after seeing it at the World Exposition in ‘98. Every visitor to the hotel was taken out to see the Woolsey, even if the visit was not the first. It was a fine automobile to drive around town, Mr. Clemes declared, as William examined the machine by lamplight and restrained his host from starting up the auto and taking it along the black streets with the same lamps held aloft.

In her bed that night, too excited to sleep, Margaret listened to the river. She had leaned out of the window earlier in the evening when she had been taken to the room with her luggage and had smelled the water, cold and flinty, as it raced towards its marriage with the Fraser at Lytton. Brown bats darted in under the eaves, feeding on the slow autumn flies and moths, almost ready to find a place to wait out the cold months. She thought of the big muscular fish in the Thompson’s waters, swimming against the current, and the canoes guided by men darkened with charcoal and grease, going out to meet the fish at night with torches of pitch-pine. And on the talus slopes, even now the rattlesnakes were deep in their winter sleep under stones. How mysterious it was, the life of a place, with its rivers, trees and grasses, and the animals coming down to drink at dawn as they had done since time began. And just as mysterious, the sound of a train moving down the canyon, sounding its whistle as it passed through the town. People on that train, or one very similar to it, had witnessed a landslide, watched as innocent children were washed away by rising water. She wondered if they would see the site of the landslide as the train passed that way in the morning. And would she ever sleep?

She must have, because her father stood at her bedside with a cup of milky coffee, gently calling her to wake up. She drank the coffee gratefully, then dressed in the chilly morning air. Her stomach was a whole flock of butterflies fluttering their wings at once, some of them rising into her throat. Her hands shook as she buttoned her boots, and she forgot where she’d packed her hairbrush.

At the train station, the Clemes family stood to one side and chattered cheerfully amongst themselves, giving the Stuarts a private moment to say their goodbyes.

“You have everything? You’re sure?”

“No, I’m not sure of anything, Father. But I think I have what I need. My cases, the camera, the ticket, money, yes, I think it’s all here. But somehow I wish we were taking the stage together home to Nicola Lake. I feel nervous about this.”

“I’m not surprised. This is a big venture for a girl who’s more at home on a horse than anywhere. But everything will go well, I’m certain. You’ll cable us from Seattle to say you’ve arrived? And from New York, of course?”

“Of course.”

The train had arrived and the door of the carriage she would be boarding opened, the porter taking her baggage to stow it away. The Clemes relations stepped up to the carriage, waving to William and calling a final goodbye to Mr. Clemes. William embraced his daughter and helped her onto the platform stool and up the train steps. Margaret could say nothing but clung to her father’s familiar arm until the last possible moment, when he pulled away, touched her shoulder, then hopped down to the platform. She waved a gloved hand and smiled through a mist that might have been tears or perhaps the beginning of rain glazing the window of the carriage. As the train pulled out of Spences Bridge, Margaret kept waving until her father was no longer visible. She sat where she could see the cluster of houses, hotels, the bridge itself, receding until the train rounded a corner and they were gone.

Are we remembered by mountains, the sweet fields of hay? Do we leave the syllables of our history in the lambent dawn or on the riffle of water as it moves past our feet in the shallows? A map of our lives might speak of favourite weather, the whistle of blackbirds on April mornings, the way our eyes saw colour, distinguished cloud forms, the texture of linen in a hoop of wood, stitched in and out by wildflowers. Our mark on the map might be rough trails or roads, open pastures, a wild cartography of longing. In Margaret’s box, a street map of New York with tiny birds sketched in and a few trees on significant quadrangles as she provided her own icons for the city. Or our history might be followed as a series of threads, silk, wool, fine textiles or rags, which outline the shapes our lives have taken — the samplers of girlhood, the tea towels of domesticity, quilts of practical warmth, and the yoking together of joy and grief in the long recollection of age. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

Because she had asked him to, the porter pointed out the site of the landslide to Margaret as the train passed — a raw slash of debris on the side of the river. Under that debris, there were houses crushed like brittle cottonwood twigs, even a child flattened like a wildflower between the pages of a book. She pressed her face to the window, seeing the field of the dead passing quickly as the train gathered speed. The river moved in urgent currents, oblivious to all that happened, ungoverned by memory. Margaret could see the yellow blooms of rabbitbrush persisting in the cold days of November and a tangle of the wild clematis she loved, which some called traveller’s joy, wrapped around a dead pine tree on the slope above the river.

Light began to enter the canyon as the sun rose high enough to illuminate the dark cliffs and narrow valleys of creeks leading into the Thompson from their sources in the dark mountains. At times, it felt as though the train was moving through a tunnel roofed by sky, so close were the walls of the mountains. The porter reeled off names as they passed creeks and town sites or entered tunnels in the shoulders of the rocks. Skoonka, Drynoch, Nicomen, Thompson Landing. Margaret was thrilled to hear the names, like lyrics to the music of the train. At Lytton she saw the azure waters of the Thompson enter the Fraser and lose themselves in the muddy confluence. At one time, her grandmother told her, so many campfires burned along the sides of these rivers that anyone looking down from a mountain must have thought the sight a fallen constellation, a wash of light along the dark water. She thought of George Edwards riding down to prison, manacled, passing the same rocks, the same trees, with an early summer sky overhead. The newspaper had said that everyone knew which train carried him to New Westminster, and bystanders called from each stopping place, wishing him well; even the dogs remembered him.

The Clemes relations talked animatedly in their seats, and they called to Margaret to come and share their snack. Little cakes and tarts filled a basket, along with thin cucumber sandwiches. Margaret wasn’t hungry but accepted an apple, choosing a fine Wolf River with a deep red skin. The train was carrying a shipment of apples from the Clemes orchard, the Martel ranch, and Mrs. Smith’s trees to customers in Vancouver. At Lytton, they’d stopped to pick up hundreds of boxes from Earlscourt Farm, and when the porter opened the door of their carriage, the smell of apples filled the air like balm. Hell’s Gate, China Bar, Kanaka, Keefer, Slaughter Run, Alexandra Bridge. Biting into her apple, imagining she detected the flavour of sunlight and sage behind the crisp white flesh veined with rose, Margaret watched the passing hills, falling asleep just as the train left the canyon to begin the straight run through the Fraser Valley to Vancouver.