Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers pull out the fish.
Now for a long swift spin to the farthest North. Leaving Manitoba behind, we soon leave the woods behind too. Beneath us lies a treeless rolling plain.
Astonishing! We were brought up to believe Northern Canada a “frozen wilderness.” We find it contains great stretches of green pasture, gay with innumerable flowers, alive with birds and beasts and butterflies. Even the Arctic islands, which most people imagine covered with perpetual snow and ice, we find carrying much vegetation and fattening herds of musk ox and caribou. A large part of Alaska, and nearly all Greenland, are mountainous. These keep their mantle of ice the year round because of their height and snowfall; but they are not in Canada. For periods varying from two to four or five months, as the explorer Stefansson tells us, most of our northern land is a picture of green prairie and flowering meadows; the flowering plants are much more conspicuous than the mosses and lichens which many people imagine are the only specimens of vegetable life to be seen.
The summer is short up here, if reckoned by months, but not if reckoned in hours of sunshine. Where the sun never sets, for weeks or months at a time, the summer warmth is continuous, unbroken by the cooling of night. In polar regions you may experience a temperature of 95 to 100 in the shade.
One day, as Stefansson predicts, this continent will draw a large part of its meat supply from vast herds of reindeer grazing on these northern prairies of Canada. The caribou is simply a variety of reindeer, and as easily tamed.
The 1,280 reindeer brought over from Siberia to Alaska, between 1892 and 1902, have increased beyond all expectations, and now number more than 200,000, after 100,000 have been killed for their meat and hides. And Alaska possesses only one-tenth of the area available for this purpose on our vast northern plains.
Our children will smile at our notion that this north land is “useless.” We have not learnt to use it; that is all.