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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Red Ribbon

He first glimpsed the sister through the trees that surrounded the Faulkenbourg Place. Since moving there it had become his habit to walk between the rows, starting from the laneway that led to the road and ending when he had circumnavigated the property and returned to the other side of the lane. The yard itself was quite large with extensive pens for cattle, grain bins and storage sheds for equipment, all in various states of disrepair. Thistle and brome grass overgrew the lanes between the corrals and buildings. They grew between the trees too, but he quickly wore down a trail. He liked being among the trees, unable to see to the farthest horizon as seemed the case anywhere else he stood in these parts. There was a hush there, a quiet, as if he’d journeyed to another place.  

The wind was blowing – it was always blowing – bending the branches and fluttering the leaves, shifting things from light to shadow and back again. She was in the field just beyond the trees, passing through the stalks of wheat with a surprising grace, a red ribbon trailing from her hair. She didn’t seem to notice him, moving alongside the trees toward him. He called out to her, not wanting her to think he was lurking in the shadows with ill intent. The wind gusted, carrying his words away, and she didn’t hear and passed on her way.  

He saw her several more times, usually in the field beside the trees, though once at the far end of the row he was in. It seemed difficult to believe she could fail to notice his presence, but she never acknowledged him. She was young, maybe eighteen or so, and he assumed she was the daughter of one of the neighbours. When one of the brothers across the way asked how he was getting on, he mentioned his walks and how much he enjoyed them and added that there must be someone in his family who felt the same for he always saw her walking the trees. The brother could not hide his dismay at the statement and changed the subject. This piqued his interest and he began to ask around town about the Faulkenbourg Place. It seemed odd to him that the yard for what had obviously been an extensive operation had been allowed to fall into such a state. 

People were reluctant to speak on the matter. They would mutter something about the sisters and then talk of something else. It was very unlike the locals who seemed willing to gossip about anything, even with a stranger like him. It was only when he came across a story in an old newspaper while doing some unrelated research that he realized what they wouldn’t tell him. Hazel and Abigail, the McIntyre sisters had both loved Sven Faulkenbourg. He’d chosen the younger and in a fit of jealousy Hazel had murdered her sister, drowning her in a slough. At the time it was seen as a terrible accident and Sven had gone to Hazel for comfort while he mourned. One thing had led to another and soon they were to be married. 

They lived with Sven’s parents until they could build a place of their own, the very house he was renting. Sven discovered a red ribbon in Hazel’s things. There had been strands of red ribbon found under Abigail’s fingernails when she had been pulled from the slough. It had been noted at the time, but more as a curiosity. When Sven found the ribbon he understood what had happened and he strangled Hazel with it. He was hanged, one of the last to receive capital punishment in those parts and his parents moved away, unable to bear being in the house and on the land where such a tragedy had happened. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Everyone in Their Right Lane

She came into town at the end of summer, harvest in full swing in the fields. Come speak your grievances to me, she said, and the people came for they had many. It seemed it had been so long since someone had actually listened. She had an easy way about her, a smile that said she understood just what the problem was and how it might be solved. No matter the concern her answer was the same: it was not their fault and it certainly wasn’t hers. The dominion government that ruled them from far away – elected yes, but not legitimate – acted against them in all ways and needed to be cast aside. And there were others, newcomers from even further away, who had come here but did not belong and were creating trouble wherever they went.  

She was not the first to come this way, not by a long shot. Fifty years now, another gleaming politician coming to town filled with answers to the same problems. You would have thought people would get tired of it, but they liked being listened to, even if the problems they all promised to fix still persisted. It was an acknowledgement that they existed and to some extent mattered. She liked giving them someone to blame. It was largely forgotten she had been that way in years before, telling everyone their freedoms were under threat. Now that she was in charge, the tune had changed somewhat. Though she still told them they were right, this couldn’t stand, and these others must be dealt with. 

Once this had been a great land, they said, and she agreed. That is why we must hold on to everything we have tightly so we don’t lose more of it. The only way to do that, she said, was that everyone had to stay in their lanes and keep to their proper place. The dominion government should stay out of their lives. Town councils too. The only proper government was hers, because only she understood what was needed in these perilous times. Also, kids were getting weirder and weirder, talking in their indecipherable slang, dressing strangely and deciding they were one thing and then another. They especially needed to stay in their lane and avoid unnatural inclinations. Obviously outside influences were the cause of that, so books would have to be banned and curriculum restored to rote memorization and oaths of loyalty to better protect minds so easily influenced. 

That was needed everywhere in truth. People couldn’t be trusted to stay in their lanes either, as the few who appeared at the complaint sessions who disputed what she said made clear. The only way to ensure less government intrusion in peoples lives, which everyone agreed was the goal, was for everyone to do as they were told. It did not need to be said who would do the telling. Most of those who attended were happy to follow along. It was easier and felt safer to have someone who could tell them how the world was and why it was right and clever for them to do exactly what she said. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

The Hermit of the Hills

Nels came to the Quarter with three others in the early years of the century trying his luck on a quarter section. The other three sent for their families after they had broken the land and thrown up a shack, later ordering homes from the Eaton’s catalogue when they had money from a couple of harvests and their second quarter was handed over. Even after he got his second quarter Nels continued in the same shack, building a more permanent structure only after his first decade on the land. Many of the neighbours said this was little better than the shack he had been living in, though it did at least have a wood floor and a cellar. 

Nels was always a friendly presence, happy to chat with anyone in town, available to help with harvest or any work really. His neighbours looked forward to his regular visits to spend an evening at cards and he called three or four families once a week. As more settlers arrived, people wondered when he would marry. Many of the other bachelors who came in those years did find wives, either among the locals or from their original homes. Nels did not though, never going with any of the local girls, even when others encouraged him to. After a time all that sort of talk stopped as people accepted things for what they were.  

He never left the Quarter after homesteading, not even during the ten years of drought when so many others abandoned their farms, some not even leaving word or a forwarding address. More left with the second great war, travelling to far-flung lands and more still in the years after. The automobile was coming in wide use then and highways were being built. There were new opportunities everywhere. The Quarter was somehow both larger and smaller as a result. Fewer homesteads dotted the landscape and the farms were getting larger, while it was now possible to travel across most of its length in the space of an afternoon.  

People saw less of Nels as the years went on. Several of the families he stopped in to play cards with had moved on after the war. Tractors and other machines meant that agriculture was no longer a communal activity, though he did still drive truck for a couple of neighbours. Folks started talking about him differently too, though he hadn’t changed much. He was a man of his era, a time now past, when people were willing to throw away the lives they had been living, leave it all behind and take a chance on a far away land with no guarantees. Everyone was settled now, knowing nothing else and of the place in a way that Nels, and those who had arrived with him, could never be.  

At some point people began calling him the Hermit of the Hills, though he was always about and his half section was not especially hilly. Older siblings told younger ones about the terrible things that would happen if you wandered onto his land or into his house, which hid a portal to another demon-filled world in the cellar. If Nels knew about these stories he never said. He got diabetes in his later years and one of his feet took an infection which he neglected. Doctors took the leg to try to save him, but it was too late.  

He willed his land to one of the neighbours, the son of one of the men he’d come out with. Nels had always called on them for visits, so the first time they set foot in his house was after he died. It was a ramshackle place, as to be expected given he’d built it himself. The yard was littered with old pieces of equipment collected in piles that they supposed had some sort of logic to them. None of that surprised them, but what filled the cellar and one wall of his shop did. Hundreds of urns and vases and bowls, made from scrap metal and whatever else Nels had at hand. They were all finely made, intricate designs carved or painted on them. Beautiful in their strange way. Of another world. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Lost Ways

I lost my way. Everywhere I looked was both strange and familiar. The grass and the hills and the glistening slivers of water in the lowlands and the small clusters of trees huddled around them and the buckbrush and the sage and the wolf willow and overhead the aching blue of the sky and far in the distance the point where the sky and land merged. All places I might have passed by before, but lacking any landmarks I could orient myself toward. But that’s being lost isn’t it. Adrift. Nothing to hold onto. 

I’d run out of roads some time ago. Fences too. I came across the occasional cow path, though there were no cattle here, so I could not be sure which creatures had carved those trails. No one lived in these parts and it was hard to believe anyone had ever passed through, as I was now, let alone settled down to make a home. Somehow atop each rise I expected the horizon to shift and reveal a distant farmhouse surrounded by fields or the gleam of a highway or a cluster of houses nestled against the rail line. I knew those things were there somewhere beyond those empty plains, but ahead of me there was always more of this. I began to wonder if I had imagined the rest. 

This was something I had sought out in truth, looking for the spaces beyond the edge of habitation where civilization ran out. The Quarter was famous for it, though it made no sense to me. To look at a map was to see it bordered on all sides. The inhabitants warned me. Those were just lines on a map, but maps could not be trusted here. The Quarter was much larger than it appeared, larger by far than the dominions that surrounded it. You could get lost in them, easily, and never find a way out. 

There were ways in and ways out and those had to be carefully followed. These had been mapped, if that is what it could be called, and the locals followed those trails without fail. To leave them was to risk being lost as I now was. Utterly and completely.  

But I refused to believe them. The Quarter must end. The land must run into others. To the west there would be foothills and mountains beyond the plains, to the north the Battle River and forests. South and east were more plains, but of a different sort. Flatter, the land richer, the crops more bountiful. I was certain that if I marched off in any direction I would eventually find myself in those places. How could I not? The logic of the rest of the world had to hold here. 

Now I know the truth. The land just goes on. It does not become something else. If you told me it was larger than the world itself I would believe you. It may be so. It is a nether realm, the bounds of which I will never escape. I tell myself I can go no further, that I must turn back and hope that I can find my way out. But something else beckons me forward. How far, how deep, how vast. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Three Days of Rain

The storm front arced across the sky, covering every horizon in a bilious grey. It seemed unmoving and immovable. Everyone looked to the sky in anticipation after a dry winter and a dry and windy spring, dust kicking up everywhere. The forecast called for three days of rain. 100ml. 200 in the foothills and mountains in the west. The rivers would fatten and creeks would run, some for the first time in years. The grass would turn an unfamiliar, vibrant green and the crops would grow. The cattle could stay on the summer grazing until August and there would be hay to cut. All things seemed possible. 

They hurried to get whatever work done they could before the clouds unleashed their bounty and kept them from the fields. It began early in the afternoon with a few passing showers, enough to wet the ground and keep the dust down but little more. Just enough rain to make working miserable, but not enough to stop. There were dark mutterings of another damp fart and little more, of how forecasters were like sorcerers – not to be trusted under any circumstances. Late in the afternoon the wind began to snarl and they understood that the true storm had arrived. The rain began to fall, steady, stinging and fierce. Every rut in the road soon had a puddle and those still out in the fields and pastures had to go slow on slick gravel when they returned home.  

It continued through the night and into the next morning, steady at times, a deluge at others. Everyone slept in and lingered over their coffees. Someone was sent out to look at the rain gauge and phone calls and marvelling texts were exchanged. By and by everyone left their houses. Children were sent to school and wives headed out to their jobs in town. The fastidious and the Christians headed for the shop or quonset, where the drumming of the rain was satisfyingly loud, and used the time granted them to take care of repairs and maintenance to machinery.  

The rest headed to shops and sheds as well, gathering in groups of four or six. A bottle of whisky was unfurled and chairs and overturned five gallon pails were sat upon around a makeshift table of plywood set across two sawhorses. They played cards until the bottle was drained sometime between that evening and the next morning. The rain accompanied them as their wives came to collect them for breakfast, cursing them for fools to do such things at their age, and lulled them through the throes of their hangovers where they swore never to do such things again.  

They wouldn’t – until the next deluge. The next day, late in the morning, the rain ceased as if by general accord. Everyone emerged from their homes, most none the worse for wear, to witness the world transformed. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Passing Through

The wind stirred, bending the blades of grass, moving like an unceasing wave up the hill and down and up the next. A shadow moved behind it as a cloud drifted over the sun.  

The two dozen or so travellers below looked up thankfully at this brief respite from the unseasonable heat. They were heading north, following the trails bison had carved through the grass. Scouts were far ahead with an eye for trouble or game, while further back mothers supervised children and dogs pulling travois. There were jests and laughter and a lightness that comes with the promise of a bountiful season to come. They paused here and there to rest where the hills blocked the sun, but did not linger in this place. 

Later others passed by, now on horseback, flintlocks mixed in with bows and arrows. They moved like the wind, with it, carried to the farthest horizons. Clouds of dust marked their passage when it was hot and dry, as it was now.  

The wind gusted, knocking the grass flat to the ground. The clouds seemed to cluster above, stuck in the sky even though the wind was so fierce below, the sun barely glinting through. 

Others came and left, measuring out the land and marking it with rods they plunged into the earth. All around newcomers arrived, setting up houses and breaking up the land. Here the land was left untouched, no one willing to settle upon it. Not entirely though, for the settlers, seeking permanence that had never been in the nature of the land previously, planted trees in a futile attempt to hold back the wind. Seeds blew to this place and soon enough grew in low lying areas where the water gathered in spring. Short and bent things, huddled close to the land against the wind. 

Later barbed wire fence was strung up, following the surveyor markers, and cattle roamed, carving new paths. A watering hole was dug where the spring runoff naturally gathered. From spring to fall the cattle wandered from the dugout to the eastern spring, finding shade in the copses that dotted the lowlands between the hills. People never lingered, coming only to bring the cattle and collect them when it was time to move to fall grazing, checking occasionally throughout the summer. 

The wind howled and groaned, whistling through the trees with menace, dark clouds massing to the north with the promise of rain and thunder. Dust whipped through the air, clouds of it forming, dimming the sun. 

When it grew too dry more of the surrounding lands were seeded back to grass. Better that than to watch it all blow away. The cattle remained, but the wire was stripped from the fences and the posts dug out or left to rot. Drones operated keeping the various herds separated, moving them to fresh pasture when needed. Only in the spring and the fall, during the great roundups did anyone pass through again – one or two only – supervising the drones’ work.  

Later, travellers passed through again, usually when crocus flowers gave way to golden beans. Usually they were on foot, moving in groups of two or four. They went slowly, stopping to camp on occasion by the eastern spring that still ran true. The bison herds from an earlier rewilding were sometimes still in the hills if the spring had been late in coming, as it often was. At night, as the wind stirred in the grass chasing away the mosquitoes, they would lie back and look at the specks of light in the vast sky above moving on their circuits through the stars. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

A Proper Home

They packed all their things into trunks and set off for parts unknown. A strange feeling to reduce a life to possessions that could fit neatly into these boxes, everything folded, taken apart and tucked away, to be reassembled elsewhere. But nothing ever goes together in quite the same way again.  

That turned out to be the simplest step, one heavily tinged with anticipation at what was to come. The long journey – first by rail and then by wagon – proved trying and tedious. They shared a cramped car with dozens of others similarly uprooting their lives and casting their hopes on lines on a map some surveyor had drawn decades ago. Who knew what awaited them.  

Once they disembarked they found a half dozen others who were homesteading in the vicinity of their quarter and agreed to make the rest of the journey together. They purchased a wagon and horses, as well as some tools and farm implements and lumber – all at an inflated price, but they had little choice. It was a journey of two days by wagon and these passed without incident. They marvelled at the treeless horizon they passed, nothing but grass and sky as far as the eye could see.  

As they came near their destination they parted ways with those who had shared their journey, everyone branching off to find the surveyor stakes that marked the line on the map in the earth. Their own was nestled in a valley, dotted with small sloughs still gleaming with water in places. At one they found a spring that flowed continuously and they decided to build their house nearby. Later they would find rings of stones on a small ridge where the wind blew clean and kept the bugs away.  

The first few nights they still slept in the back of the wagon while they broke the land, cutting sod out of the ground. They used the sod, the lumber and even some of the wood in the wagon itself, to put up a shack into which they put their possessions. Even when it was finished it still felt temporary and would until they managed to build a proper house. Life on hold, except it wasn’t. They broke the land, planted crops and a garden, harvested it and took the two day journey north to sell it.  

When they finally moved into that proper house two years later there were still things in the trunks that had never been taken out. Though they considered passing them on to someone who could use them, they did not, returning them to the trunks which they used as furniture at the end of beds and sofas. It was a comfort of sorts that some part of that past life and past home was still here in this new one.

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

The Landlord

He set off for the Quarter in March, as he did every year. An unsettled time, the weather always unpredictable and the ways into the Quarter, which were always drifting, were even harder to trace. It was important that he look in upon his lands each spring to ensure all was in order for the growing season to come, at least that was what he told himself and those he visited. Some years spring had not arrived by the time he did and he was forced to endure a sullen and frigid tour. 

It had been decades since he lived within the Quarter, having fled those environs at the first opportunity. A number of listless years followed wherein he wandered about attempting to find his place in the wider world. That proved difficult, for he spent most of his time half-heartedly indulging in various passion projects, all of which came to nothing. There was his writing, of course, which he quickly gave up once it went from ignored to dismissed. Also, his travel, which he talked about constantly. He was always going to be establishing some new venture in some distant place, only to quietly leave after a few months when he could secure no interest from the locals. 

After a number of years the birthright, which had always been his even as he rejected it out of hand, came to him. His possessions, though not substantial, were more than enough to support him. He was not so foolish as to believe he could return and make of himself a landholder, so he endeavoured to let it out to some of his former neighbours. A satisfactory agreement was reached, but he was left unsatisfied by it and determined that he should tour his lands each spring, though he was told this was strictly unnecessary and in fact something of a burden. The renters and the lawyers and accountants could manage the arrangements perfectly fine without him.  

He ignored them. It felt important that he maintain a connection with the Quarter if he was to have possessions there. And he knew from experience that the longer he stayed away the more difficult it came to find his way back.  

The weather was pleasant when he left, but as he came nearer to the amorphous border of the Quarter it turned, as it often did. Sleet came down heavily, stinging his cheeks and soaking him right through. The rolling hills, which had been brown and bare were soon white with snow. All the roads were obscured, the way forward unclear. He was unconcerned, for past experience had taught him that it was only when he was certain he was utterly lost that he discovered he had somehow entered the environs of the Quarter.  

This time proved no different. By afternoon the skies were clearing and he could see a vast horizon unfolding ahead of him. White lined with darkness where the roads crisscrossed and speckled with other colours where houses stood. Somewhere in that vastness were his holdings. He set off toward them with a lightness in his step. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

The Sorcerer Comes to Town

The sorcerer came to town at the end of November. Cold winds arrived with her leaving a blanket of snow on the fields and streets. They were northerners mostly, it was said, though he had driven in from the south. Anyway, it was hard going for a few days. The first cold snap of the year was always the worst as everyone remembered all over again what winter was.  

She moved into the Lang place, which had sat empty since Mabel had left town after Harold went to jail for touching the kids. Once it had been the locus of that end of town, half a dozen or so children heading there every day after school to spend a few hours until their parents came home from work. Most found it fitting that a sorcerer would move into a place like that, so shadowed with the weight of the past that everyone wanted to forget. They were disturbing sorts anyway.  

A few speculated on the logistics. Had the sorcerer bought it? Except it hadn’t been put up for sale, certainly not advertised. Was Mabel renting it? Again, there had been no advertisement. Did sorcerers pay rent and deal with landlords? They must, they were people, after a fashion. 

That he was a sorcerer was evident from the staff he carried, if not his dress. Most had not seen a staff before and they studied it curiously. Easier that than meeting her eyes. It was more like a walking stick, rising only to his waist, with a narrow point at one end. The whole thing was wrapped in thin bands of metal, perhaps silver, for it certainly shone like that. Each band was filled with runes, some only visible in the right light. There were a few left in town who could read the old tongue, but no matter how they were pressed they refused to speak on the meaning of any of the runes. 

The sorcerer wasn’t seen much about town. The odd encounter in the grocery store where everyone fell silent and eyed what she had in her cart. Cereal, milk, nothing unusual. She complained about the price of Doug’s vegetables, but everyone did. People did begin to visit him, though no one would ever admit it. Most entered through the back alley, but they were still seen. It was a small town after all and everyone knew everyone’s business. What transpired within the house was most certainly left unsaid. A sorcerer’s business was her own. 

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Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Festival Calendar

Seasons have their rhythms everywhere and the Quarter is no different. Its inhabitants have their own ways of marking those cycles, events whose origins are sometimes obscure but which are unimaginable outside of certain times on the calendar. Just as winter warms to spring which unfurls into summer, so the spring socials turn to sports days and fairs. One could travel from town to town across the full deceptive breadth of the Quarter taking in the festivities until harvest begins. Autumn brings turkey suppers and harvest dances, while winter is an interminable time whose dark hours are measured out in card games and curling bonspiels.  

All of these celebrations, in one form or another, can be found in towns and villages across the greater western plains. There are others that are unique to the Quarter, like the First Drop in spring. When the ground is finally warm enough for seeding to begin, farmers across the Quarter will empty a bottle of rye on a chosen field for luck and good harvest. In some places this is a solitary, almost furtive exercise, in others a field is chosen and the whole community turns out for the ceremony, which is concluded with a potluck in the community hall. 

Another is the Fallow Ground, typically in October, although some communities wait until after the first snow stays. Always it is after harvest. Families and sometimes whole communities will gather at a field that has been shorn of its crop and there they will bury human figures made of bread or cake to restore the land. These figures are often marked with some representation of a deceased relative, an acknowledgement of the cycle of life and death in which everyone is engaged. In some cases, a sin-eater is present and one of the bread figures will be given to them, along with a glass of rye or beer, to consume. These individuals are scorned members of the community at all other times of the year, but on this one day it is for them to take the burden of everyone’s sins upon them to ensure next year’s harvest.