Annual Gamble With Nature.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 7 January 1911, Page 4

Annual Gamble With Nature.

For ten days and ten nights early in August the Canadian homesteader is uneasy, says Fred Bates Johnson in "Success Magazine." The hot sun of a long summer day helps the feeble patches of yellow in the gram to make deep inroads into the mass of green. , Day by day the conquering yellow sends its colour over the receding frreon, until the field stands half and lialf. Night by night the homesteader watches the temperature, the winds, and the clouds. Each nin-ht is a bit folder than the previous one. There is the suggestion of frost in the air early one .morning. The grain is now yellow with patches of green—the reverse of the last week's condition. Under tho influence of the blazing, 'burning sun tho yellow throws off the suggestion of frost and fades into the last disappearing ranks of -green. Two or three days more and the green is gone, routed, vanquished. _ The yellow, now tipping into golden brown, dominates the field. Another day or so and early one morning a binder sings in tho field., lno grain is ripe and ready. It has been saved, none is there to care for the bitter, stinging, killing irost that comes a. few nights later. Ihe homesteader has made a gamble. h<i lias gambled with Nature—and won. And this is the annual gamble that human beings aro making with Nature all throughout the western provinces of Canada. During the ten-day period of ripening season every year, there is the danger that a. killing frost will catch tho gram. The margin of timo between the ripening and the killing frosts is so small that everywhere in .these grain-growing provinces there is that anxious ten-day period—the anxiety based on the fear that the margin of safety will disappear, and the frost catch tho grain before it is ripe and ready. .„.,,, , Tin's, fundamentally, is the heart of the Western' Canada proposition, and the people living there realise it. Travelling through those provinces, talking with the elevator men, the merchants, the farmers, the 'bankers, the homesteaders, one cannot but catch this note of uneasiness. It is in tho air. Consciously or subconscious! v. it is in everyone's mind. True, iii the few years that gram has been grown in that country, the farmer has always won the chance, but by so close a margin that there always remains behind the fear—the great fear of the north-west prairies country.