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The view was as confined and unvarying as the banks of a canal, except that canals commonly are straight, while this watercourse twisted like Archimedes's screw. The only breaks in the endless panorama of cut-banks, mud-flats, willows, and grass were the occasional little inlets, gay with aquatic flowers. Bela was most at home kneeling in the stern of her dugout.
The cut-banks are unique, however, and would make the fortune of an Eastern river, though here little noticed on account of their number. It was now the 18th, and the weather was intensely hot, foreboding change and the August freshet. We had camped about eight miles below the Burnt Rapid, and the men were very tired, having been in the water pretty much since morning.
"This settler, I might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as Dinosauria, and there's about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I'm wedded to science.
We noted much good timber standing on heavy soil, and on the 14th passed a curious hump-like hill, cut-faced, with a reddish and yellow cinder-like look, as if it had been calcined by underlying fires. Near it was an exposure of deep coloured ochre, and, farther on, enormous black cut-banks, also suggestive of coal.
It was much like a furrow of Nature's ploughing, cut out to serve as a drainage for the surrounding plains. It wound its irregular course away east and west, a maze of undergrowth, larger bluff, low red-sand cut-banks and crumbling gravel cliffs, all scattered by a prodigal hand, with a profusion that seemed wanton amidst the surrounding wastes of grass-land.
In this region the river scenery changes to a succession of cut-banks, exposed in all directions, and in almost all situations. Immense towering hills of sand, or clay, are cut down vertically, some facing the river, others at right angles to it, and others inland, and almost inclosed by projecting shoulders of the wooded heights.
Night, too, was falling and the going was rough and even dangerous; for now hillsides suddenly broke off into sharp cut-banks, twenty, thirty, forty feet high. It was one of these cut-banks that was his undoing, for in the dim light he failed to note that the sheep track he was following ended thus abruptly till it was too late.
Along the shores, steep cut-banks alternated with muddy shoals; and a new set of problems faced Garth. These chiefly took the form of stout willow bushes overhanging the cut-banks diabolically malicious, sentient beings, they became to Garth.
Wunpost was in trouble, and she knew it; and now she was on her way, either to find him or to make sure he was safe. The trail up Fall Canyon twists and winds among wash boulders, over cut-banks and up sandy gulches; but at the mouth of the canyon it plunges abruptly into willow-brush and leads on up the bed of a dry creek.
These cut-banks carry layers of stone here and there, and are specked with boulders, and in some places massed into projecting crests, which threaten destruction to the passer-by. Otherwise the scenery is desolate, mountainous always, and wooded, but with much burnt timber, which gives a dreary look to the region.
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