on the wave,” Keith says. “Do you use one finger or take your whole hand off the wheel?” Since I grew up in small prairie towns, as he didn’t, he sometimes looks to me for advice about local etiquette. Even though he’s lived in Saskatchewan for more than half his life—he arrived in Saskatoon in the mid-1970s—he still occasionally feels like a newcomer. No wonder, since he was born in Nairobi and educated there, at a boarding school in Scotland, and at universities in England. We had met in the fall of 1991 (only a year or two before our first trip to Cody, come to think of it) when he had found himself newly single and, in those days before online dating, had dared to place an ad in the personal column of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix: “Friendly, attractive professional man, early 40s, seeks sincere, intelligent woman to enjoy adventures, travel, the arts . . .” I was then a youngish widow, with a freckle-faced daughter in tow: he had won me over at “friendly.” We met, great jubilation ensued, and here we were together, going down the road.
About an hour past Grass Range, U.S. Route 191 flows down into the broad, sculpted valley of the Missouri River—we walk the dogs to the silvery, high-pitched clatter of the cottonwood leaves—and then we are up and away again, flying past the Little Rocky Mountains, the cusps of their blue molars biting into the western sky, past, almost without noticing, the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, home to several hundred members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine nations. At the down-on-its-luck town of Malta, we turn west, through the not-much-luck-to-be-down-on hamlet of Chinook, and pass, again without noticing, a sign directing us to the Bear Paw battlefield, sixteen miles to the south. It was here, in the fall of 1877, that a massed force of U.S. infantry and cavalry, armed with a twelve-pound gun, surrounded, pounded, and eventually defeated a camp of Nez Perce refugees who, during the preceding months, had fought their way cross-country all the way from Oregon, in the desperate hope of finding safe haven on the other side of the international border.
At Havre, we jog north again, running for the border ourselves, and fail to notice, on the western outskirts of town, the remains of Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879 and once the grandest military establishment in Montana, with a garrison, at its peak, of more than five hundred blue-coated men. Their mission was to clear the country of “British” Indians, Cree and Métis hunters from across the line, by whatever means necessary. Voices hang in the air here, speaking of hunger, displacement, and cold, but we do not hear a word. Do you suppose it’s really true that what you don’t know can’t hurt you?
From Havre onward, the land is reduced to a kind of primal simplicity, a tawny expanse that tugs our eyes to the farthermost edges of the world. Somewhere over there, in the white haze of distance, earth and heaven collide. Although I have always thought of myself as a prairie person, I am out of place here, dazzled by these spinning horizons and this unbounded sky that bleeds off into infinity. The prairie landscapes of my childhood had been softer, more contained. If instead of stopping at Eastend, Keith and I were to continue driving northwest clear across Alberta to the edge of the plains and into the scrubby fringes of the northern forest, and if we then pushed on through swamp spruce and muskeg for half a day more, we’d eventually break into the tree-fringed grasslands of the Grande Prairie in the Peace River Country. That’s where I was born.
My parents were teachers, not farmers, so we always lived in town. But it was seldom far to the nearest pasture, where pale crocuses poked their furry snouts through the dead thatch first thing in spring and shooting stars launched their ardent magenta rockets around the margins of saline sloughs. As far as I knew, I was enjoying the total prairie package. But my mother knew differently. Her name was Edna Elizabeth Sherk, née Humphrey, and she was a true prairie girl, born to the high, wide, windswept plains of southern Alberta. She’d scarcely seen a tree in her life before coming north to the Peace River Country to teach, and at first they’d frightened her—so she told my sisters and me—looming over her in the darkness, rustling and shadowy.
She’d be in her glory here, I think, as I watch the light spin past the van. If it weren’t for the occasional farm site with a struggling stand of box elders (or Manitoba maples, as they’d be called on the Canadian side of the line) braced against the wind, there wouldn’t be a tree for fifty miles in any direction. At the international boundary, we pause momentarily for formalities, leaving behind the euphoric American promise of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” for the less stirring Canadian virtues of “Peace, Order and Good Government.” But the land flows on unmarked by national aspirations, as the road heads north and then east, on the final leg of our journey. By now, the day is fading, and we soon find ourselves tunneling through the dark. Highway signs leap into view, announcing places we have never heard of before: Consul, Robsart, Vidora. Even though we are theoretically back home, in our own country and province, the land that lies around us is enticing and unfamiliar.
We count down the miles to our destination, now so close at hand. There is nothing to be seen but liquid darkness, nothing to be heard but the gentle snoring of dogs and the hum of tires on asphalt. Then, with perhaps ten minutes to go, the headlights pick up a glimmer in the ditch, a flash of green-gold.
“Do you want to stop?”
Silly question. “Yes, of course!” We always stop.
In the wide bottom of the ditch, two coyotes are gnawing on the carcass of a road-killed deer. Caught in the flare of the headlights, their eyes glint; their muzzles are bloody; their bodies jitter in and out of the glare. There is something unexpectedly fleshy about them, something carnal and wild. We watch for a few minutes, then, with a nod of agreement, leave them to their feast. A door has opened into the darkness, giving us a privileged glimpse of the life that goes on, in secret, around us. A thrill of expectation rises in my body as we roll on toward Eastend. Whatever this place turns out to be, it’s going to be an adventure.
Eastend sits on the southeastern edge of a landform known as the Cypress Hills. From the bit of reading I’ve done before leaving home, I know that “cypress” is a bungled translation, from Michif (the Métis language), of les montagnes des cyprès, a phrase that actually means Jackpine Mountains. In Blackfoot, these uplands have been known variously as the Eastern Place Where There Are Many Pines and as the Overlapping, or Wavelike, Hills. In Assiniboine, they’re the place Where the Land Gets Broken; to some Cree speakers, the Beautiful Highlands. Like a great animal sprawled across the prairies, the hills rise in southeastern Alberta and flow eastward for more than eighty miles as a complex of broad, gradually diminishing plateaus. At the Head of the Mountain near Medicine Hat, the land stands almost 2,500 feet above the surrounding flatlands and attains a maximum altitude of nearly 5,000 feet, higher than the town of Banff—in fact, the highest elevation in Canada between the Rocky Mountain foothills and the mountains of Labrador. From this summit, a series of broken tablelands slouch downward across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border toward the Foot of the Mountain at Eastend. In all, the Cypress Hills encompass around a thousand square miles of magnificently varied terrain, a secret kingdom in the middle of a cactus plain.
Because of their abrupt rise above the surrounding prairie, the hill country experiences cooler temperatures and more precipitation than the dry lands at their base. Near the summit, conditions are ideal for conifers, including dark ranks of both jack and lodgepole pines, and for rare fescue grasslands. These isolated islands of habitat are occupied by isolated populations of birds and animals—white-throated sparrows, pine siskins, lynx, and elk—that are typically associated with the mountains and forests hundreds of miles to the west and north. At lower elevations, however, the boreal vegetation gives way to shining expanses of the ground-hugging grasses and wildflowers that are more typical of the northern plains. Wherever the land is broken, the hills have set a limit to the plow, and the wild prairie has been preserved as grazing land for cattle. As a result, the hills are an oasis of undisturbed prairie in a desert of plowed-up land and one of the most promising regions on the continent for grassland conservation.
Not surprisingly, the Cypress Hills are also celebrated across Saskatchewan as a beauty spot that everyone intends to visit, one day, soon, whenever they have a free weekend. But given the distance between this
