thought of the day, a few years later, when I looked down on the prairie from an airplane and for the first time saw how the curvilinear contours of hill and valley, with their scribbled water courses, seemed to struggle against the straight lines of the surveyors’ rule. This wild and wonderful land was caught tight in a net, and my people, and others like them, had ensnared it.
And there was something else. On the homestead in the Peace River Country where my dad grew up, there was, and is, a piece of land known affectionately within the family as the Indian Quarter. Closer to a half-section in reality, it consists of a cultivated field bisected by a track that leads to a brushy ridge. Past this horizon, the land folds downward, through a tangle of aspen and spruce, to the wild currents of the Beaverlodge River. On the grassy ledge beside the water, the whole family often gathered together when I was a kid—a happy tribe of aunts, uncles, and cousins—to picnic and swim in summer or, when the ice was clear, to skate and drink hot chocolate on winter afternoons.
According to the family story, this spot had once been a favorite stopping place of the local Beaver Indians, who had continued to camp here until about 1910, when my pioneering great-grandfather and his sons had purchased the property from them. Like many family legends, this account is at least partly false, since treaty Indians at that time were not permitted to hold individual title to land. But whatever the truth of the matter, I was fascinated by the thought of those disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, enjoying ourselves, and they had vanished.
I’m not sure how old I was when this discomfort first coalesced into an image, though I may have been eight or nine. In my mind’s eye, I saw my late grandmother (think Queen Victoria in a housedress) crossing the field on the dirt track that led toward the riverbank. Opposite her, at a distance, a young Beaver woman (an Indian princess in buckskin) stood at the edge of the brush, as if she had just come up the hill from the water. The two women faced each other across the clearing, as diffident as stones. No matter how often I conjured them there, they never approached each other, and neither uttered a word. The silence that lay between them seemed impenetrable.
Nights passed, and days, and our two-week booking at the Stegner House was drawing to a close. Our van turned up, roadworthy, with a little time to spare, but to our surprise we no longer wanted to go anywhere. Keith had settled into a happy routine of reading in the backyard—summer having graced us with a brief return—or just sitting and looking across the creek at the sun-cured hills. The land was tawny, streaked with black in the gullies where brush flowed down the slopes, and it reminded him, in a distant way, of his East African boyhood.
Stay put, the quiet voice had told us. Pay attention to where you are. We were in Eastend, Saskatchewan, on the northernmost edge of the great North American plains. We were traveling through time, through memory, the invisible dimension.
And then, before we quite knew what had happened, our holiday had sped past, and we were back in the city, bound to our desks. Although we often spoke of our time in Eastend—I mean, really, a cappuccino bar in a beat-up prairie town, and coyotes singing in the dark, and the light spinning around the cottonwoods, and the lure of all those places we had tried to get to and hadn’t, and the unheralded sense of euphoria that had overtaken us by the time we left—despite all that, not to mention our unexpected immersion in the settlement saga and the connections with our own pasts, we had no expectation that we’d be coming back.
Yet when we hit the road the following summer on another of my grassland research tours, guess where we ended up? It seemed that all roads led to Eastend. When we noticed a tidy white bungalow for sale on Tamarack Street, a block north of the Stegner House—and when we bought it—we knew that we were hooked. This homely little town in its nest of wild hills had charmed us into putting down tentative roots. And all around, the bright wind whispered through the grass, speaking to us of reasons we didn’t yet understand.
{three} Digging In
This was, after all, the kind of landscape that demanded one’s attention.
BETH LADOW, The Medicine Line, 2001
By the time the house deal had gone through, it was September, and another prairie winter was drawing near. You could hear it in the metallic rattle of the cottonwoods across the alley from our new house; you could see it in the fiery red of the chokecherry bushes along the creek.
Our new house. All that fall and winter, whenever we had a free weekend, we filled our van to the gunnels with household paraphernalia, loaded up the dogs and headed for what had suddenly become our second home. In choosing a route for our travels, we were as unvarying as pilgrims. After an hour or so in the fast lane on the highway to Calgary, we left the mainstream at Rosetown to head south into a big silent country under a high blue sky. Merely to think about it now, sitting at my desk, makes my chest expand with breath, as if the only response to that light and space were to open into it.
From that moment on, the journey became easy, and we seemed to flow effortlessly downhill, first heading south to cross the impounded waters of the South Saskatchewan River, a liquid plain set among tawny slopes, and then on to the leafy valley city of Swift Current. From there it was west to Gull Lake, south to Shaunavon, and finally west again, proceeding step by diminishing step toward our destination.
From the beginning to the end of the journey—a good four hours of travel, with a few minutes added here and there as rest stops for humans and dogs—the landscape told and retold the same familiar story. The broad fields of stubble that spun by our windows represented the climax of the settlement saga, the triumphant end point of the mural in Jack’s Café, the payday of my own grandparents’ enterprise. Somewhere past Gull Lake, we passed a commemoration of the whole agricultural undertaking, painted in exact letters on the gable of a meticulously maintained barn: “Rolling View Farm,” it read, “1917.” It was as if the settlement experience marked the beginning of time.
Of the country’s longer past and its deep reservoirs of stories—memories of the Métis settlement that (unbeknownst to me on these early journeys) flourished briefly at the Saskatchewan River crossing; of the terrible battle that had taken place in the Red Ochre Hills, southwest of Swift Current, in 1866; or of the buffalo jump near Gull Lake that dates back thousands of years and once sustained hundreds of families—of these memories and so many others we did not hear a single word.
By the time we reached Shaunavon and the last, short, westward leg of our journey, the countryside had become assertively modern, with pump jacks feeding in the stubble like dazed, mechanical birds. Yet in the face of this evidence of “progress”—and who was I to knock it, whizzing along as I was in a gasoline-powered van?—I found my eyes wandering around and past these intrusions to consider the lay of the land. On the western horizon up ahead, the world was now rimmed by a blue rise of hills, which suggested that our destination was drawing close. Meanwhile, to the north of the road and to the south and then, at irregular intervals, here and there, near and farther afield, we found ourselves surrounded by a flotilla of strange landforms.
“Look,” I said to Keith, beside me in the driver’s seat, “those hills—they’re like whales, bigger than whales, stranded under the grass.”
“Eskers, drumlins, and kames,” he replied smartly. (He was an art historian: how did he know this stuff?) “That’s all I remember from A-level geography. Something to do with glaciers and the Ice Age.” Drumlins. That was it: I’d just been reading about them, as part of the research for the chapter on geological history in my prairie book.
“Hey,” I said, “I know about this. The geologists call it a swarm. We’re driving through a ten-thousand-year-old drumlin swarm.”
