Contents
Prelude
We see them as a raven might see
them, from a distance.
The men walk single file, dark strokes etched
against an infinite plain of snow.
Behind them, a day’s straggling march to the south,
lie a cold prison cell and the grim
accusing faces of the Great Father’s blue-coated soldiers.
Ahead of them, if the spirits prove willing,
are friends and family, and the uncertain
embrace of the Great Mother and her red-coated police.
It is late November 1881, already
the dead of winter.
The men walk with the ghosts of the buffalo.
They are almost ghosts themselves.
The soldiers have taken their rifles and ammunition,
their torn lodges, their moccasins.
They are hungry. The snow stings their skin.
The police: it is hard to tell what the red coats
have taken, are taking. The truth.
Otapanihowin, the means of survival.
Black wings rasp against the frigid air.
Two men stumble, get up, fall.
The leader of the travelers, that Nekaneet
looks up, then looks ahead to the blue smudge
of hills on the horizon. That means, just like
if we walk, if you are ahead, you are
kani’kanit, the leader. Nekaneet is walking
north, walking home, walking into another day.
Somewhere up there in the distance,
you and I are waiting, hungry for stories.
{one} Getting There
. . . conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving . . .
GERTRUDE STEIN, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” 1935
Let’s just say that it all began when Keith and I took a trip. Keith is Keith Bell, my companion of going on twenty years, and it’s largely thanks to his love of travel that I’ve seen a bit of the world: the wild-and-woolly moors of Yorkshire, the plains of Tanzania, the barren reaches of Peninsula Valdés in Argentina. Yet the journey I want to tell you about was not a grand excursion to some exotic, faraway destination but a trip that brought us closer home. A nothing little ramble to nowheresville.
Remember what Thoreau once said about having “traveled a good deal in Concord,” that insignificant market town in which he was born and mostly lived? In an unintended riff on this Thoreauvian concept, Keith and I find that we have traveled a good deal in and around another insignificant dot on the map, a town called Eastend in our home province of Saskatchewan.
Eastend, population six hundred, lies about a thumb’s breadth north of the Canada–U.S. border and more or less equidistant from any place you’re likely to have heard of before. It’s in the twilight zone where the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan, a territory that leaves you fumbling with highway maps. But if you piece the pages together, south to north, east to west, and scribble a rough circle around the centers of population—Great Falls, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Billings, and back to Great Falls again—you’ll find Eastend somewhere in the middle, a speck in the Big Empty of the North American outback.
To explain how and why this out-of-the-way place has become so central to our lives, I need to take you back several years, to a day in late September of 2000. Keith was just embarking on a year-long sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as an art historian at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. As for me, I was supposed to be gathering forces to meet the most daunting challenge of my writing career. Earlier that summer, I had thrown common sense to the winds and agreed to prepare a natural history of the whole broad sweep of the western plains, from the Mississippi to the Rockies and from the llanos of Texas north to the wheat fields of Canada. By rights, I should have been at my desk day and night, or in the crypts of the science library, nose to the grindstone. What greater inducement could there be for hitting the open road?
Happily for my guilty conscience, the route we had chosen for our travels