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 rise of land and the cities where most of us live, relatively few people actually make the trek. Before our arrival in Eastend, Keith knew the hills only as a vague presence on the horizon as he sped along the Trans-Canada toward Calgary and Banff. As for me, despite spending most of my adult life in the province (I, too, had arrived here from Alberta in the early 1970s), I had visited the area only twice before, never this far south, and never for more than two or three days at a time. But brief as those earlier visits had been, both had been riveting. Who could forget the slither of dozens of shiny garter snakes exploding out of their hillside hibernaculum on the first warm day in spring? Or, at the other end of a different year, the hard stare of a cow moose, with her calf at her side, warning off intruders at the bottom of a tobogganing slide?
Fortunately, Keith and I have booked a two-week stay in Eastend at the Wallace Stegner House: “First turn on your left when you get into town—there’s a sign, so you can’t miss it—and there’ll be a key waiting for you in the front porch.” I’d seen the place advertised in a writers’ newsletter, so we knew that it was run by the Eastend Arts Council as a retreat where writers and other artists could pursue their creative interests. In the face of these lofty intentions, I blush to admit that what the place represented to us was two weeks of affordable accommodation. The only interests we intended to pursue were indolence and sloth, with the spice of excursions into the hills for excitement.
By the time we let ourselves into the house, all we could think of was sleep. Morning’s light revealed a trim one-and-half-story structure with narrow gables, painted a soft sage green and screened from the street by a dense stand of spruce trees. Inside, past a cozy veranda furnished with armchairs and crocheted throws, lay a small but comfortable parlor, a dining room with a lovely old oak table, and a tidy kitchen stocked with a useful miscellany of dishes