And then it was spring, and life settled into a pattern that has served us well ever since. Although we spend most of our time in the city, we make a point of getting to Eastend at least once a month. During the university term, when Keith is occupied with lectures and meetings, we usually only manage three or four days at a time, but in summer, when the pressure is off, we often have the luxury of settling in for a span of weeks. Over the years, the balky old van to which we owe our Eastend adventure has given way to more reliable wheels, and the dogs who accompanied us on our early travels have all died and been replaced, sometimes in super-abundance. These days we are accompanied by two retrievers in the back seat and two dachshunds up front, with Calla the cat wedged in somewhere or other. In recent years, for longer stays we have rounded out the menagerie with two quarter horse geldings, Tanner and Tex, whom we tug along behind us in a horse trailer.
By the time we have reached our destination, delivered the horses to their rented pasture (an idyllic valley with a spring-fed creek), and settled in, Keith and I are usually content to sit and stare out our new window for an hour or two. But before long, the view, plus a barrage of canine entreaties, lures us out the door. Sometimes, we stroll down the back alley and across a narrow margin of grass to stand on the cutbank and gaze down into the slow, syrupy water of the Frenchman River. As a student of Wolf Willow, I know that Wallace Stegner stood on this very spot when he visited town on a reconnaissance mission in the early 1960s (shyly, slyly, giving his name as Mr. Page), impelled by “the queer adult compulsion to return to one’s beginnings.” 1 And it was here, electrified by the “tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native” musk of the wolf willow, that he reconnected with the “sensuous little savage” he had once been.2
For newcomers like us, however, the excitement is more immediate. Look, see that sudden shimmer down there in the water, by the old piling? It’s a beaver, a muskrat; no, it’s a mink, swimming upstream, impossibly black and shiny. Or follow the river back toward our house and west around the first bend, no more than a hundred steps, and stop on the bank again. Do you hear a catbird mewing in the bushes; notice the kingbirds hawking for insects from the low, overhanging branches; see the swallows, lithe as fish, slicing through the air? Try to follow their acrobatics with your binoculars and all you’ll get is blur. Barn swallows, check. Bank swallows, check. Tree swallows, check. Northern rough-winged swallows, check. Violet-green swallows, check. Who would ever have guessed that they could be so swift, so blue, so varied, so alive? So thrilling.
“Biodiversity” is a bloodless term but here it was, on the wing. The wild tangle of life along the creek bank offered a moment of grace, exempt from decline and loss, in which beauty coexisted with abundance. As a student of grassland ecology, I knew that this was a rare and privileged experience, a dispensation from the ecological tragedy of the Great Plains grasslands. Back in the city, my office was strewn with reports that attempted to quantify everything that had been lost: number of acres given over to cultivation, percentage of wetlands drained, the extent to which prairie rivers have been channelized or curtailed. Other documents tallied the body counts of the disappeared and the dead—plains grizzlies, plains wolves, pronghorns, prairie dogs, prairie chickens, sage grouse—all the special creatures of the grasslands that are either long gone or grievously diminished in numbers.
Leading the list is the plains buffalo, known with scientific insistence as Bison bison bison, an animal whose hair was once woven into every bird’s nest, whose hooves aerated the tough prairie sod, and whose flesh fed tribes of hunters, both two- and four-legged. Massed into herds of hundreds and thousands, the buffalo flowed across the landscape, eating on the run, and creating a textured mosaic of grazed and ungrazed habitats. Diverse habitats for the prairie’s diverse organisms. Even the buffalo’s dung played a role by helping to sustain the invisible universe of the soil.
The special genius of the grassland ecosystem is its ability to ride the extremes of a midcontinental climate—a meteorological rollercoaster of blazing heat, brutal cold, sudden downpours, and decades-long droughts—by storing precious moisture and nutrients in the ground. As much as ninety percent of the biological activity in the grasslands takes place in the soil. When this life force puts up shoots, the vegetation may look meager and stunted, but it is bursting with energy. The power of the soil, the wind, and the rain is concentrated in every leathery shrub and every blade of sun-cured grass. Transferred up the food chain, this vitality takes on animal form and becomes manifest in the blue of a butterfly, the bright eye of a snake, the eerie voice of a curlew echoing over a lonely landscape.
But the truest expression of the grasslands, without any doubt, was the buffalo. What would it have been like to put your ear to the ground and feel the rumbling vibration of thousands of hooves running across the plains, somewhere out of sight? What if we could step back a lifetime or two, to 1873, and ride south from the Cypress Hills, day after day for a week, with buffalo on all sides?
The great herd running away,
The buffalo running,
Their drumming hooves
Send dust clouds billowing to the sky
And promise good hunting
The buffalo and her child approaching,
Mother and Calf coming
Turned back from the herd,
Promise abundance.3
Once the heart and soul of the prairie ecosystem, the buffalo is now described by scientists with the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “ecologically extinct.” Although today’s herds number in the tens of thousands, virtually all of the survivors endure a hemmed-in, semidomesticated existence as commercial livestock and park specimens.
Worse yet is the news that damage to prairie ecosystems is not limited to the past. Even now, the populations of grassland birds—from chestnut-collared longspurs to Sprague’s pipits and from bobolinks to burrowing owls—are decreasing year by year, exhibiting faster and more consistent declines than any other similar habitat group. The latest data indicate that aerial insectivores, including the nighthawks that dart over Eastend on summer evenings and the swallows that dance along the creek, are also experiencing a calamity. Nobody knows why the populations of these species have dropped so sharply, but the general consensus is that the remaining grasslands are so impoverished that they can no longer provide the birds with what they need to survive in abundance.
And yet here in the Frenchman Valley, the mink are still side-slipping into the moist grasses at the edge of the water the way they have always done, and the rough-winged swallows nest in cutbanks along the river just as they did when Wallace Stegner was young. Despite everything that has been lost and everything we are now losing, the landscape around Eastend remains radiant with life. Imagine walking down the main drag at dusk and looking up to the beat of powerful white wings, as a flight of swans whooshes low overhead, following the course of the street. Imagine the hollow hoo-hoo-hooing of great horned owls in the trees outside your house. Breathe in and fill your lungs with reassurance. Breathe out and exhale your grief. Give yourself permission to walk in beauty.
The buffalo ecosystem—the wild prairie—is irreclaimably lost and gone, but its spirit continues to linger in the hills and valleys around Eastend. If my initial experience of the town had brought on a bout of childhood nostalgia, our encounters with the life along the creekside invoked a deeper, earthier past. And Eastend had another source of consolation to offer, though I didn’t recognize it as such at first. After all, you don’t typically expect to find comfort in a dinosaur museum. The T.rex Discovery Centre is Eastend’s marquee attraction, and like everything else in town, it is an easy few minutes’ walk from our house. To get there, you simply walk out the back door and down the alley (past the old swimming hole and Stegner’s childhood home), take a sharp turn to the right, and cross the river on an old iron bridge. At a T-junction, a yellow-and-black traffic sign may urge you to continue up the north hill, with a promise or