A Geography of Blood (5 page)

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 perhaps a threat. It reads:
T.rex Dead Ahead.

And there's our goal, set into the hillside and fronted by a sleek curtain of silvery glass. Officially opened in 2003 as a joint project of this jaunty little community and the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, the center houses the fossilized remains of “Scotty,” one of the most complete tyrannosaurus skeletons ever uncovered. Most of her bones (for, yes, Scotty turned out to be
regina
rather than
rex
) are stored, together with thousands of other wonders, in the state-of-the-art paleontology laboratory that's to your right as you enter the wide front doors. Even so, her terrible presence dominates the place. She bears down on you from the life-sized mural in the main display gallery, gape jawed and toothy. She leers from a nearby plinth, a disembodied head with cold snake eyes and scaly skin. If I were the triceratops displayed on a nearby bench, I'd seriously consider making a run for it.

Scotty was a Late Cretaceous predator that lived, and died, about sixty-five million years ago. Thereafter (until 1991, when a worn tooth and caudal vertebra were found protruding from the dirt) her mineralized bones lay entombed in a bleak, arid tributary of the Frenchman River, about half an hour's drive southeast of town. Officially known as Chambery Coulee, the quarry is fondly regarded by paleontologists as “the Supermarket of the Dinosaurs.” In and around Scotty's disarticulated bones lie the traces of an entire extinct world: fish scales, turtle skulls, champsosaur ribs, crocodile teeth, the frail tibiotarsus of a long-dead bird. Here, too, are the fragmented remains of
Edmontonsaurus saskatchewanensis
(the typical duck-billed dinosaur of the Late Cretaceous era) and of
Triceratops horridus
(sometimes crushed within fossilized T. rex dung). The triangular tooth of a pachycephalosaurus, the fang of a dromaeosaurid, or raptor.

It takes a few rounds of the gallery to begin to take everything in. These monstrous, fantastical beasts, with their horns and their fins and their bird-feet, had lived in a lush subtropical forest near the shore of an inland sea. They had lived and been buried
here.
And to think that I had been getting all tingly when I picked up echoes from my childhood or, across mere centuries, conjured up the vanished abundance of the buffalo prairie. Now I was being invited to stride lightly back over millions of years, to confront the final days of the Age of Reptiles. Relatively soon after Scotty died, a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico (near the present-day town of Chicxulub) with the force of a hundred million megatons of TNT, causing an apocalypse of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, incandescent ejecta, and a pall of ash and dust that enveloped the planet. This cataclysm marked the end of the terrible lizards.

And yet, out of this cosmic disaster, strange new life was born. Could it be that the mad genius of evolution is more ruthless and resourceful than we give it credit for? Perhaps, despite all of humanity's worst efforts and the extinction crisis that we are bringing down on our own heads, life will eventually flood the world with its new inventions, as beautiful and grotesque as those that have been lost to the ravages of the past. It's a brutal hope, but hope nonetheless.

At the T.rex Centre, crossing the threshold of mass extinction is as simple as stepping through a door. Leaving Scotty and Co. behind, we proceed through an archway and find ourselves circling around the spotlit skeleton of yet another gargantuan beast, this one sporting humped shoulders; a scooped-out, square-jawed skull; and a pair of bony spurs that sprout from what must have been its snout. A caption identifies it as a brontothere, or “thunder beast,” a long-vanished relative of the rhinoceros and the horse that lumbered around these hills for a thousand thousand years, sometime after the extinction of the dinosaurs. An artist's rendition across the back wall combines the torso of a hippo with the hide of an elephant and a lugubrious wattled head that only a mother brontothere could love. The animal stands in a broad savanna, near the edge of a meandering stream, delicately protruding its loose upper lip to browse on the leaves of a tree.

Again, we are asked to imagine this scene playing out
here.
If the major repository of dinosaur bones lies just south of town, fossils from the Age of Mammals have been discovered in a number of sites to the north, east, and west, all within easy reach of Eastend. Together, these deposits document the epoch immediately following the impact disaster and pick up the story again in the era of the brontotheres. From then on, beginning about forty-five million years before the present and continuing for thirty million more, the record is remarkably rich and continuous. The Calf Creek quarry, straight north of town, for example, has yielded teeth and bones from more than seven dozen mammalian species, including
Hesperocyon gregarius
(the oldest known member of the dog family), tiny bears, ancestral deerlets and pronghorns, camels, rhinos, three kinds of miniature three-toed horses, and two types of giant brontotheres. All are now extinct.

I have to admit that I didn't get all these facts straight on my first visit—there was too much oddity to absorb at once. In fact, even after several subsequent tours, I still wasn't sure that I understood what I was being told, so one day I stopped to chat with the center's paleontologist-in-residence, Tim Tokaryk. A big guy (“ex-football,” he explains), he occupies a cramped office just around the corner from the gift shop. Everything about his space—from the portrait of Darwin on the door to the shelves of learned volumes that crowd the walls—speaks of his dedication to science. What will he think of me if I ask him what I really want to know? Is it possible that the land around us remembers?

I watch Tim for signs of discomfort when I blurt out this embarrassing query, but he merely nods his head. “Within an hour's drive of town, I can hit almost a continuous seventy-five million years of vertebrate history,” he says matter-of-factly, “from the end of the Western Interior Seaway, through the Late Cretaceous and the extinction event, all the way to the Age of Mammals and the emergence of the grasslands. If you want a wonderful, wild, and wicked story about the past and the present, this is the place to come. We have to realize that we're the luckiest.”

After imbibing as much evolutionary excitement as we can handle, Keith and I often pause on the walkway outside the T.rex Centre to take in the view. See, just down below, there's our little house on the edge of town, with its proud new window, its apple tree, and its tidy chain-link fence. Back in the everyday world, the monstrous procession of life and death on display in the T.rex Centre fades into fantasy, as if it were a kind of scientifically sanctified freak show. And so it remained until one day, a few months after our arrival in Eastend, when the here and now cracked open, and cracked me open, too, and the profound strangeness of the real world crept under my skin.

We were out walking on the flat benchlands above the center—Keith and I, the dogs, and our grownup daughter, who had joined us for a few days. It was stinking hot, mid-August, so when we noticed the shimmer of water on a cutaway bank down below, we made a beeline for it, the dogs panting in the vanguard. In they all went, humans and canines alike, and no one else seemed to notice that the pond was green and slimy, with an oozy, muddy bottom that sucked up between your toes. As I watched my ankles disappear into the muck, I realized that there were worse fates than being hot. Surely, I thought, someone should sit up on the shore and watch the dogs, in case one of them tried to run off.

At first, all the bathers were happy to lie in the water, but after a while, one pesky dachshund (oh, they are wonderful trouble those dogs!) developed serious wanderlust. After retrieving her several times, I plopped myself down in the dirt, red faced and streaming with sweat. I had had it. So when the darn dog took off yet again, I found myself appealing in desperation to the fairies, the genius loci, the lares and penates, to whatever powers might be listening, to see if I could cut a deal. If I went after the runaway one more time, the world had to agree to show me something special.

With this illusory prospect in mind, I mustered the strength to stagger to my feet, as the dog tripped lightly up a scabby little erosion channel, heading for parts unknown. “I'm on your tail, mutt,” I muttered as I closed in on her rear. “And, this time, you're going on your leash.” But even as I attended to these practicalities, I kept scanning my surroundings, nurturing my heat-hazed hope. We'd cut a deal, hadn't we? I'd done my part—dog in hand—so where was my reward? In the ooze down below, where my family was still lolling? On these scabrous cutbanks or in this dried-up watercourse? It looked like I'd been skunked. Then, just as I was on the verge of returning to normalcy, I noticed something odd. A rock was poking out of the edge of the path, quite unlike anything else around. It was lumpy, gray-white, and ugly, about the size of my head. Idly, I wrestled it out of the earth and flipped it bottom-side up.

In an instant, I had forgotten about being put-upon and overheated. “You guys,” I shouted, as I hurried my companions out of the swamp. “You've got to come see this!”

We crouched in a circle around the rock, intent as children. There, protruding from the dry underside of a dry rock in a prairie gulch was a perfect fossilized clam. The hills had begun to show us their secrets.

{four} Ravenscrag Road

“No frontier is marked between the Western landscape and a country of fable.”

BERNARD DEVOTO,
Mark Twain's America,
1932

Although Keith and
I usually traveled to Eastend on our own, with our rabble of pets, we were always glad when friends or family paid us a visit. The pleasures of these hills were so abundant that there was plenty to go around, and we were eager to share our house with like-minded souls. Our most frequent guests were our daughters, one of whom had stood in the magic circle around the fossil shell, and the other of whom joined the party whenever she was able. It was this second daughter—a bright, practical soul, not given to morbid thoughts—who made an observation that ever since has echoed through my mind. She came into the house one morning, after a walk with the dogs, and said that the hills seemed sad to her. “It feels like something bad must have happened here.”

“Sad? Something bad?” I objected. “But it's so peaceful. So lyrical.” Hadn't she heard the pair of orioles chanting to one another at their nest? Hadn't she seen their miraculous silken basket swaying from a cottonwood branch? Hadn't she noticed the way the morning light was slanting down the valley, filling it to the brim?

She nodded in vague agreement, but her eyes were already skidding past me to gaze out the window at the river hills. “Maybe it's just the sense that so much has been happening here for so long. It's kind of spooky.”

And I have to admit that she is right: this land is filled with ghosts. Sometimes, especially when Keith and I are settling in for one of our long summer stays, I wake up to find myself troubled by an unaccountable melancholy. It lodges behind my breastbone, a dull, lumpen ache. That's when I, too, find myself staring out at the river hills and thinking about my own ghosts. That's when I think about my mother. She died of cancer on a beautiful day in June, and it wasn't until after she was gone that I began to understand how the view from my window, and the hills beyond, connected me with her.

That summer was a season of endings. My mother's death was echoed a few weeks later by the closing-out auction at my grandparents' farm south of Hanna, Alberta, a place I knew from her stories and from the few awkward visits we made there during my childhood. In recent years, I'd been trying to get her to go back with me, though she had been hard to convince. Once, we made it to the closest town but, with a mere three miles to go, we lost the scent—couldn't find the right road, too much had changed, she said—and after that she refused to try again. “Why would you want to go there?” one of my uncles asked. The place was being farmed by its owners-in-waiting, the local Hutterite colony, while the last of the Humphreys, my once dashing uncle, cowered inside the beat-up house, drinking himself to an early death.

And then my uncle was gone, and my mother, and the farm and all of its accoutrements—rows of rusty, disabled equipment set out at the foot of the ramshackle yard—were up for grabs by the highest bidder. What the Stegners had achieved in less than a decade had taken us a hundred years, yet here we were, at the end of days, in “our own special plot of failure.”
1

When my mother was dying, I know that she often returned to her childhood home in her thoughts. “I never told you very much about my mother,” she'd say, and this time it wasn't the witch who had tried to give her away to a neighbor that she needed to talk about. “All those babies, one after another, with no running water.” She paused, as if the very thought made her weary. “It must have been hell on earth.”

Standing in the weedy, dissolute farmyard on auction day, I'm glad that my mother isn't here to see strangers picking over the bones of her parents' life work. But there is one thing that I know would have raised her spirits, as it raises mine. Beyond the array of old junk, past the reach of the auctioneer's babble, across the stubble fields, along the horizon, sprawls a mottled, low-slung ridge. I know at once, as if by instinct, that what I am seeing is the Hand Hills, where my child-mother used to pick saskatoon berries and where she had once been threatened with groping, or worse, by a neighbor. “Dad,” she had shrieked, “Dad,” and her father had emerged from the berry bushes in time to rescue her. Although the hills had been erased from my memory—who knew that they were visible from the yard?—their presence must have lodged in my body when I visited as a child. I'd seen them again without knowing it when we arrived in Eastend and opened our house to them. The hills outside our window were the motherland.

And so off Keith and I set to court this other expanse of prairie and this other range of hills, more intent than ever on understanding where we were. As the circuit of our explorations broadened, we traveled with the road map in hand, one person as driver and the other as navigator. But even with this guidance, we often ended up flying by the seat of our pants, not entirely lost but pleasantly off the map. As long as we kept to the pavement, we usually knew where we were, but the instant a side road beckoned, luring us onto a dirt track and then to a rutted trail, jogging right, then left, then right, across a ford, past a farmyard, up and over a hill—well, who really needed to know exactly where we were? I still have the handwritten diagram of one of those early journeys, studded with exclamation points (“tall larkspurs, southeast slope, probably saline!” “4 wild boars!!” “a moose with a newborn calf, right out on the open prairie, way up on the top of a hill!!!”) and glossed with cheerful expressions of doubt (“somewhere,” “eventually,” “a bit confused here”).

Yet it was surprising how quickly we began to learn our way around. For one thing, even counting the dirt tracks and goat trails that we favored, there weren't actually many roads. Unlike the flatlands of the surrounding plains, with their mile-by-mile grid, the rumpled rise and fall of the hills had curtailed the road builders' ambitions. For the most part, traffic was directed along coulees and river valleys or around the foot of the hills, making the dendritic web of connections relatively easy to learn.

It also helped that our travels were rich in surprises and small adventures, each of which was charted on our mental maps. You see that scrubby field beside the highway? It may not look like much, but that's where a certain C. Savage was eaten alive by mosquitoes when she dared to venture through a glittering expanse of wild sunflowers. And that house, screened behind a windbreak just north of the Claydon grid, is not just any house. It's where our new friends Bob and Betty live with their troupe of eight wire-haired dachshunds. A mile or so to the south lies the ditch (twenty telephone poles from the corner) where we once found an injured ferruginous hawk—an endangered species—and called the conservation officer in Shaunavon who drove twenty-five miles to help, only to discover that the bird was too badly injured and had to be put to death. Week by week, month by month, the landscape was filling up with the sediment of our experiences.

Of all the trips that we have made around Eastend, my all-time, number-one favorite is a short jaunt to the west, to a place that was once a place but that now doesn't really exist. The hamlet of Ravenscrag, fourteen miles distant, formerly enjoyed all the amenities of rural life—three grain elevators, church and school, a pool hall, and a ladies' baseball team—but the last forty years have reduced it first to a ghost town and then to a plot of vacant lots that, today, serve as a staging ground for a large private farming operation. Yet through all these changes, the site has kept its charm. Like Eastend, Ravenscrag sits on the broad lap of the Frenchman Valley, encircled by unruly, misshapen hills. Looking at them, you could be forgiven for wondering if, long ago, a company of gargantuan green camels had stretched out to rest in a disorderly heap, all shoulders, noses, and knees, never again to rise from their stony dreams.

The most spectacular pleasure of this landscape, however, lies neither at Ravenscrag nor at Eastend but about halfway in between. Here, the hills on either side of the valley are drawn subtly together to define a broad-floored, walled-in trench. On the flatlands at the bottom, the river continues its drowsy meanders, leaving just enough space along its southern margin for a gravel road to scoot past. Up above, on both sides of the valley but especially to the north, steep, dissected cutbanks rise to clip the horizon, enclosing a river of sky. You could come this way a hundred times and catch these embankments in a hundred different moods, sometimes towering and majestic, sometimes hazy and withdrawn, sometimes outlined with snow so that their bones show.

But the rewards of this passage are not merely scenic; they can also be revelatory. During the research for my prairie book, I'd picked up a copy of something called
Field Trip Guidebook No. 6,
“Upper Cretaceous and Tertiary Stratigraphy and Paleontology of Southern Saskatchewan,” a slim volume that had been prepared for the post-conference delectation of visiting scientists in 1997. Despite its unpromising title and technical vocabulary—any bets on the nature of a “neoplagiaulacid” or a “polarity chron”?—the book turned out to be a little treasure. Almost the entire volume focused on the Cypress Hills, including the eroded headlands along the Ravenscrag road.

Granted, I missed many of the finer points under discussion, since a lot of it was over my head, but there was no mistaking the essence of what was being said. It seemed that the saga of the earth's history, the same stupendous story we had encountered in technicolor at the T.rex Centre, could also be read in the subtle earth tones of the valley between Ravenscrag and Eastend. According to the guidebook, the strata that were exposed there dated back some eighty million years, to the gray mudstones and siltstones that had formed on the bed of the Bearpaw Sea. (My mind flashed to the fossil clam, embedded in dark, fine-grained stone. Eighty million years ago: was it possible?) After that salty beginning, successive chapters were written in successive striations of grayish-yellow, milk white, mauve, greenish-brown, charcoal, gray, and tan, each bearing witness to an episode in the earth's long turmoil. The final retreat of salt water. The fallout from distant volcanoes. The emergence of Scotty and Co. The thin stratum of disaster. The swampy forests of the early Age of Mammals.

With
Guidebook No. 6
at my elbow, I summarized these teachings in my notebook as a simple, handwritten chart. The next time we headed for Ravenscrag, I took the page along, hopeful that it would enable me to decipher the strata for myself. But apart from the most obvious features—the chalky extrusions of the Whitemud Formation and the seventy meters of ancient lake bottom that formed the face of Ravenscrag Butte—I was still at a loss. All the same, I felt honored to sit on the roadside and contemplate this record of the creation of the earth, even if I wasn't able to decipher it chapter and verse.

Come to think of it, there was another feature—or the absence of a feature, really—that I
was
able to discern. The guidebook described what it called an “unconformity” at the very top of the cliffs. Apparently, after millions of years of archiving everything that happened by collecting sediments, the landscape had eventually been subjected to erosion by water and wind, with the result that a thousand meters of soil had been stripped from the surface. (How these folks could estimate the depth of the land that was missing by studying what remained was one of the fine points that escaped me.) As a result of this downgrading, there was a chronological break, or “hiatus,” between the sandstones of the Ravenscrag Formation (the second layer from the top) and the surface that overlaid them. With the aid of binoculars, I could see that the cliffs were surmounted in places by what the field guide identified as the Cypress Hills Formation, a coarse jumble of stones that had washed out of the young Rocky Mountains and been carried eastward and northeastward by great, gnashing rivers during the Miocene era. The disconnect between the Ravenscrag and Cypress Hills formations represented an erasure of about thirty million years. In other places, the round, river-washed stones were missing, and the banks were topped with debris and silt that had been dropped just a few thousand years ago by the retreating glaciers.

Yet to an unschooled eye, nothing looked amiss; one layer overlaid another in complete innocence. Apparently, an unconformity could exist between the present and what we knew of the past, and very few of us would ever notice it.

According to
Guidebook No. 6,
the whole of the Cypress Hills country, including the uplands along the Ravenscrag road, are an “erosional remnant” of a landscape that originally covered the surrounding plains. If the hills now stand hundreds of meters above the prairies, then hundreds of meters of earth must have been stripped away from everywhere else. I once buttonholed a geologist and asked him how something so inconceivable could have happened and where all the lost land had gone. He just shrugged and said that, in theory at least, it had either been carried north to the Arctic Ocean, via the creeks and rivers of the Saskatchewan drainage, or south to the Gulf of Mexico, through the Frenchman and the Missouri river system. That was probably why the hills had survived as hills, he said, because they lie midway between the two oceans, on the divide between major watersheds, and thus have been spared the full, relentless force of erosion.