Otherwise (10 page)

Katherine, the eldest daughter, would sometimes sing along with the scratchy voice coming from the Victrola’s horn. Her extraordinarily inventive renditions of arias from
Aida
remain with me long after the best efforts of the Metropolitan Opera Company have faded from memory.

Frank, whose boast was that he never missed an opportunity to collect a new mammal, quickly became interested in Katherine, who one day responded by inviting him to accompany her to the village of Carlton, fifteen miles away across an ocean of shimmering prairie. She volunteered to drive Frank there in the Rahiers’ automobile, a 1919 McLaughlin-Buick touring car whose superstructure (including windshield and doors) had long since vanished. So had the seats, to be replaced by wooden slats. When all six cylinders were firing, this massive vehicle could attain a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. This was quite fast enough because the car had only one functional brake – a handbrake – on just one of its wooden-spoked wheels.

Frank offered to drive but Katherine would have none of that. The pair set off in a cloud of yellow dust and we saw nothing more of them until late next morning when Frank appeared at camp subdued and chastened and reluctant to talk about his experience. We eventually learned that he and Katherine had surprised a coyote on the track that passed for a road. Frank did not yet have a coyote in his collection and desperately wanted this one so, eager to oblige, Katherine had wheeled the car out of the ruts and headed it off across the prairie in pursuit.

Wildly bouncing into and out of gopher and badger holes, flinging dirt and tumbleweed in all directions, they were gaining on the coyote when it reversed its course and disappeared. Katherine hauled on the brake handle, which made the big car slew sideways so abruptly that a wheel
broke and Frank was flung out of the car and into a patch of Russian thistle – nature’s version of barbed wire.

Frank and Katherine walked the ten miles back to the farm, where, without a word of censure or complaint, Servais hitched up the ox and went off to haul the car back home. Then he and the boys carved new spokes for the broken wheel. Two days later the old vehicle was back in service.

During the remainder of our stay, Frank concentrated on four-legged mammals, which were in great abundance at Fort Carlton. But then there are few places in the world where small mammals are not abundant, though humans are generally unaware of this because most four-legged creatures are too small or of too little monetary worth to merit our attention.

As a case in point, the places we visited in Saskatch e-wan were home to some sixty different mammalian species. Rodents alone included meadow jumping mice, woodland jumping mice, pocket mice, house mice, deer mice, white-footed mice, grasshopper mice, harvest mice, red-backed voles, meadow voles, sage voles, prairie voles, blond-faced voles, heather voles, bog lemmings, kangaroo rats, wood rats, Norway rats, pocket gophers, flying squirrels, red squirrels, grey squirrels, fox squirrels, prairie dogs, pocket gophers, wood gophers, common gophers, striped gophers, chipmunks, muskrats, beaver, cottontail rabbits, snowshoe rabbits, and jackrabbits.

Then there were the members of the shrew family: short-eared shrews, arctic shrews, masked shrews, prairie shrews, dusky shrews, the truly diminutive pygmy shrews (half a dozen of which weigh less than an ounce), and water shrews
(creatures smaller than one’s little finger living, as the name implies, in and under the water).

All are preyed upon by martens, ermines, minks, otters, long-tailed weasels, least weasels, black-footed ferrets, red foxes, kit foxes, black (silver) foxes, badgers, and coyotes.

To be added to the list are the mammalian aeronauts. Those living in Saskatchewan include the big brown bat, little brown bat, silver-haired bat, red bat, hoary bat, long-eared bat, and small-footed bat.

The little people of the mammalian world were almost un believably abundant a century ago when a single acre of virgin prairie could harbour thousands of shrews, mice, voles, ground squirrels, and their ilk. However, their once-thriving communities have since been decimated by the destruction of their habitat, by deliberate poisoning and trapping campaigns, and ”incidentally” by herbicides and insecticides.

During the summer of 1939 we four budding scientists did our bit to hasten the decline. Fort Carlton’s primary attraction for us was that it was the ”type locality” for two species of ground squirrels.

In 1825, John Richardson, second-in-command of a Royal Naval expedition charged with making a land-based exploration of the coast of the central Arctic, was delayed at Fort Carlton for a few days while en route north. Typical of his kind and of his times, Richardson amused himself by wandering around shooting whatever creatures came within range. Among his trophies were two small mammals which, when sent to London, turned out to be unknown to science. British zoologists christened them Richardson’s Ground Squirrel and Franklin’s Ground Squirrel.

Europeans who later settled the prairies called them wood gophers and common gophers and, because those fed on grasses (including grains), stigmatized them as worthless vermin and spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to eradicate them.

For us, however, they had real commercial potential. Scientific collectors paid handsomely (and still do) for type specimens –
topotypes
they are called – and since nobody had collected topotypes at Fort Carlton since Richardson’s visit we hoped, as my journal attests, to make a killing there.

O
ur next station was near Dundurn, some eighty miles south, where I had spent my bittersweet sixteenth birthday. Now, in early August of 1939, Murray Robb and I, accompanied this time by two new companions, again pitched our tent in the same magical place.

Although the Big Slough had become little more than a vast alkaline puddle it still nurtured abundant life. Around and beyond it the shortgrass prairie, including a military preserve and an Indian reservation, had escaped the settlers’ plows and so still provided a home to many of its original inhabitants, except buffalo, wolves, and prong-horned antelope, all of whom had been exterminated by modern man.

The survival of this oasis seemed something of a miracle. Not far from our camp stood a monumental example of the forces that had been deployed against it – an abandoned steam tractor almost as big as a turn-of-the-century locomotive,
whose iron-cleated drive wheels ten feet in diameter and five feet wide had once provided traction to haul a gang plow capable of scalping fifty acres of native grassland every day.

Thirty years earlier this clanking invader had been mysteriously halted at the border of the Indian Reserve and had never moved again. Summer storms and winter blizzards had conspired to rust its mighty shafts and wheels into permanent immobility. It stood (and for all I know may still stand) as a monstrous testimonial to mankind’s relentless efforts to reshape the natural world.

Grain fields stretched to the horizon south and west of the dead monster. Seed planted in them that spring had sprouted, but the young stalks had grown only a few inches before drought withered them. To the north and east, however, the native prairie grasses had survived. Although a hot wind rippled through them, they bent before it and rose again when it had passed.

The south and west was now an incipient desert – a man-made one – while to the north and east lay a parched but living world in which Harris, Murray, and I assumed the role of the Grim Reaper.

With August drawing on, our time was running short so we decided to spend what remained to us ”investigating” a rolling plateau not far from the U.S. border. Straddling the boundary between Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Cypress Hills rise some two thousand feet above the surrounding prairies, achieving the highest elevation in mainland Canada between British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains and the Torngat peaks of Labrador. A fertile island in the prairie sea,
the Cypress Hills once supported a verdant sprawl of pine, spruce, birch, and poplar copses that were home to an enormous assemblage of plants and animals.

Their survival and variety was due largely to the fact that all through the last great continental glaciation (which ended about twelve thousand years ago) the Cypress Hills miraculously remained ice-free, a haven for all living things. During the short time we had to prowl its high plateau, we found the bones of bison, the horns of big-horned sheep, a puma’s jaw, and part of the skull of what must have been one of the last of the Great Plains grizzly bears – now fabulous creatures who had still been at home here when the first Europeans arrived.

The Cypress Hills had also been a haven for aboriginal people. As late as the nineteenth century, when the Indians of what would become the western United States were being harried toward extinction, many came here seeking sanctuary. They did not always find it. In 1873, thirty-six Indians fleeing the U.S. Army’s genocide were massacred here by marauding American bounty hunters. But, in 1875 the Canadian government sent the newly formed Northwest Mounted Police to the Cypress Hills to build wooden-walled Fort Walsh as a bastion against American incursions. To the surprise of all concerned, Fort Walsh and its handful of defenders managed to do the job.

My journal has this description of
our
meeting with the successors of the
NWMP
upon
our
arrival at the Cypress Hills.

Soon thereafter Frank and I made an expedition of our own to the U.S. border, looking for a prairie dog town we had heard about.