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Preparations for the journey posed no great problem. Angus had taken good care of my camping and travel gear during my absence and all I needed to do was dust it off; but the requirements of science were more demanding. Although any enthusiasm I might once have had for killing other creatures had evaporated in the carnage of war, I knew I would still have to do some ”collecting.” Every species listed in my
Birds of Saskatchewan
would have to be substantiated by at least one ”study skin” preserved in the catacombs of a reputable scientific establishment. So, like it or not I had to provide myself with an armoury of guns and
ammunition, and with all the rest of the mortuary paraphernalia of a scientific investigator.

On April 11 I took possession of a spanking-new Jeep with
LULU BELLE MK IV
emblazoned in big black letters across the bottom of her fold-down windshield. The owner of the Willys dealership apologized because she was not equipped even with a canvas top. ”Be pretty unprotected – windy and wet,” he said dubiously.

”Gloriously unprotected!” I replied and drove happily away.

On April 20, 1946, I officially ceased to be a serving member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, and on May 2 began my odyssey.

Lulu Belle got under way at 0700 hours on a drizzly spring morning with me hunkered down behind the wheel in the old army uniform I was sentimentally wearing. We ambled westward at a sedate 40 mph, the recommended speed for cars of that era while they were being ”broken in.”

All went well until we reached the U.S. border at Sarnia, where two armed U.S. immigration officers warily approached. Their caution may have been due to never before having encountered a soldier wearing half-Wellington boots, khaki serge trousers, a scruffy British battledress tunic with the 8th Army crusader shoulder patches, a bright red silk scarf around his neck, and a peaked, go-to-hell military cap perched jauntily on the back of his head. The unusual colour of my Jeep may also have contributed to their unease.

”Just who might you be, mister?” one of them demanded. ”Whatta ya got in that there Jeep?” the other asked.

They were joined by three customs officers, and the quintet surrounded me, watching suspiciously as, under their orders, I unloaded every blessed thing from the Jeep and spread it out for their inspection. They paid particular attention to my shotgun, to a pump-action .22 rifle, and to a smooth-bore .32 with a sawed-off barrel. My explanation that this arsenal was for collecting scientific specimens in Saskatchewan did not go over well, and I might have been in real trouble had not their supervisor, who had briefly been a liaison officer to the British 8th Army in Italy and liked ”the Limeys,” appeared. He was also an amateur ornithologist. The gods were smiling.

The supervisor waved me on with a friendly warning.

”If I was you, Cap, I’d get me some different duds going through the States. Some bonehead could take you for a Commie Russkie, and that would not be good.”

Because I was too tired to bother pitching my tent, I spent that night in a tourist cabin in northern Michigan. The café associated with the place served me a gargantuan supper built around an enormous steak surrounded by fat sausages, giant baked potatoes, and mountains of beets, carrots, and something called succotash, the whole crowned by three fried eggs.

”Do people actually eat all this?” I asked the waitress in awe.

”Mostly they don’t; but we gotta give big servings or we lose the custom.”

This was something to think about at a time when meats and many other foods were still rationed in Canada, and when most of the world’s peoples were going hungry. However, such profligacy did have a positive side, as I learned when the owner of the place suggested I park Lulu Belle in his pig run
overnight in order to ensure her contents would be protected from thieves.

”I feed them hogs the swill from the caff,” he told me. ”Makes ’em big as bars and just as yeasty. They’ll put the run on anything comes near their trough.”

He may have meant ”feisty,” but he was right on the other two counts. It took me twenty minutes the next morning to get aboard Lulu Belle without losing a leg.

Trundling sedately westward, it took two more days to reach and cross the border into Saskatchewan, my Promised Land, where I was greeted by a blinding snowstorm. When I pulled up to the only garage in the village of Yellow Grass, a gaunt young man swung open a pair of double doors and beckoned me to drive on in.

”Geez, chum, you look half froze! Come and have coffee with Milt and me – he’s my brother – and maybe a squirt of something into it.”

The brothers Fred and Milt were veterans of the Saskatchewan Light Infantry, an outfit my regiment had served with at Monte Cassino and elsewhere in Italy. Upon being demobbed six months earlier, they had pooled their small resources and bought the White Rose station in their home town. The easy acceptance by fellow servicemen was good for my weary heart and was to be found frequently across the continent in those first post-war years.

”This place looked like a good way to start on civvy street. But last month a big shot from Regina – owns about ten thousand acres of wheat land – started building a new garage here big enough to handle a squadron of Sherman tanks. Going to give it to one of his sons, a fellow our age who run
some of his pappy’s farms while we was overseas. So it’s going to be hard times. Don’t know can we make it, but we’ll sure give them stay-at-home bastards a run for their money!”

The storm got worse so we stabled Lulu in the garage for the night then drove to a wind-whipped little house where Fred’s pregnant English war bride gave us supper. Later we shared memories of London during the Blitz and polished off a bottle of my rum. Before we went to bed Fred said thoughtfully:

”Funny thing. Milt and me hung in over there four goddamn years fighting for our homes and country, so they told us, and all the time itching to get back to Yellow Grass. When we
did
get back it looked about the same. Only turned out it weren’t ours any more. Maybe we shoulda stayed right here to do our fighting?”

During the night the storm blew itself out and the rising sun melted the snow. As I drove on north, the long-anticipated world of meadowlarks on fence posts, tumbleweed in ditches, gophers whistling from far-spreading fields, and greenhead mallards quacking from roadside pools, revealed itself. I was back among the Others, but I was not as pleased as I should have been. I was experiencing something akin to the uncertainty of a lover hastening to a long-deferred rendezvous, apprehensive about what might await him though in a tearing hurry to find out.

I drove until late that night then caught a couple of hours’ sleep while wrapped in a blanket beside Lulu Belle and at dawn was on my way again. It was May 7. On the twelfth, I would turn twenty-five and I was determined to celebrate my birthday in that fondly remembered poplar bluff near Dundurn.

It was late afternoon before I reached the deeply rutted trail leading to my old camping place. By then the darkling sky was leaden and smeared with snow flurries. The wind blew from winter, not from spring.

And nothing was as it had once been.

Although the long drought had eased, dreadful scars remained. Surrounded by dead and broken cattails flailing in the raw wind, Big Slough was nearly dry. The prairie beyond looked as lifeless as stubble on a dead man’s cheek. No throbbing flocks of waterfowl greeted me, and there were few smaller birds. Even the ubiquitous gophers seemed to have all but vanished. I wrote in my journal:

If nature failed to welcome me back, humanity proved no kinder. As night fell I drove to the officers’ mess of the army camp on the nearby military reserve. Anticipating a comradely reception, I was instead met with suspicion from a handful of career officers who had fought
their
war in Canada.

As I was driving away, a private guarding the gate kindly told me about an empty shack a mile down the road.

”Got a stove and all. Radio says there’s a storm coming and you could freeze your balls off if you pitch a tent tonight.”

The twelve-by-twelve-foot shack proved to be so superior to a tent that I set up housekeeping in it in preparation for re-familiarizing myself with the surrounding country.

Next day I visited a coulee that had hosted a small stream when I had known it before. The stream had been reduced to a string of puddles, except where a dirt causeway spanned it. Here I was delighted to find a good-sized pond jam-packed with migrant ducks. At Lulu’s approach they took to flight with a roar of wings.

It was the kind of welcome I had been looking for. When I jumped out of Lulu to investigate this watery oasis, I found that someone had stoppered the large culvert that pierced the causeway. I assumed the ”someone” was a farmer providing a waterhole for his cattle until I heard a crack as loud as a rifle shot and beheld a large beaver thrusting its flat head above water, perhaps to see what had made the ducks take flight.

I could scarcely believe my eyes. A beaver had no business out here on the bald-headed prairie! How could such a woodland creature possibly exist in this parched and almost treeless land?

It was a mystery to me until I met Bill Evans. A dirt farmer with a quarter section of land up against the reserve, Bill had been able to survive the Depression and the drought only because the military paid him to maintain its fences. Bill explained about the beavers.

”Them furry buggers! I don’t know where they came from or when. They was here when I homesteaded just after
the big War. Them times there was lots of poplar bluffs and willow swales for beavers to feed on and enough rain to keep things nice and green.

”When the drought come on in the thirties, it was tough going for all hands. The sloughs and cricks dried up so then the beavers took to building dams, something they’d never done here before. Never had to, I reckon.

”Well that was fine ’cause the cattle could drink at their ponds and kids could swim there. Beavers and us got along good until your war started. Pretty soon the army started all sorts of training around here. Trucks and troops and tanks running all over the country, shooting off big guns, tearing up the prairie, knocking down the bluffs.

”There used to be lots of deer around but they soon got shot off by trigger-happy soldiers. So did the jackrabbits, coyotes, and lots of other critters, including most of the beavers. By the end of the war there was just a couple beaver families left.

”One day the camp got a new gung-ho colonel. He called me in and told me to open up the culvert under the road that the beavers had plugged, in case there might be a flash flood that would wash the road away. I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening and I said so. ‘You just do as you’re damn well told!’ he told me, and so I done it.

”My boys and me spent the best part of a week with shovels and picks and crowbars unplugging that culvert. The pond drained out and the beavers was left high and dry. Not for long though. A week later the dam was back – not so good as before but good enough to hold the runoff from the only rain we had that summer.

”I’da let the new dam be but the colonel came down on me again so we tore it out. The beavers built it back. And that’s how it went till the hard frosts set in and we all had to quit for the winter.

”Come spring when we busted the dam again the beavers started fighting back.

”The reserve’s always been well fenced with barbed wire strung on posts of lodgepole pine brought all the way from British Columbia. All first-class stuff but now we couldn’t keep fences up at all. The beavers were going for the posts tooth and nail. And not because they had any use for them. There was no bark on them for them to eat, and they couldn’t drag them off to use for dams ’cause they was all bound together by three strands of barbed wire nailed into them.

”Why did the beavers do it then? I believe they chewed down every damn fence post they could find to get even with us. If ’twas revenge they was after it didn’t work against me and the boys ’cause we was
paid
for putting the fences back up. And the posts the beavers cut down made the best winter firewood we ever had.

”So we had our own little war right here on the reserve. Fast as we’d put up new posts, the beavers would chop them down. It never come to blows, though it come close. One time my son Jack and me was driving our old truck across the prairie when we come upon a pack of
four
big beavers chewing down fence posts. We stopped the truck and got out and run toward them, yelling at them to get the hell out of it. They must have been really pissed off because what
they
did was come running right for us!

”We never had no guns with us so we hopped back into the truck pretty smart. I suppose we could have run them
over with it but that didn’t seem just right so we drove on home and left them to it.

”Last summer the camp began closing down ’cause your war was over. The colonel went away and the major left in charge didn’t give a hoot about the beaver dam so we stopped pulling it apart. Right away the beavers stopped chewing down the fence posts.

”Who won? Well, I guess you could say it was even-steven ’cause them and us is both still here.”

One day Lulu and I went to Proctor’s Lake, which lay in an incipient desert of parched grass and blowing sand twelve miles to the south of my shanty. It turned out to be another vast alkaline slough with a wide foreshore of sun-baked mud between it and a surrounding fringe of bulrushes and reeds, but it had water in it, making it one of the few functioning waterholes for miles around.