Perfection of the Morning (3 page)

What I could remember about that natural world from which our family had been separated by so little was a combination of smells, the feel of the air, a sense of the presence of Nature as a living entity all around me. All of that had been deeply imprinted in me, but more in the blood and bone and muscles—an instinctive memory—than a precise memory of events or people. I remembered it with my body, or maybe I remembered it with another sense for which we have no name but is no less real for that. As I returned to the ranch and hay farm to visit, the sense of this memory grew; I found myself inexorably drawn to it although I did not understand this at the time, preferring to accept the obvious romantic scenario of marrying and living happily ever after.

If I could recover my powerful early connections with Nature, there was still the reality that as I became a town and then a city child, I had stopped thinking of Nature as people raised in it do and began to think of it as urban people do: as a place to holiday—the mountains, the seaside, a quiet lake somewhere in the country—as a place to acquire a suntan, have a summer romance, paint a picture of, enjoy a change of atmosphere. For a long period in my late teens
and early twenties, I actively avoided picnics, complaining bitterly that they were stupid since there were always dirt and bugs and leaves in your food and insects to bite you, and although they were supposed to be a holiday, picnics were more work for us women than cooking a meal in the kitchen would be.

Besides, for a girl born in the bush into relative poverty who, for whatever reasons, had learned to aspire to a more glamorous lifestyle—at six, never having seen a dancer other than my father stepdancing late at night at a farmhouse party somewhere—I wanted to be a ballet dancer; I wanted to wear satin ballgowns, go to the theater, have movie stars for friends. I did not want to go back to the bush, a place so terrible that my mother, once we were gone from there, wouldn’t even speak of it. When I asked about it when she was an old woman, she told me that she tried never to think of it, and on her deathbed, when I asked again, her response came in a distant whisper, her eyes dark and fixed on something I couldn’t see: “It was so cold…the wind was always blowing…in the morning…the men would…put on their things and go out…” She fell into silence and I regretted asking her, and yet I wanted to know, I truly wanted to know.

There was indeed a whole other story, a narrative, our family history transformed into our family mythology, which was what I had grown into since the other—the compelling, intense beauty of Nature and our lives lived in the midst of it—was never spoken of, never even conceived of in any concrete way in all the years since we’d left. Our father said nothing; our mother painted golden pictures of her girlhood on the prosperous farm in Manitoba, which I at least doubted, although I never dared say so. (And a good thing, too, because long after her death, when I paid my only visit there, I saw that they had all been true.) We had come
from better things—land ownership and wealth, ancient heroism, blood links to the aristocracy in Ireland and Scotland—our fortunes had fallen, but we as people had not fallen with them, and consequently we did not dwell on the hardships, the misfortunes, the demeaning struggles for survival, refusing to accept them as anything more than temporary conditions to be met with courage and disdain.

I think, in accepting about our family history what I was told, I was often confused by the contrast between it and the life I had lived. I couldn’t doubt what my mother said, yet these ancient family memories were no more to me than fairy tales. (As I grew older, in fact, I persisted in identifying with my father’s family.) I was too young at the time to have been able to keep clear mental pictures of my own of our life in the bush into which I was born, but from my own diffuse memories in combination with our few ragged black-and-white snapshots, and eventually our mother’s mother’s memoirs, the images I knew were not inviting. The family stories, not often mentioned, were about hardship: people hurt or ill or losing or having babies, doctors miles away over bad or impassable roads and stories about survival in the cold; about the hard, hard labor of the men to provide the most meager kind of existence for us under conditions that were often heartbreaking, the most instructive of these being how, according to our grandmother’s memoirs, during the Depression when our families ran out of cash, our father and our mother’s father would spend an entire day in the bush cutting a couple of cords of firewood which they would take to town and sell for one dollar and fifty cents a cord. And once our grandfather had to carry one hundred pounds of flour on his back a mile and a half through the water and bog that had swallowed the road into his and our grandmother’s log house.

But there also had been much laughter. Our mother and our aunts sometimes talked, when we were young, about the funny things that had happened, the practical jokes, the visiting with neighbors; there was even much laughter about the hardship, trailing off into muted smiles and finally silence freighted with a painful and, it seemed to me, confused nostalgia.

Even though that past which had become somehow shameful was hardly ever mentioned—such a fall it was for our mother and her family—as I grew up this was what I remembered. It had become far more important than the other—the life lived so close to Nature—which also was never spoken of. (Although I remember our mother, in her seventies at the time, saying in a dreamy voice with a faint smile, how our father “used to shoot ptarmigan.” “Really? Ptarmigan?” I said. She looked at me, her distant smile vanishing, returned to her small house in Saskatoon where we sat together. “I think it was ptarmigan,” she said. “I think it was your father.”)

By the time I was twenty I had developed contempt for those who wanted to return to Nature, believing they were all romantic dreamers, nitwits from the city, people raised in the lap of luxury who did not know about Nature’s nasty side, who had never done a day’s real work in their lives and thus had no idea of the grinding labor a life in Nature demanded for mere survival. I liked to look at Impressionist paintings of Nature, having once harbored the dream of becoming a painter, and I was not averse to sunsets or moonlight on water, but I was just as happy to look at pictures of them while seated on a soft couch, with my feet on a thick rug and a well-insulated wall between me and the thing itself.

Yet driving home from some errand in Regina, late at night on a deserted and lonely highway, I often looked out my side window and saw above the hills a few small white stars, points of light in
boundless darkness. Once, as I gazed up at them, my heart, a live thing in my chest, leaped, cracked and then hung there, aching. At that moment it seemed a thing apart from the
me
I knew, and it yearned with an intensity that was deeply sorrowful to go back to the immensity from which it declared itself to have come.

And, driving down for short visits in the year before our marriage, I used to wait for that first moment when I neared the ranch, when the country seemed to open up, and I saw again the wide fields of native grass cured, very quickly even after that wet, green spring, to a pale yellow by the sun, for with that sight came the much longed-for lifting of my heart, a metaphorical unfurrowing of my brow, the easing of my muscles, and the city life, my studies, my urban concerns fell away from me. It was as if in that magnificent spread of pure light across the grassy miles I could breathe freely for the first time since childhood.

Peter and I decided very soon after my first visit here that we would marry, but we both agreed, each for our own reasons, that it would be better to wait till the following spring. The winter was a long one, and at Christmas, leaving behind the round of parties and my long, silky dresses, I drove down with Sean to spend the week with Peter on the ranch.

It was my first lesson in the realities of ranching life. Although none of this made clear sense to me at the time, every winter the Butalas, on horseback, trailed their cattle the forty miles from the ranch northeast to the hay farm where there was shelter in the breaks of the Frenchman River and a winter’s supply of hay and grain bales. Every spring they trailed them back south to spend late spring, summer and fall on the ranch where the great fields of grazing land were. Each move took three days, and sometimes four,
since they were willing to travel at a pace comfortable to the cattle.

Peter took it for granted that I would do this without questioning it, and since I had no idea what I was getting into, I naively didn’t. I got up one morning and soon found myself, with Sean beside me, driving the half-ton loaded with square bales behind a four-hundred-head herd of twelve-hundred-pound range cows and two- and three-year-old steers and heifers. Between the half-ton and the herd were four men on horseback, and out of sight up ahead, another led the way in the four-wheel-drive ton truck.

I had never seen anybody move cattle before, and I knew nothing about range cattle. Peter’s cattle were (and are) horned Herefords, beautiful, powerful animals whose strong white horns can kill with one well-aimed thrust, but I hardly knew enough to be afraid of them. Except in the most vague sense, I did not know where we were going—to a road allowance somewhere where we’d pen them for the night—or even very clearly why. I was in a kind of culture shock, at once bewildered, frightened, excited.

That winter there was an unusually large amount of snow which was in places, even out on the open and windswept plains, very deep. Since we were crossing uninhabited grassland that first day, our progress was slow because of it. All that first day, I drove through that frigid air, in the middle of what seemed to be nowhere, far from houses or barns or people, picking my way carefully through the deep snow, getting stuck occasionally when, recognizing by the roaring motor I was in trouble, Peter would ride back, dismount, and drive the truck out for me. After three or four rescues, I learned from him how to do it myself. It had been cold when we started out in the morning, but as the day wore on the temperature began to drop and it got colder and colder.

Darkness came in the late afternoon and we hadn’t yet reached
our destination. The wind had begun to blow, and snow drifted across the backs of the cattle and the hood of the truck and swirled up around the riders hunched on their horses, sometimes blotting them from view. I discovered that if I stayed too close to the back of the herd—they had never “strung out” that day, but moved in a clump—my headlights would throw their own shadows over the cattle, which would frighten them and make them run, bad for their lungs in that intense cold. I tried to keep far enough back to prevent that from happening, but in that directionless, timeless darkness and that inexpressible cold, if I could not see the riders between me and the cattle, I grew frightened. I struggled to keep the truck neither too close nor too far away.

By now it was about thirty below Fahrenheit, completely dark, and we had still not arrived at wherever we were going. Picking my way carefully so as not to get stuck, I shone my headlights on what looked like a safe, flat spot and drove through it only to discover that the level snow hid a deep depression. I was stuck. I shifted into first and tried to roar ahead, and then through neutral into reverse, then back again, till I’d set up a rhythm, the old prairie trick of “rocking” my way out. But we were in too deep, and in a minute I’d stalled the motor. The riders kept moving on into the blackness out of the range of my headlights and were gone from view. Sean and I sat helpless, alone in the stalled, cooling truck in the darkness.

Before I had time to feel fully the fear that was threatening to swamp me, out of that blackness Peter came riding toward us, icicles hanging from his horse’s mane and muzzle and clinging to his own eyebrows, lashes and beard. When he saw how deeply we were stuck, he told us to wait and he’d get the four-wheel-drive and pull us out.

“We’re there,” he added, as he rode away. I peered ahead and, at the place where the truck lights melted softly into moving, black
emptiness, I saw a fence corner. How the men had found a mere fence corner, and the right one, in the blackness and blowing snow, I had no idea. I imagine there’d been consultations between them I hadn’t heard, about how the fencelines ran in that field and, relative to them, what our location at any moment must be.

Peter was back in a minute in the four-wheel-drive and pulled us out. All the riders but one piled into the two trucks, while Peter and the remaining rider, using the trucks’ headlights, held an intense conversation about what to do with the four horses, which were tired, hungry and very cold. The image is forever imprinted in my mind: sitting in the cab of that truck in that black and frigid winter night with snow all around us, far from succor of any kind, watching Peter and the other man unsaddle all but the lead horse, throw the saddles on the back of one of the trucks, and change their bridles for halters.

Then, as we watched, one by one they tied the tails of each of three of the horses to the halter of the horse ahead of it, till there was a line of four horses tied tail to halter, together. The other man mounted the lead horse and leaned down from his saddle to hear better while Peter gave him precise, careful instructions about how to find a ranch house almost three miles away across the frozen fields and through the blowing snow that obliterated landmarks. All of us knew, even I, that if the rider got confused in the darkness, or if the fences which he would be following had been changed from the year before, there was a good chance he might pass that shelter by and freeze to death.

The men closed the gate on the cattle, threw off the feed for them, settled them down for the night in a low spot out of the wind, and we went around by a prairie trail, with Peter driving my truck, to the ranch house where we found our rider had reached safely. The horses had already been fed and stabled, and the woman there invited us in
for coffee. Not even trying to hide her surprise and what might have been a touch of awe, she said, “We expected you through one of these days, but we sure didn’t think it would be on a night like this.”