Читать книгу A Geography of Blood - Candace Savage - Страница 8

{three} Digging In

This was, after all, the kind of landscape that demanded one’s attention.

BETH LADOW, The Medicine Line, 2001

By the time the house deal had gone through, it was September, and another prairie winter was drawing near. You could hear it in the metallic rattle of the cottonwoods across the alley from our new house; you could see it in the fiery red of the chokecherry bushes along the creek.

Our new house. All that fall and winter, whenever we had a free weekend, we filled our van to the gunnels with household paraphernalia, loaded up the dogs and headed for what had suddenly become our second home. In choosing a route for our travels, we were as unvarying as pilgrims. After an hour or so in the fast lane on the highway to Calgary, we left the mainstream at Rosetown to head south into a big silent country under a high blue sky. Merely to think about it now, sitting at my desk, makes my chest expand with breath, as if the only response to that light and space were to open into it.

From that moment on, the journey became easy, and we seemed to flow effortlessly downhill, first heading south to cross the impounded waters of the South Saskatchewan River, a liquid plain set among tawny slopes, and then on to the leafy valley city of Swift Current. From there it was west to Gull Lake, south to Shaunavon, and finally west again, proceeding step by diminishing step toward our destination.

From the beginning to the end of the journey—a good four hours of travel, with a few minutes added here and there as rest stops for humans and dogs—the landscape told and retold the same familiar story. The broad fields of stubble that spun by our windows represented the climax of the settlement saga, the triumphant end point of the mural in Jack’s Café, the payday of my own grandparents’ enterprise. Somewhere past Gull Lake, we passed a commemoration of the whole agricultural undertaking, painted in exact letters on the gable of a meticulously maintained barn: “Rolling View Farm,” it read, “1917.” It was as if the settlement experience marked the beginning of time.

Of the country’s longer past and its deep reservoirs of stories—memories of the Métis settlement that (unbeknownst to me on these early journeys) flourished briefly at the Saskatchewan River crossing; of the terrible battle that had taken place in the Red Ochre Hills, southwest of Swift Current, in 1866; or of the buffalo jump near Gull Lake that dates back thousands of years and once sustained hundreds of families—of these memories and so many others we did not hear a single word.

By the time we reached Shaunavon and the last, short, westward leg of our journey, the countryside had become assertively modern, with pump jacks feeding in the stubble like dazed, mechanical birds. Yet in the face of this evidence of “progress”—and who was I to knock it, whizzing along as I was in a gasoline-powered van?—I found my eyes wandering around and past these intrusions to consider the lay of the land. On the western horizon up ahead, the world was now rimmed by a blue rise of hills, which suggested that our destination was drawing close. Meanwhile, to the north of the road and to the south and then, at irregular intervals, here and there, near and farther afield, we found ourselves surrounded by a flotilla of strange landforms.

“Look,” I said to Keith, beside me in the driver’s seat, “those hills—they’re like whales, bigger than whales, stranded under the grass.”

“Eskers, drumlins, and kames,” he replied smartly. (He was an art historian: how did he know this stuff?) “That’s all I remember from A-level geography. Something to do with glaciers and the Ice Age.” Drumlins. That was it: I’d just been reading about them, as part of the research for the chapter on geological history in my prairie book.

“Hey,” I said, “I know about this. The geologists call it a swarm. We’re driving through a ten-thousand-year-old drumlin swarm.”

A year earlier, approaching Eastend from the south, we’d been ushered into town by coyotes, distorted forms caught in the headlights’ glare. Now, arriving from an approximately opposite direction, we found ourselves in the company of a troupe of Ice Age hills, their ancient energy held in suspended animation. And more strangeness was in store as we rounded the final bend and rolled down into the wide bottomlands of the Frenchman River valley. Instead of proceeding into town as we had expected, we appeared to be heading straight for an earthwork of ridges and conical, turretlike hills that blocked the view ahead. At the very last minute, the road jogged left, discovered a gap, and delivered us into town and onto the main drag. A sign announced that we had entered the Valley of Hidden Secrets.

Our new house was essentially perfect as found. Built in the early 1970s, it featured mahogany-fronted cabinets, complete with copper-trimmed knobs, and a planter-knickknack-and-book-shelf combo that was straight out of my teenage years. Even the crimson carpet in the bedroom—“This will need to be updated,” the real-estate agent who showed us the place had told us solemnly—exuded a shabby, retro charm. The real glory of the place, however, was not its stylish accoutrements but what in a more competitive market might have been written up as its “prime location, surrounded by parks.”

Our place was at the very end of the street, on the outermost edge of town. Beyond the back fence, across the alley, lay the bend of the Frenchman River where young Wallace Stegner and his friends had once congregated to swim. To the north lay a wide grassy field, really a floodplain, that was bounded by a sweeping arc of the stream and housed the town’s baseball diamonds and campground. Past these amenities and across the creek, the land rose up and away from us in a choppy sea of conical mounds, intercut by coulees and shadowed by a tangle of chokecherries and rosebushes. The wide prairie world was right there, on the other side of the wall, just begging for us to come out and continue our explorations.

Strangely, however, the house turned a blind eye to this view. Although there were openings in every other direction, east, west, and south, the entire north wall was windowless. We were loftily critical of what we saw as an aesthetic error, until someone pointed out that the previous owners might not have looked at the scene through quite the same lens as us. The Taylors—we knew their name from a decorative knocker affixed to the front door—had been ranchers who spent summers somewhere up in the hills and retreated to this house in the fall, much as the Stegners had done a generation before. (All this we gleaned from conversations with our new neighbors.) Perhaps, like coastal fishing families who face their homes away from the sea, the Taylors had preferred to turn their backs on the prairie and its lethal winter storms. Keith and I, by contrast, were mere visitors, in the country though not yet of it. Regardless of wind and weather, the prairie was calling to us and we were eager to open ourselves to its wide horizons.

In remarkably short order, we had cajoled a local contractor into ordering a picture window (four-paned to echo the four-paned knickknack shelves in the room divider) and inserting it into our living room wall. Now, with our brand new secondhand love seat positioned directly in front of the glass, we could sit side by side and gaze out at the scene: from the bare symmetry of the poplar tree in the foreground to the dense scrawl of bushes along the river and then up, layer by layer, fold upon voluptuous fold, to the bony haunches of the hills that loomed over the town. Sometimes, we watched as small herds of white-tailed deer grazed on the flats along the stream bank or held our breath as they circled close, doe eyed and fleshy, and walked under our windowsill. Above them, against a leaden sky, the snowy hills told the hours in shadowed pools of blue that spread and deepened and finally merged into the darkness.

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 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.