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 ha
d 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.”
It was an overwhelming experience which afterward I could hardly find words to describe adequately to my friends and family. My mother must have been alarmed, although she was careful not to say so. Her memories of her hard years in the bush must have been strong, and I think she wanted to advise me to give up the idea of marrying Peter because of the hardship she was sure I would have to endure. On the other hand, if the Butalas were far from rich, having succeeded in wilderness where we had failed, it was clear they had at least a considerably more financially secure life than we had had when we were enduring those years of privation in the bush country, and this would make my life much easier than hers had been. And she must have seen in Peter the same qualities I saw: his strength of character and physical strength, his stability, his integrity and his quiet competence.
The draw was powerful and it was not mitigated by the obvious physical danger of such a life; it may even have been enhanced by it. I saw nobody in my city life doing anything more physically dangerous than walking to work, and in Saskatoon that wasn’t much of a risk. I’d had enough of my windowless office at the university and the endless maneuvering for advantage, not to mention the incredibly hard work people of my lowly rank had to do for distressingly low pay; I’d had enough of the men I was meeting, each one of whom seemed to be more insecure, convoluted and uncertain than the last one; I couldn’t wait to put it all behind me. The winter cattle drive had been more than memorable—it had been invigorating, simple, firmly tied to a physical reality that I had been missing and, without even realizing it, longing for.
I put my faith in Peter. I was in love. If I was giving up what had turned out to be a fantasy of a closetful of satin ballgowns and the life to go with them, if I was giving up men with doctorates and fancy cars, it was for a second chance at a meaningful life and for a man who clearly was what he appeared to be. I saw myself merely as escaping into a simpler, more pure and more ethical life, a life that made clear sense as the one I was living had ceased to do. Despite the powerful feelings surfacing in me, it really didn’t occur to me that when I married I was going into a life in Nature. Nature entered into my picture of my future merely as an unavoidable background, desirable chiefly because of its—oh, unexamined cliché!—peacefulness and beauty.
Peter and I were married in late May, and since there was no new house on either the hay farm or the ranch—where there were only two settlers’ shacks pulled together around 1934 and sided over to form one house—for the first two and a half years we moved back and forth between the two places with the cattle and the seasons. It was awkward and sometimes confusing, but I didn’t care. There was something freeing about having two “camps,” as Peter often called them, instead of one home. And I loved both places despite the fact that both houses were too small, dilapidated and lacking in amenities that for years I’d been able to take for granted. On the hay farm we lived in a log house that had been built there before 1912, though we don’t know exactly when or by whom. We had electricity and running water in both places, but no bathrooms, especially no indoor toilets of any kind. Often I had to get up in the middle of the night to go outside to the toilet, something I had done until I was thirteen years old.
In my first year of living that way, rising in the night to go outside, wending my way down a footpath under the stars, sometimes being startled by the distant drumming of horses’ hooves growing louder as they approached and by the rush of wind as they swept by me in the darkness, hearing, but not seeing them, I had a dream.
I dreamt it was night and I had stepped outside the door of our log house into the deepest winter. There were mountains of untouched snow everywhere, great high drifts of it banked up around the house to its roof and there were thick, long stalactites of ice hanging from the eaves. I was wearing a nightgown—strangely, the one I wore on my wedding night of my first marriage in 1961, white with white lace trim on the bodice—but I wasn’t at all cold.
A white coyote appeared from out of the darkness on my left. It trotted slowly past me only three or four feet away, and as it passed it turned its head to stare straight at me into my eyes. It limped on three paws, holding up its right front paw to its chest as if it had been wounded. Even then, knowing nothing of these things, I knew by the silver-white color of its thick coat that it was a spirit animal. It was clear I was out of the realm of everyday life; I was in an archetypal realm, a limitless, timeless world of pure wilderness.
I cherished the dream and told Peter about it, but what did it mean? I puzzled over it for days without making any progress in its interpretation. I knew nothing about the whole study of dreams, and any significant dreams I’d had before had always involved people and were clearly about problems in my daily life. I knew that this dream was a product of this perfectly unnameable thing I felt stirring inside me from the time of that first weekend I’d spent in what became my new home; I recognized the intense, rich mystery and beauty of the dream. I was fascinated and at first could think of little else, but as the months passed, I thought less and less about it, believing that one day its meaning would come to me and in the meantime it was useless to keep puzzling over it.
But the dream caused something else to happen: the memory of a childhood experience came flooding back to me—something that happened when I was eight years old and making my First Communion. We had been told in catechism that, after having been purified by confession and penance, when we received the Host for the first time in our lives, the Holy Spirit, conceived of by the artist in our catechism materials as a shining white dove, would enter us.
I had—sometimes I think I was born with—a powerful sense of myself as a sinner, as unworthy, as always guilty, which a Catholic upbringing presumably did nothing to alleviate, and the source of which, though I have some glimmerings of it, will remain untold on these pages. But I was, in the way of children, especially those kept close to their mothers, an innocent. I believed what I was told; I believed it with all my heart, wholly, without question.
In my new white dress, white stockings, shoes and veil, I knelt at the altar of that small wooden church on the edge of the town, surrounded by wild grass and beyond that by wheatfields. The priest approached and, murmuring a prayer in Latin, put the Host on my tongue. I rose with the other children and began the walk back to the pew where my parents and sisters waited. And then I felt it: something, though this was all so many years ago I barely remember, but something I perceived as a cloud of white light lit inside my chest, swelling till it filled it.
But those words fail to give the miraculous sense of it. It was not myself, it was both within me and bigger than me; it was, when I tried to tell my mother after as we waited in the car for our father to come from his chat with the priest and drive us home to Sunday dinner, as if the Holy Ghost had come as was foretold and filled me with its whiteness and purity. I had no idea beyond that white dove, what the Holy Spirit the priest talked about was. If I was merely incarnating the priest’s description through the power of his suggestion, I had forgotten the rushing of wings, the cooing, the wind.
Perfection of the Morning Page 3
