What is this land?

It has been smoothed over by glaciers whose moraine is now low snaking hills. It has been cut by meltwater from the Laurentide ice sheet, loosing the bones of dinosaurs from the bedrock and dictating the path of both branches of the mighty Saskatchewan River. It has been used as a thoroughfare and as the theatre of living by native peoples and European explorers and Hudson Bay Company employees and settlers.

It is huge.





It is exposed but cryptic. It is brutal but fertile. It is uniform but diverse. It is the Canada that few people truly know, and most of them have gone...gone like the dry bones of the sagebrush, tumbling in the sharp autumn wind. They left behind their wooden epitaphs: the ruins of homesteads are sprinkled on the hills here and there, defiant but decaying monuments to ambitious but unrealistic settlement policies of the past.



Humanity has travelled here for the last 11,000 years; before Europeans even knew of the existance of the Americas, peoples who lived in tipis rather than homes of wood dwelt upon the plains, and have left their own relics of stone and history. Sitting Bull took refuge on Wood Mountain in 1877 after the Battle of Little Bighorn.

But even before the arrival of the First Nations, coyotes roamed North America, then as now, their coats bisected by the wind like water before a ship's keel. Cold is little enough to them under their thick fur.



There are other, more teasing hints. Through the speed and endurance of the pronghorn, a glimpse is gained of an older world. The cat which whittled the antelope's survival tactics is no longer surviving - like most of North America's large mammals, it vanished at the end of the last ice age, leaving behind this curious child: a prey species full of adaptations that it no longer requires. It run - run faster than anything still living on Earth save the cheetah of Africa - and it runs best in open country, and so its native habitat is the prairie.



Space. There is an airiness, an exposure to the prairies that is written on every shaking grass stem and in every keen-eyed hawk.

The hunters of night take their posts. A short-eared owl studies the dusk light.



A great horned owl is also perched in the gloom.



And yet, when night falls, and that vast horizon line is shrouded by darkness, the illusion of forest suddenly becomes severe. The shadows are heavy, but they come only from the clouds, and the conflict between what the brain assumes to be beyond the lights of the car, and what the mind knows is really there, is oddly giddying.



Bison standing against the watercolour sunset must still feel the space through the wind.



Once all natural light is finally gone, a red fox hunts rodents in the stubble of a farm field.



Distance can be so deceptive in the dark. Eyeshine, far ahead on a long straight road, reveals the presence of a wary bobcat But it turns towards the prairie and is gone, melted away into the night like a ghostly memory of the great cats that hunted pronghorn in the plains so long ago.

It is a land that defies neat, human definition. Even the provincial name - Saskatchewan simply means "swift flowing river" in one of the native languages - offers little insight. The signpost at the entrance to Val Marie states that it is the place where "Heaven meets Earth". Perhaps for now that had better suffice.