There is a moment in prairie life when the space itself becomes imprisoning. When the grey clouds reach down to the land, the sensation of being trapped inside a giant sandwich - caught between air and earth - is quite remarkable, but no less so than seeing the endless roads tumble off the edge of the horizon into the mist beyond.



Not all the land designed as potential national park has yet been purchased by Parks Canada, and the land they do manage isn't all in one segment. All of my photos of the park that I've posted on here to date come from the West Block, the largest single section. But about an hour and a half away, close to Wood Mountain, is the East Block, and despite its roads being gravel and remote, we decided to take a gamble and head out there, ready to head back to tarmac if the rain started splattering down again.

En route, the watchers were on their fenceposts, as ever, although slightly more bedraggled than usual.



But as we approached Wood Mountain, visibility fell... to almost nothing. Fog in the North Downs is picturesque, if a little awkward for landscape photography. In the plains it is downright eerie, as that vast horizon that becomes accepted as the normal standard of space melts away into choking whiteness. And then, out of the gloom, a giant dark shadow, held aloft by thin brown legs, suddenly emerged...



A moose!



Indeed, a moose - but moose love wetlands, and coniferous forests, and beaver ponds; the bizarre spectacle of one loping across a prairie road on its bizarrely long legs is hard to forget. This is right on the very limit of their Saskatchewan distribution. They are of course the largest deer species in Canada, and indeed in the world, and much less group-focussed than, say, elk or mule deer. Their size alone is a deterrant to most natural predators. This one is a young bull, and not the stature of some that I've seen in Jasper and Yellowstone. Still, he was big enough



Wood Mountain never appeared out of the mist but as we continued southeastwards, the land cleared - a little. And the roads were reasonably dry. Close to the American border, whipped by a cold wind and slightly worried about running of gas for the car we crept onward...



...to vistas of one of the least visited sections of the southern Canadian national park system. Even the West Block of Grasslands is far off the conventional tourist route, but out in the East it is quiet, so quiet...



Except, that is, for ground squirrels, squeaking in the grass.





East Block is rougher country than its western counterpart. Out there, behind the clouds, are the Killdeer Badlands, in which, back in the 19th century, Canada's first dinosaur fossils were found. It is still a good region for fossil-hunting today, although park laws prevent private collecting. When the weather is poor, watching living wildlife posing against the scenery seems the better option


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Next morning, the weather still held something to be desired. But the local pronghorn had something else on their minds: a coyote, and that argument was only ever going to end one way





Healthy adult ungulates are, in general, very good at defending themselves. Only one creature was truly made to hunt pronghorn, and that is the long-extinct American cheetah. I doubt that this little coyote had any intentions towards these pronghorns at all, but it certainly made a speedy exit

Further down the road, a more tranquil scene presented itself: a mother pronghorn and her young fawn



All in all, the morning's drive was quite satisfactory. But as we headed back to the village, I happened to glance casually over my shoulder at the grassy verge. Cue one moment of frozen astonishment, a muffled call for the car to be reversed, and a very hasty grab of the camera.

Something was looking back at me from the bank...