A Geography of Blood Read Online Free

old Saskatchewan?—and we would have paused to let its significance sink in if our van hadn’t already been slithering, sideways and downward, in a northerly direction.
    Eventually, hours later than intended and sprayed with mud from prow to stern, we made Maple Creek and the hard top, and all was forgiven. For as G.K. Chesterton once wisely pointed out, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.” 1 And so, the very next morning, we prepared to head out again. Prudently determined to stick to the pavement this time, our plan was to drive south and then east toward Grasslands National Park, the only public lands in Canada exclusively dedicated to prairie conservation and our best hope to see burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, and the sole colony of prairie dogs north of the border. With good roads in prospect and a tail wind to help us on our way, surely everything would go perfectly. And so it did, for the first half hour or so. Then, in the middle of nowhere, without a bang or a sigh, our old van abruptly expired. No matter how often we turned the key or gazed longingly under the hood, nothing we did could persuade it to move an inch.
    If you’ve never squeezed into the cab of a tow truck with three dogs, you really haven’t lived. So there we were, enveloped in clouds of warm dog breath, our vehicle dangling from a winch, forcibly returned to our starting point. Back in town, the mechanic at the gas station obligingly tweaked a thingamabob or two, replaced a widget that had blown, and expressed the hope that “she should be good to go.” Thus reassured, we set out next morning for Fort Walsh, a historic post of the fabled North-West Mounted Police, which lies in a picturesque valley just west of Maple Creek. New destination, same story. Five minutes west of Eastend, the van sputtered to the side of the road, and there we were on the end of a winch, being dragged back home.
    You might think that by now we’d have received the message, but not so. It was only after our fourth outing, and our third tow back to town, that we finally gave up and submitted to the inevitable. For the time being at least, we were going nowhere. On the surface, the cause of our predicament was obvious—some intractable mechanical problem, not surprising in our old tin can, perhaps brought on by unfriendly weather and lamentable road conditions. Crazy thing, though: that wasn’t the way we felt. Instead of registering as an inconvenience, our dramatic returns to Eastend took on the aura of an intervention, as if some Power Greater Than Ourselves had resorted to the means at hand to grab hold of our attention. (Bad weather, maybe I could accept that, but did the gods really speak through clapped-out Astro vans?) It was ridiculous, we knew, but even though we laughed and shook our heads, we couldn’t quite shake the sense that we were being offered a teaching moment. “Stop,” a quiet voice kept saying. “Stay put. Pay attention to where you are.”
    In the week since we’d left Wyoming, Keith and I had been in ceaseless motion, traveling across boundaries, over watersheds, through memory and forgetting, knowledge and ignorance, in the uncharted territory between history and legend. Now we stood on the divide between the mundane and the numinous, between the events of our everyday lives and the meanings that were speaking to us. “Stay put,” that still, small voice insisted. “Pay attention.”

{two} The Stegner House
    Find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
    Former Eastend tourism slogan
    What we noticed first was the silence. If you stood on the curb in front of the Stegner House and listened, you could feel your ears reaching for sounds, as if they were trying to stand up as sharp as a coyote’s. Now and then, a vehicle whispered along the main drag a couple of blocks to the south, and every hour or so a truck hauling a load of huge round bales