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”this ghastly exile from everything I’ve ever known”; and Angus because he was at war with his library board over his efforts to provide books to impoverished farmers far beyond the city limits.
    Angus was also preoccupied by what to do about a new job offer – that of inspector of public libraries for Ontario, a job that carried with it the prospect of his eventuallybecoming director of library services for that province. He did not tell either Helen or me about the offer until he had accepted it, so it was not until April that I learned instead of accompanying Uncle Frank back to Hudson Bay I would soon be moving to a new home in Ontario.
    I was stunned by the decision, which came as close to breaking my heart as anything I had ever experienced. Being deprived of my arctic adventure was bad enough. The realization that I was also to lose the plains, sloughs, poplar bluffs, and open skies of the prairies and be robbed of the companionship of the creatures, human and otherwise, I had found there, was almost more than I could bear.
    I retreated into sullen rebellion. Helen noted in her diary: ”This decision has changed poor Bunje into a horrid little boy!”
    She at least was aware of my anguish. Angus was not, or if he was chose to hide the knowledge beneath parental bluster.
    ”Taking you back east where you belong is the best thing that could happen to you. So chin up and take it like a man.”
    But I was
not
a man, and I found the prospect of leaving the west intolerable. In the privacy of my bedroom, I raged and wept and made desperate plans to run away. My closest friend, Bruce Billings (a farm boy so attuned to the prairie that he proudly called him
self
a gopher), volunteered to join me as did Murray Robb, my next-best friend. It was no use. My time in Saskatoon was inexorably drawing to a close.
    May arrived and with it my sixteenth birthday. One morning Helen asked how I would like to celebrate it. I knew exactly what I wanted.
    One of the few surviving expanses of aboriginal short-grass prairie still survived to the southeast of Saskatoon. Waved with small hills, furrowed by coulees, studded with poplar bluffs, and pocked with sloughs, it had escaped the devastation visited on the plains country by homesteaders. It still belonged to the Others. For me it was the last best west, and it held my heart.
    ”I’d like to spend a week camping out with Brucie and Murray at the big slough near Dundurn. Just the three of us and Rex and Mutt.”
    Helen smiled. ”I’ll talk to your father, dear. I think he’s feeling a teeny bit guilty about taking you away from all this….” She waved her hand as if to encompass the whole of Saskatchewan. ”I’ll try to make him feel a little more so.”
    She was as good as her word.
    Early on the morning of May 11, we three loaded ourselves, dogs, and camping gear into my father’s Model A, and he drove us over rutted dirt roads across the greening plains to a spreading poplar bluff south of the dour little village of Dundurn. Angus did not linger, nor did I encourage him to do so. It would be a long time before I fully forgave him for having so abruptly altered the tenor of my life.
    Spring had come early to the prairies. The sky was clear and the sun beat down brilliantly. There had been little rain but the new grass was vividly, lusciously green and richly alive. The floor of the bluff was dusted by silky seed parachutes drifting down from the cottonwood trees. This snowy stuff kept getting into the dogs’ noses and making them sneeze as they snuffled at the burrows made by wood gophers.
    We three felt so good we played like little kids, lying on our backs waving our arms and legs to make angels in thecottonwood snow. We gathered piles of it to serve as mattresses beneath our bedrolls. We pitched the tent and cleared a place for a firepit, then went off to visit the slough where, in past years, I had hunted ducks with my father in the autumn and searched for the nests