Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  Gabby (2012)

  Andy called me as he was leaving Lac La Ronge. The fishing trip had not gone exactly as he had hoped.

  “Not enough fish, too much beer and too many big boats.”

  But he was enthusiastic about the camping and canoeing opportunities. “It’s such beautiful country, Gabby. Maybe I’ll get a two-person kayak.”

  When I asked who the second kayaker was, he laughed and suggested that before going back to his camp in the Great Sandhills he could come see me. Where would I like to meet him for dinner?

  I told him our usual burger joint would do. I wanted to get home early this evening as I, too, had things to do.

  I thanked Madeline for all her help and promised to stay in touch by email. Although she had never succumbed to the lure of social media or texting, Madeline made good use of her internet to stay connected with friends in the north and former students spread around the world. And her sister in the States, of course.

  The three-hour drive gave me time to think over the Metis story and then lock it in the back of my mind. I needed to focus once again on the settler story. As I reviewed what I had so far, I realized the disparate threads needed to be drawn towards the present. I decided I really must get Eric to talk about recent years.

  I was nearing the Mammoth intersection, and out of habit, I slowed and turned into town. Well, why not stop to see how Mr. Tollerud enjoyed the Canada Day weekend? It might have been a dull time for him, as most of his family would have been engaged with the horse show and rodeo in Swift Current.

  I was surprised to see Jo sitting alone in the family room off the corridor that led to his room. She was deep in a book and wouldn’t have noticed if I had walked right by, but that thought never crossed my mind. If something happened to Eric while I was away, I wanted to know about it.

  “Oh, Dad is fine,” she assured me. “I just stopped by on the way home from Frontier Days. But he apparently has been sleeping a lot the past few days, must have been all tuckered out with the company on Friday. Some of the great-grands who won’t make it here for his birthday decided to surprise him. If he doesn’t wake up soon, I’ll go and rouse him. He wouldn’t want to miss supper.”

  Then she asked me about my weekend. So, I told her.

  “Wow! You have been learning a lot about Saskatchewan, haven’t you! It is almost as though we have two separate realities here in this province, the world built by us on top of an older world that we know nothing about. Do you know, I’ve never even been to a pow-wow? Or visited a First Nations reserve? And I’ve lived here all my life! But anyway – I think you’re dead right about the past having an impact on the way things go today. Sometimes it’s obvious. And sometimes it is hidden. But it’s always there, whether we notice it or not.”

  She smiled. “That reminds me of a story Dad told me. Something that happened years ago. This was back in the ‘70s, about the time he and Mom moved off the farm so James and his wife could take over. He had bumped into an old friend one night during the fall rodeo in Hillview …”

  Eric (1978)

  “And that’s the last of the calf-roping. Let’s hear it for these boys!” (Scattered applause.) “We’ll be back in a few minutes with the steer wrestling.”

  As the blare of the loudspeaker cut out, the rink buzzed with cheerful voices. Most of the crowd headed for the concession booth inside the waiting room. With the bleat of calves and the clatter of hooves against metal corrals as familiar background racket, spectators turned to the friendly faces nearby with a greeting or a comment. A late fall indoor rodeo had been a hard sell to the rink committee when it was first suggested a few years earlier, but quickly became a popular event, drawing cowboys and rodeo fans from around the province. Almost every family within a twenty-mile radius could be counted on to volunteer some sort of help and to attend. Neighbours had a lot of catching up to do after the prolonged isolation of harvest. Grumbling about the low price of wheat – “Costs almost as much to buy a couple loaves of bread as we get paid for a bushel!” – or worries about the proposed railway abandonment of branch lines like theirs were temporarily forgotten.

  “So, Eric, I hear one of your boys is taking over the farm.”

  Eric turned to greet the weathered old cowboy.

  “Well, you know how it is, Hank. Catherine and I aren’t quite ready to retire yet, but we figured we should let James and his wife have the farmyard. We’ve moved to the Ostgard place for now. Guess we’ll be moving into town come spring.”

  Hank fell into step beside him as they made their way through the crowd towards the lunch counter.

  “Always liked that farm of yours, with the hills so close by, and so handy to the community pasture. O’course, I always figured it was a darned shame any of that land was ever put to the plough. Some of the best grazing land I ever seen.”

  “Yeh, well, can’t do anything about that now. Once the prairie grass is gone, it’s gone. I planted crested wheat to one field, just below the hills, and it makes a pretty good hayfield. Not as drought resistant as the native grass, though.”

  Hank stirred powdered cream into his coffee and handed the creamer jar to Eric.

  “Did I ever tell you a story I heard about your place? Before it was your place, of course. It was Olmsted that told it to me. You know, the Olmsted Ranch, started when there was still a Northwest Mounted Police post at Sask Landing.”

  “The Olmsteds? Sure, I knew them.”

  “He told me this story way back in the early ‘30s, he was already a pretty old codger then. I’d just started out working for his outfit. The time he was talking about must have bin ought-five, ought-six, maybe even earlier. Before your folks came from the states. Don’t think any homesteaders were out there at that time.”

  The two men claimed a couple of recently vacated chairs in a corner of the waiting room. Eric leaned back and took a sip of the hot coffee and said in his measured way, “If there was no one living out there, must have been before nineteen-aught-five. The way I heard it, Gowans homesteaded in aught-five, gave it up in aught-eight, then Dad and Mother filed on that quarter in nineteen-thirteen.”

  Hank nodded. “Olmsted, you know, was one of the first ranchers around the Sask Landing. Came about the same time as the Pradera Ranch got their land grant. Anyways, the way Olmsted remembered it, a couple of his cowboys had ridden from his place by Sask Landing, crossed the river in late summer when the ford was low, just went exploring through the hills. Maybe they planned to visit the cowboys at the Pradera summer camp, maybe they were looking for horses the Jackson Horse Outfit had lost. Anyways, they rode through those hills of yours, came to that big flat just below the east-facing range, a mile or so from where you have your farm buildings.”

  A blare of the loudspeaker announced the steer wrestling would commence. The waiting room emptied as almost everyone except Hank and Eric headed back out to find a place in the bleachers or along the boards.

  “Well, these cowboys, they came upon something pretty strange. Four hobbled horses, so thin they didn’t look like they should be alive, their legs all sore and bleeding. They’d been hobbled for some time; the boys could see that. They cut the horses loose, and then went investigating what else they could find. Within a few miles they came upon two wagons. The box of one had been taken off and turned upside down on the ground. When they looked underneath what do you suppose they found?”

  Eric shook his head. Hank would satisfy his curiosity, he knew.

  “Under that wagon were the remains of three men. They’d bin there for days, mebbe weeks. Stunk awful. Just awful. The fellas thought they must’ve got caught in a thunderstorm, hid under the wagon box. Struck by lightning, likely.”

  Hank shook his head.

  “Well, anyway, stories should stay with the land. You can pass that one on to your boy and his wife. The land don’t count for much without its stories. Kinda go together, don’t they. The dirt on the dirt, ya might say.”

  Hank enjoyed his little joke.
Eric chuckled with him.

  “Thanks, Hank. I’ll be sure to tell my kids.”

  A loud “OOOh!” from the crowd out in the arena brought the two men back to the present. “Better get out there, Eric. We’re missing the action!”

  As they hurried to rejoin the rodeo crowd, Eric asked, “So what did they do with the bodies?”

  “Buried them right there in your hills, of course.”

  Later that evening, driving home to the farmhouse he and Catherine had made their temporary home, Eric thought about all that had changed. The Pradera Ranch that had been turned into one of the first community pastures, the abandoned farms, all that had been lost or buried and forgotten.

  Ten years ago, just after his younger son Henry finished high school, the boy had hired on with the Pradera Community Pasture as a rider for the summer. It had been, in Henry’s words, “The best job ever.” The work was physical, the weather often severe, but being out on the open range had been its own reward. Henry and his riding partner, a local kid hoping to make his fortune as a bull rider, had been surprised by the number of tipi rings they found, once they knew what to look for. Eric wondered if another civilization far in the future might be similarly surprised to find remains of their farm.

  The headlights of his car pierced the prairie blackness, darkness accentuated by the few combine lights still moving slowly through distant fields. Ever since that first long lonely ride from what he now thought of as Clare’s place to the homestead, he had been awed by the sense of the hugeness of this land at night. It held mysteries and secrets that might never be revealed.

  But things do have a way of turning up. Just this past week he had been walking around the farm with no conscious purpose in mind, except maybe to say goodbye. He’d found himself standing on the knoll by the machine shed and thought, this is where our sod house was, the door over there, kitchen table would have been about here.

  All trace of the soddie had been obliterated. Eric guessed he was the only person alive who remembered where it had stood. The sod walls had returned to the prairie from which they came, and the wooden beams, doors, windows, floor had long ago been recycled into other buildings. He scuffed the clumps of grass with the toe of his boot, thinking how things that had seemed so solid to him as a child had disappeared. Something dislodged from the dirt beneath his foot, an odd shape for a pebble. Maybe a lynch pin or bolt that had fallen from a piece of machinery?

  He bent and picked up a small dirt encrusted shape. My boss horse. Instantly, he was transported back to his six-year-old self, sprawled on the soddie floor, content in his imaginary world, his proud black boss horse harnessed with the smaller horses to the toy wagon, leading the others.

  Eric’s car turned off the road through a tree-lined lane into the Ostgard place and he saw a light still shone in the kitchen window. Catherine might let him sample one of the pies she was baking to take to the rodeo concession tomorrow. He parked the car, reached into his jacket pocket, took out the tiny toy horse and held it for a long moment.

  He tucked it back into his shirt pocket and went into the house.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The grasslands once covered 1.5 million square kilometers. Less than 2% of native prairie remains today. Gabriellas’ Prairie Notes

  Gabby (2012)

  Andy and I met for supper at our favourite sports bar Monday evening. The town was emptying of cowboys, now the rodeo, horseshow, Agricultural Fair and 4-H competitions were over. The bar was only half full. I chortled at Andy’s hilarious account of how NOT to catch a fish – apparently his buddies were clueless outdoorsman – but was enthralled by his account of rock art he had seen on a lakeside cliff.

  “Do you know who made it? The rock art?” I asked. “Is it just graffiti made by travellers? Maybe fur traders? Or did the Indians make it?”

  “Not done by fur traders, that’s for sure. The rock paintings were already there when the first European traders arrived, in the 18th century. And another thing, no one’s been able to replicate the kind of paint used. Fish-oil base, I would guess. I really don’t know that much about it, except that the drawings belong to a tradition of art that is continent-wide and ancient. Along the Churchill River system, they were painted on cliffs. Most can only be seen from the water, they had to have been painted sitting or standing in a canoe.”

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that?” I wondered.

  “A Cree teenager from Stanley Mission told me he thought the symbols were warning signs for travellers. And since his ancestors might have painted them, that’s as good an explanation as any.”

  I refrained from pointing out that the teenager probably had more experience with Twitter than with rock art. It seemed to me the land had lost way more history than it retained.

  Andy didn’t ask for any details of my own weekend, after hearing I’d spent my time researching a 19th century Metis family. He probably thought there was nothing he hadn’t already heard on that subject.

  But he did suggest we meet for a movie Friday night and an excursion somewhere on the weekend. Maybe Cypress Hills, or Grassland National Park in the southern part of the province. As we kissed goodbye, I realized how much I was looking forward to a weekend of just us two and the wide-open country.

  Back in Mammoth on Tuesday, I was greeted by another of Eric’s many relatives. Carol’s husband, Eli, came into the room soon after I arrived, and my plan to gently steer Eric towards talking about his recent hobbies and interests was derailed. Both men seemed fixated on farming. I had the feeling they were continuing a conversation that had been going on for years, the details only changing with the seasons. How much rain last week? How’d that sale go? What’s so-and-so seeding this year? By faking interest and inserting questions wherever possible, I learned that although Eric retired from his farm over 40 years ago, he was hard-pressed to name any interest that replaced it. He mentioned taking up golf, playing shuffleboard. Playing bridge. Dancing. He made one of those ugly smiles a person makes when choking back tears. And I realized talking about the retirement years he and Catherine enjoyed together brought home to him his alone-ness after her death.

  Eli recognized this and took complete control of the conversation from that point. Back to the safe and familiar topics. Agriculture, markets, changes in the community. Eli said to me, “You know, you can take the farmer from his farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the farmer. Eric has never lost touch with the land, it’s in his blood. Eric, how many years did you work with the crop insurance program after James took over the farm? Ten? Fifteen?”

  Eric’s voice sounded weary, petulant. Like a child needing a nap. “Oh, I don’t remember. Anyway, it wasn’t much good. I thought I could do something worthwhile, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

  By unspoken agreement, Eli and I allowed Eric to withdraw from the conversation as we switched to lighter subjects, the rodeo, the weather, the trophies won by his grandchildren at the horse show. When Eric slipped into an uneasy sleep, Eli picked up his cowboy hat from the floor by his chair and we tiptoed out into the corridor.

  “I’m sorry I upset him,” I said.

  Eli patted my shoulder. “Almost anything upsets him these days,” he said. “Eric has lots of great memories to hang onto, but when he’s feeling weary, he only remembers the bad ones. My asking him about his years as a crop insurance field-man was a mistake.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  And, surprisingly enough, he did.

  Eric (1990)

  When Eric first retired from the farm but wasn’t yet ready to be put out to pasture, as he would have put it, he jumped at the offer of part time work as a field man with Saskatchewan Crop Insurance. In his mind the new job promised serene days driving the back roads of the province, visiting a variety of farms and meeting new people. He anticipated seeing invention and innovation, of bringing home some good pointers that would make the boys sit up and take notice. But it wasn’t li
ke that. Not at all like that. Happy farmers and prosperous farms were too rare to counteract the depressing impression left by the many struggling farmers he encountered.

  “I swear, John Deere and Monsanto have got it figured out to the last nickel how much they can charge us without putting us right under,” complained the grizzled farmer. He glared at the small box in his hand. “I paid over two hundred bucks for this piece for the combine. And had to drive all the way to Speedy Creek to get it. Then, wouldn’t ya know it — get back out to the field, the rain’s moved in like it plans on keeping my fields soaked ‘til spring.”

  Eric shifted the crop production forms from his right hand to his left, gave a grunt intended to convey sympathetic understanding, and scanned the horizon as though looking for some relief from the dull clouds. This present situation was too familiar, the farmer’s words too common a complaint. Stories abounded on coffee row of ridiculous sums paid for a tiny, but necessary, machinery part. Even worse, interest rates had jumped. Farmers who had dared to expand their operation were suffocating under the weight of bank loans.

  As Eric travelled the country roads, he realized this was the new norm. It looked to him as though young farmers were abandoning everything their predecessors had learned about the land. And old-style farmers, like this one before him, were simply flummoxed.

  “Okay. Let’s get this paperwork out of your way.”

  Eric scribbled something on the form and held the clipboard out to the farmer, who studied it briefly, nodded and accepted the pen Eric offered him.