September 2018

Out there, where land and sky are greeting. Where wind whips the grass into waves, and light dresses hills in gold.

It is wolf country. Can you hear them call?

For ninety years they’ve been gone, but the deer, I think, are still listening. The grasslands never forget their own.

Things that belong to it: implausible ridges cloaked in sagebush.

Ghosts of villages that crumbled under Time.

Trees that grow grackles like autumn leaves.

Shallow lakes the locals call ‘potholes’: scars of past glaciation, now tended by muskrats.

And roads that redefine infinity.

I’m on one of them. It’s been an eventful 48 hours in Saskatchewan, but now it’s time to turn north.