Red Dog, Red Dog

It was the fear in his mother and sister that frightened
him the most, what he couldn’t accept. He was afraid that it might live in him some day, that woman-fear stopping him from becoming a man. He was afraid that it might grow inside him, until he became like his mother, like Alice. It never occurred to him that by leaving the farm and family it would be his father that would grow in him like a moth grub in an apple that waits for the fruit to ripen before eating the heart.

At the fence line where it met the northwest road he almost turned aside. He’d looked into the dark where he was headed and saw it in shreds among the western clouds, the first light coming out of the east behind him in a brittle band. He knew where his sister was and he almost turned away from the road to go to the alder-log shed by the dugout, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t go. He knew what he would find there and he knew, finding her, he would have to do something. But what could he do? He lifted the barbed wire, and ducked through, the fence between him and what he knew. His mother had told him he had but an hour to run before his father woke.

He’ll not forgive you taking his knife, she said.

He started walking again, his feet loose in his father’s old boots, the bound blanket slung over his shoulder. He was thirteen years old and would not look back, not ever.

I know, Father, I know.

Father was just a boy when he first wandered the plains. That summer he found himself in the southern foothills down near Pincher Creek where he lived a short year in an abandoned sod hut with a Métis woman and her baby, the woman a stranger kind of mother, her language a mix of Stoney, Chippewa, and French. When he left, he stole his first horse from a ranch near Fort MacLeod and rode east out of the spring storms into the Cypress Hills where he worked the ranch and wheat country of Palliser’s Triangle. The border meant nothing to him, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, they were all one country in his mind. He didn’t think he belonged to any one place. He was a wanderer and called nowhere home. When he was fifteen, he hid out in a cave on the Big Muddy down in the Badlands, piling greasewood and sagebrush to block the blizzard winds. He lived there a winter, staring out at the rare antelope herds, an isolate buffalo stone at his feet, its wallow empty. He shot marauding wolves with a stolen Enfield rifle, selling their hides in Havre. In the spring, he drifted past Old Man On His Back to the Frenchman River near Eastend where he got a job on the railway for the summer. Later, he cowboyed on the McKinnon ranch, worked thresher crews near Medicine Hat and Olds, then quit and hit the trail again. He worked a season here and there, moving on from farm to ranch, from village to town, Sweetgrass, Climax, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, footloose and drifting through his younger years. He was a “stopper,” riding in alone, working a day or a week in exchange for a shed to sleep in and food for whatever horse he’d traded for or stolen.

Elmer knew the colour of the land in all its moods, felt the heaviness of the South Saskatchewan River, its great brown heave. He squatted in an abandoned shack one winter by the Qu’Appelle lakes, camped in the Badland coulees and in the wasteland at the edge of the Great Sand Hills. He heard the call of the loon and saw the fall of the snow geese onto the sloughs, the Canadas and curlews as they came in their millions down the sky onto the desolate prairie lakes. Going north or south, blade after blade of birds cried down until the water was so weighted by their breasts he thought the lakes themselves would rise above the earth and drown the land forever. He’d seen the dust walk the plains, a thousand-foot wall of earth moving across the fields. He lived the drought years. It seemed at times all he talked of was dust and roads.

I turn in the memory of his tellings.

But what’s a father’s witness to a dead child? What meaning was there in his hoard of words? Adventures, not confessions, his stories not a life.

There’s a leaf floated through the air. Now it rides the autumn current of Cheater Creek. Boulders have washed down over the years and lie strewn across the waters below the clay bluffs beyond the bridge. The spare rains and the winds blowing up the valley have eaten the clay away and the creek has chewed the foot of the bluff, glacial gravel sliding down from the seams. The leaf follows the current through the rocks and is thrown by a brown wave into an eddy bound by stone. The current runs close by and the leaf turns and touches faster water, its crinkled edge turned back and circling there, the leaf a small boat caught. Like that leaf, his life.