A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage Read Free Book Online

irregular intervals, here and there, near and farther afield, we found ourselves surrounded by a flotilla of strange landforms.
    â€œLook,” I said to Keith, beside me in the driver’s seat, “those hills—they’re like whales, bigger than whales, stranded under the grass.”
    â€œEskers, drumlins, and kames,” he replied smartly. (He was an art historian: how did he know this stuff?) “That’s all I remember from A-level geography. Something to do with glaciers and the Ice Age.” Drumlins. That was it: I’d just been reading about them, as part of the research for the chapter on geological history in my prairie book.
    â€œHey,” I said, “I know about this. The geologists call it a swarm. We’re driving through a ten-thousand-year-old drumlin swarm.”
    A year earlier, approaching Eastend from the south, we’d been ushered into town by coyotes, distorted forms caught in the headlights’ glare. Now, arriving from an approximately opposite direction, we found ourselves in the company of a troupe of Ice Age hills, their ancient energy held in suspended animation. And more strangeness was in store as we rounded the final bend and rolled down into the wide bottomlands of the Frenchman River valley. Instead of proceeding into town as we had expected, we appeared to be heading straight for an earthwork of ridges and conical, turretlike hills that blocked the view ahead. At the very last minute, the road jogged left, discovered a gap, and delivered us into town and onto the main drag. A sign announced that we had entered the Valley of Hidden Secrets.
    Our new house was essentially perfect as found. Built in the early 1970s, it featured mahogany-fronted cabinets, complete with copper-trimmed knobs, and a planter-knickknack-and-book-shelf combo that was straight out of my teenage years. Even the crimson carpet in the bedroom—“This will need to be updated,” the real-estate agent who showed us the place had told us solemnly—exuded a shabby, retro charm. The real glory of the place, however, was not its stylish accoutrements but what in a more competitive market might have been written up as its “prime location, surrounded by parks.”
    Our place was at the very end of the street, on the outermost edge of town. Beyond the back fence, across the alley, lay the bend of the Frenchman River where young Wallace Stegner and his friends had once congregated to swim. To the north lay a wide grassy field, really a floodplain, that was bounded by a sweeping arc of the stream and housed the town’s baseball diamonds and campground. Past these amenities and across the creek, the land rose up and away from us in a choppy sea of conical mounds, intercut by coulees and shadowed by a tangle of chokecherries and rosebushes. The wide prairie world was right there, on the other side of the wall, just begging for us to come out and continue our explorations.
    Strangely, however, the house turned a blind eye to this view. Although there were openings in every other direction, east, west, and south, the entire north wall was windowless. We were loftily critical of what we saw as an aesthetic error, until someone pointed out that the previous owners might not have looked at the scene through quite the same lens as us. The Taylors—we knew their name from a decorative knocker affixed to the front door—had been ranchers who spent summers somewhere up in the hills and retreated to this house in the fall, much as the Stegners had done a generation before. (All this we gleaned from conversations with our new neighbors.) Perhaps, like coastal fishing families who face their homes away from the sea, the Taylors had preferred to turn their backs on the prairie and its lethal winter storms. Keith and I, by contrast, were mere visitors, in the country though not yet of it. Regardless of wind and weather, the prairie was calling to us and we were eager to open