A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage Read Free Book Online Page A

ourselves to its wide horizons.
    In remarkably short order, we had cajoled a local contractor into ordering a picture window (four-paned to echo the four-paned knickknack shelves in the room divider) and inserting it into our living room wall. Now, with our brand new secondhand love seat positioned directly in front of the glass, we could sit side by side and gaze out at the scene: from the bare symmetry of the poplar tree in the foreground to the dense scrawl of bushes along the river and then up, layer by layer, fold upon voluptuous fold, to the bony haunches of the hills that loomed over the town. Sometimes, we watched as small herds of white-tailed deer grazed on the flats along the stream bank or held our breath as they circled close, doe eyed and fleshy, and walked under our windowsill. Above them, against a leaden sky, the snowy hills told the hours in shadowed pools of blue that spread and deepened and finally merged into the darkness.
    And then it was spring, and life settled into a pattern that has served us well ever since. Although we spend most of our time in the city, we make a point of getting to Eastend at least once a month. During the university term, when Keith is occupied with lectures and meetings, we usually only manage three or four days at a time, but in summer, when the pressure is off, we often have the luxury of settling in for a span of weeks. Over the years, the balky old van to which we owe our Eastend adventure has given way to more reliable wheels, and the dogs who accompanied us on our early travels have all died and been replaced, sometimes in super-abundance. These days we are accompanied by two retrievers in the back seat and two dachshunds up front, with Calla the cat wedged in somewhere or other. In recent years, for longer stays we have rounded out the menagerie with two quarter horse geldings, Tanner and Tex, whom we tug along behind us in a horse trailer.
    By the time we have reached our destination, delivered the horses to their rented pasture (an idyllic valley with a spring-fed creek), and settled in, Keith and I are usually content to sit and stare out our new window for an hour or two. But before long, the view, plus a barrage of canine entreaties, lures us out the door. Sometimes, we stroll down the back alley and across a narrow margin of grass to stand on the cutbank and gaze down into the slow, syrupy water of the Frenchman River. As a student of Wolf Willow, I know that Wallace Stegner stood on this very spot when he visited town on a reconnaissance mission in the early 1960s (shyly, slyly, giving his name as Mr. Page), impelled by “the queer adult compulsion to return to one’s beginnings.” 1 And it was here, electrified by the “tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native” musk of the wolf willow, that he reconnected with the “sensuous little savage” he had once been. 2
    For newcomers like us, however, the excitement is more immediate. Look, see that sudden shimmer down there in the water, by the old piling? It’s a beaver, a muskrat; no, it’s a mink, swimming upstream, impossibly black and shiny. Or follow the river back toward our house and west around the first bend, no more than a hundred steps, and stop on the bank again. Do you hear a catbird mewing in the bushes; notice the kingbirds hawking for insects from the low, overhanging branches; see the swallows, lithe as fish, slicing through the air? Try to follow their acrobatics with your binoculars and all you’ll get is blur. Barn swallows, check. Bank swallows, check. Tree swallows, check. Northern rough-winged swallows, check. Violet-green swallows, check. Who would ever have guessed that they could be so swift, so blue, so varied, so alive? So thrilling.
    â€œBiodiversity” is a bloodless term but here it was, on the wing. The wild tangle of life along the creek bank offered a moment of grace, exempt from decline and loss, in which beauty coexisted with abundance.