Only of course it wasn’t a tame moose, just an unusually tolerant one. After a little more retreating it got fed up, lowered its antlers and charged – and Fatso did have to run. I can see him now, in a red-checked shirt and shorts, his camera accessories flying straight out on their straps behind him, streaking through the trees like a scene from a Mack Sennett film with the moose going head-down after him.
Fortunately for him it was still in an amiable mood – it just saw him off at a half-run, like a horse with a dog that has been pestering it. Then, with the man wedged deservedly up in a tree-fork, the moose moved unhurriedly off into the forest. The great black shadow became fainter among the trees until at last we were looking at nothing. ‘I wish we’d had a movie camera to take that fat man running,’ I said. ‘Gosh,’ said Charles ecstatically. ‘But what a moose we’ve seen!’
We saw several after that. Always at a distance though, in bogs or lakeside clearings. Never such a magnificent specimen and never again at such fantastically close range.
It was just about a chance in a million.
Like the time we saw the wolverine. That, however was still ahead of us. Meanwhile our yellow and white camper with the prairie rose emblem of Alberta on its registration plate took us, with only an occasional emergency stop as one of the cupboard doors swung open in the living section behind us and either the saucepans fell out at the bottom or our canned food fell out at the top (that was the only fault we could find with the camper; its door fastenings were a 88
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bit hit-or-miss)... down to Banff, along the beautiful Bow River to Calgary, south down what was once the old Fort Macleod trail, and then abruptly west, into the foothills of the Rockies.
We were on familiar ground now. Here was the spot where, on our last visit, we’d stopped to look at the rangeland in the moonlight and a coyote had come out on to the trail ahead of us. There ahead of us, at the junction of several tracks, was the little white clapboard schoolhouse... not in a village street, as one would expect a schoolhouse to be, but all by itself on the range.
The school bell still hung there, silent in its white wooden steeple, and inside was the big round wood-stove that used to warm the communal schoolroom in winter. So many children must have learned their lessons there, just above the creek with the beaver dam. So many grown-up socials and Sunday prayer-meetings it must have seen, before there was anything but horse transport into the nearest town. Unused now for years, the ranchers preserved it out of affection.
Over the wooden bridge across the creek we drove up past a white signpost giving the direction to various ranches.
Somebody had peppered it with bullet-holes for fun, to add a Western flavour. We took the left-hand fork. We were going to the Ewings’ ranch. On, it seemed endlessly, along a rough, red-dust track, our way blocked at intervals by wandering cattle – our friend Sherm Ewing’s herd of Herefords, spread like a milling sea across the rangeland. At last we drove through the great log gate that closed off the home corral, down to the ranch-house nestling in the bowl of the valley, and Claire Ewing, slim in Western jeans, was coming out to meet us. It was as if we had come home.
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The Coming of Saska In more ways than one. We had spent a lot of time here on our first trip and every corner of the place was familiar.
Its setting, too, was very like our own at home. The rolling hills made for galloping, the pine forest darkening the head of the valley – except that this, of course, was on a much bigger scale and there were the snow-covered Rockies in the background. There were cats at the ranch and the dog. Sage, who remembered us. The only thing missing, we said laughingly, was Annabel. Then Sherm and his son Charlie appeared, doffing their Stetsons, clattering in off the verandah in their high-heeled Western boots. ‘We knew you were here, by the camper in the yard,’ said Sherm. ‘So we stopped off and did a bit of saddling up. We thought you might like a ride before supper. You’ll find a couple of your friends at the door.’
There she was when we went out. Sheba, the part-Arab cow pony I’d ridden two years before. She still had the barrel-shaped stomach that any other Arab would have been ashamed of, but which she found so useful when she decided to slip her cinch. I’d ridden miles lopsided on that wilful little pony because, however much one tightened it, her saddle kept sliding round. Uphill, downhill, Sheba deciding the direction, while I concentrated, sweating, on staying on.
‘Not this time, my beauty,’ I told her, thinking of the practice I’d put in for this on Mio, riding up the precipitous Slagger’s Path at home standing up with my arms outstretched, fast-trotting down the lane on the way back to the stables, arms folded, deliberately without reins...
Sheba regarded me with an Annabel look from beneath her dark Arab eyelashes, then snorted and rubbed her nose against Biz, the big roan who was tethered alongside her.
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‘Here they are again.’ You could practically hear her saying it. ‘What shall we do with them this time? You like to have first try?’
That, at any rate, is the only reason I can give for the fact that when Charles put his foot to Biz’s stirrup. Biz, who’d behaved last time as if he were Olympia trained and Charles the rangeland Alan Oliver, stood up on his hind legs, waved his front ones, and started to panic backwards.
Charles, clinging to him like a leech for a second or two, got his other leg over the saddle. Biz came down from his rearing, and Charles leaned forward to pat him. Up went Biz again... backing, with Charles in the saddle, straight for the open barn door while Sheba looked approvingly on.
‘Wait till this one gets on me,’ said the semaphore tilt of her eartips. ‘I’ll come in backwards too. It’ll look just like we’re ballet dancing... or one of those funny films they run in reverse.’
It no doubt would have done too, except that Charles is a pretty good horseman and Biz suddenly found himself going forward against his will, whereat Sheba, seeing him walk submissively across the yard, let me get up on her and followed after him.
‘Where are we going to have the fun then? Up on the hill?’ was the undoubted meaning of her second snort. I rode out as if I’d been a cowgirl all my life – but oh boy!
did I wish I was walking!
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Ten
BIZ, ONCE HE WAS out of the yard, was perfectly all right.
He’d got this habit lately, said Sherm, of playing up when people got on him. Seemed to have got a ticklish back. He’d bucked Charlie clean off the other day.
I looked surreptitiously at Charles. This was what happened when you rode in the West. People regarded being bucked or reared with as natural, like crossing the road. Apparently Charles regarded it that way too. He beamed back at me, reins loose on Biz’s neck, as if he rode perpendicular horses practically every day.
Not so me. I manoeuvred Sheba behind Biz and Sherm’s horse, Duke, with every intention of keeping her there.
Biz’s capers had unnerved me. Just let Sheba get the chance... I remembered her speed from last time. She trudged there for a while, obviously insulted, her head down like Annabel’s when she, too, was being a Slave in Bondage. Her shoulders moved wearily. Her head drooped 92
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lower. She must stop for a Moment, she said. She wasn’t as young as she used to be and I was quite a weight to carry.