I let her rest. We were climbing the steep hill opposite the ranch-house: she couldn’t do anything very disastrous on that gradient. Even though, when she did plod on again, we were quite a way behind Sherm and Charles. By the time she’d stopped for another couple of breathers we were even further behind. The track was narrow and sunken, though. There were bushes on either side. And ahead of us the hefty rumps of Biz and Duke blocked our way like a wall of sandbags.
At the top of the path she paused again, turning her head very quietly to the left. One of her little tricks, I thought, tightening up the reins. I bet there was a sidepath round here and she had some idea of taking it. But no, when I followed the pointing of her ears, it was to see a mule deer watching us from about twenty yards away, its head and shoulders above a bush. The pair of them regarded each other silently for a while, then Sheba resumed her upward trudge. How was that for observation? said her ears, now tilted back at me. That old Biz and Duke hadn’t seen that one.
They hadn’t, as a result of which they were now several hundred yards ahead of us, ambling placidly side by side as their riders chatted. Gosh, we were all Behind! said Sheba, suddenly quickening her pace. We were still on the narrow track, so I let her. But, as she was obviously aware, knowing these paths like the palm of her hoof, by the time we caught up with the others, the narrow trail had ended. We were out on the wide, open top of the hill now and we went round Biz and Duke like a racing car round a bollard.
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‘The West gets her like this,’ I heard Charles say as I shot past. ‘She’s been looking forward to a good long gallop for weeks.’ Not like this I hadn’t, apparently bound straight for the border, with nobody in front to block my path. Sherm and Charles, I knew, would have come tearing after me, but pride wouldn’t let me yell for help. I was supposed to be able to ride!
We flew along the hilltop, clearing scrub bushes and gopher holes as we went. I expected to go down at any moment. But we didn’t. Sheba was a cow-pony, used to ground like this. She knew what she was doing. And then the thought came to me – what on earth was I worrying about? I’d never come off yet on Mio. If Sheba was safe on her feet- and she seemed to be – I ought to be enjoying it.
‘Sit down! Get your hands down! Work alternately on the reins!’ I could hear Mrs Hutchings saying it. I did. Sheba was still going like a catapult along the hilltop but I began to feel her responding. I slowed her pace down... gently...
not wanting to turn her head so she couldn’t see where she was going over the gopher holes. I had her. We were back now to a rhythmic, loping canter. I could watch the way ahead, avoid the holes. And suddenly it was glorious...
exhilarating... the thud of her hooves on the turf, the wide Canadian sky, the rolling rangeland, the feeling of boundlessness... ‘Enjoying it?’ asked Sherm, as he and Charles caught me up. ‘You bet,’ I said, patting my trusty steed’s neck. ‘She really is a good girl.’
Except, of course, that she’d managed to loosen her cinch and it was no good Sherm tightening it up. Cutting steeply down the hillside at the head of the valley she got it loose again and both the saddle and I went sideways.
Taking advantage of this, Sheba started to get up speed 94
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again, obviously intending to nip down and get past the others. She thought I liked it out in front, she said when I pulled her up. She just wanted to show me how she could go Downhill.
I’d take her word for it, I said, bringing her back behind Biz and Duke and putting her nose once more into their tails. I’d ride her flat out anywhere now, so long as we were on a reasonable level – but not with her saddle canted 40
degrees to starboard, going downhill on a slope like Ben Nevis.
Two happy days we spent riding the range again, the camper parked by the side of the ranch-house, but we had to get on to see those grizzlies. Regretfully we said goodbye to the Ewings, told Biz and Duke we’d be back one day, and set out for a neighbouring valley. Here, at the Box X Ranch, lived another of our friends. Babe Burton. A splendid trout stream waters her land and there are several beaver dams in it. But we were not going fishing or watching beavers at work this time. We were on our way to Waterton and she was coming with us. As far as her cabin at Yarrow Creek, anyway, a couple of miles from the Waterton Park boundary.
There we really would be in grizzly country.
When we set out in our respective vehicles to drive the forty miles from the Box X to the cabin, Babe carried a high-powered rifle in her truck. Not because she was nervous. She knew the wilderness and its animals better than most people. But there could always come a time when she might need it. She’d have felt safer, no doubt, if she’d had it along the time she was caught between a grizzly and her cubs.
For many years, the grizzlies around Yarrow Creek had a reputation for being exceptionally aggressive – the 95
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The Coming of Saska result, it was said, of an incident back in the 1860s, when a band of Indians who were camped there developed smallpox. Indians took smallpox very badly indeed – whole encampments would be wiped out in no time – and while the band lay in their teepees along the creek bank, too sick to bury their dead, grizzlies, attracted by the smell, had come padding into the camp. They had begun to feed on the dead bodies, had gone on to pull the living out of their tents most of them were too weak to resist; only a few survivors got away. From then on Yarrow Canyon was taboo: no Indian ever entered it again. When some forty years later, Babe’s father decided to build a cabin there, the Indians did their best to dissuade him. It was full of ghosts, they said.
And, presumably, grizzly bears. There were still an unusually large number around and they had a reputation for deliberately attacking people. They were believed to have acquired a taste for human flesh and, with the memory of non-resistance in the teepees, to have lost their fear of humans. It could have been so. A grizzly can live to be 40 and their non-fear could have been passed on to their descendants. Gradually the trait had faded, however, and the story of how it started. Nowadays probably few people in the Yarrow district ever think of it. Except on such an occasion as when Babe got caught between the bears.
It seemed that one of her neighbours had a cow which had been ailing for quite a while. The owner dosed it with all kinds of remedies and when the cow eventually died... a couple of hundred yards from Babe’s boundary fence: she could see it from her window... he hadn’t bothered about moving it because there was no value in the carcass.
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Inevitably the grizzlies arrived – a large male, a medium male, a female and her half-grown cubs. They fed always in that order. Woe betide a lesser bear that tried to eat before its superior. In the normal way, said Babe, they’d have eaten the cow in no time, but with all that medicine in it, obviously it hadn’t tasted so good. They’d chew at it, go off again...
they came every day for about three weeks. The males then disappeared, there being little left of the cow – but the mother still came with her cubs, so they could play at attacking and practise fighting with the bones.
Babe had watched many bears in her time, but none so consistently as these. The cubs, she said, were some two years old and seemed to be always squabbling. The mother would stand it for a while, then she’d lose her patience, grow irritable and hit them. A hefty cuff that sent them reeling and they’d hide in the bushes and cry like children for a while. Then out they’d come, bouncing after Mum, a new leaf definitely turned – until they forgot, and started to quarrel, and their mother would whack them again. She was obviously fed up with them. It was nearly time for them to be going off on their own, and for her to think of re-mating, which she couldn’t do while she still had cubs around because a male bear would have killed them. But still they trailed persistently after her