To see it I have only to walk a half-mile out onto the prairie, up a sage and cactus strewn slope, around a thinly-grassed hill or two, retreating further and further from civilization into that gorge where only coyotes, deer and rabbits come, till I reach the place below an abandoned eagle’s nest where the pieces of bone protrude from the yellowish clay. When I was an obscure, barely-published writer filled with dreams of glory, I had made a solitary pilgrimage around the prairie provinces to the few small towns and farms where writers of talent had once lived: to the homestead of the Icelandic poet, Stephan Stephansson in Alberta, to Margaret Laurence’s family home in Manitoba, and in Saskatchewan I had searched for what had been the farm where Sinclair Ross was raised. For a month I spoke to almost no one; I remember the feel of the steering wheel under my palms, day after day, the green countryside passing by the open car windows, the heat, the perpetual prairie wind, the undercurrent of loneliness that I could never quite shut off, and my determination that never wavered in spite of it.
