It’s Grasslands National Park Day on ReadReidRead

Reid Dickie

For the second year in a row, February 1st is Grassland National Park Day on my blog. This year I’m offering two new videos, one of prairie dogs in GNP and a video tour of The Convent Bed & Breakfast in Val Marie, SK on the edge of the park.

Grasslands National Park is an enchanting place. Features of the park include its recent designation as a Dark Sky Preserve, in fact, the darkest Dark Sky Preserve in Canada. Critterwise, GNP is celebrating its first wild-born black-footed ferrets. The park reintroduced black-footed ferrets without much success until last year when, for the first time in 70 years, a wild black-footed ferret was born in Canada. Watch a park video of the ferrets.  

Another reintroduction to Grasslands National Park is plains bison. For the first time in 150 years, a herd of plains bison now numbering about 250 head are part of the prairie ecosystem. Adaptable and comfortable, the plains bison population is increasing quickly with about 75 calves expected to be born in spring 2012. The herd has increased from the 70 bison first released in 2005.

Read posts from last year’s Grasslands National Park Day.

The Convent B&B, Val Marie, SK

Reid Dickie

I’ve spent more glorious nights at The Convent Bed & Breakfast than any other lodging on my prairie travels. Its appeal is powerful and pleasant, relaxing yet stimulating at the same time. The combination of a serene old building and the caring owners creates a peaceful and rare experience. The picture above is The Convent’s charming dining room overlooking Grasslands National Park.

Val Marie (pop. about 130) is located at the western end of Grasslands National Park and features the park office and visitor centre. It’s about an hour south of Swift Current off the Trans Canada Highway. Few accommodations for travelers exist in the little village making The Convent even more precious. An actual convent used as a teaching facility into the late 1960s, the Ducans converted it into a bed and breakfast in the late 1990s. They retained many of the features, such as blackboards, chapel including confessional and woodwork from the original building. Take a video tour of The Convent inside and out with me by clicking on the pic below.

Prairie Dogtown in Grasslands National Park

Reid Dickie

For sheer cuteness and adorability it’s hard to find a rodent more fitting than the black-tailed prairie dog. Largely extirpated from most of their habitat which extends down into Texas, the prairie dogs in Canada are safely preserved in Grasslands National Park. Several easily accessible dogtowns dot the park and you won’t be disappointed with the shenanigans of these cute critters.

Prairie dogs are a keystone species, meaning they are often the main course for several other species in their habitat. In GNP prairie dogs are preyed upon by newly-reintroduced black-footed ferrets, prairie rattlesnakes, swift foxes, ferruginous hawks,  golden eagles, badgers and coyotes. Burrowing owls nest in old prairie dog burrows. It’s a cozy relationship. Click the pic and spend two minutes in dogtown.

You can find more information on prairie dogs elsewhere on my blog like here and here

February 1 is Grasslands National Park Day on ReadReidRead

Dusk in Val Marie, Saskatchewan

The Antonioni cottonwoods (watch Blow-Up!) nuzzle the prairie breezes leaving symphonic rustles hanging in the late afternoon air. Nuance consumes nuance. I am mostly naked, cooled by the day as I am heated by the wine. The second floor balcony of The Convent is close to heaven. Linda occurs! I am a blessed being, lucky times infinity, living that same dream in the middle of now here, an exclamation point on the endless prairie! This is what dusk in Val Marie looked like that night.

Out There It’s Summertime

Reid Dickie

I’m just back from a eight-day ramble on the prairies, mostly in the Missouri Coteau and Cypress Hills areas of southern Saskatchewan. I visited half a dozen new sites, revisited some familiar ones, shot almost 2 hours of video (expect plenty of reports from afar as a result), met wonderful new people and spent time with some old favourites. My intuition quickened, Spirit whispered through the trees in Pine Cree Park and Old Souls aided and abetted me along the way. My reward for the 2800 kms and ensuing events is serenity, a renewed sense of purpose and a bolstering of my humanity. You get what you intend.

The trip began with a perfect Saturday at the Regina Folk Festival with Linda’s cousin, Mike Panko and his beautiful partner, Brenda. Mike’s an Old Soul and a ton of fun. Here’s Mike and me at the fest.

A day of great music culminated with an energetic set from k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang closing the evening concert which also featured Taj Mahal. k.d. is in fine form these days with a new band, high energy, great new songs from her Sing It Loud CD (buy it if you haven’t already) and a back catalogue that would be the envy of any singer with perfect pitch. The show began with the lead-off track from the CD called I Confess, to my ears a Roy Orbison homage of high order. (That was one of the Tunes of the Tour as was Moonglow because Wendy Thomson performed it beautifully with the moon rising above her on the second floor balcony at The Convent in Val Marie. Both tunes sift through the inattentive spaces in my mind as the miles go by.) k.d. covers two songs on the CD and performed both of them: Heaven “by that great country band, Talking Heads,” as she introduced it, led eerily, perfectly into a new arrangement of Hallelujah; and she swung the Little River Band hit Reminiscing. She sang Miss Chatelaine, Western Skies, ending the show with a rockin’ version of her now-evergreen Constant Craving. To end the encores and evening she sang Neil Young’s Helpless.

After a restful night on Mike’s futon and a long, leisurely breakfast with him and Brenda, I was westbound onto the Missouri Coteau. The Coteau stretches from the northwest in central Saskatchewan south between Moose Jaw and Swift Current into South Dakota. It’s the next step up on the prairies after the Manitoba Escarpment and features lots of hills and gullies, some of Saskatchewan’s best scenery and worst highways, friendly people and endlessly changing vistas that surprise and enchant the curious seeker. It’s one of my favourite places to drive. The highways are lonesome and long, the sky runs ahead of me just as far as it extends behind me and there’s enough room to think, to evolve, to expand my awareness and discover what’s there. I head south from Moose Jaw to Assiniboia then west toward Pine Cree Park, my camping destination for the night.

Located in the foothills to the Cypress Hills between Shaunavon and Eastend, over the years Pine Cree Park has sheltered my little tent more than any other campground on the praires. This is a shot of the South Fork of Swift Current Creek, which runs right through Pine Cree Park; its pleasant burble can be heard from most campsites in the park.

Set in a deep mysterious coulee on a Continental Divide, Pine Cree Park is a truly rustic camping experience. There is no other like it in southern Saskatchewan. Soft-shell camping is encouraged, the park is non-electric, the width of the road and bridges prevents any unit longer than 28 feet from using the park and weight restrictions on the bridges apply. It gets extremely dark. Great for stargazing. Here’s another shot of the little stream through the park.

The little park has custodians this year, something new. Joan Hodgins and her nephew Darcy tend the park and live in two trailers just at the entrance. Both wonderful helpful people. I bought a generous tailgate load of firewood for $5 delivered. Joan offers outdoor programs at the park and both her and the lad demonstrated a great love for and understanding of this sacred place. Joan helped me understand the significance of a gift Spirit gave me just after I arrived in the park. I will have a video report on the gift soon.

The next night I moved from soft shell camping to luxury on the prairie, staying at The Convent Country Inn in Val Marie. A former convent saved from demolition by Robert and Mette Ducan about 15 years ago, this is my favourite bed and breakfast out there.  Other guests included Wendy and Eldon Thomson from Saskatoon who’d also attended the Regina Folk Festival and were out for a drive on the Coteau. Up on the second floor balcony, Wendy serenaded us with her lovely singing and guitar playing until way past dark. The balcony affords a wide view of the Frenchman River valley, Grasslands National Park beyond and the star-filled night sky. The Convent is for sale, a bargain at $525,000. Video coming soon. UPDATE: Watch my video tour. Here is a picture of me in front of The Convent.

Two more shots of The Convent: the first floor breakfast room and the second floor sitting room.

The next day I took the eco-driving tour of Grasslands National Park. There is some development occurring in the park. A small, primitive campground has been set up at the Belza Place which has a vast view of the Frenchman River valley, and closer to the prairie dog Dogtown, another development is being built. Spend a couple of minutes with the prairie dogs in GNP. Here’s a shot of the vista from the Belza campsite.

After a night at the Stage Coach Motel in Willow Bunch, I took a private tour of the Big Muddy Badlands offered through Coronach Tourism. Tillie Duncan, who’d lived in the area her whole life and knew it like the back of her hand, was my guide. She took me through the Sam Kelly Caves where outlaws like Dutch Henry and Butch Cassidy hid the horses and cattle they rustled back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We also visited two sacred sites that were new to me: a ceremonial circle and a turtle effigy, both high atop a butte on the Giles Ranch which is private property and accessible only through guided tours. Though elderly, Tillie was spry and full of vigour, offering countless entertaining anecdotes about the area. She still farms 13 quarters, growing durum and lentils this year! I recommend her highly for the Big Muddy tour. Here’s a shot of me taken near the turtle effigy.

A night in the Country Boy Motel then I re-explored a couple of the accessible sites Tillie had shown me, like the 1902 Big Muddy North West Mounted Police barracks and the family cemetery of an early pioneer, James Marshall, all with magnificent vistas of the huge Big Muddy valley. I revisited Castle Butte and took some great video of the place. Again coming soon to a blog near you. The only rain of my eight-day journey occurred Friday morning when I awoke in Weyburn. By the time I got to Manitoba, the sun was shining again. I was thrilled to discover Hwy #5 through Spruce Woods Park is now open and the park is slowly getting back on its feet. This is my report on the park’s current status.

I arrived home feeling rejuvenated and fully in touch with my humanity. The mighty Avenger and I will travel the prairies for another month. There is always room in the virtual passenger seat for you. Hope you are up to the drive all the way “out there” and back. Come on along.

Prairie Dog Rapture? Repost

Reid Dickie

It’s been floating around for years and landed a few days back in my sidebar. I mean this painting of the prairie dogs with their paws and heads raised performing en masse what appears to be a ritual. Titled where I’ve seen it as Prairie Dog Rapture, I got curious about it. Do prairie dogs do this?

The painting is by a contemporary artist named Anthony Falbo, a multi-stylist who sometimes paints in Dali style, sometimes cubist, other times representational. His God Art site gives you the gist and gamut of his work. I learned that the artist’s actual name for the painting is Praising Prairie Dogs, giving it a slight twist, otherwise Anthony wasn’t much help.

Since image is the language of the soul, any picture on the internet will create its own mythology, as did this one. Some people stated and many believed that every morning and every evening prairie dogs stop whatever it is they are doing and spend anywhere from 20 minutes to half an hour grouped in this pose honouring the sunrise and sunset.

Over the decades, several of my long treks, including two this past summer, took me into southwestern Saskatchewan and Grasslands National Park. GNP has two large dog towns, which comprise the only Canadian habitat for prairie dogs, those varmints whose burrows broke the legs of horses and cattle. Easily accessible, the dog towns are part of the self-guiding driving tour the Park offers to visitors. Linda and I visited there together one year and spent hours watching the funny little critters run and play, hug and kiss each other and bark like, well, prairie dogs. I thought if anyone in the country can tell me if prairie dogs do sunrise and sunset rituals, they’d be at Grasslands. And they were.

Pat Fargey, a species-at-risk biologist at GNP, returned my call and was curious about the picture. Without seeing it and based on my description, Pat thought the only time prairie dogs made that gesture was when they were barking which was usually not formal as in the picture. I scoured internet images to find a prairie dog making the gesture.

There’s the gesture – prairie dog barking! It does have an element of Hallelujah in it, to be sure and I can see how Falbo adapted the pose turning it into praise. If prairie dogs spend an hour a day gesturing like this for whatever reason, that behaviour would be a well-known part of the prairie dog description and wouldn’t need a painting on the internet to suddenly bring it to light.

Nonetheless, the image remains evocative, even edifying. As a group, they share joy and passion, prompting me to imagine them about to sing as a choir of little prairie dog voices and wonder what hymn they picked and what it sounds like. Let’s listen…

Prairie Dogs Have Their Own Language and Can Describe What Humans Look Like

 
It’s a language that would twist the tongue of even the most sophisticated linguist. Prairie dogs talk to each other and can describe what different human beings look like, according to scientists. The species – only found in North America – call out to warn their friends when a predator approaches their habitat. Not only that, but they have calls for ‘human’, one for ‘hawk’ and another for ‘coyote’, radio station NPR reports.

Professor Con Slobodchikoff, of Northern Arizona University, has been studying prairie dogs for 30 years. He is particularly interested in deciphering their language because to do so would ‘open the door for understanding how other species communicate’.

The prairie dog’s barks, yips and chirping sounds are really a sophisticated form of communication that contains a vocabulary of at least 100 words, Professor Slobodchikoff claims. ‘The little yips prairie dogs make contain a lot of information,’ he said.

Professor Con Slobodchikoff, of Northern Arizona University, has been studying prairie dogs for 30 years

‘They can describe details of predators such as their size, shape, colour and how fast they are going. ‘They also can discriminate whether an approaching animal is a coyote or a dog, and they can decipher different types of birds.’

Professor Slobodchikoff and his students hid themselves in prairie dog villages and recorded the noises the rodents made whenever a human, hawk, dog or coyote passed through. What they found was that the prairie dog issues different calls depending on the intruder. The researchers discovered this by analysing the recorded calls for frequency and tone. They concluded that it doesn’t have one call for ‘danger’, rather it has a collection of warning noises – or a language.

To further develop this line of investigation, Professor Slobodchikoff gathered four volunteers and had them walk through a prairie dog village four times. On each occasion they wore the same clothing, except for different colour shirts. The prairie dogs responded by issuing different calls, depending on the colour of the volunteers’ shirts.

Professor Slobodchikoff then discovered they also issued different calls for varying heights, and even for abstract shapes including cardboard circles, squares and triangles. He told NPR: ‘Essentially they were saying, “Here comes the tall human in the blue,” versus, “Here comes the short human in the yellow.”‘

Above section from internet

This is an article I wrote about prairie dogs and a well-known painting showing them in praise or rapture or not.

Fifteen Museums That Don’t Exist

BEFORE AND AFTER VAL MARIE

 Reid Dickie  

BEFORE

            At Ipswich McCauley’s Museum, you will see five hundred sixty one pairs of baby shoes dating back to 1750; one hundred twenty of them are bronzed, some are moccasins worn by Sioux babies.

Down the road apiece is Doanne Skweizer’s grandfather’s collection of wrenches, 184 in all. Next to each wrench is a glass jar of nuts and bolts the wrench was used on.

In Lipton Seeback’s farmyard is a small shed that contains three hundred eleven early electric fans and a couch made of horseshoes welded together. Not even one of the fans work but, improbably, the couch is extremely comfortable.

Astwurst Shfickins brought his mother’s collection of dolls made of goat dung – all two hundred seventy three of them – from Norway. She made every one herself. He keeps them under locked airtight glass domes, each dome lit by an intense overhead beam.

A mile detour gets you to Ditdit Kbeema’s House of Coconuts. It is not a house made of coconuts but rather a collection of all the varieties of coconuts the planet provides.  Ditdit will always try to sell you a polyester Hawaiian shirt. Do not buy one.

Lukas Smallth claims to have about $30,000 worth of coins that he watched being run over by trains after he put them on railway tracks. When you ask him the obvious question, Lukas will likely weep.

Pershing Dowhauser inherited an uncle’s collection of clothespins and displays them on a clothesline holding up an aunt’s collection of Irish linen tea towels with birds on them. Everyday is laundry day at Pershing’s house.

As a school project when he was eight, Gorse Grass started keeping a diary of his toilet habits and still persists at this fifty-three years later. He will show you his twenty-seven volume diary, point out highlights, explain his rating system and, if he is in a good mood, show you the entry for his most favourite bowel movement ever.

Dawn Intrafficschool’s museum features the two things she collects: ribald stories about nuns and obscure laundry detergents. Dawn will enthrall you all day with her nun stories, which she reads aloud in her bold voice. Since she blushes easily, she will spend most of the time beet-faced and embarrassed. Next to her wringer washer is her collection of rare laundry detergents with names by Pek, Jer, Poomt, Durf, KKKleen and White World. Whether removed from the market due to corrosive natures, unhealthy emissions or witless naming, all her detergents have a story to tell, just like Dawn herself.

VAL MARIE

            I stopped at a pay phone outside a garage in Val Marie, Saskatchewan at 3:00 am to call in my report. A small green ball of light shot around the streets of the tiny village the whole time I made my call. It ignored me and, making a tiny rocket noise, zoomed about four feet off the ground up and down the dozen dusty streets that comprise Val Marie. The few streetlights in the village were the old-fashioned, loaded-with-shadows white light types so the brighter-than-neon green gave an eerie organic illumination to the scene.

As I drove out of town, the green ball streamed by me then turned down a street it had traveled 80 times in the last 5 minutes.

A few miles on, I stopped at the side of the highway. As I stepped out of the car, Orion stepped out of the sky and rubbed my shoulders. I palpitated next to Highway 18, massaged by a constellation.

By a stream, I fell asleep. I know this.

I am eastbound now, horizon speaking directly to me in the dim yellow language of morning.

AFTER

            Toodhow Klippenhaus will show you his collection of Venezuelan toreador hats for a small fee, usually from $5 to $8. He has over 800 to show you. Set aside a day.

At Aurora Gaunt’s Soup Museum, taste sixty-six kinds of consommé.

Watch for the dozens of flags flying at Biffyland, the world’s largest collection of outhouses, all in working order. How many? They have lost count but you can count on getting lost in the Biffy Maze. This is a recommended pit stop.

For some odd reason Clynmyst Gigglougg kept everything his mother told him never to put in his mouth. And here it all is, awaiting your perusal. Warning signs are posted.

The Old Testament is written on the west wall of Bryton Galosheski’s barn, on the east the New Testament. The gable ends are painted to look like the fore and aft of Noah’s Ark. All along the ridge top of the gambrel roof is a large wooden cutout of the Last Supper, elaborately painted on both sides. The entire roof area is covered with antlers, horns and hooves of wild animals fastened securely with airplane wire. Some say “awesome”, others say “ghastly.” You decide.

If broken scissors are your bliss then do not miss the stimulating displays at Dayton Drayder’s Home for Wayward Half Scissors. Dayton can answer all your scissor-related queries, even “Is half a scissor better than no scissor at all?”

  March 15, 2004

 None of these museums exists. Sorry.

Val Marie does exist in southwestern Saskatchewan at the western edge of Grasslands National Park. It has 137 people, an excellent bed and breakfast called The Convent, interesting tour guides and the Information Centre for Grasslands National Park. It is often the Canadian hot spot.

Prairie Dog Rapture?

Reid Dickie

          It’s been floating around for years and landed a few days back in my sidebar. I mean this painting of the prairie dogs with their paws and heads raised performing en masse what appears to be a ritual. Titled where I’ve seen it as Prairie Dog Rapture, I got curious about it. Do prairie dogs do this?

            The painting is by a contemporary artist named Anthony Falbo, a multi-stylist who sometimes paints in Dali style, sometimes cubist, other times representational. His God Art site gives you the gist and gamut of his work. I learned that the artist’s actual name for the painting is Praising Prairie Dogs, giving it a slight twist, otherwise Anthony wasn’t much help.

            Since image is the language of the soul, any picture on the internet will create its own mythology, as did this one. Some people stated and many believed that every morning and every evening prairie dogs stop whatever it is they are doing and spend anywhere from 20 minutes to half an hour grouped in this pose honouring the sunrise and sunset.

            Over the decades, several of my long treks, including two this past summer, took me into southwestern Saskatchewan and Grasslands National Park. GNP has two large dog towns, which comprise the only Canadian habitat for prairie dogs, those varmints whose burrows broke the legs of horses and cattle. Easily accessible, the dog towns are part of the self-guiding driving tour the Park offers to visitors. Linda and I visited there together one year and spent hours watching the funny little critters run and play, hug and kiss each other and bark like, well, prairie dogs. I thought if anyone in the country can tell me if prairie dogs do sunrise and sunset rituals, they’d be at Grasslands. And they were.

            Pat Fargey, a species-at-risk biologist at GNP, returned my call and was curious about the picture. Without seeing it and based on my description, Pat thought the only time prairie dogs made that gesture was when they were barking which was usually  not formal as in the picture. I scoured internet images to find a prairie dog making the gesture.

            There’s the gesture – prairie dog barking! It does have an element of Hallelujah in it, to be sure and I can see how Falbo adapted the pose turning it into praise. If prairie dogs spend an hour a day gesturing like this for whatever reason, that behaviour would be a well-known part of the prairie dog description and wouldn’t need a painting on the internet to suddenly bring it to light.

            Nonetheless, the image remains evocative, even edifying. As a group, they share joy and passion, prompting me to imagine them about to sing as a choir of little prairie dog voices and wonder what hymn they picked and what it sounds like. Let’s listen…

Lise Perrault

Reid Dickie

UPDATE: Lise Perrault passed away on March 7, 2015 at age 91. Funeral information here

On my second visit to Val Marie, SK in August 2001 I met a local woman named Lise Perrault who, among other things, ran a small museum in her home. Lise collected and proudly displayed all 24 first editions of the cowboy novels written by western writer and actor Will James who ranched in the Val Marie area. Besides the books, the museum featured other James memorabilia and pictures. Lise sometimes loaned her collection to other museums, claiming it to be the definitive Will James collection in Canada, of which I had no doubt.

               Lise in 2001 when I first met her at her Val Marie house.

Lise thought Will James and his connection to the district was never fully exploited for its tourist and educational value. “We have one of the greatest stories right here in Val Marie,” she said, “but instead of preserving his homestead and making a display of it, we’re not taking advantage of it.” Today in the self-guiding driving tour of the Frenchman Valley in the Park, one of the featured stops is what remains of the Will James ranch.

Making use of her detailed knowledge of the area’s history, geography and special places, Lise offered interesting and well off-the-beaten-path tours of the mysterious Frenchman Valley and Grasslands National Park. In addition to the stories of local ranchers, aboriginals and settlers, Lise could recount tales of bootleggers and point out relics such as the trail the North West Mounted Police used on their patrols between Wood Mountain and Cypress Hills, an ancient half-moon effigy in the dry grass and where the prairie rattlesnakes spend their winters. The day I met her, I waited at her house/museum while she escorted a vanful of tourists around the sights. Her credentials for providing tours were solid.

                     Lise Perrault painting titled Buffalo Rub Stone         

Born in the district and a third generation descendent of Max Trottier who homesteaded in the region in the 1880s, Lise claimed that her grandfather participated in the last buffalo hunt in which 482 buffalo were killed southwest of Val Marie in 1885. Lise is a big fan and promoter of another relative, now-retired hockey player Bryan Trottier who grew up in the Val Marie area and played 18 seasons in the National Hockey League for the New York Islanders and the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Ferdinand and Lise Perrault ran the Rocking 4 Ranch 24 miles east of Val Marie for 38 years where they raised nine children. In 1984, they sold their land to the Park with their ranch becoming the cornerstone of the new 900 square kilometre Grasslands National Park. A strong and vocal advocate of the Park, Lise stated, “Our hills are beautiful. There is colour in our country. It is for discerning people who have time to stop and look.”

Lise was also an accomplished painter who spent her life paying attention to the landscape and capturing its nuances in a unique folk art style. Her depictions of the prairie she saw every day and the critters who roamed it brim with simple honesty both in subject and in style. The vast dun hills rolling back and away dotted with the dark forms of buffalo and deer, the huge blue sky and the subtle connection between land and people were effortlessly captured by Lise’s brush.

Lise is now in a personal care home in Ponteix, SK, her museum closed and the fate of her paintings largely unknown. A few of her paintings are still accessible in Val Marie. The Val Marie Museum retains two of Lise Perrault’s most evocative works. Painted in 1982, one is a hilly and treed vista that may have been the lowlands of the Cypress Hills just west of here. The other, from 1998, depicts two cowboys shaking hands in the middle of the prairie. Nothing in the picture suggests the men’s motive or meaning, no points of reference. There is amicability between them but mystery as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two paintings by Lise Perrault at the Val Marie Museum. Neither are for sale.

The Val Marie Hotel features a mural by Lise depicting the broad prairie with buttes, buffalo and prairie dogs. Located in the hotel restaurant/pub, the scene covers most of a wall. The cattle brands, burnt into the wood above the mural, come from local ranches.

Lise’s prairie mural in the Val Marie Hotel with brands from local ranches along the top.

Lise’s prescient depictions of buffalo roaming the open prairie have come to life. Buffalo returned to the muscular prairie we call Grasslands National Park in December 2005 when seventy plains bison from Elk Island National Park were released into the Park’s West Block. Hoping to enhance the park’s ecological integrity by restoring grazing to the landscape, the buffalo enclosure covers approximately 181 square km and is part of the self-guiding driving tour.

I treasure the time I spent with Lise. She was welcoming and generous with her knowledge of the land and sparked my curiosity to explore and look deeper into the Frenchman Valley, Grasslands National Park and Val Marie. As well, one time she took me to Buffalo Butte Ceremonial Site via “the back way,” as she put it, when the pasture gate was locked. For all that, I am indebted to her.

Lise’s home was lined with dozens of paintings, all in her whimsical folksy style. As she spoke a bit about each picture and what it meant to her, her love of the land and all its secrets welled out of her. It made her joyful. At the time, I was highly inclined to buy one of her paintings but my finances didn’t permit it. I regret that.