And reading it for fun, because that’s what this historical novel has been to pen: a great deal of fun. And all the while, thinking about the second book in the series, The Third Riel Conspiracy.

In September Jenn and I took a road trip to Saskatchewan. While Jenn wanted to go somewhere sunny and warm where we could surf and lie in a hammock and drink fruity drinks, I wanted to go to Saskatchewan, where I could immerse myself in the settings of the North West Rebellion. Jenn, being supportive and enthusiastic about my writing career relented, and we drove 2000 kilometers across mountain ranges and aspen parkland and out onto the great Canadian prairie in pursuit of our nation’s magnificent history.

Salmon at Baily's Cutte, Well's Grey Provincial Park

Along the way we stopped in some of the West’s most amazing places: Well’s Grey Provincial Park, where we watched the vanguard of this year’s tremendous salmon run jumping Bailey’s Chute on the Clearwater River; Mount Robson Provincial and Jasper National Park, shrouded in fog and cloud; Elk Island National Park, its bison passing like ephemeral ghosts in the night; and the highlight: Prince Albert National Park, with its wild lakes, spectacular forests and magical wolves.

Prince Albert National Park

But the unexpected centerpiece of the trip was the discovery that this chapter of Canada’s history took place in some of the most amazing landscapes and verdant locations I’ve visited. It stands to reason: though there were many origins of the Riel Rebellion – or Resistance, as many in central Saskatchewan call it – the spender of the land, and the Métis and woodland Cree’s relationship with it, was certainly central to their complaint with the Dominion Government. The distant bureaucracy in Ottawa wanted to impose a square lot survey on a landscape and a way of life dependent on the serpentine Saskatchewan Rivers. Here, as they had in Upper Canada, the french speaking Métis organized their farms and their lives along elongated rectangular river lots. This way, each farm got access to the necessary river corridor for transportation and irrigation.

Standing on the hilltop overlooking the historic town of Batoche, the location of the decisive four day battle between General Middleton’s Dominion forces and Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont’s Metis and Cree, its plain to see why these men were willing to fight and die for what they believed in.

For three or four days Jenn and I drove the back-roads of Saskatchewan, touring various historic sites.

Fort Pitt, on the shores of the North Saskatchewan River, was our first stop. As we raced along the never-ending dirt roads of this beautiful area near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, we were concerned that we might arrive after the Interpretive Centre closed. It being cold and windy on the plains in late September, we fanaticized about a hot chocolate in the cafeteria after our tour of the site.

Arriving to find that Fort Pitt sported little more than a cluster of (well written) interpretive signs and some four-by-four timbers laid out where the buildings of the Hudson’s Bay post once stood was a wake-up call.

We’d left the sometimes over-presented world of the mountain National Park’s behind and were on our own. That made more room for our imagination.

Later that afternoon, with the sun setting low, we visited first the old town of Frenchman Butte, and then the swell of land after which the town is named. There on that bluff a band of woodland Cree, retreating from the Alberta Field Force and the dauntless Sam Steele, made a brief stand. Riffle pits can still be seen amid the undergrowth.

The South Saskatchewan River from Fort Pitt

Fort Carlton

Next we made for Fort Carlton, where there is more than just the outline of the Fort, but where we were too late in the season for an actual tour inside the ramparts. Better still, however, was the walk through the woods to the North Saskatchewan River, where an unidentified owl swooped low across our path, or  through the grasses and brush on the bluffs above, where we jumped a red fox from his resting place.

What ensued was about what I expected: I fell in love with the landscape, which is what happens almost every time I visit a new part of this country. And as I did, the landscape itself started to tell its story to me, and those tales became entangled with the history of the place, and wove their way into my fictional recreations.

Constructing a historical murder mystery, set in what today is known as Lake Louise, but was in 1884 called Holt City, or the Summit, and doing it again on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River, in Batoche, posses numerous challenges, but conveying the glory of the place is not one of them. Canada’s history is set amid fabulously beautiful landscapes that have, these hundreds of years, preserved the essence of our stories in their stone ramparts, as in Lake Louise, and their dips and swells and mottled forests, such as at Frenchman’s Butte.

What I do find to be a challenge is this: how do I preserve the essence of Canadian history while weaving a wholly fictional narrative around it? How do I present Canadian history in a way that is thrilling and inviting – which is my purpose with the Durrant Wallace series – while remaining true to the key events of the past?

Finding an answer to this question was my purpose in our final stop on our pilgrimage in Batoche.

The Cemetary at Batoche National Historic Site

This would become the centerpiece for the mystery behind the second book in the Durrant Wallace series, set during the North West Rebellion. Durrant Wallace, Sergeant in the North West Mounted Police, is requested by Superintendant Sam Steele to travel with haste into the fray of the battle in order to assist with an investigation. Arriving at Batoche Durrant is perplexed by the strange circumstances surrounding the demise of Reuben Wake, far behind the line of battle in the defensive structure called the Zereba. When the Mountie begins his own inquiry into what motive there might have been for the assignation, he learns that there are many who wanted Wake dead, and had the opportunity to commit the crime during the chaos of Batoche. Those motivations, and the men Durrant suspects of committing the crime, mirror the various causes of the Resistance itself. In this way I can allow Durrant to trace the history of the battle, and the Rebellion itself, back through time in order to present the actually history of the period, while telling the fictional story.

It’s still a fine line. Without revealing too much of the plot of either book (The End of the Line will be published by Touchwood in the fall of 2011, with The Third Riel Conspiracy following a year later), things happen in well known places such as the famous Kicking Horse Pass, on the Continental Divide between present day Alberta and BC, and on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River at Batoche, that may stretch fact and blur the lines between history and fiction.  My purpose is to tell a good story, and if in doing so a few more people can see that Canadian history – even without the brash and ill-tempered North West Mounted Police Sergeant barging through it – is fascinating and important reading, then it’s worth the literary risk.

Follow these stories and more on Twitter @stephenlegault.

In writing The Darkening Archipelago, I choose a real landscape and real issues to set the story among. The Broughton Archipelago, and the salmon farming controversy that rages within its troubled waters is very real. But I was also aware that I would need to take creative liberties with the location and with the monumental challenges facing wild salmon and the communities that rely on them for survival to create a plausible story.

Looking east towards the Broughton from Malcolm Island

Canoe behind the band office, Alert Bay, BC

Early in the creation of the storyline for The Darkening Archipelago I decided that rather than set the crux of the story on an existing island — which would entail knowing that place very well, which wasn’t really feasible for me — that I would image a new one, and create it as pure fiction. I did so, christening it Parish Island and there created the community of Port Lostcoast, where Archie Ravenwing and his daughter Grace live. Like many communities throughout the knot of islands that pepper the BC coast, this one is a resource based community, eking a merge existence from the forests and the oceans that define this part of British Columbia.

Fishing Boat, Malcolm Island

Also like many of the communities that line the bays and inlets of the coast, Port Lostcoast is racially diverse; First Nations people are the majority, but a small white community also lives there. That First Nation, in fact, is also imagined. The Port Lostcoast Band and the “North Salish” people are fiction, and while I drew from the broad history of the region and the cultures it has spawned, don’t mistake my fictional representation in the book for the real, complex and animated culture that has lived among the Broughton for more than ten thousand years.

It was on my road trip with Josh that I decided to write the community of Alert Bay into the book. Until that point, several chapters of The Darkening Archipelago were to be set on the “big island” in Port McNeil. But I was charmed by Alert Bay, and the fact that it is a living example of an island that is half First Nations and half white made it all the more interesting to me from the perspective of plot development.

The all too real presence of the the ancient residential school – built in 1829 – which now houses the local Band Office, helped set some of the context for The Darkening Archipelago. Like so many First Nations people in Canada, Archie Ravenwing, and his father and mother before him, were taken from their families, robbed of their language, culture and identify, and raised by strangers in these institutions. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse, and all were subject to the emotional and mental cruelty that is tantamount to cultural genocide. The scars of that terrible period in Canadian history haunt First Nations people, and are a black mark on our progress as a country.

That the residential school in Alert Bay now houses the Band Office, and forms the backdrop to traditional totem carving efforts, dug-out canoe projects, and the U’mista Cultural Museum is a testimony to the real First Nations of the Broughton Archipelago’s resilience, spirit, and sense of place.

The "re-purposed" Band Office from the First Nations Dock in Albert Bay, British Columbia

In addition to being charmed by Alert Bay, I was likewise charmed by my short time with renowned wild salmon activist Alexandra Morton. It is to her that the spirit of The Darkening Archipelago belongs. During my visit to Malcolm Island Josh and I had dinner with Alex – wild salmon of course – and we spent the evening talking about her experiences taking on the salmon farming industry, exposing the plague of sea ice that infest these waters, and continuing to root herself in her own sense of place.

Totems in Alert Bay, BC

My own sense of place for The Darkening Archipelago is as much a feeling as it is fact. It is a landscape of myth and magic, or powerful totems and ancient cultures. It is home of Ulmeth, grandfather raven, and of the Salmon people, who for Milena have co-existed with the wild salmon of the Broughton Archipelago in a way that allowed both to thrive. It is the islands fridged with tattered clouds and mountains that rise up from the green waters of Knight Inlet to rip the sky. It is a place real, it is a place imaged, it is a place for things precious and wild and one on the very brink of their existence.

Totem, First Nations Dock, Alert Bay, BC

The former Residential School in Alert Bay, which is now the band office.

U'mista Cultural Centre (left) and the former residential school (far right) in Albert Bay, BC

Sun set at Green River Overlook, Canyonlands National Park

It wasn’t my first trip to the Four Corners region. During the winter of 1993-94 I spent five months in the Southwest, first volunteering at Grand Canyon National Park as a Ranger Naturalist, and then down through southern Arizona and New Mexico, and back up through the high country around Santa Fe. But I was stupid, and was traveling light, so didn’t bring my real camera with me, just a tiny Olympus point-and-shoot.

Since my first trip down the Green River I’ve been back to Utah five times, including three other trips on that wonderful river, and a five-week-long exploration of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Zion National Park in western Utah. At the end of September Jenn and I spent two weeks in southern Utah and Northern Arizona; it was a powerfully creative time.

Photography is the art of bending light. The eye beholds the scene, and the heart longs to capture the beauty before you. The mind calculates how. The camera is the tool through which light passes and is recorded, for the longest time with silver on the film plane, and now through ones and zeros on the memory card. The light must bend through eye and heart, through head and lens, through bits and bytes to emerge transformed by the creative process on the screen, on the wall, on the print before our eyes once again.

The American southwest is one of my hearts true homes. It’s a joy to share it with you. Click here (new Window)  to visit a Picasa Web Album of some images from our September 2009 trip to the American Southwest.

Sunset, Cape Royal, North Rim of the Grand Canyon

I was raised with wildness at my back. Beyond the mown expanse of weeds and the thousand square-foot vegetable garden that was our back yard in Porcupine, Ontario, was a field of tangled shrubs and small trees bordered by an old double track road; beyond that a small creek sheltered by willows; beyond that a single paper birch that stood on the edge of Mr. Mackey’s field; and finally, the rough second grown pine forest that defined my childhood and gave birth to my taste for nature.

These woods, and those that rambled away beyond the squared log home that my grandparents lived in for more than forty years on the Palmour Mine property, were the geography of my childhood.

Stephen and Chantal walking on the road behind our home in Porcupine, Ontario

The paper birth and Mr. Mackey's field, with woods beyond

Singular moments: cross country skiing on the trails that Lucien cut through the woods behind his home, and coming to the place where like a miracle, cookies would materialize form the worn pack he always carried; cookies no doubt hastily packed by my whirlwind of a Grand-mare, Evelyn. I remember one particular day as if it were yesterday; it was just he and I — Grandfather and grandson – and a gift of precious time that will never occur again.

Singular moments: hunting for grouse with my father behind our Porcupine home. My father was a good marksman who won trophies for trap-shooting. To watch him stop, swing the Winchester shotgun to his shoulder and fire in one fluid motion was a heart stopping sight for a boy of seven or eight. There would be an explosion of leaves and small branches in the woods and then he would walk into the foliage and return with a partridge, its body perfectly intact but its head astonishingly absent. My father would then field dress the bird and put it in his pack while the acrid scent of gunpowder dispersed in the crisp autumn air.

My grandparents square-log home in Palmour, Ontario

After a day's hunting

Singular moments: during the summer of 1979, when we lived in Elliot Lake for a short time, building a fort in the well of a tree that had been toppled in a storm in a woodlot behind our house. We hollowed out the well and using scrap lumber and garbage bags built an igloo like structure which we convinced our parents to let us sleep in one night. I was eight; just a little older than my eldest son Rio is today.

I lasted until sometime after midnight. Of all the phantasmal sounds that haunted those woods, it was an ant that finally sent me indoors. We had an old 8-volt battery powered light in our hut with us, and it’s beam was angled upwards toward the ceiling. In the circle of light it cast we watched, horrified, as a giant creature circled our hut again and again, its shadow pressed against the flimsy plastic fabric of our makeshift walls. As the creature roved around the circumference of our abode, we would each in turn cower as it drew close to our backs. It finally dawned on one of us that if we were seeing the shadow inside the hut, then the beast had to be inside too: which is when we noted the ant running in manic circles around the rim of the upturned flashlight.

Skiing with my grandfather, hunting and fishing with my dad, camping with my buddies in a plot of forest spared the saw and the subdivision, fishing, hiking, the annual Christmas-tree hunt in the back-forty, walking with my sister to inspect robin’s eggs in the trees beyond the big garden: these and a hundred other moments of wildness are what shaped me and created who I am today.

Which is why I find it so perplexing that I have moved so far from my connection to wildness. And why, when recently Jenn and I spent a long weekend in the Rockies that a single day in a wild, out-of-the-way place made my heart ache for more singular moments of wildness.

There is a creek that snakes its way between Mount Andromache and an unnamed peak to join with the Bow River just south of Mosquito Creek in Banff National Park, Alberta. The creek’s name is Noseeum: it’s named for an animal the size of a dust mote with teeth like a saber tooth cat’s. This was our destination one hot afternoon over the August long weekend: It’s a place I’ve been twice before, and have wanted to share with Jenn since we became a couple two years ago.

I moved to the Rockies in 1992. After a single season working for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources as a student Park Naturalist at Murphy’s Point Provincial Park, I got a dream job as a natural history interpreter in Lake Louise, in Banff. I knew nothing about the mountains, but over time learned just enough to stay alive and employed, in part thanks to the fact that my lot was thrown in with veteran park staffers Jim Wood and Jack Loustinau. For three or four summers I lived with Jim, Jack and a motley collection of other seasonal park staff in a dark, dank, dismal locale called Charleston Residence. But we were rarely there. We spent our time outside and it was that time that defines my experience in the Mountain Parks. We hiked. We hiked a lot. And in 1993 when Jim and Jack and I met Josh – who is now a Doctor of Physiology but was then a sheet snapper at the Lake Louise Inn – we became a team.

But it was Jim Wood who provided my inaugural experience with the true wildness of Banff National Park. It was Jim who taught me how to pack for a trip, what to wear, how to read a topographic map and use a compass, and how to travel “off-trail.” In short, it was Jim who taught me to take my adventuring in the parks beyond the carefully scripted descriptions in the guide-books (most of which were written by friends, and which are invaluable) and into the vast regions of the Parks seldom seen and rarely visited by people.

It was Jim took me up Noseeum Creek for the first time. It was early June of 1992; I’d been in the Rockies for five or six weeks, and Noseeum Creek and the high mountain passes beyond were to be my first off-trail adventure.

Like the singular moments with my father and grandfather, this one is engrained in my recollection.

Jenn and I shoulder day packs and head up the south side of the creek. The afternoon is warm, and within minutes we’ve feeling the sun boring into us. We find the familiar cadence of walking and talking and inside of an hour we’re at the base of a steep cliff where waterfalls thunder through a deep gorge and trip across ancient stone cast aside in the last ice age. From here we can see where Jim Wood and I made our accent of the limestone steps that lead to Noseeum Creek’s headwaters: a narrow gulf strewn with boulders that provides a steep egress to a table-like plateau nearly two thousand feet above us.

Jenn and I take a more circuitous route, but one with fewer objective hazards (fancy mountaineer talk that rocks that might fall on your head). After plugging up the mouth of the creek with where it surges from its canyon with stepping stones we jump across and scramble up the headwall. Another ten minutes and we’re reaching the top of the first of many deceptive benches that will eventually lead to a sparkling, melt-water lake. But we won’t reach the glistening waters before succumbing to the erroneous relief of numerous false summits.

Near the headwaters of Noseeum Creek, Banff National Park

The day that Jim and I ventured up Noseeum Creek was overcast, the clouds pressed tightly down on the headwaters of the creek, so that when we finally exited the narrow chimney, we were cloaked dank, grey cloud-cover. We didn’t have the spectacular view that Jenn and I enjoy of Mount Andromache and the Molar Glacier to buoy our spirits. It’s probably for the best, because I was already tired, and a little scared, and if I’d seen where we were heading I probably would have protested even more than I already was.

On the hot afternoon in August, my wife and I look back at the long, sensuous ridge of Mount Andromache and I can’t help but retell the story of Josh and my accent of that peak. It was during the feverish summer of 1995 when he and I climbed peaks before work and after work and on the weekends. In one frantic week Josh and I ascended five mountains and got turned back by a sixth. Mount Andromache was one of the five, and it was a lovely scramble on a perfect morning. I later wrote an unfortunately worded account of that climb for the Alpine Club newsletter in which I stated that Josh and I lost our innocence on that peak. That of course could be misconstrued: all I meant to say was that because we thought the peak’s name was Andrew Mackey, and not Andromache, we hadn’t found any climbing bata on the peak, and so our route was of our own making.

That’s all. No harm intended.

I shake my head at the memory of the awkward mistake, and at a time when all I did was wake up at four a.m. and bag peaks with my best friend.

It wasn’t so long ago, really.

Jenn and I weave our way through a steep, forested glade, crossing another creek below a tantalizing waterfall, its spray filling the air with a cool mist scented with the essence of a mountain wilderness: sun warmed pines tinged with seared limestone. I’ve written this so often over the last twenty years that I fear that I’m plagiarizing my own words: it is moving water is what stirs me and awakens me the most in nature. Our bodies are almost entirely composed of water so that when next to a cascading creek or river I find it nearly impossible to ignore my kinship with the blood of the earth.

Of course, Wallace Stegner said it best when he wrote, in The Sound of Mountain Water that “[b]y such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth: it is purity absolute. Watch is racing current, its steady renewal of force: it is transient and eternal.”

Headwater: "purity absolute"

Stegner may not have known it (or he very well may have) but at a quantum level water is of course both transient and eternal, as are we. Transient because like all matter, the tiniest components of our water-born bodies are flickering in and out of existence at the speed of light; eternal because these particles that make up this cascade and my own sweat and blood are nothing more than energy and information, born of a star eleven billion years ago, recycled over and over, assembled and reassembled as man and forest and canyon and yes, as mountain water.

Just as the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us are fanciful demarcations, nowhere more so than when seated next to, or standing in, an icy creek high in the mountain wild.

Upwards again, urging our protesting legs to plod along a small rise, we surmount yet another bench of tilted limestone. Jenn lies down in the sun while I scout our route, wondering just where the hell this lake has gotten too since I was last here more than a decade ago. I scramble up another fifty foot high step and spot the reclusive thing and then see Jenn striding along below. Reunited, we make the final approach to the shimmering lake and find a place in the shade to cool off.

All around the landscape is bare and devoid of vegetation. This is raw earth, not so long ago beneath the rapidly receding Molar Glacier or its kin. Unnamed peaks rise up all around, dip and fold and are cut through by rivets of melt water. A few snow patches cling to the mountain sides below the merciless sun. Above, another few kilometers walking, is the saddle that Jim and I crossed into the next watershed on our journey.

I’m not normally one to take the plunge, but being a coastal boy these days, the opportunity to cool my heels (etc…) in a mountain lake is rare, so I strip down and dive in. Jenn complains that she might have missed the event while taking pictures so insists I do a repeat performance. I oblige, shouting and stammering as I cut the frigid waters.

The repeat performance

When Jim and I reached the lake we kept on walking right by, crossing that high col above the watery shores to reach the headwaters of the Molar Creek and South Molar Pass. From our extraordinary vantage point we could look down on a herd of elk – and no tame town elk these but a wild lot never having munched someone’s front lawn or manicured hedge or roadside verge.

From there Jim and I carried on, dropping down to the Molar meadows, traversing miles of hummocky terrain that taught me my first real lessons in off-trail travel – don’t get frustrated — and finally connecting with the Mosquito Creek Trail. The last dozen kilometers of our walk were on that well worn path. It was my first really big hike in the Rockies; counting couldn’t number all those to follow.

In 1992 I was just discovering what it means to be alive, on this glorious earth, in a wild place untrammeled by people. Today, eighteen years after I first visited the headwaters of Noseeum Creek, I am remembering again all those vital lessons.

Though sore feet and aching legs might have obscured it at the time, my long day in the mountains with Jim Woods was one catalyzing moment of a profound relationship with the earth. What began with my forays into the spruce and pine forests and on the crystal lakes of Northern Ontario became a vocation for me during the summers of 1991 through 1996 when I hiked a thousand kilometers a year, many of them in an Ontario MNR, Parks Canada or US Park Service Volunteer uniform.

But more than that, being amid the wildness of Banff and the other Mountain National Parks became a portal through which my perception of the world changed, and my place in it right along with it.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but even then I was aware that through my exploration of the natural world I was delving into my spiritual connection to the universe beyond. Then I spoke of nature and the mountains, and later the canyons of Arizona and Utah, as my temples, my houses of the holy. And of course they still are.

Now, I can add to this. Simply put, when immersed in wild country I know that I am closer to the basic elements of creation than nearly anywhere else. In the canyons of Utah, the folded peaks of the Rocky Mountains, my childhood forests of the North, or on a wild beach at lands end I might touch the raw fabric of existence. That of human making only adds to the barriers which obscure our relationship with the fundamental truth of existence: we are all incontrovertibly one.

Jenn and Mount Andromache: the graceful ridge that rises from right to left was the route Josh and I followed fifteen years before

Since childhood I have experienced moments of blissful connection with the earth and the sky and those I love while in wild places. Here the illusionary boundaries between me and the living earth, its myriad creatures the universe beyond are less palpable. Here I can, for brief moments, experience the rock solid earth as part of the quantum soup that we wade through, unseeing, most every day.

These are singular moments: not unlike the feeling of connection that comes from a moment shared between father and son or grandfather and grandson, we are connected to this sacred earth in ways more holy and more profound than we have the senses to perceive.

Jenn and I return to the car. We drive into Lake Louise, and for nostalgia’s sake, drink a cold beer and eat dinner at Bill Peyto’s Café at the Hostel. If we were to slip a Blue Rodeo CD into the stereo it would complete the reminiscence. We’re both dirty and sun burnt and a little tired, but exuberant for having been in the mountains for a day. I love my wife in all ways, but in no way more than when we are together in wild country.

I remember now what propelled me up so many trails, over so many unmarked passes between wild valleys, to the summit of so many craggy peaks: immersion in the world around me. Immersion: It’s what I’ve been missing living apart from wild places. It’s what my decisions over the last five years have cost me. And though I don’t regret the outcome of those decisions, I’m ready to invite more wild moments into my life again.

The moving away from is of course as natural as the desire to reunite. And now, of course, I have so much more to bring back into the wild that might help me see it as I really is. And so much less to get in the way of that view. One moment of wildness can reveal all that there is to know about the real nature of this universe of mysteries. One moment of wildness is a window unto the vast, sparkling nature of the soul.

(Bliss: the rope swing and the man who built it - my grandfather Lucien Legault - and me, around 1976 or so. The swing dates to when my father was a boy. I really wish I had a fringed coat like that now....)

Note: My thanks to my father, Bob Legault, for taking such good care of our childhood images, and for scanning them recently for a fabulous slide show at my wedding to Jenn. We are very grateful.