The mental and emotional migration west started a few years before when I contemplated running away from home as a teenager. Being a fan of both Led Zeppelin and John Muir, I called Yosemite National Park and requested some pamphlets and maps of the park (going to California with an aching…).

But I didn’t run away. Not for a few more years. And when I did it was only after I’d secured a job, not in Muir’s Sierra Nevada, but at Tom Wilson’s Lake Louise.

When I got the job I didn’t even know where the place was.

It went like this: I was studying Parks Management at Sir Sandford Fleming College and knew that I wanted to work outside, preferably in the wilds, possibly in the mountains. Somewhere. But I was in south-central Ontario, and had never been west of Wawa; what did I know from mountains?

After my first summer at SSFC I got a great job, possibly my best job ever, at a small provincial park called Murphy’s Point. It was on the Frontenac Axis which is an arm of the Canadian Shield that reaches down through the southern lowlands around Kingston, Ontario and connects New York states’ Adirondack Mountains with Algonquin. Murphy’s Point was on this spine of rocky uplands and it was magical. Sometime, when nostalgia strikes again, I’ll write more about it; suffice to say, early mornings in a canoe watching loon chicks hatch and snapping turtles patrol the shore left an indelible impression on my 20-year-old heart and soul. I fancied myself a modern Henry David Thoreau, minus the pencil business and the theodolite.

The following spring I cast my lure wide looking for more permanent employment. I sent out more than eighty applications to provincial and federal parks across Canada. I got two bites: St. Lawrence Islands National Park, just an hour from Murphy’s Point, and Banff. Some considerable distance further away.

My interview went well for the position in Banff. I had studied hard, practically memorizing everything on the Park in my college’s library. This consisted mostly of old Park Management Plans and Parks Canada policy documents. I drew heavily on my experience at Murphy’s Point during the interview and a few weeks later I was offered the most junior position possible in the Park’s interpretive service. I’d be stationed in Banff, and would work at the Parks information centre, pointing tourists to the bathroom. If I did a good job of it I might get to lead a hike or two by the end of the summer.

I was ecstatic. This was my ticket west! I continued to study for the job. My father bought me a copy of Ben Gadd’s Handbook of the Canadian Rockies and it became my bible. Then, three days before I was to fly to Calgary I took a call from someone identifying themselves as Mike Kerr. He said he was my boss. He asked if I would mind working in Lake Louise instead of Banff.  I would lead hikes and do campground talks instead of telling people how to get back on the highway. I said an enthusiastic yes.

The first thing I had to do after hanging up the phone was figure out where the hell Lake Louise was.

I knew it was in Banff, but I had spent all my time studying the Hot Springs and the Cave and Basin and the history of Canada’s first National Park. I found Lake Louise on a large scale map in the Management Plan but failed to note that the TransCanada Highway ran straight to it.

I’m going to be living on a lake again, I thought. I can get up early and canoe with the loons.

How right I was.

My dad drove me to the airport at 4 a.m. on May 4^th 1992 and I remember waving goodbye. And then I was gone. Doug Brown, another park interpreter, met me in Calgary. On the way out of city he asked if I wanted to stop and get something to eat. We were going to arrive in Banff just as a meeting of all the Park’s interpreters were being held at a popular picnic site outside of the town of Banff so we stopped at a Subway I bought two foot long sandwiches: I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get groceries in remote Lake Louise.

Then it was on to the mountains. I fell asleep. I recall waking somewhere around the Morley flats and being gob-smacked as the sheer face of Mount Yamnuska pressed into the sky; then I drifted off again. It would be another week before I ventured into Calgary for a training session and got to experience the Eastern Slopes rising up from the foothills in all their magnificence once more.

We arrived at Cascade Ponds and I met my fellow interps (including Joel Hagen and Nadine Fletcher, who I have remained friends with ever since.) For whatever reason I had chosen to dress in my Toronto clothing that morning: black dress shoes, fashionable jeans, a dress shirt and my impracticable oilskin coat. Everybody else sported fleece and hiking shorts. I didn’t wear those clothes until I got on the plane the following September.

I tried to stay awake as Charlie Zinkan told us about the important role we would play in presenting the park to the millions of visitors that came to Banff every year. (So important, in fact, that the following summer half of the interpretive positions in the Park were cut.)

What I was really inspired by was the luminous form of Cascade Mountain rising up behind the Superintendent. I asked my new friends about the mountain names and wondered how I would ever remember them all.

Then, at last, it was onto Lake Louise. That’s when I learned the awful truth about my new home. Two million people would visit Lake Louise that year, and all but one or two who couldn’t find their way out of the shopping mall parking lot would venture to the lake shore. Dreams of another summer in peaceful contemplation of nature were replaced with the reality of motor homes belching diesel fumes. Worst of all: someone had built a seven-story hotel where my log cabin was supposed to be.

Memories of my home on the shore of Loon Lake were dashed when I saw Charleston Residence where I would live for the next three summers; a massive log structure owned by the ski area and used in the winter to house the grunts who operate the ski lifts and work in the concessions. In the summer Parks rented a few dark rooms with ski-wax stained floors for their transient staff. It was year round party central. The upshot: I met lifelong friends Jim, Jack and Josh there.

Despite these annoyances, it was a glorious summer. It was magical. I lead hikes and did campground talks about grizzly bears. I got firsthand experience in that subject matter when I was bluff charged by a notorious female grizzly named Blondie just a few weeks after I arrived. I climbed my first mountains and took up rock climbing to overcome my fear of heights. I logged nearly a thousand kilometres on trail and off in the backcountry and up and down the Plain of Six Glaciers. I fell hopelessly, madly, bottomlessly in love with the mountains.

I struggled to square my love for the backcountry wilderness with my disdain for Lake Louise itself. The scenery was magnificent; it was the scene that drove me bonkers. People bustled for a snap-shot of the lake, or of the penitentiary-like facade of the Chateau Lake Louise, and then blasted off for the next appointed attraction. It was a zoo. It was loony. It soured my disposition and I my outlook on National Parks. From time to time it made me grumpy.

Twenty years later I don’t like it any more than I did in 1992, but age and miles have taught me some patience and compassion, and I no longer grow frustrated when I stroll into that picture-postcard scene. People come to appreciate nature in their own way, in their own time, at their own speed. Who am I to judge?

Before I had left Ontario for Banff and Lake Louise I’d secured a job for the following winter as a “sustainability consultant” at my college. The summer tourist season drew to a close and on September 4^th I put on my city clothes, tucking my hiking shorts and fleece deep in my pack, and Jim drove me to the airport. I remember watching the mountains grow distant as we drove over Scott Lake Hill. I thought: I’ll be back. I’ve found home.

And I had.

For the next four summers I was employed by Parks Canada. Just before Christmas in 1996 they grew tired of my grumpiness and my relentless activism on behalf of Banff and Canada’s National Parks and told me that I wouldn’t be offered a job the following summer. I didn’t leave; not for good. I just did what everybody else who had been canned by Parks for being too pro-nature did: moved down valley and got a new job.

I’ve come and gone a great deal over the last twenty years. For more than five years I lived on the west coast. While still the “West” it never felt like Alberta, like the Eastern Slope, like home. During that time I drove back and forth dozens of times, missing the feeling of peace that the mountains provided. Having been back in the Rocks for more than a year now, I know for certain I am home once more.

There will be more coming and going. But for twenty years this place has been my heart’s true home; every day here is a gift. Every sunrise is a delight and every eventide perfect. I wake and am grateful for the blessings in my life; principal among them is the opportunity to call the Rockies home.

Now my children are coming to love the mountains as I do. When I walk with Rio and Silas in the mountains, and they take my hand or run ahead on the trail, skipping, or crouch down on the fragrant earth to admire some wonder I become dizzy with gladness. My love for this landscape is now inter-generational.

Rio, Silas and Jenn at Buller Pass, Kananaskis Country, 2011

I recall during my fourth summer based out of Lake Louise meeting a pair of horse wranglers and guides deep in the backcountry along the Red Deer River. They were towering men, more imposing from the saddle, and as we chatted one of them looked down and asked: “So, just how far east are you from.”

In a rare moment of quick wit I responded, “We can’t all be born in the place we call home.”

You might not come from the place you call home, but you can be born when you find it.

And so, I have.

One year ago I wrote a blog post in which, among other things, I advocated trying to find a way of using the ancient Chinese philosophy of “capturing whole” to minimize the damage a Stephen Harper majority government might do to the environment.

Here’s what I said:

We’re going to have to, as Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War, suggests: “capture our opponent whole.” That means moving carefully to make it so our values, our vision, our passion, slowly becomes their own. We must find what they respond to – be it positive reinforcement or public accolades, as difficult as that may be to stomach – and exploit them as an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.

If we do not, we’ll find ourselves on the outside looking in, and watching all that we cherish about this beautiful nation slipping from our grasp. And we will only have ourselves to blame for its loss. Every moment in life is a choice. This choice is clear: accepting the reality of a polarized politic and gaining what we can, or raging against it, and losing it. It’s that stark a dichotomy.

Reading those words now, today, on the first anniversary of the Conservative’s majority government election victory, makes me feel both naive and foolish.

The first year of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has been the worst 365 days for Canada’s environment in our nation’s history. It’s been that bad. If Stephen Harper and his Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver have their way it’s going to get a lot worse. While I still hold with the philosophy of capture whole – of defeating your opponent without a fight – I must remember one critical disclaimer from the Art of War: avoid a fight if you can. If you can’t, fight hard, and fight to win.

It’s time to fight: to fight smart, to fight clean, to fight fair, but to fight to win. What we’re fighting for is far more than we could have imagined one year ago today. We’re fighting for the soul of Canada: our National Parks, our magnificent wilderness, our wild creatures, our natural heritage: our future. That might sound like hyperbole, and maybe it is. Looking at what we’ve already lost after one year of the most neo-conservative government this country has ever seen, I believe a fair statement. Apparently my friend Tzeporah Berman thinks so as well but then, like me, she’s a radical environmentalist too.

Lets consider for a moment the damage that this government has done in 365 days. As Elizabeth May points out in her widely circulated story “How the conservatives stole the environmental protection in broad daylight,” they have waged an all out war on nature, and on those who protect it. They started by withdrawing from the Kyoto Accord, something that must have burned Prime Minister Harper’s gut during his five years in a minority government. Then they attacked environmental groups, focusing their wrath on those who were opposing the Northern Gateway pipeline, but tarring them all (pun intended) with the same brush: radicals, suckling at the teat of US based lefty-foundations.

Never mind that much of the money used to promote the whole-scale sell off of Canada’s petroleum resources, in the tar sands and everywhere else, comes from the US, Europe, and China. If you take foreign money to continue to narrow Canada’s economic development and destroy the environment, you’re a patriot; if you take money to advocate for the protection of the environment, First Nations cultures while diversifying the economy, you’re a radical, bent on destroying Canada.

Now the Conservatives want to re-write of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, making it easier for industry to win approval of mega-projects like those in the tar sands, and gut the Fisheries Act to remove the scant protections we currently have for nature. Rumour is that the Conservatives have their sights set on the Species at Risk Act, a law that is particularly close to my heart as I dedicated more than five years of my life to its passage.

Budget cuts are a convenient way to disguise the Conservative war on nature. Stephen Harper and his Ministers have cut positions that monitor and clean up oil spills, research the impacts of climate change on the arctic, and most recently, present and safeguard our national parks.

And this is only the first year.

But it’s not. Not really. Stephen Harper is the wiliest and most strategic Prime Minister Canada has seen in a generation. He’s a patient man. He waited. Five years of minority governments and he waited. It must have tried his considerable fortitude not to push ahead with his offensive, but he waited. And when he seized – stole — complete power in May of last year he was able to reshape Canada in the image crafted by the elite, far right wing of Canadian politics who funds his party.

It was almost as if the Prime Minister himself was a student of The Art of War: his war on nature could serve as a text book example of how a superior army confronts an inferior force. His opening attack, delivered by Joe Oliver, and escalated with Senate hearings and the allocation of an additional $8 million to Revenue Canada for “education” and other Orwellian indoctrinations of Canadian environmental charities, is a perfect example of how to use a strategic strike to weaken your opposition in advance of an all out assault.

If I wasn’t so livid I might almost be in awe of the man’s strategic prowess.

What to do? As I said a year ago, and I still believe, there is no time for hand wringing. Capturing whole isn’t going to work either; there is no room to “exploit an opportunity to advance a progressive vision for Canada.”

Many are already acting. Dr. David Suzuki left the board of directors of the organization that he founded a quarter century ago so he could speak with impunity. Forest Ethics, one of the most ardent and outspoken organizations in the environmental community has made the calculated move of splitting in two: one organization will continue to undertake charitable work while another will go head-to-head with those who are destroying Canada’s environment. I say power too them.

But there is more work to be done. The Conservative war on nature has just started. And while I no longer believe we can find a way to capture this enemy without a fight, we must be very careful in how we confront them. They hate us and what we stand for, and they will use every resource at their disposal to eliminate us as an opponent so that their greed and nepotism can endure.

If Stephen Harper is a smart strategist, we must be smarter. If it appears as though his Conservative government has torn a page from the Art of War and is using it against Canada’s environment and those millions of Canadians who stand to defend it, we must learn how to beat them at their own game.

Over the coming months I’m going to continue to write on this topic, and I invite you to do the same. Post a comment, write an essay, send a tweet: if we’re smart and if we work together, we can stop this war on nature in its tracks and reclaim the soul of this great country.

Even Joe Oliver, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Stephen Harper’s puppet in his war on nature, can appear green-tinged on Earth Day. Today is the day where what we do counts.

According to a poll published in today’s Globe and Mail online edition, the upstart Wildrose Party has a nine point lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. Because Canadian political alliances can be confusing, the Wildrose party is backed by the federal Conservative Party, while the provincial PC party seems to have been cut adrift by the mother-ship.

When I moved back to Alberta, and back into the conservation community, I knew what I was getting into. For nearly twenty years I’ve had to go toe-to-toe with the likes of former Energy Minister Steve West, and former environment Minister Ty Lund when they were in Ralph Klein’s cabinet. Being an environmentalist in Alberta was, as author Sid Marty has written, like being a boy scout in Hell.

Hell is going to look pretty good if Danielle Smith is elected on Monday.

But this is what Alberta does; it lurches from one government to another, about once a generation or so. If as the pollsters predict Alberta changes government on Monday it will only be for the fourth time in our 107-year history that this has happened. The Wildrose will form Alberta’s fifth government, and if they do, Alberta’s willingness to protect land, water, air and its ability to combat climate change will be in considerable doubt.

A part of me thinks: it can’t be any worse than the Progressive Conservatives. Premier Alison Redford has been a tremendous disappointment in this regard. While she has talked tough on education and health care, she has been a dismal failure when it comes to protecting the underpinning of our physical health and our economic system: our ecosystems. She’s cow-towed to the oil and gas sector on the tar sands and despite overwhelming opposition to logging in the Castle Wildland in south western Alberta, bowed to pressure from the local MLA Evan Berger, going so far as to put him in Cabinet to satiate the party’s good-old-boy right wing.

I know it could be much worse. Alberta’s protected area’s network is held together with spit and bailing wire. We have scant protection for our parks from industrial tourism, OHV use, logging and oil and gas development; the land base outside of our parks is fair game to just about anybody with a big idea and a few bucks in their pocket. As the party of extra free enterprise and with a Libertarian leaning, Wildrose cannot be counted on to protect these assets that are the cornerstone of our Province’s natural beauty, ecological health, and economic future.

Add to this Danielle Smith’s defence of candidates who are homophobic, xenophobic and want to take our province back decades in its relationship with the rest of Canada and the world, and it would appear as if politics in Alberta are about to go from bad to catastrophic.

When the federal Conservatives won their much sought after majority, I quickly posted a blog entry suggesting that things weren’t so bad, and that all we needed to do as environmentalists was to burrow into the belly of the beast and work from within to convince Stephen Harper’s government to protect Canada’s environment.

I was wrong. Sometimes this tactic espoused in The Art of War and other Taoist manuals works, but sometimes all that happens is you find yourself surrounded by a rotting pile of entrails while the beast is off devouring what is precious to you.

If Danielle Smith wins election on Monday, I won’t be making any entreaties for Alberta’s environmental community to try and “capture the enemy whole” (as Sun Tzu might advise). On the contrary: my advice will be to use whatever advantage we have to safeguard what we hold dear. Capturing whole only works if both opponents are on roughly equal footing and if both are honourable in their undertakings. As Stephen Harper has demonstrated over the last year, this is far from the case. And what is Danielle Smith’s Wildrose but another guise for a political movement bent on eviscerating Canada and Alberta’s environmental laws, protections and safeguards in the name of smaller government and more free enterprise?

Really, Alberta: just as I was starting to think I understood you. In addition to having good common sense fiscal prudence, I thought that maybe we were on the cusp of having a government that reflected the majesty and beauty of this province. But it looks like I was wrong.

There’s a big stack of signed copies of The Vanishing Track, The End of the Line, and The Darkening Archipelago at Cafe Books. I’m told The Cardinal Divide is on order. Click here to read a summary of each of these titles.

Reading from The Vanishing Track in Canmore, Alberta.

I’m off to Vancouver and Victoria next. Check here for event details. Follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault for updates.

It’s always humbling to walk into any book store, let alone five Chapters stores in a row. The first Chapters I visited was in the Chinook Centre and I had to navigate my way around a massive circular table adorned with the biggest stack of books I’ve ever seen. It must have been piled as tall as a person could reach, and all by one writer: Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy.

She also got her own section. Similar piles of that same book greeted me in the other Chapters.

More than just that display of marketing power, the thing that really humbles me when I walk into a Chapters is the sheer volume of titles vying for the consumer’s eye. There are tens of thousands of books on their shelves. And that’s just a drop in the bucket of what is being published each year. Ten times that number are being published as e-books. It’s good to keep perspective.

I dutifully sought out copies of The Vanishing Track and the End of the Line, my two most recent books, on the store’s shelves and signed them and introduced myself to store staff and asked for “signed by the author” stickers. I don’t really know if this helps book sales. I don’t think it hurts, and I suppose if a reader has to choose between two books, a scrawled personalization might tip the scale in my favour.

I did have two really positive experiences. The first was visiting Owl’s Nest Books, one of my two favourite book sellers in Calgary, the other being Pages on Kensington (who I visited last week). They had lots of my books on their shelves, including copies of The Darkening Archipelago, a previous Cole Blackwater title. Owl’s Nest, like other independent stores, is not so easily influenced by mass hysteria around books like The Hunger Games. I’m sure they had copies in the store, but nothing that threatened to bury a customer if they inadvertently knocked the display table.

The End of the Line, Darkening Archipelago and The Vanishing Track at Owl's Nest Books. You can just see Stieg Larsson being crowded to the side by my titles.

The other really positive experience was in the Dalhousie Chapters. They were short on staff, so I just grabbed copies of my books off the shelves and took them to the checkout counter where I signed them and handed them to the clerk for stickers and re-shelving. The people in line behind me had a small armload of mystery titles and they asked me about my books and then happily added copies of The End of the Line and the Vanishing Track to their purchases. Connecting with readers is one of the best parts about being a writer.

In the end, I don’t know if driving all over Calgary and signing books will help sell a few more. But it was good to meet more book sellers and a few readers. And my message is that, as a writer, I’m willing to go the extra mile to make a success of my books.

“Actually, I’m an overnight success. But it took twenty years.” — Monty Hall

I started my day today by checking my email and finding a Google Alert for my name. The alert told me there was something in The Calgary Herald so I clicked on the link and found out that The Vanishing Track, which was released a month ago by TouchWood Editions, was the #1 bestseller there last week.

I was gob-smacked. My first instinct was to tell someone, but because I start my day at 5am there wasn’t anybody around to confide in. The kids are at their other household and Jenn is on the coast where it was only 4am. Its not part of a healthy marriage to wake your wife up so early, even if it is with good news.

I don’t even have a pet I could tell so I made another cup of tea and paced around the house for a while, and then sat down and felt a wave of happiness and something else –relief? — rush over me

I’ve been writing since 1988 and seriously trying to publish since 1994. My first book was released in 2006 and since then I’ve had four more published. This is the first time I have been on a bestseller list. Just like Monty Hall said, this overnight success has been some time in coming. No, it’s not The New York Times or The Globe and Mail, but this means something to me.

It means that my hard work is paying off. It means that the choices I’ve been making are sound. And it means that I have a lot to be thankful for.

That’s what is most important about this for me: gratitude. I am grateful that every morning I can wake up and sit down at the computer and without fail write something. I’ve never had a single day of writers block. Yes, I’ve encountered plot challenges, but that’s different. Writing comes completely naturally, if you call dogged determination and waking up hungry to create and succeed every single morning natural.

I’m also grateful to have an impressive team behind me, starting with my wife Jenn, who is the first person to read everything I write to keep me from seriously embarrassing myself. Ruth and Frances at TouchWood form the backstop of my editorial team and Lenore has been doing her best with my rotten syntax and terrible spelling for the last couple of novels. Without them I’d be nowhere. The rest of the gang at TouchWood – Peter, Emily, and a whole gaggle of other folks who I adore but whose names I can’t remember or find in my email – make me look far better than I deserve.

I can’t forget my children: a couple of hours ago my 6-year-old Silas called me up to congratulate me. Either his mom and step-dad told him about this or he’s creeping me on Facebook. Kids these days.

There are a lot of people selling my books. To get to #1 on a local bestsellers list (without passing through numbers 10 through 2 I should ad) means that two book stores in Calgary – The Owl’s Nest and Pages on Kensington – had to sell a stack of books. That’s how it works: bestsellers lists, including the Globe and Mail‘s, are compiled from sales from independent booksellers. There aren’t as many of them around anymore, and digital book sales are having an impact too, so this is a heroic effort. In additional to these fine Calgary book sellers, Victoria’s Munro’s, Bolen and Russell Books, and of course, my favourite Chronicles of Crime, are what keep writers like me motivated. In Canmore Café Books pretty much treats me like family.

But most importantly, readers are who I have to be grateful to. People like you who buy these books for their Kindles or Kobos, who pick them up at their favourite independent book seller or at one of the big stores, who take them out of the library or buy them used or, as one woman recently wrote to tell me, found The Darkening Archipelago in a lending library in her hotel in Thailand. It turns out that Alison and I worked at Royal Roads University at the same time (and the book was one of the only English language books on the shelf) so she picked it up and now it’s continuing its globe-trotting.

Readers are what make my job so much fun. We connect across the universe; we are, as someone once said, holding hands under the table (or maybe it was the covers….). So thanks for buying my books; you make it possible for me to keep doing what I love, hopefully in every increasing amounts. I am grateful to you.

If you’d like to keep in touch follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

I penned about 8,000 words this morning. I had planned to work on this manuscript over the long weekend, being at home sans wife and children, and now that it’s done all have to do for the next few days is sit back and gloat. And go skiing.

In case you’re just dying to know, here’s what a day in the life looks like as I race through the conclusion of a first draft.

10:30 pm. A good morning’s writing starts with an early bed time. Healthy, wealthy and all that, minus the wealthy.

4:14 am. Wake up, already thinking about the final chapters of the book. I just fall back asleep when…

4:50 am. The alarm goes off. I lay in bed for a couple of minutes and then go down to the kitchen, make tea.

5:00 am. Back in bed I listen to the news. I usually do this in my office, but Jenn is away so I won’t wake anybody.

5:03 am. The news is the abbreviated version reserved for holiday’s when there is little newsworthy going on, or nobody left at the CBC to report it. Thanks Stevo. Feel cheated. Listen to the first 6 minutes of some BBC show on science.

5:09 am. Still savouring my first cup of tea, I commute the 7 steps to my office and read the Globe and Mail, Politico, and Pearls before Swine, online.

5:11 am. Open The Glacier Gallows and start reading the last few paragraphs I wrote yesterday.

5:12 am. Read Calvin and Hobbs. That’s right. On Go Comics you can read the whole strip, right from the start, with a new instalment daily. The internet is swell.

5:13 am. Back to The Glacier Gallows: start writing. I’m still not fully awake so it’s slow going at first.

5:20 am. Make second cup of tea. First breakfast: Honey-nut cheerio’s with almond breeze.

5:30 am. I work my way through some minor changes that I was thinking about at 4:14 and then start into a new chapter. The writing comes very quickly at this point and by 6:20 I’ve written 1,200 words.

6:21am. Third cup of tea. I switch to decaf (And don’t sneer. Taylor’s of Harrogate makes the best bagged tea in the world and they started making a decaffeinated tea and it’s awesome.)

6:30 am. Check Tweet Deck. Send a few tweets. Check Facebook. Check weather forecast and look at Ski Louise web site. Fantasise about skiing.

6:40 am. Back at it. (Sound of whip cracking.) I bore into the next chapter, and write another 1,100 words before…

7:30. Fourth cup of tea. Back to caffeine. High octane stuff. I use a fork to speed the steeping process.

7:33 Get distracted (again, always) by sunrise out my office window. Take pictures. Upload. Edit. Post.

The view from my office window of Mount Peter Lougheed (right), Wind Ridge (forested, foreground) Mount Allen (centre) and Mount Collembola (left)

7:42. For the next couple of hours I work on one of the climatic scenes in the book. It’s the much anticipated (by me) chase scene. Good fun.

9:45. Fifth cup of tea. Back to decaf. Switch things up. Keep the adrenal glands guessing. Second breakfast: toast with jam. I’ve come to a plot challenge that I have to work through, so I pace around the empty house, talking to myself. “Well, what would Cole do? He would do this…No, no, no he would do this….”

10:04 am. Take a shower. Next to going for a run, this is the easiest way for me to solve a plot problem.

10:09 am. Warm up fifth cup of tea.

10:10 am. Back at it. The plot challenge overcome, I burn through the a very long, exciting chapter that involves a car chase, a gun fight, a fist fight, an car accident and livestock being startled by masked assailants.

11:45 am. I want more tea, but it’s a bad idea, so I drink a glass of water and feel slightly righteous.

11:47 am. All I have left is a short epilogue. Not much room for creativity there….But wait, the excitement isn’t over! I decide to set up the fifth Cole Blackwater book right there in the epilogue. Legault you clever fellow. That’s where all the smug gloating comes from.

12:30 pm. I punch the last period of the last sentence of the last paragraph….you get the idea…of the first draft of The Glacier Gallows.

12:31 pm. Tweet about it.

12:32 pm. Wonder what I’m going to work on next.

If you would like to know what comes next, follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

To read all of my posts on Deconstructing Draft One for both The Glacier Gallows and The Third Riel Conspiracy, click here.

To read part 2 click here.

To read part 3 click here.

To read part 4 click here.

To read part 5 click here.

By the end of the week the survey team had completed their transect. Two nights in a row Jeffrey had come into the woods to undo the work they had done. On the third night instead of flags and survey stakes he found blazes cut into the trees themselves. He sat alone in the woods that night and felt them die around him. The trees were still there, but something had slipped from the forest, and from him. He felt a hollowness envelope him where wholeness that had been building through the summer.

At last, sitting on a log in the darkness, the arrow-straight line that cut through the forest and into him only ten feet away, he understood the significance of his encounter a few nights before. The animals had come to him on the last night they could. He imagined those spectral creatures, the soul of these woods, wandering restlessly through the suburbs, pushed further and further away until they could  find no place to go. The forest—through its animals—had come to him to say a final farewell.

The men worked for two weeks straight, even on Sundays, and then the woods were quiet again. When at last the men were gone he walked into the forest and went to a giant beech tree growing along the side of the creek. He leaned against the tree that he imagined to be the oldest in these woods and rested against the smooth bark, his eyes closed.

It occurred to Jeffrey that some ceremony was needed. He thought at first that he might simply set fire to the woods and watch them burn. Let them die by the hand of someone who loved them, he thought. He lacked the courage to take such a risk. Maybe the subdivision would not be built this year and he could spend the winter in the woods, tracking and painting.

Instead he decided on something simple, something that involved ritual, that offered back to the woods nothing physical, but rather something spiritual. He would bathe in the creek. He knew that on his own he could not find the coyote’s pool. He needed one of the forest’s emissaries to lead him to that haunt. He settled for his favourite bend in the creek where a deep pool formed on the outer bank. He walked to it and slipped down the bank onto the gravel at mid-channel.

He slipped his shoes off with his toes, pulled his shirt off and unbuckled his belt. Jeffrey pulled off his jeans, then his underwear, and looked around self-consciously. He felt the wind dance over him and thought of the cougar and the way it moved through the forest. Stepping into the water, he sank up to his waist. It pulled him in. Jeffery sat down and closed his eyes, letting his body sink into the flow. He sat on the gravel on the bottom, the water closing in over his head and felt the push of it on his chest and on his face. When he stood again the water streamed off him. A few leaves stuck to his chest. He put his hands on the bank and looked down into the pool. He stood still long enough that the ripples in the water quieted and he could see a wavy reflection of his face, the forest swaying above him. In the reflection it appeared that there was no delineation between him and the forest.

There was nothing left to separate them. No distinction remained.

A shout shattered the moment. It came from behind him, from the direction of Upper End Line. He heard another and thought that maybe the workers had returned and seen him. Then came the heavy sound of many feet running, crashing through the woods. His clothes lay in a pile near his feet and he bent low to grab his pants. The sound of footsteps intensified and to his astonishment an animal that looked like a cross between a moose and a deer bounded from the woods and landed heavily in the creek bed. The animal stumbled on the loose gravel and rocks only twenty feet downstream from him, but managed to stay upright. It was bigger than a deer and had a dark tan hide—almost red—and a great spreading rack of antlers that made Jeffrey think of pictures of reindeer he had seen in books about northern Europe. In the blink of an eye it bounded up the five-foot bank of the leaving Jeffrey holding his breath.

He hunched there for no more than a second when a shrill shout pierced the air. From the trees two men jumped into the creek, one of them falling and rolling and getting to his feet so quickly he appeared to be a circus performer. The other hit the creek running and bounded out the other side before Jeffrey could focus on him. They were followed by two more men in rapid succession, each one leaping from the woods into the creek, splashing across it with powerful bounds. He managed to fix in his mind an image of the four men. They all appeared to be completely naked. If they wore anything it must have been the same colour as their skin. They had long dark hair that looked like dark wind flowing from their heads.

Jeffrey could swear that they were all carrying bows and arrows.

He stood in the water, his pants in his hand, and looked at the place where two seconds before a woodland caribou had thundered across, pursued by four men intent on killing it. When a fifth man jumped into the water Jeffery had pulled his pants on. The man looked at him and Jeffrey saw that he was only a boy, no older than he was. The two stared at each other across the water. Then the boy smiled and stepped to the bank and leapt up it. Jeffery slipped on his shoes and started up the side of the creek. In a moment of deja-vous, the boy turned quickly to look at Jeffrey struggling up the bank. The two locked eyes again. The boy looked at him as the coyote had, taunting him. And then he was gone.

Jeffrey reached the top of the bank in time to see the dark back of the boy disappear through the woods. Without thinking, he began to run. He felt the strength in his legs propel him forward, dodging trees and jumping roots. The woods passed in a kaleidoscope of light and colour. He caught sight of the boy ahead, darting through the trees, running steadily. It came as no surprise that he passed the place where the woods should have ended, but did not. Instead of running into the neighbouring subdivision he passed beneath maple and pine. He ran for ten minutes this way, then twenty. All the while he could hear the shouts of the men and could see the boy just ahead of him.

Then the woods began to open and the terrain rolled like undulating waves. Jeffery watched the boy pass from the trees into an open meadow and saw sunlight beating down there and as he himself came to the forest’s edge, he stopped.

The men and the boy were pressing the caribou onwards. The animal was clearly tired. The meadow was two hundred meters wide and there was dark green forest on all sides. The caribou made a sharp turn to the left and the men pursued it. They were only fifty feet behind it now. Suddenly from the far side of the meadow three more men rushed from the woods, each brandishing clubs. They were shouting and running straight at the oncoming animal. The caribou turned again, kicking up tufts of sod and turf as it did, the dust rising in the hot, humid air. The animal was now running a course between its pursuers, one group with bows and the other carrying their clubs close to their bodies. The animal headed for a gap in the woods and was only fifty feet away when another group of men broke into the clearing. They ran straight out of the pathway that the caribou was heading for. The caribou tried to stop abruptly, its long awkward looking legs buckling under it. It scrambled to its feet – Jeffrey thought he could see the fear in the animal’s eyes – and turned to bolt, but the men were on it now.

One man struck the animal in the head and another hit it in the back legs. The caribou fell to the ground. Another man deftly drew a long knife from a sheath and slit the animal’s throat. There was no yelling. The animal sagged on the ground and the man who had cut its throat stepped from its back. Jeffery watched them all bow down and then one of the men stood and raised his hands over his head.

Four of them went into the woods and quickly returned with two long poles. The others lashed the animal to the poles and they hoisted it onto their shoulders. The four men carrying the caribou started off into the woods on the far side of the clearing, following the trail that the caribou had been running toward.

At length only the men with bows and the boy were left in the clearing. They seemed to be resting.       After a few minutes they stood and began to walk toward the trail at the far side of the meadow. As they were about to disappear into the forest the young boy stopped and turned. He looked right at Jeffrey, though how he could see him, Jeffrey could not tell. And then he was gone.

Jeffrey sat still awhile. He thought maybe he had come six kilometres. Maybe more. He did not know how he would find his way back. He stood and stepped into the clearing. He walked across its undulating surface and then entered the woods on its far side on a trail.           He did not run, but walked swiftly. He had no desire to overtake the men he was following. He had no appetite to confront whatever it was that was leading him deeper into these woods.

He walked for more than an hour and then the canopy of the dark forest seemed to fall away into nothing. The trail was wide and well-trodden. He came to the verge of the woods and the earth vanished beneath him. He stood spellbound looking over a great river valley. He could see across to the far side of the vale where the woods rose up again. At the centre of the valley he could see, in places where the trees parted, the curve of a river. It was broad and it glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. Next to the river several columns of smoke rose through the trees.

Jeffrey sat down on the path. His jeans were dirty and wet and he wore no shirt. As looked out across the valley he knew that he could name the river, but not the year. This was unlike anything Jeffrey had ever seen, even in the north: wide and lush with waves of trees. The gentle curve of its walls and the way the river sat so snugly at its centre left him with a great feeling of peace. Clouds of birds flew above the glistening water.

There was no six-lane parkway at this valley’s centre, no derelict and dilapidated factories, and no chemicals leaching into the waterway. There was blue above; not a smog tarnished sky. A hawk planed overhead. There was a rolling blanket of forest hugging the earth.

He thought of his childhood along the Nighthawk River, of his father. He imagined what it would be like to fish the waters that lay before him. If he walked into the camp of men and women and children what would their reaction be?

On the horizon, toward the lake, Jeffrey could see clouds beginning to build. A late summer storm was brewing. Thunderheads piling on top of each other were shot through with electricity.

He stood and thought that if he wanted to get home before dark he would have to leave now. With a storm coming he would not make it without getting soaked to the skin. His mother would have already called someone to look for him. They would have found his shirt and underwear in the creek and would suspect the worst.

He thought about his woods; the tiny vestige that hunched amid the turmoil progress. He knew that soon men with machines and good intentions, but who were immersed in their own ignorance, would come into those woods and reduce them to subdivisions with neat yards and carefully planted shrubbery.

Jeffrey thought that he would have to find a place to live where he could run through the woods and feel in his heart the freedom that accompanied such wildness. In one world he would live among the wounded—all of those who had suffered and disappeared from this earth so that one species might prosper.  In the other he might live differently— though he had no idea how—and he would feel what he had felt that morning while watching his reflection in the pool: that the lines between the human world and the rest of creation are thin and he could, if he were willing to make a sacrifice, transcend them.

Jeffrey stood and watched the thunderstorm approach. It rolled in from the lake and blotted out the sun. There was a flash of lightening followed closely by a crack that echoed up the broad valley. But he wasn’t afraid. He was closer to home than he had believed. He straightened up and set off down the path, into the valley below.

Thanks for reading Among the Wounded. This is part of a collection of short stories that I’m seeking a publisher for. I’d love your feedback to help me make my stories stronger. Use the comment form below. You can follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

Everybody seemed so concerned. I did an interview with Russell Bowers, the host of CBC’s Daybreak Alberta last Thursday and he started the interview noting that I was in a bit of a jam. He had read this blog. It’s no big deal, I assured him: Cole got the pickup truck moving again and he’s no longer loitering on the streets of Cheyenne Wyoming.

He did get himself in a heap of trouble, mind you.

Things don’t always go as planned when I’m working on a first draft. That’s certainly been the case with The Glacier Gallows. Given that this story has been in my head for more than five years, and the meticulous planning that I do when I’m preparing to pen a first draft, you’d think that this would have been all but feta-complete. It doesn’t work that way. I step into first draft mode with a solid idea as to where I’m going, and a good idea as to how to get there, but there are a lot of miles between word one and word ninety-five thousand.

Characters change; the story takes on a life of its own. It goes in directions that I couldn’t’ have foreseen. It’s a living thing: born of the grey matter between my ears in part, but more a mixture of the creative soup of the cosmos than anything else. I’m just the dude at the keyboard.

The one thing that has happened in penning The Glacier Gallows that has never happened before is about two-thirds of the way through I changed who the killer is. I didn’t see that coming. But there I was working my way through that jam in the plot line when it occurred to me that the killer had been revealed too soon, and maybe I had better rethink this whole mess.

I did, and things changed. I’ll have to go back in draft two and expand on some stuff in the early chapters, but I’m pretty happy with the way the story is shaping up.

As always, there’s going to be a lot of work to do to get this book to print in the next eighteen months. And I’ve still got three or four chapters, and another six or eight thousand words to write tomorrow morning, but I’m in the home stretch. I think.

Wanna read more about first drafts and plot changes? Follow along @stephenlegault.