Invisible Roots

My friend Susan remembers walking on the log sills of the Métis longhouse, but that was decades ago, when she was a child. “I’d say it was about 40 feet long,” she says, tracing a line in the air with her finger, “and there was a pit, some kind of cellar, I guess. The last time I came here, I couldn’t find it.” She peers and then plunges into the tangle of scrubby aspen that has pushed up along the margin of the site. “No,” she says when she re-emerges a few minutes later, “I don’t know where it is any more.” But she can still find the fallen chimney, a scatter of large, spatulate stones half-hidden in the grass. They are splotched and whorled with rust-coloured lichens.

We are on the up-slope of a broad, flat-bottomed valley on the edge of the Cypress Hills, in the far southwestern corner of Saskatchewan. Below us, sunlight ripples over the fall of land as it sweeps toward the...