Old Man on His Back:
Portrait of a Prairie Landscape
Sharon Butala
Photography by Courtney Milne
Not since Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder have the prairies had so devoted a chronicler as Sharon Butala. In her best-selling memoir, The Perfection of the Morning, she writes with feeling and wisdom about marrying a cattle rancher and getting to know for the first time "the glowing, fragile plains, the radiant hills" of southwestern Saskatchewan. In her companion volume, Wild Stone Heart (recently released in paperback), she tells of watching a field on the family property return to its natural state, where it became both an exemplar of long-vanished prairie ecology and a source of inspiration and meditation—"layers of presence gradually disclosing themselves to me."
As readers of that book know, Butala and her husband eventually came to sell 13,000 acres of ranch land to the Nature Conservancy of Canada—part of a comprehensive effort to protect a stretch of semi-arid mixed-grass prairie called "Old Man on His Back." That terrain, with its "hills and fields of grass and blooming wildflowers," now finds an ideal word-and-picture showcase in Butala’s latest book, Old Man on His Back: Portrait of a Prairie Landscape (HarperCollins Canada, $39.95), with photographs by Courtney Milne.
— Louis Bayard
