He Gave Us Eyes to See Them

We pulled out of our driveway in Alberta, heading west to our son’s home in Alaska, almost two thousand miles (thirty-two hundred kilometers) away.

That’s a great distance to travel in just three days.

But the distance and the hours would pass.

My husband, Larry, would read to me; I’d quiz him on facts from travel guides; and we’d count wild animals to keep ourselves more alert and make us more aware of our marvelous world. I took a small notebook from my purse and started looking around. In our neighborhood, we occasionally see porcupines waddling along the road. Once, we’d seen a pair of beavers crossing a highway.

We knew that in nine hours, we’d see stone sheep in Stone Mountain Provincial Park, and tomorrow there would be wood bison near Liard River Hot Springs, but we hoped for a coyote or two, some deer, elk, moose, and bear —black and grizzly— before then. The miles sped by. No coyotes or deer in the fields.

I asked Larry about the length of the Yukon River.

No bears visible. The terrain changed, and I took over the driving. Larry read to me, and I scanned the sides of the road. “Nothing,” I complained when he rested his voice. “Not a porcupine, coyote, or deer. Certainly not a bear or moose.

Absolutely nothing. Nothing but those little ground squirrels. They’re everywhere.” Larry replied, “I thought we were counting animals. Did we establish a size criterion? Does the animal need to be at least a meter [about a yard] long, like a porcupine? Or must it weigh nine hundred kilos [nearly two thousand pounds] like a wood bison? Of course, ground squirrels are only about twenty-five centimeters [ten inches] long and probably don’t weigh even half a kilo [one pound] —but they’re still animals, aren’t they?” His observations hung in the air between us for a moment. I looked at him and realized how blind I’d been. “You’d better put that book away,” I said, grinning.

“You’re going to be much too busy counting ground squirrels to get any more reading done!” And so we traveled ever westward with a new, more vivid and inclusive appreciation of our wondrous world and all its creatures —both great and small.

Denise Dick Herr