This shot was taken between Lake Louise and Revelstoke, BC, along Trans-Canada Highway 1.
" Are you crazy? They're wild animals! "
That's what a woman on a Greyhound bus shouted out the window when it whizzed by my mother and me as we walked among these guys who were grazing by the side of the road. We had been having such a fine patch of time until so rudely interrupted. I think that was a good shot; now you get a picture of me walking up to one of them..........SNORT.........Um, he doesn't want us to get any closer; don't go any nearer............ Yup, we were getting along just great until that lady bellowed at us, and then kept on screaming her warnings even after the bus had passed us and was rounding a sweeping curve in the road changing her window view completely.
She had ruined the moments of grace. What had been allowed to exist among us for a brief time that morning on our trip in Canada hung on a thread of hushed hope for a moment after the bus disappeared from sight. Then something awful happened. Fear cut the thread, leaving each of us -- two women, five elk -- to react to the fold in the atmosphere.
My mother, then 76, reacted first, whispered to me let's get back to the car and I said don't whisper, just walk.
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