Knucklehead & Other Stories by W. Mark Giles Page A

Interpretive Centre. It was, I had been told by the Travel Alberta trip-planning consultant, the only United Nations-designated World Heritage Resource in Canada. The centre has won awards for its design, and so I took a professional interest.
    I am an architect. So I keep telling myself. My small boutique practice specializes in doing a select few sprawling homes for the rich and the very rich. The rich trust me: I am one of them, and a dilettante, and the wealthy trust their own dilettantes. Some years I come close to breaking even on the business. Most of my clients are acquaintances of my father or grandfather or my famous uncle. Others know my mother’s father and brothers, and still a few more know my father’s second and third wives’ families. Many mornings, as I perfect the knot in my silk tie, I try to hold my gaze in the mirror as I remind myself, “I am an architect.”
    I rarely design great buildings. It’s true that the lions of architecture—Wright and Mies, Philip Johnson, Erickson here in Canada—did find willing patrons, true lovers of art and form, clients who indulged the artist, encouraged design with vision. The results may or may not be livable—bedrooms with columns in the centre of the room, glass houses in suburbs, bunker-like austerity. Livable, no, but living works of art, yes!
    My own work is closer to a long progression of compromises through phases of conception, design and building. I respond to the whims of those who sign the cheques. If my client wants a Doric portico grafted onto a house that is otherwise postmodern, so be it. I state my objections, then I do what is asked, walnut-jawed. It used to annoy my ex-wife. Why don’t you stand up to them, she would demand. You don’t need their business. This is true: grandfather’s trust fund provides well. Tell them what awful taste they have, she would say, as if bad taste is a crime. I’m not that good an architect, I would reply. I think she divorced me for my shrug.
    Occasionally, an interesting commission comes my way. I was introduced to a retiring oil baron who wanted to build an estate in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, using earth-sheltered design—essentially a building that is set into the earth, underground, or backed into a hill or cliff. I drove out from the coast to meet the client and inspect the site. He owned a remarkable property, perched near the eastern slopes, complete with creeks, blind canyons and yogic cattle content to bask on hillsides and chew their cuds. I admitted that I had no experience with earth-shelter designs, but the challenge intrigued me. He suggested I take a look at Head-Smashed-In. And so it was that I came to be driving a back highway on a sunny July day on the prairie. Taking photos of dead horses.
    I have the prints of the two photographs here on my desk as I write. The first, taken as the car hit the pothole, is as one might expect. Askew. The sky occupies most of the frame, overexposed and burned almost white. In the top left corner is a dark blotch: the door frame of the car. Running from the centre of the bottom edge to about a third of the way up the right edge, the crest of the knoll defines the horizon. The head and forequarters of the paint pony burst from outside the frame. A very dynamic photo, with its unorthodox composition, its implied action, the rearing horse. The second photograph seems to contain nothing. When the technician at the lab developed the negatives, she assumed this one was a ruined exposure. I asked for a print: a mottled grey background peppered with eighteen seemingly random dark blotches.
    III
    I had imagined the Head-Smashed-In site as a sharp precipice with a yawning maw below it. I visualized a stampede of buffalo pitching to their deaths down a sheer rock face. Instead, if not for the interpretive centre, you could drive by without picking out the spot from the blocks of hills and deep-cut coulees that