I spent last weekend with my dad and his wife Dorothy at their home in Drumheller Alberta. It was a bit of a journey back in time.

Drumheller is where I spent my early childhood. To be precise I lived in the community of Midlandvale, then a village built near the Midland Coal Mine a mile or so outside of Drumheller.

The mine in Midland had shut down in the fifties, and the community never really recovered, but when you are six or seven years old you don't know that your town is poorer than most. It takes perspective, time and adult eyes to see that.

What I did know is that I lived 50 yards from the bush covered banks of the river. Meanwhile at the other end of the street, the Red Deer River badlands rose up to form, in a child's eyes, a range of immense and mysterious hills.

I had friends on the block like Darrel and Michelle (whom we called Mitch), and a block away was my best friend Terry and his brother Nick, or Nicky as we called him then.

Given the least chance I'm certain our minds tend to paint childhood in the happiest hues, but my early years really were a happy mix of the warmth of home and the freedom to explore.

Forgive me, for I know this sounds like something out of "Tom Sawyer" but I caught and kept as pets; snakes, tadpoles, frogs, salamanders, mice, rabbits and gophers. We would catch minnows in the river using bent pins as hooks and bread dough as bait.

In the summer we often swam in the river. In the winter it was where we played hockey.

My black lab Lady went with me everywhere. For a short time we had a ram, as in a male sheep, who bore the clever name Baa-Baa. I think dad won him at some Kinsmen party, and that's probably a story in itself.

We kept him in a pen by the river. Once, I climbed into his pen and he knocked me unconscious. I admit this knowing my tormentors will suggest that this explains many things. Unfortunately that's not the half of it.

Dad saved me by grabbing a shovel and sharply annointing Baa-Baa on the head. Shortly thereafter Baa-Baa was sold to a farmer, at least that's what I was told.

While my friends and I used to spend lots of time along the river bank I was particularly fond of the hills.

In the spring, at the base of the hills there were muddy ditches that were full of big tadpoles that all of us kids would catch and keep in pails.

The hills were full of fossils of various kinds. Petrified wood was everywhere and pieces of dinosaur bone were common.

In the winter we tobogganed in the hills. Once I was trying out skis for the first time and was laying at the bottom of the hill and some of the big kids in the neighbourhood came down the hill on a toboggan and accidentally ran it right into my face. The result was a trip to the hospital and a trip to the dentist.

I know what you're thinking but personally I view occasional minor head trauma as the price you pay for being an interesting and adventurous boy.

We moved away from Drumheller in Grade Two, but used to come back frequently to visit family and friends.

As I grew older we would fish for goldeye in the river. This mostly involved still fishing with worms, but the river could move pretty fast so you needed a heavy sinker to hold your line in place.

We solved this problem by going over to the old mine site and collecting pieces of lead, which for some reason were laying on the ground in abundance.

Then we would build a fire on the river bank, and melt the lead in a tin can. Then we poured it into holes that we had dug in the ground. Once it started to set up we would take a fence post nail, used to string barb wire, and we would stick it in the cooling lead. Ten minutes later we had a heavy enough sinker to fish the river.

I leave it to you to speculate on the impact this frequently handled lead had on the brains of boys who now were approaching twelve or thirteen. I admit that it probably wasn't helpful but in my case I suspect that it only amounted to a rounding error, though that may be the lead talking.

All of these memories came back to me last weekend as I walked along the river bank in what is now a suburb of Drumheller. There are still wild spots on the river bank, though that great wilderness seems so much smaller now with the passing of forty years.

The hills above my old house are now part of Midland Provincial Park. This area too is much smaller than the sprawling and impenetrable frontier that I had recalled, but as we have already discussed my brain may have good reason for being a tad fuzzy. This area of the park is much less than a square mile. But even today it is wild enough and holds enough magic to capture me the same way it did all those years ago.

This past weekend as I walked through those haunted hills, above a muddy pond overlooking the old mine site I flushed a fox from a copse of chokecherry bushes.

In that exhilarating instant decades peeled away, and I saw that fox through the eyes of a very young boy.