by Farley Mowat
My father’s retreat was slow, and defended by rearguard actions. “Mutt’s so obviously not a hunting dog!” he would insist as he retired a few more paces to the rear.
“Nonsense!” Mother would reply. “You know perfectly well that once Mutt makes up his mind, he can do anything. You’ll see.”
I do not think that Father ever publicly hoisted the surrender flag. Nothing was said in so many words, but as the next hunting season drew near, it seemed to be tacitly understood that Mutt would have his chance. Mutt suspected that something unusual was afoot, but he was uncertain as to its nature. He watched curiously as Father and I salvaged our precious hunting trousers from the pile of old clothing that Mother had set aside to give to the Salvation Army (this was an annual ritual); and he sat by, looking perplexed, as we cleaned our guns and repainted the wooden duck decoys. As opening day drew closer he began to show something approaching interest in our preparations, and he even began to forgo his nightly routine check on the neighborhood garbage cans. Mother was quick to point out that this behavior indicated the awakening of some inherited sporting instinct in him. “He’s started to make up his mind,” Mother told us. “You wait – you’ll see!”
We had not long to wait. Opening day was on a Saturday and the previous afternoon a farmer who had come to know my father through the library telephoned that immense flocks of mallards were in his stubble fields. The place was a hundred miles west of the city, so we decided to leave on Friday evening and sleep out at the farm.
We left Saskatoon at dusk. Mutt entered the car willingly enough and, having usurped the outside seat, relapsed into a dyspeptic slumber. It was too dark to see gophers, and it was too cold to press his bulbous nose into the slip stream in search of new and fascinating odors, so he slept, noisily, as Eardlie jounced over the dirt roads across the star-lit prairie. Father and I felt no need of sleep. Ahead of us we knew the great flocks were settling for the night, but we also knew that with the dawn they would lift from the wide fields for the morning flight to a nearby slough where they would quench their thirst and gossip for a while, before returning to the serious business of gleaning the wheat kernels left behind by the threshing crews.
Reaching our destination at midnight, we turned from the road and drove across the fields to a haystack that stood half a mile from the slough. The penetrating warning of an early winter had come with darkness, and we had long hours to wait until the dawn. I burrowed into the side of the stack, excavating a cave for the three of us, while Father assembled the guns by the dim yellow flare of Eardlie’s lights. When all was ready for the morrow Father joined me and we rolled ourselves in our blankets, there in the fragrant security of our straw cave.
I could look out through the low opening. There was a full moon – the hunter’s moon – and as I watched I could see the glitter of frost crystals forming on Eardlie’s hood. Somewhere far overhead – or perhaps it was only in my mind – I heard the quivering sibilance of wings. I reached out my hand and touched the cold, oily barrel of my gun lying in the straw beside me; and I knew a quality of happiness that has not been mine since that long-past hour.
Mutt did not share my happiness. He was never fond of sleeping out, and on this chill night there was no pleasure for him in the frosty fields or in that shining sky. He was suspicious of the dubious comforts of our cave, suspecting perhaps that it was some kind of trap, and he had refused to budge from the warm seat of the car.
An hour or so after I had dozed off I was abruptly awakened when, from somewhere near at hand, a coyote lifted his penetrating quaver into the chill air. Before the coyote’s song had reached the halfway mark, Mutt shot into the cave, ricocheted over Father, and came to a quivering halt upon my stomach. I grunted under the impact, and angrily heaved him off. There followed a good deal of confused shoving and pushing in the darkness, while Father muttered scathing words about “hunting dogs” that were frightened of a coyote’s wail. Mutt did not reply, but, having pulled down a large portion of the straw roof upon our heads, curled up across my chest and feigned sleep.
I was awakened again before dawn by a trickle of straw being dislodged upon me by exploring mice, and by the chatter of juncos in the stubble outside the cave. I nudged my father and sleepily we began the battle with greasy boots and moisture-laden clothing. Mutt was in the way. He steadfastly refused to rise at such an ungodly hour, and in the end had to be dragged out of the warm shelter. Whatever hunting instincts he had inherited seemed to have atrophied overnight. We were not sanguine about his potential value to us as we cooked our breakfast over the hissing blue flame of a little gasoline stove.
When at length we finished our coffee and set off across the frost-brittle stubble toward the slough, Mutt grudgingly agreed to accompany us only because he did not wish to be left behind with the coyotes.
It was still dark, but there was a faint suggestion of a gray luminosity in the east as we felt our way through the bordering poplar bluffs to the slough and to a reed duck-blind that the farmer had built for us. The silence seemed absolute and the cold had a rare intensity that knifed through my clothes and left me shivering at its touch. Wedged firmly between my knees, as we squatted behind the blind, Mutt also shivered, muttering gloomily the while about the foolishness of men and boys who would deliberately expose themselves and their dependents to such chill discomfort.
I paid little heed to his complaints, for I was watching for the dawn. Shaken by excitement as much as by the cold, I waited with straining eyes and ears while an aeon passed. Then, with the abruptness of summer lightning, the dawn was on us. Through the blurred screen of leafless trees I beheld the living silver of the slough, miraculously conjured out of the dark mists. The shimmering surface was rippled by the slow, waking movements of two green-winged teal, and at the sight of them my heart thudded with a wild beat. My gloved hand tightened on Mutt’s collar until he squirmed, and I glanced down at him and saw, to my surprise, that his attitude of sullen discontent had been replaced by one of acute, if somewhat puzzled, interest. Perhaps something of what I myself was feeling had been communicated to him, or perhaps Mother had been right about his inheritance. I had no time to think upon it, for the flight was coming in.
We heard it first – a low and distant vibration that was felt as much as heard, but that soon grew to a crescendo of deep-pitched sound, as if innumerable artillery shells were rushing upon us through the resisting air. I heard Father’s wordless exclamation and, peering over the lip of the blind, I saw the yellow sky go dark as a living cloud obscured it. And then the massed wings enveloped us and the sound was the roar of a great ocean beating into the caves of the sea.
As I turned my face up in wonderment to that incredible vision, I heard Father whisper urgently, “They’ll circle once at least. Hold your fire till they start pitching in.”
Now the whole sky was throbbing with their wings. Five – ten thousand of them perhaps, they banked away and the roar receded, swelled and renewed itself, and the moment was almost at hand. I let go of Mutt’s collar in order to release the safety catch on my shotgun.
Mutt went insane.
That, anyway, is the most lenient explanation I can give for what he did. From a sitting start he leaped straight up into the air high enough to go clear over the front of the blind, and when he hit the ground again he was running at a speed that he had never before attained, and never would again. And he was vocal. Screaming and yelping with hysterical abandon, he looked, and sounded, like a score of dogs.
Father and I fired at the now rapidly receding flocks, but that was no more than a gesture – a release for our raging spirits. Then we dropped the useless guns and hurled terrible words after our bird dog.
We might as well have saved our breath. I do not think he even heard us. Straight over the shining fields he flew, seemingly almost air-borne himself, while the high flight of frightened ducks cast its shadow over him. He became a steadily diminishing dot in an illimitable distance, and then he vanished and t
he world grew silent.
The words we might have used, one to the other, as we sat down against the duck blind, would all have been inadequate. We said nothing. We simply waited. The sun rose high and red and the light grew until it was certain that there would be no more ducks that morning, and then we went back to the car and brewed some coffee. And then we waited.
He came back two hours later. He came so circumspectly (hugging the angles of the fences) that I did not see him until he was fifty yards away from the car. He was a sad spectacle. Dejection showed in every line from the dragging tail to the abject flop of his ears. He had evidently failed to catch a duck.
For Father that first experience with Mutt was bittersweet. True enough we had lost the ducks – but as a result my father was in a fair way to regain the initiative against Mother on the home front. This first skirmish had gone his way. But he was not one to rest on victory. Consequently, during the first week of the season we shot no birds at all, while Mutt demonstrated with what seemed to be an absolute certainty that he was not, and never would be, a bird dog.
It is true that Mutt, still smarting from the failure of his first effort, tried hard to please us, yet it seemed to be impossible for him to grasp the real point of our excursions into the autumnal plains.
On the second day out he decided that we must be after gophers and he spent most of that day digging energetically into their deep burrows. He got nothing for his trouble save an attack of asthma from too much dust in his nasal passages.
The third time out he concluded that we were hunting cows.
That was a day that will live long in memory. Mutt threw himself into cow chasing with a frenzy that was almost fanatical. He became, in a matter of hours, a dedicated dog. It was a ghastly day, yet it had its compensations for Father. When we returned home that night, very tired, very dusty – and sans birds – he was able to report gloatingly to Mother that her “hunting dog” had attempted to retrieve forty-three heifers, two bulls, seventy-two steers, and an aged ox belonging to a Dukhobor family.
It must have seemed to my father that his early judgment of Mutt was now unassailable. But he should have been warned by the tranquillity with which Mother received his account of the day’s events.
Mother’s leap from the quaking bog to rock-firm ground was so spectacular that it left me breathless; and it left Father so stunned that he could not even find reply.
Mother smiled complacently at him.
“Poor, dear Mutt,” she said. “He knows the dreadful price of beef these days.”
5
MALLARD-POOL-MUTT
had supposed that after the fiascos of that first week of hunting, Mutt would be banned from all further expeditions. It seemed a logical supposition, even though logic was often the stranger in our home. Consequently I was thoroughly startled one morning to find the relative positions of the antagonists in our family’s battle of the sexes reversed. At breakfast Mother elaborated on her new theme that Mutt was far too sensible to waste his time hunting game birds; and Father replied with the surprising statement that he could train any dog to do anything, and that Mutt could, and would, become the “best damn bird dog in the west!” I thought that my father was being more than usually rash, but he thought otherwise, and so throughout the rest of that season Mutt accompanied us on every shooting trip, and he and Father struggled with one another in a conflict that at times reached epic proportions.
The trouble was that Mutt, having discovered the joys of cattle running, infinitely preferred cows to birds. The task of weaning him away from cattle chasing to an interest in game birds seemed hopeless. Yet Father persevered with such determination that toward the end of the season he began to see some meager prospect of success. On those rare occasions when Mutt allowed us to shoot a bird we would force the corpse into his jaws, or hang it, albatrosslike, about his neck, for him to bring back to the car. He deeply resented this business, for the feathers of upland game birds made him sneeze, and the oily taste of duck feathers evidently gave him a mild form of nausea. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to pick up a dead Hungarian partridge of his own volition, but he did this only because Father had made it clear to him that there would be no more cow chasing that day if he refused to humor us. Finally, on a day in early October, he stumbled on a dead partridge, without having it pointed out to him, and, probably because there were no cows in sight and he was bored, he picked it up and brought it back. That first real retrieve was not an unqualified success, since Mutt did not have what dog fanciers refer to as a “tender mouth.” When we received the partridge we got no more than a bloody handful of feathers. We did not dare complain.
Being determinedly optimistic, we took this incident as a hopeful sign, and redoubled our efforts. But Mutt remained primarily a cow chaser; and it was not until the final week end of the hunting season that the tide began to turn.
As the result of a book-distributing plan which he had organized, my father had become acquainted with an odd assortment of people scattered all through the province. One of these was a Ukrainian immigrant named Paul Sazalisky. Paul owned two sections on the shores of an immense slough known as Middle Lake that lies well to the east of Saskatoon. On Thursday of the last week of the season, Paul phoned Father to report that huge flocks of Canada geese were massing on the lake. He invited us to come out and try our luck.
That was a frigid journey. Snow already lay upon the ground and the north wind was so bitter that Mutt did not leap out after cattle even once. He stayed huddled up on the floor boards over the manifold heater, inhaling gusts of hot air and carbon monoxide.
We arrived at Middle Lake in the early evening and found a wasteland that even to our eyes seemed the essence of desolation. Not a tree pierced the gray emptiness. The roads had subsided into freezing gumbo tracks and they seemed to meander without hope across a lunar landscape. The search for Paul’s farm was long and agonizing.
Paul’s house, when at last we found it, turned out to be a clay-plastered shanty perched like a wart upon the face of the whitened plains. It was unprepossessing in appearance. There were only two rooms, each with a single tiny window – yet it held Paul, his wife, his wife’s parents, Paul’s seven children, and two cousins who had been recruited to help with the pigs. The pigs, as we soon discovered, were the mainstay of the establishment, and their aroma was everywhere. It seemed to me to be a singularly unpleasant odor too – far worse than that usually associated with pigs. But there was a good reason for the peculiarly powerful properties of that memorable stench.
Like most of the immigrants who came from middle Europe in response to the lure of free land in Canada, Paul was an astute and farsighted fellow. As soon as he had taken over his homestead on the shores of Middle Lake, he made a thorough assessment of the natural resources at his disposal. He soon discovered that a narrow channel which flowed through his property, connecting the two main arms of Middle Lake, was crowded with enormous suckers. There was no commercial market for these soft-fleshed fish, so they had remained undisturbed until Paul came, and saw, and was inspired. Paul concluded that if the fish could not be marketed in their present form, their flesh might very well be sold if it was converted into a more acceptable product – such as pork.
He surprised his wheat-farming neighbors by going into the pig business on a large scale.
He acquired three dip nets, and he began to raise hogs on suckers. The hogs prospered almost unbelievably on this pure protein diet, reaching marketable weight in about two thirds the length of time required by corn-fed swine. They bred with abandon, and their progeny were insatiable for fish.
Paul was a bit of a mystery man locally. None of his neighbors knew about the fish, and there were two good reasons for Paul’s reticence. First of all, he had no wish to share a good thing with duller folk; and secondly, he had sometimes tasted fish-fed swine in the Ukraine. Because of this experience he chose to ship his hogs all the way to Winnipeg, disdaining the more accessible local markets, and ch
eerfully shouldering the extra freight costs. The local people thought that this was foolish, but Paul saw no reason to explain that he had chosen Winnipeg because it would be practically impossible for the retail butchers in that large city to trace the origin of certain hams and sides of bacon which seemed to have been cured in cod-liver oil.
In later years Paul became a powerful and respected figure in the west. He was of the stuff from which great men are made.
He was still in the preliminary stages of his career when we knew him and he had few physical amenities to offer guests. Nevertheless, when Eardlie drew up at his door, he took us to the bosom of his family.
That is to say he took Father and me to the family bosom. Mutt refused to be taken. Sniffing the heavy air about the cabin with ill-concealed disgust, he at first refused even to leave the car. He sat on the seat, his nose dripping, saying “Faugh!” at frequent intervals. It was not until full darkness had brought with it the breath of winter, and the wailing of the coyotes, that he came scratching at the cabin door.
We three slept on the floor, as did most of Paul’s family, for there was only one bed in the place. The floor had its advantages since the air at the lower levels contained some oxygen. There was none too much and, since neither of the two windows could be opened, the trickle of fresh air that found its way under the door was soon lost in a swirl of nameless other gases. Our lungs worked overtime, and we sweated profusely, for the stove remained volcanic the night through.
For Father and me it was a difficult experience. For Mutt it was sheer hell. Gasping for breath, he squirmed about the floor, seeking relief and finding none. Finally he thrust his nose under my armpit and resigned himself to what seemed like certain suffocation.