by Farley Mowat
“I stand there painted,” he explained to me, “and nowhere looking when it comes up between the legs. Dat dug! Oh my, dat dug! I yomp, what else?”
What else indeed. I only wonder that he did not yomp clear up onto the roof.
Mutt and I withdrew after I had made my apologies for both of us, and the outcome of the incident was that Couzinsky became our warmest friend in the neighborhood. He never tired of telling the story about “dat dug.”
On another occasion Mutt found a tempting ladder, ascended it, and, being unable to turn around, simply clambered into an open second-story bedroom window and scratched at the closed bedroom door until the householder came upstairs and let him out. The owner of that house was another singular character. He had worked for the Canadian National Railways for thirty-odd years and as a result he was the most phlegmatic man I ever knew. Nothing could disturb his equanimity.
When he re-entered his living room after having let Mutt out the back door, his wife asked him what the noise upstairs had been, and he replied, “Nothing, my dear. Only a stray dog in the bedroom.”
I know that this is true, for his wife told Mother about it during a tea party, and Mother, recognizing that the culprit must have been Mutt, told me.
It was after he had at last become fully competent at going both ways on a ladder that his brush with the Cat Lady occurred.
I never heard her other name, if indeed she had one. To all of us on River Road, adults and children alike, she was known only as the Cat Lady. She lived in a ramshackle frame house at the corner of our block, and she kept cats.
There must be many women like her in the world; spinsters, most of them, who suffer from frustration and who take to cats in compensation. Women of this kind can be truly formidable in their felinity, and such a one was our Cat Lady. She knew no other love, no other interest than her cats, and when she began to have differences with her neighbors and with the public-health authorities about them, she resolutely turned her back on the outer world. No human being was allowed to enter her house and for some ten years before we arrived on River Road, not even the milkman – a favored character whom she tolerated – had been inside her doors. She refused even to allow the meter readers to enter the basement, and finally the utility company had to cut off the power and the water.
No one had any accurate idea of how many cats her house actually contained. It was one of the entertainments of my friends and me to spy on the place – but circumspectly, for she was a devil with her tongue and with her broom – and count the cats that we could see on the windowsills. One Saturday I counted forty-eight, but a chum of mine swore that he had once counted sixty-five.
Because of dogs and neighbors, the cats were not allowed out into the yard, and the lower windows of the place were never opened, winter or summer. The interior of that house must have had an atmosphere reminiscent of the lion house at a second-rate zoo, for when the wind was right and the Cat Lady’s upstairs windows were open, I could detect the unmistakable feline odor all the way down the block to our house.
In order to give her cats some opportunity for exercise the Cat Lady made use of an oddity in the design of her house. The place was built on a T plan with the crossbar representing a normal peak-roofed section facing on River Road, and the upright of the T representing a two-story structure with an almost flat roof that sloped gently toward the rear and terminated in a fifteen-foot drop to the back garden. Two gable windows of the main section of the house opened on to this flat-topped wing, and in fair weather these windows were opened and the cats could promenade over the roof to absorb fresh air and moonshine. They got no sunshine, for the Cat Lady allowed them no freedom in daylight, fearing perhaps that her neighbors would be able to make a sufficiently accurate count to force the public-health officials to take action.
I have no idea which one of us youths made the original suggestion. I was against it at first. It was only after much badinage, and many taunting reflections on my courage, and on Mutt’s skill, that I consented.
There were five of us involved, and we chose a satisfactorily dark night toward the end of the summer holidays. We had no difficulty in transporting the ladder down the back alley and across the broken-down fence of the Cat Lady’s property, and in setting it up against the end wall.
We had no difficulty with Mutt either. The cat smell was overwhelmingly powerful in his nostrils, and he, like the other dogs of the area, must have spent many a thoughtful hour considering ways and means of getting at this multitude of cats.
He went up the ladder with the quiet agility of a squirrel, but when he reached the roof his claws clattered alarmingly on the tin shingles. We discreetly retreated to the alley to await events.
Mutt encountered a cat almost at once. There was a sudden scurrying, a despairing squalling noise, and then a thud as something fell into the yard. At once the night grew hideous. There must have been a score of cats loose on the roof and in the darkness a frightful free-for-all began.
The Cat Lady lived in deathly fear of burglars, or at least of male intruders, and I suppose she immediately assumed the worst. There was a volume to her screams that the whole pack of Sabine women, taken all together, could hardly have bettered. I think there was also something else too, an ill-defined quality that seems to me now, looking back on it, to have expressed a kind of yearning hope.
We had not expected such a violent reaction and, appalled by it, we fled for the shelter of our respective homes, abandoning both Mutt and ladder. But I was smitten by conscience when only halfway home. I stopped and was trying to nerve myself to return to the scene, when Mutt happily caught up with me. He did not seem at all distressed; rather he seemed smugly self-satisfied, despite a four-pronged gash that ran the full length of his bulbous nose. From his point of view the evening had been a considerable success.
It was a success from everyone’s point of view, except that of the poor Cat Lady – and, possibly, of the two policemen who shortly arrived upon the scene.
One of the policemen began to bang on the front door of the house, while the other raced around to the back in the hope of intercepting an escaping burglar. He found the ladder, but he had to fight his way up it against a perfect avalanche of cats that were hurriedly abandoning ship.
There was a brief account of the incident in the next day’s paper, but Mutt received no recognition for the part that he had played. He would not have cared, had he known of this neglect. Throughout the next week he and the other local dogs had themselves a wonderful time hunting cats that had fled from the roof, or that had escaped when the police finally forced the front door of the Cat Lady’s house.
Neither was justice visited upon us who were the instigators of the whole affair. The police concluded that “person or persons unknown” had attempted to break in, and had been foiled by prompt official action. The investigation was soon dropped since there were no helpful witnesses – all the Cat Lady’s neighbors having sworn that they had seen nothing that might be of assistance to the police.
I have sometimes wondered about that. Only a week after the incident I received a brand-new and expensive .22 rifle as a gift from the man who lived next door to the Cat Lady, and to whom I had never even spoken before.
9
CONCEPCION AND
MISCONCEPTION
lthough our sojourn on the Saskatchewan plains satisfied my father in most respects, he nevertheless knew one hunger that the west could not still.
Before coming to Saskatoon he had always lived close to the open waters of the Great Lakes, and had been a sailor on them since his earliest days. Nor is this purely a figurative statement, for by his own account he was conceived on the placid waters of the Bay of Quinte – in a green canoe. He came by his passion for the water honestly.
During his first year in Saskatoon, he was able to stifle his nautical cravings beneath the weight of the many new experiences the west had to offer him; but during the long winter of the second prairie year, he began to dre
am. When he sat down to dinner of an evening he would be with Mother and myself in the flesh only, for in spirit he was dining on hardtack and salt beef on one of Nelson’s ships. He took to carrying a piece of marlin in his pocket, and visitors to his office in the library would watch curiously as he tied and untied a variety of sailors’ knots while talking in an abstracted voice about the problems of book distribution in prairie towns.
Knowing my father, and knowing too that he was not the kind to remain satisfied with a dream world, it came as no surprise to Mother and me when he announced that he intended to buy a ship and prove that a sailor could find fulfillment even on the drought-stricken western plains.
I was skeptical. Only the previous summer we had made a journey to Regina, the capital of the province, where I had spent some hours on the banks of Wascana Lake. Wascana was made by men, not God, and by just such men as my father. It boasted two yacht clubs and a fleet of a dozen sailing craft. But it could boast of no water at all. I have never seen anything as pitiful as those little vessels sitting forlornly on the sun-cracked mud of the lake bottom, their seams gaping in the summer heat. I remembered Wascana when Father told us his plans and, supposing that he must remember the phantom lake as well, I asked him if he was contemplating dry-land sailing – on wheels perhaps?
I went to bed early, and without my supper. And I felt a little hurt, for I had only been trying to help.
He bought his ship a few weeks later. She was a sixteen-foot sailing canoe that, by some mischance, had drifted into the arid heart of Saskatchewan. Berthed temporarily in our basement, she looked small and fragile, but she was to prove herself a stout little vessel indeed, and in this year of 1957 she remains very much alive, still pert and active, and she and I still sail together every summer.
My father spent the balance of the winter laboring over her. With meticulous and loving care he built leeboards, splashboards, a mast, a steering oar, and a set of paddles. He borrowed Mother’s sewing machine and made a sail out of the finest Egyptian cotton, shipped to him from Montreal. As for the canoe herself – he burnished her sides with steel wool, scraped them with glass, and painted and repainted until her flanks were as smooth as the surface of a mirror.
Then he applied the final coat of paint – bright green – and with some ceremony christened her Concepcion. He said that she was so named after an island in the Philippines.
Her launching took place on a day in early May. I helped Father carry her down to the riverbank beside the Twenty-fifth Street bridge and en route we collected an interested group of followers. Vessels of any sort had been unknown in Saskatoon since the time of the prairie schooners, and Concepcion was an eye-catching maiden in her own right.
As my father went about the task of stepping the mast and preparing the canoe for her first voyage, the crowd of onlookers increased steadily in numbers. High above our heads the ramparts of the bridge darkened with a frieze of spectators. They were all very quiet and very solemn as Father nodded his head to tell me that he was ready, and then I pushed Concepcion into her own element.
It was early spring and the Saskatchewan River was still in flood. My father knew all there was to know about water (so he believed) and it had not occurred to him that there would be much difference between the Bay of Quinte and the South Saskatchewan. There was a good breeze blowing and it riffled the surging brown surface of the water, effectively concealing the telltale swirls and vortexes beneath. The watchers on the bridge, on the other hand, knew a good deal about the nature of prairie rivers in the spring, and there may have been something funereal about the hush that lay upon them as they watched Father and Concepcion take to the stream.
The launching took place several hundred feet above the bridge, but by the time Father had everything shipshape, and was able to raise his eyes to look about, the bridge had inexplicably changed its position in relation to him. It was now several hundred yards behind him, and receding at a positively terrifying rate of speed. He became extremely active. He ran up the sail and began hauling in the sheet in an effort to come about.
From the parapets, where I now stood watching with the rest, there came a gasp of mingled awe and admiration. Most of the watchers had never seen a sailing vessel before and they had always understood that sail was an old-fashioned and painfully slow way of getting about. Their eyes were being opened.
Concepcion was acting strangely. She would not come about, for the current was stronger than the breeze. She resolutely skittered downstream, making about twelve knots. She should not have been making five in that light air, and my father knew it. He began to understand about the current. He got out his paddle and with almost demoniac frenzy strove to bring her head upstream. He was successful in the end, but by that time he and Concepcion were no more than a rapidly diminishing dot upon the distant surface of the river.
Some of the men standing on the bridge beside me began making bets as to when Father would reach the town of Prince Albert, some hundreds of miles downstream. But it was clear that my father did not really want to reach Prince Albert. He was sailing the canoe now with a grim determination and a skill that he had probably never before been called upon to use. He wanted very badly to come back to Saskatoon.
Concepcion beat back and forth across the river like a wood chip on a frothing millrace. She tacked and beat, and though she kept her head resolutely upstream – and though she was sailing like a witch – she nevertheless kept diminishing in our view until at last she vanished altogether in the bright distance to the north.
One of the men near me glanced at his watch and spoke to his companion. “Eleven o’clock. ’Course, he’ll be a mite slower now, goin’ backward that way, but I reckon he’ll hit the Prince Albert bridge by suppertime. I’ll lay you fifty cents he does.”
He would have lost his bet, however, for Father and Concepcion did not go to Prince Albert after all. They might have done so had they not been fortunate enough to run aground some ten miles below Saskatoon. Shortly after midnight they arrived home together, in a farm cart that was being towed by two noncommittal horses.
The setback to my father’s design was only temporary. “Never mind,” he said at breakfast the next day. “Wait till the spring flood passes, and then we’ll see.”
But what we saw when the flood was gone was not encouraging. The South Saskatchewan was back to normal, and normal consisted of a desert expanse of mud bars with here and there an expiring pool of trapped brown scum and, in a few very favored places, a sluggish trickle of moving water.
It was a sight that would have discouraged any man except my father. He refused to be defeated. He had made his plans, and the river would simply have to conform to them. That was the way he was.
His plans suited me well enough, for we closed up our rented house and moved our old caravan some ten miles south of the city to the Saskatoon Golf and Country Club. Here, on the wooded banks of the Saskatchewan, we established our summer residence.
It was a fine place for a boy to spend a summer. There were enough pools remaining in the river bed to provide swimming of a sort. There was a stretch of virgin prairie where coyotes denned and where determined gentlemen batted golf balls into gopher holes. And only a few miles away there was an Indian reservation.
My time was my own, for the summer holidays had begun, but my father had to commute to work in the city every day. He might easily have done so by car, but he had planned to commute by water and he refused to be dissuaded by the uncooperativeness of nature.
At seven o’clock on the first Monday morning he and Concepcion set out bravely, and full of confidence in one another. But when they returned late that evening, it was as passengers in, and on, a friend’s automobile. My father was very weary; and uncommunicative about the day’s adventures. It was not until years later he admitted to me that he had actually walked eight of the ten miles to Saskatoon, towing Concepcion behind him through the shallows, or carrying her on his shoulders across sand bars. There had been a brief but
exciting interlude with one sand bar that turned out to be quicksand, too, but on this he would not dwell.
Through the next few days he wisely, but reluctantly, commuted in Eardlie, but then there was a rainfall somewhere to the south and the river rose a few inches. Eardlie was again abandoned, and Concepcion returned to a place of favor. During the weeks that followed she and Father became intimately familiar with the multitudes of sand bars, the quicksands, and the other mysteries of the shrunken river’s channels. And to the astonishment of all observers, my father began to make a success of his water route to the office. It was true that he still walked almost as far as he was able to paddle, but at least he was spared the ignominy of having to haul the canoe along in front of an audience, for a relatively deep channel running through the city enabled him to paddle the final mile of his route to the landing place near the Bessborough Hotel, with Hiawathan dignity.
He would not leave Concepcion on the riverbank to await his return, but carried her with him right to the library building. The first few times that he came trotting through the morning traffic in the city center with the green canoe balanced gracefully on his shoulders he caused some comment among the passers-by. But after a week or two people ceased to stare at him and no one, with the exception of a few ultraconservative ice-wagon horses, so much as gave him a second glance. He and Concepcion had become an unremarked part of the local scene.
Mutt often accompanied Father and Concepcion downriver. He quickly developed the requisite sense of balance and would stand in the bow, his paws on the narrow foredeck, poised like a canine gargoyle. This was not mere posturing on his part either, for he had taken it on himself to give warning when the canoe approached shallow water, or a hidden bar. His efficiency as a pilot was not high, despite his good intentions, for he was notoriously shortsighted. Nor could he, as they say, “read water.” After a hysterical outburst prompted by a current boil that he had mistaken for a submerged log, he would very likely be staring placidly into space when Concepcion ran hard aground. If the canoe was traveling at any speed Mutt would be catapulted overboard to land on his face in the muddy water. He took such mishaps in good part, and would return to his piloting duties with increased vigilance.