by Farley Mowat
As the day drew on, the initial mood of amity wore thin. “She’ll take up all right,” my father remarked bitterly as they unloaded The Coot for the twelfth time. “She’ll take up the whole damned river before she’s done – that’s what she’ll do!”
By the time they established their night camp they had covered a total distance of six miles, and The Coot had lost what little putty still remained in her. Her crew slept fitfully that night.
On Monday there was little difficulty keeping the water out, since there was no water – only a continuous sand bar. It was a terrestrial day, and they hauled The Coot the entire two miles that they made good before sunset. The three days which followed were of a similar nature. Mutt began to get footsore from sand between his toes. Because they spent so much of their time slithering and falling in the river muck as they attempted to haul The Coot a little farther on her way, both Father and Aaron abandoned clothing altogether and went back to nature.
They kept making new discoveries about their vessel and her equipment, and these were almost all discouraging. They found that in the monstrous pile of stores left behind in Saskatoon had been the fuel for the stove; the ammunition for the shotgun, though not (alas for an innocent cow) for the .22 rifle; the ax; and, blackest of all omissions, three bottles of Jamaica rum. They found that most of their soft rations were inedible because of prolonged immersion in sewage water, and they found that their sodden blankets were in an equally unsanitary state. They found that all the labels of the canned goods had washed away, and they discovered that the two cases of gleaming, but nameless, cans which they had supposed held pork and beans actually held dog food intended for Mutt.
I do not wonder that the log had so little to say about those days. I only wonder that The Coot continued on her voyage at all. But continue she did, and on Thursday evening her crew was rewarded by at last reaching relatively navigable waters. It was nearly dusk by then, but neither mate nor skipper (both of whom had become grim and uncommunicative) would be the first to suggest a halt, and Mutt had no say in the matter.
They pushed The Coot off the final sand bar and slipped away downstream into the darkness. At midnight they fouled the ferry cable, and lost their rudder.
That loss was not so serious as it seemed to them at the time, for before dawn they were aground again – and again trudging over the mudbanks with the towropes gnawing into their bare shoulders while The Coot obstinately dragged her keel.
They had paused for a while in order to cook a dismal breakfast when my father, happening to glance up at the high bank, saw the horse. Inspiration came to him and he leaped to his feet, shouting with elation. He was no longer shouting when, after having hiked five miles over the burning prairie in order to find the horse’s owner, and arrange for a temporary rental, he came wearily back down the banks of the river to rejoin The Coot. Aaron greeted him with unwonted joviality and a momentous announcement. “I’ve found it, Angus!” he cried, and held aloft one of the precious bottles which had been given up for lost.
It was the turning point of the journey.
By noon the amiable horse had dragged The Coot across the two-mile flats to open water once again. Aaron allowed the horse to wade a little way out from shore in order to float The Coot. He was about to halt the beast in order to untie the towrope when my father’s genius renewed itself. “Why stop him now?” Father asked.
Aaron looked at his mate with growing affection, and passed the bottle. “By God, Angus,” he said, “for a librarian you’ve got quite a brain.”
So The Coot proceeded on her way under one horsepower and, since the river seldom was more than three feet deep, the horse experienced but little difficulty in his strange role. When, as occasionally happened, he struck a deep hole, he simply swam until he could touch bottom once again. And when the water shoaled into a new sand bar, The Coot’s passengers jumped ashore and helped him haul.
The use of a river horse was a brilliant piece of improvisation, and it might well have sufficed to carry the voyagers to Lake Winnipeg – where they would assuredly have drowned, had it not been for the flood.
When the rain began on Saturday afternoon, Father and Aaron took The Coot to shore, hauled her a little way up on the flats, covered her with a big tarpaulin, and crawled under the canvas to wait out the downpour. The horse was turned loose to scale the high banks and forage for himself, while the two men and the dog relaxed cozily in their shelter over tins of dog food and dollops of red rum.
The rain grew heavier, for it was the beginning of one of those frightening prairie phenomena – a real cloudburst. In less than three hours, three inches of water fell on the sun-hardened plains about Saskatoon and that was more than the total rainfall during the previous three months. The ground could not absorb it and the steep-sided gulches leading into the valley of the Saskatchewan began to roar angrily in spate. The river rose rapidly, growing yellow and furious as the flow increased.
The first crest of the flood reached The Coot at about five o’clock in the afternoon, and before her crew could emerge from their shelter, they were in mid-stream, and racing down the river at an appalling clip. Rudderless, and with only one remaining oar – for Aaron had used the other to support a tea pail over an open fire a few days earlier, and then had gone off to sit and think and had forgotten about oar, tea, and fire – there was nothing useful that The Coot’s crew could do to help themselves. The rain still beat down upon them, and after a brief, stunned look at the fury of the river, they sensibly withdrew under their canvas hood, and passed the bottle.
By seven o’clock the rain had moderated to a steady drizzle, but the flood waters were still rising. In Saskatoon we who waited impatiently for news of The Coot were at last rewarded. The arrangements made by the newspaper began to bear fruit. Reports began arriving from ferrymen all down the river, and these succeeded one another so swiftly that at times they were almost continuous. The telephone exchange at the newspaper office was swamped with messages like this one:
SPECIAL TO THE STAR:
SAILING VESSEL, COOT, OUTBOUND IN BALLAST FROM SASKATOON, SIGHTED AT INDIAN CROSSING AT 7:43 P.M. ON COURSE FOR HALIFAX, THAT IS IF SHE DON’T GO BUSTING INTO THE BIG ISLAND BAR AFORE SHE GITS PAST COYOTE CREEK.
The Coot got by Big Island and Coyote Creek all right, for at 7:50 P.M. the watcher at Barners Ford reported that she had just passed him, accompanied by two drowned cows, also presumed to be en route for Halifax. At 8:02 she went by Indian Crossing … at 8:16 she sideswiped the Sinkhole Ferry … at 8:22 she was reported from St. Louis (Saskatchewan, not Missouri) … and so it went. The ferrymen tried to “speak” the speeding ship, but she gave them no reply and would not even deign to make her number. So swiftly did she pass that a hard-riding stockman who spotted her near Duck Lake could not even draw alongside.
In the city room at the newspaper, reporters marked each new position on a large-scale map of the river, and someone with a slide rule calculated that if The Coot could maintain her rate of speed, she would complete her passage to Halifax in six more days.
By nine o’clock that evening the darkness of an overcast and moonless night had so obscured the river that no further reports were to be expected from the watching ferrymen. However, we presumed that on Sunday morning the observers would again pick up the trail. A number of people even drove out at dawn from Prince Albert to see The Coot go past the junction of the two branches of the river. They made that trip in vain. The flood passed and the river shrank back to its normal, indolent self, but no Coot appeared. She had vanished utterly during the black hours of the night.
All through that tense and weary Sunday we waited for news, and there was none. At last Aaron’s son-in-law called on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for help, and the famous force ordered one of its patrol aircraft up to make a search. The plane found nothing before darkness intervened on Sunday evening, but it was off again with the following dawn.
At 11 A.M. on Monday the following radio message was r
eceived in Saskatoon:
COOT LOCATED FIVE MILES NORTHWEST FENTON AND TWO MILES FROM RIVERBANK. AGROUND IN CENTER LARGE PASTURE AND ENTIRELY SURROUNDED BY HOLSTEIN COWS. CREW APPEARS ALL WELL. ONE MAN PLAYING BANJO, ONE SUNBATHING, AND DOG CHASING CATTLE.
It was an admirable report, and indicative of the high standards of accuracy, combined with brevity, for which the force is justly famed. However, as my father later pointed out, it did not tell the entire story.
Mutt, Aaron, and Father had spent the whole of Saturday night under cover of their tarpaulin. Even after the rain stopped they did not emerge. Father said that this was because he wished to die bravely, and he could do so only by ignoring the terror and turmoil of that swollen river. Aaron said it was because they had found the second bottle of rum. Mutt, as usual, kept his peace.
When the light grew strong on Sunday morning, Father began to hope that they might yet survive and, pulling aside the canvas, thrust his head out for a look. He was stupefied by what he saw. The Coot had evidently managed to cover the entire distance to Lake Winnipeg in less than ten hours. His bemused mind could find no other explanation for the apparently limitless expanse of brown water that stretched away on every side.
It was not until late afternoon, when the flood waters began to subside and the tops of poplar trees began appearing alongside The Coot, that the illusion was partially dispelled. It had vanished totally by Monday morning when the voyagers awoke to find their vessel resting on a broad green meadow, surrounded by a herd of curious cattle.
The crew of The Coot now proceeded to enjoy the happiest hours of their journey. There was no water in the boat, or under her. There was no sand or mud. The sun was warm. Aaron had found the third of the missing bottles, and Father had procured a side of home-cured bacon and five loaves of homemade bread from a nearby Dukhobor settler. Mutt was having a time with the cows. It was a fair and lovely place for storm-tossed mariners to drop their hook.
The idyll was disturbed by the appearance of the search aircraft; and shattered a few hours later by the arrival of Aaron’s son-in-law as a passenger in a big red truck. A conference was called and the cruise was declared to be at an end, despite Aaron’s blasphemous dissent. The Coot went ignominiously back to Saskatoon aboard the truck.
When he was safely within his own house, Father frankly admitted to us that he was delighted to be there, and that he had never really had much hope of seeing home again. For the rest of that summer he was content with Concepcion, and we spent many a happy week end on Lotus Lake, sailing her back and forth between the Anglican Church Beach and Milford’s Beer Parlour.
But there is a curious postscript to the story of The Coot. One day in the autumn of the following year my father received a letter from Halifax. It contained nothing save a snapshot which showed a funny little craft (unmistakably The Coot) tied up alongside that famous Lunenburger The Bluenose. On the back of the snapshot was a cryptic message, scrawled large in purple ink. “Quitter!” it said.
Father would have felt badly about that, had not his friend Don Chisholm (who was assistant superintendent of one of the railroads at Saskatoon) shown him a waybill sometime earlier. It was an interesting document. It dealt with the dispatch of one flatcar, “with cargo, out of Saskatoon, bound for Halifax.” And the name bestowed on that flatcar for the journey by some railway humorist was writ large on the bottom of the bill.
It was The Cootie Carrier.
11
VIGNETTES OF
TRAVEL
he Mowat family was a restless one – or at least my father was a restless one. Mother would have been content to stay quietly in almost any of the places that were temporarily home to us, but Father always yearned for far horizons.
During the Saskatoon period of our lives we traveled widely, from Churchill on Hudson Bay, to Vancouver on the Pacific shores. We traveled the hard way, too, for a librarian is always underpaid. However, the lessons I learned from the vicissitudes of those journeys have stood me in good stead on my own travels, for writers too are always underpaid. In examining my memories of those excursions I am struck by the way Mutt looms so large in all of them. There was our journey to the Pacific, for example. Looking back on it now, I can recall a string of vignettes in each of which Mutt was the center of attention – while for the rest, there is nothing but an amorphous blur.
We began that journey on the June day in 1934 when I finished my last school examination paper. I still possess a snapshot taken of us as we pulled away down River Road, and when I look at it I am appalled at the manner in which we burdened Eardlie. None of your pregnant glass-and-chrome showcases of today could have carried that load for a single mile. Eardlie could do so only because he was the ultimate result of five thousand years of human striving to devise the perfect vehicle. For there is no doubt at all but that the Model A stands at the apex of the evolution of the wheel. And it is a matter of sorrow to me – as it should be to all men – that this magnificent climax should have been followed by the rapid and terrible degeneration of the automotive species into the effete mechanical incubi which batten off human flesh on every highway of the world today.
The load that Eardlie shouldered when he set bravely forth to carry us across far mountains to the sea almost defies belief. There was a large umbrella tent tied to the spare tire; there was Concepcion supported high above us on a flimsy rack; there were three folding wooden cots lashed to the front mudguards; on the right-hand running board (an invaluable invention, long since sacrificed to the obesity of the modern car) were two wooden crates of books – most of them about the sea; on the other running board were two trunk-suitcases, a five-gallon gasoline can, and a spare spare-tire. In addition, there were the canoe masts, sails, and leeboards; Father’s Newfoundland-pattern oilskins and sou’wester; a sextant; a schooner’s binnacle compass; Mother’s household implements, including pots and pans and a huge gunny sack containing shreds of cloth for use in making hooked rugs; and, not least, a canvas bag containing my gopher traps, .22 rifle, and other essential equipment.
As Eardlie arched his back under the strain and carried us out of the city past the town slough, where the ducks were already hatching their young, we would have done justice to Steinbeck’s descriptions of the dispossessed.
Mutt enjoyed traveling by car, but he was an unquiet passenger. He suffered from the delusion, common to dogs and small boys, that when he was looking out the right-hand side, he was probably missing something far more interesting on the left-hand side. In addition, he could never be quite sure whether he preferred the front seat – and looking forward – or the rumble seat – and looking backward. Mutt started out up front with Mother and Father, while I had the rumble seat; but we had not gone five miles before he and Mother were at odds with one another. They both wanted the outside berth, and whichever one was temporarily denied it would growl and mutter and push, until he or she gained his or her ends.
Before we had been driving for an hour Mother lost her patience and Mutt was exiled to the rumble seat.
Riding in the rumble did strange things to him, and I have a theory that his metabolism was disturbed by the enforced intake of air under pressure from the slip stream, so that he became oxygen drunk. He would grow wild-eyed and, although not normally a drooling dog, he would begin to salivate. Frequently he would stand up with his front feet on the back of Mother’s neck, and he would drool on her until, driven to extremes, she would poke him sharply on the chin, whereupon he would mutter, and come back to drool on me.
But his favorite position, when he became really full of oxygen, was to extrude himself gradually over one of the rear mudguards until there was nothing of him remaining in the car except his hind feet and his tail. Here he would balance precariously, his nose thrust far out into the slip stream and his large ears fluttering in the breeze.
The prairie roads were indescribably dusty, and his nose and eyes would soon become so clogged that he would be almost blind, and incapable of smelling a dead cow a
t twenty paces. He did not seem to mind, but like a misshapen and misplaced figurehead he would thrust farther outward until he passed the point of balance. Then only my firm grip on his tail could prevent disaster, and on one occasion, when my grip relaxed a little, he became air-borne for a moment or so before crashing to the road behind us.
When this happened we thought we had lost him forever. By the time Father got the car stopped, Mutt was a hundred yards in the rear, spread-eagled in the center of the road, and screaming pitifully. Father assumed the worst, and concluded that the only thing to do was to put the poor beast out of his misery at once. He leaped out of the car and ran to a blacksmith’s shop that stood by the roadside, and in a few minutes returned waving the blacksmith’s old revolver.
He was too late. While he had been out of sight, Mutt had spotted a pair of heifers staring at him over the fence, and had hastily picked himself up to give vociferous chase.
Although he suffered no lasting injuries from this mishap, there was one minor consequence that allowed me to make a place for myself in the family annals by subsequently reporting that “Mutt was so scared he went to the bathroom in his pants.”
Because of the dust we three human travelers were equipped with motorcyclists’ goggles. Father decided one evening that this was favoritism, and that Mutt should have the same protection. We were then entering the outskirts of a place called Elbow, a typical prairie village with an unpaved main street as wide as the average Ontario farm, and with two rows of plank-fronted buildings facing each other distantly across this arid expanse. The drugstore was the only place still open when we arrived.