by Farley Mowat
Father, Mutt, and I entered the shop together, and when an aged clerk appeared from the back premises, my father asked him for driving goggles.
The old fellow searched for a long time and finally brought us three pairs that had been designed and manufactured in the first years of the automobile era. They seemed to be serviceable and without more ado Father began trying them on Mutt.
Happening to glance up while this was going on, I met the clerk’s gaze. He was transfixed. His leathered face had sagged like a wet chamois cloth and his tobacco-stained stubs seemed ready to fall from his receding lower jaw.
Father missed this preliminary display, but he was treated to an even better show a moment later when he got briskly to his feet, holding the second pair of goggles.
“These will do. How much are they?” he asked. And then suddenly remembering that he had forgotten to pack his shaving kit before leaving Saskatoon, he added, “We’ll want a shaving brush, soap, and a safety razor too.”
The old man had retreated behind his counter. He looked as if he was going to begin weeping. He pawed the air with one emaciated hand for several seconds before he spoke.
“Oh, Gawd!” he wailed – and it was a real prayer. “Don’t you tell me that dawg shaves, too!”
We had to improvise a special harness for the goggles because of the unusual shape of Mutt’s head, but they fitted him tolerably well, and he was pleased with them. When they were not in use we would push them up on the lift of his brow, but in a few days he had learned how to do this for himself, and he could pull them down again over his eyes in time of need. Apart from the effect they had on unimaginative passers-by, Mutt’s goggles were an unqualified success. However, they did not give him protection for his nose and one day he met a bee at forty miles an hour. The left side of Mutt’s already bulbous nose swelled hugely. This did not inconvenience him too severely, for he simply moved to the other side of the car. But luck was against him and he soon collided with another bee, or perhaps it was a wasp this time. The total effect of the two stings was bizarre. With his goggles down, Mutt now looked like a cross between a hammerhead shark and a deep-sea diver. Our second night on the western road was spent at Swift River in southern Saskatchewan. Swift River was almost the center of the dust-bowl country and it had a lean and hungry look. We were very hot, very dusty, and very tired when we drove into its northern outskirts and began searching for the municipal tourist camp – for in those times there were no motels, and the only alternative to a tent of one’s own was a tiny cubicle in a crematorium that bore the sardonic title of “hotel.”
Swift River was proud of its municipal tourist camp, which was located in a brave but pathetic attempt at a park, near the banks of an artificial slough.
We set about pitching the tent, which was a patented affair and not easily mastered. Soon a policeman came along and eyed us suspiciously, as if convinced that we were undesirable vagrants masquerading as bona fide tourists. He became quite grumpy when called upon to help with the tent.
We were all in a taut temper when we finally crawled into our blankets that night. It did not ease our mood that the night’s rest was fragmentary due to the influx of clouds of mosquitoes from the nearby slough, and due also to the sad moanings of a pair of emaciated elk who lived in a nearby wild-life enclosure.
We tossed and muttered in the hot and crowded tent, and were not disposed to rise with the dawn. We were still abed, still partly comatose, when voices near at hand brought us unwillingly back to the new day.
The voices were feminine, spinsterish, and indignant. I was too drugged with fatigue to catch the gist of the conversation at first, but I was sufficiently conscious to hear Father’s sudden grunt of anger, and Mother’s whispered attempts to soothe him. Things seemed interesting enough to warrant waking fully, so I sat up in bed and gave the voices my attention.
The dialogue went like this:
From outside: “It’s a shame – that’s what it is. A regular public nuisance! I can’t imagine what the officials are thinking of to allow it.”
Mutterings from Father, who seemed to know what this was all about: “Old harridans! Who the devil do they think they are?”
Mother, soothingly: “Now, Angus!”
Outside again: “What a perfectly poisonous smell…. Do you think it really is a dog?”
At this my father jerked convulsively, and I remembered that Mutt had abandoned the dubious comforts of the tent in the early dawn and had walked all over me, seeking the doorway. I began to share my father’s annoyance. No stranger had the right to speak of Mutt in terms like these. And they were growing worse.
“It looks like a dog – but how it stinks!” the disembodied and waspish voice continued. “Phew! Whoever owns it should be put in jail.”
This was more than Father could bear. His bellow shook the tent.
“I own that dog,” he cried, “and what do you intend to do about it?”
He had already begun to stumble about, looking for his clothes, when one of the voices responded in a manner that unhinged him completely.
“Well!” it said scathingly. “Why don’t you bury it – or is that too much to expect from – from drifters!”
It was at this point that Father burst out of the tent, clad only in his pajama tops, and so angry that he was incoherent. Wordless he may have been, but his tone of voice was sufficient to send the two bird watchers – for that is what they were – skittering to their car. They vanished with a clash of gears, leaving us alone with the unhappy elk – and with a dog.
It was not Mutt. It was a strange dog, and it floated belly up in a backwater of the slough not more than twenty feet away. It had been dead a long, long time.
Mother was triumphant. “There, you see?” she told my father. “You never look before you leap.”
She was undeniably right, for if Father had looked we would have been spared the half hour that followed when the grumpy policeman returned and demanded that we haul our dog out of the slough and bury it at once. He was really more truculent than grumpy, and he did not have a sympathetic ear for our attempts at explanation. It would perhaps have been easier to convince him that the whole affair was a misunderstanding had Mutt been present, but Mutt had gone off in the early dawn to examine the quality of Swift River’s garbage cans, and he did not return until Eardlie stood packed and ready to flee. Mutt never understood why Father was so short with him for the rest of the day.
The remainder of our journey through the prairies passed without undue excitement, and this was well, for it was a time of mounting fatigue, and of tempers strained by days of heat, by the long pall of dust, and by the yellowed desert of the drying plains. The poplar bluffs were few and far between, and their parched leaves rustled stiffly with the sound of death. The sloughs were dry, their white beds glittering in the destroying heat. Here and there a tiny puddle of muck still lingered in a roadside ditch, and these potholes had become death traps for innumerable little families of ducks. Botulism throve in the stagnant slime, and the ducks died in their thousands, and their bodies did not rot, but dried as mummies dry.
It was a grim passage, and we drove Eardlie hard, heedless of his steadily boiling radiator and his laboring engine. And then one morning there was a change. The sky that had been dust hazed for so long grew clear and sweet. Ahead of us, hung between land and air, we saw the first blue shadows of the distant mountains.
We camped early that night and we were in high spirits at our escape from drought and desert. When the little gasoline stove had hissed into life and Mother was preparing supper, Mutt and I went off to explore this new and living land. Magpies rose ahead of us, their long tails iridescent in the setting sun. Pipits climbed the crests of the high clouds and sang their intense little songs. Prairie chickens rose chuckling out of a green pasture that lay behind a trim white farmhouse. We walked back to the tent through a poplar bluff whose leaves flickered and whispered as live leaves should.
We crossed through m
ost of Alberta the next day, and by evening were climbing the foothills. It had been a day for Mutt to remember. Never had he suspected that cows existed anywhere in such vast numbers. The size of the herds bewildered him so much that he lost all heart for the chase. He was so overwhelmed (and so greatly outnumbered) that he stayed in the car even when we stopped for lunch. In the evening we made our camp near a little roadside stand that sold gasoline and soda pop, and here Mutt tried to recover his self-respect by pursuing a very small, very lonely little cow that lived behind the garage. His cup of woe was filled to overflowing when the little cow turned out to be a billy goat – Mutt’s first – and retaliated by chasing him back to the tent, and then attempting to follow him inside.
We began the passage of the mountains in the morning, and we chose the northern route, which at that time was no easy path even for a Model A. The roads were narrow, precipitous, and gravel surfaced. There were no guard rails, and periodically we would find ourselves staring over the edge of a great gorge while Eardlie’s wheels kicked gravel down into the echoing abyss.
We seemed to undergo a strange shrinking process as the mountains grew higher and more massive. I felt that we were no more than four microorganisms, dwarfed almost to the vanishing point. The mountains frightened me, because I knew them as the last of the Terrible Things – the immutable survivors that alone remained unaltered by the human termites who have scarred the face of half a world.
Mutt too was humbled at first, and he showed his awe of the mountains in an odd way. He refused to use them for mundane purposes, and since there was nowhere else to cock a leg, except against a mountain, he was in agony for a time. Fortunately for him his awe was transitory. It was eventually replaced by the urge to climb, for the desire to seek high places had always been his, and it had taken him first to the top of fences, then up ladders, and finally high into the trees. Now he saw that it could take him to the clouds, and he was no dog to miss an opportunity.
We lost Mutt, and two days from our itinerary, when he set out on his own to reach the peaks of the Three Sisters. We never knew for certain if he achieved his goal, but when he arrived back at our impatient camp, his paw pads were worn almost to the flesh and he had a cocky air about him as of one who has stood upon a pinnacle and gazed across the world.
This mountain-climbing passion was an infernal nuisance to the rest of us, for he would sneak away whenever we stopped, and would appear high on the face of some sheer cliff, working his way steadily upward, and deaf to our commands that he return at once.
One day we paused for a drink of spring water near the face of a forbidding cliff, and of course Mutt was unable to resist the challenge. We did not notice that he was gone until a large American limousine drew up alongside us and from it four handsome women and two well-fed men emerged. They were all equipped with movie cameras and binoculars, and some of them began staring at the cliff with their glasses, while the rest leveled their cameras. The whirr of the machines brought me over to see what this was all about. I asked one of the women.
“Hush, sonny,” she replied in a heavy whisper, “there’s a real live mountain goat up there!” And with that she too raised her camera and pressed the button.
I spent a long time looking for that goat. I could see Mutt clearly enough, some three hundred feet up the cliffside; but no goat. I supposed that Mutt was on the goat’s trail, and it irked me that I was blind while these strangers were possessed of such keen eyes.
After some ten minutes of intent photography the Americans loaded themselves back into the limousine and drove away, engaging in much congratulatory backslapping at their good luck as they went.
I had caught on by then. That night we discussed the anomaly of a piebald mountain goat with long black ears, and I am afraid we laughed outrageously. Yet in point of fact no genuine mountain goat could have given a more inspired demonstration of mountaineering techniques than could Mutt.
Leaving the mountains temporarily, we descended into the Okanagan valley, where we hoped to see a fabulous monster called the Ogo Pogo that dwells in Lake Okanagan. The monster proved reluctant, so we solaced ourselves by gorging on the magnificent fruits for which the valley is famous, and for which we had often yearned during the prairie years. To our surprise – for he could still surprise us on occasion – Mutt shared our appetites, and for three days he ate nothing at all but fruit.
He preferred peaches, muskmelon, and cherries, but cherries were his undoubted favorites. At first he had trouble with the pits, but he soon perfected a rather disgusting trick of squirting them out between his front teeth, and as a result we had to insist that he point himself away from us and the car whenever he was eating cherries.
I shall never forget the baleful quality of the look directed at Mutt by a passenger on the little ferry in which we crossed the Okanagan River. Perhaps the look was justified. Certainly Mutt was a quaint spectacle as he sat in the rumble seat, his goggles pushed far up on his forehead, eating cherries out of a six-quart basket.
After each cherry he would raise his muzzle, point it overside, and nonchalantly spit the pit into the green waters of the river.
12
SQUIRRELS,
SCOTSMEN, AND
SOME OTHER BEASTS
hortly after I fell under the influence of my Great-uncle Frank I began to be something of a trial to my parents. Frank laid his hand upon me when I was five years old, and I have not completely evaded his shadowy grip even to this day.
He was a naturalist and collector, of the old school, who believed that everything in nature from eagles’ eggs to dinosaur bones deserved house room. He also insisted that the only way to know animals was to live with them. He impressed upon me that, if it was impossible actually to live among them in the woods and fields, then the next best thing was to bring the wild folk home to live with me. I proceeded to follow his advice and on my first expedition as a budding scientist I collected, and brought home, a cow’s skull and two black snakes, for which I found quarters underneath my bed.
Mother said that snakes were not fit companions for a five-year-old, but Frank – who had a good deal of authority in the family – took my side and the snakes remained with us for some weeks, until the landlord of our apartment heard about them.
Those snakes were only the first of an interminable procession of beasts, furred, feathered, and finned, which I inflicted upon my parents. It is to their eternal credit that they managed somehow to bear with most of my house guests, nor did they attempt to discourage my bent toward practical zoology. I think Mother had some hope that I would become another Thoreau; or it may be that she simply preferred to have me declare my pets openly, rather than have me secrete them against the inevitable, and startling, moment of discovery.
There were a few such moments anyway. There was the time I kept rattlesnakes in a bookcase – but that incident passed off harmlessly enough. Then there was the time when I was six years old and was staying for a week with my paternal grandmother. One afternoon I went fishing with another lad and we caught half a dozen mud pouts, or catfish, as some people call them. I brought the fish home so that I could live with them.
Grandmother Mowat was an immensely dignified and rather terrifying old lady who did not easily tolerate the pranks of youth. Yet it was with no intention of playing a practical joke on anyone that I placed my mud pouts in the toilet bowl. I had no other choice, since there were no laundry tubs in the house, and the bathtub drain leaked so badly that you had to keep the tap running when you took a bath.
I was honestly and tearfully penitent when the mud pouts were discovered – and penitence was needed. Grandmother made the discovery herself, at a late hour when the rest of the household was fast asleep.
She forgave me, for she had a knowing heart. But I doubt that she ever fully forgave my parents.
All through the early years before we moved to Saskatoon, our rented homes and apartments housed not only us three, but a wide variety of other beasts as well. In
Trenton I had a Blanding’s tortoise – a rare terrestrial turtle of which I was immensely proud, and which one day distinguished itself beyond all other turtles by talking. True, it spoke but once, and then under unusual circumstances. Nevertheless, it actually did speak.
Some of my parents’ friends were visiting our house, and they were kind enough to humor me and ask to see my turtle. Proudly I got it out of the box of sand where it normally lived, and released it on the dining-room table. I was chagrined when it refused to poke so much as a leg out of its shell. In exasperation I prodded it with a pencil.
Slowly it protruded its head, peered sadly up at us out of its old-woman’s face, and then in the clearest, but most despondent, tones imaginable it spoke a single word.
“Yalk!” it said – as distinctly as that – and without further preamble laid an egg upon the tabletop.
I kept that jelly-bean-shaped leathery object on top of the stove for seven months, but it never hatched. I suppose my turtle must have been a virgin.
We left Trenton not long afterwards and moved to Windsor. Point Pelee National Park was only thirty miles away, and we used to drive to it on week ends so that I could do field work in natural history. One day I spied what looked like a crow’s nest in a tall pine, and I climbed up to investigate. It turned out to be a black squirrel’s nest containing three young squirrels.
Naturally I brought one of them home with me, carrying it inside my shirt. Without really meaning to I rather overdid Great-uncle Frank’s precept, for I spent the next few days living very close to a band of several hundred fleas.
The little squirrel took readily to captivity. We called him Jitters, and Father built a cage for him that hung over the kitchen sink. It had a door that he could open and shut by himself, and he had the run of the house, and later of the neighborhood. He was an ingratiating little beast and one of his favorite diversions was boxing. He would sit on the back of a chair and box with us, using his front paws against our forefingers.