by Farley Mowat
Suspicion became hostility when the intruders slaughtered pregnant does; pilfered from trapline caches (a cardinal sin amongst forest folk); failed to properly douse their camp fires; deliberately set wildfires; and scarred the land with “test holes” blasted into the bedrock.
Harv kept an especially close eye on them, as did Cliff, who viewed them with a boy’s innate curiosity sharpened by suspicion.
On occasion Cliff would conceal himself overlooking the mouth of West Reach, his .22 crooked in his elbow, imagining he was an Algonquin brave and the stranger making his way unobtrusively down the lake in a nondescript canoe was the advance scout of an Iroquois raiding party.
Then Cliff would lay the foresight of his rifle on the unsuspecting prospector – and hold on him until he passed from sight behind a point of land.
Returning to Ananias, Cliff would tell his grandfather what he had seen.
“Bush devils!” Harv would grunt angrily. “Carrying on like they owns the world. Poaching the deer! Firing half the country! Bastids would steal gold outen your back teeth.
“Goddamn them all to hell. I knows them. Back before the big war I was up in Negeek Lake timber cruising when they come busting into that country. They was the devil’s curse! Blazing claim lines all across the best deer runs, building corduroy roads across the best moose marshes, cutting or burning the best timber stands and staking every goddamn gold-showing even was it no bigger than a piss pot! I tell you, boy, they made a goddamn mess.
“They did find one good patch of pay dirt though and then some hog’s ass from Toronto or New York or some such rat hole dug a mine and built a concentrator mill and hired every man and boy round about they could lay hands on to go underground like a bunch of goddamn moles.
“That was hard times so a good many men as should’ve knowed better went down that mine – and caught the gold fever themselves.
“They worked their asses off down there in the dark … until the gold give out. Then everything closed down. But the fellows who worked the mine and the mill never got themselves turned back around. So most of them left the country and went out front to scratch for wages. Their women folk helped drive them to it. They’d got used to having cash money in the hand.
“But men or women, they was gulled – the lot of them. Gulled by gold!”
“Granddad,” Cliff asked the old man one day, “what we going to do about them fellers if they come looking for gold around our place?”
As Cliff recalled it, Harv had been standing at the head of the long kitchen table. He crouched down, spread his great hands wide, then clenched them as if around someone’s throat.
“By the Lord livin’ Jesus!” he roared. “Ary one of they shows hisself on West Reach I’ll cuff him up to a peak and knock the christer’s top right off!”
That triggered Liza.
“You blaspheming old fool! If the Lord don’t strike you dead for carrying on that way, maybe one of them prospectors will. And it’ll be no more than you deserve!”
Harv was not religious, but Liza surely was. At first light each Sunday she would begin loudly praying and continue at it until bedtime, interjecting hymn singing, shouted hallelujahs, and Bible readings. For his part, Harv made a practice of quitting the house before dawn on Sundays, nominally to go hunting.
Early one Sunday in June, he rousted Cliff out of bed to go hunting from a hide near a remarkable granite cliff called Elephant’s Arse. It bore that name because it was huge, well-rounded in the right places, and vertically scored down the middle by a deep crevasse, up which a boy could shinny to the top before diving into the crystalline waters below. Generations of naked boys had plunged from Elephant’s Arse – and countless deer had made use of the narrows just beyond it as a convenient place to swim the Reach.
On this particular Sunday, as Cliff remembered, “we toted a grub-box with a bottle of Harv’s white lightning down to the dock and put it into the canoe. Harv took along his old .44.40 and let me have his .30.30. We got to the hide just before dawn. It was just a few poles covered with spruce boughs and a pile of dry bracken inside to lay on. I crawled in and went to sleep until maybe an hour later Harv poked me in the ribs.
“ ‘Wake up, boy!’ he says quiet like. ‘They’s something swimming past Elephant’s Arse.… Could be a deer, maybe a bear.…’
“It was kinda misty and Harv’s sight wasn’t the best anymore. What I saw was somebody in a canoe ghosting along into the shadow of Elephant’s Arse so close he looked to be part of it. When I said what I seen, Harv took another good hard look, then slammed his .44.40 to his shoulder.
“ ‘Goddamn it to hell, boy, that ain’t a man … it’s a Christly prospector!’
“With that he thumbs back the hammer on the old gun, draws a bead, and yells at the top of his lungs, ‘GET OUTTA HERE, YOU HELLHOUND!’
“Well, you know a .44.40 goes off like a cannon. The echoes when he took the shot sounded like a regiment of artillery letting loose. I never did know for sure what he aimed at – if he aimed at all – but I heard the whack of lead hitting something solid.
“I was scared to look. Maybe Harv was too. The quiet after the echoes faded was awful, but neither of us said a word. We was ready to slip out the back of the hide and head for home when we heard something queer – sounded like one of them big red-topped woodpeckers banging on a stovepipe, only it was coming from Elephant’s Arse. We looked then, and we seen the feller hadn’t been hit. Nor he hadn’t made tracks out of there neither. He’d run the bow of the canoe into the crack and was standing up, banging away with one of those little prospector’s hammers.
“Harv seemed kind of stunned as we hightailed it home, shaking his head and saying, ‘What can you do with the kinda feller’s got to be dead afore he’s scared?’
“When we got back to the house, Liza went for us.
“ ‘I heard that shot!’ she yells. ‘God in his Heaven musta heard it! Wonder he didn’t strike the both of you down, banging away on the Sabbath like you was the devil come calling.’
“Harv never said a word – just took himself off and we never seen him again ’til next day.
“I tried to tell Liza what happened but that only made her flap her apron and hiss like a goose. After a time she calmed down a little and ordered me to paddle back to Elephant’s Arse and fetch the prospector back for dinner.
“ ‘Least you black heathens can do for that poor man! Now git!’ was what she said.
“So I went back. The fellow was still working away from his canoe – a little squirt of a man hadn’t shaved in a year or two. He paid me no heed at first and I had to ask him three times to come to our place for dinner before he stopped hammering. Finally he turns to me with a smile big as a sunset and says, ‘Supposes as I might. Seems like fortune is blessing me this day.’
“Liza treated him like he was a long-lost brother. Nothing was good enough for him. She had made a big venison pie for Sunday dinner, but there was precious little of it left for me, and none at all for Harv when he did come home.
“The little feller never said much ’til he was full as a tick, then he pushed back from the table and says, ‘A dee-licious re-past, the likes of which I haven’t ate for many a year. My thanks to you, Ma’am. And to you, boy, if you was the one as fired. Your bullet struck a vein of quartz not two feet from me, and when I got the dust out of my eyes I sees a showing of gold I believe will assay thirty dollars to the ton. Good enough to put me on easy street the rest of my life. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I got to hustle back there and stake my claim.’ ”
The months that followed may have been the worst in Harv Gunter’s life. Word of the strike must have got around with lightning speed. If Harv stirred more than a few hundred yards from Ananias he was likely to encounter a claim post, for the country around was crawling with prospectors and Harv was convinced West Reach was doomed to become a mining camp. He hardly left the place all summer, and his rifle hardly ever left his side. Come fall a shortage of powd
er for reloading cartridges sent him to the store at Gilmour.
“As old man McAllister was weighing out the powder,” Cliff told me, “he asked if Harv had seen anything of a bearded little prospector with a wild look about him. Harv started to tell him yes, then thought the better of it.
“ ‘No, by the Lord livin’ Jesus, I never seen that devil’s spawn, nor ever wants to again! What about him?’
“Mac tells him the fellow had come into the store clucking like a hen partridge with a nest full of pipped eggs. Said he wanted to buy some grub but hadn’t no money. Instead, he pulls out a baking powder can, unscrews the top, and spills a little pile of yellow flakes onto Mac’s counter.
“ ‘This here’s better than money,’ he says.
“Mac figured the poor bugger must have been born yesterday. Mac had worked in a gold mine in Quebec and knew what pyrite was, but he never called him on it. Give him a few dollars’ worth of grub and the fellow went on his way, happy as a hound in spring.
“He never came back. Mac doubted he ever would. Figured the poor bastard most likely went right off his rocker when he found out what he had in his can was just fool’s gold.
“When Harv got back to Ananias he told me about it then give me a hungry sort of a grin and says, ‘Take a lesson from that, my boy. Don’t never pull the trigger ’til you knows what’s in your sights. I might of shot that son of a bitch stone dead and him as harmless as a burnt porcupine.’ ”
* The name had doubtless been conferred in remembrance of General Zebulon Montgomery Pike, commander of the U.S. force that, during the War of 1812, invaded Canada to sack and burn Toronto. Killed there by an explosion initiated by his own troops, General Pike is honoured and memorialized in the United States by a real mountain that triumphantly bears his name.
6
INTERLUDE
My visits to Wes’makoon and the time I spent with its denizens both human and otherwise, past and present, were a great solace to me, but ever since our trip to Europe our ten acres, which had seemed such a sylvan sanctuary in a world still reeling from the insanities of war, had begun to feel more like a subtle trap, and I was experiencing a recurrence of my post-war compulsion to flee the madding crowd.
Early in the summer of 1953, I had proposed to Fran that we take a year’s leave of absence from the Albion Hills and spend it with the remnants of the Idthen Eldeli – the Dene people who still lived a semi-nomadic life to the north of Brochet.
“Theirs is the other half of the People of the Deer story,” I explained. “It needs to be told – and I’d like to do the telling.”
Although I did not expect her to be enthusiastic, I was taken aback by the vehemence with which she rejected the idea.
“Look!” she cried. “You’re thirty-two years old and I’m almost thirty. Way past the best time to start a family. We have to start one now, and I want us to do it here in Albion!”
Although pleased by the prospect of paternity, I could feel the concrete hardening around my feet. The prospect of new obligations sent me back to my typewriter while taking what comfort I could from the “birds and the bees” who were moving onto our property in variety and abundance. They seemed content to be here, which almost made me feel I should be too.
Our small patch of swamp, scrub, and worked-out hillsides seemed to have become an irresistible magnet for the Others. Our pond was a hive of activity – spring peepers had laid their eggs in it and it was swarming with froglets. As the summer drew on, innumerable kinds of water bugs, beetles, and flies emerged. These in turn attracted a young painted turtle, spotted salamanders, more species of frogs and toads, several ribbon snakes, and a water shrew; some of these were presumably awaiting the transformation of the tadpoles into bite-sized froglets. The pregnant pond was also periodically reconnoitred by a great blue heron, a kingfisher, and a spotted sandpiper. A resplendent pair of wood ducks visited briefly but took a rain check, and I did not see them again until two years later, when another pair took possession of the pond.
The pond was also visited for a drink, a bath, or reasons I could only guess at, by all sorts of other creatures. These included a groundhog; a vixen who was raising her family in a den dug into our hill; a mink who left only her footprints in the mud to mark her visits; and, incredibly, an osprey – the great fish hawk – who hovered casually over our pothole for a few minutes as if to see how things were developing before taking herself off to more productive waters.
The pond produced never-ending surprises. On a day when the temperature was well above ninety degrees and the heat became more than I could bear, I shucked off my shorts and jumped from the end of my little wharf to stand naked on the muddy bottom in water barely up to my thighs.
Though almost as warm as soup, it felt wonderful. I was in a state of blissful relaxation when something hit my penis so sharply it sent me scrambling out of the water. Feeling somewhat foolish, I went to the end of the wharf and peered into the brown water for a glimpse of my assailant. Unable to see much, I cautiously lowered my hand with forefinger extended. There was a sudden swirl and I glimpsed a silvery something delivering a head-on charge.
It had to be a fish, but there were no fish in my pond – or should not have been, since no stream fed it. I had, however, “inoculated” it with a few pails of water scooped from a swampy little lake on a neighbouring property in an attempt to introduce spores, eggs, and cysts, together with minute adult forms of pond life and thus speed up the evolution of a natural and balanced aquatic habitat. Evidently the inoculation had included something unexpected.
After again poking my finger below the surface, and again having it unceremoniously bumped aside, I got my butterfly net. This time, when the finger was bumped, I swooped up an aptly named bullhead minnow, only three inches long but furiously indignant at finding itself cupped in my hand. I let it go at once for I had guessed its secret. Having glued a mass of eggs to the underwater woodwork of the dock, it was now on guard against any intruder who might pose a threat. A week later, when the water had cleared a bit, I found its nest – a lemon-sized, translucent jellylike mass filled with little sacs, each of which contained an embryonic minnow.
Every day thereafter until the eggs hatched, I made my peace with the little fish by scattering a few tiny earthworms, which it accepted with alacrity though continuing to attack my intruding finger. I gave it no second chance to reject any other part of me. (I later learned from a professional ichthyologist that my bullhead was almost certainly a male since, in this species, it is the male who guards the eggs until they hatch. I like to think that perhaps he was a bit jealous.)
The pond also played a role in attracting a wide variety of non-aquatic birds and terrestrial animals to our property. These included a pair of yellow-bellied cuckoos, who successfully nested in a bush ten feet from the edge of the pond; a cedar waxwing, who fledged five offspring in a spruce tree overlooking it; and a pair of almost-invisible grasshopper sparrows behaving like winged mice as they scuttled about the edge of the pond.
More than thirty species of birds chose to nest with us that year, and most of our co-residents seemed happy to take advantage of our hospitality. There were fox snakes in the fireplace, skunks and chipmunks under the house, and a flying squirrel who raised a brood in our attic. Even our bed was investigated by rambling deer mice – sometimes while we were in it.
The summer of 1953 grew hellishly hot, resulting in an exodus of Torontonians to the relative coolth of the Albion Hills. During July and August, the township roads, woods, valleys, and sylvan nooks were overrun by human intruders who all too frequently were obstreperous and sometimes threatening, tending to treat the countryside and its inhabitants with casual contempt.
Some drove their cars right up to our door and parked there while they investigated our pond for fish (there were none except for the beleaguered bullhead) or with a view to picnicking or swimming.
Some bristled when asked to move along; some grew threatening. I tried dealing with
the latter by displaying my old army carbine, until it dawned on me that another tactic might be more successful. I began a sign campaign, arranging them strategically about the property:
DO NOT STEP ON THE SNAKES
and
BEWARE OF POISON IVY
and
HORNET STINGS CAN BE FATAL
The one that had the most salutary effect, however, was this:
DANGER
RADIATION HAZARD
to Unprotected Personnel
by order
Keewatin Research Authority
In those Cold War days the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still loomed ominously, so this was potent stuff. Once the radiation signs were in place we had no more unwanted visitors. And few wanted ones since for a time nobody would come through our gate without being assured of safe passage. Some local residents even took to avoiding the 30th side road entirely, and the township’s road grader and gravel trucks became even more invisible than usual. This was, however, a small price to pay for the absence of vacuum cleaner and Fuller Brush salesmen, the Raleigh Man with his van of patent medicines, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
But then, one sunny day in August, a shiny Buick bearing the insignia of the Department of Health edged cautiously up to our door and out stepped two men in suits carrying briefcases, followed by two more in white coveralls carrying Geiger counters. They advanced upon me with the gravitas of pallbearers. Halting a safe fifteen or twenty feet away, one of the suits solemnly intoned the reason for their presence.
“It has been brought to the attention of the department that radioactive emissions are believed to be emanating from your property. All radioactive substances must be authorized, licensed, and inspected by federal authorities. Produce the relevant documents. After which we will inspect the premises and installations.”