At Home in Nature

by Rob Wood

  Finally, after hours of chasing, we had them both in their gunny sacks sharing the back seat of the car with Zandra and Kiersten. Then we had the 45-minute boat ride up to our island in our aluminum skiff, fully exposed to the hot afternoon sun. While one of the piglets lay calmly in the bottom of the boat, the other one, the male needless to say, was banging its head nonstop on the side of the boat. Attempting to cool him down, the girls were busy pouring sea water over him. When we eventually pulled in to the beach directly below our homestead, Laurie immediately grabbed the male in his sack and sprinted off up the trail. I took the female at a more leisurely pace with the girls in tow.

  Just a few yards short of the pen, to my surprise and to my poor niece Zandra’s absolute horror, we came across Laurie lying on top of the pegged-out, belly-up male piglet, attempting to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation.

  No luck. The pig, like Monty Python’s parrot, had “snuffed it.” It was an “ex-piglet.”

  “It ’ad met its mortal maker.” The young skiers knew the lines.

  So we packed the carcass up to our house and put it in the bathtub and sent a message with the girls to our neighbours, who were the most experienced farmers in the neighbourhood, to come and help butcher the piglet. Trouble was, these two farmers were also raving alcoholics who brewed their own moonshine. They were too drunk to come now but agreed to come next morning. They arrived first thing, already looped, brandishing and gesticulating wildly with their carving knives. Amid much hilarity on their part and ours but sheer panic on my niece’s, they went through the whole butchering ritual. At one point, the plump farmer’s wife warmed her hands up by putting them inside the carcass before pulling the guts out.

  Sensing her cousin had had enough, Kiersten offered to take her over to visit some other girls and go horseback riding on the next island, only to find that the scene over there was even more mad than ours, at which point poor Zandra asked to be taken back to the airport.

  Discussing the incident with her many years later, when she was an adult, I found she remembers the whole thing fondly and confided that she’d had the feeling, at the time, that she had to go home because if she stayed with us any longer she too would have become so crazy she would never have been able to go back to her normal life.

  Perhaps we should say that we have since become more vegetarian than we used to be and no longer keep pigs.

  Laurie has always insisted on having chickens. Although I enjoy eating their bright yellow free range eggs, I have always been skeptical about the economic benefit of the effort. Although the flock finds much of its own food scratching in the yard and the woods, we supplement it with a couple of 25-kilogram bags of cracked corn every month, bringing it all the way from the pet store in town, into the car, then into the boat, then onto the tractor and then into the barn. In return we get close to one egg per chicken most days, except when they’re brooding or moulting. Laurie usually has about 15 chickens and a rooster so we often have a surplus of eggs which she sells to neighbours.

  The hens sleep lined up in rows on the roosts in their henhouse in the barn. At dusk they all come trooping home and line up quite peaceably by pecking order on the roost. They are sociable, and like to be where the people are, whether that’s in the yard, on the deck, or in the house if we aren’t careful. Laurie gets most of their attention, as they revere her as a main food source.

  Once an old climbing friend called Pete Muscroft came to visit with his sarcastic and cynical sense of humour, and when I told him I had conversations with chickens he scoffed contemptuously. Then one day I was talking to a chicken that had wandered inside the house, suggesting that she scoot, and she was clucking politely in reply. The visitor was on the couch reading the newspaper.

  “Hey Pete. The chicken’s talking to you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s she say?” he scoffed, putting his paper down condescendingly.

  “Buck ’orff, Muscroft,” I replied.

  Chickens usually get taken out by one or another of a long list of predators before they grow old and die: hawks, ravens, owls, cougars, mink, weasels and neighbours’ dogs. Mink are by far the worst because they will kill the whole flock and not even eat any of them. Yes, nature can sometimes be red in tooth and claw. Blue jays (Stellers) are a nuisance because they pinch the chicken feed.

  One day I was over at the barn and saw Laurie squatting down and peeping out the back door.

  “Whatcha doing?” I asked.

  “Catchin’ blue jays,” she replied.

  Then I saw the cardboard box out on the ground in the chicken run perched at an angle on a stick tied to a piece of string that led to Laurie’s hand.

  “Caught any yet?”

  “Caught one.”

  “Whatcha do to it?”

  “Clipped its wing feathers.”

  “So you mean it can’t fly anymore?”

  “It can still get around. If it does come in here again, I’ll clip them some more.”

  “They’re pretty smart.”

  “Too damned smart.”

  Once, when Kiersten was working at a local fish farm, part of her job was shooting predatory seals, which she really did not want to do. She came home after a ten-day shift one time and confided in me that she had had to kill a seal that day and was upset and worried about what Laurie would say.

  “Don’t worry about your mum,” I said. “She just killed a mink in the chicken house with a piece of plywood this morning.”

  “You must have had dogs.”

  YES, OF COURSE. FOR MANY years we had a wonderful female dog called Sheen. A shepherd and malamute cross, she had originally belonged to our next door neighbours, and their young son had named her after her beautiful shiny white coat. She always knew exactly what was expected of her and never transgressed. Funnily enough, she took a liking to me. This was very flattering and hard for me to understand because I was notably disinclined to bond with animals, no doubt because I had missed out on that experience as a child. Sheen was so adorable that even I was softened by her spirit and allowed her to teach me unconditional love.

  She went everywhere with me, including all kinds of adventures in our sailboat and in the mountains. On one occasion we had Kiersten, aged 8, and Sheen along with us on an ascent of a 9,000 ft. peak straight up out of the sea at the head of Bute Inlet. Everything went well on the ascent, but coming down we thought we’d take a shortcut which ended up requiring a rappel down a cliff. We showed Kiersten how to do it and gave her a makeshift harness and safety rope that worked out well enough, but poor old Sheen slipped out of her improvised harness and fell part of the way down the cliff, fortunately landing in soft snow. She took off on her own the rest of the way down the mountain. Hours later, she was waiting for us in the boat.

  I was so used to her following me that I never had to think about where she was, but alas as she got older she sometimes gapped out, and of course so did I and didn’t notice she was no longer with me. It happened in town one time when I went into a tool rental store and she patiently sat outside the store as usual. I came out, jumped into the car and drove all the way back home without her.

  I found her next day still lying quietly outside the store where I had left her.

  Although Sheen was a tough act to follow, our next dog, a big male shepherd called Skookum, possessed all of Sheen’s qualities and more. Although he already had his name when we acquired him as a puppy, it turned out to be uncannily well suited to his character. The word “skookum,” meaning strong, well integrated, well put together, is from the Chinook dialect, which was part English, part Native and part French, used universally across Canada by the first settlers and traders.

  A big dog with natural equipment for delivering violence, he never did. On the contrary, his gentle, playful spirit and his insistence on enjoyment of the moment brought great joy to many people. He avoided fighting with other dogs and was sometimes timid and afraid of smaller ones. He was fascinated by cats but had his nose scratche
d a couple of times from getting too close to Irish too soon. He never forgave her for that. The closest he ever came to violence was popping balloons.

  I remember one time at the Heriot Bay dock I had just finished carrying loads down the ramp from the car to the boat and was untied from the dock and ready to leave, except there was no Skookum. He was still standing at the top of the ramp and didn’t show any sign of coming down when I called him. This was most unusual because he loved boat rides and was usually the first one into the boat. Looking around to see what was spooking him, I noticed a tiny little terrier at the bottom of the ramp that Skookum could have eaten for lunch if he had wanted to. I had to go all the way back up the ramp and bring him down whimpering like a puppy.

  For those of us who were blessed with his companionship on a frequent basis, the quality that moved us even more than his Sheen-like loyalty and love was his extraordinary intelligence. He had a vocabulary of over 200 words, most of them toys. You could tell him to go fetch his dinosaur and he would run to his huge basket of toys, spill them all out on the carpet and sort though them with his long nose, pick out the right one and bring it to you. He was a master entertainer and revelled in the spotlight of attention. With the array of tricks that Laurie taught him, he sure could hold an audience. We had him at a party in Vancouver one time with a kitchen full of people jammed together. He entertained everyone for an hour with a spontaneously invented game of tapping a balloon up in the air with his nose.

  In the bush he was right in tune and enjoyed tracking; in the mountains he was superb, agile as well as strong. We had him out on hundreds of great mountain trips, including numerous ten-day ski mountaineering expeditions into the Mount Waddington Range, pulling his own sled full of dog food on the way in and full of our garbage on the way out. He was always a star, not only in the entertainment department but also in safety. His herding instinct demonstrated obvious concern for the well-being of the group, and his awareness and sensitivity to the vibrations of the environment were a great source of security for us as well as an inspiration. He was always in the Zone.

  One time, on a ski trip in the mountains, our friend Lyle was giving us a bit of a workshop on the use of avalanche transceivers. Lyle had previously buried an activated transceiver in the snow some distance away. When it came time for Lyle to stop instructing and send us off to find it, he was confronted by an excited Skookum with the transceiver in his mouth, poking Lyle with it in the crotch.

  He was with us when we crossed the Hecate Strait to the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii) in Quintano. Although this passage was very rough, it was also remarkably fast and we sailed the 72 miles in only ten hours. Even though Skookum would never go to the bathroom on the boat, this long day was not too much of a problem. On the way back, however, we took a more diagonal line across the strait that gave us a 130-mile passage, and because there was no wind, we had to motor. In order to conserve a limited fuel supply, we had to travel slowly, with the result that poor old Skookum went for 34 hours without a pee. Poor lad was not quite sure of his legs when he finally got ashore and headed up the beach to the grass.

  On a lovely, sunny, spring-like day, but oh so sad, we had to lay our beloved old Skookum to rest in the garden. Needless to say, this was an extremely emotional time for us. I am brought to tears again, just writing about it now. A big dog in his fourteenth year, he had been deteriorating for some time, but about ten days previously, after he had not eaten for a few days, Laurie took him to see Marlene, our very good friend the vet. She diagnosed internal bleeding (probably from a ruptured tumor) and warned us that he was very close to the end. We thought it best to take him home to die peacefully in a day or two, but the old trooper hung in for another ten days. He was completely immobile toward the end, however, and Laurie was attending to him like a baby, complete with diaper changes in the middle of the night. Although he did not seem to be suffering too much, I could see that Laurie was, so I took Marlene up on her offer to come up to our island and put Skookum down with an injection. The time seemed right, as it was the first beautiful sunny day for quite a while.

  Skookum showed me that animals can equal humans in many ways. Their body language is amazingly sophisticated and their ability to communicate honesty is staggering. It was never necessary for us to train him. He was so smart and learned so quickly, he always knew, telepathically, exactly what was expected, and his desire to please was so powerful he automatically tuned into the flow, from curling up and keeping still in boats to scrambling up rock faces. He didn’t need training or regulating. With all sincerity and humility, I can honestly say that, rather than being his master, I considered Skookum an equal if not a superior being. I certainly consider it a great privilege to have been his friend. Through him I have learned to place my allegiance with the commonwealth of other creatures with whom we share this beautiful planet. He had a good life and one we will never forget.

  Skookum sure was a skookum dog.

  -8-

  WILD ANIMALS

  “Do you ever see or hear any wolves on your island?”

  WE USED TO HEAR THEM a lot when we first came up, sometimes really close to our houses but mainly at night, so we rarely saw them. They haven’t been around so much in recent years. Some of them have unfortunately been shot. Wolves and cougars don’t share the same territory at the same time and their presence in any one area alternates. They both feed on deer, so the deer populations fluctuate quite dramatically in symbiosis. They all swim across the channels between the islands.

  We once went to the next island to pick up a goose we had been given and were heading back home with Sheen dog, walking along an old skid road through deep second-growth forest. Laurie was carrying the goose and she had put a sock over its head to help keep it calm. Sheen was happily running along ahead as usual but suddenly she started whimpering and ran back beside us, obviously quite spooked. At the same time the goose started squirming and squawking. We looked ahead and there, only 20 feet away, right on the edge of the road and the bush, was a magnificent, huge bracken-brown wolf looking right at us. Once we had got over the shock we realized we were not afraid, though both the dog and the goose obviously were. I had time to notice how magnificently calm and dignified the wolf looked and how well it blended into the environment. It was not threatening, so we tried gingerly continuing on our way even though this meant we would have to pass closer to it. Sure enough the wolf turned away and allowed us to pass even though we could still see it in the bush alongside of us.

  Then, when the dog and the goose started getting angsty again, we suddenly realized there were several wolves beside us. When we looked on the other side there were several more, and when we looked behind us we saw a single big black wolf following us along the road. Now we had no choice but to keep on going and our pace quickened up.

  Trouble was, we were heading into a gully formed by erosion and wear and tear on the road by heavy logging machinery, which gave us the feeling we were being herded into a canyon trap. So we avoided it by leaving the road and following the upper rim of the trough, right on the edge of the bush. Now that we were committed, our adrenalin was really pumping as we involuntarily broke into a run. It was as if we were being escorted off the premises. We no longer looked around, just straight ahead. Sheen dog took off and sprinted ahead of us. After a while we needed to rest, and when we took another glimpse around the wolves had vanished. Once again, Sheen was waiting for us in the boat.

  “What about bears?”

  THERE WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO be bears on our islands, till one showed up and broke into somebody’s house. Since then we’ve had a few, mainly in the fall when they come looking for apples.

  We arrived home from a town trip one evening in the fall, just before dark, to see a gap in our garden fence. Laurie was ahead of me as we came into our clearing, and she was going right for the hole in the fence to check it out. She didn’t want the chickens getting into the garden. As I arrived on the scene from a more distant
viewpoint I was able to see over the fence and into the garden, where my attention was immediately distracted from the gap in the fence by a flurry of motion over in the apple tree at the far corner of the garden. As the flurry of activity emerged from the apple tree it took the unmistakable form of a bear cub right at the very top of the tree. Then a much more deliberate motion, a huge mama bear rearing up on her back legs. This mama was the biggest black bear I’ve ever seen. She must have stood at least eight feet tall. That and the brown colouring on her back made her look like a grizzly. The cub sure looked cute, I had time to notice.

  Laurie was now at the fence, only the width of the garden, about 100 feet away from the bears and had evidently still not seen them, the fence itself being solid enough to obstruct her view. Suddenly mama bear set off running at great speed across the garden, directly toward the hole in the fence where she had entered, which was also right where Laurie was standing. I screamed at Laurie, “Run, there’s a bear!”

  At that point, only 20 feet from Laurie, mama bear stopped dead in her tracks, evidently sensing that junior was not following her, spun around on a dime and sprinted off back toward the apple tree. Meanwhile, the cub had decided to run the opposite way and, having just broken a new hole in the fence behind the apple tree, was heading toward our house, which also happened to be where I was planning on going ASAP. Mama bear sliced smoothly through the new hole that junior had just made in the cedar picket fence, caught up with the cub and ambled off past our back deck and disappeared into the forest, heading back toward our barn.

  Unfortunately, Laurie was also heading to the barn, round the opposite side of the garden, no doubt to check on the chickens. So I screamed again to tell Laurie to come back around my side of the garden so we could get safely to the house. Laurie argued that she didn’t want to go to the house. She wanted to make sure the bears didn’t get her chickens. She headed for the barn. I followed my instinct to hide in the house and wait for them to go away, which, thankfully, they did.