by Wendy Dudley
Chapter Two
Wild Beginnings
During winter blizzards, wolves would move across our lake, hiding behind a curtain of snow, their heads down, their eyes slanted.
I was only nine years old, but I will never forget the summer I discovered Grey Owl and his beavers.
My admiration for this conservation crusader grew with every page of his autobiographical Pilgrims of the Wild. My tears tumbled like a creek in spring flood when I reached the part where his pet beavers McGinnis and McGinty disappear forever, their mournful wailings only a memory. Never again would they chortle over sweet candies, never again would they gambol like children; they were gone, most likely killed by a trapper but perhaps, Grey Owl and I hoped, only lost to the wilderness in which they were intended to live. Wrenched by such emotional passages, I would abandon the book on a mossy tree stump and stumble off in search of my dog. Listening to every word of this tragic story, she put the world right by slurping away my salty tears.
Over the next few years, I read most of Grey Owl's books during the summer and winter vacations we spent on Lucy Lake, a gentle beaver pond cradled in the rounded hills near Ontario's Algonquin Park, a marvellous quilt of granite cliffs, dark waters, moose bogs, and maple forests. Here, where animal trails were more common than roadways, it was easy to become part of Grey Owl's wilderness. I walked summer bushland trails in moccasins and packed winter paths on rawhide snowshoes, living my own version of stories told in Tales of an Empty Cabin and Men of the Last Frontier.
My father built our cabin on Lucy's shores when I was three, and it became my childhood home on weekends and school holidays. Our heat radiated from a coal-black wood stove, its fuel chopped and stacked by hand. Our amber light came from oil lamps; our water was hauled from the lake in metal buckets, the chopping of the winter water hole a regular morning chore. In spring we tapped the trees with wooden spiles, boiling the sap into sweet and sticky maple syrup in fire-blackened washtubs. In summer we swam among the lily pads, seeing if we could get close enough to the loons to see their red eyes. In winter we watched a pageant of northern lights while skating on a rink lit by storm lanterns. The night always took on an exciting chill when the wolves moved across the frozen lake, their chorus of howls raising the hackles of our soft-bellied lapdogs.
During autumn evenings, when the sky's blue spilled into a deep wine red, I often watched a pair of beaver swim across a secluded bay, their plump dark bodies surfacing at the marshy shoreline. Together, they would waddle towards a stand of birch, preparing for their nocturnal chew. Thinking of Grey Owl and how he once made his living as a fur trapper, I worried about the beavers' future, fearing they would die a cruel death when the local trapper arrived with his battery of traps.
Skirting the lake's icebound shores, I combed the terrain for the ghastly steel fangs. Some were tucked beneath logs, where I would discover red squirrels, their tiny bodies cold and stiff, crushed by massive jaws intended for larger animals. But sometimes I arrived in time, spotting a chain attached to a pole embedded in the frozen beaver dam. Tracing its links below the lake's dark surface, I would probe the mud with a thick stick, jumping back when the trap suddenly snapped shut and split my maple pole as if it were a brittle bone.
I would flee in tears, convinced the trapper would track me down and demand payment for the loss of a pelt. Maybe he would throw my parents behind bars, declaring it bushlaisd justice. Or, I hoped, he would curse the sprung trap, believing he'd been outsmarted by the beaver. Yes, that was it! I would tell him I didn't know anything about his trap, that the beaver must have cleverly sprung it by teasing it with a stick.
I don't remember how my parents reacted to my tearful confession, but I do know I was not severely reprimanded. After all, it would be difficult to punish me for sharing their belief that all animals from the deer mice and flying squirrels that visited our bird feeders at night to the lumbering moose and brown-muzzled bears that shared our walking trails were precious and worth saving from a gruesome death.
Wild animals were always welcome at our camp, up to a point, that is. I can still see that corn broom swinging through the air, my mother swatting at a hefty bruin bent on coming through our screen door to snatch a still-warm wild raspberry pie off the kitchen table. Our other wild guests included deer, mink, otters, and, of course, grey jays, the proverbial camp robbers we called whisky-jacks. We'd be gone from the cabin for months, but within minutes of our arrival the jays would swoop in, as if the smoke curls from our chimney had signalled the arrival of Those Who Bring Gifts of Sunflower Seeds.
I was indeed my parents' child, rooted in nature from my first breath. Mom used to say I was practically born in a canoe. My parents worked summers in Algonquin Park, where the Group of Seven so gloriously captured on canvas the area's wild northern spirit and vivid fall colours. My dad taught canoeing, while Mom cooked for construction camps until some of the men thought it funny to chop off the chipmunks' tails and pin them to their hats. She quit in disgust.
Living in a wedge tent on Canoe Lake, Mom befriended a moose, a long-legged beauty she named Evelyn. Every day at the same time, Evelyn crashed through the underbrush, heading down to the lake for her afternoon drink. However, her route was a little too close to mom's firepit. It wasn't that mom feared the clumsy animal; she just wasn't fussy about having Evelyn sample the pies she was cooking over the fire's embers. Instead, mom offered her bread, and the two became best of friends. With Evelyn now eating from Mom's hands, she was close enough to reveal her true gender. Evelyn underwent a name change; she was now known as Bruce the Moose.
Mom learned about wilderness survival from Dad, who was raised in Toronto when the Don Valley Parkway was still a wooded riverway. He and his mother would camp in the valley, living in their homemade tepees. My dad consumed every survival skill taught between the covers of Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages, and he continued to praise the book's lessons long after my brother and I were born. Dad was a holdover from the pioneer days. He was breaking horses on a ranch near Kleinberg, north of Toronto, when he met my mother. When they married in 1943, Mom also wedded a life devoted to the natural world.
During their years in Algonquin Park, Mom met another wonderful teacher, Bea Baskerville, a widowed woodswoman whom I met years later when we stayed at our own cabin near the park. Bea had a way with wild animals, and I can still see the raccoons she invited into her kitchen for evening snacks. She always knew when they were there, having trained them to ring an outside bell to announce their arrival. Bea died many years ago, but her spirit lives on in her hooked rug of artist Tom Thomson's The Jack Pine, a family treasure we hang above the fireplace.
My dad has since died of cancer, but he left me his love of wilderness literature and his campfire stories about fishing trips with Lorne Greene, the CBC Radio broadcaster who later made his fortune as Pa Cartwright on the Bonanza TV series. We gave my dad a creekside memorial service in Alberta's Rocky Mountains, a region he loved to hike. Launching him on his final journey, we flung his ashes into a swift-moving river. That special spot remains private, but it's a place where the country still smells wild and where Dad can dream of moonlight shining silver on Lucy Lake.
. . .
That trapper never did come to our door, and I continued to ferret out his traps, believing no animal should have to chew off its leg and struggle on three limbs, or drown on a lake bottom with its paw clenched in a trap. Lucy Lake is now just a fond memory, but my days there seeded my reverence for the natural world. When I discovered Grey Owl those many years ago, he became a kindred spirit. I was a loner, but through his words I found someone who shared and understood my passion for wildlife. It didn't matter to me that Grey Owl wasn't really an Indian, his deception revealed after his death. What did matter was the message he delivered to the world, one which sought respect for the creatures we live with and the land and waters we share with them. A conservationist before his time, he spoke of stewardship instead of superiority.<
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I didn't know it then, but my youth at Lucy Lake may its waters always carry a forging V of beavers and the writings of Grey Owl would stay with me for years to come, following me from the Ontario bushland to the spruce and aspen foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where the air quakes with drumming grouse and where I walk trails worn smooth by coyotes, grizzlies, cougars, and lynx. Where I now live, a creek gurgles outside my window; its lush banks shade a trampled path. The beaver live here too.
Chapter Three
Of Cows and Girls
On hot afternoons, I would sit on the farm porch, shelling pea pods, and on warm night I would sleep there inhaling the perfume of cows and sweet hay.
I fell in love with all things barnyard during my first high-school summer job, when I worked on a dairy farm near Lindsay, in cow country northeast of Toronto. It was two months of glorious back-breaking labour, a summer that sent me home with calloused hands, bulging biceps, and a determination to one day own my own piece of rural heaven.
Part of a provincial agriculture program, the student job was supposed to teach urban teenagers like me about the source of our food. Now, I had a pretty good idea that my milk came from a cow, that my eggs came from chickens, and that pork came from a pig, but I didn't have a clue about how the food got from the gate to the plate. When I filled out the application, I was hoping for a summer of sunshine and fun.
How thrilled I was to be picked, along with a dozen or so other students, for this pilot project. With a whopping salary of seven dollars a day, at six days a week, I had hit the jackpot! If I was dancing on clouds, my host farmer, Bill, was kicking the dirt. He wanted a strapping young lad, not a tender-footed girl! He sized me up pretty quick, all five feet of me. So this is what they sent me to help milk my barn of cows, bale my township of hay, and stack my acres of mow? To make matters worse, I didn't even know how to drive, never mind plough a field. And it didn't help that Bill's farm
"Well, I don't know what I should have you do," Bill said over breakfast on my first morning, his brow furrowed with self-pity. "Clean out the calf pen, I guess. See what kind of job you can do with that."
An hour later, I was standing knee-high in soiled straw. Oh boy, my first stall to muck out! Wearing brand-new, stiff leather gloves and a crisp new work shirt, I dug into my chore like a hungry man digging into a mound of buttery, hot mashed potatoes. I was having fun all right, but gee, this job seemed to be taking hours. For every fork of manure I picked up, half slipped through the tines. But I persisted, determined to show Bill I was up to the job, that I was made of the right stuff. He'd see, I could do twice the job of that brawny high-school football player he'd hoped for.
When noon rolled around, Bill came looking for me. He chatted a bit, then casually folded his arms. I was sure I detected a smile skipping across his ruddy face. "You've done a real good job," he said. "But next time, it might be easier if you use the manure fork instead of the hay fork."
Bill was a great teacher but an unforgiving boss, so I made sure I never complained. Not when he had me heave hay bales without gloves, the twine digging into my fingers, the blisters bursting before we left the first field. And not when he made me pay for the roadside mailbox I sheered off with the tractor. Besides, I adored this farm, with its doe-eyed Jersey cows, its smell of early morning dew, and its shed full of cranky tractors. It would be eighteen more years before I received my driver's licence, but by summer's end I had graduated from a gentle grey Ford tractor to a multi-geared fire-engine-red International Harvester.
And I soon got over my shyness about calling in the cows for their morning milking. At first, I worried about waking the neighbours with all that hooting, but it wasn't long before I had them marching in single file under my command. In the beginning, they played bovine jokes, cramming into each other's milking stalls and gazing at me as if they'd lost their way. And then Bill would arrive, looking like a Jack Russell terrier on the hunt. "What's that one doing over there?" he'd snap. "She's supposed to be over here, in the next row."
I'd shrug my shoulders and bow my head, taking full blame for not knowing one fawn-coloured Jersey from another. Eventually, the bossies and I worked it out, and I learned which ones had sensitive udders and which ones would sooner slap your face with their whiplike tails than learn the meaning of patience.
I'm not at my best in the morning, but that was one summer I didn't mind tumbling out of bed before 6 AM. The barn cats would gather beneath the cows, waiting for a frothy squirt, and on cool mornings I too delighted in a taste of warm, creamy milk, fresh from Mamma cow's udder.
A day in the mow, however, was like a day pouring hot tar. Above the barn's stalls, the hay attic was a blazing cauldron, the air a thick stew of heat and dust. As the bales tumbled off the conveyer, I wrestled them into orderly stacks. The pace was fast and unforgiving. If I didn't stack the bales tightly, my leg would plunge into the deep and dark gaps, jolting my knee and hip as if I'd stepped into a badger hole. Miss a beat, and the bales landed every which way, bouncing off each other in a haphazard free-for-all. But it was my work in the mow that promoted me from a mere city girl to a genuine hired hand.
It was a particularly hot afternoon when Bill's father offered to work the mow. "No," Bill answered, without
giving it further thought. "I want her up there. She's good." With that boost of confidence, I threw the bales higher and faster. I found a rhythm, tossing them in a single fluid motion, from the ground to my thighs to the top of the stack. The sky was my limit. I thought of the Women's Land Army, those 80,000 British city women who flocked to the fields during the Second World War. They felled trees, ran threshing gangs, and tended to livestock, feeding a nation. I would not let them down!
So what if several days later I drove the tractor into the rear end of the combine, crumpling the bale chute like an accordion and pushing the machine out the other side of the barn? Darn tractor, the brakes were soft. Or the clutch was acting up. Or something.
And so what if I embarrassed Bill when I sobbed over a sick cow? Men cry too, you know. One of his best milkers lay crumpled in the back field, her eyes dull and her breathing slow. She had hardware disease, a serious inflammation of the bovine stomach. Cows often swallow without chewing, leaving them vulnerable to ingesting bits of wire, staples, or nails. The metal lodges in their stomach, which before long becomes infected. In great pain, the cow finds it hard to walk, and eventually she stops eating. If left untreated, she usually dies. Some farmers insert magnets into their cows to collect the metal bits, but I don't know if such gadgets were around in Bill's day.
Bill tried to teach me that farming is a business, that animals die, that sometimes veterinary care is too expensive, and that on a farm, every penny counts. But that didn't stop me from playing nursemaid. Every few hours I slipped into the field to check on Bossie's condition, sponging the flies from her eyes with a wet cloth. Her breathing was heavy, her eyelids barely flickering when I stroked her chocolate brown muzzle. After dark, I returned with a flashlight. She was down. Her sides were still, her eyes glazed and staring. Bossie was dead. I removed the leather collar from around her neck and tucked it into my back pocket, a memento I would keep for many years.
The next day, the truck came to haul Bossie away. I didn't go out to watch, and I turned the other way when it passed by the house, heading down the lane to the highway. Now behind in his chores, Bill hailed me to the barn. "If you're still thinking about that cow, it's time you stopped," he said. "This is just the way it is." I picked up the hay fork. I was still miserable, but I knew he was right.
If I had tender emotions towards animals, that's where the softness ended. By summer's end, my body was hard muscle, my shirt sleeves straining around my firm biceps. And I had a voice that could holler home the furthest field of cows.
"Good lord," my mom said, when, back in the city, I answered the phone with the bellow of a bull. "Do you have to talk so loud? You're not calling someone in from the barn, you know."
"You may not want to come back since your duties will involve more babysitting than farm chores," Bill's note read. I guess he noticed my preference for mucking out stalls to cleaning up the kitchen.
Months later, I heard that Bill signed on for another agriculture student, and this time he got his young man. I also heard this boy wasn't nearly as good as "that girl" he had the summer before.
Chapter Four
A New Home
A home is like a soft blanket—warm, cozy, and secure. After years of roaming I was eager to turn our house into a home.
Mom and I spent three days driving the winding back roads west of Calgary, searching for a home where we could launch a new adventure. Earlier that year my dad had died of cancer, prompting my mother to pack up, move west, and join me in laying a claim to rural life. Agitated by a city's nervous energy, we combed the countryside for our own piece of land where neighbours would be more than five steps away, where cattle drives would have the right-of-way, and where an open window would greet a chorus of night creepers.
We ruled out dense bush too depressing and not enough light. We also crossed off pancake prairie too much wind and too few trees. And forget those tidy four-acre plots even a pair of chickens couldn't survive on something that small.
"And don't show me anything that's called Estates," Mom said. "I don't want to be part of some cul-de-sac development. I want to be off on my own." To say my mother is something of a lone wolf would be stating the obvious. She has never run with a pack, preferring instead the solitude of home territory.