Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

  Large photographs of the friends of my youth watched from the walls. Mutt’s bright eyes, which had followed me through my boyhood, were fixed quizzically upon me. Wol, the great horned owl who had been a boon companion during my Saskatoon years, huffed at me from a balm of Gilead tree that seemed so real I could smell the fragrance of its spring catkins and taste their bitter-sweet resin.

  Basil, a wood gopher I had found as a naked suckling, nursed on a bottle, and often taken to school concealed in my jacket, was there too. After his death I had tenderly skinned and stuffed him and now he stood erect and expectant on my bureau.

  Marie, my first true love, smiled at me from the wall above my bed. On the opposite wall, Bruce Billings and Murray Robb warmed their hands at a campfire we had built in a prairie bluff on a January day with a blizzard raging around us.

  And there were all my notebooks containing untidy scrawls and scraps of two-fingered typing; my journals; and jumbled fragments of poems, stories, and attempts at scientific reports. There were also many published books about the Others, and a good few dealing with wilderness adventures. The effect of all this was to engender a desperate hunger to live again the life that had been mine only a few short years earlier.

  I spent most of the next several days in my room with the door shut against the world beyond, while downstairs my mother cooked up a storm, and both she and my father racked their brains to think of things that might distract me.

  Their distress was so evident and so painful that it became more than I could endure. Several days before my leave was officially over, I told them I had been recalled and, promising I would spend Christmas with them, fled from Richmond Hill.

  But where was I to go?

  Because I could think of nothing better I retreated to Ottawa and re-entered the dark tunnel from which I had just begun to emerge. Abhorrent as it was, the army seemed to be the only human aggregation to which I could belong. Somebody in authority decided it would be worthwhile keeping me on staff while the foofaraw swirling around our shipload of German matériel was resolved, so I found myself assigned to an obscure branch of military intelligence at National Defence Headquarters; and there I went into a kind of emotional hibernation.

  I did visit Richmond Hill for a few days at Christmas but despite the best efforts of my parents and friendly neighbours, I felt like a disembodied spirit casting shadows over everything in its vicinity.

  Slinking back to Ottawa after Christmas, I discovered that Mike Donovan had been returned to Canada so I arranged to have him assigned as my assistant. He and I spent the first four months of 1946 swinging the lead, as the saying went, while the higher-ups continued their fruitless efforts to unravel the tangled skein of our shenanigans in post-war Europe. But Treasury Board’s attempts to find who was responsible for the First Canadian War Museum Collection Team’s aberrations went nowhere for we had a powerful friend in General Graham.

  ”It wasn’t so difficult,” he would later tell me. ”The powers-that-be simply couldn’t bring themselves to believe a mere captain could have made such a shambles of authority.”

  Graham was not so successful in ensuring that our collection served any useful purpose. Blindly confident that peace had come to stay, Canada’s politicians were not about to spend money preparing for a possible future conflict, or even to memorialize the horrors of the one just passed. In consequence, our collection was dis membered and dispersed almost at random. The tanks and most of the German vehicles were sent to Camp Borden to be stored in an empty aircraft hangar, where they remained until it burned down, reducing most of them to scrap. A few (including a Panther tank) have since been restored and have found a home at the new Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, along with our V-1 buzz-bombs and midget submarine. However, most of our larger trophies, including almost all the artillery pieces, were sold for scrap. The majority of the smaller items met similar fates. Several tons of experimental munitions, including finned projectiles and rocket-assisted bombs, were shipped to Halifax to be dumped at sea.

  The V-2’s fate was a notable exception. Civilian scientists of Defence Research who had met the Blommersdiik on her arrival in Montreal spirited the rocket off to their base at Val Cartier, where they hurriedly disassembled it before the Americans could learn of its existence and demand it be turned over to them. The guts of our V-2, together with some other rocket engines we had collected, became the basis for Canada’s own modest rocketry program, which produced two high-altitude rockets: the Black Brant and the Velvet Glove. More than fifty of these, carrying scientific instruments instead of explosives, were fired into space from a range at Churchill – less than a mile from the Black Shack in which I had camped with Uncle Frank during the summer of 1936.

  In 1951 the outer shell of the V-2 was reassembled and exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto for one season only. Then overshadowed by the lethal products of the rocket rivalry between the United States and the USSR, it too was dispatched to limbo.

  Mike and I spent our working days in the windowless cellar of a temporary wartime building with other redundant servicemen engaged in more or less meaningless activities – ”fucking the dog” it was called.

  Ottawa offered me little stimulation or distraction. Uniforms still swamped the city, clogging every movie theatre, café, and bar with red-tabbed staff officers, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger and with whom I had nothing in common.

  I found the civilian scene equally depressing. Unless one was a politician, a senior civil servant, or a ranking military officer, the social ambience was as frigid as the winter weather. At this juncture, even Mike Donovan abandoned my sinking ship by getting married and losing himself in domestic bliss.

  Most of my spare time was spent in my rented room, where I read a great deal, drank more than was good for me, tried (and failed) to write fiction, mourned my disbanded private army, and darkly contemplated a clouded future.

  Yet a light was glowing in those depths. The voyage back to Canada had reignited my feelings for and affinity with the Others. Lying awake in the long winter nights I found myself in their company again, trekking across the rolling prairies; plunging through swamps and marshes; paddling across northern lakes and down fast-flowing rivers. Their company in these happily remembered places brought me the only comfort I knew during those bleak months in Ottawa.

  At the end of January Helen took to her bed with some ill-defined affliction, perhaps arising from her concern about my state of being. At Angus’s urging, I returned home to try to cheer her up, but was about as successful as a morgue attendant might have been. Finally my father lost patience with me.

  ”You’ve simply got to snap out of it, Farley. Heaven knows I sympathize with how you feel, but you can’t stay in that slough of despond much longer. If you do you’ll suffocate, and probably take your mother with you.”

  He demanded that I begin making my re-entry into the civilian world.

  ”A lot of young fellows like you are taking advantage of the veterans’ education program. Getting paid to go back to school or on to university. You should damn well do the same! Not that it’ll solve all your problems but it’ll give you breathing space. Time to read, to think, to talk to your peers. Time to settle yourself down. Then you could carry on to become a professional zoologist up to your elbows in bird shit for the rest of your life if that pleased you. Or become a librarian, like me. Or a garbage collector, so long as you became an effective one. Effective! That’s the key.

  ”You have to find your balance, before you stumble over the edge. You simply must regain a sense of purpose even if you have to manufacture one – as I expect you did with your war museum caper.”

  He was right, of course. Scotch Bonnet, and writing, might have provided what I needed; but neither was within present reach. I was sitting in my old bedroom one night surrounded by the memorabilia of better times when my exasperated inner self rose up and took command.

  Everything changed with the force
and immediacy of a right hook to the jaw. In what amounted to a revelation I suddenly knew what I was going to do with myself.

  Returning to Ottawa next day I was weighed down by a duffle bag and a haversack filled with books and papers including, especially, my prairie journals – and an empty loose-leaf binder freshly labelled:

  The Birds of Saskatchewan

  by

  Farley M. Mowat

  – 15 –

  YOU CAN’T GO HOME

  This time when I returned to Ottawa there was a spring in my step – from which Mike Donovan drew the wrong conclusion:

  ”Hey skipper! Finally get your ashes hauled?”

  When I told him the real reason for the glint in my eye, he at first refused to believe I had been galvanized by a prairie bird epiphany.

  ”You’re going to write a book about birds? Real birds, with feathers? You have to be effing kidding!”

  Having made my decision, I wanted nothing but to get on with it so I asked for immediate ”demobilization.” I was refused because it appeared that the army did not want to let go of me until all the questions about the First Cdn War Mus Col Tm had been resolved. However, though I would have to wait, I could still make plans.

  These centred on a new expedition to Saskatchewan (the first of many, so I hoped) to be undertaken as early as possible in the coming spring. And preferably with a likeminded companion.

  I began looking for one such among those who had gone west with me in 1939. First I tracked down Harris Hord and found he had taken an early discharge from the RCAF and was working as an entomologist for the United Fruit Company in Honduras. I cabled him an invitation to join me, but he refused to take the bait.

  ”I’ve done enough risky stuff in the air force over the past couple of years to last me all the way to the old folks home,” he wrote in reply. ”I wouldn’t go west with you again for my weight in rubies. You go and make a fool of yourself any way you want. I’ve better things to do.”

  Next I contacted Andy Lawrie who, after four years in the navy, was now studying zoology at the University of Toronto. Rather wistfully he told me he would love to spend the summer with me out west but could not afford to do so.

  Frank Banfield was actually in Ottawa, where he had exchanged an army staff job for a sinecure in the federal bureaucracy. But Frank made it clear he was of no mind to risk a secure future by renewing a relationship with me.

  I could find no trace of Bruce Billings, and when I finally located Murray Robb it was to find he had already exchanged his uniform for a business suit. He would, he said, be happy to put me up for a night or two if I happened to be in his neck of the woods.

  It was apparent that the rest of the world had already taken Angus’s advice so I resigned myself to making the voyage single-handed. I would have to provide my own vehicle, and the choice inevitably fell upon the ugly but indomitable Jeep.

  Jeeps had served me faithfully and well throughout the war years. In Sicily one had probably saved my life by outrunning a German armoured car. I had had three Jeeps – all named Lulu Belle. Two had died in battle and the third had been reluctantly left behind when I returned home from Europe. I wanted Lulu Belle back, not just because of her toughness and versatility but to help insulate me from a civilian milieu I had no desire to re-enter.

  Getting a Jeep proved a bit of a problem. The Quarter Master General’s office told me I could probably acquire a used one from army surplus in six months’ time. I could not wait that long so I wrote to the manufacturer, the Willys Car Company in the United States, and learned that its first civilian Jeeps would go on sale in Canada in April. They would be civilian in name only. Although painted glossy green instead of dull khaki, they would be military Jeeps right off the line. I immediately ordered one.

  Preparations for the journey posed no great problem. Angus had taken good care of my camping and travel gear during my absence and all I needed to do was dust it off; but the requirements of science were more demanding. Although any enthusiasm I might once have had for killing other creatures had evaporated in the carnage of war, I knew I would still have to do some ”collecting.” Every species listed in my Birds of Saskatchewan would have to be substantiated by at least one ”study skin” preserved in the catacombs of a reputable scientific establishment. So, like it or not I had to provide myself with an armoury of guns and ammunition, and with all the rest of the mortuary paraphernalia of a scientific investigator.

  On April 11 I took possession of a spanking-new Jeep with LULU BELLE MK IVemblazoned in big black letters across the bottom of her fold-down windshield. The owner of the Willys dealership apologized because she was not equipped even with a canvas top. ”Be pretty unprotected – windy and wet,” he said dubiously.

  ”Gloriously unprotected!” I replied and drove happily away.

  On April 20, 1946, I officially ceased to be a serving member of His Majesty’s Armed Forces, and on May 2 began my odyssey.

  Lulu Belle got under way at 0700 hours on a drizzly spring morning with me hunkered down behind the wheel in the old army uniform I was sentimentally wearing. We ambled westward at a sedate 40 mph, the recommended speed for cars of that era while they were being ”broken in.”

  All went well until we reached the U.S. border at Sarnia, where two armed U.S. immigration officers warily approached. Their caution may have been due to never before having encountered a soldier wearing half-Wellington boots, khaki serge trousers, a scruffy British battledress tunic with the 8th Army crusader shoulder patches, a bright red silk scarf around his neck, and a peaked, go-to-hell military cap perched jauntily on the back of his head. The unusual colour of my Jeep may also have contributed to their unease.

  ”Just who might you be, mister?” one of them demanded. ”Whatta ya got in that there Jeep?” the other asked.

  They were joined by three customs officers, and the quintet surrounded me, watching suspiciously as, under their orders, I unloaded every blessed thing from the Jeep and spread it out for their inspection. They paid particular attention to my shotgun, to a pump-action .22 rifle, and to a smooth-bore .32 with a sawed-off barrel. My explanation that this arsenal was for collecting scientific specimens in Saskatchewan did not go over well, and I might have been in real trouble had not their supervisor, who had briefly been a liaison officer to the British 8th Army in Italy and liked ”the Limeys,” appeared. He was also an amateur ornithologist. The gods were smiling.

  The supervisor waved me on with a friendly warning.

  ”If I was you, Cap, I’d get me some different duds going through the States. Some bonehead could take you for a Commie Russkie, and that would not be good.”

  Because I was too tired to bother pitching my tent, I spent that night in a tourist cabin in northern Michigan. The café associated with the place served me a gargantuan supper built around an enormous steak surrounded by fat sausages, giant baked potatoes, and mountains of beets, carrots, and something called succotash, the whole crowned by three fried eggs.

  ”Do people actually eat all this?” I asked the waitress in awe.

  ”Mostly they don’t; but we gotta give big servings or we lose the custom.”

  This was something to think about at a time when meats and many other foods were still rationed in Canada, and when most of the world’s peoples were going hungry. However, such profligacy did have a positive side, as I learned when the owner of the place suggested I park Lulu Belle in his pig run overnight in order to ensure her contents would be protected from thieves.

  ”I feed them hogs the swill from the caff,” he told me. ”Makes ’em big as bars and just as yeasty. They’ll put the run on anything comes near their trough.”

  He may have meant ”feisty,” but he was right on the other two counts. It took me twenty minutes the next morning to get aboard Lulu Belle without losing a leg.

  Trundling sedately westward, it took two more days to reach and cross the border into Saskatchewan, my Promised Land, where I was greeted by a blinding snow
storm. When I pulled up to the only garage in the village of Yellow Grass, a gaunt young man swung open a pair of double doors and beckoned me to drive on in.

  ”Geez, chum, you look half froze! Come and have coffee with Milt and me – he’s my brother – and maybe a squirt of something into it.”

  The brothers Fred and Milt were veterans of the Saskatchewan Light Infantry, an outfit my regiment had served with at Monte Cassino and elsewhere in Italy. Upon being demobbed six months earlier, they had pooled their small resources and bought the White Rose station in their home town. The easy acceptance by fellow servicemen was good for my weary heart and was to be found frequently across the continent in those first post-war years.

  ”This place looked like a good way to start on civvy street. But last month a big shot from Regina – owns about ten thousand acres of wheat land – started building a new garage here big enough to handle a squadron of Sherman tanks. Going to give it to one of his sons, a fellow our age who run some of his pappy’s farms while we was overseas. So it’s going to be hard times. Don’t know can we make it, but we’ll sure give them stay-at-home bastards a run for their money!”

  The storm got worse so we stabled Lulu in the garage for the night then drove to a wind-whipped little house where Fred’s pregnant English war bride gave us supper. Later we shared memories of London during the Blitz and polished off a bottle of my rum. Before we went to bed Fred said thoughtfully:

  ”Funny thing. Milt and me hung in over there four goddamn years fighting for our homes and country, so they told us, and all the time itching to get back to Yellow Grass. When we did get back it looked about the same. Only turned out it weren’t ours any more. Maybe we shoulda stayed right here to do our fighting?”

  During the night the storm blew itself out and the rising sun melted the snow. As I drove on north, the long-anticipated world of meadowlarks on fence posts, tumbleweed in ditches, gophers whistling from far-spreading fields, and greenhead mallards quacking from roadside pools, revealed itself. I was back among the Others, but I was not as pleased as I should have been. I was experiencing something akin to the uncertainty of a lover hastening to a long-deferred rendezvous, apprehensive about what might await him though in a tearing hurry to find out.