Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

  It was a stalemate until I peeled off my light jacket, flung it over the loon’s head, and jumped down upon the bird. Using my coat as a kind of straitjacket, I carried the loon back to Stennarson’s. As I passed close to a group of young natives, the loon thrust its head and neck out and gave a sibilant warning hiss that would have done justice to an anaconda. Later, under the watchful but safely distant eyes of these youngsters and a number of adults, I fitted a numbered aluminum bird band to the captive’s leg and turned it loose into the lake. It dived and vanished, leaving me to wonder how it had managed to stray so far out of its element, and the audience to wonder if I was possessed.

  The effect on the local people of my dalliance with the loon was magnified when I set up shop in a large wall tent beside Gus’s house and began preparing specimens. This involved wielding my formidable array of shiny surgical bone saws and shears, gleaming scalpels, intricately curved knives, serrated scissors, and an array of forceps, one of which was as long as my forearm.

  The watchers, who at one time or another included most of the women and young folk (and even a few enigmatic men) from Montreal Lake’s native settlements, drew their own conclusions about me. According to Gus, some thought I was merely deranged, but some concluded I was a shaman, and a number of people came seeking treatment for everything from an accidental gunshot wound to a bad bellyache.

  If their ailments were of a kind that could not be fixed with iodine, adhesive tape, and a bit of gauze, Gus would get me off the hook.

  ”I tell them you no-good doctor on the run. Got fired because too many your patients die down south. Better they go see Indian Department doctor at Waskesiu. Ya. Even though is a long way and a lot of his patients dies too!”

  I worked in the tent but lived in the house, sharing its amenities with Gus and with Walt, a young man whom Gus had hired (paying the salary out of his own pocket) to teach some twenty native children. The schoolroom preempted most of the lower floor of Gus’s house. We slept on the second floor, furnished with many beds because my host extended his hospitality to all comers: trappers, mounted policemen, fur buyers, game wardens, an occasional itinerant preacher, and road-construction workers together with their attendant bootleggers and hookers.

  Stennarson’s Post, as it was unofficially called, was in fact a kind of northern roadhouse where one and all felt free to enjoy the moment. I sometimes returned from a day in the field to find a dozen visitors brewing up a party that might last well into the following day. On such occasions the upstairs dormitory could become a scene of such fervid activity that I would seek refuge in my work tent.

  Late one night, after sustained revelry in the house had driven me to the tent, I wakened abruptly, to find Gus shaking me violently while bellowing in my ear:

  ”Get oop! Get oop! Angie’s baby coming, but don’t vant to come! So you must come!”

  It took a while to clarify the issue, the essence of which was that Angela Moiestie, who lived in ”the village” a few miles distant, was in labour and having difficulties. A doctor was clearly required and, since no other was to be found nearer than fifty miles, Angela’s clan had decided I would have to do.

  I was horrified. And thoroughly frightened. When I protested that I knew absolutely nothing about midwifery, Gus nodded.

  ”Ya. You know nuttin. I know you know nuttin. But dese people, dey don’t know you know nuttin. So you got to come. You don’t come dey blame me and den both you and me get run out of here!”

  When I continued to resist he bundled up some of my skinning tools, together with a bottle of iodine, a roll of cotton batting, and a quart of rubbing alcohol. With these under one arm he shoved me out of the tent and into Lulu Belle. Finding me still reluctant, he banged me on the head with his hand and shouted, ”I knock your balls off you don’t go right now!”

  The ”village” consisted of nine log cabins scattered along a stretch of beach. Low-roofed, one-room affairs with a minimum of windows, the cabins were occupied by Creespeaking people who bore surnames such as Moiestie, Nelson, Moberly, Angus, and McPherson – the names of traders and trappers of not so long ago. Regardless of their mixed blood they counted themselves Cree, were still tribal, and were still fully committed to the ancient precept of one for all and all for one.

  There was little they would not do for one of their own or for friends, from whom they of course expected reciprocity. Gus was their friend so his friends were their friends and my involvement in Angela’s predicament was inevitable and inescapable.

  Surrounded by a group of men carrying kerosene lanterns, I was escorted (pushed would be more like it) from Lulu Belle to a cabin whose door gaped wide open, revealing Angela lying in bed with half a dozen women crowding around her. The room, about the size of a one-car garage, was lit by candles and by the glare from the open door of a sheet-iron stove on top of which pots and kettles were shooting jets of steam into the superheated and smoky air. Angela’s husband, Ben Moiestie, thrust me forward, while Gus followed close behind.

  Although I had never been present at any birth but my own, I had no difficulty recognizing a breech presentment. Except for Angela’s gentle moaning, the room had gone expectantly silent. The next move was clearly mine.

  I knew that in such a situation the baby should be turned around. But how to do it! Though I had only the haziest notion, I was sure about one thing: I was not going to engage in a hands-on attempt, for of what use would a doctor (even a pseudo doctor) have been when he had fainted dead away?

  Gus tapped me on the shoulder. He was holding out the twenty-four-inch forceps I normally used for stuffing the long necks of geese. Inspiration (or maybe instinct) made me seize them: jam a huge wad of cotton around their tip, soak it in rubbing alcohol, then gingerly, very gingerly…. I have a confused remembrance of being rather sharply brushed aside by one of the women and soon thereafter of hearing the mewling of a newborn.

  A few days later Ben Moiestie, accompanied by Frank Nelson, who was the de facto leader of the band, showed up at Gus’s with a hindquarter of deer and a beautiful caribou skin parka decorated with beads and quill work. The meat was for Gus and Walt and me. The parka was for me alone, and Frank presented it to me, beaming.

  ”Baby do pretty good now. Make pretty good hunter, maybe. Angie and Ben, they call him Yeep.”

  Lulu Belle MK IV must have been proud!

  When the visitors had gone Gus slapped me on the back.

  ”Any time you go down to the village now, you go right in. Stay long as you vant. Do vat you please. Ya. You got kin down dere now.”

  My acceptance into the community was confirmed a week later by an invitation to attend a basket social at Frank Nelson’s home.

  Frank’s cabin was one of the largest but by the time I arrived it was clogged with relatives and friends from all around Montreal Lake. Every woman present had brought a hand-woven basket containing a lunch for two of meat, bannock, and sweets. Frank raffled the baskets off to the men, and the top bidder for each got not only the basket but its creator too. The couple then discreetly disappeared into the surrounding woods, not to be seen again until after dark when a dance started up.

  Forty or fifty people had packed themselves into Frank’s cabin, where the cook stove smoked and roared under kettles full of tea. Almost everyone was puffing on a pipe or a hand-rolled cigarette. The door was propped wide open and the single window had been temporarily removed from its frame without much effect on the fug within.

  Somehow in the crush and confusion I found myself in possession of a basket belonging to a grinning, glitter-eyed woman whose age was impossible to guess for she was as wrinkled as a corrugated tin roof. When I declined to follow her outside to share the lunch, she took furious umbrage.

  I was rescued by Frank who pulled me aside and shouted in my ear: ”Don’t you worry none! Sylvee won’t eat you! She only eat bear!”

  Life at Stennarson’s Post was generally more routine. I usually spent from early morning to mid-afternoon �
�in the field” tramping through woods and muskegs or paddling a borrowed canoe on the big lake or its tributary streams. Returning to Gus’s house, I would eat the dinner he had cooked then, with a reluctance that increased day by day, turn to skinning, stuffing, and otherwise preserving the creatures I had butchered in the name of science.

  Reluctance became revulsion. I killed fewer and fewer of the Others and spent more of my time just hanging out with them.

  This led to some remarkable experiences. It enabled me to closely observe a majestic pair of sandhill cranes incubating two enormous, tan-coloured eggs in a nest the size of a truck tire that floated on a muskeg pond. Although initially (and wisely) the big birds were wary, they eventually came to accept my presence with almost as much equanimity as if I had been one of their own kind, and to herald my visits to the nest site with the same sonorous cries they gave one another.

  And there was the morning I came upon four downy little chicks bouncing around on the forest floor below a dishevelled nest originally built by robins but later usurped by a pair of the only species of sandpiper to nest in trees. As soon as the chicks had hatched, they had fearlessly jumped to the ground twenty feet below, and now were being shepherded by their parents toward a swamp a quarter mile distant. When I came on the scene there was panic at first, but soon the adult birds seem to have concluded I meant no harm and allowed me to provide rearguard protection for the little procession all the way to the safety of the swamp.

  As my servitude to the skinning table diminished, I also spent more time in the company of my own kind. Though not effusive, Angela and Ben and their extended family (which seemed to have no limits) always welcomed me, and I grew used to being peed upon by little Jeep, who was never subjected to the indignity of diapers. I also made friends with two ”white men” (as they called themselves) married to native women.

  Johnny and Carl were about my own age. Both were farmers’ sons from southern Saskatchewan who, even before the war, had abandoned the dust bowl and the Depression to go north in search of a better life. They had found it in the bush at Montreal Lake.

  ”People here kind of adopted us,” Carl told me. ”We never had much and they never had much, so we got along. They showed us what we needed to know about their country and the both of us found good women. We was doing good, when along come the goddamn war. I don’t know why we done it – crazy as coots – but we both enlisted. Was in Italy with the SLI [Saskatchewan Light Infantry]. Well, hell, you know what that was like! We was lucky. Johnny got deafened by a Teller mine – still can’t hear much – and I got an extra hole in my ass, but we come home in pretty good shape.”

  These two shared a trapline northeast of Montreal Lake, from which they made enough money to meet their families’ modest cash requirements. Living on and from the land, as their relatives by marriage had done since time immemorial, they seemed an admirably contented pair, but they had their problems. One day Carl casually inquired if I would care to accompany them on a canoe trip to their trapping cabin some fifty or sixty miles into the country. He did not offer any explanation of why he and Johnny wanted to go there in summer, until after I had agreed to go along. Then, rather diffidently, he explained:

  ”Too damn many trappers around here now so things has got tight. Johnny and me is thinking we might go on north – away north, up around Cree Lake. Thing is we’d have to fly our outfit in and that’d cost an arm and a leg. So last winter we took a few more beaver than was on our licences so we could pay to charter a plane this fall.

  ”Trouble is, game wardens around here are on the warpath. We had to leave our extra beaver skins cached near our winter camp. So now we got to go back and get them, but it’d look queer if we went into the country this time of year … unless we was your guides helping you get those specimens of yours. See what I mean?”

  I saw, and sympathized.

  Their canoe was a seventeen-foot Peterborough with plenty of room for the three of us, our gear, and two weeks’ grub. We had no kicker (outboard motor), which was as well for it would have been more of an encumbrance than a help on the many shallow streams and muskegs that had to be crossed between stretches of navigable water.

  The country we would be travelling through was mostly low-lying and often marshy, ideal habitat for aquatic birds, especially ducks and geese. These were abundant, having probably been driven to this watery world in the forests by the prolonged drought on the prairies to the south.

  July 6th

  We’ve been two days en route, really pushing it through a maze of little lakes, ponds, marshes, and muskegs with one really rough five-mile portage to Meeamoot Lake over burned ridges covered with deadfalls from a forest fire. How in hell the boys can find their way through this maze is beyond me! There are no markers, not even a blaze on a tree to point the way. They must be doing it by smell!

  They prefer to travel after dusk and before dawn, claiming this makes us less conspicuous. To whom? The only sign of anything human I’ve seen so far is a grave on the shore of the Bow River. Just a pole stuck into the sand with a smoke-blackened tea pail wired to it. No name. I wouldn’t have guessed it was a grave until Johnny pointed to some human rib and arm bones dug up by some animal.

  The first day out we slept under the canoe to baffle the flies, then pushed on at 0300, travelling across marshy ponds shrouded in morning mist, waking thousands of waterfowl, startling some deer, and getting ”shot at” by beavers slapping their tails on the water to tell us to get to hell out. The morning sun began to warm us up as we came into Trout Lake, a long and sinuous body of water with lots of bays, pine-grown shores, crystal waters, and yellow-sand beaches. Made our way along its south shore through fleets of young ducks and anxious mothers. At noon stopped for a swim then ponassed a ten-pound trout we had picked up on our troll line. With tea and a hot bannock, it was a meal to remember, particularly because we had an uninvited guest – a very large black bear we assumed was male because there was no accompanying cub. He was following his nose, the end of which was wrinkling like a dog’s as he sniffed fish sizzling on the coals of our fire.

  We were ready to beat a quick retreat to the canoe and leave him to it, but he stopped about twenty feet away and sat back on his haunches like a trained bear in a circus, and just stared at us – hopefully, I think.

  I went for my shotgun but Carl said, ”Maybe he just wants a handout. Anyhow that little popgun of yours would just make him mad.” With which Carl tossed him the head and guts of the trout. Mr. Bear shuffled forward, ate it, then looked like he’d like some more, so Johnny tossed him a slab of smoking hot meat. You could tell it burned his mouth, but he glutched it down anyway.

  After that he sniffed hopefully a couple of times but when no more grub was forthcoming, turned around and ambled off. He didn’t say thank-ee. But if he had I wouldn’t have been much more surprised than I already was.

  Carl and Johnny felt we were now safely distant from Montreal Lake so we continued at a gentler pace until we reached the winter cabin. Long and low, it occupied a pine-grown point jutting into a lake that did not seem to have a name. They referred to it simply as ”home lake,” presumably because the cabin on its shore was their home for almost half of every year. Its walls were made of eight-inch logs tightly fitted and well-chinked to keep two spacious, low-ceilinged rooms cozy and comfortable in fifty-below-zero weather. It was surprisingly well furnished and equipped, considering that its contents had either been made on the spot, mainly with axe and handsaw, or laboriously brought in by canoe and dog team.

  Since there was now little likelihood of being surprised by game wardens, Carl and Johnny decided to make a fast trip to retrieve the illicit fur from an outpost camp farther east. They suggested I remain behind.

  I was happy to spend some time on my own moseying about the home lake in a twelve-foot birchbark canoe kept at the cabin. Everywhere I went I found myself in the company of loons, grebes, ducks, and other water birds rearing their young. They had such little fear
of me that I was able to pick young loons out of the water in order to photograph them. When I put them back, adult birds would surface close alongside and unhurriedly lead them away.

  A red-necked grebe and three downy little grebelets who lived in a marshy cove near the cabin became familiars. They would allow me to paddle to within a yard of them but if I came closer they would dive. The adult would go down as smoothly as a seal but the grebelets were as buoyant as Ping-Pong balls and could submerge only by seizing hold of the adult’s feathers with their serrated beaks and being hauled down under by her.

  The water was glass-clear, so I could watch them hanging on for dear life as their protector porpoised in the depths. Occasionally one would lose its hold (or its breath) and pop to the surface, where it might take a rest on my outstretched paddle. Such close contact with loons, grebes, ring-necked ducks, goldeneye ducks, mergansers, and their young made me feel I was living in a time before man became the universal enemy.

  Then one evening the big canoe returned. It was very low in the water, and when Johnny and Carl ran it up on the landing beach I saw that four bulging packsacks occupied most of the cargo space. I did not ask about their contents and nothing was volunteered.

  My companions were now ready to take life easy for a few days. Both were good cooks and we had some wonderful fish dinners after which we would sit around drinking tea and yarning.

  Carl and Johnny had many stories to tell about the ”real north” – stories that brought back vivid memories of my visit to Churchill with Uncle Frank. I found myself hungering for that distant world of caribou, polar bears, Inuit, and untrammelled space I had barely glimpsed. One night I wrote in my journal: