Otherwise

by Farley Mowat

She did not respond with any marked enthusiasm until one warm and sunny October day I took her birdwatching in the wooded glades of High Park, where she joined me in ”making angels” in the windrows of fallen leaves. We wound up making love under a blanket of them.

  Since we were fully clothed this was a fumbling and unsatisfactory encounter, but we made up for that a few days later when we visited Scotch Bonnet, cosily moored for the winter in a lagoon on Toronto Island.

  Things moved rapidly after that. On a day late in October, after I had known Fran for little more than a month, I was with her in one of the Royal Ontario Museum’s specimen storage vaults proudly showing her examples of my previous (and perhaps future) scientific endeavours when she turned suddenly on me, white-faced and tense, and demanded:

  ”You’ve got to marry me!”

  In the language of the times, this meant she was pregnant.

  Once my panicky first reaction had simmered down, the prospect was surprisingly easy to accept. Marriage would mean escape from the vale of loneliness, would ensure ongoing sex, and (so I assumed) would bring me all the rest of the promised rewards of married life. Even when it turned out (as it soon did) that the pregnancy was a false alarm, I made no attempt to avoid a commitment that was already in train.

  Before enlisting in the armed forces, Fran had been a student at Bishop Strachan School, one of Toronto’s most prestigious private schools for girls. She was now determined to be married in BSS’s impressive chapel and as soon as possible.

  Her parents, Reuben and Florence Thornhill, had migrated to Toronto in the 1920s from a disintegrating rural community in western Ontario. A young couple without money or resources, they had been hoping to find the proverbial better life in the big city. In classic style, Rube worked his way up from the shop floor of a factory to become a successful salesman able to buy a heavily mortgaged semi-detached house and a new Ford car.

  Rube was satisfied with these achievements, and so was Florence – up to a point. The ”point” was her daughter’s future and Florence’s aspirations for her. Even though the Depression was by then draining the economic lifeblood from people in the Thornhills’ circumstances, they some how managed to put their only daughter into Bishop Strachan School and maintain her there for several years. Had the war not intervened, Fran would doubtless have graduated from BSS and, if her mother’s dreams had been realized, would have married well above her station to live in affluence ever after.

  BSS took its time replying to Fran’s request for us to be married in the chapel. The reply, when it came, was a singularly curt refusal. Fran was devastated and I was angry. I demanded explanations and eventually we were granted an audience with the head mistress. This regal lady (I have forgotten her name) coolly informed us that being married in the school chapel was a privilege reserved for graduates only, and there could and would be no exceptions.

  My response was roughly this:

  Leading Seaman Thornhill and I are both veterans of the recent war. Both of us left school to volunteer for action in the armed forces, in which we served a total of seven years helping to defend this country and its institutions – of which Bishop Strachan School is a prime example. We think we’ve done our bit. How come you won’t do yours and give us dispensation from your damn fool regulation?

  Frances Thornhill and I were married by a former army chaplain on December 19 in a Toronto church at some distance from BSS.

  We spent our honeymoon at a summer cottage in northern Ontario where the temperature fell to thirty-five degrees below freezing and the only really warm place was in bed. On December 23 we took up married life in two rooms of my parents’ house in Richmond Hill.

  A few weeks later the axe fell.

  As a matter of form, the Arctic Institute had sent a copy of my proposal and the institute’s offer of support to the federal Minister of Mines and Resources, whose department administered the Northwest Territories. This material ended up in the hands of a recent graduate in zoology whom the Department of Mines and Resources had just hired.

  He was Frank Banfield, of the Dodge sedan and one of my companions on the 1939 Faunal Survey of Saskatchewan.

  Frank scrutinized my proposal, then, having elaborated on it somewhat, took it to his chief and convinced him that, not only was a study of the Barren Land caribou an urgent matter, it was too important to be entrusted to a pair of undergraduates and a freelance photographer. Frank strongly recommended the job be done by the department and volunteered to take charge of it himself.

  Andy and I knew nothing of this when, early in the new year, we were invited to Ottawa for an interview with the deputy minister of Mines and Resources, who was also deputy commissioner of the Northwest Territories and the effective monarch of that vast region. Greatly excited, for we thought we had been summoned in order to receive the imprimatur on our plans, we travelled to Ottawa, where with due ceremony we were escorted into the sanctum of a portly Colonel Blimp-type who was deferentially introduced to us as Commissioner Gibson.

  R.A. Gibson did most of the talking. Having informed us that ”his” department was undertaking a comprehensive survey of the status of Rangifer arcticus (the scientific name for the Barren Land caribou) and of the ”native tribes associated with the animal,” he delivered our coup de grâce.

  ”You understand, of course, that a proposal such as yours is now redundant and cannot be supported by the department. We have so informed the Arctic Institute of North America who might otherwise have sponsored you. Furthermore, I must advise you that an Explorer’s and Scientist’s Permit to undertake field studies in the Northwest Territories on your own cannot be issued to you.”

  He paused to let all this sink in, then added: ”However, Captain Banfield, who is in charge of the survey, believes he might be able to find employment for you.”

  Captain Banfield (the use of military titles was de rigueur in Ottawa) was waiting for us as we slunk out of the commissioner’s imposing office.

  Frank took us to the cafeteria of the Lord Elgin Hotel for lunch and attempted to cheer us up.

  ”Sorry about all this, you chaps, but it ain’t necessarily so bad. Bill Carrick’s out but I have the authority to hire both of you. You’d sign on as student biologists in training – at a pretty small salary I’m afraid, but you’d get the chance to do a lot of things you wanted to do. Your base camp could still be the Schweder cabin at Nueltin Lake. The department would provide everything you’ll need, including a canoe, outboard motor, air transport … even a short-wave radio.

  And you could hire your young half-breed friend as a guide and general factotum.”

  He paused for a long moment. ”I don’t want to push you, but time is short. I have to have your answer by tomorrow morning.”

  Andy and I spent the rest of that dismal day in a cheap hotel room trying to come to terms with the bitter reality that we really had little choice but to accept Banfield’s offer.

  Our train for Toronto was due to leave at eleven the next morning. By then we had formally submitted ourselves to servitude as part-time government employees. This was especially hard for me to swallow because I had sworn that, having freed myself from the morass of bureaucratic imbecilities in which the army had immersed me, I would never again subject myself to such a fate.

  As the train trundled us homeward, the only solace I could find lay in the private thought that, having avoided becoming a zombie in the army, I might be able to avoid the same fate as a government employee.

  – 18 –

  SLEEPING ISLAND LAKE

  Spring had come to Ontario. Birds were streaming northward and soon I would be too. Frances and I felt it might make the coming separation easier if we had a second honeymoon before I departed. On my twenty-seventh birthday we drove Lulu Belle back to the place we thought of as Icy Cottage and spent five glorious May days soaking up the essence of spring while making love and making plans.

  Surprisingly the university had agreed to let Andy and me do most of our ne
xt year’s course work extramurally, requiring only that we return to Toronto in the spring of 1949 to write formal examinations. In consequence, he and I planned to spend the coming year attempting to follow the Keewatin caribou herds by canoe and on foot wherever they might lead.

  We would try to live with the deer on the tundra until the autumn of 1948, then follow them to their wintering grounds in the vicinity of Reindeer Lake. Frances would join me there and we would set up housekeeping (if we could find a house or cabin) in the tiny settlement of Brochet at the north end of the lake. In the spring of 1949 all three of us would return to Toronto.

  Fran and I had very little idea of what we might do after that. The uncomfortable truth was that I had nothing substantial in view for the future. The abandonment of my Birds of Saskatchewan project followed by my disillusioning experiences as a neophyte zoologist under Dr. Harper’s tutelage had combined to kill any remaining inclination to become a professional biologist.

  Although I had been a ”writer” since childhood, I had never thought about it as anything more than a pleasurable avocation. Now I was beginning to wonder if I might be able to earn a livelihood at it.

  Frances encouraged me, suggesting that I might someday write a book about our travels. The idea took hold and as I prepared to go north again I began keeping an extensive journal.

  May 18th. A grey day in Ottawa, this grey-minded city of bureaucrats and bullshit. A mist swirls over the airport. Out on the tarmac looms a massive Lancaster bomber recently demobbed from war to peace. In the foreground stands a small green jeep from which two figures swathed in heavy arctic clothing make their way toward the big RCAF plane, rifles in hands and heavy packs upon their backs. Alongside the jeep a third figure, a small one in a blue naval raincoat, with a gaudy kerchief tied around her head, watches them go. The sky seems to glower and a wet, sulphurous wind sweeps in from the Ottawa River.

  An odd assortment of other passengers climbs a ladder into what had formerly been the bomb bay. They include two private soldiers from the Three Rivers Regiment nursing monumental hangovers; a handful of U.S. enlisted men and officers from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line on their way north for the first time in their lives; a middle-aged Newfoundland nurse escorting an Eskimo child who has spent two of its three years of existence in the Hamilton Tuberculosis Sanatorium. The nurse is herself returning to another year of exile at a lonely post on Hudson Bay. And there is a smattering of civilians looking slightly ashamed, as civilians tend to do when in the military presence.

  Our steward, a saturnine, gum-chewing RCAF corporal, waves Andy and me to our seats – wooden benches against the plane’s sides. If I strain my neck I can just manage to peer through a tiny window behind me and see Lulu Belle at the distant edge of the field and huddled beside it the small figure of my wife. A signal light flashes from the tower and the Lanc begins to vibrate alarmingly as all four Rolls-Royce motors bellow. We begin to roll … become airborne. Ottawa looms in view for a moment or two then is lost as we climb into a dirty overcast and the world disappears.

  Of the flight, which takes us a thousand miles in a little less than seven hours, there is not much to say. There was not much to say or do aboard either. The thundering engines precluded conversation and there was hardly enough light to read by. Like cattle, we could do little but ruminate. A civilian meteorologist beside me stretched his long legs half way across the plane and dozed with mouth gaping and prominent teeth bared as if in the rictus of death. As on any long journey where human beings are crammed together in a confined space, an aura of frowziness soon gathered over us. Faces grew slack and an oily film seemed to overlie the skin. Only the Eskimo child seemed untouched by the slow decay which seemed to assail the rest of us. It slept contentedly for most of the journey.

  The bomb bay was not pressurized and there was no supplementary oxygen so we flew at only a few thousand feet, immersed in cloud and unable to see anything outside the plane. Three-quarters of the trip passed before we escaped into clear skies over the bizarre country that lies southwest of Hudson Bay. Not long emerged from an ancient polar sea, this vast coastal plain seems half-submerged. Bereft of trees and filled with bogs, muskegs, ponds, and meandering streams, it appeared to Andy (as he yelled into my ear) ”good for sweet fuck-all except ducks.” Most of the other passengers gave this, their first view of the sub-arctic, an appalled glance then gloomily returned to staring blankly at the inside of the plane. But I was fascinated by the palette of Dutch Masters’ colours and the infinite variety of sinuous watery shapes. I thought that if an ancestor who had been alive when the earth was very young was to see it, he would greet it familiarly and call it by a name we will never know.

  In late afternoon we swept out over still-frozen Hudson Bay, its old ice dark and forbidding. The corporal/steward appeared, to yell a laconic ”Twenty minutes!” Passengers began to stir, scuffling about for lost scarves and gloves. Combs came out amongst the soldiery and hats were cocked at rakish angles as we came in sight of an immense concrete grain elevator looming like a mountain titan over the scattering of shacks still half-buried in winter drifts that is Churchill.

  We spent an infuriating week in Churchill dealing with matters Captain Banfield had failed to arrange, such as the hiring of Charles Schweder. The Schweder brothers had made their way to Churchill by dog team late in the winter and I had since been in touch with Charles, but now when I ran him to earth he gave me the bad news that the ”officer from Ottawa” (Banfield) had refused to pay rent for the cabin at Windy River and, in consequence, Charles’s father refused to let his son accompany us. Instead, Charles had been put to work on a local construction site to help support his father’s family.

  This major disappointment was followed by a second when we called at the home of young Gunnar Ingebritson, who had been chartered to fly us to Nueltin in his old, ski-equipped Norseman. We learned he was in Winnipeg getting his airplane repaired and by the time he returned to Churchill the season would be too advanced to fly us in on skis. We were advised to relax and enjoy the ”amenities” of Churchill until the thaw brought open water to the lakes and made it practicable to fly float-equipped planes into the interior. When we asked how long that might be, the discouraging answer was ”Mid-June, or maybe later.”

  At this juncture Churchill inflicted a severe attack of food poisoning on me.

  The gods finally took pity.

  Late on May 22 Gunnar’s Norseman stuttered over the sleazy hotel where we were staying. An hour later this laconic son of a Norwegian fisherman joined us to announce that next day he would attempt to coax his plane, laden with us and our ton of supplies, off the disintegrating ice of the nearby tundra pond where he had just made a ”dicey” landing.

  The sky next day was heavily obscured by fog and snow flurries. The Norseman laboured mightily to get airborne, its skis sending up fountains of meltwater as it plunged across the rotting ice. Somehow Gunnar jockeyed it into the air, and we turned northward along the coast only to find ourselves pinned down by the fog to thirty or forty feet above a ragged jumble of sea ice.

  I was for returning to Churchill, until Gunnar shouted into the intercom:

  ”We turn back now and you guys have lost it. Might be a month before I can fly on floats.”

  I glanced at Andy. Cheerfully he waved us on.

  Somewhere near the mouth of Seal River we swung inland, thankfully leaving the fog behind. The weather still held us down to five hundred feet as the coastal barrens were replaced by rolling highlands whose massive black rock ridges slashed across the softer reds and browns of muskeg glittering with meltwater. Great eskers (the reversed beds of one-time glacial rivers) ran their dry courses beneath us, gigantic yellow serpents overriding the ponds, rock barrens, muskegs, and living rivers that lay in their path. Caribou trails laced the muskeg, but we saw only one herd, a small one, and I was afraid we might have already missed the main northbound migration of la foule.

  I tried to follow our course on
a chart filled with white voids containing the cryptic word ”Unmapped.”

  ”Never you mind the maps,” Gunnar shouted, noticing me peering at mine. ”Can’t trust the buggers! Steer by the sun and the stars and by the feeling in your gut. Never failed me yet.”

  Two hours after leaving the coast of Hudson Bay, the Norseman was abreast of a singular black basalt outcrop that Gunnar thought marked the entrance to Nueltin’s northwestern arm. Soon we were flying at deck level above unbroken ice toward the mouth of Windy River, where the Schweder cabin stood.

  Gunnar made such an abrupt landing that the plane skidded and slithered for several hundred yards before he was able to ease it to a stop. With scarcely enough fuel remaining for the return trip and with ominous black clouds rolling in from the west, he was not about to waste any time.

  ”Get your fucking stuff outta my plane!” he shouted as he flung open the doors. ”You got five minutes before I’m off!”

  Andy and I threw everything onto the ice, and five minutes later waved the plane away into the darkening sky. Only then did it register on us that we were half a mile from shore.

  A cock ptarmigan on a nearby islet called mockingly. Two ravens circled overhead, hopefully perhaps. I looked shoreward and saw a two-legged object bounding toward us. Soon it resolved itself into the sturdy fur-clad figure of a man I recognized from the summer before, an Inuit named Owliktuk.

  When we three had finished beaming at one another and shaking hands, Owliktuk let us toward the empty cabin. Later we would learn he had walked down from the Ihalmiut camps near the Kazan River some sixty miles to the north, bringing five white fox skins he had hoped to trade with Charles Schweder. Finding the cabin abandoned, as it had been for months, Owliktuk searched for but found no useable supplies except a few pounds of tea. There being nothing else for it, he had exchanged his pelts for the tea and set off for home but had gone only a mile or two when he heard the Norseman.