by Farley Mowat
It would appear that unless the pekan finds another champion as powerful as the pulp and paper industry, the likelihood of its continuing survival is tenuous at best.
If the pekan has had some quondam friends amongst modern men, the wolverine has not. As large as a medium-sized dog, the chunky wolverine looks somewhat bear-like. It is equipped with stout claws, sharp teeth, remarkably tough skin, and a steely musculature that, in combination, protect it from most potential enemies.
Early man was no threat to its survival. Native peoples regarded the powerful “little bear” with exasperated respect, seeing in it the personification of a puckish spirit who liked to play sharp tricks on humankind. The wolverine has a remarkable faculty for locating and successfully raiding food caches, human or otherwise. Indians met this challenge, not by attempting to eliminate the raiders, but by constructing ingenious tree-caches the animal could not reach.
Europeans were not so passive. When wolverines raided storage depots built by early colonists, making light of massive barriers of logs, earth, and even stones, the owners were infuriated. They became even angrier when they began commercial furring and discovered their traplines being patrolled by wolverines, who not only ate the corpses of captured animals but, with what seemed like deliberate contempt, sprang traps set for them, then defecated on the traps.
The wolverine had no redeeming features in European eyes. Its tough and musky flesh was almost inedible, and its comparatively coarse fur of little commercial value. So the newcomers personified it as Indian Devil and characterized it as a truly wicked beast endowed with satanic cunning. Reputedly driven by a savage blood lust and possessed of an insatiable appetite (glutton was another of the names bestowed on it), it became the object of a remorseless vendetta. Because of the wolverine’s sagacity and its ability to avoid traps and guns, victory over it remained elusive until the invaders stumbled on a fatal weakness in its defences. Being much attracted to carrion—the riper the better—the wolverine proved peculiarly vulnerable to the use of poison.
It is important to realize that the word “trapper” is often a misnomer. From the earliest days of the European fur trade in North America, the name “poisoner” would have been equally appropriate. Although traps and snares were an essential part of the trappers’ death-dealing equipment, these men also relied heavily on arsenic and strychnine and whatever other poisons they could acquire. They continue to do so in our time. Despite laws prohibiting it, some modern “trappers” have graduated to the use of sophisticated and fearsome new chemical killers such as those routinely used by Canadian and U.S. government agencies against “pests and vermin.”
By about 1700, poison had come to be considered the only sure way to destroy wolverines, and it has remained in favour ever since. During the winter of 1948–49, I stayed for a time with a white trapper in northern Manitoba. One day he found what might have been a blurred wolverine trail crossing his trapline. He reacted by hurriedly making several wolverine “sets.” These consisted of piles of rotten caribou guts liberally laced with cyanide. During the succeeding few days, as I accompanied him around his trapline, I noted three foxes, a lynx, some forty or fifty ravens and Canada jays, and two sled dogs from a nearby Indian encampment, all lying dead near the baits. They were some of the usual by-products of the poisoner’s trade. We did not, however, find a wolverine; probably because there had not been one in the vicinity in the first place. That winter, only five were traded from the whole of Manitoba north of Reindeer Lake, a region embracing about 200,000 square miles of what had once been prime wolverine territory.
Originally, the wolverine ranged over most of the northern half of the continent from Pacific to Atlantic and from the shores of the Arctic Ocean south at least to Oregon and Pennsylvania. Not only was it one of the most widespread of predators, it was also one of the most successful. Today it is extinct throughout more than two-thirds of its former range. It has been extirpated from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the northeastern United States. It is so rare as to be virtually extinct in much of the rest of its original habitat, including Labrador and most of Quebec and Ontario. During the trapping season of 1976–77, not one was reported as having been trapped to the eastward of Quebec City, and this despite the fact that wolverine fur had by then become a valuable article of trade.
Wolverine hair possesses the unique property of inhibiting the formation on it of frost crystals. Inuit and Indians took advantage of this quality by using wolverine fur to trim their parka hoods. The expanding popularity of fur-trimmed parkas, which began as a fashion fad in the 1960s and has now become an essential part of outdoor winter recreation, particularly by snowmobilers and others such, resulted in a great demand for previously almost worthless wolverine pelts. By 1980, a good pelt was fetching $200. Today, a top-quality untanned wolverine skin can fetch as much as $500. Tomorrow... who can tell?
One thing is certain. As the wolverine edges closer to extinction, and its skin becomes ever rarer, it will also become more and more valuable. So the spiral of death will tighten, if we permit it, to its inexorable end.
As I have hypothesized, the name “fisher,” now carried by the pekan, probably originated with a related but quite separate species now vanished from this earth. It might well have vanished from memory, too, had it not been for a twentieth-century discovery in a Maine Indian kitchen midden of bone fragments from an animal unknown to science. Although considerably larger, the bones were mink-like in character and so zoologists christened the unknown creature “giant mink.” What follows is an attempt to unmuddle the true nature and re-establish at least something of the history of a lost species.
Early European venturers found a good many familiar animals in the New World, and of those that were new to them, one seemed to combine the elements of several known kinds. In body shape and gait it was reminiscent of a greyhound, while in its agility and some of its habits, it seemed rather more feline. Although generally fox-red in colour, its short, dense fur seemed more akin to that of a marten. Its head was otter-like and it lived an aquatic sort of life, fishing for its dinner along rocky, exposed sea coasts and from remote, outer islands.
Being a coastal creature it was probably one of the earliest fur-bearers to come to the attention of Europeans. Its pelt would have commanded a goodly price since it combined some of the admired qualities of otter and marten with a unique reddish hue. We have no way of knowing what its European discoverers called this unusual creature; indeed, some of the early voyagers seem to have been in doubt about what to call it themselves.
The earliest mention of it may be a reference in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s late sixteenth-century proposal for establishing a colony in the New World. As noted earlier, in his advertising brochure for the project, he lists some of the exploitable resources of the western seas, such as seals, whales, and horse-fyshe (by which he meant the grey seals). He also includes a species described only as a fyshe like a greyhound. Unable to find any species of fish that even remotely answers to this description, and forgetting that to a man of the sixteenth century anything, including mammals, that lived in salt water was a “fish,” historians have dismissed the mysterious creature as a flight of fancy. Yet no less an authority than the renowned English naturalist Joseph Banks, who voyaged to Newfoundland in 1766 to study the local fauna, made the following observation while in Belle Isle Strait.
“About the middle of [September] an Extraordinary animal was seen by Mr. Phipps... bigger than a Fox, tho not much, in make and shape nearest compared to an Italian Greyhound, legs long, tail long and tapering... [it] Came up from the Sea.”
Neither Phipps nor Banks could identify this animal although both were accomplished zoologists familiar with the fauna of the north temperate zone. The similarity to Gilbert’s fyshe like a greyhound seems too striking to be mere coincidence.
Early in the seventeenth century, the creature may have been known in Ne
w England as the water marten. William Wood, writing about the fauna there, gives a list of “Beasts living in the water.” It includes otter, beaver, muskrat, and a kind of “martins,” which Wood describes as “being good fur for their bigness,” by which he evidently meant valuable fur because of being larger than the ordinary marten. What was this animal? It cannot have been the marten we know today—besides being small, it detests water of any kind. It seems unlikely that it was the mink, which is even smaller than any marten, weighing at best a mere two pounds.1
* * *
1 Because of their small size, inconspicuousness, and wide distribution, the two smallest musk bearers, the weasel and the mink, have managed to survive the European invasion more successfully than their larger brethren. Nevertheless, the populations of both are probably only fractionally as abundant as they were at first contact.
The early French also seem to have been familiar with the creature but have lumped it in with the otter family. In his description of the fur-bearers of Acadia, New France, and Newfoundland, Lahontan describes the “Winter and Brown Otters,” worth “4 Livres 10 sous,” and the “Red and Smooth Otters,” worth “2 Livres.” From other sources, we know that the blackish marine otter was sometimes listed as a winter otter, so it would seem that Lahontan is here bracketing marine and freshwater otters together under the description “Winter and Brown.” What then are the “Red and Smooth” ones that are only worth half as much, presumably because of their smaller size? Are they the original fisher?
The creature seems to have retained the identity of fisher, or fisher cat in New England, until the main focus of the fur trade shifted west away from the depleted coasts and into the still abundantly stocked interior of the continent. Perhaps as early as 1800, trapper-traders transferred the fisher’s name to the pekan of the interior because it bore a resemblance to the coastal creature now left behind in physical fact, and soon to be left behind in memory as well. Certain it is that at about this juncture the original fisher, reduced to a remnant of its original numbers, began to be known as sea mink, the name by which it would be called until the end of its existence.
A fish like a greyhound, water marten, red otter, fisher cat, sea mink—this multiplicity of names has so confused the identity of the animal that perhaps it is not surprising that science failed to recognize its existence until the discovery of its bones left no alternative. Still, it is hard to understand how it could have been so neglected for so long by both natural and social historians. It is surprisingly easy to establish its one-time presence along the more than 10,000 miles of coastline fringing the Atlantic approaches from Cape Cod to mid-Labrador. Its abundance can be inferred from the fact that, although it was heavily exploited from the onset of the European invasion, a remnant population managed to exist until well into the nineteenth century.
During the late 1700s, we have records of Nova Scotian whites and Micmac Indians regularly hunting sea mink on islands from La Have north to Halifax, to which town the pelts were taken to be sold. On one occasion, a Micmac woman was relieved there of several sea mink skins, plus the pelt of a bear, in exchange for a quart of wine.
Less is known about its presence in the northern part of its range, but in 1766 French settlers at the northern tip of Newfoundland told Joseph Banks that “they every now and then See these animals in Hare Bay, and an old Furrier we spoke with told us he remembered a skin sold for five Guineas.”
The Maine coast seems to have been a preferred habitat. Periodically, men with specially trained dogs would visit islands frequented by sea mink. They went in daylight because, perhaps as a consequence of their long persecution, the animal was largely nocturnal, feeding by night and lying up in caves, rock crevices, and other such shelters by day. The dogs were quick to pick up what was described as the strong but not unpleasant musky scent of the quarry and would lead the hunters to its hiding place. If this could not be broken open with pick, shovel, and crowbar, the hunters might smoke the creature out with burning sulphur or pitch. If the crevice was shallow, they might fire black pepper into it from muzzleloading guns. If all else failed, they did not hesitate to insert powder charges and blow the refuge open, though odds were the animal would be so mutilated that its pelt would be worth little.
Up to 1860, a few sea mink skins were still being offered for sale in Boston every year, but after that date it was seldom seen, alive or dead. The last Maine record is of one killed on an island near Jonesport in 1880. The last known survivor of the species anywhere was killed on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in 1894.
So perished a unique and, as Joseph Banks noted, extraordinary animal. Its like will not be seen again. Yet, for a time, something of it will remain. Scattered along the rock-bound coasts from Maine to Newfoundland are a number of small islands that once provided welcome haven to sea mammals and birds alike.
Each bears the self-same name... now meaningless.
Mink Island.
9. The Passing of the Buff
The first great source of wealth to be exploited by Europeans in the northeastern reaches of the New World was oil. Next came fish. The third was not, as we have been taught to believe, fur. It was a more mundane commerce in the skins of those large mammals that lent themselves to the making of leather.
Encapsuled in our plastic age, we have already forgotten the universal and overwhelming importance of leather in the lives of our ancestors. Early seamen used it for cordage on their vessels and, in some cases, sheathed their boats with it. In one form or another it has shod mankind since dim antiquity. Through the millennia it clothed aristocrats and peasants alike. It was essential to a thousand artisan and agricultural trades and was invaluable in domestic life, where it appeared in forms ranging from the bellows that revived the hearth fires to tooled morocco binding on rare books. However, nowhere was it used in greater quantity than in warfare.
Prior to the fifteenth century, armies not only marched on leather or rode chargers saddled and reined with it, individual soldiers carried leather shields or wore heavy leather clothing as a form of armour. Because of its toughness and durability it remained in favour with the military even after firearms largely negated its protective role. Well into the nineteenth century, leather was still being used in huge quantities for military software.
Before the discovery of the Americas, leather for military clothing had long been a specialty product known variously throughout western Europe as bufle, buffle, or simply buff. This was a particularly stout though supple leather of a whitish-yellow colour. The name was derived from the Greek word for wild ox, reflecting an ancient preference for skins of the aurochs, the archetypal wild cattle of mythology.
By mid-fifteenth century, both the aurochs and Europe’s only other wild cattle, the wisent (later, bison), had been mostly hunted to death and, for want of anything better, buff was being made out of the greatly inferior hides of domestic cattle. This was true everywhere except in Portugal where a product as good as the original was still being produced from the imported skins of a mysterious creature the Portuguese called bufalo and whose identity and native heath was a closely guarded trade secret.
The Portuguese had discovered it during their explorations of the west African coast, which began about 1415. The mystery animal was in reality the African wild ox, which to this day bears the name Cape buffalo. The Portuguese carried its hides home, where they were turned into splendid buff that sold at premium prices all over Europe.
That first buffalo had to share the name with a second species after Vasco da Gama rounded Cape of Good Hope in 1498, then sailed eastward to a landfall on the Malabar coast of India. Here, he encountered an Asian wild ox whose hide had the desirable qualities of the African variety. It was distinguished from the first by the name water buffalo, and its hides, too, went to strengthen the Portuguese buff monopoly.
The third wild ox to bear the name was also discovered by the Portuguese, probably
at about the same time as the second—but on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
This was the North American buffalo. An enormous creature—a big bull could weigh over a ton, measure twelve feet in length, and stand seven feet high at the shoulders—it roamed most of the continent and was at home from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Immensely adaptive, it dominated a bewildering variety of habitats ranging through sub-Arctic spruce bogs, alpine meadows, the Great Plains, the massive hardwood forests of the east, and the sub-tropical forests of the south. At least four distinct races had evolved: the Plains buffalo; the wood buffalo, a larger, darker animal inhabiting the forests of the northwest; the Oregon buffalo, a mountain-dwelling cousin of the Plains variety; and finally the eastern buffalo, largest and darkest of all, which claimed the forested eastern half of the continent as its homeland.
By any standards these animals were all extraordinarily successful. Having outlasted the only predators that were ever their physical equals—prehistoric beasts such as the sabre-toothed cats and the enormous dire wolves—they had had no difficulty holding their own against aboriginal man through the twenty to forty millennia of his occupancy of North America. At about the year 1500 they are believed to have numbered more than 70 million individuals and were perhaps the most numerous large mammalian species on the planet.
Although the bloody history of the Plains buffalo is relatively well known, that of the eastern buffalo has been consigned to oblivion. Neither historians nor biologists seem even to be aware of the magnitude of its aboriginal herds, or of the fact that it was the dominant large herbivore of the Atlantic seaboard when the European invasion began.