by Farley Mowat
“Tony!” was the admiring epithet Grandmother Georgina Thomson bestowed upon the place when she and Hal arrived by train for a visit later that autumn. For me the house’s greatest virtue lay in its proximity to the steeply wooded river bank, one of the few places inside the city limits to have escaped significant human “improvement.” It was a ribbon of natural parkland—a birch, poplar, berry bush, and bramble jungle a quarter of a mile wide, that seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction along the river valley. Although no longer home to bison or to the great grey prairie wolves, foxes still frequented it as did the occasional coyote. And as did I on every possible occasion, for this was wilderness at my own doorstep.
Late in September my parents hired a maid. Rachel was nineteen, only six years my senior. Slim and quick, she was gifted with the dark vivacity of the northern Celts. I immediately fell in love with her, not in any overt sexual way but as with the sister I had never had. And I think Helen came to feel Rachel was the daughter she did not have. In any event, the newcomer soon seemed as much a part of our small family as if she had been born into it.
Half a century later, she wrote to me the first word I had heard from or of her in all that time since.
Sitting here with pen in hand going back over the time I was with you and your family it is hard not to include my whole life as it was then. My Dad was a wheat farmer, and a good one, though he had come from scotland as a middle-aged man and had to learn everything about life on the prairie.
I was born and grew up on the farm and never knew what it was not to have all I wanted or needed as a teenager in the late ’20s—the fun days of the Flapper era. Then in 1929 the Crash came and soon we were well into the Dirty Thirties with the drought and dust and no price for what wheat we could grow. My Dad barely made enough to pay the men who worked for us, and keep us all from going on relief.
We had to scratch for a living then but there was almost no paid work available. At fifteen, i had to stop school and help at home until things got so bad there was not enough to eat for all of us. So I went off to Saskatoon and did housework. I started at $25 a month but as time went on and things got worse and worse, the going wage by the time i knew you was down to $10 a month.
I took night courses in Saskatoon and got my certificates in shorthand and typing but it was no use. The few secretary jobs that came up all went to young men. I was lucky to have $10 a month and my keep. Many of the girls I grew up with did not even have that much and some had nothing at all.
From age seventeen I had been engaged to be married but my young man could not get work either. We waited until 1933 then got married anyway. We decided neither one of us could be any worse off than we were, so no matter what we did it had to be better. But we could not afford to live together, of course. He went away to The Pas in northern Manitoba as a logger in a bush camp and I did housework in Saskatoon but at least we felt married and we were together in heart and spirit.
That was when I came to you people. You were a nice easy family and there are lots and lots of pleasant memories from that time.
Coming from Ontario, you had to adjust to a new school and playmates and didn’t do very well at that. Your dog was your best friend. Saturday mornings you and Mutt would disappear down the riverbank into the bush, or out on the prairie. Sometimes you’d come back with your pockets full of owl pellets, balls of bones and feathers. And you’d expect me to be interested in your finds. Well, I could relate to what interested you. I had roamed our farm all my childhood and knew every kind of bird and where their nests were, and had followed their summers from eggs to fledglings.
School wasn’t something you were interested in, so we spent many evenings with me trying to teach you what you couldn’t be bothered with at school. That wasn’t all of your troubles. You remember the Catholic school nearby? The boys from that school used to often chase you home. You always played innocent but I used to wonder what you did to get them so mad that half-a-dozen of them on their bikes would come flying after you right into our front yard.
Your mother was in bed much of that winter with infections of her sinuses, so I more or less ran the house. She gave me $40 a month for groceries and other supplies like coal that were delivered mostly by horses. She also gave me the Boston Cook Book she had when she got married, and you and I learned to be pretty good cooks.
Your dad was taking a night course at the university so you and I spent lots of time together. I did your maths for you and you taught me a lot I didn’t know about birds and animals; but sometimes we would just sit and talk. I guess we were both lonely. You used to choose books for me to read, and some of them were not exactly what my dad would have approved of.
I remember the night I was going to visit an old Scots couple on the other side of the river and you came along. It was early winter and the river was already frozen. You decided we should walk across the river instead of going the long way round by the bridge. It would save streetcar fare, and I couldn’t afford that anyway so I agreed. It was very dark and about twenty below zero and we kind of felt our way across. When we got to the old folks’ house the smell of mash that came out the door could have knocked you down. I knew what it was but old Charley didn’t want you to know so he said it was grain soaking for his chickens. And you never even smiled as you said, “I hope it doesn’t make them too drunk to walk.” Charley gave us what-for for crossing the ice. The day before, it had smashed under a cutter and drowned the horse. We could have vanished without a trace and nobody the wiser.
That was the Xmas you woke me at 4 in the morning, crawling into bed with me to show me the little .22 your father had bought you. What a way to be wakened up, with an icy cold rifle to be admired!
The last time I saw you was in the fall of 1935. I met you in the street with Mutt. You asked me if I was coming again to spend the winter with you and when I said I couldn’t, that I was going to join my husband in The Pas, you looked sad and asked, “who’s going to help me with my math, and who can I talk to at night?” I guess you were still pretty much of a loner.
Indeed, I was something of a loner but by no means a misanthrope. It was just that I could not find many people my own age who interested me or shared my interests. Those I did find tended, like the Marsh Boy, to be unusual.
One such was Fred. His father was a locksmith who spent what little he earned on booze for himself and his wife, and used to beat his son on any or no provocation. I first met Fred one autumn Saturday when he was snaring gophers in a stubble field north of the city. I saw him before he saw me and, being a prudent soul, stopped to study him from a safe distance through my old field glasses. He was not a reassuring sight. He was clad in tattered bib overalls, had tangled hair hanging to his shoulders, and a truly fearsome face which, I later learned, had been disfigured at birth. I would have made a strategic retreat had he not looked up, seen me, and waved a friendly arm. Somewhat apprehensively, I approached.
“Hi ya, kid! Wanna make some money? Farmer owns this half section is gonna pay a cent a tail for all the gophers I can catch. There’s plenty for both of us, an’ I got lots of binder twine to snare ’em with.”
This was a truly generous offer and I did not refuse. Fred and I became good friends. He did not have many such. He was called Frankenstein at school, where he was generally treated with aversion, yet he was a kindly and harmless boy, avid for whatever I could teach him about prairie creatures. In return he taught me how to open locks and gave me a beautifully made set of picklocks with which I could have set myself up as a housebreaker if I had had the urge or, as it may be, the courage.
Fred introduced me to a girl of our age who was almost an albino and so was nicknamed Whitey. Whitey’s mother was a single parent. How she made a living was no concern of ours, but we knew how Whitey earned her disposable income. For five cents, or a chocolate bar, she would accompany a boy down into the jungle of the river bank and show him her “private
parts.” For five cents and a chocolate bar, she would allow the youth to attempt a fumbling kind of coitus—standing up. Whitey had her standards. She would not lie down with a boy, claiming indignantly that this was “dirty stuff.” Whether she meant this literally or figuratively I never knew, but I do know that her favourite brand of chocolate bar was Sweet Marie.
My last meeting with Fred was a shattering experience. In the summer of 1935 a circus came to town. My father took me to it and I insisted on seeing the freaks on display in the midway. These included the inevitable fat woman, a three-legged goat, the World’s Skinniest Man—and the Wild Boy from Borneo.
The Wild Boy was a fearsome sight. Clad only in a breech clout of mangy fur, he squatted in a cardboard cave, growling ferociously and occasionally gnawing scraps of raw meat from a bone. His body was streaked with red and purple paint and dirt. His hideously contorted face was also painted. I recognized him anyway.
I grabbed my father’s arm. “That’s Fred!” I said with horror in my voice.
“Can’t be,” my father replied soothingly. “This chap’s from Borneo.”
But I knew. I leaned forward over the low barrier in front of the cave and whispered nervously, “Fred! What are you doing?”
He looked at me, growled menacingly, then muttered just loudly enough for me alone to hear.
“Makin’ a dime, Billy. Makin’ a dime.”
Presumably Fred left town with the circus because I never saw him again. Well, life with the circus crowd could hardly have been worse than what he had had to endure at home.
ABOUT THIS TIME my parents began to worry that I was not (as we would say these days) becoming socially integrated. They set out to remedy this by making me attend Sunday School at the Anglican Cathedral where I would be associating with “lots of nice children” of my own age and kind. The cathedral was on the other side of the river, a long bike ride and an even longer walk from home. I went reluctantly (pocketing the ten cents given to me for the collection) until cold weather began, after which I found a sufficiency of excuses to stay home. “Alibi Ike,” my father called me with some admiration, for he was secretly on my side, never having been able to abide Sunday School himself.
It was then decided I should join the Cubs. I did not like this either. I had read and re-read Kipling’s The Jungle Book (upon which Baden-Powell based much of scouting’s ritual) and for me Akela and the Wolf Pack were jungle-dwelling realities—not prosaic human imitations thereof. I think I went to three meetings, during each of which we Cubs had to squat in a circle around a distinctly obese (and un-Akela-like) Cub Master, and engage in a group cacophony which was supposed to represent the howling of a wolf pack. I found the procedure embarrassing if not downright silly.
Saskatoon kids knew a lot of jokes about Cub and Scout Masters, and one evening at dinner I casually remarked that mine was “really chummy. I guess he thinks a lot of me because he keeps patting me on the behind.” I was allowed to withdraw from scouting with no further ado.
The next attempt to socialize me saw me volunteered to Saskatoon’s Little Theatre group as a bit player in a pantomime based on Alice in Wonderland. This was slightly more to my liking. Rehearsals were held in the spooky attic of a downtown warehouse. It had a complement of bats which used to swoop about when disturbed by our Thespian activities. The bats distressed the women and girls but delighted me, for there was a den of the little creatures in the attic above my bedroom at home and I was becoming something of a bat aficionado.
My role was not demanding. I played the Dodo, and all I had to do was shuffle across the stage, identify my character by name, then wander off into the wings. This verbal identification was deemed necessary because my costume, which was composed of angular masses of cardboard with chicken feathers glued all over them in random clusters, did not resemble any creature that had previously been seen on earth. The costume was also very difficult to manoeuvre, and was so constructed as to render me nearly blind.
On opening night I duly shuffled onto a brilliantly lighted stage, peered myopically through the inadequate eye slits, and set course for the opposite wing.
I didn’t make it.
Instead I made sudden and forceful contact with the Mad Hatter, played by the male lead who was a policeman in ordinary life. I knocked him down and myself collapsed in a heap of crushed cardboard and a cloud of feathers. Then I belatedly identified myself.
“Dodo,” I said as firmly as I could.
“DUMBO!” corrected the enraged Hatter with a roar.
At the after-theatre party my mother apologized to the cast on my behalf.
“He can’t really help himself,” she explained. “He gets it from his father. Has to be the centre of attention, no matter what. Some day they’ll both fall through their pants and hang themselves.”
Although I don’t know exactly what it means, the shadow of this dire prophecy haunts me still.
My mother’s final attempt to socialize me was to enroll me in the Vienna Children’s Choir, a group of about thirty mostly female youngsters directed by an immigrant Austrian tyrant who may well have been a relative of Hitler’s. I hated him and I hated the choir.
Rehearsals were held on Sunday afternoons and, since I could not be trusted to attend them on my own, Helen would personally deliver me to the auditorium. I pleaded to be allowed to stay home from the fourth rehearsal on the grounds that I was sick. Helen gave me a look of practised scepticism and dragged me off to catch the streetcar. But I really was sick. In the middle of “Ave Maria,” I fainted and fell down, taking two other youngsters with me as I clasped them in a drowning man’s grasp. That would have been disruption enough but my body overdid things. My bladder, which had been at maximum distension, emptied itself all over me and my two neighbours.
This may well have been the darkest moment in my entire life. Taken home in a taxi, I was put to bed with a diagnosis of influenza. I probably would have tried to stay in bed for ever had it not been for the happy accident that nobody else from Victoria School was in the choir. Even so, I was deadly loath to go back to school to face what could have been the ultimate ignominy. Fortunately, my luck held and the story of how I sabotaged “Ave Maria” never reached the ears of my peers.
At this juncture my parents gave up their attempts to find a suitable niche for me in Saskatoon’s social structure. This was not entirely due to the defeats we had mutually endured. It was as much due to the fact that, having failed to find a tribe which suited me, I created one of my own.
DURING THE AUTUMN of 1934 I had begun to acquire a bit of a reputation at school as an interesting eccentric. Although many of my contemporaries (mostly in the hockey and baseball crowd) continued to deride me as a “sissy nature kid,” others were impressed by the remarkable relationship which existed between me and Mutt, one which seemed to verge on the paranormal. It was claimed by some (and who was I to deny it?) that I could communicate with beasts by means of mental telepathy, something which was all the rage in those times. My possession of a witch doctor’s bundle composed of dried tarantulas and poisonous centipedes (a present from my uncle Jack who had picked it up in Africa during the war) did my reputation no harm, and the fact that I was known to share my bedroom with bats was thought fascinating by some, if in a repulsive sort of way. These things produced a sufficient measure of regard from a small group of other youngsters to enable me to create the Beaver Club of Amateur Naturalists.
Initially the club consisted of four boys and three girls, one of the latter being Tom McPherson’s daughter, Kathleen. All candidates for membership (excepting Kathleen, with whom I was enamoured and who therefore had dispensation) were required to submit to a rigorous initiation. Each had to be able to list from memory one hundred birds, twenty-five mammals, and fifty fish, reptiles, or insects. Each had to undertake at least one ten-mile nature hike a month. Each had to write, then read aloud at one of our regular weekly
meetings, a four-page essay about nature. Finally, each had to donate a natural object of some considerable value to the Saskatchewan National Animal Museum.
I had actually begun the museum some time before founding the club and shortly after my first exploration of the professor’s house. In the basement I had found a large, wood-panelled room whose walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with glass-fronted book shelves. Recognizing their potential as display cases for my ever-growing collection of bits and pieces of animate creation, I staked my claim on the room (which had been the professor’s study) as a place in which to do my homework. Since neither Angus nor Helen had any other use in mind for it, they let me have it.
One of the first things the Beaver Club did was to devote a Saturday afternoon, when my parents were absent from home, to pulling the professor’s hundreds of academic tomes off their shelves and hauling them out to the garage. We stacked them between the lawn mower and the lawn roller where nobody but mice was likely to discover them until spring. Then we began filling the bookcases with our exhibits.
Kids love collecting stuff, and enthusiasm amongst the club members reached fever pitch. During two successive weekends we laboriously hauled home scores of clay-coated bones from a landslip a mile away on the river bank. I identified these as dinosaur bones. They may actually have belonged to buffalo, but more probably cows. We also scoured barns, back sheds, and attics in the neighbourhood, from which we abstracted some rare and wonderful objects.
Until a few years ago I still had the “acquisition catalogue” in which was carefully inscribed a list of our exhibits. It has now gone from me but I remember some of the more interesting entries. There was, for instance, the joined skulls of a two-headed calf. There was an enormous umbrella stand made from the lower leg and foot of an elephant. And there was a gruesomely discoloured human kidney in a jar of alcohol, “borrowed” from his doctor father by one of our members.