by Farley Mowat
The temperature hardly went above freezing that day and we had about given up on spring. Again we camped in a straw stack, having nearly perished in our wickyup the night before. During the night the weather changed. We woke to brilliant sunshine and a warm wind from the south—a wind that smelled like thaw and gumbo. Spring had come to our part of the prairies like a blitzkrieg. By noon the temperature was in the high sixties and the world had begun to run with thaw water. By next day the thaw had flooded fields, coulees, and ditches as if an invisible dam had broken somewhere beyond the horizon. We could hardly move about because of water, slush, and mud.
Late in the afternoon the ice in the river went out. The primal thunder as the surging waters burst their winter bonds shook the river bank where we stood watching. A half-mile-wide expanse of ice began to grind, heave, and split into enormous floes, some several feet thick. We knew that, back in Saskatoon, people would be crowding the bridges watching with delicious apprehension as massive ice blocks smashed headlong into the bridge piers.
If a dam appeared to have broken that day, flooding the surface of the world with water, another broke during the night—this time flooding the realm of air with life. A torrent of bird migration had been unleashed and was pouring northward.
Bruce and I lay awake for hours listening to the thrum and whistle of wings overhead. A three-quarter moon was shining and when we aimed my old field glasses at it, we could watch an almost unbroken procession of ducks, geese, and cranes together with uncountable flocks of lesser birds passing across the lunar disc in silhouette. Most were too small and distant to be identifiable but their numbers were astounding. “Looks like all the birds in the world goin’ by!” was Bruce’s awed comment.
A few days later, after our return home, I wrote this poem.
Across the darkened dome of prairie sky
Toward the home of shaggy northern bear,
Vast flocks of swiftly flying ducks go by,
Beating with weary wings the singing air.
Close followed by a thousand flocks of geese,
Filling the vernal dusk with eerie cries,
They beat their steady way across the east
Into the flickering Light of Polar skies.
Timeless as life, this strong, unflagging flight,
This muted throb of muffled, beating wings,
Awakens echoes in the prairie night
To memories of a thousand bygone springs.
Mr. Wilson was delighted to hear we had found an owl’s nest, but when Bruce and I revisited it the following Saturday, it was empty. A few yards from the nest tree lay the wingless body of one of the adult owls. Bruce later learned it had been shot, and its wings and eggs taken by a neighbour’s boy anxious to collect the bounty being offered for “birds of prey” by the sportkillers’ organizations in the interests of “conserving” game birds.
The bounty money paid for the eggs and carcasses of hawks; owls, crows, and magpies amounted to only a few cents for each, but cash money was so hard to come by that boys, youths, and even grown men scoured the countryside, virtually eliminating the nests and eggs of “vermin” birds in many regions. This was especially true close to Saskatoon, so it now looked as if Mr. Wilson’s prospects for photographing a horned owl on her nest were virtually nil.
Then I had an inspiration. About five miles north-west of the city was a large farm owned by a Mr. Redding, an English immigrant and literary man who was something of an eccentric. He and Angus had become friends and we had visited his place which embraced two sections, partly devoted to wheat but mostly in natural prairie pasture on which Mr. Redding raised Texas cattle. Believing in doing things the natural way, he allowed his several long-horned bulls to roam free. In consequence his land was studiously avoided by all who had no business there, including hunters and egg collectors. It occurred to me that his property might harbour an owl’s nest.
Keeping a wary eye on the half-wild cattle, Bruce and I searched the farm’s bluffs and on April 19 found a horned owl’s nest. It contained three newly hatched chicks.
Very pleased with ourselves we went along to Mr. Redding’s farmhouse to tell him about it. He was interested in birds, and when we asked if Mr. Wilson could build a blind in the bluff from which to photograph the owls, he readily assented.
On the following Saturday, Angus agreed to drive Mr. Wilson, Bruce, and me to the Redding farm, because Monkey did not own a car and we had to transport a bolt of green cotton cloth, hammers, saws, and a bag of nails, as well as the camera gear.
We found the young owls safe in their nest. Then, to the distress of the parent birds who flitted about the bluff like a pair of gigantic moths, we built what amounted to a tree house in a cluster of poplars about fifteen feet away from the nest tree. Five feet square and twenty feet above the ground, it was constructed of branches around which Mr. Wilson wrapped the green cotton cloth. He cut a hole for his camera lens in the side facing the nest, and the blind was ready.
According to Mr. Wilson, you could hide in the blind and stay there until the owl thought everything was safe. Then, when she came back to her nest, you could take all the pictures you wanted and she would never even know about it.
“He sure must think owls are dumb,” Brucie muttered to me when Mr. Wilson wasn’t near. “She may not see him but she could see that tent if her eyes were shut; and I don’t think she’s going to like it.”
Now that the blind was finished, Mr. Wilson said he was ready to try it.
“You boys go off for a walk, ” he told us. “Make a lot of noise when you’re leaving. The books say birds can’t count—so the owl will think all three of us have gone and she’ll never guess I’ve stayed up here in the blind.”
“Okay, Mr. Wilson,” I said. “C’mon, Brucie. Let’s get going.”
We walked about a mile away to a little slough and started looking for red-winged blackbirds’ nests. It was a nice day and we forgot about Mr. Wilson until we began to get hungry. Then we went back to the bluff.
Mr. Wilson was sitting on the ground and he didn’t look the least bit well. His face was awfully white and his hands were shaking as he tried to put his big, black camera away in its case. The camera looked as if it had fallen out of a tree. It was all scratched and covered with dirt.
“Get some good pictures, sir?” I asked him cheerfully.
“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Wilson said, and it was sort of a snarl. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Any blame fool who says owls can’t count is a liar!”
On the way home Mr. Wilson told us what had happened. About an hour after we went walking the owl came back. She lit on her nest and then she turned around and took a good long look at the little tent, which was on a level with her.
Mr. Wilson was busy focusing his camera and getting ready to take the owl’s picture, when she asked a question: “Who-WHOOO-Who-WHOOO?” Then she leapt into the air.
The next thing Mr. Wilson knew, the front was ripped right out of the blind and the owl was looking at him from about a foot away.
He accidentally dropped his camera and then, of course, he had to hurry down to see if it was all right. And that was when we got back to the bluff.
This was only a temporary discouragement. Within a few days, the owls had become so accustomed to the presence of the blind that they paid it no further heed. Over the next several weeks, Mr. Wilson was able to take a series of impressive photographs.
Monkey kept his promise. He sold me his old camera for two dollars. It was a primitive little 35-mm machine with only three exposure speeds, and a fixed lens which made it useless for close-ups. Nevertheless, it was infinitely superior to my mother’s box Brownie and I loved it dearly.
MY BIRTHDAY THAT year—my fifteenth—brought with it the most memorable present I ever received.
I had sent copies of “Birds of the Season” to my great uncle Frank Farley,
from which he concluded that I was showing promise as an ornithologist. Without letting me know what he had in mind, he made a proposal to my parents.
Every June for the past five years, Frank had made a journey to the subarctic community of Churchill on Hudson Bay. This was a one-time Hudson’s Bay Company post which, in 1927, had been selected as the site for an ocean port from which prairie grain could be shipped to Europe. Over the next several years, a railroad was built north across more than five hundred miles of muskeg and spruce forest to service the new port.
Quite incidentally this last great achievement of North American railroading also provided a means for naturalists to reach a unique concentration point on the Arctic flyway of millions of migrating waterfowl and wading birds. Some individuals of many species which flew this route in spring remained on the tundra near Churchill to nest and lay their eggs. The eggs were the magnet which drew my uncle north. He planned to go to Churchill again in June of 1936, and proposed to take me with him as an egg collector.
My parents gave their assent and details were agreed upon by letter. However, Angus and Helen decided to keep me in the dark until my birthday. This was just as well. Had I known earlier what was transpiring, I would have been able to think of nothing else. When at last it was revealed to me, the proposal was as irresistibly entrancing as the prospect of a trip to the moon might be to a youth of today.
Frank was to pick me up on June 5 when his train passed through Saskatoon. Since this would be more than two weeks before school ended, it posed a problem. My parents, bless them, did not mind my missing that much school time but the principal of Nutana Collegiate would have to authorize such a departure from the rules. I do not know if he would have done so on his own. I do know that Monkey Wilson represented my interests to such effect that the day after my birthday he was able to bring word that not only would I be permitted to leave school early, I would also be excused from writing the end-of-term examinations. For that intervention, if for nothing else, I owe him a lifelong debt of gratitude.
There remained the problems of assembling my outfit—and of mastering my impatience until June 6 arrived.
Angus had read widely on Arctic subjects so he was the expert on what I should take with me. The outfit he finally assembled would have better suited a member of one of Peary’s polar expeditions but my father had so much fun gathering it all together that none of us had the heart to bring him down to earth. Uncle Frank did that in due course. When I eventually embarked, I left behind such items as a patented Scott-of-the-Antarctic-style tent large enough to house eight men; a sleeping bag as bulky as a small hay rick and guaranteed to keep one warm at sixty below zero; a manual on how to train and handle dog teams; and an ingenious set of interlocking cooking pots which weighed about as much as I did. I suspect that my father may have been secretly planning a polar expedition of his own since, so far as I know, none of the rejects was ever returned to the store from which it came.
As to my impatience: it was somewhat alleviated by the owls we had found for Mr. Wilson—and by one owl in particular.
On May 20 a torrential rain storm accompanied by near-hurricane winds swept over Saskatoon. The following day when Bruce, Murray, and I visited the owls’ nest we found it broken apart and on the ground. Near it were the three chicks. Two were dead but the third—the largest—was still alive.
He was about as big as a chicken and his grown-up feathers were beginning to push through his baby down. He even had the two “horn” feathers growing on his head. He looked completely miserable because all his down and feathers were stuck together in clumps and he was shivering like a leaf,
I thought he wouldn’t feel like fighting but when I tried to pick him up he hunched forward, spread his wings, and hissed at me. It was a good try but he was too weak to keep it up and he fell right over on his face.
He looked so wet and sad that I got down on my knees and very slowly put my hand on his back. He stopped hissing and lay still. He felt as cold as ice so I took off my shirt and put it over him. Then I carried him out of the bluff so he could sit in the sunshine and dry off.
It was surprising how fast he got better. Murray had brought along some roast-beef sandwiches. He took some of the meat and held it out to the owl. It looked at him a minute with its head on one side, then gave a funny little hop and came close enough to snatch the meat out of Murray’s fingers. It gave a couple of gulps, blinked its eyes once, and the meat was gone.
After that we were friends. When we started to walk away from him, just to see what he would do, he followed along behind us like a dog. He couldn’t fly, of course, and he couldn’t walk any too well either. He kind of had to jump along. I think he knew he was an orphan and if he stayed with us we’d look after him.
When I sat down again he came up beside me and, after taking a sideways look into my face, hopped up on my leg. I was afraid his big claws would go right through my skin but they didn’t hurt at all. He was being very careful.
“Guess he’s your owl, all right,” Bruce said, and I think he was a little jealous.
We carried him home in my haversack. He didn’t like it much but we left his head sticking out so he could at least see where he was going. We put him in the summerhouse and, when Dad got home from work, the owl was sitting in there on an orange crate.
“What are you going to call him?” my father asked.
I hadn’t thought of a name up until that moment. Now I remembered Christopher Robin’s owl in Winnie the Pooh.
“His name is Wol,” I said.
And Wol he was, forever after.
19A low, lean-to windbreak of brush, open at the front and roofed with tumbleweed and straw.
16
ON JUNE 5, ACCORDING TO Helen’s diary, “Bunje up at 3:00 a.m. No peace for any of us until 7:30 when Uncle Frank’s train arrived and we went to meet it. Bunje terribly excited.”
That I was. When Uncle Frank’s rangy great frame swung down from the steps of the parlour car, I could hardly have been more agitated if God himself had alighted.
I had not previously met Frank in the flesh and he certainly seemed bigger than life. He stood a lean six feet three inches tall in knee-length, lace-up boots. His head, under a soft felt hat, was a mountain crag dominated by the famous (in the family) Farley nose. He had the washed-out stare of a turkey vulture. All in all, he was the most intimidating figure of a man I had ever encountered.
Now he was smiling. One ham hand swept down and gripped my shoulder so powerfully I wanted to squeal like a puppy that has been stepped on.
“So this is the bird-boy, eh?” Frank boomed, shaking my seventy-five-pound frame none too gently. “Not much bigger than a bird at that.”
He let me go and turned to introduce a slight, dark-haired young man who had descended behind him—Albert Wilks, a twenty-year-old school teacher who had also been signed on as an egg collector.
Tipped off by Angus who was always au fait with the press, a reporter from the Star Phoenix was on hand to interview the “world-famous ornithologist.” The interview was conducted over breakfast in Wang’s Chinese Café where, for the first time, I heard what Frank had in mind.
We would camp on the tundra near Churchill, he told us, until the pack ice covering the inland sea called Hudson Bay slackened enough to let us travel in sea-going canoes accompanied by two Barrenground trappers, “Eskimo” Harris and “Windy” Smith, north up the coast to the Seal River. We would then set up a base camp and spend a month on and around the Seal, making the first scientific collection of animal life from the region. It was to be hoped, Frank added portentously, that the collection would not only encompass birds’ eggs but would also include white wolves, Arctic foxes, and seals.
My breakfast went untouched. I was so bedazzled by visions of what lay ahead that I may have been slightly catatonic by the time my parents saw the three of us aboard the noon train
. My mother thought I looked angelic, but stunned would probably have been closer to the truth.
By dinner time the train had left the “big prairie” behind and was running north and east through poplar and birch parkland. At midnight it came to a halt beside a cluster of shacks and a small station which bore the tantalizing name “Hudson Bay Junction.” Here we disembarked with all our gear to await the arrival of a train from Winnipeg which would take us on to The Pas.
At 3:30 a.m. a baleful whistle roused me from broken sleep on a station bench. We stumbled aboard and found ourselves in the nineteenth century. Our chariot to the North was a colonist car built in the 1880s to ferry European immigrants westward from Montreal after they had been disgorged from the bowels of trans-Atlantic sailing ships.
Colonist cars were designed to transport the impoverished at minimum cost. No effort had been spared to preclude anything smacking of comfort. The seats were made of hardwood slats. They faced each other in pairs and could be slid together in such a way that each pair formed a crowded sleeping platform for four people. There was no upholstery of any kind, no mattresses, and no cushions. Lighting was provided by oil lamps whose chimneys were dark with age and soot. Our car was heated by a coal stove upon which passengers could boil water for tea and for washing, and do their cooking. Some colonist cars had flush toilets of a sort but not ours. There was only a hole in the floor of the toilet cubicle through which one could watch the ties flicker past—an exercise that gave me vertigo.