by Farley Mowat
The car was only half full when we boarded so we were able to claim a two-seat “section” for ourselves. We were lucky. At The Pas—the last settlement en route to the Arctic—the car would become so crowded that some people would have to lay their bed rolls in the aisles.
Our fellow passengers were mostly trappers of European, Indian, and mixed blood, accompanied by their women and children. We also had two Roman Catholic missionaries, and the engineer and three crew members of a Hudson’s Bay Company schooner which had spent the winter frozen in the ice at Churchill. All these were exotic enough, but most fascinating was a trio of Eskimos on the first lap of a long voyage back to their homes in the high Arctic after having spent many months in a tuberculosis sanitorium in southern Manitoba. They spoke no English and, since nobody else in the car spoke Inuktitut, I could not begin to satisfy my enormous curiosity about them.
We reached The Pas at noon. Despite its curious name, it was no more than a ramshackle little frontier village serving as the southern terminus of the Hudson Bay Railway which, all in its own good time, would carry us to Churchill. The northern train was made up of a long string of wheat-filled boxcars to which our colonial car, a baggage car, and a caboose were appended like the tail of a dog.
At dusk we pulled out of The Pas and began the long haul northward at a sedate twenty miles an hour—a speed we were never to exceed and which we often fell far below.
By now we had entered the true boreal forest and were bumping along through a seemingly endless black spruce shroud, broken here and there by quagmires and little ponds. Frank joined me at one of the dirt-streaked windows as I looked out upon a broad sweep of saturated “moose pasture” thinly dotted with tamarack trees.
“That’s muskeg, my boy. You’ll see enough of it before we’re through. Fact, most of what you’ll see from now on until we reach the edge of the Barrens is just like this. That’s why the train is called the Muskeg Express. By some. Some call it the Muskeg Crawler and claim you could walk the five hundred miles from The Pas to Churchill quicker.”
Our home on wheels now began to come vigorously to life. Someone stoked up the stove with billets of birch and soon the aroma of bannocks frying in pork fat assailed us, mixed with the molasses-laden reek of the “twist” tobacco most trappers smoked. Those who did not smoke either chewed or used “snouse” (Copenhagen snuff). There were no cuspidors and one would not have wanted to walk about barefoot.
Blackened tea billies came to the boil and were passed along from seat to seat so that everyone could fill his or her mug with a smoky brew heavily laced with sugar. Bert heated us up a pan of pork and beans. A Cree woman across the aisle suckled a young baby at her breast while feeding an older one canned milk out of a beer bottle… and I stared until my eyes bulged.
This being the first night out of The Pas, there was a considerable celebration. Lusty songs were sung in Cree, French, English, and unidentifiable tongues. Bottles were freely passed around. Some of the men began playing cards and there was a brief fight during which I thought I saw the flash of a knife. The noise level mounted by the minute. Two young women began having a shrill argument over possession of a very hairy, very drunk young man.
At this juncture one of the train men (there was no conductor) came along and leaned down to yell something in Frank’s ear. My uncle nodded and pulled me to my feet. “Get your bed roll!” he bellowed.
We swayed to the end of our car, passed through the baggage car (which contained several canoes and a line of Indian dogs chained to a cable along one wall), then we were in the caboose.
“You’ll sleep here,” Frank told me. “It’ll keep you out of trouble. And it’ll be a damn sight quieter.”
So it was, but much duller. Although I had a bunk and mattress to myself, I regretted missing what might be happening in the colonist car.
Next morning the train crew shared their breakfast with me and the brakeman made me free of the cupola. Reached by a short ladder, it offered an unparalleled view of the country we were passing through. It was like having one’s own observation car. I could also step out onto the little porch at the rear of the caboose. I was having a pee from this vantage point when something flipped up from the road-bed and went singing past my head. Another missile whirred by and I hurriedly stepped inside. I told one of the trainmen what had happened and he laughed.
“That’s the spikes popping out. You see, kid, the road-bed over the muskeg is so spongy the tracks sink down under the weight of the train then, when they spring back up, they flip loose spikes out of the ties just like stones shot out of a slingshot.” I gave the back porch a miss thereafter and used the inside facilities, unattractive though they were.
I spent a lot of time in the cupola looking for wolves, moose, deer—whatever the vast spruce forests and muskegs might have to offer. They had very little. I saw one solitary moose lumbering away from the track, and an occasional raven.
That was about all, except for human beings and they too were scarce. Occasionally the Muskeg Express would ooze to a halt in the middle of nowhere and a couple of human figures would emerge from the forest to take delivery of packages tossed out of the baggage car.
Sometimes when the train stopped there would be nobody and nothing in sight but trees, until one of our passengers shouldered his pack and climbed down from the car to set off for his trapping cabin in the back of beyond.
Sometimes a canoe would be unloaded and a family of Crees would leave us to paddle away in it. For the rest, there were only the section points, spaced about fifty miles apart. At each of these, two or three section men charged with track maintenance lived with their families in red-painted cabins under grandiose station signs that read: Wekusko… Wabowden… La Pérouse… Sipiwesk…
During the morning of the second day out of The Pas, we crossed the mighty Nelson River flowing eastward into Hudson Bay. The right-of-way now pointed due north and the train ran—crawled, rather—on a road-bed that literally floated on muskeg. The muskeg in turn floated on permafrost—the eternally frozen underpinnings of a land which, even in the first week of June, was still cross-hatched by huge snowdrifts and whose lakes and major rivers were still frozen. According to Uncle Frank, spring was very late this year and he grew gloomy about the prospects for travelling on Hudson Bay.
The uncertain footing now slowed the Muskeg Express to something less than a crawl and there was little to see of interest in the snow-striped landscape. I tried entertaining myself by clocking the slow passage of the black and white mile boards nailed to telegraph poles. By Mile 380 I had tired of this game and was reduced to reading a book. It appeared that nothing was going to happen until we finally reached Churchill.
But at Mile 410 something did happen. I had earlier noticed that the succession of stunted spruce trees was being pierced by openings running out of the north-west. When I asked Uncle Frank about these, he explained that they were fingers of tundra thrusting southward from the vast Arctic plains which comprise the Barrenlands.
I went back to the cupola with renewed interest and had just seen Mile 410 slide slowly past when the rusty whistle of the old engine began to give tongue with a reckless disregard for steam pressure. At the first blast I looked forward over the humped backs of the grain cars.
A flowing, brown river was surging out of the shrunken forest to the eastward, plunging through the drifts to pour across the track ahead of us. But this was no river of water—it was a river of life. I had my field glasses to my eyes in an instant and the stream dissolved into its myriad parts. Each was a long-legged caribou.
“C’est la Foule!” The French-Canadian brakeman had climbed up into the cupola beside me. It is the Throng! This was the name given by early French explorers to the most spectacular display of animal life still to be seen on our continent or perhaps anywhere on earth—the mass migration of the Barrenland caribou, the wild reindeer of the Canadian North.
/> The train whistle continued to blow with increasing exasperation but the oncoming hordes did not deviate from their own right-of-way, which clearly took precedence over ours. They did not hurry their steady, loose-limbed lope. At last the engineer gave up his attempts to intimidate this oblivious multitude. With a resigned whiffle of steam the train came to a halt.
For an hour that river of caribou flowed unhurriedly into the north-west. Then it began to thin and soon was gone. The old engine gathered its strength; passengers who had alighted to stretch their legs climbed back aboard and we, too, continued north.
The dwarf trees began to march along beside us again but I did not see them. I was intoxicated by the vision of the Throng. Many years later it would inexorably draw me back to the domain of the caribou.
We rolled sluggishly into Churchill at 11:00 p.m.—and it was still broad daylight, for we were now in the Land of the Long Day at a latitude not far short of the southern tip of Greenland. With one exception there was not a great deal to catch the eye. Winter still held the place in thrall. A sprawl of unpainted clapboard shacks and shanties lay nearly buried in drifts which were successfully resisting the half-hearted onslaught of a belated spring. The whole vast sweep of Hudson Bay stretching to the northern and eastern horizons was still ice-bound. So was the broad Churchill River, although its tidal estuary displayed a frigid mixture of open water and swirling floes. A treeless waste of tundra composed of frozen mosses, lichens, peat bogs, and little ponds surrounded the bravely named Townsite. The sky was sombre and a dusting of snow hung in the chill air. It was a scene in which modern man did not seem to belong, yet it was dominated by a man-made object.
A gargantuan concrete grain elevator loomed monstrously over the surrounds of Churchill, appearing even more enormous than it actually was in a landscape where every other sign of human life seemed puny. Towering fifteen storeys tall, this monolith, with its adjacent storage silos and associated docks for ocean-going vessels, was the reason the Hudson Bay Railway existed.
Begun just before the Crash, the complex had been intended to make Churchill a shipping port for the hundreds of thousands of tons of prairie grain annually destined to eastern Atlantic and Indian Ocean ports. It was a visionary mega-project which, like so many such, turned out to be an economic disaster. Yet when I first saw it that grey day in June of 1936, I thought it was something to rival the pyramids—one of the man-made Wonders of the World.
Perhaps it was. But before I had been many days in its shadow, it had ceased to engage me. By then I had become enchanted by the wonders of another world—where man’s works played no part.
The morning after our arrival we loaded our gear on a hand jigger—a little rail car propelled by manpower. With Uncle Frank and Bert pumping the handles we rattled out of Churchill on a narrow-gauge spur line. Our destination was an abandoned construction shack standing in lonely decrepitude on the bald tundra some eight miles south-east of Churchill. Shanty-roofed, with tar-paper walls, it contained a rusty barrel stove, two double-tiered bunks, a broken table, and not much else except the frozen corpse of a white Arctic fox that had apparently jumped in through a broken window and failed to find its way out again.
We settled in to await the withdrawal of the pack ice from the coast of Hudson Bay. As it happened, the ice never did withdraw while we remained in Churchill, so we stayed on at the Black Shack, as Bert named it, for the duration.
“At” but seldom “in.” Uncle Frank would have made (and maybe was in a previous incarnation) an effective slave driver. Since the nights never got wholly dark, he regarded sleeping as a waste of time.
“Look about you,” he lectured me as I tried to lie abed one shivering morning when our water pails had an inch of ice on them. “The birds out on the tundra haven’t slept a wink. Too much to do! Too busy! And here it is 4:00 a.m. and you want more sleep! Up and at ’em, sonny!”
Bert was our cook. Burned cornmeal porridge was his specialty but we also ate canned beans; bannock spread with molasses; fat bacon and, on special occasions, cornmeal mush that had been allowed to solidify overnight before being sliced and fried in bacon fat. Frank explained that he had intended us to “live off the land” at Seal River: “Lots of seal meat; maybe a haunch or two of caribou.” But since there were neither seals nor caribou where we were, Frank spent much of his time roaming the surrounding tundra blasting ducks and ptarmigan with his double-barrelled shotgun. Bert made watery concoctions that he called Mulligan stew from some of these victims of my uncle’s gun, but the corpses of many ended up in a nearby ditch which served as our garbage dump.
I agonized a little about this apparently wanton killing of breeding birds at the peak of the nesting season until Uncle Frank put me straight.
“Don’t be soft, boy. There’s millions more out there. We’re doing this for science. I measure every specimen I shoot and note the condition of its plumage. Science needs to know these things.”
Years would pass before I would realize that collecting expeditions such as ours were little more than high-grade plundering operations conducted in the hallowed name of Science. However, for the moment my qualms were stilled and I could go about my duties with an easy conscience.
My duties were straightforward enough.
“Find every nest you can,” Frank instructed Bert and me. “The rarer the bird the better. If the nest hasn’t got a full clutch, mark the spot and leave it ’til it has. If you aren’t sure what species it is, shoot the parent bird and bring it back when you bring the eggs.”
With half a dozen tobacco cans filled with cotton wool in our haversacks together with our lunches, Bert and I would be out every day and all day, unless it was pouring rain or, as happened sometimes, snowing so hard that searching for nests would have been useless. I was a good nest finder and I loved the work. When I flushed a rarity, such as a Hudsonian Godwit, and found four eggs ready for the taking, I would feel as elated as if I had found four gold nuggets.
So many waterfowl and wading birds clustered on the tundra that there seemed hardly room enough for all of them to nest. As I sloshed across the still-half-frozen morass of water and mossy tussocks, curlews, several species of plovers, many varieties of sandpipers, and numerous kinds of ducks would rise before me, filling the air with their cries of alarm.
I took a heavy toll from their nests.
Having made my way back to the shack for supper, dog-tired and, like as not, soaking wet from falling through the rotting ice of a pond, I would spread my day’s “take” on the table to be admired. Once I unpacked thirteen clutches from my tobacco cans, bettering anything Bert or Frank himself had so far collected in a single day. Frank rewarded me with kind words: “You’ll make a good scientist, my boy.”
According to my uncle, one egg by itself had no scientific value so we always took the full clutch, thereby ensuring that, because the season was too short to allow the birds to nest again, the adult pair would raise no young that year. The real truth of the matter was that the eggs had no commercial value unless a whole clutch could be displayed as a unit in a collector’s glass-topped case. This was something else I was still to learn.
To blow an egg we forced air through a pipette into a small hole bored in its side, whereupon, if fresh, the contents would come bubbling out. If the egg was heavily incubated, we would have to delicately draw out the embryo, piece by bloody piece, using a needle with a bent tip. We saved the contents of fresh eggs and those only slightly incubated, for omelettes which we ate as bedtime snacks. I remember one such made from Arctic loons’, Old Squaw ducks’, and a mixed lot of shore birds’ eggs; it had a distinctly pink tinge and a meaty flavour, probably because the incubation season was by then well-advanced.
Lemmings were all around us, both inside and outside the shack. It was a peak year in their seven-year cycle of abundance and they were making the most of it. Friendly little creatures looking not unlike small hamsters,
they would sometimes crawl across my lap as I sat on a tussock eating my lunch. They would also run all over the cabin floor, paying no heed to us until Bert lost patience and tried to sweep them out the door.
Egg collecting was not all beer and skittles. One morning the sun shone, the snow was melting, and it really felt like spring so the three of us set off together to explore the wall of granite which fringed the still-frozen bay like a titanic dyke. We were after the eggs of rough-legged hawks (famed lemming hunters) who occupied a chain of nests built at half-mile intervals on ledges along the seaward face of the dyke.
According to my uncle these nests were ancestral possessions used by generations of rough-legs. Not all were occupied every year. The year after the lemming population “crashed,” at the bottom of its cycle, the hawks might use only every second or third nest and, instead of laying a clutch of four or five eggs, might lay only one or two. They were able to adjust their reproductive capacity to the available food supply, something human beings seem incapable of doing.
Because 1936 was a good lemming year every nest held a full clutch. Bert and I had to gather these by scaling the face of the wall or by descending from above. Either way it was a risky business. We had each delivered two clutches to Frank waiting below on the ice-cluttered beach when the hawks decided things had gone far enough.
The ones we had already robbed had been following us, shrieking their distress as they soared overhead. Now, as I began to ascend to my third nest, they began to descend. One by one, like a squadron of attacking fighter aircraft, they stooped on me, talons outstretched and beaks gaping wide. The first one missed by no more than a foot and made me cower against the cliff wall. The second struck home.
My head was buffeted hard against the rock by fiercely beating wings. I raised an arm to protect myself and it was raked from wrist to elbow by sharp talons. For a horrible instant I thought I was going to fall; then Frank’s shotgun bellowed and my attacker spun away, still screaming defiance.