by Farley Mowat
I did not wait for the next attack but slid down the face of the cliff to land, scared and shaking, on the beach. Bert bound up my arm with his handkerchief but my uncle offered scant sympathy. He was eyeing the circling hawks and the nest which still contained the eggs he coveted.
“You must have done something to upset them,” he said crossly, which surely had to be the understatement of the year.
To do him justice, Frank tried to make amends. When next he pumped the jigger into town for supplies and to see if any possibility existed of making the voyage to Seal River, he declared a holiday and took me along.
We went first to “Ma” Riddoch’s Hudson Hotel, a dark little cavern of a tavern to which a few rooms for guests, or girls, or both had been attached. Here I met the redoubtable “Eskimo” Charlie and listened while he and Frank had several beers. Charlie was a weather-beaten Scandinavian with beetling brows who was reputed to have had several Eskimo wives. He certainly did have an awesome store of foul language. There was no effing hope of getting to the effing Seal, he told us, but he would be happy to take us hunting effing white whales in the effing estuary—where the whales were gathering to calve. Frank could see no profit, scientific or otherwise, in such a venture and turned it down.
Later that day I went alone to the docks and watched several hundred belugas, as they are known in the North, disporting themselves in the estuary shallows… until a pair of motor boats put out from shore and their crews began to blaze away with heavy-calibre rifles. What followed was a marine version of shooting goldfish in a bowl. The whales churned the shoal water into foam in their efforts to escape but I could see splashes of crimson appearing on the backs and flanks of many of them.
When I told my uncle about it, he was disapproving. “That’ll be some of the men employed at the elevator having a little sport. Foolishness! The Chips might use a couple of beluga for dog feed but most of the ones those fellows hit will roll up on the beach after they die and stink the place up come summertime.”
The “Chips” were Chipeweyan Indians from the interior of northern Manitoba who made their way out to Churchill by dog team each spring before the thaw. They came to trade pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company post and were of interest to Frank as a possible source of specimens. We visited their camp and, while he dickered for a pair of white fox pelts, I looked about with awe not untinged with apprehension.
These were the most primitive people I had ever seen. Small, dark, solemn (in our presence), they spoke a peculiar language full of rustling sibilants. They were partly dressed in caribou-skin clothing which was shedding and looked singularly ratty. About twenty of them were living in squat little teepees of soot-blackened canvas full of rips and patches. When I came too close to one of these, an old woman shook her gnarled fist at me, but a much younger woman—hardly more than a girl—smiled and beckoned to me while at the same time opening the front of her shirt. I did not know whether she was being seductive or merely mocking my youthfulness. I retreated in confusion and took shelter behind my uncle.
He had bought his fox skins and was now being offered something so exotic I could hardly contain my excitement. A live wolf pup! When he shook his head at the rather pathetic little animal straining away from us on the end of a dog chain, I couldn’t contain myself.
“I’ll buy it!” I cried urgently. “I’ll take it home for Mutt! Please, Uncle Frank, tell them I’ll buy it!”
He continued to shake his head. “You can’t afford it. They want its bounty value and that’s five dollars.”
“Lend me the money,” I pleaded. “I’ll pay it back. I promise!”
“You’re talking foolishness, boy. Come along. We’re going back to camp.”
SUMMER EXPLODED DURING the last week of June. Overnight the temperature soared into the sixties and, but for the hordes of mosquitoes emerging from the tundra ponds, we could have gone around naked. The remaining ice and snow shrank visibly before our eyes. The egg-laying season was coming to an end and soon it would be time for us to leave.
There were some chores to be attended to first. Foremost of these, as far as I was concerned, was collecting one more set of rough-legged hawk’s eggs to compensate for the clutch I had failed to get. Frank had said nothing directly to me about this but I knew it was on his mind.
One warm and sunny morning I set off to the coastal ridge. I did not go back to the stretch we had already robbed but headed farther east. Nests proved few and far between in this area and it was not until afternoon that I found one, in a cleft of rock fifty feet above the beach. This time I climbed down to it from above, keeping a wary eye on the parent birds wheeling disconsolately overhead. They did not attack and I stole their eggs, wrapped them in cotton wool and packed them in my haversack. That done, I looked about from my high vantage point.
Below me the waters sucked and seethed at stranded ice floes along the shore. Open-water leads criss-crossed the decaying pack to seaward. I looked eastward along the beach and saw a large reddish object. Through my field glasses it revealed itself as the shattered remnant of a ship.
Few things will fire a boy’s curiosity as hotly as a wreck, and I hurried off to examine this one. It consisted of the forward half of a small coastal freighter which must have driven ashore many years earlier. I climbed through a maze of twisted, rusty plates until I was standing high on the angled rise of the bow.
And then discovered I was not alone!
Not more than a hundred yards away, three ivory-white bears were ambling unconcernedly towards me. The leader of the trio seemed unbelievably huge, though its followers were not much bigger than a pair of spaniels. I did not need to be a naturalist to know that this was a female polar bear and her cubs.
I was terrified. “Always stay clear of a sow bear with cubs” was a maxim of which I was well aware though, in my case, it had referred to the relatively small black bears of more southern climes. I felt that the warning must apply in spades to the monstrous apparition now padding in my direction with such fluid grace.
I thought of fleeing but to move would have meant revealing myself—and I had no stomach for a race with her! The light breeze was in my favour, blowing towards me, so I could hope the bears might pass by without ever realizing I was crouching in abject fear ten feet above them.
They were within a dozen yards when, for no apparent reason, the female abruptly stopped and reared back on her ample haunches while extending her forelegs for balance. Her immense paws hung down before her, revealing their long, curved claws. Perhaps I moved, or maybe she heard my heart pounding. She looked up and our glances locked. Her black nose wrinkled. She sniffed explosively then, with an astonishing lithesomeness for so huge a beast, slewed around and was off at a gallop in the direction from which she had come, her pups bounding along behind her.
My own departure was almost as precipitate. I fled so fast that the eggs in my pack had become the ingredients for another omelette before I reached Black Shack.
A WEEK LATER we again boarded the Muskeg Express. The first of a long series of visits I would eventually make to Churchill and on into the mighty sweep of tundra stretching northward from that Arctic gateway was at an end.
17
THE JOURNEY HOME WAS AN anticlimax. No reporters were waiting at the Saskatoon railway station to welcome the returning explorer. There was only Angus, and he seemed preoccupied.
Having greeted Frank and Bert rather perfunctorily, he turned to me.
“Thank heavens you’re back! I’m sick and tired of being foster-parent to an owl. Mutt’s threatening to leave home and your mother’s about to have an attack of nerves. You and your damned pets!” He paused as he caught sight of the slatted crate I was half-hiding behind my back.
“Ohmigawd! What have you brought back this time?”
What I had in the crate was a long-tailed jaegar, a large and strikingly patterned Arctic bird which looks like
a gull but acts like a hawk. I had rescued this one after Uncle Frank winged it with a shotgun blast, and had kept it alive while its wound healed. Unfortunately the damage was such that it would never fly again so I felt compelled to bring it home with me. The fact that I also wanted to be the possessor of the most unusual pet any of my peers had ever seen may have had something to do with this decision.
The jaegar was unusual—unusually unpleasant. It would strike at any living thing that came within reach, and its hooked beak could rend flesh and draw blood with ease. It was handsome, but its manners were foul. It defecated as if equipped with an anal blunderbuss and woe betide anyone who stood behind it. Furthermore, it had a terrible voice—a kind of whining scream with which it gave almost continuous expression to its animosity.
Uncle Frank and Bert climbed back aboard the train, perhaps with some relief. Angus and I waved them off, then piled my gear and trophies into Eardlie and drove out to the country club where the caravan, my mother, Mutt, and Wol awaited us.
Wol had nearly attained his full growth during my absence. He now stood two feet tall and, although he had not yet taken to flying, had a wing spread of four feet or more. He had also acquired a regal presence. I think he saw the rest of animate creation, humans included, as his subjects. Certainly he tended to treat them as such. For the most part he was a benign monarch, unless roused by an act of lèse-majesté when he could become a Jovian thunderbolt. He admitted me to his court by leaping lightly on my shoulder, breathing deeply in my ear, and muttering a gruff “Hoo-hoo-hoo.”
Mutt crawled out from under the caravan and flung himself upon me after Wol had returned to his throne, a poplar post beside the fireplace.
“I think Mutt’s trying to tell you,” Angus explained, “that he’s had enough. Wol sneaks up on him when he’s asleep and grabs his tail with those ruddy great claws. Thinks it’s a great joke. But it’s turning Mutt into a troglodyte.”
My mother kissed me warmly. “You’ve gotten thinner, Bunje darling, though as smelly as ever. How about a swim? That is, if you can make your owl stay away from us. He’s taken to hopping on people’s heads when they wade in and if you try to shake him off he gets excited and goes to the bathroom in his pants.” She shuddered delicately.
It was apparent that Wol was pushing everyone’s tolerance to the limit. I suspected my parents were only waiting until I had settled in to tell me the time had come for Wol to return to his own world.
If Wol was difficult to live with, the jaegar turned out to be hell on wheels. It absolutely refused to accept life in a cage and raised such a hideous protest that my mother began to fret. “What on earth will people at the club think we are doing down here?” she asked. “It sounds like murder!” Murder would have been a solution but we could not bring ourselves to that so we tried giving the jaegar its freedom. It abused that freedom with diabolical ingenuity.
Unable to fly, it developed the agility of a road-runner. It would lurk behind a tree, under a bush, or beneath the caravan, then burst out unexpectedly to viciously assault a bare leg (if human) or a hairy one (if Mutt). One ripping tear and it was gone, far too swiftly for any of us to catch it. It became the chief peril of our camp. Then one day it spread its reign of terror farther afield. Bruce, who was working as a caddy at the club, came down to tell me: “Your goddamn bird tore into a ladies’ foursome on the fifth hole this morning. Jeeez! You should have seen ’em scatter! The pro is frothing mad and says he’ll shoot the damn thing next time he sees it.”
Since there was nothing else to be done I caught the jaegar (by trapping it with meat scraps) and caged it again. By the following day its screams of rage had become unendurable, so Angus and I built a good-sized coop of chicken wire, reasoning that the bird might be more content in a larger enclosure.
Nothing of the sort. It raced around the perimeter of the coop, tearing at the wire and making such a fuss that, belatedly, the King at last deigned to take notice of it.
None of us actually saw what happened. I think Wol hopped over the wire impelled by simple curiosity about the nature of this obnoxious bird. And I think the jaegar made the mistake of going for him.
The jaegar’s two long tail feathers became a souvenir pinned on my bedroom wall at home. Wol became a hero. And the suggestion that the time had come for him to return to the wild was never voiced.
We continued in our camp by the river through most of the remainder of the summer. Angus commuted to work in town, though no longer by automobile. Late in 1935 he had bought a sailing canoe which had somehow become stranded in Saskatoon. It had fallen on hard times but Angus spent much of the winter lovingly restoring it. He painted it green and christened it Concepçion in honour of the event with which my life began.
Each summer morning he slid Concepçion into the river and, if the wind would serve, set sail for Saskatoon six miles downstream. Off he would go, skimming the shoals and slipping past the dead-heads until he reached his chosen landing place below the Bessborough Hotel. Then, having unstepped the mast and furled the sail, he would flip the canoe upside-down on his shoulders and portage it through the morning traffic to the library. In the evening he would reverse the procedure. If he could not sail he paddled, although it could take as long as three hours to struggle home against the current.
I sometimes accompanied him to town but the attention he attracted as he trotted down Broadway with a sixteen-foot green canoe over his head was not something I relished. One morning as we sprinted to catch a traffic light, we encountered a school acquaintance of mine. He watched in astonishment as my father sped by then turned to me, bringing up the rear, and exclaimed, “Holy Cow, Billy! Your old man sure is one loony bird!” I could only nod miserably and hasten on.
We had to strike camp and return to the city earlier than we wished in order to move to a different house before school started. The new one was on Spadina Crescent on the opposite side of the river. The river bank here was much lower and less interesting, but our new home was surrounded by unkempt grounds and bordered by rows of big poplars which attracted birds and small animals. The house was, according to Helen’s diary, “our best yet, with five bedrooms and two fireplaces, and very cosy.”
A third floor, consisting of two bedrooms, comprised what was effectively a separate apartment. To my delight I was given both rooms, one to sleep in and the other to use as “your study, Farley, although,” added my father, “God alone knows what you’ll really do up there.”
Predictably, one of the things I did was populate the third floor with a variety of animals, dead and alive. I kept a dead badger in my study for a week while I tried to skin and stuff it, and if God didn’t know about that He was the only one who didn’t.
Some of my other acquisitions were thrillingly alive. One such was a prairie rattlesnake captured by a friend during his summer vacation at Val Marie in the south of the province. He parted with his still-youthful snake—it was barely three feet long—reluctantly and only because his parents adamantly refused it house room. Although I was confident that my parents would be more understanding, I did not put the matter to the test by telling them about the handsome guest who lived in the bottom drawer of an old bureau in my study.
Kaa, as I called him after the rock python In the Mowgli stories, was a gentle soul who did not object to being handled. He was usually so full of mice that probably all he wanted to do was sleep. I kept a colony of white mice in the drawer directly above Kaa, which made for a most convenient arrangement.
The study was festooned with birds’ nests and other natural bric-a-brac, including the wings and tails of hawks, owls, and an eagle, all of which had been shot by sportkillers as vermin. My formidable collection of books, mostly concerned with natural history, was ranged around two walls. A table under a dormer window in the third wall supported an aquarium and a small microscope. A desk and chair occupied that portion of the floor not already crowded with cardboard carto
ns and home-made cages.
THE CHURCHILL EXPERIENCE coloured the remainder of that year. I spent most of my evenings in my eyrie (Helen’s name for it) dreaming over my summer’s notes and specimens, poring over Arctic maps with future expeditions in mind, and reading everything available about the North and its creatures.
All the same, I did not neglect the world around me. Murray, Bruce, and I remained boon companions and we trekked ever farther afield by bicycle, snowshoes, and on foot. A tribe of three, we frequently camped out on long weekends and other holidays.
I spent part of my time that autumn banding small migrant birds which I caught in a variety of wire-mesh traps set in our back yard. By mid-October I was catching, banding, and releasing as many as a hundred white-throated, white-crowned, song, and Harris sparrows a week. And this despite Wol’s attempts at sabotage. He had cast himself in the role of an avian Scarlet Pimpernel. He would sidle up to a trap in which a dozen small birds were fluttering and rake it with the talons of one foot, tearing a wide enough gap in the mesh to allow the captives to escape. Oddly enough he never tried to snatch a quick snack for himself. He would stand aside with a distinct air of benevolence and watch the prisoners flee. I dealt with this problem by whacking him with a rolled-up newspaper whenever I found him near one of my traps.20
Although I was an enthusiastic bird bander, my work was not entirely appreciated by the Ottawa civil servants in charge of the program. A few years ago a well-wisher sent me the file of my 1936 correspondence with the National Parks Branch. Pinned to the cover of the file was this some-what querulous note:
This [banding] co-operator has been the cause of considerable confusion in this Department because he seldom uses the same name twice. Here is a list of the names he uses: