Otherwise (11 page)
We eventually came to the small village of Val Marie, a ”one-elevator dump,” Frank called it, where we found an emaciated young coyote chained to a post in front of a gas station. Frank was desperate to get it for his collection, but I was determined to save its life – which I did with one of my last remaining dollars.
In deference to the array of sharp white teeth with which the pup warned all comers to keep their distance, I named him Fang. Although not aggressively hostile, within minutes of our arrival back at camp in the Cypress Hills he had validated the name by putting his mark on Murray for attempting to give him a patronizing pat on the head.
During our absence, Harris and Murray had collected the two rarest birds of the trip: a Bullock’s oriole and an Audubon’s warbler. They had also had a visit from the park warden, who warned them that the troubles in Europe were threatening to lead to war. We were not much disturbed by this news. Whatever might be happening overseas, we did
not expect it to impinge upon our lives. Such was the extent of our innocence.
The summer of 1939 was now nearly at an end. We were almost broke, were a little homesick, and were very tired of our own cooking. So, on September 1, we set out for Ontario by a circuitous route that would take us into northern Wyoming to see the wonders of Yellowstone National Park.
On September 3 we stopped at a gas station near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, and the fellow manning the pump saw from our licence plates that we were Canadians.
”You Canucks going off to war again, eh?” It was more of a statement than a question. ”I guess them English bastards given you your orders. Expect you’ll get your asses in a sling and it’ll serve you goddamn right! That’ll be two bucks thirty for the gas – and don’t give me none of your funny money.”
We abandoned our sightseeing shortly thereafter, not because we had seen enough but because our remaining money was all Canadian currency. In anticipation of Canada’s imminent destruction at the hands of the Nazis, most American stores and gas stations were refusing to accept our cash.
Driving by night and by day and living mostly on crackers and stolen fruit, we headed east through a miasma of hostility. Some Americans were actively sympathetic to the German cause and many were isolationists, as their refusal to join the Allies in the war until two years later would demonstrate. We became edgy, Fang edgiest of all, perhaps because he was being subjected to a meatless diet. He rode on the ledge under the rear window and I have a vivid memory of Harris’s expression as Fang leaned over his shoulder one day and snatched a banana out his hand – perhaps hoping to get the hand as well.
It was with considerable relief that, on September 6, we crossed the border at Windsor and regained our own country again.
Three days later, Canada declared war on Hitler’s New Order.
I returned to school determined to get good enough grades to let me become a professional biologist, but what I really wanted was to regain the limitless horizons of Saskatchewan after graduation.
I had much to do that winter, but still found time for the Others. Andy occasionally came out for a weekend of bird-watching, and Harris and I spent a lot of time tramping over fields and through woodlots, making countless small discoveries about the lives of the ”lesser beasts.” I tried to train Fang to come along for I was certain he would be able to show us many hidden things. It was not to be. Fang belonged to the wild. He hated being on a leash and one morning when I went to get him I found a gaping hole in the mesh of his enclosure.
Though I never saw him again, I did hear from him – as did many others. He took up residence in the Honey Pot, a swatch of unfarmable wooded ridges a few miles west of Richmond Hill. From there, when the moon and the mood were right, his laments sounded across the countryside. Reports of an invasion of wolves, ”the first to be reported since a wolf was killed here in the 1890s,” appeared in the local paper. Only Harris and I and a few fellow conspirators knew who the singer
really
was.
Late in 1940, a duet was heard from the Honey Pot hills. The sex of the newcomer was established the following summer when the singing from the Honey Pot swelled
to a chorus of half a dozen voices, some of them quaveringly juvenile. It delights me now to realize that, even if only by accident, I helped bring the coyote to Ontario, where his kind are now firmly established and where I hope they will continue to prosper, despite all that human beings can do to put them under.
The end of 1939 was fast approaching and Andy, Frank, and Harris had all agreed to come along on a new expedition to Saskatchewan if I could organize it. However, I had not yet found financial support and, sensing that their commitments were weakening, I suggested a Christmas get-together in a semi-abandoned cabin a hundred miles north of Richmond Hill. I kept no journal of this but later wrote an account for a never completed book.
A cracked iron range billowed acrid smoke into the cabin, further dimming the flickering light from an oil lamp. The wind snoring across the burnished ice of the big lake had no trouble finding its way through the log walls
.
It might seem a peculiar way for four town-bred eighteen-year-olds to be spending New Year’s Eve. Some of our more dashing contemporaries were at this very hour disporting themselves at Bill Beasley’s Esquire Club on Toronto’s waterfront. Others, more sedate or better heeled, were squiring their dates to a glittering prom at Casa Loma. Those who were neither rich nor dashing were partying at home or, if they lived in little towns like mine, swinging their partners around high school gym floors, sweating in the heat of adolescent sexual miasma
.
”Time for a drink!” I cried
.
Someone hauled a gallon jug of cider out from under the table and tilted it to fill our mugs. Alas, the cider had turned to frozen mush that had to be tickled out of the jug with a fork
.
”Music, maestro!” shouted Andy
.
I fiddled with the knobs of a battered Stromberg-Carlson radio whose battery was almost dead, or almost frozen. Through a blur of static I could only get a thread of band music, barely recognizable as Tommy Dorsey playing ”Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” We began to sing along – with feeling – as the wind bellowed across the lake blowing smoke down the tin chimney until we could hardly see each other
.
When the music lost itself in static I spun the dial, and suddenly a clear, calm, male voice broke through:
… report several German aircraft shot down over Alsace-Lorraine … At sea, German activity has increased but the Royal Navy is countering … On the ground in France only patrol activity has been reported on this, the last day of 1939… We return you now to the ballroom of the Royal York Hotel here in Toronto where, in just five minutes, we will welcome the New Year….
Five minutes later we four linked arms around a rickety old table, raised our mugs of icy cider, drained them to the bottom, and joined the distant revellers in singing ”Auld Lang Syne.”
And never realized that not only were we bidding adieu to the year just passed, but that this was a final farewell to the last hours of our unfettered youth.
WAR DRUMS
D
espite the fact that there was a war on, the outlook for 1940 seemed reasonably bright to me. The initial gloom cast by the outbreak of hostilities had largely dissipated as the situation overseas stagnated into what came to be known as the Phony War. Except for bombings by the Luftwaffe, the Germans appeared to be content to sit tight behind their borders. Nor were the Allies inclined to provoke them. Many people actually thought Hitler would make peace with France and Great Britain, or at least arrange an armistice with them in order to free the fascist forces for a massive assault upon the Soviet Union. Many resolutely neutral Americans would have been happy to have seen this happen and might even have supported the Nazis in a crusade against Godless Communism.
The jobs and money so suddenly produced by a war economy fostered a feeling of optimism in Canada that my father did not share. The Hastings and Prince Edward
Regiment (a rural south-central Ontario peacetime militia unit in which he held a captaincy) had mobilized for active service in mid-September of 1939, and Angus had ever since been trying to find an active role for himself in this new struggle for world dominion. Despite having lost the use of his right arm, Angus yearned to be a warrior again. To prepare the way, he had finally given my mother what she most desired. In November 1939, he had actually bought a comfortably aged house in Richmond Hill, where he could leave her when he went off to battle.
Two days before my nineteenth birthday, the Phony War ended as the
blitzkrieg
shattered the defences of the Maginot line, overwhelmed Holland and Belgium and thundered westward toward the English Channel.
A devastation which would snuff out at least fifty million human lives along with the lives of thousands of millions of the Others had begun. Though we could not even begin to comprehend its ultimate horror, we knew our world had shifted and a terrible darkness was descending.
It is hard now to remember, let alone describe, the conflicted state of mind into which we so suddenly and tumultuously found ourselves thrust. Personal hopes and plans were swept aside as we sensed, if dimly still, that everything we had believed secure was now in jeopardy. There was a rush to take up arms.
By the end of May many of my closest male friends had enlisted in the army, the navy, or the air force. On May 28, I headed for the Royal Canadian Air Force’s manning pool in Toronto’s Exhibition buildings to become part of a long line
of (mostly) youths trying to enlist. After a cursory preliminary interview, I was passed along for a medical examination by a harassed doctor. He pronounced me underweight.
A few minutes later a tired recruiting sergeant glanced at my medical report and confirmed my lack of suitability.
”Shove off,” he said. ”The air force don’t need no peach-faced kids.”
Although I knew I looked younger and more fragile than I really was, I was still furious. Once back home I unburdened myself to my father, who was now under orders to report for duty with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment.
Angus attempted to soothe me with some derogatory comments about the air force being ”the junior service” before casually mentioning that there were still openings for junior officers in the ”Hasty P’s” as the regiment was familiarly known.
I had no interest in becoming an infantryman or in joining my father’s old outfit, but I was not going to be left behind while all my peers got into uniform so I agreed to try the army.
On June 18, Angus and I set sail in
Scotch Bonnet
from Toronto, bound for the regimental depot at Picton on the Bay of Quinte. When we arrived there, it was to learn that my father had been made a major and given command of Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, based in Trenton. I was told to proceed to the headquarters of Military District No. 3 in Kingston for a medical examination.
I feared I would fail this examination too but the staff of
HQ MD
3 included a number of my father’s aging cronies from the Great War. One of them ordered me to drink six large
glasses of water – seven if I could get the last one down – before presenting myself to the medical team.
Bollocks naked, I went before the three doctors, one of whom eyed my rotund stomach with interest and made as if to poke it with his finger. He was restrained by the one who had told me to drink up.
”For God’s sake, Harry, don’t
do
that! You’ll drown us all!”
Then they put me on the scales and to nobody’s surprise found I weighed enough to pass medical muster.
Having been declared fit to die for my country, I was returned to Picton. There, after taking the oath and being duly attested, I was enrolled in the ranks of the 2nd Battalion as Private Mowat, F.M., was issued a moth-eaten First World War uniform meant for a much larger person, and provided with two threadbare blankets of equal antiquity. I was not issued a weapon because at this stage of the war there were not even enough military rifles in Canada to arm the
active
battalions, let alone the militia.
I had no need of a weapon anyway. My first assignment was as a batman (officer’s servant) to the elderly lieutenant who was the depot’s assistant adjutant. I spent the first month of my service life shining his boots, polishing his brass, burnishing his Sam Browne belt, and helping him get over his hangovers, for he seldom went to bed sober.
Determined to become a good soldier I worked to such effect that I was promoted to lance corporal (acting) and put in charge of the bar in the officers’ mess.
This happy state of affairs ended as soon as my father got wind of it.
Angus had my career firmly charted. He was determined that I follow in his footsteps by becoming a platoon
commander, even though he of all people must have realized this was likely to get me killed or maimed.
After he discovered that, instead of slamming my feet up and down on a parade ground, I was ”slinjing” (his word) in the officers’ mess, I received orders to report to
HQ
Company in Trenton.
Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion was run by a handful of mostly over-age soldiers commanded by my father. It consisted of three rifle platoons, composed of men who were either too young, too old, or too disabled for active service, or those who could not be spared from warrelated civilian jobs but could ”soldier” two nights a week and on weekends.
Most of our training was of First World War vintage. A farmer’s field became our training ground and here we laboriously dug a full-scale 1918-style trench system. On those rare occasions when we could scrounge a little ammunition from District Headquarters, we practised marksmanship at targets illuminated by the headlamps of parked cars. On weekends we engaged in war games, during which we were sometimes attacked by antiquated
RCAF
biplanes whose pilots dropped paper bags filled with flour on us as we pointed wooden machine ”guns” at them and shouted ”
Bang!
”
