Otherwise (22 page)

Spring migration was then at its peak so not only the surface of the lake but also the air above it was a-shimmer with winged life. Countless ducks, geese, swans, pelicans, and gulls swam upon it, dived into it, or wheeled over it. Its mud flats swarmed with curlews, sandpipers, plovers, willets, stately avocets, and such rarities as black-necked stilts. The surrounding marshy enclaves provided a garish display of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds and sooty black terns, while beneath and around them grebes, moorhens, and rails slipped through the reeds like living shadows.

Proctor’s Lake brought solace to my soul, though it also gave me some dicey moments. I was driving Lulu over its salt flats one day when all four wheels broke through a crust of sun-baked mud covering a slime pit of unknown depth.

For a dreadful moment, I thought I had lost Lulu and might be in danger of losing myself as well, but she sank only to her floorboards, upon which she floated like a tin duck.

Putting her into reverse in four-wheel drive, I cautiously let out the clutch. Almost imperceptibly she began inching backwards, all wheels spinning, shooting geysers of mud into the air while she
swam
– literally swam – until she was able to get a grip on hard bottom and haul us out of the quagmire.

Living a surrogate life among the Others again was wonderful, but I was still lonely. One day I drove to Saskatoon seeking human company.

Although the town looked much as I remembered, it was now inhabited by strangers. I could find few friends of my youth and most of these no longer belonged to my tribe. Nor I to theirs. But I did succeed in locating Bruce Billings.

Bruce had only recently returned from
his
war. The single parent of a three-year-old son, he was now living with his parents on their rundown fox farm a few miles outside Saskatoon. He was as happy to see me as I to see him. During the next few days he told me a little about his life since we had parted in 1937.

The war had seemed to offer him a heaven-sent opportunity to escape the twin tyrannies of Depression and drought. He tried to enlist, but first the army then the air force and finally the navy rejected him because of a tractor accident suffered in his childhood that had left him with a functional but crooked leg.

Undaunted, he stole rides on freight trains east to Halifax, determined to take part in the war. The way that finally opened for him was the merchant marine and at nineteen
Bruce became a stoker aboard a freighter carrying munitions from Canada to Britain.

During Bruce’s second voyage, his vessel was torpedoed in mid-Atlantic. When she blew up and sank, he was one of only seven survivors, spending six winter days and nights in an open lifeboat before being rescued.

This horrendous experience did not deter him, or at least not enough to send him back to the prairies. He continued going to sea in merchant vessels until ”fall of ’43 I was outbound on a hard-luck Limey tanker that bust her shaft and had to be towed back to Nova Scotia. We was tied up there a couple of months and I got foolish and fell in love with a Sydney girl and married her.

”Turned out she was a goddamned tart.
Some
body had knocked her up.
Could
’a been me I suppose, but I’da been at the end of a long, long line.

”Anyway, I went to sea again and never got back to Canada till well after the kid was born. The bitch had took off for Toronto with some air force guy, dumping the kid on her old ma. But the old woman kicked the bucket so I took a job ashore and took the kid on myself, along with another bimbo I got mixed up with.

”Things went right to hell after that, and I hit the booze so hard I pretty near died. When the lights came back on, I pulled myself together for the kid’s sake and figured we’d be better off back home.

”But where the hell had it got to? The old farmhouse was still here all right and my ma and pa were still alive, though both well over the hill, but now I was a foreigner hereabouts. Nobody knew me or wanted to, except a few rubby-dubs in the beer parlours. Government turned me down for a rehab
grant to fix up the farm ’cause I wasn’t a fly boy, a blue-jacket or, saving your worship’s grace, a khaki cowboy.

”Now I’m stuck with raising goddamn foxes. I think like one and I stink like one. Not doing too good a job of it, either. First week I was back I put my mitt into the meat grinder and the foxes got to eat two of my fingers. At that I suppose I’m doing better than when I was shovelling coal on a frigging freighter with a sub ready to shove a tin fish up my ass.”

Bruce accompanied me back to the shanty at Dundurn, both of us hoping to recapture something of our shared enthusiasms of earlier times.

It did not work. We stayed up all one night drinking rum washed down with beer. Next day we were fit for nothing. The day after that I drove him back to Saskatoon burdened with the knowledge that even we were now strangers to one another.

Before I dropped Bruce off at his parents’ farm, he told me he had been offered a job with a construction company bulldozing a new road into the still-virginal wilderness of lakes, rivers, and forests that blanketed the top half of the province.

”Road’s heading for Lac la Ronge. I’d sure like to get up there. My old man was up there with the Hudson’s Bay Company when he first came out from Scotland. Still calls it God’s Country. Nobody screws you around up there, he says. Sure wish I could go … but I got the kid, and the old folks can’t do much for themselves. What the hell! I got the foxes. See you around, chum.”

In the event I did not see him again for nearly half a century. In 1993, while doing publicity for a new book, I visited Saskatoon and on a whim asked my publisher’s
representative if she could find out anything about the fate of the Billings family. I was due to fly to Vancouver that evening, but two hours before departure she located a Bruce Billings in the city’s largest hospital.

I found him in a bed in a public ward, heavily sedated. On a table beside him was a worn copy of my book
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be
, my account of my boyhood and his in Saskatoon during the Thirties.

Bruce did not awaken during my visit.

A few weeks later I learned that he was dead.

B
y the last week of May most of the bird migrants had moved on. It was time for me to do so too. Although Dundurn was still a good place to meet the Others, it had failed to show me the way forward I was blindly seeking. So I decided to try somewhere new.

Bruce’s remarks about Lac la Ronge had struck a chord. It lay only a hundred miles north of Emma Lake, where Frank, Harris, Murray, and I had pitched camp during our 1939 expedition and it was deep in the boreal forest in a world dimpled and riven by a multitude of lakes and rivers. Without roads, railroads, airports, or formal settlements it was a world in which the Others still lived much as they had always done, sharing lands and waters with scattered bands of Aboriginal people. And it was a place where human beings of my culture and stripe were blessedly still rare.

On June 1 I drove to Prince Albert where I learned that a road to Lac la Ronge was indeed under construction and might be navigable by Jeep, part way at least.

The proper way to have gone into the boreal forest would have been by canoe, but I had no canoe and I did have Lulu Belle so I loaded her up with beer and rum (Prince Albert was then the most northerly place in Saskatchewan with a liquor store) and set off.

We ran out of gravelled road just beyond Emma Lake but Lulu churned on through mud and muskeg in four-wheel drive and bull-low gear until we reached the north end of Montreal Lake (still thirty miles from la Ronge), where we found further progress blocked by a bulldozer mired to its cab in muskeg.

Off to my left was what looked like a trail of sorts so I steered Lulu into it. Deep ruts led to a small clearing on the shore of Montreal Lake dominated by a two-storey log building surrounded by a few shanties and wall tents. Slant-eyed sled dogs and dark-skinned children watched nervously as my mud-spattered green machine jounced toward them.

The owner of this establishment was Gus Stennarson, a heavy-set Swede in his early sixties who, in the 1920s, had been a deckhand in one of the last windjammers carrying wool and wheat from Australia to Europe. For reasons he never revealed to me, Gus abandoned the sea to make his way as deeply as he could get into the heart of North America.

Montreal Lake captured him and he prospered there, first as a lumberjack then as a trapper, and eventually as a trader with the local Indians and Metis.

Almost as broad as he was tall and built (as he himself put it) ”like a brick shithouse,” he was completely bald though possessed of a luxuriant black beard. His protruding eyes were the faded blue of willow china. A man of boundless generosity, he possessed an unplumbed affection for all
mankind and a special one for womankind. He welcomed me to his log mansion in the wilds, poured us huge mugs of coffee laced with rum, and listened intently to my explanation of how I happened to be there and where I hoped to go.

”Ya. Vell, you go on and dat little green auto going to get sunkered in mudhole and maybe you with it. You vant birds? T’ick as horseflies right here! You like rum? Never go dry yet at Stennarson’s! You like eat? I am best goddamn cook in Canada! Better you stay here. Von’t cost you nuttin.”

Gus’s arguments were so compelling that I stayed for the next six weeks, while slowly, slowly, beginning to find my way again.

Montreal Lake belongs to the arctic watershed, emptying into the Churchill River and thence into Hudson Bay. The surrounding woods were full of northern birds. White-throated sparrows, hermit thrushes, Canada jays, and half a dozen kinds of warblers reacted to my invasion with varying degrees of indignation. One day as I bent down to get under a deadfall I came face to face with a loon. Here, in the midst of a Jack pine forest and at least five miles from the nearest body of water, I found myself eyeball to eyeball with the great northern diver himself. Such a meeting was not possible, but there could be no mistaking that needle-sharp javelin bill.

Not only was this a loon, it was one with an attitude. It went for me, silently but with such alarming vigour that I stumbled backwards and fell. The big bird was on me in an instant, thrusting its spear at the sole of my rubber boot. When I scrambled to my feet and fled, the bird gave chase!

This was not as simple as it sounds. A loon’s legs are set so far aft that it cannot stand upright but must push
itself forward on its breast. This one did so with amazing speed. Spotting a high stump close ahead, I scrambled up on it to become perhaps the first human in history to be treed by a loon.

It was a stalemate until I peeled off my light jacket, flung it over the loon’s head, and jumped down upon the bird. Using my coat as a kind of straitjacket, I carried the loon back to Stennarson’s. As I passed close to a group of young natives, the loon thrust its head and neck out and gave a sibilant warning hiss that would have done justice to an anaconda. Later, under the watchful but safely distant eyes of these youngsters and a number of adults, I fitted a numbered aluminum bird band to the captive’s leg and turned it loose into the lake. It dived and vanished, leaving me to wonder how it had managed to stray so far out of its element, and the audience to wonder if I was possessed.

The effect on the local people of my dalliance with the loon was magnified when I set up shop in a large wall tent beside Gus’s house and began preparing specimens. This involved wielding my formidable array of shiny surgical bone saws and shears, gleaming scalpels, intricately curved knives, serrated scissors, and an array of forceps, one of which was as long as my forearm.

The watchers, who at one time or another included most of the women and young folk (and even a few enigmatic men) from Montreal Lake’s native settlements, drew their own conclusions about me. According to Gus, some thought I was merely deranged, but some concluded I was a shaman, and a number of people came seeking treatment for everything from an accidental gunshot wound to a bad bellyache.

If their ailments were of a kind that could not be fixed with iodine, adhesive tape, and a bit of gauze, Gus would get me off the hook.

”I tell them you no-good doctor on the run. Got fired because too many your patients die down south. Better they go see Indian Department doctor at Waskesiu. Ya. Even though is a long way and a lot of
his
patients dies too!”

I worked in the tent but lived in the house, sharing its amenities with Gus and with Walt, a young man whom Gus had hired (paying the salary out of his own pocket) to teach some twenty native children. The schoolroom preempted most of the lower floor of Gus’s house. We slept on the second floor, furnished with many beds because my host extended his hospitality to all comers: trappers, mounted policemen, fur buyers, game wardens, an occasional itinerant preacher, and road-construction workers together with their attendant bootleggers and hookers.

Stennarson’s Post, as it was unofficially called, was in fact a kind of northern roadhouse where one and all felt free to enjoy the moment. I sometimes returned from a day in the field to find a dozen visitors brewing up a party that might last well into the following day. On such occasions the upstairs dormitory could become a scene of such fervid activity that I would seek refuge in my work tent.

Late one night, after sustained revelry in the house had driven me to the tent, I wakened abruptly, to find Gus shaking me violently while bellowing in my ear:

”Get
oop
! Get
oop
! Angie’s baby coming, but don’t vant to come! So you must come!”

It took a while to clarify the issue, the essence of which was that Angela Moiestie, who lived in ”the village” a few
miles distant, was in labour and having difficulties. A doctor was clearly required and, since no other was to be found nearer than fifty miles, Angela’s clan had decided I would have to do.

I was horrified. And thoroughly frightened. When I protested that I knew absolutely nothing about midwifery, Gus nodded.