Otherwise (3 page)

He was being offered something so exotic I could barely contain my excitement. A live wolf pup! When Frank shook his head and turned away from the little creature straining at the end of a dog chain, I could not contain myself.

”
I’ll
buy it!” I cried urgently. ”I’ll take it home and tame it! 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.”

”Lend me the money,” I pleaded. ”I’ll pay it back, I promise!”

”You’re talking foolishness, boy. Come along now.”

Summer finally arrived during the last week in June and temperatures soared into the sixties. Except for hordes of mosquitoes emerging from the ponds, we could have gone around half-naked. The last of the ice and snow vanished magically. The egg-laying season was ending and all too soon it would be time for both the birds and us to go south.

But first I felt I had to collect one more set of rough-legged hawk’s eggs to make up for the clutch I had failed to get. Although Frank had said no more about this failure, memory of it rankled, so one warm and sunny morning I set off alone for the coastal cliffs. I did not go to the stretch we had already robbed but went farther east, where nests turned out to be few and far between. Finally finding one, I climbed down to it and its three eggs from above, keeping a wary eye on the parent birds wheeling overhead.

Although I knew that this late in the season the eggs would be ready to hatch, I collected them anyway, wrapped them in cotton wool, and packed them into my haversack. Then I took the opportunity to look around from my high vantage point.

The waters of the great bay sucked and seethed at stranded floes below me. Open-water leads crisscrossed the decaying ice to seaward. A mile to the east along the coast
a strange object loomed. Field glasses revealed it to be the remains of a wrecked ship.

It was irresistible. Sliding down the cliff I hurried off to examine the wreck. It proved to be the forward section of a small freighter that had driven ashore many years earlier. I climbed into it through a maze of twisted, rusty plates and girders until I found myself standing high on the angled rise of the bow. Only then did I discover I was not alone.

Three ivory-coloured bears were ambling along the beach toward me. Two were not much larger than spaniels but the leader was enormous.

”Stay the hell away from a sow bear with cubs!” was a maxim that had been drilled into me in southern climes where relatively small black bears were to be found. I assumed it would apply in spades to the monstrous apparition padding toward me now with such fluid and lethal grace.

Briefly I thought of trying to flee, but to move at all would have meant revealing myself – and I had no stomach for a confrontation. And since the light breeze was in my favour, blowing from the bears toward me, there was a possibility they might pass the wreck without ever realizing I was crouching in it only a few feet above them.

They were within a dozen yards when, for no apparent reason, the female stopped and reared back on her ample haunches. She extended her forelegs for balance, displaying immense paws and long, curved claws. Her pink tongue protruded from between a gleaming palisade of teeth. Perhaps she heard my heart pounding. She looked up and our glances met. Her black nose wrinkled. She sniffed explosively then, with a litheness astonishing in so huge a creature, turned
and was off at a gallop in the direction from which she had come, the cubs bounding along behind her.

My
departure in the opposite direction was as precipitate. By the time I regained the haven of the Black Shack, I was winded and the hawk’s eggs had been churned into a bloody mess in the bottom of my haversack.

I enjoyed a triumphal return to Saskatoon where my tales of Inuit, Indians, and polar bears, together with a cracked walrus tusk found on the beach, a carton of arctic birds’ eggs, a pair of friendly lemmings, and a crippled but ferociously lively jaeger – a species of gull possessed of the attitudes and attributes of a bird of prey – provided me with consider able status among my peers.

Through the long winter that followed I was haunted by dreams of the Arctic. Just before Christmas Uncle Frank had written to ask if I would be interested in going north with him again come spring. This time, he assured me, we would certainly reach Seal River and might even travel farther north to the legendary Thlewiaza River, where a trapper had reported freshwater seals of a kind not to be found elsewhere.

Again my parents agreed to let me go, and perhaps they were relieved for they were preoccupied with other problems: my mother with despair at what she referred to in her diary as ”this ghastly exile from everything I’ve ever known”; and Angus because he was at war with his library board over his efforts to provide books to impoverished farmers far beyond the city limits.

Angus was also preoccupied by what to do about a new job offer – that of inspector of public libraries for Ontario, a job that carried with it the prospect of his eventually
becoming director of library services for that province. He did not tell either Helen or me about the offer until he had accepted it, so it was not until April that I learned instead of accompanying Uncle Frank back to Hudson Bay I would soon be moving to a new home in Ontario.

I was stunned by the decision, which came as close to breaking my heart as anything I had ever experienced. Being deprived of my arctic adventure was bad enough. The realization that I was also to lose the plains, sloughs, poplar bluffs, and open skies of the prairies and be robbed of the companionship of the creatures, human and otherwise, I had found there, was almost more than I could bear.

I retreated into sullen rebellion. Helen noted in her diary: ”This decision has changed poor Bunje into a horrid little boy!”

She at least was aware of my anguish. Angus was not, or if he was chose to hide the knowledge beneath parental bluster.

”Taking you back east where you belong is the best thing that could happen to you. So chin up and take it like a man.”

But I was
not
a man, and I found the prospect of leaving the west intolerable. In the privacy of my bedroom, I raged and wept and made desperate plans to run away. My closest friend, Bruce Billings (a farm boy so attuned to the prairie that he proudly called him
self
a gopher), volunteered to join me as did Murray Robb, my next-best friend. It was no use. My time in Saskatoon was inexorably drawing to a close.

May arrived and with it my sixteenth birthday. One morning Helen asked how I would like to celebrate it. I knew exactly what I wanted.

One of the few surviving expanses of aboriginal short-grass prairie still survived to the southeast of Saskatoon. Waved with small hills, furrowed by coulees, studded with poplar bluffs, and pocked with sloughs, it had escaped the devastation visited on the plains country by homesteaders. It still belonged to the Others. For me it was the last best west, and it held my heart.

”I’d like to spend a week camping out with Brucie and Murray at the big slough near Dundurn. Just the three of us and Rex and Mutt.”

Helen smiled. ”I’ll talk to your father, dear. I think he’s feeling a teeny bit guilty about taking you away from all this….” She waved her hand as if to encompass the whole of Saskatchewan. ”I’ll try to make him feel a little more so.”

She was as good as her word.

Early on the morning of May 11, we three loaded ourselves, dogs, and camping gear into my father’s Model A, and he drove us over rutted dirt roads across the greening plains to a spreading poplar bluff south of the dour little village of Dundurn. Angus did not linger, nor did I encourage him to do so. It would be a long time before I fully forgave him for having so abruptly altered the tenor of my life.

Spring had come early to the prairies. The sky was clear and the sun beat down brilliantly. There had been little rain but the new grass was vividly, lusciously green and richly alive. The floor of the bluff was dusted by silky seed parachutes drifting down from the cottonwood trees. This snowy stuff kept getting into the dogs’ noses and making them sneeze as they snuffled at the burrows made by wood gophers.

We three felt so good we played like little kids, lying on our backs waving our arms and legs to make angels in the
cottonwood snow. We gathered piles of it to serve as mattresses beneath our bedrolls. We pitched the tent and cleared a place for a firepit, then went off to visit the slough where, in past years, I had hunted ducks with my father in the autumn and searched for the nests of waterbirds in spring.

Big Slough, as it was known locally, was really a lake about six miles long and a mile wide. Although the prolonged drought had turned much of the surrounding country into a dust bowl and reduced the slough itself to little more than a huge alkaline puddle, its murky water still stood knee-deep even among the broad beds of reeds and cattails fringing its shores.

And it was overflowing with life.

Out in the middle, several hundred whistling swans formed a raft so dense it looked like an ice floe. The swans were surrounded by milling multitudes of ducks, geese, grebes, coots, and other waterfowl, some swimming, some diving, others in free flight. We stood at the edge of the rushes and marvelled at the spectacle.

In the southern sky, a heavy-flying wedge of massive white birds with huge heads and jet-black wings was descending like a ghostly phalanx of pterodactyls from Jurassic times. They were white pelicans – fliers whose antiquity stretches back to the age of dinosaurs. There was a wild flurry on the slough as lesser birds scattered to get out of the way and the pelicans planed grandly down to obscure the surface in a curtain of spray.

We worked our way around the slough’s perimeter to a stretch of muddy foreshore almost hidden beneath a horde of godwits, curlews, avocets, and smaller shorebirds.

The Others were everywhere in such abundance and variety that I gave up trying to keep track of their kinds and numbers. Our ears were filled with the rush of wings and the cacophony of avian voices gabbling about food, sex, travel, and whatever else birds talk about. With Mutt and Rex plunging after us, we waded out into the reed beds, where we were assailed by mobs of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds defending nesting territories. Muskrat houses covered with fresh layers of swamp muck stood among the rushes. Each mound seemed to have a pair of grebes or coots nesting upon it. Marsh wrens were weaving their delicate hanging nests on cattail stems while unseen sora rails yammered at us for trespassing on their watery turf.

On our way back to camp, we had to wait while Rex and Mutt excavated hillocks of soft mud pushed up by pocket gophers. Although the dogs did not uncover any of these secretive little mammals, they did unearth scores of yellow-spotted tiger salamanders who were using the gopher burrows as covered ways through which to travel to the slough where they would spawn.

When we got back to camp the emerald-leafed poplars were alive with waves of warblers and other small songbirds. Branches overhead were illuminated by the azure flash of mountain bluebirds, the orange challenge of orioles, and the flame of rose-breasted grosbeaks.

We were too tired to pay them much attention. When a skein of sandhill cranes flew low overhead trumpeting their sonorous calls, I looked up only briefly before falling back in a drift of cotton snow to wonder aloud if we would ever again see such a multitude of living creatures as we had seen this
day. Bruce was lying near me chewing on a twig. He spat it out to say, ”Dunno. Maybe. If we was awful lucky.”

Six days later the Model A came puttering back to the campsite, and it was then – at that hour and in that place – that I really bade farewell to the prairie world – to Bruce and Murray and to all the Others with whom I had lived some of the best years of my life.

A
ngus was born at about the same time as the gasoline engine was invented but he nourished the conviction that the fates had chosen the wind as Man’s prime mover. Though circumstances forced him to accept the machine age, he never rejected the old gods. When, in 1919, he felt compelled to buy a motor vehicle he chose a topless Model T Ford truck completely open to the weather. This was succeeded in 1934 by an almost equally breezy Model A roadster with a folding canvas hood over the front seat and no shelter of any kind for the occupants of the ”rumble seat” in rear.

The canvas hood was seldom used. Angus preferred driving with the wind in his hair and the sun (or, as the case might be, the rain) in his eyes. Since he was indisput ably the captain, his passengers had no choice but to follow suit. Once, when Helen remonstrated with him, he told her flatly:

”We’d all be far healthier if we still travelled under sail. We can’t always do that now, more’s the pity, but
no
, I will
not
put up the top!”

When, in April of 1937, he celebrated his new job by buying a spiffy new Dodge, he again chose a convertible with a folding roof and no provision for sheltering the occupants of the rear seat.

Mutt and I generally occupied the rumble seat but for the journey back to Ontario we had to share it with Annie, an uninhibited nineteen-year-old farm girl who had come to Saskatoon looking for a job and found one as the Mowat family’s housemaid.

One vibrant mid-June morning we departed from Saskatoon towing our homemade caravan. Angus and Helen had the car’s front seat to themselves, which left the rest of us to squeeze into the rumble. I tried to make Mutt sit between Annie and me but he insisted on occupying the outer edge of the seat where he could balance himself with his forepaws on a back fender while thrusting his head far out into the slipstream. Perhaps he felt he was doing me a favour by forcing Annie and me into one another’s laps, but I was intimidated by her, and especially by her forthright approach to sex, for I was still very much a virgin, and a somewhat priggish one to boot. Although Annie did her best to make a man out of me during the long journey east, I was unable to cooperate because I was terrified my parents would twig to what was going on in the rumble seat.