Otherwise (6 page)

For a month he delayed telling us what he had done, while taking every opportunity to extol the joys of life on the ocean wave. Helen may have smelled a rat but I never guessed what was coming until the late April day he made the momentous announcement that he had found the boat in which we three would one day embark upon a voyage round the world.

However, he added: in order to hasten that day we needed to economize, so we would have to move out of our present house, whose rental we could no longer afford.

”But where are we to go?” wailed my mother.

”We will live aboard our ship – she is to be called
Scotch Bonnet
– until I can buy us a house somewhere outside Toronto. It’s not fair to keep Farley in the city when he wants to be close to nature.”

Angus did not state the obvious: that a house in the hinterland would cost a lot less than one in the city. If indeed he ever did actually buy one.

It was all too much for Helen. Pleading a migraine headache she took to her bed, where she stayed incommunicado for a week. Many years later she would tell me:

”I really couldn’t think what to do. I did think of leaving him but my own parents and family would have been bitterly opposed, and I would probably have lost you, my darling, for how could I have supported you on my own? So I decided I had to grin and bear it.”

I had no idea of the tension
Scotch Bonnet
brought to my parents’ marriage. For me her coming was an open sesame to
a world of high adventure. I believed
Scotch Bonnet was
capable of carrying us to the ends of the earth. I listened enthralled to Angus’s talk of voyaging across the Atlantic in the track of such bold venturers as Jacques Cartier and Martin Frobisher. My head filled with fantasies of sailing to golden islands ”below the Line” (the equator), where the palm-fringed atolls were alive with exotic wildlife, including dusky maidens. It seemed to me that the adventures of
Robinson Crusoe
,
Swiss Family Robinson
, and
Treasure Island
were now all within my reach. It never occurred to me that
Scotch Bonnet
’s acquisition sounded a death knell to my mother’s hopes and dreams.

My closest human companion at this time was Andy Lawrie, a tall, curly-haired, blue-eyed youth who, like me, suffered from a name affliction. Even as I had been dubbed
Fart
ley Mowat by schoolmates in Saskatoon until I changed my name to William, he had been mocked as
Annie
Lawrie. These shared indignities drew us closer together.

Andy was the only child of immigrant Scots parents who, having endured the economic purgatory of the Dirty Thirties, were determined their son should walk an easier path. When he showed a burgeoning interest in wild creatures, they set their sights on a university degree in zoology for him.

We young naturalists were all under pressure from our mentors at the museum to seek careers in biology. It was impressed upon us that this was as exalted a vocation as any to which we could aspire. Especially promising neophytes were taken on field expeditions and taught how to collect birds, mammals, insects, fishes, and any other non-human or non-domestic creatures they might encounter. The word ”kill” was never used, ”collect” being the preferred euphemism of
those times for describing the slaughter of wild animals in what is now usually described as ”harvesting.”

The professional biologists who oversaw us on our field trips may or may not have known that the word
biology
translates as the study of
life
.
They
practised it as an exercise in death and taught us to do likewise, employing poisons such as arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide; snares and traps ranging from household mousetraps to steel leg-hold traps strong enough to hold a bear; and a fearsome array of firearms, including shotguns with which to bring down birds from hummingbirds to eagles, and rifles with which to collect mammals ranging in size from squirrels to elephants.

They also taught us acolytes how to preserve the creatures we ”collected.” Fishes, frogs, and most soft-bodied animals were immured in jars or vats of alcohol or formaldehyde. Insects were generally pinned in regimented rows to sheets of cardboard. Birds and small mammals were skinned then stuffed ”in the round” with cotton wool before being laid to rest (birds on their backs and mammals on their bellies) in trays stacked from floor to ceiling in hermetically sealed steel sarcophagi built to keep their contents safe from the ravages of time. Such mausoleums are the inner sanctums of all zoological museums. So far back as 1938 the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology possessed almost a million such ”study skins.”

Like all natural history museums, the
ROMZ
dispatched its collecting expeditions to the far corners of the globe, but relied heavily upon local collectors whose ranks Andy Lawrie and I and other members of the
TOFG
were being groomed to join. Then, as now, collectors were issued permits by the federal government, authorizing the killing of all manner of wild creatures in almost any place and at any season.

A chance to prove myself worthy of such a permit came early in December when somebody spotted a white-eyed vireo in the willow swales of Toronto’s Ashbridges Bay. Since this southern species had previously been recorded only three times in Canada, the report of its arrival brought every birdwatcher in Toronto out to look for it. I was one of them, but in addition to my field glasses I carried a slingshot and a burning desire to prove myself worthy of the scientific mantle.

The odds against spotting this unobtrusive little bird were very high; yet I had barely parked my bike under a dripping willow when a flicker of movement in the branches overhead caught my eye. And there it was! A sparrow-sized little thing, its drab plumage fluffed against the chill, it seemed completely unremarkable except for chalk-white eyes that made its identity unmistakable.

It may have been too cold or too hungry to pay attention to me. I was not five feet from it when my third shot killed it. Hurriedly wrapping the tiny body in a handkerchief, I thrust it into an inner pocket, got on my bike, and hastened home.

That night in the privacy of my bedroom I skinned and prepared the specimen and a few days later proudly displayed it to Jim Baillie. Expecting a commendation, I was shaken when he launched into a tirade, accusing me of having deprived the museum of a rare specimen staff members had been searching for. He calmed down when I assured him it had always been my intention to donate the vireo to the museum. This was a lie but I made it true, and once the specimen was in official hands I was restored to favour.

A few months later federal authorities in Ottawa issued a permit authorizing me to collect up to six specimens a
year of each and every species of bird I might encounter in Canada – a limit that would be increased as my scientific status grew.

In May of 1938, while Helen was sadly packing our belongings, I was suffering through the hours school demanded of me but spending my free time flitting around the city’s parks and green spaces almost as actively as the birds I was watching. Angus, meanwhile, was devoting
his
weekends to sailing
Scotch Bonnet
west from Montreal. He had planned to bring her to Toronto but, unable to arrange a satisfactory (by which he meant free) mooring for her there, he instead chose Whitby, a small lakeshore town some thirty miles east of Toronto in whose uncrowded harbour
Scotch Bonnet
could lie at anchor while serving as our temporary home.

One May weekend he invited me to join him at Kingston for the last lap of the sail to Whitby. I was ecstatic, especially when he agreed to let Andy come along.

We took the train to Kingston where Andy and I got our first sight of my father’s vessel. Her sombre black hull and ochre-coloured sails contrasted sharply with the gleaming white yachts among which she was moored. Heavily built and broad of beam, she seemed a bit like a water buffalo lording it over a herd of gazelles – tough, enduring, and unstoppable.

I was instantly in thrall to her. My memory of the next three days is a kaleidoscope of happy sounds and images: the rattle of the anchor chain coming up, the snap and crackle of canvas as she took the wind, spray whipping over her bluff bows as a hard gust laid her over, and the vibrancy of her passage through the water transmitted by rudder and tiller to my guiding hand.

Our course took us the full length of the Bay of Quinte where Angus had learned to sail and I, as a two-year-old, had made my first voyage happily splashing about in the wet bilges of a sailing dinghy. By the time we dropped anchor in Whitby harbour,
Scotch Bonnet
had established herself as a pivotal influence in my life, and I had contracted sailor’s itch: a lively and incurable combination of exhilaration and apprehension.

That sail must have been just as memorable for my father. Not only had he brought his dream ship home but, on that same day, a Toronto firm had published his first book,
Then I’ll Look Up
, a novel about nineteenth-century life on and around the Bay of Quinte. As one of the few truly Canadian books to appear that year in a field dominated as usual by British and American imports, it was seen by some as a bright omen of things to come.

Things were going well for Angus. And for me. By the end of June school was over. We had moved out of 90 Lonsdale and were living aboard
Scotch Bonnet
. Soon after dawn most days (sometimes before the dawn) I would climb into our little pram – a bathtub-sized dinghy – and ease my way into the dense reed beds that enclosed most of the harbour and were home to many swimming beasts and nesting birds. I did not yet have a collecting permit and went among them in peace. Carrying only field glasses, a notebook, and sometimes my camera, I entered a domain of the Others, not unlike some I had known in my Saskatchewan years.

Old friends were here: raucous red-winged blackbirds, reclusive marsh wrens, pompous bitterns, sprightly teal, moth-winged harriers, skulking rails. Engrossed in mating and nesting, some birds were so incautious as to alight
on the gunwales of the pram and occasionally on my head or shoulders.

I even managed to establish something of a relationship with an enormous snapping turtle who liked to sun itself on a muskrat’s floating lodge. About two feet in diameter, this hoary creature had a tail resembling that of an alligator. He (or she) may have been as much as a century old. Having survived so long it seemed to have no fear. When I approached it for the first time, it raised its gnarled old head, opened its eagle’s beak, and hissed so fiercely that I hurriedly back-paddled. Nevertheless, I visited it again and again and in time it came to accept me. Or ignore me. One sunny morning I eased the pram so close alongside as to be able to tentatively touch its armoured back. Very slowly it turned its ancient head and looked full at me. Neither of us could have guessed that, with the passage of only a few more years, its sanctuary would be transformed into a dredged and regulated basin of polluted water inhabited chiefly by ”stink pots,” as Angus called powered pleasure boats.

I was content but Helen grew increasingly despondent as the days slipped by and Angus, who always seemed to be away in some far corner of the province on library business, did nothing about finding us a house ashore.

One day she revolted, announcing she was going to Montreal to stay with her spinster sister who had a spacious apartment there. Helen wanted me to go too but I begged off on the grounds that, if I did, there would be nobody to look out for Mutt. The truth was that I had not the slightest desire to leave my marshy world where eggs were hatching and abundant new life throbbed below and above the
waterline. Moreover, having just turned seventeen, I felt quite capable of looking after myself, and was happy to have the chance to do so.

Next day I rowed my mother ashore. She took a taxi to the train station while I hastened back aboard to become, at least temporarily, master of my own destiny.

Andy came to join me and we had a splendid time in the ensuing week. We lived in an aquatic Eden through most of the daylight hours. When night fell we lit the gimballed brass lamps in
Scotch Bonnet
’s snug cabin, cooked our supper on the cast-iron Shipmate stove, drank cider (which our imaginations transmuted into rum), and fantasized that we were anchored in the lagoon of a tropical atoll where, next morning, we might encounter a Komodo dragon or some such semi-legendary creature.

My collector’s permit arrived that week. The pleasure this gave me was marred by Andy’s announcement that he had to return to Toronto and look for a summer job to help pay the expenses of his next year at school.

Then I had an inspiration. How would it be, I asked if, instead of his trying to find a job in a labour market swamped with the unemployed, he and I mounted an expedition to collect birds and small mammals for the
ROMZ
, which was then paying up to fifty cents apiece for specimens.

Deluded by the wilful optimism of youth, I predicted that such a venture would earn Andy at least double what he could expect to get from any summer job available to him in Toronto. He was intrigued but dubious. Where would we go and how would we finance an expedition of our own? I first suggested Saskatchewan, but the cost of travelling so far put it out of reach. Then I remembered Hawk Lake.

”We could go to my grandparents’ place in Quebec. I heard Dr. Diamond [head of the
ROMZ
] tell Jim Baillie the museum needs stuff from Quebec. Hawk Lake’s real wild. We could camp out and scrounge most of our grub off of the country. Wouldn’t hardly cost us a thing. What d’you say?”

Andy said yes.

I
never knew what transpired between my parents after Helen’s return from a prolonged visit to Montreal. The atmosphere between them was glacial, mostly I think because the question of where we were going to live when summer ended remained un resolved. I didn’t really care where I lived because I was preoccupied with preparations for what I pompously described in a proposal given to Jim Baillie as
A Zoological Investigation of the Kazabazua Region in the Province of Quebec
.