BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT
People of the Deer (1952)
The Regiment (1955)
Lost in the Barrens (1956)
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957)
Coppermine Journey (editor) (1958)
Grey Seas Under (1959,)
The Desperate People (1959)
Ordeal by Ice (1960)
Owls in the Family (1961)
The Serpent’s Coil (1961)
The Black Joke (1962)
Never Cry Wolf (1963)
Westviking (1965)
The Curse of the Viking Grave (1967)
Canada North (illustrated edition 1967)
The Polar Passion (1967)
Canada North Now (revised paperback edition 1967)
This Rock Within the Sea (with John de Visser) (1968)
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float (1969)
Sibir (1970)
The Siberians (1971)
A Whale for the Killing (1972)
Tundra (1973)
Wake of the Great Sealers (with David Blackwood) (1973)
The Snow Walker (1975)
And No Birds Sang (1979)
The World of Farley Mowat (edited by Peter Davison) (1980)
Sea of Slaughter (1984)
My Discovery of America (1985)
Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987; renamed Gorillas in the Mist, 2009)
The New Founde Land (1989)
Rescue the Earth! (1990)
My Father’s Son (1992)
Born Naked (1993)
Aftermath (1995)
A Farley Mowat Reader (edited by Wendy Thomas) (1997)
The Farfarers (1998)
High Latitudes (2002)
Walking on the Land (2002)
No Man’s River (2004)
Bay of Spirits (2006)
Otherwise (2008)
This book is for all the the Others I have known. It is also for the Sea Shepherd Society, and its leader, Captain Paul Watson, the most indomitable defender of the Others I have ever known.
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Part One: Before The Storm, 1937–42
1 The Last Best West
2 Go East Young Man
3 Escape
4 Love And Death
5 The Great Adventure
6 Before The Storm
7 War Drums
Part Two: Interlude
8 A Green And Pleasant Land
9 Settling In
10 Bombs And Bimbos
11 The Balloon Goes Up
Part Three: Seeking
12 Mowat’s Private Army
13 Homeward Bound
14 Winter Of My Discontent
15 You Can’t Go Home
16 God’s Country
Part Four: Finding
17 Keewatin – Land Of The North Wind
18 Sleeping Island Lake
19 Inuit And Others
20 People Of The Deer
21 The Western Water Way
22 Master Of The Barren Lands
23 Tuktu
24 Of Wolves And Women
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a memoir of my life between early 1937 and the autumn of 1948, excluding my descent into the black horror of the Second World War. Essentially it is a story of discovery that goes to the heart of who, and what I am. It may well be my last hurrah.
Because I’ve always written books drawn from my own life and experiences, some sections of Otherwise inevitably revisit parts of my life that have appeared in greater detail in earlier works, notably And No Birds Sang, Never Cry Wolf, No Man’s River, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, and Born Naked. I make no apologies. This book overlaps these in time, and seminal incidents in one’s life inconveniently remain so.
PART ONE
BEFORE THE STORM
1937–42
– 1 –
THE LAST BEST WEST
Born in mid-May 1921– lilac time in the small town of Trenton on the northern shore of Lake Ontario’s Bay of Quinte – I spent my early years messing about in swamps, woods, and farmyards; falling in and out of boats; and surviving in various decrepit houses while establishing fundamental relationships with such disparate beings as snapping turtles, portly spiders, rapier-billed herons, honeybees, a bear who visited me in dreams, Charlie Haultain’s silver foxes, crayfish and eels, water snakes along the Murray Canal, a passel of mongrel dogs, and Beatrix – an enormous earthworm who lived through an entire winter in a tin can by my bedside.
When I was eight we moved to Windsor, a grungy industrial city given over to the manufacture of cars and rye whiskey. This move brought about a severe disruption of my universe; never theless I was able to find natural companions even here. These included a black squirrel named Jitters; a toothy but chummy baby crocodile (gift of a relative in Florida); an enormous and complacent toad who lived under our back porch; gorgeous luna and cecropia moths as large as a human hand whose caterpillars I reared in glass jars until they metamorphosed and I could let them fly to freedom; and Hughie, son of a vagrant victim of the Great Depression, who was so en amoured of grass snakes that he got himself expelled from school for carrying writhing knots of them in his pockets.
Some people felt that Helen, my raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty of a mother, and Angus, my dapper, sinewy father, were recklessly permissive in letting me consort so freely with creatures of such questionable status. But because she possessed infinite faith in a protective providence Helen did not fear for my safety. And Angus was of the opinion that broadening one’s associations with animate creation and taking chances were essential to a well-rounded life.
He was so convinced of this that in 1933, just when the worldwide economic meltdown known as the Dirty Thirties was at its worst, he abandoned a secure position as Windsor’s chief librarian to accept a similar job at half the pay in distant Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Similar, but by no means equivalent, for the desiccated prairie town had been so battered by the Depression and by several years of blistering drought that many of its residents were on relief and the town was all but bankrupt.
Years later, when I inquired why he made the move, my father seemed surprised.
”Well, you see, Saskatchewan was a dust bowl by then, barely able to afford to feed its human inhabitants. Nothing much left over for the mind, you understand. Library services had all but collapsed just when people needed books as never before. I couldn’t bring them bread but, by Heaven, I could at least help them get books to ease the misery a bit…. And then too, what an opportunity it was for the three of us to explore new horizons and perhaps learn a little something about how others lived….”
A generation earlier the Great Plains had been devastated by steel-shod plows in the hands of modern men, but had not as yet been utterly laid waste. Although most of the larger natural inhabitants, including bison, grizzly bears, antelope, wolves, whooping cranes, trumpeter swans, and aboriginal people, had been exterminated or reduced to vestigial remnants, a wealth of life still survived even within Saskatoon’s city limits. And where the city gave way to the remnant prairies the world of the Others remained in full and vital ferment. This was my entire world during the years between 1933 and 1937, although I did make one singularly exhilarating foray beyond it – one which was of crucial importance in shaping my future.
My passion for the Others had brought me to the notice of Frank Farley, a great-uncle on my mother’s side. In 1882, at the age of twenty, Frank had left his family’s farm in Ontario and gone homesteading in the Golden West, where he broke several hundred acres near Camrose, Alberta, and farmed them to such good effect that when he retired almost fifty years later, he was wealthy enough to indulge his lifelong fascination with birds. A self-made naturalist in a tradition that sancti
oned and encouraged killing wild animals with such avidity that many species were literally pursued to extinction, Frank’s specialty was birds’ eggs. By the 1930s, he had amassed such an enormous and varied collection that he was accounted one of Canada’s outstanding scientists.
Although he and I had never actually met, the far-flung family net had informed him of my fascination with wild creatures. In January of 1935, he wrote my parents proposing that, come spring, I accompany him on an expedition to Hudson Bay to collect the eggs of arctic birds, a project in which ”a quick young fellow could be of great assistance.” This proposal was as entrancing to me as the offer of a trip to the moon might be to a youngster of today. My parents, bless them, acquiesced without demur and so it was arranged that Frank would pick me up on June 5, a little more than three weeks after my fifteenth birthday.
My mother’s diary for that date notes: ”Bunje [my nickname] up at 3:00a.m. No peace for any of us until 7:30, when Uncle Frank’s train arrived from Calgary and we went to meet it. Bunje terribly excited.”
When Frank Farley swung down from the step of the parlour car, I could hardly have been more agitated if God himself had alighted. My great-uncle seemed so much bigger than life. He stood well over six feet and wore knee-length, lace-up boots. His head was a huge bald dome dominated by the large family nose. His eyes were hooded and had the unnerving stare of a turkey vulture. He was the most awe-inspiring human being I had yet encountered.
But, thankfully, he was smiling. One hand clamped my shoulder so powerfully I almost squealed.
”This is the bird-boy, eh?” he boomed as he shook my slight frame none too gently. ”Not much bigger than a bird at that.”
He let me go and turned to introduce his companion – Albert Wilks was slight and dark-haired, a young school teacher who had also been enlisted to my uncle’s expedition.
Frank explained what he had in mind for us. We would camp on the tundra near Churchill until the pack ice covering the inland sea known as Hudson Bay had slackened enough to permit travel in a boat belonging to someone called Husky Harris. Who would take us north along the coast to Seal River, where we would spend a month making the first scientific collection of animal life from that region. Frank said our collection might include white wolves, arctic foxes, perhaps even a walrus.
I was so bewitched by heroic fantasies of this northern summer that I hardly felt the train pull out of the station. By dinner time the train had left the ”big prairie” behind and was trundling north and east through poplar and birch parkland. At midnight it drew to a halt beside the small Hudson Bay Junction station. Here we dis embarked to await the arrival of a northbound train that would take us to the enigmatically named town of The Pas.
I dropped into a broken sleep on a station bench until a baleful whistle roused me and we stumbled aboard our train, a colonist car built in the 1800s to ferry European immigrants west from Montreal. It was constructed mainly of wood. The seats were hardwood slats without upholstery of any kind. Lighting was provided by oil lamps whose chimneys were dark with age and soot. It was heated by a wood stove upon which passengers could make tea, cook, and heat water for washing. The toilet was a tiny cubicle with a simple hole in the floor through which one could see the ties rush past – an experience that gave me vertigo, and constipation.
Our fellow passengers were mostly trappers of European, native, or mixed blood. I was fascinated by a trio of middle-aged Inuit (the first I had ever met) on their way back to their homes in the High Arctic after having spent many months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in southern Manitoba. They spoke no English and, since nobody else in the car spoke Inuktitut, I could not begin to satisfy my enormous curiosity about them.
At the ramshackle frontier village of The Pas, our car was shunted onto the recently completed Hudson Bay Railway to become part of a train pulled by a steam locomotive that would in its own good time haul us to Churchill. The train consisted of a long string of boxcars filled with wheat to be shipped from Churchill to Europe, with our solitary colonist car, a baggage car, and a caboose attached to the back end.
Entering the boreal forest, we bumped along at a lethargic twenty miles an hour through a seemingly endless shroud of black spruce trees and peat-filled quagmires. Frank joined me at one of the dirt-streaked windows as I peered out at a seemingly endless sweep of scraggly forest dotted with saturated ”moose meadows.”
”That’s muskeg, me boy. Goes all the way to Churchill, which is why they call this train the Muskeg Express.”
Whatever it might be called, it was vigorously alive. The stove was well fed with billets of birch, and the aroma of bannocks fried in pork fat mingled with the burnt molasses reek of the ”twist” tobacco most trappers smoked. Those who did not smoke chewed ”snouse” (snuff). There were no cuspidors, and few addicts could resist spitting on the hot flanks of the stove in passing.
Tea billies came to the boil and were passed from seat to seat so everyone could have a swig. Bert heated us up a pan of pork and beans. I watched, fascinated, as a Cree matron across the aisle breast-fed her youngest while an older child sucked condensed milk out of a beer bottle.
The first night aboard the Express was given over to celebration. There was lively singing in Cree, French, English, and tongues unidentifiable to me. Bottles were freely passed around. Some men played poker and there was a fight during which I thought I saw the flash of a knife blade.
At this juncture, one of the trainmen came along and leaned down to yell something in Frank’s ear. My uncle nodded and pulled me to my feet, bellowing, ”Grab your bedroll and follow me!” We swayed out of our car and to the rear through the baggage car, which contained several canoes and a line of Indian dogs chained to a cable along one wall. Beyond it was the caboose, where the crew had its quarters.
”You’ll sleep here, Farley me boy. Keep you out of trouble, and it’ll be a damn sight quieter.”
The crew gave me a bunk and next morning shared breakfast with me. The brakeman allowed me up into the cupola. Reached by a short ladder, this small tower on the back of the caboose provided a stunning view of the country we were passing through. It was rather like having one’s own observation car. I was also free to step out onto a porch at the rear of the caboose and I was having a pee from this vantage point when something flipped up from the road bed and spun viciously past my head. When another followed, I jumped back inside and told one of the crew about it. He laughed.
”That’s spikes popping out. You see, kid, the roadbed over the muskeg is so spongy the tracks sink down with the weight of the train, and when they spring back up they flip the spikes out of the ties like stones out of a slingshot.”
Thereafter I used the indoor facilities, intimidating as they might be.
I spent a lot of time in the cupola watching for wolves, moose, deer, but saw disappointingly few of these others. Occasionally the Express would ooze to a stop in the midst of nowhere and a couple of people would emerge from the forest to take delivery of packages tossed out of the baggage car. Sometimes a canoe would be offloaded at a river crossing and a Cree family would go paddling away in it. Civilization was limited to the section points, spaced about fifty miles apart, where two or three men charged with track maintenance lived in tiny shanties that bore enigmatic station signs such as WETUKSO … WABODEN … LA PEROUSE … SIPIWESK.
During the morning of our second day out from The Pas, we crossed the mighty Nelson River flowing eastward into Hudson Bay. Then the right-of-way headed due north and the train crawled over a roadbed floating on muskeg, which in turn floated on permafrost. Even in these first days of June the land was still half-buried under snowdrifts and its major lakes and rivers were icebound. Uncle Frank worried that spring seemed to be exceptionally late this year and grew increasingly gloomy about the prospects of travel on Hudson Bay.
The trembling roadbed slowed the train to a virtual crawl. There was little to interest me in the snow-streaked country beyond, and I was reduced to enterta
ining myself by clocking the distance we had travelled from The Pas by counting the black-and-white mile-boards nailed to telegraph poles. I had just watched mile-board 410 slide past when the rusty whistle of our engine disturbed the quiet. At its first blast I looked forward from the cupola over the humped backs of the grain cars and beheld what appeared to be a tawny brown river surging out of the thin forest to the eastward and pouring across the track in front of us.
The French-Canadian brakeman scrambled up into the cupola beside me.
”C’est la foule!” he shouted. It is the throng! This was the name early French explorers had given to one of the most spectacular displays of animate creation to be found upon our continent or, perhaps, anywhere on earth: the annual mass migration of Barren Land caribou, wild reindeer of the Canadian north.
Although the train’s whistle rasped with increasing exasperation, the caribou did not deviate and at length the engineer gave up his attempt to intimidate the multitude and the train drew to a halt with a resigned huff.
For an hour a living river flowed unhurriedly across the track. When the last stragglers had passed, the engine gathered its strength again and we continued north.
At 11 in the evening we rolled sluggishly into Churchill in broad daylight. We had arrived in the Land of the Long Day at a latitude not far short of the southern tip of Greenland. Winter still held Churchill in thrall, its unpainted clapboard shacks and shanties half-buried in dirty grey drifts. The vast sweep of Hudson Bay extending to the northern and eastern horizons was still icebound. The tidal estuary of the Churchill River was a frigid mix of open water and breakup ice. The treeless waste of frozen mosses, peat bogs, and ponds surrounding the townsite was smeared with dirty snow. It all made for a singularly desolate scene, one that was not made any more welcoming by a colossal man-made object at its centre – a gargantuan concrete grain elevator. Fifteen storeys high, and looming monstrously over the surrounds of Churchill, this behemoth with its adjacent storage silos and docks for ocean-going vessels was the reason the Hudson Bay Railway and Churchill existed.