I drove until late that night then caught a couple of hours’ sleep while wrapped in a blanket beside Lulu Belle and at dawn was on my way again. It was May 7. On the twelfth, I would turn twenty-five and I was determined to celebrate my birthday in that fondly remembered poplar bluff near Dundurn.
It was late afternoon before I reached the deeply rutted trail leading to my old camping place. By then the darkling sky was leaden and smeared with snow flurries. The wind blew from winter, not from spring.
And nothing was as it had once been.
Although the long drought had eased, dreadful scars remained. Surrounded by dead and broken cattails flailing in the raw wind, Big Slough was nearly dry. The prairie beyond looked as lifeless as stubble on a dead man’s cheek. No throbbing flocks of waterfowl greeted me, and there were few smaller birds. Even the ubiquitous gophers seemed to have all but vanished. I wrote in my journal:
The desolation is appalling. Even the cottonwoods in the bluff seem to be half-dead, their buds all shrivelled up. What the hell has happened to this place? Nothing green. Apparently very little alive. A couple of sad-looking magpies and sober crows and one lean and mangy coyote were all I could find. Drove Lulu all the way to the flats by the river where there used to be a stand of enormous balm o’ Gilead trees. All dead now. The willows by the wisp of a river that still remains are all dead too. It couldn’t look much worse if the whole place had been blitzed by the Luftwaffe.
If nature failed to welcome me back, humanity proved no kinder. As night fell I drove to the officers’ mess of the army camp on the nearby military reserve. Anticipating a comradely reception, I was instead met with suspicion from a handful of career officers who had fought their war in Canada.
As I was driving away, a private guarding the gate kindly told me about an empty shack a mile down the road.
”Got a stove and all. Radio says there’s a storm coming and you could freeze your balls off if you pitch a tent tonight.”
The twelve-by-twelve-foot shack proved to be so superior to a tent that I set up housekeeping in it in preparation for re-familiarizing myself with the surrounding country.
Next day I visited a coulee that had hosted a small stream when I had known it before. The stream had been reduced to a string of puddles, except where a dirt causeway spanned it. Here I was delighted to find a good-sized pond jam-packed with migrant ducks. At Lulu’s approach they took to flight with a roar of wings.
It was the kind of welcome I had been looking for. When I jumped out of Lulu to investigate this watery oasis, I found that someone had stoppered the large culvert that pierced the causeway. I assumed the ”someone” was a farmer providing a waterhole for his cattle until I heard a crack as loud as a rifle shot and beheld a large beaver thrusting its flat head above water, perhaps to see what had made the ducks take flight.
I could scarcely believe my eyes. A beaver had no business out here on the bald-headed prairie! How could such a woodland creature possibly exist in this parched and almost treeless land?
It was a mystery to me until I met Bill Evans. A dirt farmer with a quarter section of land up against the reserve, Bill had been able to survive the Depression and the drought only because the military paid him to maintain its fences. Bill explained about the beavers.
”Them furry buggers! I don’t know where they came from or when. They was here when I homesteaded just after the big War. Them times there was lots of poplar bluffs and willow swales for beavers to feed on and enough rain to keep things nice and green.
”When the drought come on in the thirties, it was tough going for all hands. The sloughs and cricks dried up so then the beavers took to building dams, something they’d never done here before. Never had to, I reckon.
”Well that was fine ’cause the cattle could drink at their ponds and kids could swim there. Beavers and us got along good until your war started. Pretty soon the army started all sorts of training around here. Trucks and troops and tanks running all over the country, shooting off big guns, tearing up the prairie, knocking down the bluffs.
”There used to be lots of deer around but they soon got shot off by trigger-happy soldiers. So did the jackrabbits, coyotes, and lots of other critters, including most of the beavers. By the end of the war there was just a couple beaver families left.
”One day the camp got a new gung-ho colonel. He called me in and told me to open up the culvert under the road that the beavers had plugged, in case there might be a flash flood that would wash the road away. I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening and I said so. ‘You just do as you’re damn well told!’ he told me, and so I done it.
”My boys and me spent the best part of a week with shovels and picks and crowbars unplugging that culvert. The pond drained out and the beavers was left high and dry. Not for long though. A week later the dam was back – not so good as before but good enough to hold the runoff from the only rain we had that summer.
”I’da let the new dam be but the colonel came down on me again so we tore it out. The beavers built it back. And that’s how it went till the hard frosts set in and we all had to quit for the winter.
”Come spring when we busted the dam again the beavers started fighting back.
”The reserve’s always been well fenced with barbed wire strung on posts of lodgepole pine brought all the way from British Columbia. All first-class stuff but now we couldn’t keep fences up at all. The beavers were going for the posts tooth and nail. And not because they had any use for them. There was no bark on them for them to eat, and they couldn’t drag them off to use for dams ’cause they was all bound together by three strands of barbed wire nailed into them.
”Why did the beavers do it then? I believe they chewed down every damn fence post they could find to get even with us. If ’twas revenge they was after it didn’t work against me and the boys ’cause we was paid for putting the fences back up. And the posts the beavers cut down made the best winter firewood we ever had.
”So we had our own little war right here on the reserve. Fast as we’d put up new posts, the beavers would chop them down. It never come to blows, though it come close. One time my son Jack and me was driving our old truck across the prairie when we come upon a pack of four big beavers chewing down fence posts. We stopped the truck and got out and run toward them, yelling at them to get the hell out of it. They must have been really pissed off because what they did was come running right for us!
”We never had no guns with us so we hopped back into the truck pretty smart. I suppose we could have run them over with it but that didn’t seem just right so we drove on home and left them to it.
”Last summer the camp began closing down ’cause your war was over. The colonel went away and the major left in charge didn’t give a hoot about the beaver dam so we stopped pulling it apart. Right away the beavers stopped chewing down the fence posts.
”Who won? Well, I guess you could say it was even-steven ’cause them and us is both still here.”
One day Lulu and I went to Proctor’s Lake, which lay in an incipient desert of parched grass and blowing sand twelve miles to the south of my shanty. It turned out to be another vast alkaline slough with a wide foreshore of sun-baked mud between it and a surrounding fringe of bulrushes and reeds, but it had water in it, making it one of the few functioning waterholes for miles around.
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. Somebody 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.
– 16 –
GOD’S COUNTRY
By 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.