Only a few of my fellow students were actually from Richmond Hill. Others came from adjacent farms or had been parachuted into our semi-rural school by parents from distant places chasing the few jobs to be found during the Depression. Whatever our origins, all of us had been shaped to some degree by the adversity that characterized those lean years. In consequence we had mostly put aside competitive behaviour in exchange for the camaraderie, tolerance, acceptance of singularity, and loyalty to the clan that I would later encounter in the army and, later still, among the native peoples of the Arctic and the fisherman of Newfoundland.
Late in December, Bridge End House finally became available. A shoddy imitation of an English country cottage, it squatted forlornly in what had once been a swamp but was now a muddy field drained by a narrow ditch (the ”stream” Angus had bragged about) running through a rusty culvert (the ”Bridge”) under a rutted trail that dead-ended at the house. Wind and rain blew through its scrofulous planking and under its curling roof shingles. Its shallow and almost certainly contaminated well (we never dared have it tested) ran dry if the toilet was flushed more than three times a day. There was no proper sewage system, not even a septic tank, just a cesspool with a nasty tendency to back up and flood the bathroom.
The cellar was truly a nether region. Dark and airless, it grew toadstools and harboured its own wildlife. It was also home to the furnace, a coal-burning monster whose grates had long since melted into slag. It was my duty to stoke this antiquity because Angus was seldom home to do it and Helen wisely refused to descend the slimy cellar stairs. I found it nearly impossible to keep the fire burning properly so we endured the winter by piling on extra clothing and by crowding around a kerosene heater in the frowsty kitchen.
Although my mother never summoned the courage to call it that in my father’s hearing, it was she who re-christened our new home Dead End House. Life there must have been almost intolerable for her. Being without a car (she never learned to drive nor did Angus ever encourage her to learn) she was isolated from friends and family in a rural ghetto.
While my mother suffered, I enjoyed a new life. On foot, bicycle, cross-country skis, or snowshoes, usually accompanied by Mutt, I ranged the back concessions where pockets of wilderness were still to be found. I did not carry a gun – only my field glasses and occasionally my Graflex. I was rewarded by encounters with flying squirrels, deer, a mink, pileated woodpeckers, a golden eagle, and many others.
School was an ongoing pleasure – not for what it could teach me but because the people I was with were willing to accept me on equal terms. For the first time I truly felt myself to be a social animal surrounded by my kind. My mentors and companions at RHHS were not inclined to view me as a wimp because of my lack of interest in competitive sports. Neither did they sneer at me as a ”nature lover.” Many actually seemed to admire my knowledge of wild creatures and several began developing their own interests in the Others.
Richmond Hill was the northern terminus of a rural streetcar line known as the Radial. Running on a track set close alongside Yonge Street, electric trolleys carried passengers between Richmond Hill and the outskirts of Toronto and so made it relatively easy for me to visit the ROMZ, and for Toronto friends to visit me. Sometimes on Friday evenings one or two of them would ride the Radial to Richmond Hill, walk the mile and a half to our house, and stay the night there so we could spend all day Saturday roaming the countryside together.
We also found time for some epic camping trips. Andy Lawrie, Al Helmsley, and I spent the 1938 Christmas holidays at the Helmsleys’ summer cottage on Lake Simcoe. This flimsy board-and-batten structure was put to the test by the fiercest storm of the winter. A four-day blizzard piled drifts almost to the top of the rattling cottage windows and dusted the interior with so much snow not even the pot-bellied wood stove stoked to incandescence could melt it all.
Fuel was a problem. During the first night of the storm the stove consumed the scanty wood pile. With the return of what passed for daylight, we ventured into the blizzard to look for more. All we could find was a snake-rail fence almost buried in snow. Its cedar rails burned hot, but so swiftly that by evening most of it had also been fed into the insatiable stove.
Fortunately the cottage had for several generations served as a depository for cast-off family furniture. These oak, maple, walnut, and mahogany relics burned even hotter (and longer) than cedar rails. And were far handier.
There was, however, one antiquity of such commanding presence that nobody felt like putting an axe to it. A windup Edison gramophone housed in a towering and ornate teak cabinet, it played music through an immense cherry-wood horn. Or had done so once upon a time.
When, on the third day of the storm, I began to look speculatively at the massive teak cabinet, Al forestalled me.
”We have to leave that one, Farl. Aunt Jane’d kill me if anything happened to it. Was a present from her husband back about 1900, and it still works … kind of.”
To prove the point he carefully cranked up the machine’s coil-spring, placed one of only three surviving record cylinders in position, and engaged the playing head.
I could distinguish nothing above the tumult of the storm until I pushed my head deep into the flaring mouth of the horn, where I heard a distant, glassy tinkling sounding vaguely like an insect mating song. The effect was as odd as if I had tuned in to the voice of some unimaginably distant planet … or, as Andy suggested, to a spaceship from a Buck Rogers comic.
He and I were fascinated. Breathing frostily into the cavernous horn while the heat from the stove toasted our backsides, we listened intently. The garbled snatches of music and words that came through to us made little sense … except for a single verse of a single song.
When you’re trapped on the second floor
And someone bangs upon the door:
”Any old bones or rags to sell?”
Ain’t that a grand and glorious feeling? …
Early in the new year, principal Jimmy Stewart called me into his office. He spent some time deploring the rising tide of fascism in Europe before coming to the point.
”I believe, Mowat, you wish to become a zoologist and hope to take a degree from Queen’s University.” He paused to look me in the eye in fatherly fashion. ”Are you not aware that something more than passing grades are wanted for entrance into Queen’s? Your Christmas examination results were appalling. You failed chemistry … physics … algebra … and geometry. And Latin and French both seem to be truly dead languages insofar as you are concerned. Would you care to explain where the difficulty lies?”
I usually had no trouble producing excuses. Not for nothing did Angus sometimes call me Alibi Ike. This time, however, I could not find my tongue.
Jimmy gave me a knowing glance. ”So,” he said gently, ”perhaps your inability to concentrate has something to do with a certain young lady in your class? Yes?” He sighed a little. ”Well, I can recall the feeling….”
Marie Heydon was a slim, supple, dark-haired, and dark-eyed seventeen-year-old. Although no pin-up, she had a vivacity that made her irresistibly attractive, to me at any rate. The only child of the railway station agent in Richmond Hill, Marie liked birds, photography, and poetry. My poetry especially. We were simpatico … and brimming with hormones. We had begun eyeing one another early in November and by the end of January had become a couple.
Although we were in love, love-making was almost impossible. None of us owned a car or had ready access to one. Our parental homes were small, crowded, and the domain of mothers who did not go off to work and so could (and did) keep sharp eyes open for ”goings on.” We occasionally attended parties at the girls’ homes, where we sat around listening to the Big Bands on radio while eating gooey cake and drinking Coke. The best we could hope for would be a little feel or a quick smooch if no adult member of the hosting family happened to be looking.
If the indoor scene was pretty hopeless, the outdoor one in winter was little better. Walking a girl hom
e on a subzero night; accompanying her on a sleighing party; snowshoeing through a frozen forest – all these served to inflame the mood but seldom resulted in satisfaction. One could only expect so much from a girl who was being embraced in a snowbank, or under an old buffalo rug shared by several other couples. There was little chance of making out until spring finally transformed the great out-of-doors into something more accommodating.
This was the way it was for Marie and me until Aphrodite took pity on us.
After badgering my parents for two months, I finally persuaded them to let me have a party at Bridge End House. I planned to invite a dozen close friends on a Saturday night to eat hot dogs and listen to records, to dance, and to breathe steamily over one another. However, on the Thursday before the chosen date Angus announced that he and my mother were going to Winnipeg for a three-day library conference and so, without the presence of a supervisory adult, my party could not be held.
I protested so vigorously that my parents relented.
”Very well then,” said Angus, ”perhaps you are old enough to act like a responsible human being. You can have your party if you behave yourself!” Then, assuming his most military bearing, he laid down the rules.
”There’s to be no more than eight guests, none of whom will enter the bedrooms or go upstairs for any reason other than to use the bathroom. Singly. No alcohol will be allowed on the premises. Guests will depart by 9:30p.m. leaving the house in immaculate condition and, I trust, remaining in that same state themselves. Is this fully understood?”
I whittled the guest list down to seven: Marie, and three couples who had been suffering the same restraints that had been making life a torment for me. There was insufficient room for more. If one excluded the cellar (and one would) and the bedrooms (which were strictly verboten), the only rooms suitable for what I had in mind were the living room, my father’s office (he refused to call it a ”den”), which had a daybed, and my mother’s sewing room, which had a couch.
There was also, however, our caravan, parked a few hundred feet away. Once my parents had departed I cleansed the battered caravan of its accumulation of mouse droppings and dead flies, aired the mattresses and pillows, and set an array of tumblers and glasses on the dinette table.
Determined to make this a truly memorable affair, I spent most of Saturday preparing dinner. The pièce de resistance was a silver serving dish filled with curried veal on a bed of rice and garnished with apple rings dusted with cinnamon. For dessert there was chocolate trifle and brandied pears. Apart from the pears I cooked all of this myself, following recipes in my mother’s well-worn copy of the Fannie Farmer Boston Cookbook. The pears were a present to Angus and Helen from a gourmet friend in England and had been set aside for some special event.
I served the meal on a mahogany dining table that had belonged to one of the founding Fathers of Confederation, my great-great-uncle, Sir Oliver Mowat. The silver, which I had polished to a silken gleam, bore the Mowat monogram. The dining room was lit by tall wax tapers.
The wine was Four Aces Sherry, brought by one of my male guests who got it from the local bootlegger. The wine bottles and two dozen beer bottles stayed in the caravan, sequestered but frequently visited. No alcohol was available in Bridge End House that night.
After dinner we played some records on Helen’s phonograph and did a little torrid dancing. Then the couples began drifting away. Where the others went and what they did I cannot say. I whispered in Marie’s neat little ear:
”Ever wonder what it’d be like living the gypsy life in a caravan?”
The early days of 1939 were cold and leaden until April brought the benison of spring. When I opened the kitchen door one morning I inhaled the sensual smell of warming earth. Mutt could smell it too. He was old now but still game.
”Spring’s here, old-timer. Ducks’ll soon be back. How’s about a walk?”
Wagging his tail, he pushed stiffly past me, nostrils wrinkling as he tested the fleeting breeze. I returned to the kitchen to pull on my rubber boots and when I went outside again he was not in sight.
His tracks were there – meandering to and fro across our field toward the county road. I followed them to a snake-rail boundary fence with flocks of juncos bounding over it. He had taken his time here untangling the identities of the many foxes, farm dogs, and hunters’ hounds who had come this way during the long winter months.
After a bit his tracks left the road for fallow fields where he had paused now and again to sniff at old cow flaps or at collapsing field mice burrows revealed by the melting snow.
His tracks led me to the beech woods, taking me under the red tracery of budding twigs wherein a squirrel jabbered its defiance at the unheeding back of a horned owl brooding her round eggs.
A small pond lay near at hand. I scanned its only recently ice-free surface with my field glasses and, although I could see no ducks, I knew that somewhere in the yellowed cattails a mallard drake and his mate were waiting for me to go away so they could resume their courtship.
The first bee flew by. Then, suddenly, I heard a familiar voice raised in wild yelping somewhere among the dead cattails. There followed a frantic surge of wings as the drake lifted out of the reeds with his mate close behind. They circled heavily while Mutt reared below, plunging recklessly through the tangle, revelling in a surge of the lithesome energy that had been his when guns had spoken over other ponds in years long gone.
I ambled after him as his tracks led me through a cedar tangle into the tamarack swamp and on into a small clearing where the soft leaf mould had been churned as if by the hooves of a herd of deer. But these tracks were all Mutt’s. I was baffled by them until a butter fly fluttered through the clearing on unsteady wings. Then I remembered the many times I had watched him leap and hop and circle, mocked by just such a one as this.
Now the tracks led me beyond the swamp into another field, where they hesitated before a groundhog’s den. I could envisage Mutt’s bulbous nose wrinkling with interest as he wondered if it might be worth his while to do a little excavating with his blunt old claws.
Then a rabbit passed close by and the rising breeze must have brought Mutt its scent. His tracks veered off abruptly, careening recklessly over the soft and yielding furrows of October’s plowing. I followed more sedately to where his progress had been interrupted by a bramble thicket. He had not stopped in time. The thorns still held several tufts of his long, silken hair.
A new scent must have reached him on the wind for now his tracks moved purposefully toward the county road again, and toward the farms that lay beyond. A new mood was on him. I knew it, for it was in my blood too. I even knew the name of the little collie bitch who lived on the nearest farm. I wished him luck.
My boots were sucking in the mud of the road when a truck came howling up behind and showered me in dirty water. I glared angrily after it as it swerved abruptly to avoid a bend in the road. It vanished from my view and I heard the sudden shrilling of brakes, followed by the roar of an accelerating engine….
That evening I drove along the county road in company with the silent farmer who had come to fetch me. We stopped beyond the bend. The tracks I had followed ended here. Nor would they ever lead my heart again.
It rained that night and when dawn broke even the tracks were gone.
The pact of timelessness between the two of us was ended, and I went from him down the narrowing tunnel of the years.
– 5 –
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Andy’s resolute pursuit of a scholarship tied him to Toronto through most of that winter. I did not miss his company as much as I might have, because of a new friend, Harris Hord, a dreamy-eyed, six-foot beanpole who was in my class. Harris was the only child of yet another family driven to the wall by the Depression. He had planned to quit school at the end of this year and indenture himself as a bank clerk in order to help his family but, through his association with me, became enamoured of the world of the Others and concluded that what he
really wanted to do was become a scientist. Although there seemed little prospect of this ambition being realized, I felt he at least deserved a fling and, since I was then nurturing a fantasy of my own, made room in it for him.
Ever since leaving the west I had dreamed of returning to it and of eventually becoming Saskatchewan’s premier ornithologist. Early in 1938, after learning that the ROMZ’s budget for the purchase of specimens had been restored, I asked Jim Baillie if the museum would be interested in financing a freelance collecting expedition to Saskatchewan that coming summer.
”If you’re able to put it together we’d consider buying the bird and mammal skins you might collect” was his reply.
This wasn’t much, but it was enough to set me off. What I needed next was a partner. I first tried selling the idea to Andy who, perhaps disillusioned by the outcome of our Gatineau trip, turned me down. I tried Harris next.
Harris was a tough sell but eventually I was able to persuade him to take part in what I grandiloquently termed a Faunal Survey of Saskatchewan, by assuring him the experience would open doors for him into the sacred halls of science. Or words to that effect.
The next problem was how to finance the plan. When the ROMZ refused to make a cash advance, I emptied my own bank account of the $26.47 it contained; borrowed forty dollars from my father, twenty from my mother; and wheedled a cash advance of thirty more from a rich Chicago surgeon who claimed to own the largest private collection of bird skins in America, but wanted more.
This was the sum total of our capital. We still needed to get to Saskatchewan and find a means to get around once we were there.
The solution turned out to be Frank Banfield, a rather oleaginous Toronto youth about to enter university as a zoology student. Frank was the only child of a pair of Methodist missionaries who had done well for themselves during three decades in China. Now retired, they wanted for nothing. Nor did Frank, to whom they had just given a brand-new Dodge sedan as a reward for having passed the Fifth Form examinations he had yet to write.