Frank’s interest was in mammals. An avid collector, he had already amassed several hundred skins in his own personal collection. When, one March weekend, he unexpectedly showed up at Bridge End House behind the wheel of his fabulous new car, I seized this God-given opportunity to tell him about my Saskatchewan plans and to paint a glowing verbal picture of the mammalian wealth of the Great Plains.
”Frank,” I enthused, ”you could triple your own collection in a summer out west as well as make a pile of money. Oh boy, just think of the rarities! There’s probably a dozen brand-new subspecies of desert mice alone, just waiting out there to be discovered by somebody. Could be you….”
Before the afternoon was over Frank was hooked.
Little more than a month later his waxed and polished Dodge drew up in front of Donnelly’s Café in Richmond Hill, where a group of friends waited to speed Frank, Harris, and me on our way to the Golden West. Somebody took our photo grouped beside the car. In it Marie stands beside me holding my hand and wearing the Scotch bonnet that was my trademark. The Dodge is crouched like a racing car, heavily laden with two tents, camping gear, five rifles and shotguns, enough ammunition to start a minor war, scores of traps, skinning and preservation equipment, and personal belongings. The load flattens her springs almost to the ground.
Nevertheless, she bravely set off down Yonge Street with Frank at the wheel and Harris and I waving last farewells out the windows.
Ten miles down the road, Frank swerved violently at a stop sign and mashed a fender against a lamppost. It seemed an inauspicious omen, but our prospects improved when halfway between Toronto and Hamilton we came upon an enormous Heinz Company truck overturned and smouldering in the roadside ditch. The wreck was surrounded by people, many pushing baby carriages or towing children’s wagons into which they were urgently loading canned goods that had scattered from the crash. During these hard times, people had learned to seize upon every opportunity.
To us, setting out on an expedition of at least two months’ duration, with practically no money and almost no food (a dozen cookies, a few chocolate bars, and a bag of apples), this was a gift from the gods.
When we drove on again the car was, as Harris happily put it, ”really dragging her ass.” Dozens of tins, many with their labels burned off or scorched beyond legibility, filled every nook and cranny. The unidentified contents, including fruits, vegetables, spaghetti, beans, and soups, became the surprise mainstays of our menus for many days to come.
Crossing into Saskatchewan, we found that a storm had turned the gravel-surfaced highway into a quagmire of greasy muck known locally as gumbo, in which the car was sometimes mired to its axles. A back wheel fell off, then we cracked the pan and the engine lost its oil. A farmer towed us to his farmyard, where he welded the cracked pan. He would not accept so much as a nickel for his help and his emaciated-looking wife insisted on giving us a loaf of soda bread to help us on our way.
Even with all three of us taking turns at the steering wheel, it required almost a week to drive through the province to the town of Prince Albert where we paused long enough to pick up Murray Robb, my friend from Saskatoon days, whom I had inveigled into joining us on what he mistakenly thought was to be a holiday venture.
Our immediate objective was Emma Lake, four hundred miles north of the Canada–U.S. border, at the edge of the coniferous forest that blankets central and northern Saskatchewan. I had chosen Emma Lake as our first ”station” because I had previously camped there with my parents and knew the region to abound with animal life.
Having pitched our tents in the ”bush,” we set about scouring the country for miles about by canoe and on foot, collecting material for our faunal survey – which meant killing everything within range that was not too big for us to handle.
The then director of the Department of Mammals of the American Museum of Natural History eloquently described the rationale underlying what we were doing.
”The building up and serious study of a collection of study skins is well worth the time devoted to it. The sentimental reluctance one naturally feels at killing these wild creatures may be set at rest by the realization that the forces of the wild environment and the tremendous sacrifice of life extracted every twenty-four hours by Dame Nature herself make the activities of the collector a very trivial consideration; and it is better to devote a few specimens to such a serious and lasting purpose than to forego the capture and surrender the victim to a Snake, Hawk, Weasel or predatory House-cat. The collector is usually the least of many enemies an animal may have.”
So we busied ourselves far into mosquito-ridden nights, working under nets by the flaring light of a gasoline pressure lantern, skinning birds and mammals, cleansing their skins of fat with carbon tetrachloride, and preserving them with powdered arsenic. We stuffed them with cotton batting and pinned the mammals’ carefully cleansed little skulls beside them. To one leg of each specimen of bird or mammal we tied a neatly inked label on which was recorded such invaluable scientific data as the body length, tail length, sex, condition of the gonads, presumed age, location where the kill was made, and the name of the killer (whichever one of us had set the trap or pulled the trigger).
Our lives were not entirely dedicated to science. The shores of Emma Lake and nearby Prince Albert National Park had a sprinkling of human occupants – Metis, Indians, wardens, trappers, and on occasion a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman on patrol.
Frank became enamoured of the girlfriend of a large, heavily bearded trapper who was not amused by Frank’s interest. One morning while Frank was checking his mouse trapline, bullets began whistling through the trees around him. When Frank appealed to the police for protection, an RCMP patrol canoed across the lake to our camp to recommend that Frank ”desist from bothering the locals.” After this Frank and Murray were ready for a change of venue but Harris and I were not. Harris had found favour with the wife of a trader at Okema, while I had fallen under the spell of a legend.
Anahareo was an Iroquois, the recent widow of a man calling himself Grey Owl who claimed to be half-Scot and half-Apache and who, greatly influenced by Anahareo’s convictions and example, had become an impassioned defender of the Others. Before his death in 1938 Grey Owl had become hugely famous in Canada, Britain, even in the United States. During the mid-thirties he and Anahareo had lived beside a remote lake in northern Saskatchewan, sharing a semi-aqueous log cabin with a family of beavers. Grey Owl wrote several books about the mingled lives of the two species, all of which I had avidly read.*
When a local friend of Anahareo’s invited me to meet this young woman who had been the imperative in Grey Owl’s life, I eagerly accepted – perhaps partly because I had recently received my first ”Dear John” letter. It was from Marie Heydon, telling me her parents were so opposed to our romance that it would have to end, though we could remain ”good friends.”
When I first saw her, Anahareo was standing in the doorway of a log cabin wearing high leather boots, jodhpurs, an open-necked white shirt, and a fringed deerskin jacket. Although a decade older than I, she was slim, vivid, and beguiling. I have no idea why, but she treated me kindly. Suddenly and utterly smitten, I was soon dreaming of a time when she and I would travel together by canoe to some unsullied northern lake where we could continue living the kind of life she and Grey Owl had made their own.
It was not to be. Just two weeks after we first met, she gave me a pair of beautifully beaded moose-hide gauntlets and told me she would soon be marrying a wealthy Swedish businessman who was prepared to underwrite her continuation of Grey Owl’s work.
I did not sleep at all that night. Next morning I told my surprised companions to break camp – that we were moving to a new location and the sooner the better.
We drove south out of forested country onto a rolling prairie dotted with bluffs and laced with mostly dry stream beds. The heat was intense, and dust was always with us as we jounced along dirt roads toward Fort Carlton, a long-abandoned trading post o
n the bank of the North Saskatchewan River. This river’s headwaters rise among Rocky Mountain glaciers that maintain a flow even when drought desiccates the broad plains through which the river runs.
At the turn of the eighteenth century the North Saskatchewan was a major artery of the northwestern fur trade. In 1810, the Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort Carlton on its banks roughly halfway between Winnipeg and Edmonton. Grandiosely named after King George III’s London Palace, Carlton became a mid-way depot for canoes and York boats transiting the Great Plains. It also served as a meat post, where huge quantities of buffalo pemmican were collected from native hunters to fuel the web of traders and transporters pursuing the fur trade across half a million square miles of wilderness.
In 1885, Fort Carlton found itself at the centre of a war that we, the victors, call the Riel Rebellion. It was fought between government soldiers and police armed with machine guns and artillery, and prairie Indians and Metis with rifles and smoothbore guns desperately trying to retain ownership of their homelands. Fort Carlton was where one of the greatest freedom fighters in Canadian history, the Cree chief Big Bear, eventually surrendered to the paramilitary Northwest Mounted Police. Before another decade had passed, the buffalo upon which the plains people had depended for their existence had been destroyed and the People of the Buffalo were being submerged beneath the first waves of European immigrants come to occupy their lands.
Abandoned Fort Carlton burned to the ground. Berry bushes and cottonwoods took over the ruins until, by the time we arrived, nothing of it remained visible.
We descended into the river valley along a narrow dirt road that ended at the water’s edge but began again on the far side of the river a quarter of a mile away. The river could be crossed on a wooden scow capable of carrying a car or two, or up to six cows. This ferry was on the far side when we arrived. We were awaiting its return when a rangy little man, burned and wrinkled by fierce prairie suns and sporting a tattered straw hat and ancient overalls, came striding down the road. He introduced himself as Servais Rahier, and when we asked where Fort Carlton was he led us through a tangle of berry bushes to an overgrown clearing where we found a few bones exposed by the upturned roots of a fallen tree and some crumbled rocks and mortar that may once have been part of a chimney. This was what remained of Fort Carlton. When we asked permission to camp, Servais invited us to set up our tents wherever we pleased.
”You will be my guests, n’est-ce pas? This is our land, but what we have is yours. Then please come to my house and meet my family.”
Servais’s weatherworn, rough-planked home standing just below the protective lip of the river valley housed him and his wife, Isabella, and several children ranging from eight to eighteen. He had emigrated to Canada in 1919 from a farming village in Belgium that had been all but obliterated during the First World War. Barely eighteen years old and on his own, he had jumped down from a railway colonist car one spring morning at the Metis village of Duck Lake.
Within a month he had staked a claim to a homestead embracing a quarter section (160 acres) of virgin prairie overlooking the valley of the North Saskatchewan. Then he dug a windowless dugout in the valley wall, where he lived for two years while clearing fifty acres with an ox and a single-furrow sod-breaker plow in order to plant his first crop.
When he had harvested it, he sent for the girl he had left behind and, while she was en route from Belgium, built her a one-room, sod-and-log cabin.
Servais, Isabella, and their children had only just begun to make ends meet by 1929 when the world of finance collapsed and the Great Depression swept over them. This di saster was close followed by a prolonged and consuming drought. At the time we met them, the Rahiers were effectively penniless (as indeed they had been during most of the previous two decades), yet were as ebullient and seemingly as contented as if they were on top of the world.
Frank and Harris had never met their like before. I had, and I knew them as avatars of mankind’s ancient stock, survivors winnowed by rigorous adversity that had given them a willingness – indeed a compulsion – to help one another and others no matter what the cost.
The Rahiers took us under their wing. We were ordered to present ourselves at their table for at least one meal a day and if we failed to show up the children would bring us hot dishes from the family table. We ate bread baked from grain they grew and milled themselves; potatoes and other vegetables they somehow managed to grow in their dusty garden; pies and puddings stuffed with cranberries, wild raspberries, or strawberries picked by the children; delectable fishes called goldeyes caught in the nearby river; prairie chickens, jackrabbits, and wild ducks, all gifts of the prairie, its sloughs, and marshes. They also fed us sauerkraut, salt pork, and bottled meat from the steer they butchered every fall or from white-tailed deer shot among the tangled woods in the river valley. Eggs, milk, butter, cream, and even handmade ice cream were pressed upon us. On special occasions they gave us heady saskatoon berry wine or barley beer they had brewed themselves.
They were a musical lot. Led by Servais playing a shiny old fiddle, the children constituted an orchestra. Playing banjos, Jew’s harps, mouth organs, and a rebuilt accordion, they achieved something akin to harmony. They liked to perform at our campfire, sometimes joined by youngsters from Cree families who lived seasonally in tents at the river’s edge while netting and drying goldeye for winter use.
As we sat at their family table, the Rahier children sometimes entertained us with operatic records played on an old Victrola. Although the mainspring was broken, they made the machine work by spinning the turntable with their fingers while coaxing music from worn old records with thorn needles harvested from Isabella’s one precious rose bush.
Katherine, the eldest daughter, would sometimes sing along with the scratchy voice coming from the Victrola’s horn. Her extraordinarily inventive renditions of arias from Aida remain with me long after the best efforts of the Metropolitan Opera Company have faded from memory.
Frank, whose boast was that he never missed an opportunity to collect a new mammal, quickly became interested in Katherine, who one day responded by inviting him to accompany her to the village of Carlton, fifteen miles away across an ocean of shimmering prairie. She volunteered to drive Frank there in the Rahiers’ automobile, a 1919 McLaughlin-Buick touring car whose superstructure (including windshield and doors) had long since vanished. So had the seats, to be replaced by wooden slats. When all six cylinders were firing, this massive vehicle could attain a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. This was quite fast enough because the car had only one functional brake – a handbrake – on just one of its wooden-spoked wheels.
Frank offered to drive but Katherine would have none of that. The pair set off in a cloud of yellow dust and we saw nothing more of them until late next morning when Frank appeared at camp subdued and chastened and reluctant to talk about his experience. We eventually learned that he and Katherine had surprised a coyote on the track that passed for a road. Frank did not yet have a coyote in his collection and desperately wanted this one so, eager to oblige, Katherine had wheeled the car out of the ruts and headed it off across the prairie in pursuit.
Wildly bouncing into and out of gopher and badger holes, flinging dirt and tumbleweed in all directions, they were gaining on the coyote when it reversed its course and disappeared. Katherine hauled on the brake handle, which made the big car slew sideways so abruptly that a wheel broke and Frank was flung out of the car and into a patch of Russian thistle – nature’s version of barbed wire.
Frank and Katherine walked the ten miles back to the farm, where, without a word of censure or complaint, Servais hitched up the ox and went off to haul the car back home. Then he and the boys carved new spokes for the broken wheel. Two days later the old vehicle was back in service.
During the remainder of our stay, Frank concentrated on four-legged mammals, which were in great abundance at Fort Carlton. But then there are few places in the world where small mammals are not abunda
nt, though humans are generally unaware of this because most four-legged creatures are too small or of too little monetary worth to merit our attention.
As a case in point, the places we visited in Saskatch e-wan were home to some sixty different mammalian species. Rodents alone included meadow jumping mice, woodland jumping mice, pocket mice, house mice, deer mice, white-footed mice, grasshopper mice, harvest mice, red-backed voles, meadow voles, sage voles, prairie voles, blond-faced voles, heather voles, bog lemmings, kangaroo rats, wood rats, Norway rats, pocket gophers, flying squirrels, red squirrels, grey squirrels, fox squirrels, prairie dogs, pocket gophers, wood gophers, common gophers, striped gophers, chipmunks, muskrats, beaver, cottontail rabbits, snowshoe rabbits, and jackrabbits.
Then there were the members of the shrew family: short-eared shrews, arctic shrews, masked shrews, prairie shrews, dusky shrews, the truly diminutive pygmy shrews (half a dozen of which weigh less than an ounce), and water shrews (creatures smaller than one’s little finger living, as the name implies, in and under the water).
All are preyed upon by martens, ermines, minks, otters, long-tailed weasels, least weasels, black-footed ferrets, red foxes, kit foxes, black (silver) foxes, badgers, and coyotes.
To be added to the list are the mammalian aeronauts. Those living in Saskatchewan include the big brown bat, little brown bat, silver-haired bat, red bat, hoary bat, long-eared bat, and small-footed bat.
The little people of the mammalian world were almost un believably abundant a century ago when a single acre of virgin prairie could harbour thousands of shrews, mice, voles, ground squirrels, and their ilk. However, their once-thriving communities have since been decimated by the destruction of their habitat, by deliberate poisoning and trapping campaigns, and ”incidentally” by herbicides and insecticides.
During the summer of 1939 we four budding scientists did our bit to hasten the decline. Fort Carlton’s primary attraction for us was that it was the ”type locality” for two species of ground squirrels.