Born Naked (16 page)

Now that I was formally launching myself into a career as a newspaper columnist, I had decided to come out of my Farley closet and give Billy the go-by, at least officially. The following week I got a cheque for four dollars—a dollar a column—and a note informing me that I would henceforth have a Thursday deadline to meet.

Heaven was here—was now! I flung myself on the typewriter, frantic to build up a backlog of columns in case I burned out and died young. Visions of achieving immortality as an author danced in my head. I pleaded with Angus to let me use his machine in the evenings and, delighted with his son's success, he agreed and his novel went into temporary abeyance.

Here are some samples from “Birds of the Season.”

 

NO. 1—CHICKADEES

(Penthestes atricapillus)

 

“Chick-adee-dee!” How often have you heard this merry little call and glanced up to see a tiny black and cream acrobat hanging from a branch and gazing at you enquiringly with beady black eyes?… His fluffy little body and cheerful whistle are the essence of Winter and his spring call heralds Spring just as forcefully .

… When an intruder ventures near his nest a string of well-chosen remarks are hurled from an indignant throat and if this fails to have the desired effect of sending you on your way, the midget will attack with true pygmy valour. He flashes his wings in your face with a gesture that cannot be misunderstood and if you still linger he will make dire threats as to your fate.

 

A trifle overblown, no doubt, but at least innocuous. As I gained confidence, I began to load my pieces with weightier stuff.

THE WAXWINGS

(Bombycilla garrula, B. cedorum)

 

When the cold north wind rages over the prairies it may whisk before it a cloud-like flock of swift-flying birds, wafted like leaves through the bitter air. Next morning they will be sitting as erect as soldiers on some bountifully laden crab-apple or mountain ash tree, conversing in low, thin whistles as they labour to swallow a goodly number of the wizened berries.

… One day I came upon the nest of a Cedar Waxwing in a caragana bush. I could see the yellow-tipped tail of the sleek-plumaged bird crouched over her eggs, her back to me, and I quietly laid my hand on her. I gently removed her to examine the contents of her nest and she, with an anxious whistle, lit on my offending hand and belligerently ordered me off the premises.

… if this fearless and beautiful bird takes it into her crested head to raise a family in your back-yard, nothing will deter her, provided that cats and thoughtless boys with air rifles and slingshots are kept at a distance. Be assured that you will be amply repaid for any kindly protection against such villains you may give her.

 

This got me into a peck of trouble with boys in my neighbourhood and at Nutana who used air rifles to shoot birds at every opportunity and carried slingshots in their hip pockets as an indispensable item of wear. In fact, one boy named Donnelly planted a
BB
shot in my ass as I rode my bicycle down the back lane shortly after this piece was published. “You better keep your distance!” was his shouted advice to me.

I was learning the hard way that a columnist's life can be fraught with rue.

 

SNOWY OWL

(Nyctea nyctea)

 

Gliding on silent wings over the unfathomable stillness of the frozen prairie, a great white bird floats eerily over the desolate bluffs and silent farms lying dark and shadowy below the shimmering Northern Lights. Across the bleak, snow-bound and wind-swept fields, a barely perceptible rabbit bounces with easy effort. As it passes over the unsuspecting hare the great shadow swerves and flits, moth-like, toward the ground. The unbroken silence is pierced by a quickly stifled scream and the shadowy folds of night envelop the last scene of the survival of the fittest.

… The Snowy Owl is one of the largest of the owl family… To the casual observer it appears as a large, earless, white bird, faintly streaked with brown and possessed of the most puzzlingly silent flight around which many fanciful tales are written. What little is known of the nesting of Nyctea seems to prove that it nests only in the Far North, laying its eggs in a hollow in the tundra. When they hatch, the Lemmings, Ptarmigan and other birds and mammals in the vicinity are sorely chivvied, for a young owl consumes enormous quantities of food before it becomes the hush-winged master of the tundra.

… Owls are not at all discriminating about what passes their rending beaks, and they swallow both the hair and the bones of their victims, including their skulls. When the digestive juices have taken all that is digestible the remains are regurgitated in a soggy ball. This is a wonderful provision of nature and might be a blessing to man if he could learn to do it too.

… The economic status of the Snowy Owl is on the useful side of the line. His food, while in our part of the country, is chiefly of small rodents and occasionally a sick or wounded Hungarian or Prairie Chicken. Hunters should not condemn him for this as he and all the other kinds of owls are only weeding out the unfit of the game birds, thereby leaving a better and healthier race to carry on.

When the Snowy leaves his wild retreat in the Far North do not welcome him here with shotguns and rifles and do not shoot him as vermin but let him live, a kingly bird among birds, fit to occupy the throne of Monarch of the Air.

 

This piece stirred up trouble of a different kind. Angus came home from the library with a long face after being visited in his office by some of the local hunting fraternity, including prominent businessmen and a member of his own library board. They had made it clear that anybody who chose publicly to defend vermin against the interests of true sportsmen was pretty close to being vermin himself.

Angus told us about it over dinner.

“You know, Bunje, you could be wrong about the hawks and owls being so damned harmless. But you've got a perfect right to speak your mind about it or write about it. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Only… only for the love of God
do
stay away from birth control or anti-temperance league propaganda in future columns.”

This was followed by a good-natured word from Mr. Woodward when next I saw him. “Best not write about hunters any more, Billy,” he warned me. “They're a touchy lot.”

I played it cool in my next few columns. However, when the first twinges of spring began making themselves felt, I got carried away.

I wrote a piece about the Ruddy Duck in which I devoted a long paragraph to an enthusiastic and graphic description of how this agile little bird makes love under water.

Angus had not thought to warn me to leave sex out of my writing. I'm sure he wished he had because when my column reached the editorial office of the
Star
all hell broke loose. Someone—we were never told who—passed it on to someone else in a women's church league, and the fat was in the fire.

Angus and Helen got several letters accusing them of unforgivable laxity in dealing with my religious education and in allowing me to become contaminated by the evils of sex. “This child,” wrote one good lady, “will go straight to hell unless he is led back into the paths of clean thought and Godly behaviour. If he is sent to burn forever, it will be your fault!”

Indignation against my piece flared up so rapidly and fiercely that the
Star Phoenix
bowed before it. With some embarrassment, Mr. Woodward showed Angus a letter from a local businessman who threatened to withhold advertising from the paper “if you allow such disgusting prurience to be placed before the eyes of our children.” I believe Mr. Woodward was sorry about what he had to do. He at least saw to it that I was paid for the piece that never ran; but no more “Birds of the Season” appeared in “Prairie Pals.”

 

 

 

15

 

 

DURING THE WINTER I HAD
become increasingly chummy with Monkey Wilson, my biology teacher at Nutana Collegiate. When he discovered that I knew birds, he began accompanying me on some of my hikes. Monkey wanted to be a nature photographer, and in return for helping him find suitable subjects he taught me the basics of photography. He also promised that when he got a professional camera he would sell me his old one.

Although more than twice my age, Monkey treated me as an equal. Consequently, I was eager to please him, and when he told me he would dearly like to photograph a great horned owl at its nest, I undertook to find him what he wanted.

Ever since Christmas Bruce Billings and I had been making plans for a camping trip during the Easter holidays. These would fall in mid-April and ought to coincide with the first surge of spring bird migration. During the five days we would spend trekking along the course of the river, I expected to find at least a few birds we had never seen before. I was also hopeful of locating the nest of a great horned owl.

Bruce and I set off from the Billingses' farm on the morning of April 12. We were burdened with packsacks and bed rolls, and the dogs were saddled with backpacks. Mutt accepted his with a kind of stoic disgust but Rex tried to shed his under every barbed-wire fence we encountered.

Spring was late and the frozen drifts had developed an icy crust through which we sank knee-deep, and the dogs belly-deep. To make matters worse it began to snow. We both thought of turning back to the comfort of Bruce's house but neither cared to be the first to suggest a retreat. So on we ploughed until a darkening sky and thickening snowfall gave us an excuse to call a weary halt.

 

When we got in back of old Henry's place it was getting to be a real blizzard so we decided to build a wickyup
19
for the night. We couldn't put it on the sheltered side of the bluff because our supper fire might be seen from Henry's and we were scared he'd come and kick us off. The wind got stronger and blew right into the wickyup and covered us with ashes and sparks and smoke. Pretty soon the fire blew out and we guessed we'd better move to a straw stack and burrow into it for the night or we'd freeze to death.

We'd just got started digging into one when along comes old Henry waving a storm lantern and telling us to get to hell off his land.

He is a mean old guy and I'd have packed up and gone but Brucie told him we'd sic our dogs onto him if he didn't leave us alone. Fat lot of good that would have done! But the old bugger is scared of dogs so he cussed us out some and went away.

We chewed cold bannock for supper then the four of us burrowed about half-way into the stack. There was a foot of snow outside but we were warm and cosy even though the mice kept sprinkling straw all over our faces, and Mutt thought he heard wolves sneaking up on us and kept growling all night.

It was pretty cold when we dug out in the morning. You could see your breath, and the little thaw ponds were frozen over. We humped our stuff off Henry's place before stopping to build another wickyup, and cook beans and tea for breakfast. Then we pushed on toward Beaver Creek and saw a red-tailed hawk and a few other birds, but nothing much else because it was too darn cold! Mutt flushed a homed lark off her nest under the edge of a snowbank. Those birds must be crazy! They start nesting in March and get buried up in snow after every storm. She had four eggs and was so tame she almost sat on old Mutt's nose.

At suppertime we camped for the night in a wickyup we built on the riverbank. I made fried bannocks and Bruce boiled up some rice and corned beef for us and the dogs in our tea billy. Then we lay around the fire trying to keep warm and listening for owls.

 

My books had told me that horned owls were early nesters. A pair might begin refurbishing an old crow's or hawk's nest as early as February and by the first week in April three or four creamy white eggs would be ready to hatch. I knew too that the fiercely territorial owls proclaimed ownership of their home bluffs with nightly hootings. It seemed to me that a good way to find a nest would be to take bearings on the direction of these calls and follow up next day.

Somewhere to the south-west of our camp an owl hooted repeatedly throughout the night. We laid sticks on the ground pointing to the source. Next morning we took bearings with my pocket compass.

 

We walked along the bearing, searching each bluff we came to, and found nothing but some crows nest building. Then, in mid-afternoon, we found what we were looking for.

Brucie spotted it about thirty feet up in a poplar. A whopping big nest that could have been anything, except it had a big white tail sticking out over the edge. I climbed up and, sure enough, it was a horned owl. She fluffed up big as a barrel then flew a couple of yards away and lit in another tree and looked back at me over her shoulder, not very friendly. I peeked in the nest and it had three eggs, one of them cracked by the beak of a baby owl trying to get out. “Old Monkey Wilson's got his nest!” I yelled down to Bruce.

 

The temperature hardly went above freezing that day and we had about given up on spring. Again we camped in a straw stack, having nearly perished in our wickyup the night before. During the night the weather changed. We woke to brilliant sunshine and a warm wind from the south—a wind that smelled like thaw and gumbo. Spring had come to our part of the prairies like a blitzkrieg. By noon the temperature was in the high sixties and the world had begun to run with thaw water. By next day the thaw had flooded fields, coulees, and ditches as if an invisible dam had broken somewhere beyond the horizon. We could hardly move about because of water, slush, and mud.

Late in the afternoon the ice in the river went out. The primal thunder as the surging waters burst their winter bonds shook the river bank where we stood watching. A half-mile-wide expanse of ice began to grind, heave, and split into enormous floes, some several feet thick. We knew that, back in Saskatoon, people would be crowding the bridges watching with delicious apprehension as massive ice blocks smashed headlong into the bridge piers.

If a dam appeared to have broken that day, flooding the surface of the world with water, another broke during the night—this time flooding the realm of air with life. A torrent of bird migration had been unleashed and was pouring northward.

Bruce and I lay awake for hours listening to the thrum and whistle of wings overhead. A three-quarter moon was shining and when we aimed my old field glasses at it, we could watch an almost unbroken procession of ducks, geese, and cranes together with uncountable flocks of lesser birds passing across the lunar disc in silhouette. Most were too small and distant to be identifiable but their numbers were astounding. “Looks like all the birds in the world goin' by!” was Bruce's awed comment.

A few days later, after our return home, I wrote this poem.

 

Across the darkened dome of prairie sky

Toward the home of shaggy northern bear,

Vast flocks of swiftly flying ducks go by,

Beating with weary wings the singing air.

 

Close followed by a thousand flocks of geese,

Filling the vernal dusk with eerie cries,

They beat their steady way across the east

Into the flickering Light of Polar skies.

 

Timeless as life, this strong, unflagging flight,

This muted throb of muffled, beating wings,

Awakens echoes in the prairie night

To memories of a thousand bygone springs.

 

Mr. Wilson was delighted to hear we had found an owl's nest, but when Bruce and I revisited it the following Saturday, it was empty. A few yards from the nest tree lay the wingless body of one of the adult owls. Bruce later learned it had been shot, and its wings and eggs taken by a neighbour's boy anxious to collect the bounty being offered for “birds of prey” by the sportkillers' organizations in the interests of “conserving” game birds.

The bounty money paid for the eggs and carcasses of hawks; owls, crows, and magpies amounted to only a few cents for each, but cash money was so hard to come by that boys, youths, and even grown men scoured the countryside, virtually eliminating the nests and eggs of “vermin” birds in many regions. This was especially true close to Saskatoon, so it now looked as if Mr. Wilson's prospects for photographing a horned owl on her nest were virtually nil.

Then I had an inspiration. About five miles north-west of the city was a large farm owned by a Mr. Redding, an English immigrant and literary man who was something of an eccentric. He and Angus had become friends and we had visited his place which embraced two sections, partly devoted to wheat but mostly in natural prairie pasture on which Mr. Redding raised Texas cattle. Believing in doing things the natural way, he allowed his several long-horned bulls to roam free. In consequence his land was studiously avoided by all who had no business there, including hunters and egg collectors. It occurred to me that his property might harbour an owl's nest.

Keeping a wary eye on the half-wild cattle, Bruce and I searched the farm's bluffs and on April 19 found a horned owl's nest. It contained three newly hatched chicks.

Very pleased with ourselves we went along to Mr. Redding's farmhouse to tell him about it. He was interested in birds, and when we asked if Mr. Wilson could build a blind in the bluff from which to photograph the owls, he readily assented.

On the following Saturday, Angus agreed to drive Mr. Wilson, Bruce, and me to the Redding farm, because Monkey did not own a car and we had to transport a bolt of green cotton cloth, hammers, saws, and a bag of nails, as well as the camera gear.

We found the young owls safe in their nest. Then, to the distress of the parent birds who flitted about the bluff like a pair of gigantic moths, we built what amounted to a tree house in a cluster of poplars about fifteen feet away from the nest tree. Five feet square and twenty feet above the ground, it was constructed of branches around which Mr. Wilson wrapped the green cotton cloth. He cut a hole for his camera lens in the side facing the nest, and the blind was ready.

 

According to Mr. Wilson, you could hide in the blind and stay there until the owl thought everything was safe. Then, when she came back to her nest, you could take all the pictures you wanted and she would never even know about it.

“He sure must think owls are dumb,” Brucie muttered to me when Mr. Wilson wasn't near. “She may not see him but she could see that tent if her eyes were shut; and I don't think she's going to like it.”

Now that the blind was finished, Mr. Wilson said he was ready to try it.

“You boys go off for a walk, ” he told us. “Make a lot of noise when you're leaving. The books say birds can't count—so the owl will think all three of us have gone and she'll never guess I've stayed up here in the blind.”

“Okay, Mr. Wilson,” I said. “C'mon, Brucie. Let's get going.”

We walked about a mile away to a little slough and started looking for red-winged blackbirds' nests. It was a nice day and we forgot about Mr. Wilson until we began to get hungry. Then we went back to the bluff.

Mr. Wilson was sitting on the ground and he didn't look the least bit well. His face was awfully white and his hands were shaking as he tried to put his big, black camera away in its case. The camera looked as if it had fallen out of a tree. It was all scratched and covered with dirt.

“Get some good pictures, sir?” I asked him cheerfully.

“No, I didn't,” Mr. Wilson said, and it was sort of a snarl. “But I'll tell you one thing. Any blame fool who says owls can't count is a liar!”

On the way home Mr. Wilson told us what had happened. About an hour after we went walking the owl came back. She lit on her nest and then she turned around and took a good long look at the little tent, which was on a level with her.

Mr. Wilson was busy focusing his camera and getting ready to take the owl's picture, when she asked a question: “Who-
WHOOO
-Who-
WHOOO
?” Then she leapt into the air.

The next thing Mr. Wilson knew, the front was ripped right out of the blind and the owl was looking at him from about a foot away.

He accidentally dropped his camera and then, of course, he had to hurry down to see if it was all right. And that was when we got back to the bluff.

 

This was only a temporary discouragement. Within a few days, the owls had become so accustomed to the presence of the blind that they paid it no further heed. Over the next several weeks, Mr. Wilson was able to take a series of impressive photographs.

Monkey kept his promise. He sold me his old camera for two dollars. It was a primitive little 35-mm machine with only three exposure speeds, and a fixed lens which made it useless for close-ups. Nevertheless, it was infinitely superior to my mother's box Brownie and I loved it dearly.

 

MY BIRTHDAY THAT
year—my fifteenth—brought with it the most memorable present I ever received.

I had sent copies of “Birds of the Season” to my great uncle Frank Farley, from which he concluded that I was showing promise as an ornithologist. Without letting me know what he had in mind, he made a proposal to my parents.

Every June for the past five years, Frank had made a journey to the subarctic community of Churchill on Hudson Bay. This was a one-time Hudson's Bay Company post which, in 1927, had been selected as the site for an ocean port from which prairie grain could be shipped to Europe. Over the next several years, a railroad was built north across more than five hundred miles of muskeg and spruce forest to service the new port.

Quite incidentally this last great achievement of North American railroading also provided a means for naturalists to reach a unique concentration point on the Arctic flyway of millions of migrating waterfowl and wading birds. Some individuals of many species which flew this route in spring remained on the tundra near Churchill to nest and lay their eggs. The eggs were the magnet which drew my uncle north. He planned to go to Churchill again in June of 1936, and proposed to take me with him as an egg collector.