Otherwise

B
orn 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 sanctioned 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.