Otherwise (7 page)

Andy and I were soon in difficulties. By the time we had bought our collecting supplies (which consisted mostly of shotgun ammunition), we found we could not afford train tickets to Kazabazua. We had just enough cash left to purchase one-way bus tickets as far as Ottawa, well short of our destination. Worse still, dogs were not allowed on inter-city buses. To our great relief, Angus anted up the cash to ship Mutt from Whitby to Kazabazua by rail way express.

Andy and I set off to hitchhike from Ottawa to our destination. We walked from the city centre to the northern outskirts burdened with a bell tent, bedrolls, and two enormous packsacks. One of these was stuffed with scientific equipment, including a hundred mousetraps, cartons of ammunition, skinning tools, and lethal chemicals. The other contained clothing and fishing, camping, and cooking gear. We also carried axes, two shotguns, and a .22 rifle.

Plodding along the verges of a gravel road north of Ottawa, begrimed with dust and sweat and bent under heavy loads from which the muzzles of our several guns protruded, it is little wonder the few cars and trucks we encountered gave us a wide berth. At dusk, well into the wilderness, we came upon a hulking group of rough-looking fellows milling about a dilapidated gas station in a roadside clearing. As we drew near we saw most were armed, and none looked friendly. We had blundered into a backwoods vendetta. The garage owner and some of his supporters were anticipating a raid and their guns (which they displayed prominently) were loaded. So were they.

Neither Andy nor I spoke French and the garage’s defenders understood little or no English so attempts to explain who we were and what we were doing got us nowhere. When a black-bearded fellow pointed his .30-30 down the road we had just travelled and growled an imprecation, we hurriedly backtracked, stumbling under our loads while half-expecting to hear the whine of pursuing bullets. We retreated at least a mile before, too exhausted to go any farther, deciding to take to the woods and lie low until morning. Not bothering to erect the tent and not daring to
make a fire, we burrowed into our bedrolls and gnawed on dry biscuits for supper as we tried to defend ourselves against a perfect passion of mosquitoes.

At dawn we headed north again. We had to, because Mutt was due to arrive at the Kazabazua station that afternoon and we needed to be on hand to claim him and free him from his shipping crate. We sneaked past the now ominously quiet garage to reach Kazabazua just minutes before the daily train arrived. Ecstatically relieved to see us, Mutt peed on everything in sight, including several bags of mail.

That night we pitched our tent beside a nameless little lake in a paradisiacal setting of old conifers and hardwoods that had somehow escaped ”harvesting” by timber barons. This vestige of wilderness became the centre from which we set about denuding the region of as many of the Others as we could kill. We butchered birds, from woodland warblers to hawks and owls, and trapped and snared mammals ranging from tiny shrews to a lactating vixen who probably had suckling pups in a den not far away. We also collected a wide assortment of other animals, including fishes, reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates whom we preserved in jars and bottles recovered from the Kazabazua garbage dump and filled with formaldehyde.

This slaughter of the innocents resulted in no twinges of conscience because we were able to employ that supreme achievement of the human intellect – rationality – to suppress any feelings of guilt. We believed that what we were doing was fully justified, even laudatory.

At the start of our fourth week in the woods a letter arrived from Jim Baillie. Having expressed his hopes that we
were amassing ”a large and useful collection,” he gave us the bad news that the
ROMZ
’s budget had been cut. Consequently he would have no money this year to purchase specimens from ”outside sources” such as ourselves.

”However,” he added, ”we will gratefully receive specimens as donations.”

This news left Andy no choice but to return to Toronto where, for six dollars a week and his keep, he could get a job as a deckhand aboard a Lake Ontario cruise ship, scrubbing floors and cleaning up vomit, used condoms, and other debris left by holidaying passengers.

”It should be enough,” he later wrote to me, ”to buy my school books this fall, but I sure wish I was still up in the Gatineau with you and Mutt.”

Shortly after Andy’s departure, my mother arrived at Hawk Lake to stay with her parents until she had a home of her own to go to. Mutt and I remained with her there through the rest of the summer.

Since there was no money to be made continuing at the collector’s game, I put aside guns, traps, and poisons and again began living the life that had been mine in Saskatchewan as an observer of rather than as nemesis of the Others.

One day I was canoeing on one of the larger lakes when I spotted a porcupine waddling purposefully along the shore of an offshore islet. Since porcupines do not normally swim, I guessed this one had crossed over on the ice the previous winter. It had outstayed its welcome. Having girdled the islet’s few trees and eaten most of their bark, it was now in dire need of greener pastures.

I paddled up until only a few feet separated us. I thought its tuft of white whiskers and its yellowed, protruding teeth gave it some resemblance to my paternal grandfather and, since it seemed to be almost as amiable, I dared to gently touch it with my outstretched paddle. When it showed no resentment I grounded the bow of the canoe directly in its path. It paused, glanced at me, then reared back, and, before I could react, grasped the gunwale with its front feet, hoisted itself up and with a great rattling of quills flopped aboard.

For a startled moment I considered abandoning ship. However, this would have left
me
marooned on the islet. As the porky settled itself comfortably in the bow, I concluded I might be able to paddle both of us to the mainland.

I pushed off, carefully. My passenger remained motionless until the bow grated on a mainland beach, whereupon it thumped its tail, scrambled over the gunwale, and ambled off into the nearby forest. It did not give me even a backward glance but I had the feeling that if the time ever came when it could do
me
a favour, it would be glad to oblige.

Returning to the Thomson cottage I showed my mother and grandparents a six-inch-long quill retrieved from the bottom of the canoe and explained how it had got there.

Later I overheard Helen telling her parents:

”He takes after his father, of course.
Such
a vivid imagination. Perhaps he’ll turn out to be a writer.”

We saw little of Angus that summer. He had wrangled a free mooring for
Scotch Bonnet
at Toronto Island and was living aboard when not inspecting the far-flung bastions of his empire. He wrote occasionally to assure Helen he was diligently seeking a suitable home for us. The truth was that, having got his Dream Ship, he had no intention of
taking on the financial burden of a house as well. He could hardly have afforded to do so. Buying and refitting
Scotch Bonnet
had left him barely enough money to rent a roof over our heads.

At the very end of August he finally appeared at Hawk Lake.

”Couldn’t find quite the right kind of place to buy so I’ve rented one until we do. Bridge End House it’s called. Twenty miles north of Toronto near a picturesque little village called Richmond Hill which has a small but excellent high school. The house is right out in the country with its own little stream running through it and birds and beasts galore. I’m sure it will suit all of us very well.”

As with so many of my father’s plans, there was a hitch: we would be unable to move into Bridge End House until mid-December when the current tenants were supposed to vacate. My mother, father, and Mutt could live aboard the boat, now moored at Toronto Island, until the house became available but I would have to start school in Richmond Hill on September 3. Angus solved the problem by finding me board and bed with an elderly couple near the school. They made a living selling ”home bakes” and, though amiable, were not stimulating company. After the evening meal (which generally consisted of fried potatoes and fat sausages followed by stale pie), my hosts would crouch over a squawking table radio and listen entranced to
Amos ‘n’ Andy
.

In consequence I spent a lot of evenings in my room building model aeroplanes out of balsa wood, reading until my eyes ached, and fantasizing about accompanying a famous explorer named Frank ”Bring-’em-back-alive” Buck on exploring expeditions deep into the heart of Africa.

The bright side of that long, dark autumn was that for the first time in my life I found myself in a school I really liked.

Richmond Hill High School was a red-brick 1920s-style structure, four-square and unpretentious. Its two storeys housed just eighty students in five grades. Grade 12 (which I had managed to scrape into) had only fourteen students, and Jimmy Stewart – our class teacher and also the school principal, a kindly, somewhat myopic middle-aged man – believed in allowing us lots of latitude.

Foremost among the teachers was our hawk-nosed, piercingly black-eyed English teacher, Miss Edna Izzard. Her ”sidekick,” Miss Jean Smith, was a mousy blonde who was supposed to teach us French and who did succeed in getting us to read a lot of French classics, if in English translation. These two shared a cat, a car, and a house, but nobody in that day and age would ever have admitted to the suspicion that they might also be sharing a bed. Their home was open to any of us who might be in need of advice or encouragement. Edna (I can call her by her first name now, though I would never have dared do so in life) gruffly assured me I could write, and her recognition of my efforts to do so gave me a status I had not known in any previous school.

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.