Born Naked (17 page)

My parents gave their assent and details were agreed upon by letter. However, Angus and Helen decided to keep me in the dark until my birthday. This was just as well. Had I known earlier what was transpiring, I would have been able to think of nothing else. When at last it was revealed to me, the proposal was as irresistibly entrancing as the prospect of a trip to the moon might be to a youth of today.

Frank was to pick me up on June 5 when his train passed through Saskatoon. Since this would be more than two weeks before school ended, it posed a problem. My parents, bless them, did not mind my missing that much school time but the principal of Nutana Collegiate would have to authorize such a departure from the rules. I do not know if he would have done so on his own. I do know that Monkey Wilson represented my interests to such effect that the day after my birthday he was able to bring word that not only would I be permitted to leave school early, I would also be excused from writing the end-of-term examinations. For that intervention, if for nothing else, I owe him a lifelong debt of gratitude.

There remained the problems of assembling my outfit—and of mastering my impatience until June 6 arrived.

Angus had read widely on Arctic subjects so he was the expert on what I should take with me. The outfit he finally assembled would have better suited a member of one of Peary's polar expeditions but my father had so much fun gathering it all together that none of us had the heart to bring him down to earth. Uncle Frank did that in due course. When I eventually embarked, I left behind such items as a patented Scott-of-the-Antarctic-style tent large enough to house eight men; a sleeping bag as bulky as a small hay rick and guaranteed to keep one warm at sixty below zero; a manual on how to train and handle dog teams; and an ingenious set of interlocking cooking pots which weighed about as much as I did. I suspect that my father may have been secretly planning a polar expedition of his own since, so far as I know, none of the rejects was ever returned to the store from which it came.

As to my impatience: it was somewhat alleviated by the owls we had found for Mr. Wilson—and by one owl in particular.

On May 20 a torrential rain storm accompanied by near-hurricane winds swept over Saskatoon. The following day when Bruce, Murray, and I visited the owls' nest we found it broken apart and on the ground. Near it were the three chicks. Two were dead but the third—the largest—was still alive.

 

He was about as big as a chicken and his grown-up feathers were beginning to push through his baby down. He even had the two “horn” feathers growing on his head. He looked completely miserable because all his down and feathers were stuck together in clumps and he was shivering like a leaf,

I thought he wouldn't feel like fighting but when I tried to pick him up he hunched forward, spread his wings, and hissed at me. It was a good try but he was too weak to keep it up and he fell right over on his face.

He looked so wet and sad that I got down on my knees and very slowly put my hand on his back. He stopped hissing and lay still. He felt as cold as ice so I took off my shirt and put it over him. Then I carried him out of the bluff so he could sit in the sunshine and dry off.

It was surprising how fast he got better. Murray had brought along some roast-beef sandwiches. He took some of the meat and held it out to the owl. It looked at him a minute with its head on one side, then gave a funny little hop and came close enough to snatch the meat out of Murray's fingers. It gave a couple of gulps, blinked its eyes once, and the meat was gone.

After that we were friends. When we started to walk away from him, just to see what he would do, he followed along behind us like a dog. He couldn't fly, of course, and he couldn't walk any too well either. He kind of had to jump along. I think he knew he was an orphan and if he stayed with us we'd look after him.

When I sat down again he came up beside me and, after taking a sideways look into my face, hopped up on my leg. I was afraid his big claws would go right through my skin but they didn't hurt at all. He was being very careful.

“Guess he's your owl, all right,” Bruce said, and I think he was a little jealous.

We carried him home in my haversack. He didn't like it much but we left his head sticking out so he could at least see where he was going. We put him in the summerhouse and, when Dad got home from work, the owl was sitting in there on an orange crate.

“What are you going to call him?” my father asked.

I hadn't thought of a name up until that moment. Now I remembered Christopher Robin's owl in Winnie the Pooh.

“His name is Wol,” I said.

And Wol he was, forever after.

 

 

 

16

 

 

ON JUNE
5
, ACCORDING TO
Helen's diary, “Bunje up at 3:00 a.m. No peace for any of us until 7:30 when Uncle Frank's train arrived and we went to meet it. Bunje terribly excited.”

That I was. When Uncle Frank's rangy great frame swung down from the steps of the parlour car, I could hardly have been more agitated if God himself had alighted.

I had not previously met Frank in the flesh and he certainly seemed bigger than life. He stood a lean six feet three inches tall in knee-length, lace-up boots. His head, under a soft felt hat, was a mountain crag dominated by the famous (in the family) Farley nose. He had the washed-out stare of a turkey vulture. All in all, he was the most intimidating figure of a man I had ever encountered.

Now he was smiling. One ham hand swept down and gripped my shoulder so powerfully I wanted to squeal like a puppy that has been stepped on.

“So this is the bird-boy, eh?” Frank boomed, shaking my seventy-five-pound frame none too gently. “Not much bigger than a bird at that.”

He let me go and turned to introduce a slight, dark-haired young man who had descended behind him—Albert Wilks, a twenty-year-old school teacher who had also been signed on as an egg collector.

Tipped off by Angus who was always
au fait
with the press, a reporter from the
Star Phoenix
was on hand to interview the “world-famous ornithologist.” The interview was conducted over breakfast in Wang's Chinese Café where, for the first time, I heard what Frank had in mind.

We would camp on the tundra near Churchill, he told us, until the pack ice covering the inland sea called Hudson Bay slackened enough to let us travel in sea-going canoes accompanied by two Barrenground trappers, “Eskimo” Harris and “Windy” Smith, north up the coast to the Seal River. We would then set up a base camp and spend a month on and around the Seal, making the first scientific collection of animal life from the region. It was to be hoped, Frank added portentously, that the collection would not only encompass birds' eggs but would also include white wolves, Arctic foxes, and seals.

My breakfast went untouched. I was so bedazzled by visions of what lay ahead that I may have been slightly catatonic by the time my parents saw the three of us aboard the noon train. My mother thought I looked angelic, but stunned would probably have been closer to the truth.

By dinner time the train had left the “big prairie” behind and was running north and east through poplar and birch parkland. At midnight it came to a halt beside a cluster of shacks and a small station which bore the tantalizing name “Hudson Bay Junction.” Here we disembarked with all our gear to await the arrival of a train from Winnipeg which would take us on to The Pas.

At 3:30 a.m. a baleful whistle roused me from broken sleep on a station bench. We stumbled aboard and found ourselves in the nineteenth century. Our chariot to the North was a colonist car built in the 1880s to ferry European immigrants westward from Montreal after they had been disgorged from the bowels of trans-Atlantic sailing ships.

Colonist cars were designed to transport the impoverished at minimum cost. No effort had been spared to preclude anything smacking of comfort. The seats were made of hardwood slats. They faced each other in pairs and could be slid together in such a way that each pair formed a crowded sleeping platform for four people. There was no upholstery of any kind, no mattresses, and no cushions. Lighting was provided by oil lamps whose chimneys were dark with age and soot. Our car was heated by a coal stove upon which passengers could boil water for tea and for washing, and do their cooking. Some colonist cars had flush toilets of a sort but not ours. There was only a hole in the floor of the toilet cubicle through which one could watch the ties flicker past—an exercise that gave me vertigo.

The car was only half full when we boarded so we were able to claim a two-seat “section” for ourselves. We were lucky. At The Pas—the last settlement en route to the Arctic—the car would become so crowded that some people would have to lay their bed rolls in the aisles.

Our fellow passengers were mostly trappers of European, Indian, and mixed blood, accompanied by their women and children. We also had two Roman Catholic missionaries, and the engineer and three crew members of a Hudson's Bay Company schooner which had spent the winter frozen in the ice at Churchill. All these were exotic enough, but most fascinating was a trio of Eskimos on the first lap of a long voyage back to their homes in the high Arctic after having spent many months in a tuberculosis sanitorium 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.

We reached The Pas at noon. Despite its curious name, it was no more than a ramshackle little frontier village serving as the southern terminus of the Hudson Bay Railway which, all in its own good time, would carry us to Churchill. The northern train was made up of a long string of wheat-filled boxcars to which our colonial car, a baggage car, and a caboose were appended like the tail of a dog.

At dusk we pulled out of The Pas and began the long haul northward at a sedate twenty miles an hour—a speed we were never to exceed and which we often fell far below.

By now we had entered the true boreal forest and were bumping along through a seemingly endless black spruce shroud, broken here and there by quagmires and little ponds. Frank joined me at one of the dirt-streaked windows as I looked out upon a broad sweep of saturated “moose pasture” thinly dotted with tamarack trees.

“That's muskeg, my boy. You'll see enough of it before we're through. Fact, most of what you'll see from now on until we reach the edge of the Barrens is just like this. That's why the train is called the Muskeg Express. By some. Some call it the Muskeg Crawler and claim you could walk the five hundred miles from The Pas to Churchill quicker.”

Our home on wheels now began to come vigorously to life. Someone stoked up the stove with billets of birch and soon the aroma of bannocks frying in pork fat assailed us, mixed with the molasses-laden reek of the “twist” tobacco most trappers smoked. Those who did not smoke either chewed or used “snouse” (Copenhagen snuff). There were no cuspidors and one would not have wanted to walk about barefoot.

Blackened tea billies came to the boil and were passed along from seat to seat so that everyone could fill his or her mug with a smoky brew heavily laced with sugar. Bert heated us up a pan of pork and beans. A Cree woman across the aisle suckled a young baby at her breast while feeding an older one canned milk out of a beer bottle… and I stared until my eyes bulged.

This being the first night out of The Pas, there was a considerable celebration. Lusty songs were sung in Cree, French, English, and unidentifiable tongues. Bottles were freely passed around. Some of the men began playing cards and there was a brief fight during which I thought I saw the flash of a knife. The noise level mounted by the minute. Two young women began having a shrill argument over possession of a very hairy, very drunk young man.

At this juncture one of the train men (there was no conductor) came along and leaned down to yell something in Frank's ear. My uncle nodded and pulled me to my feet. “Get your bed roll!” he bellowed.

We swayed to the end of our car, passed through the baggage car (which contained several canoes and a line of Indian dogs chained to a cable along one wall), then we were in the caboose.

“You'll sleep here,” Frank told me. “It'll keep you out of trouble. And it'll be a damn sight quieter.”

So it was, but much duller. Although I had a bunk and mattress to myself, I regretted missing what might be happening in the colonist car.

Next morning the train crew shared their breakfast with me and the brakeman made me free of the cupola. Reached by a short ladder, it offered an unparalleled view of the country we were passing through. It was like having one's own observation car. I could also step out onto the little porch at the rear of the caboose. I was having a pee from this vantage point when something flipped up from the road-bed and went singing past my head. Another missile whirred by and I hurriedly stepped inside. I told one of the trainmen what had happened and he laughed.

“That's the spikes popping out. You see, kid, the road-bed over the muskeg is so spongy the tracks sink down under the weight of the train then, when they spring back up, they flip loose spikes out of the ties just like stones shot out of a slingshot.” I gave the back porch a miss thereafter and used the inside facilities, unattractive though they were.

I spent a lot of time in the cupola looking for wolves, moose, deer—whatever the vast spruce forests and muskegs might have to offer. They had very little. I saw one solitary moose lumbering away from the track, and an occasional raven.

That was about all, except for human beings and they too were scarce. Occasionally the Muskeg Express would ooze to a halt in the middle of nowhere and a couple of human figures would emerge from the forest to take delivery of packages tossed out of the baggage car.

Sometimes when the train stopped there would be nobody and nothing in sight but trees, until one of our passengers shouldered his pack and climbed down from the car to set off for his trapping cabin in the back of beyond.

Sometimes a canoe would be unloaded and a family of Crees would leave us to paddle away in it. For the rest, there were only the section points, spaced about fifty miles apart. At each of these, two or three section men charged with track maintenance lived with their families in red-painted cabins under grandiose station signs that read: Wekusko… Wabowden… La Pérouse… Sipiwesk…

During the morning of the second day out of The Pas, we crossed the mighty Nelson River flowing eastward into Hudson Bay. The right-of-way now pointed due north and the train ran—crawled, rather—on a road-bed that literally floated on muskeg. The muskeg in turn floated on permafrost—the eternally frozen underpinnings of a land which, even in the first week of June, was still cross-hatched by huge snowdrifts and whose lakes and major rivers were still frozen. According to Uncle Frank, spring was very late this year and he grew gloomy about the prospects for travelling on Hudson Bay.

The uncertain footing now slowed the Muskeg Express to something less than a crawl and there was little to see of interest in the snow-striped landscape. I tried entertaining myself by clocking the slow passage of the black and white mile boards nailed to telegraph poles. By Mile 380 I had tired of this game and was reduced to reading a book. It appeared that nothing was going to happen until we finally reached Churchill.

But at Mile 410 something
did
happen. I had earlier noticed that the succession of stunted spruce trees was being pierced by openings running out of the north-west. When I asked Uncle Frank about these, he explained that they were fingers of tundra thrusting southward from the vast Arctic plains which comprise the Barrenlands.

I went back to the cupola with renewed interest and had just seen Mile 410 slide slowly past when the rusty whistle of the old engine began to give tongue with a reckless disregard for steam pressure. At the first blast I looked forward over the humped backs of the grain cars.

A flowing, brown river was surging out of the shrunken forest to the eastward, plunging through the drifts to pour across the track ahead of us. But this was no river of water—it was a river of life. I had my field glasses to my eyes in an instant and the stream dissolved into its myriad parts. Each was a long-legged caribou.

“C'est la Foule!”
The French-Canadian brakeman had climbed up into the cupola beside me. It is the Throng! This was the name given by early French explorers to the most spectacular display of animal life still to be seen on our continent or perhaps anywhere on earth—the mass migration of the Barrenland caribou, the wild reindeer of the Canadian North.

The train whistle continued to blow with increasing exasperation but the oncoming hordes did not deviate from their own right-of-way, which clearly took precedence over ours. They did not hurry their steady, loose-limbed lope. At last the engineer gave up his attempts to intimidate this oblivious multitude. With a resigned whiffle of steam the train came to a halt.

For an hour that river of caribou flowed unhurriedly into the north-west. Then it began to thin and soon was gone. The old engine gathered its strength; passengers who had alighted to stretch their legs climbed back aboard and we, too, continued north.

The dwarf trees began to march along beside us again but I did not see them. I was intoxicated by the vision of the Throng. Many years later it would inexorably draw me back to the domain of the caribou.

We rolled sluggishly into Churchill at 11:00 p.m.—and it was still broad daylight, for we were now in the Land of the Long Day at a latitude not far short of the southern tip of Greenland. With one exception there was not a great deal to catch the eye. Winter still held the place in thrall. A sprawl of unpainted clapboard shacks and shanties lay nearly buried in drifts which were successfully resisting the half-hearted onslaught of a belated spring. The whole vast sweep of Hudson Bay stretching to the northern and eastern horizons was still ice-bound. So was the broad Churchill River, although its tidal estuary displayed a frigid mixture of open water and swirling floes. A treeless waste of tundra composed of frozen mosses, lichens, peat bogs, and little ponds surrounded the bravely named Townsite. The sky was sombre and a dusting of snow hung in the chill air. It was a scene in which modern man did not seem to belong, yet it was dominated by a man-made object.

A gargantuan concrete grain elevator loomed monstrously over the surrounds of Churchill, appearing even more enormous than it actually was in a landscape where every other sign of human life seemed puny. Towering fifteen storeys tall, this monolith, with its adjacent storage silos and associated docks for ocean-going vessels, was the reason the Hudson Bay Railway existed.