Born Naked (20 page)

This so devastated me that I got out of the car and walked home.

Munro commiserated with me the next day. “Maybe you should have used your hands more and your mouth less,” he mused. “But Violet's probably too old for you anyways. How'd you like to try again with Myra's young sister?”

“How young?” I asked suspiciously.

“Well, she's twelve going on thirteen.”

Celibacy seemed preferable, and safer.

At this juncture I concluded that, if nature was not going to bestow upon me a patina of physical maturity, I would have to do it for myself. I began leading the dissolute life Munro had tried to counterfeit using his mother's cosmetics.

I made a point of staying awake as late as possible every night until I really did develop such dark shadows under my eyes that Helen became alarmed and took to giving me huge glasses of Ovaltine to build me up. I rather liked the stuff but used to wonder what my mother's reaction would have been to the Ovaltine song, which was one of our school-yard jingles.

 

Uncle George and Auntie Mable

Fainted at the breakfast table.

Ovaltine soon put them right;

Now they do it noon and night.

 

Smoking was another dissolute activity in which I engaged. Like every kid in Saskatoon, I had experimented with bits of burning reed or punk, then with the occasional, usually shared cigarette. Now I took up the vice with dedication. I snitched one of Angus's old pipes, stuffed it with Pic-o-bac tobacco (the cheapest available) and went around wreathed in blue smoke whenever I was out of sight of my parents or other censorious adults.

And I took up booze.

This was not easily done because we were still living under the bleak memory of Prohibition, and the sale of alcohol was tightly controlled. Fortunately, my parents and their circle of friends liked to drink and did so on all possible occasions. I used to make a point of volunteering to help clean up after parties at our house. Having carefully collected all the glasses, I would sneakily pour their residues into an empty bottle hidden in the broom closet. It was surprising how much good stuff people left undrunk. Sometimes I collected as much as a pint of what could be quite a potent concoction.

Sipped in the privacy of my study, the lees made me woozy, drowsy, and sometimes sick to my stomach. There was no pleasure in it. Eventually I concluded I was going at it the wrong way. Instead of tippling, perhaps I should try binge drinking. With this in mind, I saved about a quart of party juice in a screw-top molasses jug to which I added a pound of brown sugar, some apple cider, and a cake of yeast. Then I stored the jug in a niche under the cellar steps and temporarily forgot about it.

Fortunately I was alone in the house when it reminded me of its existence. One Sunday afternoon I heard a smothered “blooop” and shortly thereafter the house began to stink like a combination brewery and distillery. I followed my nose down the cellar stairs to find the air thick with fumes and nothing remaining of my jug except shards of pottery and a noisome puddle on the concrete floor.

Since making moonshine was a criminal offence, I was afraid my father would not treat this mishap as a mere peccadillo. This time, I feared I was in deep, deep trouble.

Frantic, I mopped the liquid residue into a pail, carried it outside, and poured it down the river bank. However, even with all the doors and windows open to the chill November air, I could not dispel the tell-tale stench that filled the house. My fate seemed certain until I remembered that down in the cellar was something which might prove to be my salvation.

The doors and windows still gaped wide when my parents arrived home an hour later. I met them—with an apologetic smile.

“What the devil's going on?” Angus demanded. “Are you trying to heat the whole of Saskatoon?” He paused, sniffed, and then looked startled.

“What's that terrible smell? You
haven't
been fooling around with chemistry experiments again?”

No, no, I reassured him. I was very sorry but I had accidentally broken the gallon glass jug of Fly Tox he kept in the cellar and it had spread all over and, of course, the fumes had filled the house. I was really,
really
sorry.

The house stank of Fly Tox for weeks, but every now and then I caught a whiff of a different though equally pungent aroma. Fortunately, my parents were not as gifted in an olfactory way as was their son who, I may say, had now—temporarily—renounced most of his dissolute ways.

 

 

 

18

 

 

THE DRUDGERY IMPOSED BY SCHOOL
that winter was relieved by one brief yet shining adventure. My parents had become friends with painter Ernst Lindner and his beautiful wife Boadil. The four of them agreed to make a mid-winter sortie into the “bush” north of Prince Albert where Ernie knew some old-style trappers. I was to go too and, when I pleaded for the company of Bruce Billings, he was also invited.

We left Saskatoon on December 28, travelling in style. “Jamie” Jamieson, another neighbour on Spadina Crescent and head of the Canadian National Railways system in Saskatchewan, had made his private rail car available to us. Although of much the same vintage, it was a far cry from the old colonist car that had trundled me to Churchill. Jamie's was fit to carry royalty and had done so on at least one occasion. It had a spacious lounge stuffed with mahogany and walnut furniture; two en-suite bedrooms; a dining room complete with gilt chairs and rosewood table; its own galley, chef, and steward.

None of us had ever experienced such luxury before. That evening our elders dined on rare roast beef and drank French wines while Bruce and I were entertained by the chef, who fed us half a fried chicken each washed down with hot chocolate served in silver mugs.

The contrast with what awaited us at Prince Albert next morning was stunning. For one thing, the temperature when we disembarked from our palace on wheels was 40° below. For another, the transport which was to carry us north to a logging camp on the next leg of our journey turned out to be an antiquated open truck. It had just brought several horses south and the only preparation the driver had made for us was to spread fresh straw on top of the frozen turds. We climbed on top of the straw and huddled together under our sleeping bags and blankets. A suggestion that our women might ride in the battered cab was met with a shake of the head from the driver.

“Can't do that. Cab's full 0' stuff that'd freeze solid if it was in back.”

Never mind. It was all adventure; besides which, Ernie and Angus had been provided with a thermos jug full of hot rum toddy by Jamieson's thoughtful steward. Even Bruce and I were allowed the occasional swig, if only to ensure that
we
did not freeze solid.

After some hours of bouncing along an ice-rutted road, we reached the logging camp where three teams of dogs hitched to canvas-sided carioles awaited. Shortly thereafter we were being driven across a frozen lake then through miles of forest trails to our final destination, a cluster of log cabins housing the family of trappers who were to be our hosts.

A cabin had been prepared for us by clearing out the wolf and fox skins which had been stored in it. The aroma lingered on—a wild, sharp odour not unlike that of the circus menagerie that had visited Saskatoon. There were bunk beds along three walls; a sturdy cook stove; and a red-hot, pot-bellied heater in the middle of the room. Although the temperature outside was close to fifty below we were comfortable enough. But when I awoke next morning it was to find the hair of my head cemented to the log wall with hoar-frost.

We spent a week in the bush, during which Bruce and I snowshoed behind the dogs, accompanying our hosts to trap­lines that ran many miles from camp. It was so cold that we saw few live animals—an occasional raven, a fox, and a few flocks of finches. However we saw enough dead and dying ones. I especially remember a young wolf caught by a snare around its neck. For some unknown length of time it had been slowly choking to death. We heard it before we came in sight of it—a horrid, gurgling, rasping sound that haunts my memory still. At another “set” we found the paw and foreleg of a fox in a sprung trap. The animal had chewed its own leg off in order to escape.

I cannot claim that I was opposed to trapping then. In truth, I greatly admired and liked the trappers and envied them their way of life. Yet in retrospect, I realize that the animal victims I saw that week were probably the origins of the passionate aversion I now feel for the fur trade in all its aspects.

 

THE EARLY MONTHS
of 1937 were haunted by Arctic dreams, which seemed appropriate since we were experiencing an especially bitter winter with frequent blizzards and weeks of below-zero temperatures. But I hardly noticed the weather. Shortly after Christmas Uncle Frank had written to compliment me on the work I had done for him at Churchill and to ask if I would like to go north again. This time, he said, we
would
reach Seal River and might even voyage north along the Hudson Bay coast accompanying “Windy” Smith to the legendary Thlewiaza River. “Windy” had told Frank of an unknown species of freshwater seal living at Edehon Lake upstream on the Thlewiaza, where several Inuit families made their summer camps, and which was virtually unknown country to any whites except himself.

My parents were again agreeable. However this time they attached a caveat. I could go if, and only if, my school work improved dramatically. This sort of blackmail has pushed a good many students through school. It worked on me. I became a model student—and hated every minute of it.

In the end it was all to no avail. Come March Angus was offered and quickly accepted the post of Inspector of Public Libraries for the Province of Ontario. He was to begin his new job on July 1, which meant that we would have to move back east—lock, stock, and barrel—early in June. This in turn meant the dissolution of my Arctic dreams, or at least their indefinite postponement. In the event, I was not to visit the Thlewiaza and Edehon, or meet the Inuit and the freshwater seals until ten years later—but that is another story.

My disappointment was acute and devastating. Not only was I going to be deprived of the Arctic experience, I was going to be deported from the one place I had ever really felt at home. I became depressed and, in classic teenage style, grew sullen and uncommunicative. Helen noted in her diary: “This has changed poor Bunje into a perfectly horrid boy.” Nevertheless she was sympathetic, whereas my father was not.

“It'll be the best thing that ever happened to you. Going back to where you came from will do you the world of good. Chin up and take it like a soldier and a man!”

But I was neither. In the privacy of my third-floor haven, I alternately raged and wept. I made wild plans to run off and become a cave-dwelling hermit on the banks of the Saskatchewan where I would be supplied with necessities by my pals. Bruce even volunteered to run away with me.

“Let's the both of us light out for the bush. We can be trappers and live with the Crees up around Lac La Ronge. With Mutt and Rex, we already got the best part of a dog team…”

My human friends did their best but in the end it was not they who calmed my anger and eased my misery. It was the Others. Spring returned to the prairie and that great cycle of renewal again drew me into its vortex—drew me in, solaced me, and led me to an inchoate recognition of a sustaining truth: that, no matter where I might find myself on the face of the planet, I would never be out of place so long as the Others were there to comfort me with their presences.

 

MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY
was approaching and one day my mother asked how I would like to celebrate it.

I knew exactly what I wanted.

“I'd like to go away for a week to Dundurn and camp out there by the big slough with Murray and Bruce. Just the three of us on our own, and Mutt and Rex, of course.”

She smiled. “I'll talk to your father about it, Bunje dear. He's already feeling a teeny bit guilty about taking you away from all this.” She waved her hand as if to encompass the whole of the Saskatchewan plains. “Perhaps I can make him feel a little more so.”

She was as good as her word.

Early on the morning of May 12 we three boys loaded ourselves, dogs, and gear into Eardlie, and Angus drove us to the poplar bluff south of the hamlet of Dundurn which I had chosen as our campsite. He did not linger and I did not encourage him to do so. It would be some time before I would forgive him for so abruptly changing the tenor of my life.

Perhaps in compensation for a dreadfully hard winter, spring had come early. On my birthday the sky was bell-clear and the sun beat down so brilliantly that the reflections from the wavelets on the big slough hurt the eyes. The new grass was vividly, lusciously green and the whole world smelled richly musky and alive. The floor of the bluff was coated two or three inches deep in silky “snow” from the cottonwoods. It kept getting in Mutt's nose and making him sneeze as he sniffed around after chipmunks.

Murray, Bruce, and I felt so good we began playing like kids. We lay down on our backs and waved our arms, trying to make angels in the fluff. Then we gathered piles of the silky stuff to put under our bed rolls, but it was so evanescent that we ended up sleeping on hard ground.

Once the tent was pitched and a fireplace cleared, we went off to visit the slough. It was about two miles long and half a mile wide. Although it had been mostly dry in recent years, this spring it was overflowing and water stood knee-deep amongst the cat-tails around the shores. But it wasn't just full of water; it was overflowing with life as well.

Out in the middle, two or three hundred whistling swans formed a flock so dense it seemed like a great ice floe. We stopped at the edge of the rushes to stare in wonder at the multitudes of birds crowding the surface of the slough.

“Holy cats!” said Murray. “There must be a million ducks and geese out there… but what the heck are
those
?”

He pointed to the southern sky out of which a squadron of airborne creatures was descending with such stately and primaeval mien they might have been pterodactyls coming to us out of Jurassic times. They were white pelicans—enormous, ancient fliers whose antiquity does indeed go back to the age of the dinosaurs. A wild flurry of ducks scattered out of the way as the pelicans planed down to strike the surface with a spray-drenched whoosh.

We began working our way around the circumference of the slough. A stretch of muddy foreshore where cattle had trampled down the rushes had become a living carpet of shorebirds: marbled godwits, long-billed curlews, and a dozen magnificent cream, russet, and black avocets, mingling with hordes of smaller species.

Heedless of hunger we continued to follow the shore, seeing waterfowl of so many varieties and in such abundance that I gave up trying to keep a record of them. Our ears were full of the rush of wings and the cacophony of thousands of voices gabbling about sex, food, travel, and whatever else birds talk about.

Led by Mutt and Rex we waded through acres of reeds and rushes, constantly assailed by belligerent red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds claiming nesting territories. Muskrat houses freshly crowned with steaming layers of swamp muck stood like miniature islands amongst the reeds, and a pair of coots or grebes seemed to be nesting on top of every one. Marsh wrens were weaving their hanging nests on cat-tail stems, and unseen sora rails yammered at us for trespassing on their watery tun.

Tired out we at last straggled homeward, but had to halt while Rex excavated some hillocks of black mud heaped up by pocket gophers. He uncovered none of the secretive mammals themselves, but did reveal hundreds of big tiger salamanders, eight and nine inches long, who were using the burrows as way-stations on their journey to the slough to spawn.

It was late afternoon by the time we flung ourselves down beside our tent. The emerald-leafing poplars overhead were alive with waves of warblers and other small fry avidly competing for the first emerging insects. Interspersed among them was the azure blaze of mountain bluebirds, the orange challenge of orioles, and the flame of rose-breasted grosbeaks.

By then we were too tired and too surfeited with this abundance of living things to pay much attention. When a long skein of sandhill cranes flew low overhead, trumpeting their sonorous refrain, I did look up, but only briefly. Then I lay back in the cotton snow and closed my eyes.

“Hey, Brucie,” I said sleepily. “We've sure seen an eyeful today. You think we'll ever see anything like it again?” Bruce was sucking on a straw. He took it out and threw it away.

“Maybe, yeah. I guess so, if we're lucky.”

We were not to be that lucky. I doubt if anyone else ever will be either. I think it is too late.

 

SIX DAYS LATER
Eardlie came puttering up to our campsite. The tent was already down and everything was packed. We loaded the gear aboard the little car.

And it was here, at this time and in this place, that I really said goodbye to the prairies; to Bruce and Murray; to Mutt and Wol; and to all the Others with whom I had lived the happiest and, it may be, the best years of my life.