Eastern Passage

With more than forty books behind me, the time is ripe for paying homage to those at the heart of my life and labours.

Helen and Angus Mowat, my parents, who lit the fire and kept it stoked as long as they lived.

Peter Davison, poet of note, my editorial mentor and shepherd through almost four decades.

Jack McClelland, publisher par excellence, who would – and did – do anything to keep this writer’s boat afloat.

Claire Mowat, my wife and partner, who has propped me up, goaded me on, and borne with me for half a century.

Mary Talbot, unsung amanuensis who saw to it that I stayed on track and who was instrumental in delivering the goods.

Susan Renouf, infallible literary midwife and editorial helmsman, who has kept me on course these past two decades.

Albert, Victoria, Lily, Edward, Tom, Millie, and Chester, and all my friends, human and Otherwise, whose existence has made mine possible … and wonderful.

Farley Mowat
Cape Breton Island
November 2010

Eastern Passage
is the second half of a memoir about my life from early 1937 to mid-1954, but excluding the Second World War.
Otherwise
, published in 2008, covers the first part of the story.

Together these two books give an account of voyages of discovery that go to the heart of who and what I was during my apprentice years as a writer. Although they revisit some events and circumstances already described in earlier books of mine, I make no apology for the reappearance (if in a new guise) of material that is essential to my tale.

I
returned to civilian life in 1946 having served almost five years in the Canadian Army, most of that time in the infantry. Driven by a desperate need to escape the black devils of that ordeal, I fled to the Saskatchewan prairies of my childhood, but the solace and the healing I sought were not to be found in my own past. That winter, however, I chanced upon some dusty government publications that gave me hope. They recounted how, early in the summer of 1893, a young Toronto geologist, Joseph Tyrrell, and his brother James set off to fill some of the yawning gaps in the existing maps of Canada’s northern regions.

Paddled by native voyageurs, the Tyrrell brothers travelled into a world virtually unknown to white men. Ominously called the Barren Lands, it embraced an enormous expanse of tundra sprawling north of present-day Saskatchewan and Manitoba all the way to the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

In the course of three epochal journeys into it, the Tyrrells encountered such multitudes of the arctic reindeer called caribou as to make a mockery of the name Barren Lands. James wrote, “The deer could only be reckoned in acres and square miles. Joseph estimated that just
one
of the innumerable herds they saw contained as many as two hundred thousand individuals.”

Equally remarkable was their discovery that the supposedly barren lands were home to as many as two thousand Inuit.

These were a people out of time. Most had never before even seen a white man, and they knew next to nothing of the sea-mammal and saltwater world that sustains most Inuit cultures. The inland people took
their
sustenance from the caribou, around which their lives revolved.

Engrossed in studying and mapping the land’s geological features, Joseph Tyrrell had little time to spare for the people he met, but James, the more perceptive of the two, wrote that he wished he could have lived “with the Caribou Esquimaux” long enough to have learned how they managed to be “so happily content with their simple lives.”

James Tyrrell’s “wish” was reborn in me – tenfold. I was fired by a consuming desire to meet these extraordinary beings and through them perhaps find a way into an earlier and better world than the hellish one from which I had just emerged.

In January of 1947, I heard about an American zoologist who wished to spend a summer in the Barren Lands and was looking for a Canadian associate. I got in touch with him and before long had committed myself to becoming half of the “Keewatin Zoological Expedition” – the other half being Dr. Francis Harper.

The doctor wanted to spend the coming summer collecting (which is to say, killing) any non-human living things that could be converted into scientific specimens, whereas I wanted to find and follow the great deer herds into the country of the Caribou Esquimaux.

In mid-May Harper and I boarded a train, which ran erratically and very, very slowly north from Winnipeg to the west coast of Hudson Bay. The Muskeg Special, as the train was called, deposited us and our gear at Churchill, where I located a bush pilot willing to fly us into the Barrens.

He landed us near a trapper’s cabin at remote Nueltin Lake belonging to a trio of Metis brothers who, although struck almost dumb by our surprise arrival, made us welcome.

A few weeks later, twenty-three-year-old Charlie Schweder, eldest of the Metis brothers, and I embarked on an epic canoe journey of more than a thousand miles through taiga and tundra during which I met the remnants of the Tyrrells’ Esquimaux – the
Ihalmiut – People from Beyond –
as they called themselves.

Fewer than fifty of them still existed.

That summer was a healing time for me and one that made me hunger for more experience of Arctic lands.

At the end of that summer, I returned to Toronto, where I persuaded Andy Lawrie, a friend from pre-war days, to join me in spending a year studying the ways of the caribou and of the people of the caribou. We set about obtaining the mandatory official permission for an expedition into the Northwest Territories. This went well, and by October prospects looked very rosy. They looked even rosier to me after I met Frances Thornhill, a blond, blue-eyed veteran of the Women’s Naval Service, three years younger than I.

One bright autumnal day, I took her birdwatching, and we ended up making love in a windrow of fallen leaves. A month later she confronted me, white-faced and tense, with a demand that we get married, and at once. In the language of the day, this meant she was pregnant.

The effect on my plans was not as disruptive as it might have been. Once my panic had simmered down I concluded that, although marriage might complicate things for the moment, it would bring an end to aloneness.

The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm but we got married anyway, though we knew it would entail a separation of three or four months before Andy and I established a firm base where Fran could join us.

We were married just before Christmas of 1947. A few weeks later, Andy and I were summoned to Ottawa by the deputy commissioner of the Northwest Territories who was, for all intents and purposes, the reigning monarch of Canada’s northern wilderness. Assuming we were to receive the official approval for our expedition, we hurried to the capital city and were escorted into the presence of Deputy Commissioner R.A. Gibson, a man who seemed to possess the combined persona of Captain Bligh and Colonel Blimp.

He did all the talking.

Having informed us that the Department of Mines and Resources (of which he was also the deputy minister) had decided to undertake its own study of
Rangifer arcticus
(the Barren Land Caribou) and of “the native tribes associated with this animal,” he delivered the
coup de grâce
.

“You will of course understand that
your
proposal cannot now be endorsed, and the requisite Explorers and Scientists Licence to undertake fieldwork in the Northwest Territories will not be granted.”

He paused to let this sink in.

“Nevertheless, my assistant tells me there may be some employment available for you. Good day, gentlemen.”

His assistant “gave us the form” in proper military style.

“There are openings for two student assistants. The salary is minimal, as befits your qualifications. However, you will have the opportunity to associate with and learn from experts in the field, which I am sure you will appreciate.… We must have your decision today.”

Andy and I spent several hours in a beer parlour glumly pondering other possibilities, but when we did return to Toronto it was as government servants. But the situation was not as bad as it seemed. Although the Department of Mines and Resources had pre-empted our original plans, we would at least be able to implement some of them – or so we hoped.

In mid-May, we travelled to Churchill, where Gunnar Ingebritson, the young owner-pilot of a beat-up Norseman bush plane, was waiting to fly us to the cabin at Nueltin Lake.

When we arrived at Windy Cabin, we found the place abandoned and the Schweders gone from the country. However, almost as soon as we moved in we were inundated by the Ihalmiut, who were in desperate straits after a starvation winter. We gave them all the food and ammunition we could spare and then began our work. Andy’s designated task was to study the northbound caribou migration, while mine was to observe wolf–caribou interaction.

Learning from the Ihalmiut that, in late summer, hordes of caribou congregated around Angikuni Lake in the central Barrens, we decided to join the animals there. When Gunnar returned, bringing us a canoe and the rest of our supplies, we arranged for him to ferry us to Angikuni in mid-July.

Gunnar brought mail. My share included two letters from my wife that I immediately tore open – and wished I hadn’t.

Although she had not objected to my going north and had sent me off cheerfully enough, she now saw things differently. Her letters suggested I had deliberately chosen to negate our marriage and had no intention of ever returning to it, or her. There was very little time for me to decide what to do. Bad weather was brewing and Gunnar had to return immediately to his base. I gave him a hurriedly scrawled letter for Fran in which I assured her we
would
be together in three or four months and watched him fly away.

Gunnar returned on July 10, his Norseman so laden with drums of avgas for the long flight to Angikuni that there was barely room aboard for Andy and me; for an Inuk named Ohoto, who wanted to revisit his birthplace near Angikuni; and for Tegpa, a bouncy husky pup given me by the Ihalmiut.