Eastern Passage (5 page)

Nineteen forty-nine was almost upon us, but Frances and I had not yet decided what course to steer.

One morning while I was out on the bay chipping at nearly a foot of new ice that had formed in our well overnight, I saw the corporal from the weather station knocking on the door of our cabin. He had brought us a radiogram. By the time I got back with the water, he was gone but Fran wordlessly handed me the flimsy. Unlike most government communications, this one was concise and to the point.

“Looks like they got my report,” I said a little ruefully.

Fran was half smiling, half crying. “Well, what now?”

“As if you didn’t know,” I said and kissed her. “Goodbye, Brushy … Hello Toronto. Hope Tegpa can handle it!”

Our removal was neither quickly nor easily arranged. Pulling up the rootlets we had established and packing our few belongings did not take long, but finding a plane to take us out was more demanding. The Schieff Norseman seemed the obvious answer, but the post’s new manager equivocated until it was obvious we were never going to be flown out by his company’s plane. Eventually I arranged for a charter from Flin Flon, but a week of fierce storms intervened before a plane could pick us up.

2
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

A
n old Fairchild bush plane with cracked skis and fabric-patched wings finally carried us south from Brochet. Fran rode up front with a sleepy young pilot while Tegpa and I scrunched into a narrow space atop our belongings in the freezing kennel of a cabin. The old plane shook like a jelly and its unmuffled engine roared and brayed as if in agony. But all went well, and a few hours later we landed at Flin Flon, where we boarded a train for Winnipeg. From Winnipeg the trans-Canada express took us to Toronto’s Union Station to be welcomed by Reuben Thornhill, Frances’s father. He drove us to the Thornhill home, where we were to stay until we got settled.

Rube was a hardware salesman who had weathered the Depression while still managing to buy the cramped, semi-detached house in which he and his wife, Florence, had raised their daughter. Frances, Tegpa, and I were given the third floor – two tiny attic rooms in one
of which was a sink and a hot plate. We were delighted to share the family bathroom on the second floor, which was equipped with a toilet that did not need to be emptied outside every week.
And
there was a bathtub in which we could luxuriate as long as we pleased.

Fran and I were comfortable, but Tegpa, who had lived most of his young life in a world without constraints, probably found it the equivalent of a maximum-security prison. After three days of train travel chained to the wall of a baggage car, he had arrived in Toronto to find himself confined to a small box within a box and not even permitted to range around the bleak little backyard except while tethered to a clothesline. This was necessary to keep him from being run over, for he had no experience with motor vehicles.

Life grew even harder for him. His thick, heavy coat was too warm in these urban, southern conditions and in consequence he developed a raging rash that spread across his body like fire. When I took him to the Secord Clinic, reputedly the best animal hospital in Toronto, I was given a tube of ointment, and the veterinarian admonished me for having exposed my dog to unhygienic conditions during the rail journey south.

Tegpa was in such discomfort, bordering I think on agony, that he could not sleep in the heat of the house, so we made a bed for him in the unheated porch, where I spread my sleeping bag on an old mattress to keep him company.

It was not enough.

One morning near the end of January, I woke from fitful sleep, reached over to touch his muzzle and so reassure both him and me – and got no response.

Tegpa was gone.

And so one of the few living threads in the fragile tie with which I had been trying to connect myself for two years to the world from which he came was severed.

—–

Two days after our return to Toronto I was back at university.

Within a week I was finding it insufferable. Why, I wondered, had I voluntarily submitted myself to this confinement in the company of a mob of strangers, most of whom were several years my junior, who knew nothing of life and death in faraway places, and who shared few if any of my admittedly hazy hopes and expectations. They were not of my tribe nor I of theirs, and by the end of the month I was ready to abandon university; which I might well have done had it not been that a few professors allowed me what almost amounted to carte blanche in topics and writing style for my term essays. The hours I spent at my battered old typewriter in the attic apartment of my parents-in-law’s Toronto house made the early months of 1950 endurable, if barely so.

In due course I was granted a pass Bachelor of Arts degree – but did not attend the graduation ceremony. I had more pressing things to do. Late in January I had received a reply to the letter I had sent
Atlantic
magazine from Brochet. The reply – written by the assistant to Dudley Cloud, editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press – informed me that Cloud had “found it interesting and would be glad to hear more from Mr. Mowat about his writing plans.”

Interpreting this cautious letter as an open sesame to the world of literary wonders, I had replied to the effect that I had a book in mind about the fascinating native people of Keewatin and, as soon as my university work allowed, would send Mr. Cloud an outline. I begged him to bear with me.

Although during the subsequent three months I heard nothing further from Boston, the idea of a book about the Ihalmiut had developed a life of its own and I was anxious to bring it to birth. But where, and how?

I had had more than my fill of the city. The prospect of being trapped in its stinking canyons through the long summer months was more than I could face.

My father wanted me to accept a job with the publishing house of Macmillan Canada, but the idea of bedding down in Toronto stood my back hairs on end.

What I really wanted was to return to the north, but without means or backing this was an extremely tenuous possibility. Furthermore, Fran was adamant that if I chose to go back north I would go alone.

Our plans seemed to have stalled until one day we met Elford Cox, a teacher and sometime sculptor at Upper Canada College who had recently bought a farm in the Albion Hills some forty miles northwest of Toronto.

“Mostly swamps and sandhills. Not a lot of wilderness, but pretty private for being only an hour from the city. There’s way more land than I need so I could let you have a chunk.”

The weather was fine and springlike when Fran and I drove out to have a look at El’s farm. It lay on a great glacial moraine strewn with sand-and-gravel hillocks and swampy valleys. It was also strewn with the abandoned farms of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants who had scrabbled a living from it through three generations but who had so impoverished the thin soil that the land was worn out. The farmers had mostly fled but earlier inhabitants, including deer, foxes, porcupines, mink, even beavers, were returning as new stands of conifers and hardwoods began reclaiming the desolation.

This incipient renewal of life struck a chord with me, and I concluded the Albion Hills might be a place where I could live for a while. Fran was enthusiastic, viewing it as an acceptable compromise between the north and the city.

“We could have a little place of our own here and be as private as you like. With birds and beasts galore. You’d be close to publishers and to magazines you could write for.”

I was not so sure. The north was pulling hard and, although I had heard nothing further from Boston, I nurtured hopes of Atlantic Press taking my proposed book and offering me an advance that
would cover the costs of a return to the Ihalmiut country, if only for a season.

But time and my small savings were running out. When Cox offered to “let me have” a piece of his farm for a “nominal” sum, I succumbed and so, for five hundred dollars, Fran and I became the owners of ten acres of wooded swamp and a bald-headed hill. There was no building, but I concluded that if we concentrated on construction through the summer season, we could have a roof over our heads before snow fell.

On May 10 of 1949, Fran and I drove Lulu Belle (a civilian version of the military jeeps I had driven during the war) to the site of our future home. Pavement took us west out of Toronto past Woodbridge, where a gravel-surfaced road continued north to Bolton, a farming community of about five hundred people destined to be our closest “urban” centre. Ten miles beyond Bolton we passed through the decaying village of Palgrave and a few miles farther on turned west on the 30th side road of Albion Township.

The 30th was a road only by courtesy. Originally built for foot travellers, wagons, and sleighs, it was now an obstacle course. In winter it was often clogged with snow. In spring it became a sequence of mud wallows linked by pretty little stretches of standing water where wood ducks happily swam. In summer the 30th was nominally passable for motor vehicles, but so pitted and rutted that even farm tractors sometimes “bottomed out.”

Two weeks of exceptionally fine weather in early May had worked wonders on it, but even with four-wheel drive Lulu Belle needed an hour to worry her way the few miles westward to where a break in a decrepit split-cedar fence suggested an entrance to our little Eden.

The simile seems apt because we had not driven a hundred feet along the base of our naked hill when we encountered a metre-long fox snake resplendent in rich chocolate chevrons and golden scales.
Having only recently exchanged its winter skin for a glistening new one, it was too preoccupied to pay us much heed. I gave it the right of way while Fran curled her feet up under her (the jeep had no doors). We waited in the warm spring sunshine until the snake had eased itself into the tall grass, then we got out and set about deciding just where we should build our house.

What we were going to build had already been decided. Fran’s original preference had been for a two-storey house of modern design. Mine had been for a back-country cabin a little larger and more elaborate than our Brochet home had been. Fran had visions of permanence, but I had no desire to put down roots just yet. Furthermore, I only had about a thousand dollars, which would have to put a roof over our heads and also sustain us through the next several months while we built our home with our own hands.

Fran accepted a compromise design – a three-room, 20-by-30-foot log house with a 20-by-15-foot cellar under one end of it. I had hoped to cut the logs from trees growing on our own property but there were not nearly enough of sufficient girth. This stymied me until I heard about a newborn company offering construction logs at a price even I could afford. The upstart Air-Lock Log Company’s product was cheap because the logs were actually industrial waste – the cores of birch logs that had been peeled down to a uniform diameter of six inches to produce thin sheets of veneer from which plywood had been manufactured. At a total cost of $404.60, delivered, these logs were the answer to a poor man’s prayer. Ours were scheduled for delivery in the later part of May, which meant we would have to hustle to prepare a foundation for them.