Sea of Slaughter (16 page)

It would appear that unless the pekan finds another champion as powerful as the pulp and paper industry, the likelihood of its continuing survival is tenuous at best.

If the pekan has had some quondam friends amongst modern men, the wolverine has not. As large as a medium-sized dog, the chunky wolverine looks somewhat bear-like. It is equipped with stout claws, sharp teeth, remarkably tough skin, and a steely musculature that, in combination, protect it from most potential enemies.

Early man was no threat to its survival. Native peoples regarded the powerful “little bear” with exasperated respect, seeing in it the personification of a puckish spirit who liked to play sharp tricks on humankind. The wolverine has a remarkable faculty for locating and successfully raiding food caches, human or otherwise. Indians met this challenge, not by attempting to eliminate the raiders, but by constructing ingenious tree-caches the animal could not reach.

Europeans were not so passive. When wolverines raided storage depots built by early colonists, making light of massive barriers of logs, earth, and even stones, the owners were infuriated. They became even angrier when they began commercial furring and discovered their traplines being patrolled by wolverines, who not only ate the corpses of captured animals but, with what seemed like deliberate contempt, sprang traps set for them, then defecated on the traps.

The wolverine had no redeeming features in European eyes. Its tough and musky flesh was almost inedible, and its comparatively coarse fur of little commercial value. So the newcomers personified it as Indian Devil and characterized it as a truly wicked beast endowed with satanic cunning. Reputedly driven by a savage blood lust and possessed of an insatiable appetite (glutton was another of the names bestowed on it), it became the object of a remorseless vendetta. Because of the wolverine's sagacity and its ability to avoid traps and guns, victory over it remained elusive until the invaders stumbled on a fatal weakness in its defences. Being much attracted to carrion—the riper the better—the wolverine proved peculiarly vulnerable to the use of poison.

It is important to realize that the word “trapper” is often a misnomer. From the earliest days of the European fur trade in North America, the name “poisoner” would have been equally appropriate. Although traps and snares were an essential part of the trappers' death-dealing equipment, these men also relied heavily on arsenic and strychnine and whatever other poisons they could acquire. They continue to do so in our time. Despite laws prohibiting it, some modern “trappers” have graduated to the use of sophisticated and fearsome new chemical killers such as those routinely used by Canadian and U.S. government agencies against “pests and vermin.”

By about 1700, poison had come to be considered the only sure way to destroy wolverines, and it has remained in favour ever since. During the winter of 1948–49, I stayed for a time with a white trapper in northern Manitoba. One day he found what might have been a blurred wolverine trail crossing his trapline. He reacted by hurriedly making several wolverine “sets.” These consisted of piles of rotten caribou guts liberally laced with cyanide. During the succeeding few days, as I accompanied him around his trapline, I noted three foxes, a lynx, some forty or fifty ravens and Canada jays, and two sled dogs from a nearby Indian encampment, all lying dead near the baits. They were some of the usual by-products of the poisoner's trade. We did not, however, find a wolverine; probably because there had not been one in the vicinity in the first place. That winter, only five were traded from the whole of Manitoba north of Reindeer Lake, a region embracing about 200,000 square miles of what had once been prime wolverine territory.

Originally, the wolverine ranged over most of the northern half of the continent from Pacific to Atlantic and from the shores of the Arctic Ocean south at least to Oregon and Pennsylvania. Not only was it one of the most widespread of predators, it was also one of the most successful. Today it is extinct throughout more than two-thirds of its former range. It has been extirpated from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the northeastern United States. It is so rare as to be virtually extinct in much of the rest of its original habitat, including Labrador and most of Quebec and Ontario. During the trapping season of 1976–77, not one was reported as having been trapped to the eastward of Quebec City, and this despite the fact that wolverine fur had by then become a valuable article of trade.

Wolverine hair possesses the unique property of inhibiting the formation on it of frost crystals. Inuit and Indians took advantage of this quality by using wolverine fur to trim their parka hoods. The expanding popularity of fur-trimmed parkas, which began as a fashion fad in the 1960s and has now become an essential part of outdoor winter recreation, particularly by snowmobilers and others such, resulted in a great demand for previously almost worthless wolverine pelts. By 1980, a good pelt was fetching $200. Today, a top-quality untanned wolverine skin can fetch as much as $500. Tomorrow... who can tell?

One thing is certain. As the wolverine edges closer to extinction, and its skin becomes ever rarer, it will also become more and more valuable. So the spiral of death will tighten, if we permit it, to its inexorable end.

As I have hypothesized, the name “fisher,” now carried by the pekan, probably originated with a related but quite separate species now vanished from this earth. It might well have vanished from memory, too, had it not been for a twentieth-century discovery in a Maine Indian kitchen midden of bone fragments from an animal unknown to science. Although considerably larger, the bones were mink-like in character and so zoologists christened the unknown creature “giant mink.” What follows is an attempt to unmuddle the true nature and re-establish at least something of the history of a lost species.

Early European venturers found a good many familiar animals in the New World, and of those that were new to them, one seemed to combine the elements of several known kinds. In body shape and gait it was reminiscent of a greyhound, while in its agility and some of its habits, it seemed rather more feline. Although generally fox-red in colour, its short, dense fur seemed more akin to that of a marten. Its head was otter-like and it lived an aquatic sort of life, fishing for its dinner along rocky, exposed sea coasts and from remote, outer islands.

Being a coastal creature it was probably one of the earliest fur-bearers to come to the attention of Europeans. Its pelt would have commanded a goodly price since it combined some of the admired qualities of otter and marten with a unique reddish hue. We have no way of knowing what its European discoverers called this unusual creature; indeed, some of the early voyagers seem to have been in doubt about what to call it themselves.

The earliest mention of it may be a reference in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's late sixteenth-century proposal for establishing a colony in the New World. As noted earlier, in his advertising brochure for the project, he lists some of the exploitable resources of the western seas, such as seals, whales, and horse-fyshe (by which he meant the grey seals). He also includes a species described only as a
fyshe like a greyhound.
Unable to find any species of fish that even remotely answers to this description, and forgetting that to a man of the sixteenth century anything, including mammals, that lived in salt water was a “fish,” historians have dismissed the mysterious creature as a flight of fancy. Yet no less an authority than the renowned English naturalist Joseph Banks, who voyaged to Newfoundland in 1766 to study the local fauna, made the following observation while in Belle Isle Strait.

“About the middle of [September] an Extraordinary animal was seen by Mr. Phipps... bigger than a Fox, tho not much, in make and shape nearest compared to an Italian Greyhound, legs long, tail long and tapering... [it] Came up from the Sea.”

Neither Phipps nor Banks could identify this animal although both were accomplished zoologists familiar with the fauna of the north temperate zone. The similarity to Gilbert's
fyshe like a greyhound
seems too striking to be mere coincidence.

Early in the seventeenth century, the creature may have been known in New England as the water marten. William Wood, writing about the fauna there, gives a list of “Beasts living in the water.” It includes otter, beaver, muskrat, and a kind of “martins,” which Wood describes as “being good fur for their bigness,” by which he evidently meant valuable fur because of being larger than the ordinary marten. What was this animal? It cannot have been the marten we know today—besides being small, it detests water of any kind. It seems unlikely that it was the mink, which is even smaller than any marten, weighing at best a mere two pounds.
1

The early French also seem to have been familiar with the creature but have lumped it in with the otter family. In his description of the fur-bearers of Acadia, New France, and Newfoundland, Lahontan describes the “Winter and Brown Otters,” worth “4 Livres 10 sous,” and the “Red and Smooth Otters,” worth “2 Livres.” From other sources, we know that the blackish marine otter was sometimes listed as a winter otter, so it would seem that Lahontan is here bracketing marine and freshwater otters together under the description “Winter and Brown.” What then are the “Red and Smooth” ones that are only worth half as much, presumably because of their smaller size? Are they the original fisher?

The creature seems to have retained the identity of fisher, or fisher cat in New England, until the main focus of the fur trade shifted west away from the depleted coasts and into the still abundantly stocked interior of the continent. Perhaps as early as 1800, trapper-traders transferred the fisher's name to the pekan of the interior because it bore a resemblance to the coastal creature now left behind in physical fact, and soon to be left behind in memory as well. Certain it is that at about this juncture the original fisher, reduced to a remnant of its original numbers, began to be known as sea mink, the name by which it would be called until the end of its existence.

A fish like a greyhound, water marten, red otter, fisher cat, sea mink—this multiplicity of names has so confused the identity of the animal that perhaps it is not surprising that science failed to recognize its existence until the discovery of its bones left no alternative. Still, it is hard to understand how it could have been so neglected for so long by both natural and social historians. It is surprisingly easy to establish its one-time presence along the more than 10,000 miles of coastline fringing the Atlantic approaches from Cape Cod to mid-Labrador. Its abundance can be inferred from the fact that, although it was heavily exploited from the onset of the European invasion, a remnant population managed to exist until well into the nineteenth century.

During the late 1700s, we have records of Nova Scotian whites and Micmac Indians regularly hunting sea mink on islands from La Have north to Halifax, to which town the pelts were taken to be sold. On one occasion, a Micmac woman was relieved there of several sea mink skins, plus the pelt of a bear, in exchange for a quart of wine.

Less is known about its presence in the northern part of its range, but in 1766 French settlers at the northern tip of Newfoundland told Joseph Banks that “they every now and then See these animals in Hare Bay, and an old Furrier we spoke with told us he remembered a skin sold for five Guineas.”

The Maine coast seems to have been a preferred habitat. Periodically, men with specially trained dogs would visit islands frequented by sea mink. They went in daylight because, perhaps as a consequence of their long persecution, the animal was largely nocturnal, feeding by night and lying up in caves, rock crevices, and other such shelters by day. The dogs were quick to pick up what was described as the strong but not unpleasant musky scent of the quarry and would lead the hunters to its hiding place. If this could not be broken open with pick, shovel, and crowbar, the hunters might smoke the creature out with burning sulphur or pitch. If the crevice was shallow, they might fire black pepper into it from muzzleloading guns. If all else failed, they did not hesitate to insert powder charges and blow the refuge open, though odds were the animal would be so mutilated that its pelt would be worth little.

Up to 1860, a few sea mink skins were still being offered for sale in Boston every year, but after that date it was seldom seen, alive or dead. The last Maine record is of one killed on an island near Jonesport in 1880. The last known survivor of the species anywhere was killed on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, in 1894.

So perished a unique and, as Joseph Banks noted, extraordinary animal. Its like will not be seen again. Yet, for a time, something of it will remain. Scattered along the rock-bound coasts from Maine to Newfoundland are a number of small islands that once provided welcome haven to sea mammals and birds alike.

Each bears the self-same name... now meaningless.

Mink Island.

The first great source
of
wealth to be exploited by Europeans in the northeastern reaches of the New World was oil. Next came fish. The third was not, as we have been taught to believe, fur. It was a more mundane commerce in the skins of those large mammals that lent themselves to the making of leather.

Encapsuled in our plastic age, we have already forgotten the universal and overwhelming importance of leather in the lives of our ancestors. Early seamen used it for cordage on their vessels and, in some cases, sheathed their boats with it. In one form or another it has shod mankind since dim antiquity. Through the millennia it clothed aristocrats and peasants alike. It was essential to a thousand artisan and agricultural trades and was invaluable in domestic life, where it appeared in forms ranging from the bellows that revived the hearth fires to tooled morocco binding on rare books. However, nowhere was it used in greater quantity than in warfare.

Prior to the fifteenth century, armies not only marched on leather or rode chargers saddled and reined with it, individual soldiers carried leather shields or wore heavy leather clothing as a form of armour. Because of its toughness and durability it remained in favour with the military even after firearms largely negated its protective role. Well into the nineteenth century, leather was still being used in huge quantities for military software.

Before the discovery of the Americas, leather for military clothing had long been a specialty product known variously throughout western Europe as
bufle, buffle,
or simply
buff.
This was a particularly stout though supple leather of a whitish-yellow colour. The name was derived from the Greek word for wild ox, reflecting an ancient preference for skins of the aurochs, the archetypal wild cattle of mythology.

By mid-fifteenth century, both the aurochs and Europe's only other wild cattle, the wisent (later, bison), had been mostly hunted to death and, for want of anything better, buff was being made out of the greatly inferior hides of domestic cattle. This was true everywhere except in Portugal where a product as good as the original was still being produced from the imported skins of a mysterious creature the Portuguese called
bufalo
and whose identity and native heath was a closely guarded trade secret.

The Portuguese had discovered it during their explorations of the west African coast, which began about 1415. The mystery animal was in reality the African wild ox, which to this day bears the name Cape buffalo. The Portuguese carried its hides home, where they were turned into splendid buff that sold at premium prices all over Europe.

That first buffalo had to share the name with a second species after Vasco da Gama rounded Cape of Good Hope in 1498, then sailed eastward to a landfall on the Malabar coast of India. Here, he encountered an Asian wild ox whose hide had the desirable qualities of the African variety. It was distinguished from the first by the name water buffalo, and its hides, too, went to strengthen the Portuguese buff monopoly.

The third wild ox to bear the name was also discovered by the Portuguese, probably at about the same time as the second—but on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the North American buffalo. An enormous creature—a big bull could weigh over a ton, measure twelve feet in length, and stand seven feet high at the shoulders—it roamed most of the continent and was at home from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Immensely adaptive, it dominated a bewildering variety of habitats ranging through sub-Arctic spruce bogs, alpine meadows, the Great Plains, the massive hardwood forests of the east, and the sub-tropical forests of the south. At least four distinct races had evolved: the Plains buffalo; the wood buffalo, a larger, darker animal inhabiting the forests of the northwest; the Oregon buffalo, a mountain-dwelling cousin of the Plains variety; and finally the eastern buffalo, largest and darkest of all, which claimed the forested eastern half of the continent as its homeland.

By any standards these animals were all extraordinarily successful. Having outlasted the only predators that were ever their physical equals—prehistoric beasts such as the sabre-toothed cats and the enormous dire wolves—they had had no difficulty holding their own against aboriginal man through the twenty to forty millennia of his occupancy of North America. At about the year 1500 they are believed to have numbered more than 70 million individuals and were perhaps the most numerous large mammalian species on the planet.

Although the bloody history of the Plains buffalo is relatively well known, that of the eastern buffalo has been consigned to oblivion. Neither historians nor biologists seem even to be aware of the magnitude of its aboriginal herds, or of the fact that it was the dominant large herbivore of the Atlantic seaboard when the European invasion began.

The black-robed, forest-dwelling eastern buffalo was not only the largest of its kind, it also bore the greatest sweep of horns and its extraordinarily tough hide was proof against penetration by any except the sharpest of weapons. For native bowmen or spearmen on foot (and it will be remembered that there were no domesticated horses in the Americas until the Spaniards introduced them), it made exceedingly formidable prey. In consequence, and also because the woodland Indians had a plethora of easier prey at their disposal, buffalo seem to have seldom been hunted by them. However, northeastern tribesmen sometimes took the risk to obtain the huge, woolly hides because there were no better winter sleeping robes. It may well have been some of these robes, stolen or traded from east-coast Indians by the first Portuguese, that alerted them to a bonanza in buff in this New World.

During the first third of the sixteenth century the Portuguese maintained a monopoly on North American buff, but then the French got wind of it. After his 1542 excursion up the St. Lawrence River, the Sieur de Roberval noted that the natives “feed also on stagges, wild boares, bufles, porsepines...” Before another decade had passed, the French were themselves busily trading for buffalo skins. By mid-century, they had virtually supplanted the Portuguese. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, two nephews of Jacques Cartier “continued from year to year to traffic there with the said savages, in the skins of bufles, [and] bufle calves.” The French also expanded the trade to the south. Pedro Menendez wrote angrily to his master, King Philip II of Spain, to complain about French inroads on the coast. “In 1565,” he reported, “and for some years previous, buffalo-skins were brought by the Indians down the Potomac River and there carried along shore in canoes to the French about the Gulf of St. Lawrence. During two years 6000 skins were thus obtained.”

Before very long, buff manufactured in France had become particularly renowned. As Charlevoix wrote: “There is none better [than this hide] in the known world; it is easily dressed, and though exceeding strong, becomes as supple and soft as the best chamois.” According to the Bristol merchant Thomas James, it was equivalent in toughness to walrus leather, and a great deal was imported from France into England, where entire regiments were outfitted with it. At least one, the famous Buffs, even took its name from the leather worn by its soldiers.

The English were initially behind in getting their share of this new wealth. Nevertheless, by 1554 they at least knew what a buffalo was, as is evidenced by John Lok's comment that an elephant was “bigger than three wilde Oxen or Buffes.” By the 1570s, they knew what it looked like. “These Beasts are of the bigness of a Cowe, their flesh being very good foode, their hides good lether, their fleeces very useful, being a kind of wolle... it is tenne yeares since first the relation of these things came to the eares of the English.”

Anthony Parkhurst, who fished Newfoundland waters from 1574 to 1578, befriended some Portuguese seafarers who promised to pilot him to Cape Breton and into “the River of Canada”—the St. Lawrence. To his annoyance they reneged, but he seems to have learned from them of the existence of “buffes... in the countries adjacent [to Newfoundland] which [buffes] were very many in the firm land [mainland].”

It was at about this time that another English sailor, John Walker, made what was probably a buccaneering visit to Norumbega—the Maine coast/Bay of Fundy region—which was then coming under French influence. Walker explored the lower reaches of the St. John River where he and his men “founde... in an Indian house... 300 drye hides, whereof the most parte of them were eighteen feet by the squire.” We are told these hides came from “a kinde of Beaste much bigger than an [domestic] Oxe,” and that Walker carried his stolen hides to France where he sold them for forty shillings each—a large sum in those times. The report concludes by adding: “With this agreeth David Ingram, and [he] describeth that beast as large, supposing it to be a certain kind of Buffe.”

David Ingram was the English seaman marooned on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1568 by John Hawkins. Ingram spent the next two years walking north, mostly along the Atlantic seaboard, in search of fellow Europeans, meantime being succoured by the native people. He eventually met a French trader in what is now central Nova Scotia and got passage to France with him, thence making his way back to England. Here, in 1582, he was interviewed by agents of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and told them: “There is a very great store of these Buffes [in the coastal regions he travelled through] which are beasts as big as two oxen... having long ears like a bloodhound with long hairs about their ears, their horns be crooked like rams horns, their eyes black, their hairs long, black and rough and shagged as a goat. The hides of these beasts are sold very dear.” In another context, Ingram is quoted as speaking of “[Norum]Bega, a country or town of that name... wherein are good store of [wild] Oxe Hides.”

Historians contend that the skins Walker stole (and which the Norumbega Indians had probably amassed to trade to the French) were moose hides, but such a conclusion is not warranted in view of their size—“eighteen feet by the squire.” By the squire, or square, means the measurements of two adjacent sides multiplied to give the square footage, which is how such hides were sold. Even when stretched, hides of the biggest moose do not exceed fifteen feet on the square, while those of the wood buffalo—the largest surviving race—though nevertheless smaller than the eastern buffalo,
do
measure up to eighteen feet.
1

Sir Humphrey Gilbert was especially interested in Ingram's story and Walker's voyage because, during the 1570s, he was trying to mount a colonizing venture with the intention of establishing English suzerainty over Newfoundland, Norumbega, and Nova Scotia. He had to persuade potential backers that the venture would show a profit, and he concluded that buffs would help to do just that. In 1580, he dispatched a Portuguese named Simon Ferdinando on a voyage to the Norumbega coast, from which Ferdinando brought back “many great hides” that are elsewhere identified as buffalo hides.

By this time the French were becoming alarmed at the prospects of an English encroachment on their buff monopoly. In 1583, Etienne Bélanger took a party of Frenchmen from Cape Breton as far south as Cape Cod in what was perhaps an attempt to forestall the English who, in the following year, according to Hakluyt, traded with the Indians of the Virginia coast for buff hides. These are probably but two of many ventures seeking a fortune in hides such as the one John Walker reaped in Norumbega.

It is unlikely that they met with such good luck. By 1590, after about a century of increasingly intense exploitation, it appears that most of the buffalo that had once lived between the Hudson River/Lake Champlain valley and the sea had already perished. As the century ended, so did the days of the species' abundance anywhere east of the Appalachian Mountains. To sixteenth-century natives of the eastern seaboard region, buffalo hides had been what beaver skins later became for tribes farther to the west—the currency with which to purchase guns, metalware, trinkets, and booze. The magnificent black wild oxen of the eastern forests, which had taken small harm at the hands of men armed with stone-tipped weapons, fell in windrows before the same men now armed with guns. The stink of their rotting carcasses was the first whiff of a stench that would sweep across an entire continent.

During the first few decades of the new century, numbers of eastern buffalo still existed, but only well inland from the coast. In 1612, Sir Samuel Argoll sailed about 200 miles up the Potomac River to the vicinity of what is now southern Pennsylvania where, “Marching into the Countrie, I found great stores of Cattle as big as Kine, of which the Indians who were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meat, and are very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow and not so wild as other Beasts of the wilderness.” “Easy to be killed
with firearms
” is how this passage should be read.

Too easy. Buffalo were not again recorded on the Potomac after 1624 and, far to the northward in the Huron region of New France, the story was the same. By 1632, according to the Jesuit priest, Father Sagard, although “some of our Brothers have seen skins of them” none had been seen in life for some years past. Even Samuel de Champlain, who as early as 1620 had listed
bufles
, together with moose and elk, as valuable resources of New France, seems to have come on the scene too late to encounter the living animal. About 1650, Pierre Boucher reported: “As for the animals called buffaloes, they are [now] to be found only... about four or five hundred leagues from Quebec toward the west and north.”

Remnants of the eastern buffalo still held on in the central and southern portions of their range. Thus the Sieur de La Salle recorded their presence as late as 1680 in what are now New York, Pennsylvania, some western portions of New England, and south to Georgia. Courtemanche, in about 1705, reported that
boeufs
were still innumerable in the valley of the Illinois River.