Sea of Slaughter (18 page)

The highlight of the annual hunt is the suspension of a captured bobcat in a wire cage from a tree limb, while as many as a hundred frenzied hounds form a milling mob at the base of the tree. It is of interest to note that, while Nova Scotia's Department of Lands and Forests forbids the private possession of captive bobcats, its officers supply the ritual sacrifice for this event.

The Truro-centred hunt has been a tremendous success. During the winter of 1969–70, 1,729 bobcats were reportedly killed in Nova Scotia. By 1975–76, the kill had risen to 1,862, with an additional 752 slaughtered in nearby New Brunswick, mainly by sport hunters. However, the great days of the World Bobcat Hunt are now rapidly declining as the last stronghold of the bobcat in the eastern seaboard region is systematically destroyed... for fun and profit.

Three wild members of the dog family inhabited the eastern seaboard region at first European contact, together with several kinds of domesticated dogs. Two of the wild kind have since disappeared, along with most of the aboriginal domestic ones, but—and this is a unique event—a new species has appeared and bids fair to making a niche for itself in a portion of the world where its cousins suffered annihilation at the hands of modern man.

Let us first look briefly at the domestic dogs. They included the so-called husky of the Inuit, several sorts of smallish hunting-cum-sled dogs belonging to mainland Indians, and a mysterious black water dog that seems to have been peculiar to Newfoundland.

The aboriginal husky could still be found on the Labrador coast as late as 1890. Photographs show it to have been similar to Arctic Eskimoan dogs, but rangier and not so heavily furred—as befitted an animal living in a more moderate climate. The disintegration of the human culture to which it belonged brought an end to the husky, too. Until the 1940s, some cross-bred relicts of the breed existed at a few Labrador settlements such as Nain, where they still served a useful purpose as sled and pack animals. During the succeeding years they have been displaced by snowmobiles, until now only a few mangy and generally unwanted individuals remain, and they carry the blood of so many introduced canine strains as to make them unrecognizable.

The same story is to be told of the mainland Indian dogs, of which no apparent examples seem to have continued in existence after the early decades of this century. Only one of the three has managed to survive, albeit in modified form. The first mention of this remarkable creature that I can find appears in an account of the 1593 voyage of the
Marigold
to Cabot Strait, where her people met natives, “and their dogs, of colour blacke, not so bigge as a greyhound [which] followed them at their heels.” Although historians claim that the Beothuks (the Newfoundland natives) did not possess dogs, I have found ample evidence that they did. Furthermore, when these were described, it was invariably as
black
dogs that bore no resemblance to the varieties possessed by mainland tribes.

What is quite certain is that the black, presumably aboriginal dog of Newfoundland is the most important ancestor of the breeds we know today as the Labrador, Newfoundland, and several other retrievers. Until as late as the 1950s, good examples of the type were still to be found in some remote Newfoundland outports where they were, and always had been, known simply as water dogs. Few, if any, still remain, but at least the main genetic elements of the Newfoundland water dog continue in existence, which is more than can be said of their one-time human associates, the Beothuk Indians, who were exterminated to the last man, woman, and child by Newfoundland settlers and fishermen.

Two species of fox inhabited the northeastern seaboard in the sixteenth century. The red fox, in both its red and black (or silver) colour phases, was abundant throughout the forested regions, and the available evidence suggests that the black was as common as the red. It is the only form mentioned by Parkhurst from Newfoundland in the 1570s. Champlain reported that walrus hunters on Sable Island around the turn of the century “captured a large number of very fine black foxes, the skins of which they carefully preserved.” John Rose noted that foxes were abundant at Boston and that “some were perfect black.” Even as late as 1780 in southern Labrador, Cartwright's catch of foxes for the year included sixteen silvers and twenty-eight cross (intermediates) to only nineteen reds. The black, or silver, pelt was highly valued then, as now, with the result that this colour phase has been almost extirpated from the remaining wild fox population of eastern North America. The red phase still hangs on throughout most of its original range but increasing demands for fox furs for the fun-fashion trade have greatly depleted its numbers in the past few years and it is now a comparative rarity in most places.

The smaller—it is not much larger than a good-sized cat—white fox has not done so well. Like the white bear, it is now reckoned to be solely an Arctic species and, in fact, is now officially called Arctic fox. Yet at first contact it was a common resident along the Gulf coast of Labrador and even in Newfoundland.

It, too, appeared in two colour phases—white and the so-called blue, which is actually grey. Parkhurst tells us that, in Newfoundland, “There be foxes, black, white and grey.” The black we have already mentioned. The white could only have been the present species. The grey could have referred either to the “blue” phase in winter or to the summer coat of both, for the white fox of whatever colour undergoes a spring moult that leaves it clothed in dun-coloured, brown-to-greyish fur.

The white fox is distinguished by its insatiable curiosity and tameness toward men, which makes it extremely vulnerable. I knew a barren-land trapper in Keewatin who used to catch as many as 100 each winter without going more than a few score yards from his cabin. In early autumn, he would place several caribou carcasses around the perimeter of his “yard,” just far enough away so that the stench as they rotted would not be intolerable. The odour would bring in white foxes, which in fall and winter are nomadic, from hundreds of square miles of tundra until dozens were feeding on the carrion. “They'd get underfoot like a bunch of cats, they was that tame,” he told me. Then, in November or early December, when he considered their fur was prime, he would plant strychnine pellets in the carcasses and reap his harvest.

Destruction by fur traders overtook most of the aboriginal white fox population in the northeastern seaboard region, although, as late as 1779, Cartwright was still able to kill twenty-seven of them at Sandwich Bay—30 per cent of his total catch of all kinds of foxes for that year. Cartwright also noted that the white fox still bred at Sandwich Bay in his time. Even as late as 1895, according to A.P. Lowe, it was still “plentiful about Hamilton Inlet, but more rare southward to near the Strait of Belle Isle.”

Some biologists assert that the white fox was never a true resident of the region, but only an occasional winter visitor driven to migrate south from the Arctic because of food shortage there. This repeats the official explanation of the aboriginal range of the white bear and the walrus and is equally fallacious, although there is no doubt that, at rare intervals, considerable southward movements of white foxes
have
taken place. The last time this happened was during the terribly severe winter of 1922–23, when numbers of the little animals reappeared along the southern Labrador coast and in northern Newfoundland after an absence of many decades.
2
However, these were not migrants in the proper sense—they were refugees who probably made no attempt to return to the Arctic with the advent of spring but remained near the Gulf and in Newfoundland until the last of them was trapped several years later. There is good reason to believe they might have succeeded in recolonizing their lost southern range, except for two factors. One was direct persecution by man. The other was a secondary result of modern man's destructiveness and probably is one of the reasons for their disappearance from the south in the first place.

To quote from Victor Cahalane's
Mammals of North America,
the blue foxes of the Pribilof Islands “feed in summer largely on birds and their eggs, especially [seabirds. Since these] live on the cliffs, the foxes climb about on almost sheer walls, hundreds of feet above the breakers... they frequently carry away both dead birds and their eggs and cache them... for feeding the growing pups. Despite this toll, the bird colonies are so huge that the foxes do not seem to have affected their hordes.” White foxes in the eastern Canadian Arctic do the same thing still, as do red foxes in Newfoundland. There can be little doubt but that southern white foxes depended heavily on seabird colonies during the summer, and that the destruction of most of these by modern man was a blow to their continu-ing survival.

It is at any rate a fact that the white fox has been extirpated from its former southern range and is now confined to Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, except for occasional individuals that drift south on the polar pack (accompanying white bears in a jackal role), only to find themselves aliens in an alien land, with little or no hope of surviving the guns and traps awaiting them there.

In a book that consists largely of epitaphs for animals that have been unable to survive the invasion of their world by Europeans, it is truly a relief to be able to document one success story.

“Little wolf” is a Plains Indian name for the animal we know as the coyote. In aboriginal times it was exclusively an animal of the West, being at its most abundant on the Great Plains, where it shared its territory with the grey wolf. But it was no secondary species. As time and death would prove, it was so adaptable that, long after the grey wolves had been exterminated, it continued to endure. In its struggle for survival against the ultimate killer, it first learned how to survive the destruction wrought upon it by poison, snare, trap, and gun, and then even began recouping its enormous losses. The following is another excerpt from Cahalane's book, written, be it noted, in 1947.

“The coyote is the garbage man, the health officer, the sanitary engineer and the exterminator. All this it does with no pay except bed and board... It puts a quick end to senile, wounded or starving creatures. One of the most potent checks on the rodent host, it keeps down crop and range damage and lessens the danger of epizootics. Throughout the ages it has helped to weed out the unfit and keep survivors alert. Largely due to it and other predators, the deer, the antelope and other hoofed mammals have evolved into swift, graceful, efficient animals. Were it not for [these predators] they would not only overpopulate and overeat their ranges, but would doubtless become lazy, fat and have cirrhosis of the liver.

“[Although] an estimated total of one hundred and twenty-five thousand coyotes are shot, trapped or poisoned each year in the United States, Canada and Alaska... due to their large and frequent litters, their cleverness and adaptability, they have spread and increased greatly in spite of such wide persecution... They have spread to the shore of the Arctic Ocean... and to the Pacific... Even localities as remote from their natural range as Maine and Florida are occasionally visited by coyotes. Periodically, ‘strange doglike animals' are killed or trapped in the East, to become sensations in country newspapers. They are finally identified as ‘brush wolves'.

“In spite of the coyote's shortcomings, it is a clever little pilferer at worst and often a useful, interesting member of the society of mammals. The West would not be the same without it. The plains and deserts would seem mute without its plaintive song. For better or for worse, I hope that the little wolf and its descendants will be with us always.”

Cahalane's hopes are not shared by agriculturalists, sportsmen, game management experts, or politicians, most of whom harbour an irrational and abiding enmity toward the little wolf. I suspect this is at least partly because they see it not simply as a competitor, but as a creature that commits the most odious of crimes by successfully challenging our pretensions to dominion over all forms of life. If
they
had
their
way, the coyote would long since have become extinct. Its very survival, together with its ongoing occupation of vast reaches of the continent from which modern man has managed to eradicate most other predators, represents an intolerable affront.

The little wolf had reached Nova Scotia by the mid-1970s. In 1982, he crossed the man-made causeway into Cape Breton Island. The only Canadian provinces or territories where he is not yet to be found are Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland; and I would not like to bet that even these islands will remain forever free of him. To the south, the little wolf has reached the Atlantic coast all the way from Maine to Florida. And everywhere, despite our lethal enmity, he is digging in for the long haul.

The secret of his success seems to have eluded explanation, but I think I know what it is. Eastern specimens of the little wolf are noticeably larger and darker than their western relatives—to a degree that could hardly have been achieved through ordinary evolutionary processes during the mere century that has elapsed since the eastward spread began. However, it has long been known that coyotes breed freely with suitably sized domestic dogs. I strongly suspect that the brush wolf, as he is called by easterners, is the result of cross-breeding between the original coyote, the now nearly vanished timber wolf, and feral dogs; and that the little wolf of today is in effect a new species combining hybrid vigour with the insight into human behaviour that domestic dogs possess. If this is so, then the little wolf is succeeding because he is following that age-old precept: if you can't beat the bastards—join them.

Whatever the secret may be, I echo Cahalane's hopes for the tough, sagacious, and enduring little wolf, whose quavering midnight solo I heard in Cape Breton last summer for the first time since I left the western plains of my boyhood almost half a century ago.