Discovered by a Dane, Jens Munk, in 1619, Churchill became and remained a linchpin of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s empire until the early 1930s, when it was reinvented as a subarctic port from which to ship prairie grain to Europe. When I first saw it on that grey day in 1936, its massive structures seemed to rival the pyramids. However, before I had been many days in their shadow, they lost their appeal for I became enchanted by the wonders of another world, one in which man’s works played no significant role.
Soon after our arrival we loaded all our gear aboard a little jigger – a hand-propelled rail trolley – then with Uncle Frank and Bert pumping its handles, we rattled out of Churchill on a narrow-gauge spur line to an abandoned shack some eight miles southeast of the townsite. Not much more than a shanty with tarpapered walls, it contained a barrel stove, double-tiered bunks, a broken table, and the desiccated corpse of an arctic fox that had apparently jumped in through a broken window and been unable to find a way out.
We intended to remain here only until the pack ice withdrew from the coastal waters of Hudson Bay. But the ice remained implacable so we stayed on at the Black Shack for the duration.
We may have stayed at the shack but were seldom in it because Frank was not one to waste time.
”Look about you,” he lectured me as I tried to linger in bed one shivering morning when our water pails were skimmed with ice. ”The birds out on the tundra haven’t slept a wink. Too darned busy! And here it is 4:00a.m. and you want more sleep! Up and at ’em, sonny boy!”
I had thought we would be ”living off the land” but neither caribou nor seals were procurable so Bert, who acted as our cook, fed us oatmeal porridge, bannocks, boiled beans, and, on special occasions, cornmeal mush. What protein we got came from Uncle Frank’s double-barrelled shotgun with which he vigorously slaughtered ducks, ptarmigan, and shorebirds. Bert added some of the corpses to a thin concoction he called Mulligan stew, but many more ended up in the ditch that served as our garbage dump.
When I agonized about these wanton killings, Uncle Frank put me straight.
”Don’t be so soft, boy. There’s millions of birds out there and if we don’t get them something else will. It’s honest sport. Besides, we’re doing it for science. I measure every specimen I shoot and note the condition of its plumage. Science needs all the information it can get.”
My duties, as specified by Frank, were to ”find every nest you can. The rarer the bird the better. If she hasn’t finished laying her full clutch of eggs, leave the nest alone until she has. If you aren’t sure what species she is, shoot her and bring her back along with the eggs.”
Mine not to question why – especially when orders came from such an Olympian as my great-uncle. I set about doing as I was told feeling no qualms of conscience.
The subarctic nesting season was short so Bert and I were out roaming the tundra almost every day, even in fog or freezing rain, relentlessly searching for nests, especially those of waterfowl and shorebirds. I was a good finder and loved the work. To flush such a rarity as a Hudsonian godwit from her four eggs elated me as much as if I had uncovered treasure. Between us Bert and I took a heavy toll from the plover, curlews, sandpipers, ducks, geese, and loons who thronged the morass of water and mossy tussocks intent on reproducing during the all-too-brief summer season.
”The pair of you will make first-rate scientists if you keep up the good work,” Frank told us encouragingly.
We emptied the eggs of their contents by blowing air through a pipette into a small hole bored with the business end of a dentist’s drill in the side of the shell. If fresh, the contents would come bubbling out. If the egg was incubated, we would have to delicately fish the embryo out, using a needle with a bent tip. We saved the contents of fresh and slightly incubated eggs for omelettes. As the incubation season advanced, these omelettes acquired an increasingly pink tinge and meaty flavour.
Lemmings abounded. This was a peak year in their cycle and they were making the most of it. Friendly little rodents somewhat resembling hamsters, they ran around the cabin floor paying little heed to us unless we tried to sweep them out the door.
One morning we three went ”collecting” along a high granite ridge fringing the still-frozen bay. We were after the eggs of rough-legged hawks (famed lemming hunters) who occupied a chain of nests spaced at intervals of a mile or so along the seaward face of the cliffs. Bert and I were delegated to do the climbing while Frank supervised from below. Rough-legs are large soaring hawks who normally avoid humans. Bert and I had stolen the clutches from two nests and delivered the eggs to Uncle Frank, waiting below, when the owners of a third nest decided enough was enough.
As I began ascending, they both stooped upon me with talons outstretched and beaks gaping wide. Missing me by inches, the first attacker made me cower against the cliff. The second hit home.
My head was buffeted against the rock by fiercely beating wings. When I raised an arm to protect myself, it was raked from wrist to elbow by sharp talons. I thought I was going to fall, then Frank’s shotgun bellowed and my attacker soared away, still screaming defiance.
I slid down the face of the cliff to land on the beach, scared and shaken. Bert bound up my arm with his handkerchief, but Uncle Frank had scant sympathy for me.
”You must have done something to upset them,” he said crossly and completely without irony.
To do him justice, he did try to make amends. When next he went into town for supplies and to see if any possibility yet existed for the proposed voyage to Seal River, he took me along.
We went to ”Ma” Riddoch’s tavern, in whose dark depths we met the redoubtable Husky Harris, a former trapper renowned for having had numerous Inuit wives. He was equally notorious for his addiction to the use of one particular adjective. I listened in awe as he told us there was no effing hope of effingly well getting to the effing Seal River, but he would be effing happy to effing well take us hunting effing white whales in the effing estuary (where the whales were gathering to calve).
Later that day I went alone to the docks to watch several hundred beluga (another name for white whales) feeding in the estuary shallows. When a pair of motorboats put out from shore and their crews began shooting at the whales with heavy-calibre rifles, a marine version of shooting goldfish in a bowl ensued. The whales churned the shoal water in their efforts to escape, and I could see splashes of crimson appearing on the backs and flanks of many.
When I later told my uncle about this, he was mildly dis approving. ”That’ll be some of the men employed at the grain elevator having their sport. Bit of a waste. The natives can use a couple for dog feed but most of the ones hit will roll up on the beach dead and stink the place up with no profit to anyone.”
The natives were mostly Chipewyans from the interior of northern Manitoba who made their way out to Churchill each spring to trade pelts at the Hudson’s Bay Company post. They were of interest to Frank as a possible source of specimens so we visited their tent camp on the flats by the river. While he dickered with them for some white fox pelts, I looked about with awe.
They were unlike any people I had ever seen. Small, dark, and solemn (at least around strangers), they spoke a language full of rustling sibilants. Partly dressed in caribou skins, they lived in teepees made of soot-blackened canvas full of rips and tears. When I approached one teepee too closely, an old woman shook a gnarled fist at me. But a much younger woman – hardly more than a girl – smiled and beckoned while at the same time opening the front of her shirt. Unsure whether she was being seductive or mocking, I concentrated on what my uncle was doing.
He was being offered something so exotic I could barely contain my excitement. A live wolf pup! When Frank shook his head and turned away from the little creature straining at the end of a dog chain, I could not contain myself.
”I’ll buy it!” I cried urgently. ”I’ll take it home and tame it! Please, Uncle Frank, tell them I’ll buy it!”
He continued to shake his head. ”Yo
u can’t afford it. They want its bounty value.”
”Lend me the money,” I pleaded. ”I’ll pay it back, I promise!”
”You’re talking foolishness, boy. Come along now.”
Summer finally arrived during the last week in June and temperatures soared into the sixties. Except for hordes of mosquitoes emerging from the ponds, we could have gone around half-naked. The last of the ice and snow vanished magically. The egg-laying season was ending and all too soon it would be time for both the birds and us to go south.
But first I felt I had to collect one more set of rough-legged hawk’s eggs to make up for the clutch I had failed to get. Although Frank had said no more about this failure, memory of it rankled, so one warm and sunny morning I set off alone for the coastal cliffs. I did not go to the stretch we had already robbed but went farther east, where nests turned out to be few and far between. Finally finding one, I climbed down to it and its three eggs from above, keeping a wary eye on the parent birds wheeling overhead.
Although I knew that this late in the season the eggs would be ready to hatch, I collected them anyway, wrapped them in cotton wool, and packed them into my haversack. Then I took the opportunity to look around from my high vantage point.
The waters of the great bay sucked and seethed at stranded floes below me. Open-water leads crisscrossed the decaying ice to seaward. A mile to the east along the coast a strange object loomed. Field glasses revealed it to be the remains of a wrecked ship.
It was irresistible. Sliding down the cliff I hurried off to examine the wreck. It proved to be the forward section of a small freighter that had driven ashore many years earlier. I climbed into it through a maze of twisted, rusty plates and girders until I found myself standing high on the angled rise of the bow. Only then did I discover I was not alone.
Three ivory-coloured bears were ambling along the beach toward me. Two were not much larger than spaniels but the leader was enormous.
”Stay the hell away from a sow bear with cubs!” was a maxim that had been drilled into me in southern climes where relatively small black bears were to be found. I assumed it would apply in spades to the monstrous apparition padding toward me now with such fluid and lethal grace.
Briefly I thought of trying to flee, but to move at all would have meant revealing myself – and I had no stomach for a confrontation. And since the light breeze was in my favour, blowing from the bears toward me, there was a possibility they might pass the wreck without ever realizing I was crouching in it only a few feet above them.
They were within a dozen yards when, for no apparent reason, the female stopped and reared back on her ample haunches. She extended her forelegs for balance, displaying immense paws and long, curved claws. Her pink tongue protruded from between a gleaming palisade of teeth. Perhaps she heard my heart pounding. She looked up and our glances met. Her black nose wrinkled. She sniffed explosively then, with a litheness astonishing in so huge a creature, turned and was off at a gallop in the direction from which she had come, the cubs bounding along behind her.
My departure in the opposite direction was as precipitate. By the time I regained the haven of the Black Shack, I was winded and the hawk’s eggs had been churned into a bloody mess in the bottom of my haversack.
I enjoyed a triumphal return to Saskatoon where my tales of Inuit, Indians, and polar bears, together with a cracked walrus tusk found on the beach, a carton of arctic birds’ eggs, a pair of friendly lemmings, and a crippled but ferociously lively jaeger – a species of gull possessed of the attitudes and attributes of a bird of prey – provided me with consider able status among my peers.
Through the long winter that followed I was haunted by dreams of the Arctic. Just before Christmas Uncle Frank had written to ask if I would be interested in going north with him again come spring. This time, he assured me, we would certainly reach Seal River and might even travel farther north to the legendary Thlewiaza River, where a trapper had reported freshwater seals of a kind not to be found elsewhere.
Again my parents agreed to let me go, and perhaps they were relieved for they were preoccupied with other problems: my mother with despair at what she referred to in her diary as ”this ghastly exile from everything I’ve ever known”; and Angus because he was at war with his library board over his efforts to provide books to impoverished farmers far beyond the city limits.
Angus was also preoccupied by what to do about a new job offer – that of inspector of public libraries for Ontario, a job that carried with it the prospect of his eventually becoming director of library services for that province. He did not tell either Helen or me about the offer until he had accepted it, so it was not until April that I learned instead of accompanying Uncle Frank back to Hudson Bay I would soon be moving to a new home in Ontario.
I was stunned by the decision, which came as close to breaking my heart as anything I had ever experienced. Being deprived of my arctic adventure was bad enough. The realization that I was also to lose the plains, sloughs, poplar bluffs, and open skies of the prairies and be robbed of the companionship of the creatures, human and otherwise, I had found there, was almost more than I could bear.
I retreated into sullen rebellion. Helen noted in her diary: ”This decision has changed poor Bunje into a horrid little boy!”
She at least was aware of my anguish. Angus was not, or if he was chose to hide the knowledge beneath parental bluster.
”Taking you back east where you belong is the best thing that could happen to you. So chin up and take it like a man.”
But I was not a man, and I found the prospect of leaving the west intolerable. In the privacy of my bedroom, I raged and wept and made desperate plans to run away. My closest friend, Bruce Billings (a farm boy so attuned to the prairie that he proudly called himself a gopher), volunteered to join me as did Murray Robb, my next-best friend. It was no use. My time in Saskatoon was inexorably drawing to a close.
May arrived and with it my sixteenth birthday. One morning Helen asked how I would like to celebrate it. I knew exactly what I wanted.
One of the few surviving expanses of aboriginal short-grass prairie still survived to the southeast of Saskatoon. Waved with small hills, furrowed by coulees, studded with poplar bluffs, and pocked with sloughs, it had escaped the devastation visited on the plains country by homesteaders. It still belonged to the Others. For me it was the last best west, and it held my heart.
”I’d like to spend a week camping out with Brucie and Murray at the big slough near Dundurn. Just the three of us and Rex and Mutt.”
Helen smiled. ”I’ll talk to your father, dear. I think he’s feeling a teeny bit guilty about taking you away from all this….” She waved her hand as if to encompass the whole of Saskatchewan. ”I’ll try to make him feel a little more so.”
She was as good as her word.
Early on the morning of May 11, we three loaded ourselves, dogs, and camping gear into my father’s Model A, and he drove us over rutted dirt roads across the greening plains to a spreading poplar bluff south of the dour little village of Dundurn. Angus did not linger, nor did I encourage him to do so. It would be a long time before I fully forgave him for having so abruptly altered the tenor of my life.
Spring had come early to the prairies. The sky was clear and the sun beat down brilliantly. There had been little rain but the new grass was vividly, lusciously green and richly alive. The floor of the bluff was dusted by silky seed parachutes drifting down from the cottonwood trees. This snowy stuff kept getting into the dogs’ noses and making them sneeze as they snuffled at the burrows made by wood gophers.
We three felt so good we played like little kids, lying on our backs waving our arms and legs to make angels in the cottonwood snow. We gathered piles of it to serve as mattresses beneath our bedrolls. We pitched the tent and cleared a place for a firepit, then went off to visit the slough where, in past years, I had hunted ducks with my father in the autumn and searched for the nests of waterbirds in spring.
Big Slough, as it was known locally, was really a lake about six miles long and a mile wide. Although the prolonged drought had turned much of the surrounding country into a dust bowl and reduced the slough itself to little more than a huge alkaline puddle, its murky water still stood knee-deep even among the broad beds of reeds and cattails fringing its shores.
And it was overflowing with life.
Out in the middle, several hundred whistling swans formed a raft so dense it looked like an ice floe. The swans were surrounded by milling multitudes of ducks, geese, grebes, coots, and other waterfowl, some swimming, some diving, others in free flight. We stood at the edge of the rushes and marvelled at the spectacle.
In the southern sky, a heavy-flying wedge of massive white birds with huge heads and jet-black wings was descending like a ghostly phalanx of pterodactyls from Jurassic times. They were white pelicans – fliers whose antiquity stretches back to the age of dinosaurs. There was a wild flurry on the slough as lesser birds scattered to get out of the way and the pelicans planed grandly down to obscure the surface in a curtain of spray.
We worked our way around the slough’s perimeter to a stretch of muddy foreshore almost hidden beneath a horde of godwits, curlews, avocets, and smaller shorebirds.
The Others were everywhere in such abundance and variety that I gave up trying to keep track of their kinds and numbers. Our ears were filled with the rush of wings and the cacophony of avian voices gabbling about food, sex, travel, and whatever else birds talk about. With Mutt and Rex plunging after us, we waded out into the reed beds, where we were assailed by mobs of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds defending nesting territories. Muskrat houses covered with fresh layers of swamp muck stood among the rushes. Each mound seemed to have a pair of grebes or coots nesting upon it. Marsh wrens were weaving their delicate hanging nests on cattail stems while unseen sora rails yammered at us for trespassing on their watery turf.