Pilgrims of the Wild

AUTHOR'S SPECIAL PREFACE TO HIS ENGLISH READERS

October, 1935

The generous reception accorded Pilgrims of the Wild by the British reading Public has been such that I feel it to be my duty, and a mighty pleasant one, to make this small acknowledgment, and to offer my humble and sincere thanks for this kindly recognition.

This immediate and whole-hearted response to my appeal for a greater consideration for our lesser brethren, caused me all of the elation and, I must admit, considerable of the surprise of one who discovers a gold-mine whilst picking up what he thought to be a stone. Yet, had I called to mind certain events of History, as well as other incidents coming under the scope of more personal observation, I should have remembered that the British have ever been the champions of the under dog.

So, the chance seeds of what I hoped were wisdom, scattered before the winds of adversity, fell on what was thought at the time to be stony soil—which it was; but the rock proved to be gold-bearing, rich with the treasure of human understanding.

This expression of gratitude is tendered not only for myself, who happened, by some chance, to write the book, but also on behalf of Anahareo, whose deep humanity, sense of justice and innate love of fair play, eventually broke down the wall of self-justification that had long resisted the beleaguerings of an outraged conscience—I mean my own; and this circumstance stands as a direct refutation of the extremely partial testimony, not always uncoloured by an arrogant national prejudice, of earlier historians, in that it took a woman of the Mohawk tribe, long considered the most merciless of all the nations comprising the supposedly fiendish and bloodthirsty Iroquois Confederacy, to point the road to forbearance and compassion. And it was this people who also gave us Tekahionwake (Pauline Johnson), Canada's best known poetess, and Dr. Oronoteykha, who founded, and during his life was head of the Royal Order of Foresters, the most powerful fraternal Society in Canada.

And the Little People of the Forest, co-dwellers with us in this mighty Wilderness, must not be forgotten in this tribute; perhaps they would wish to send a message too, could they but understand. For they too can be grateful, in their simple way, and the least awakened, dim and dreamy minds among them all, can recognize and appreciate kindness, sympathy and a sanctuary when they find it.

And this generous interest, the more warming because it has been bestowed by those of so different a race, creed and manner of living to ourselves, has had the most profound effect upon our lives and outlook, not the least notable result of which has been the confirmation of what had been long suspected, that there are a great number of very wonderful folks in this world of ours, and that those who cry that the human race is bound for perdition have still very much to learn about their neighbours. This is attested, in part, by the sentiments expressed so uniformly in this, to us, vast correspondence, of which Tolerance was everywhere the keynote.

These letters are very heartening and inspiriting, and whether they be the honest, carefully written script of the school-boy or girl, or the well-worded communications from those of maturer years; the short, business-like note of appreciation of the tradesman or the longer, more personal missives of those whose leisure permits of a fuller discussion; whether from a brother outdoorsman, a poet, or the analytically minded professor from some University, they all, with few exceptions, express a real understanding of our ideals and aims, and a ready sympathetic acknowledgment of the obligations and responsibilities of man towards his lesser brethren of the field and forest.

They have awakened in us, these letters, a deeper realization of the Brotherhood of Man that can, and should, exist between us all, of whatever race or creed and for which I have the greatest hopes, in that it can so survive the disadvantages of four thousand miles of space; and I am trying faithfully to answer every one of them, so that all who write may know just what these letters mean to us. But the facilities afforded by a log cabin situated here on a lakeside far in the Wilderness are extremely limited, as is my skill; transportation is intermittent, and the office staff, consisting of Anahareo, little Dawn, the beaver, and myself, very much overtaxed. The beavers, whose part it is to remove the empty envelopes, are getting along quite nicely, working with great enthusiasm, as the envelopes make first-class bedding. But I lately discovered that, having become confused, not by the smell of the ink but by the various colours of the stamps, I have sent out an entire batch of mail stamped with two-cent stamps, when the regulations call for three. Having now no idea as to which of our correspondents the letters in question were addressed to, we can only offer our apologies to them collectively, and hope that we have not attracted the attention of the police.

So we sincerely hope that it will be understood why much of this correspondence must, we fear, remain unanswered, greatly to our regret.

And now this coming Winter I am to have an even greater privilege, that of addressing English audiences from the lecture platform.

Though no orator, and making no pretensions to the ability of a well-experienced speaker, I hope that these defects will be overlooked by those whose kind reception of my written work has encouraged me to undertake this enterprise. And one other thing I ask; that it be remembered above all things that I come not as a showman, or as an expositor of my own attainments as a woodsman, but as an ambassador from those whom I perforce must leave behind, as a spokesman for that vast, inarticulate, rapidly dwindling army of living things, our co-dwellers in the Land of Shadows, our kin of the Last Frontier. Perhaps I take thereby too much upon myself; if so, my only excuse is my sincere desire to tell you something of their lives and ours, so that you may know us all a little better.

Of the adventures that may await me across the sea, certainly the most moving will be the renewing, after nearly twenty years, of some old and valued friendships, happy reminders of those dark and dreary days when the black eagle of War spread the shadow of his wings over half the world. Scarcely less fortunate will be the opportunity, so long anticipated, of meeting some of those whose messages of goodwill have so encouraged me to persevere in my attempts at literary work.

Jelly Roll and Rawhide, the two beaver personalities who are the featured characters in the latter half of the narrative, are reaping a rich reward in chocolate bars, peanuts and apples from admirers. And this remuneration they have most surely earned, for to them belongs much credit—as to those others who came before them and now are gone, who still serve though perhaps, somewhere, they only stand and wait—McGinnis and McGinty, the Unforgotten Ones, without whom there would have been no book, no Beaver People as we know them, no anything.

It feels good to us to know that their short lives were not vainly spent and when, in these later days, we hear, in the calm of evening, the quiet murmur of running water at the beaver dam, or watch the stars paling to a new-born day, or perhaps when a sudden silence falls upon us in the midst of merriment and we step out into the solemn, splendrous hush of a snowy Christmas night, we wonder if they too may see and know, and be content.

And if we seem in this to be too fanciful, if such thoughts remind you that we hold strange, wild beliefs, should you have patience to read our book perhaps you may forgive and understand.

GREY OWL.

FOREWORD

Good wine needs no bush. This glowing narrative by my friend Grey Owl scarcely requires a word of mine to bid people run and read. To those in Canada who know merely the bare outline of Grey Owl's achievement in our Western country, his own story in detail of his magnificent work (the phrase is mine—he would disagree with it) will be sheer delight. To those beyond our borders it will come, I fancy, as a revelation alike of a character as lovable as he is unusual, and of sights and sounds and scenes which will entrance them. But his story will speak for itself.

I may be allowed to say one or two things, by way of explanation, of the narrative and the man who wrote it.

This is Grey Owl's book. It appears between these covers precisely as he wrote it. His publishers in Toronto, London and New York have suffered no hand to touch it. Written in the Wilderness (a capital W for you, Grey Owl!) he loves so well, in the time he could spare from his Little People and their care, it came, copied into typescript, to me. Grey Owl's eye was on it, page by page, to watch that from pen and ink to typewritten copy no word, no phrase, even no slightest punctuation mark should have been introduced into what was, in every particular, his own story. It may be doctored by nobody, said Grey Owl. It is to be published, if it is worth it, just as I wrote it. It is my work, good or bad, and nobody else's. Nobody else is going to tamper with it. He was, of course, quite right. To attempt to shape, to edit, to dress such a story as this in any way whatever, would result in robbing it of its simplicity and its beauty. Grey Owl wrote his own story. Nobody else could write it. Nobody else has written it. Nobody else may, in any way, seek to varnish it. This is to be said because all sorts of wild legends have grown up about him, about his first book, Men of the Last Frontier, and about this, his second.

The, to me, delightful sketches which are reproduced in this volume are also Grey Owl's own work.

I can think of few books more revealing of their writer than this. The very essence of our Canadian hinterland is in these pages because Grey Owl is so completely of it, and one with it. All his years, but for the briefest of intervals, have been spent in his beloved Wilderness. He loves it with a deep and abiding love. Somehow it is part of him and he part of it. The only way I can live happily, he says, is wandering over the face of the Wilderness. He is almost missionary about it. Nothing delights him so much as to try to communicate to those who don't know them at first hand something of his own affection for our forests and lakes and streams and those who dwell in them. He will forever be restless till every last one of us shall come to know for ourselves the loveliness which he knows. He would have us all be in truth Pilgrims of the Wild.

Grey Owl was born in 1888 of Scotch and Indian parentage. He went to England for a little, and returned to this side quickly thereafter, taking part in the Cobalt silver rush of 1905. He was then, as he has been ever since (but for the space of his War service), a canoeman and packer. He never forgets his great debt to the Ojibway Indians. He was still a youth when he was adopted into their tribe. It was they who named him Grey Owl because of his habit of nocturnal travelling. He learned their language. From them he derived his forest lore. He lived their nomadic life. Early becoming one of them, he feels that they are his people and that all he is and has he owes to them. They taught him to love Northern Ontario and to think of it as his homeland. Their land was his land and their folk his folk. The Indian influence, or rather the Ojibway Indian influence, is naturally very marked in all his reminiscences and portrayals of wilderness life.

A canoe is to Grey Owl what a horse is to a cowpuncher or a good vessel to a sailor. Prior to his becoming so deeply interested in what has turned out to be his life work, namely the preservation of the Little People, his days were spent in guiding, exploration and transportation of supplies up and down and across and about the north country. He trapped every winter, and for a few summers served as a forest ranger for the Ontario Government. He was singularly successful, and his ability to penetrate easily through unexplored territory gained for him a roving commission. The War stopped his activities for three years. He returned from it pronounced unfit from wounds in 1917. As soon as he was able he resumed his former manner of living, and his speed and endurance and extraordinarily intimate knowledge gained for him the post of assistant Chief Ranger over a large area in the Mississauga Forest reserve. After a few years during which he came to know every nook and cranny of this region to his own satisfaction a ranger's life became monotonous and far-off horizons beckoned. He closed his old trapping camp on the Spanish river, threw together a light outfit and set out on new wanderings, hiring out, canoe and man, wherever guiding, packing, and the like provided means of renewing supplies. He tramped over a new hunting ground every winter.

He tells his own story in the present book. You learn how he came to realise that our wild life was becoming scarcer and scarcer so that in certain areas native game was almost extinct. This was particularly true of beaver. In 1928 he gave up trapping altogether and devoted, indeed consecrated, his life to conservation of game generally and beaver in particular.

I have spoken of him as being almost missionary in his quality. He is. The cause of preservation and conservation of the Wilderness and its folk is his life-work, and he feels himself as surely called to it as a man of the cloth is called. He might paraphrase John Wesley and say, The Wilderness is my parish. In Grey Owl's own words, Give me a good canoe, a pair of Jibway snowshoes, my beaver, my family and ten thousand square miles of wilderness and I am happy. He does not add, but I may for him, that he has in ample measure another requisite for happiness: he is a happy man because he has learned to help others to happiness, and amongst those others not the least, his friends the Little People.

HUGH EAYRS.

Toronto,

October 1934.

PREFACE

This is primarily an animal story; it is also the story of two people, and their struggle to emerge from the chaos into which the failure of the fur trade, and the breaking down of the old proprietary system of hunting grounds, plunged the Indian people, and not a few whites, during the last two decades. Their means of livelihood destroyed by fire and the invasion by hordes of transient trappers and cheap fur buyers, these two, a man and a woman, newly married and with no prospects, broke loose from their surroundings taking with them all that was left to them of the once vast heritage of their people,—their equipment and two small animals as pets.

Outcasts in their own country, wandering in what amounted to a foreign land, they tried desperately to fit somewhere into this new picture. Their devotion to these creatures that represented to them the very soul of their lost environment, eventually proved to be their salvation.

All the places are actual, the story known to not a few; characters are real, and if named receive, save in one instance, their proper appellations.

In order to properly grasp the spirit in which this book is written, it is necessary to remember that though it is not altogether an Indian story, it has an Indian background. The considering attitude towards all nature which appears throughout the work, is best explained by a quotation from John G. Gifford's Story of the Seminole War.

The meaning of sovereignty is not very clear to primitive peoples, especially to the Indian. He rarely dominated the things around him; he was a part of nature and not its boss. Hewitt says of the Indian:

In his own country ... he is a harmonious element in a landscape that is incomparable in its nobility of colour and mass and feeling of the Unchangeable. He never dominates it as does the European his environment, but belongs there as do the mesas, skies, sunshine, spaces and the other living creatures. He takes his part in it with the clouds, winds, rocks, plants, birds and beasts, with drum beat and chant and symbolic gesture, keeping time with the seasons, moving in orderly procession with nature, holding to the unity of life in all things, seeking no superior place for himself but merely a state of harmony with all created things ... the most rhythmic life ... that is lived among the races of men. This viewpoint is not peculiar to people of native blood but is often found in those of other races who have resided for many years in the wilderness.

The idea of domination and submission, though now passing out of date in nearly every walk of life, is hard to disassociate, in the minds of some, from the contact between civilized man and beings in a state of nature. This was forcibly illustrated in a late radio broadcast during which, in a play dealing with frontier conditions, an actor who portrayed the part of Indian guide was heard to address the head (not the leader, as is generally supposed, the guide being of necessity in that capacity) of the party, in an awed voice, as Master. But the more tolerant and unaspiring, though perhaps less ambitious view-point of the Indian must be taken into consideration, if the reader is to fully appreciate the rather unusual tenor of the narrative.

Interpretations of the more obscure mental processes of the animal characters that run through the story, are of necessity comparative; such attempts at delineation are difficult, and often inadequate, without some parallel to draw them by; but the great majority of the descriptions of animal psychology are very clear and positive. Those manifestations that were at the time inexplicable have been construed in the light of later investigation and experience, so as to preserve the unity of impression of the narrative.

In the rather ill-considered rush we have been in to exploit our natural resources, we have taken little trouble to examine into the capabilities and possibilities of the wild creatures involved in it, save in so far as the findings were of commercial value. Therefore much that is interesting has been overlooked. The kinship between the human race and the rest of our natural fauna becomes very apparent to those of us who sojourn among the latter for any length of time; alarmingly so to those whose attitude has hitherto been governed by the well-worn and much abused phrase that Man shall have dominion over all. However I do not draw comparisons between man and beast, save in a few instances which are too remarkable to be overlooked. Nor do I ascribe human attributes to animals. If any of their qualities are found to closely approximate some of our own, it is because they have, unknown to us, always possessed them, and the fault lies in our not having discovered sooner that these characteristics were not after all exclusively human, any more than are a number of others to which we have by long usage become accustomed.

My fingers, well toasted at many an open fire, and stiffened a little by the paddle and the pull of a loaded toboggan, are ill suited for the task I set them to. In this writing game I find myself in the dangerous situation of a man who has played his first game of poker and won a small jackpot, and who is now sitting in on another round having rather disastrous possibilities. To each his craft and calling, nor should we grudge another his ability; none the less, did I have the power to expertly carry out what I have here attempted, or had another, more skilled in letters and who knew this story well, have undertaken it, it would have been better done.

To me the rifle has ever been mightier than the pen. The feel of a canoe gunnell at the thigh, the splash of flying spray in the face, the rhythm of the snowshoe trail, the beckoning of far-off hills and valleys, the majesty of the tempest, the calm and silent presence of the trees that seem to muse and ponder in their silence; the trust and confidence of small living creatures, the company of simple men; these have been my inspiration and my guide. Without them I am nothing. To these and to my teachers, men of a type that is rapidly passing from the face of the earth, belongs the credit for whatever there may be that is worthy in this work of mine.

And should any part of it provide an hour of pleasure to just a few of those who love the Great Outdoors, or who have a kindly thought for a simple people or for a lowly animal, or should I perchance touch somewhere a chord of sympathy, or make some slight appeal to the sense of fair play of any of those true Sportsmen to whom Wild Life owes so much to-day, I will count my work, with all its imperfections, as having been worth while.

WA-SHA-QUON-ASIN (GREY OWL)

BEAVER LODGE,

PRINCE ALBERT NATIONAL PARK,

SASKATCHEWAN.

November 7th, 1933

BOOK ONE. TOULADI.

My road calls me, lures me

West, east, south, and north;

Most roads lead me homewards,

My road leads me forth

To add more miles to the tally

Of grey miles left behind,

In quest of that one beauty

God put me here to find.

—JOHN MASEFIELD.



Grey Owl's Cabin—The cabin stands at the water's edge, surrounded by a palisade of heavy forest. The lake appears to sleep. There is no sound...

Courtesy of National Parks of Canada.

PROLOGUE

Outside a window from which the sash has been removed stands a man, alert, silent, watchful. The cabin beside which he keeps post faces out onto a lake, its frontage at the water's edge. The slopes of the surrounding hills are covered with a heavy forest, the tall grey poplars and giant spruce standing close in a dark and serried palisade about the camp.

The water is calm and unruffled; the lake appears to sleep. There is no sound and no movement save the desultory journeyings of a squirrel, engaged in salvaging cones he has been dropping from the spruce tops.

In front of the man, and directed through the aperture into the building, is a motion picture camera, trained on the door, which is closed. The interior of the building is equipped with the rude but comfortable furnishings, and the simple utensils of a woodsman's home, for the greater part of the dwelling is given over to human occupancy, and is a permanent abode, although it has one peculiarity. Across one end of it is a large erection having the appearance of a massive earthwork, shoulder high and occupying easily one-third of the floor space.

Outside, in strategic positions commanding the door and the approach from the lake, are other men, holding cameras. Inside the building a man sits in a chair, waiting. Suddenly:

All right! here he comes, cries a watcher. The man at the window sights his machine afresh, makes small adjustments and stands poised, ready. There can now be heard, approaching the entrance, a heavy measured tread. The camera man's face becomes suddenly tense, the camera commences to whir and simultaneously with a resounding thump the door is thrown widely open and there steps over the threshold, not the leading lady of a cast of players, not the handsome hero of