was no thing of beauty, but she was at least a thing of comfort. My father was an ingenious builder and he had fitted her cabin with every nautical convenience. There was a compact galley with a primus stove on gimbals, gimbaled lamps, great quantities of locker space, stowage for charts, a Seth Thomas chronometer on the forward bulkhead, two luxurious berths for my parents, and a folding pipe-berth for me. Dishes, our many books, and other loose oddments were neatly and securely racked in fitted cupboards so that even in the wildest weather they could not come adrift.
It was as well that my father took such pains to make the interior seaworthy, for, as we headed westward, we discovered that our wheeled vessel was—as sailors say—more than somewhat crank. Slab-sided and immense, she was the prey of every wind that blew. When a breeze took her from the flank she would sway heavily and, as like as not, scuttle ponderously to the wrong side of the road, pushing poor Eardlie with her. A head wind would force Eardlie into second gear and even then he would have to strain and boil furiously to keep headway on his balky charge. A stern wind was almost as bad, for then the great bulk of the tow would try to override the little car and, failing in this, would push Eardlie forward at speeds which chilled my mother’s heart.
All in all it was a memorable journey for an eight-year-old boy. I had my choice of riding in Eardlie’s rumble seat, where I became the gunner in a Sopwith Camel; or I could ride in the caravan itself and pilot my self-contained rocket into outer space. I preferred the caravan, for it was a private world and a brave one. My folding bunk-bed was placed high up under the rear window, and here I could lie—carefully strapped into place against the effect of negative gravity (and high winds)—and guide my spaceship through the void to those far planets known as Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Dakota.
When we re-entered Canada at the little town of Estevan, I no longer needed to exercise my imagination by conjuring up otherworldly landscapes. The desolation of the southeast corner of Saskatchewan was appalling, and it was terrifyingly real. The dust storms had been at work there for several years and they had left behind them an incipient desert. Here and there the whitening bones of abandoned buildings remained to mark the death of hopes; and the wind-burnished wood of engulfed fences protruded from the drifts of subsoil that were overwhelming the works of man.
We were all subdued. Although my father tried hard to reassure us, saying that things would improve as we went north, I can remember no great improvement in that lunar landscape as we passed through endless little hamlets that appeared to be in the last stages of dry rot, and as we traversed the burning expanses of drought-stricken fields.
Mother was openly mutinous by the time we reached Saskatoon and even my father was a little depressed. But I was at an age when tragedy has no permanent reality. I saw only that here was a land foreign to all my imaginings, and one that offered limitless possibilities for totally new kinds of adventures. I was fascinated by the cracked white saucers that were the dried-up sloughs; by the dusty clusters of poplar trees that, for some reason which still escapes me, were known as bluffs; and by a horizon that was limitless. I well remember the words of an old man at whose farm we stopped to get some water for Eardlie’s heated radiator.
“She’s flat, boy,” he told me. “This country’s flat enough so’s you stand on a gopher hill you can see nigh off to China.” I believed him, and I still do—for, geographers to the contrary, there is no limit to man’s vision on those broad plains.
The innumerable little gophers roused my speculative interest, as did the bitter alkaline waters of the few remaining wells, the great soaring shapes of the hawks that rose from the fence posts by the roadsides, and the quaver of coyotes in the evening that sent a shiver down my back. Even Saskatoon, when we found it at last sprawled in exhausted despair beside the trickle of the river, was pregnant with adventure. Founded not more than three decades earlier, as a tiny temperance outpost of the Methodist faith, it had outgrown its natal influences and had become a city of thirty thousand people who embraced the beliefs and customs of half the countries of the Western world. Many of these, particularly the Dukhobors, Mennonites, and Hutterites, were mystery distilled in the eyes of an eight-year-old from the staid Anglo-Saxon province of Ontario.
Father rented a house for us in the northern sections of the city and this jerry-built little box, which was an incinerator in summer and a polar outpost in the winter, became my home. To me it seemed admirable, for it was close to the outskirts of the city—and having been so recently grafted on the face of the plains, Saskatoon had as yet no outer ring of suburbs. You had but to step off the streetcar at the end of the last row of houses, and you were on virgin prairie. The transition in space and time was abrupt and complete and I could make that transition not only on Saturdays, but on any afternoon when school was over.
If there was one drawback to the new life in Saskatoon, it was that we had no dog. During my lifetime we had owned, or had been owned by, a steady succession of dogs. As a newborn baby I had been guarded by a Border collie named Sapper who was one day doused with boiling water by a vicious neighbor, and who went insane as a result. But there had always been other dogs during my first eight years, until we moved to the west and became, for the moment, dogless. The prairies could be only half real to a boy without a dog.
I began agitating for one almost as soon as we arrived and I found a willing ally in my father—though his motives were not mine.
For many years he had been exposed to the colorful tales of my Great-uncle Frank, who homesteaded in Alberta in 1900. Frank was a hunter born, and most of his stories dealt with the superlative shooting to be had on the western plains. Before we were properly settled in Saskatoon my father determined to test those tales. He bought a fine English shotgun, a shooting coat, cases of ammunition, a copy of the Saskatchewan Game Laws, and a handbook on shotgun shooting. There remained only one indispensable item—a hunting dog.
One evening he arrived home from the library with such a beast in tow behind him. Its name was Crown Prince Challenge Indefatigable. It stood about as high as the dining-room table and, as far as Mother and I could judge, consisted mainly of feet and tongue. Father was annoyed at our levity and haughtily informed us that the Crown Prince was an Irish setter, kennel bred and field trained, and a dog to delight the heart of any expert. We remained unimpressed. Purebred he may have been, and the possessor of innumerable cups and ribbons, but to my eyes he seemed a singularly useless sort of beast with but one redeeming feature. I greatly admired the way he drooled. I have never known a dog who could drool as the Crown Prince could. He never stopped, except to flop his way to the kitchen sink and tank-up on water. He left a wet and sticky trail wherever he went. He had little else to recommend him, for he was moronic.
Mother might have overlooked his obvious defects, had it not been for his price. She could not overlook that, for the owner was asking two hundred dollars, and we could no more afford such a sum than we could have afforded a Cadillac. Crown Prince left the next morning, but Father was not discouraged, and it was clear that he would try again.
My parents had been married long enough to achieve that delicate balance of power which enables a married couple to endure each other. They were both adept in the evasive tactics of marital politics—but Mother was a little more adept.
She realized that a dog was now inevitable, and when chance brought the duck boy—as we afterwards referred to him—to our door on that dusty August day, Mother showed her mettle by snatching the initiative right out of my father’s hands.
By buying the duck boy’s pup, she not only placed herself in a position to forestall the purchase of an expensive dog of my father’s choice but she was also able to save six cents in cash. She was never one to despise a bargain.
When I came home from school the bargain was installed in a soap carton in the kitchen. He looked to be a somewhat dubious buy at any price. Small, emaciated, and caked liberally with cow manure, he peered up at me in a nearsighted sort of way. But when I knelt beside him and extended an
