up about him, about his first book, The 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 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 realize that our wildlife 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 lifework, 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 Ojibway 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
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
