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magazine / ja08
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July/August 2008 issue |
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FEATURE
Following Farley
Inspired as a child by Farley Mowat’s books about Canada’s wildlife
and wilderness, a park warden, his filmmaker wife, two-year-old son and
dog embark on a cross-country journey by canoe, train and sailboat, retracing
the places and stories featured in those celebrated books
Story and photography by Karsten Heuer
A tattered paperback copy of Never Cry Wolf lay open on my lap as
I steered our canoe across the inky waters of Nueltin Lake, which straddles
the Manitoba-Nunavut border. Behind us, tucked into the twisted spruce trees
on shore, purple fireweed
grew from the ruins of the trapper’s cabin where Farley Mowat, then a young
writer and naturalist just home from service on the battlefields of Europe
during the Second World War, had stayed for two summers 60 years ago. Ahead,
somewhere on the “yellow sand esker … winding sinuously away in
the distance like a gigantic snake” was the Arctic wolf den he’d
written about in one of his best-known books. We were paddling toward it to see
whether it was still in use.
Getting to Nueltin Lake hadn’t been easy.
Since leaving our Canmore, Alta., home 2½ months earlier, my wife Leanne
and I had paddled with our two-year-old son Zev and dog Willow across the prairies
of Mowat’s childhood. We had then dragged, lined and otherwise struggled
with our canoe up the northern Manitoba river he’d followed, humping loads
over the same overgrown trails he’d portaged with his Metis guide in the
late 1940s and negotiating the same “roaring torrents” of the Thlewiaza
River down to Nueltin Lake. But pilgrimages aren’t meant to be easy. And
a pilgrimage this was. Mowat’s books were serving as our maps across Canada,
and our purpose was to revisit their narratives as we travelled through the prairie,
northern and maritime chapters of his life. The journey’s end would be
an encounter with the author himself.
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