Farley Mowat

• Born: May 12, 1921
• Birthplace: Belleville, Ontario, Canada
• Died: May 6, 2014
• Place of death: Cobourg, Ontario, Canada

Biography

Farley Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, on May 12, 1921, to Helen and Angus Mowat, both of Scottish ancestry. Farley was an adventurous child and a dedicated reader by age six. When Angus moved his family to Windsor in 1930, Farley was complementing James Fenimore Cooper and Ernest Thompson Seton with rambles around the city’s hobo jungles and collections of wildlife (for example, Limpopo, a six-inch Florida alligator) and moths. A romantic move to Saskatchewan in a ship’s cabin mounted on a Model T truck and a trip to Vancouver Island were followed in 1936 by an expedition to the Arctic with the ornithologist Frank Farley, his great-uncle, who taught him to collect bird nests and eggs on the tundra. Farley met Inuit people for the first time on this trip and was shocked by the brutal rifle assaults on the friendly whales around Churchill. In 1937, the Mowats resettled near Toronto, where Farley devoted much time to studying birds as a prelude to a two-month field trip to Saskatchewan to undertake an ornithological survey.

Mowat grew up fast during World War II, when he served as a brigade intelligence officer engaged in hard combat in Sicily and Italy. Discharged in 1946, he enrolled at the University of Toronto and in 1947 accompanied Francis Harper, a Pennsylvania biologist, to Canada’s Keewatin District. Returning to Toronto that fall, Mowat married Frances Elizabeth Thornhill, a classmate. The trip with Harper inspired the first half of People of the Deer (1952), and a second trip, in 1948, partially funded by the Dominion Wildlife Service, exposed him to the suffering among the Ihalmiut that he was to recount in The Desperate People (1959). His long absences damaged his marriage, and in 1951, after two years in Palgrave, Ontario, in a house without running water, Fran was ready to leave. The publication in 1952 of People of the Deer provoked a controversy that reached the House of Parliament in Ottawa but to no effect, and the Ihalmiut were dismissed by Dr. A. E. Porsild of the Department of Resources and Northern Affairs as the product of Mowat’s imagination.

During the 1950s, Mowat involved himself in left-wing causes; fathered a son, Robert Alexander, and adopted another, David; and struggled with his writing. He made his first visit to Newfoundland in 1957 but in 1958 was back in the Barrenlands investigating the plight of the Ihalmiut, a project that led to The Desperate People. With an old army friend, Mike Donovan, Mowat sailed in June 1960, to the French-owned islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon just off Newfoundland’s northeast coast. He soon began an intense affair with a twenty-seven-year-old art student from Ontario, Claire Wheeler, and after an escapist interlude in England, they settled in at Burgeo, Newfoundland, where Mowat wrote the immensely successful Never Cry Wolf (1963). In 1965, Mowat obtained a Mexican divorce and soon married Wheeler before returning to Burgeo and starting a bitter feud with Joey Smallwood, the premier who had led Newfoundland into the Canadian Confederation. The Luddite Mowat opposed Smallwood’s efforts to modernize, but he gave up this battle to travel to Siberia to study the Soviets’ management of that great natural icebox.

The period from 1967 through 1977 demonstrated no coherent unity of purpose and was marked by travels to Europe, difficulties with publishers, outbursts of antagonism toward the United States for its Vietnam War, support for groups that opposed whale hunting and seal clubbing, and struggles with various writing projects. His relationship with his parents grew more complicated as Angus abandoned Helen for Barbara Hutchinson, a Toronto librarian. The filming of Never Cry Wolf in 1981 provided a pleasant interlude, as did a trip to Scandinavia with the governor-general of Canada Ed Schreyer and his wife. By 1984, two books decrying humankind’s inhumanity to humans and to other animals—And No Birds Sang (1979) and Sea of Slaughter (1984)—had further boosted his huge success. (In 2001 there were 460 translations in twenty-four languages.) For Mowat, the 1980s and 1990s were replete with honors and more publications (Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey [1987] won many readers) but were also marred by an article, “A Real Whopper,” that challenged the truthfulness of People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf. From this attack, a consensus seems to have emerged that even though the books may have dealt lightly with the facts, they were badly needed statements about the plight of the Ihalmiut and the wolves. Whatever the case, Mowat remained, as one journalist characterized him, “a pint-sized dynamo.”

Mowat published a number of works in the 2000s. These include Walking on the Land (2000), which returns to the topics of environmental destruction on the North Atlantic seaboard and tribal decline; High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey (2002) recounts his trip to see a government development scheme in the Arctic; No Man’s River (2004) tells of another Arctic expedition that took place in 1947; Bay of Spirits: A Love Story (2006), about falling in love with Newfoundland and his second wife; and Otherwise (2008), a memoir of his research in the 1930s and 1940s. Eastern Passage (2010), the last book he published during his lifetime, is a memoir of his discovery of a sick or injured beluga whale while sailing down the St. Lawrence River from Montreal to Halifax and his investigation into the cause of a mysterious die-off of the species in the St. Lawrence between 1950 and 1988.

Mowat died in 2014 at the age of ninety-two, less than a week before his ninety-third birthday. He had been working on another book at the time of his death. During his career he had published forty-five books, which had sold 17 million copies and been translated into fifty-two languages.

Analysis

Mowat’s most discussed books, the ones that made his career, are the three accounts he wrote of life in the Arctic—People of the Deer, The Desperate People, and Never Cry Wolf—and the reader’s first step in judging these works is to determine how much of them is truth, how much literary embroidery. The defense usually offered for Mowat’s way of telling his stories is to admit, yes, there are inventions that violate the letter of the truth, but at the same time, these inventions are faithful to the spirit of the truth, a much higher goal. As one defender put it, Mowat

is concerned with reality, with truth, but with the underlying truths that are the concern of every creative artist. In his view, facts are important only as they relate to truth, and in themselves meaningless.

Closely connected to Mowat’s sympathy for the wolf is A Whale for the Killing (1972), inspired by the fate of a whale trapped at Burgeo, Newfoundland, in 1967 and slaughtered by men with rifles. Of the whale’s suffering, Mowat said,

An awesome mystery had intruded into the closely circumscribed order of our lives; one that we terrestrial bipeds could not fathom, and one, therefore, that we would react against with instinctive fear, violence and hatred.

This remark reveals the key to understanding Mowat’s approach to nature and its creatures. A similar indignation informs Sea of Slaughter, a frontal attack on the destruction of numerous species from the oceans, and it explains his enthusiasm for writing Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey.

A persistent strain of contempt for bureaucracies colors many of Mowat’s narratives, especially in his controversial account of Ottawa’s treatment of the Ihalmiut in People of the Deer, as well as in his sharp criticism of Governor Smallwood’s whaling policy in Newfoundland. The mere title of Canada North Now: The Great Betrayal (1976) speaks loudly on this point, as does Rescue the Earth! Conversations with the Green Crusaders (1990). In both these volumes, Mowat’s political sympathies converge with his awe of the natural world.

Mowat owed much of his success to a plain style that carries incidents and characterizations along in a smooth narrative. In The Desperate People, for instance, the old Ihalmiut shaman Pommela emerges on the page in all his irascibility, and Pommela’s rival leader, Owliktuk, stands out as a courageous leader of his group. Uncle Albert in Never Cry Wolf is an unforgettable and singular companion to Angeline and George and their cubs. However, what most distinguishes Mowat’s depictions of people—and wolves—was his ability to enter imaginatively into their lives with a powerful human sympathy.

The Desperate People

First published: 1959

Type of work: Nonfiction

The author recounts the struggle for survival of the Ihalmiut Eskimos of the Keewatin District in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

The Desperate People describes the “virtual extinction” between 1952 and 1959 of the beleaguered Ihalmiuts in the inland plains known as the Barrengrounds. An appendix identifies by name all the Ihalmiut who were living in 1946 and either tells where they were living in 1958 or explains what happened to them. Of the 111 individuals, only 64 were known to be alive twelve years later, many of them at Rankin Inlet on the shore of Hudson Bay. Diphtheria was the commonest cause of death.

Due west of Hudson Bay, in the Canadian District of Keewatin, lies the Land of the Ihalmiut Eskimos, marked in the northwest by Dubawnt Lake and the Dubawnt River, in the southwest by Ennadai Lake, in the south by Nueltin Lake, and in the northeast by Yathkyed Lake. The Kazan River snakes down from the northeast to the southwest, and the tree line meanders around across the southern region. This is the home of the people christened by Farley Mowat as the People of the Deer in his book by that title. In 1912, the Ihalmiut, or “the Other People,” as they knew themselves, were hit by an epidemic of what was probably influenza. This tragedy was followed in 1913 by the first trading post, an institution that introduced the tribes to Caucasian trinkets, flour, cloth, and “much other sorcery” that would convert the Ihalmiut to fox trappers. The introduction of rifles in return for fox pelts meant a rapid decrease in the caribou herds (the “deer” of Mowat’s narratives are not the North American whitetail but caribou) and the disintegration of the people and their traditional way of life. Thus, by 1930, the Ihalmiut were reduced to four small groups, the largest being the People of the Little Hills, something above one hundred in number, clustered around Ennadai. The white trappers who swarmed into the Barrens in these years slaughtered the deer, poisoned the foxes with strychnine, and shoved the Ihalmiut aside. At the same time, the Ihalmiuts’ traditional enemies, the Idthen Eldeli, or Athapascan Indians, pushed northward to put pressure on the Ihalmiuts’ southern flank. Thus, by 1932, the community numbered no more than two hundred across the whole region. In the winter of 1942–1943, forty-four people, a third of the survivors, died of hunger, leaving only about sixty Ihalmiut struggling along northeast of Ennadai.

Mowat flew into Windy Bay in May 1947, with an unidentified male companion and befriended a lone Ihalmiut named Charles, who let him share his cabin. Through Charles, Mowat met the young shaman Ootek, his wife Howmik, and their daughter Kalak, as well as Ootek’s neighbors Halo and his wife, Kikik. The natural leader of this group was Owliktuk, married to Nutaralik and father of their four children. Owliktuk’s followers included Yaha, a good hunter; the fatalist Miki; and a fringe figure, Ohoto, husband of Nanuk. A nearby camp was under the control of the tyrannical shaman Pommela, spiritual guide to a small group including Katelo, Pommela’s younger brother, and Katelo’s twelve-year-old son; Onekwaw and his wife, Tabluk, and her daughter by a previous union; and Alekahaw, a “sly and clever opportunist.” A third small camp, consisting of Hekwaw and his family, completed the Ihalmiuts when Mowat met them in the summer of 1947.

The Ihalmiuts’ miseries were not alleviated much by the obtuseness of the government authorities, for whom Mowat harbored an obvious contempt. When a government plane flew in to the little outpost of starving survivors in the spring of 1948, it brought boxes marked “Eskimo Relief Supplies,” a brutally disappointing collection of six sheet-metal stoves, several fox traps, one dozen large axes, and twenty galvanized-iron pails. Stoves and axes in a land of no trees revealed the minds of Ottawa officialdom. The best Mowat could do was give the Ihalmiut ten boxes of ammunition for their aging rifles and hope for the best. However, later, in August, Mowat procured one dozen .303 rifles and one thousand rounds of ammunition from the Canadian Army detachment at Churchill, along with a load of battle-dress trousers and jackets. In September, another plane landed with more ill-conceived supplies: a drum of rancid powdered milk, some flour and lard, and two large bales of discarded service underwear. However, this particular year ended happily, with Ohoto catching more than fifty fat deer for the coming winter and everyone enjoying a festive night before Mowat’s departure.

A new challenge faced the Ihalmiut in 1949 when the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals decided to build a radio and meteorological station at Ennadai Lake and to bring in materials in the dead of winter on cat-trains, Caterpillar tractors towing strings of freight sleds. In the same year, an outbreak of poliomyelitis ravaged the Eskimo population all across the Keewatin District, killing some of the Ihalmiut, crippling another seventeen of them at the Padlei settlement, and maiming several of those in the camps led by Owliktuk and Pommela. The coming of the construction workers introduced novelty into the Ihalmiuts’ lives, and the workers at first delighted in the diversion offered by the community, but Pommela’s scrounging contributed to a weakening of warm feelings. The Ihalmiut expected the white workers to provide salvation from their destitution, but the government workers never understood the group’s expectations, and the Ihalmiuts did not understand why their needs were ignored.

In early 1950, starvation began in the camps of Owliktuk and Pommela. Mowat explains the seeming indifference of the Canadian government to the dominance of the three “empires”: the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose dependence on fur trapping encouraged exploitation of the Eskimos; the missions run by the Roman Catholic Oblate organization and the Church of England, both of whom argued that salvation took precedence over health issues among the Eskimos; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who saw their task as enforcing law among backward “natives.” Moreover, the persistent image of the Eskimo as beaming primitives, happy in their igloos, slowed with the government’s realization that these were a suffering people whose life expectancy was twenty-four years, whose infant mortality rate was 260 for every 1,000 live births, and whose risk of tuberculosis was one out of eight.

In 1948, the government approved a plan to relocate the Ihalmiut from Ennadai to Nueltin Lake, where they would work in a commercial fishery, and when the project opened in 1949, the trading post moved there from Churchill. The forty-seven surviving Ihalmiut were flown in on May 1, 1950, but their poverty and their fear of the Idthen Eldeli prompted them to trek to Otter Lake that autumn. The 170 remaining Padliermiut were even worse off than the Ihalmiut and were saved only by the Hudson Bay post manager at Eskimo Point, who urged them to take refuge at the post. Even so, twenty-two Padliermiut starved that winter. The grand fishery project thus failed the Ihalmiut, who, by the spring of 1951, were back in their familiar Ennadai region.

Mowat reports that the Ihalmiuts’ prospect of slow starvation was shared by all eleven or twelve thousand Eskimos scattered across Canada, and he contrasts Canada’s neglect of them with the enlightened policies begun in 1952 by Denmark in Greenland. Ottawa’s grasp of the crisis is reflected in its plan to make the Eskimos self-sufficient by carving pipe bowls out of soapstone. The collapse in prices for white fox pelts further left the Eskimos without a source of income and hastened their dependence on government assistance. The Ihalmiuts’ misery—and Ottawa’s indecisiveness, compounded by the persistent feeling of many Canadians—thus dragged on through the 1950’s. However, when Mowat returned to Hudson Bay in August 1958, he found a new rehabilitation settlement had been established near the mining outpost of Rankin Inlet, and thanks to the courage and insight of the mine manager, Andrew Easton, and the company president, Dr. W. W. Weber, Eskimos were enjoying employment on the same terms as other workers. Thus, Mowat’s story ends with what he describes as the “near-miraculous transformation which has come over the Ihalmiut.”

Never Cry Wolf

First published: 1963

Type of work: Natural history and autobiography

Lieutenant Mowat goes to the Keewatin District to study wolves for the Dominion Wildlife Service.

Never Cry Wolf is a short work (160 pages) that incorporates the truth about wolf behavior as Mowat interpreted it in his assignment to investigate “wolf-caribou-predator-prey relationships.” He himself called it a “potboiler,” and the Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition is marketed as juvenile literature complete with pedagogical materials. His critics sneered at the depiction of wolves as fanciful, but whatever the book’s merit as a study of wolves, it sold more than 300,000 copies and established Mowat’s reputation as a spokesman not only for wolves but also for nature in general.

As the narrator of Never Cry Wolf, Mowat is a young man whose vicissitudes are sometimes comic. His experience with his radio, for example, revealed an embarrassing gaffe by his Ottawa superiors: He had been supplied with an instrument meant for forest rangers and which had a range of only twenty miles. Nevertheless, Mowat rigged it up and sent his call sign, “Daisy Mae,” crying out into the “darkling subarctic skies.” As it turned out, he contacted an amateur operator in Peru, a Spanish speaker whose English was no better than Mowat’s Spanish.

The substance of Mowat’s story concerns his relationship with three wolves he names Angeline, her mate, George, and a solo male, Uncle Albert. One of his first discoveries was that wolves ate mice, of which there was a generous supply. The researcher’s next step was to introduce mice into his own diet, and he created a dish he called Souris à la Crême. In many of his explorations, Mowat was accompanied by an Eskimo friend, Ootek, who interpreted wolf talk for him and helped track the three wolves and their cubs to their summer den. Mowat deflates some commonly accepted beliefs about wolves, especially the misconception that they always pose a threat to humans. Moreover, Ootek explains to him that a healthy adult caribou can easily outrun a wolf and that even a fawn is too fast for most predators. The wolf’s usual victim is an aged or ailing doe, but even when successful, the hunter usually spends a long night traversing fifty to sixty miles of country.

Just before he returns to the city, Mowat hears George howling for his family, and it is to him “a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role. . . .”

Summary

In a century that saw a rapid loss of habitat for both people and animals, Mowat stood up for those pushed to the margin by technology and population explosion. His name joins those of Rachel Carson and Dian Fossey, among others, who attempted to forestall the damage done by a sometimes blind and indifferent civilization.

Bibliography

Austen, Ian. “Farley Mowat, Author, Dies at 92; Champion of the Far North.” The New York Times, 7 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/world/americas/farley-mowat-canadian-writer-and-wildlife-advocate-dies-at-92.html. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.

King, James. Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 2002.

Lucas, Alec. Farley Mowat. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976.

McGoogan, Ken. Review of Eastern Passage, by Farley Mowat. The Globe and Mail, 5 Nov. 2010, www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/eastern-passage-by-farley-mowat/article1216467/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2017.

Orange, John. Writing the Squib: A Biography of Farley Mowat. Toronto: ECW, 1993.

Thomas, Wendy, ed. A Farley Mowat Reader. Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1997.

York, Lorraine. Introducing Farley Mowat’s “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.” Canadian Fiction Series. Toronto: ECW, 1990.