”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
PAEAN TO A PRINCE – Part 2
“The greatest strength is gentleness.”
(unknown)
While Prince the dog lived with us for roughly five months that summer, every once in a while he would disappear for a week or so. The first time it happened my heart sank as I thought he had gone for good, returning to his itinerant ways, his taste for relative civilization sated. Then, to my surprise and secret delight, he reappeared one day none the worse for wear, if again in an appallingly scruffy condition. On one such occasion when he had suddenly materialized out of the bush after a couple of weeks’ absence, Prince had proudly laid at my feet the complete skeleton of a large rabbit. Because of its intact condition I suspected he may have just found the skeleton but, less probably, it may also have been the remnant of a victim which the dog had caught, killed and (delicately!) eaten; perhaps an indirect verification of his rumoured wolf genes. Certainly Newfoundland dogs are water dogs not forest hunters, but Prince would have required nourishment during his periodic disappearances into the bush.
It might also have been that instead of hunting on his own, the dog had temporarily returned to the aboriginal village from whence he allegedly came, but I was inclined to think not. The rumours of his abuse appeared valid from Prince’s behaviour in the presence of the occasional aboriginal that passed through our camp. Before such an individual was even in sight, the hairs on the dog’s neck would rise, accompanied by low growls and bared fangs as he scented the man. While not actively aggressive, this behaviour prevailed until the man had left the camp. The dog’s behaviour towards non-aboriginals was completely different suggesting that the rumours of his abuse may have had some substance.
Prince’s size became even more apparent when he and I engaged in the odd wrestling match, an act of play that Prince seemed to revel in and from which I was to suffer, how inadvertently, the consequences. Engaged in such horseplay one day, Prince reared up on his hind legs and with some surprise, I was startled to realize that that action left me looking up at him, his stature on hind legs exceeding my slightly less than six feet. My education was further advanced when with swiping paws, he inadvertently ripped the front of my shirt off me, leaving a trail of scratch marks down my chest. Conceding defeat once and for all, that episode ended our participation in that activity.
Another use of those massive paws was for digging, and did that dog love to dig. He should have been a miner. I have pictures of Prince reclining in a hole like a soldier in a foxhole, the latter having been dug by Prince to a depth of some four feet or so. Maybe he was looking for rabbits but since the hole was just outside the bunkhouse, I expect that for the dog, it was just a place to relax in the sun. The real use of those paws was to be demonstrated when Prince reveled in the environment he seemed to most enjoy, the water. Close by the camp ran a river that flowed south toward La Tuque. Largely devoid of rapids and meandering in nature, the river nonetheless ran silent with a formidable current. That current allowed logs that had been felled upstream to float downstream to a dam having special chutes down which the logs would be propelled to be collected and boomed in the river at the dam’s bottom for transportation to the pulp mill.
The river was also used as a water highway for a less legal activity, that of smuggling moose meat. Dense forests traversed by a myriad of winter roads hacked out of the bush to enable winter access for logging, together with the wide, sandy banked river with its many oxbow lakes formed from the channels of abandoned meanders cut off by new beds carved out by the swift flowing river, all served to provide an incredibly ideal environment for moose habitat. The so-called winter roads, less roads than wide trails enabling sleighs or tracked vehicles to pass along during the winter, aided both man and beast in traveling through the bush. It was a rare day that while downwind and walking along one of these roads, my footfalls silenced by the mossy under footing, that I did not encounter a moose. Occasionally the encounter was sudden, as rounding a corner a moose and I, mutually startled by our sudden encounter, were frozen and staring at each other over a distance of perhaps no more than a dozen feet. A mature bull moose is an awesome animal. Standing over six feet at the shoulder, a bull moose’s head, topped by a six foot spread of antlers, will tower over even the loftiest of basketball players. Weighing up to 1,600 pounds (725 kilograms), a close encounter with a moose is both awe inspiring and frightening. Unlike my first meeting with Prince, my strategy when meeting a moose close-up was certainly not to extend a hand in friendship. Rather there was the effort to remain stock still, while attempting to minimize the involuntary shaking that wracked my body. Invariably, the moose would get bored and shuffle off into the bush, leaving me breathless, heart pounding and quaking in its wake. It has always amazed me how such an animal could manage to wrestle six feet of antlers through the tangled growth of forest when people like me with no horns, at least of the physical variety, had such difficulty in doing the same.
As magnificent was the moose in its natural habitat, so it was, perhaps sadly, equally magnificent on the dinner plate. Having eaten both venison as well as moose, it has always perplexed me how the former acquired its reputation as a gourmet delicacy. Next to moose, venison is virtually tasteless, but I guess that’s what makes a market as the saying goes. The sale of game, be it moose or otherwise, was illegal at the time my story takes place. That did not however diminish the appetite many people had for the delicacy. Consequently, there was a thriving trade in La Tuque and elsewhere in the illicit sale of freshly killed moose. That resulted in a game of cat and mouse that rivaled the days of rum running during prohibition. To counter this illegal activity, various law enforcement agencies ranged against the hunters that supplied the moose meat. Undermanned and in some cases acting in complicity with the hunters, successes by the law were generally few in comparison with those of the hunters. Purchasing moose meet on the black market involved little subterfuge once the meat got to town. The main challenge for the hunters was to get it there. Road transport often met with failure as the law waited in ambush at key points to intercept vehicles laden with illicit meat. Transportation by river during the day often met with similar interceptions. It was therefore at night when the smuggling action most often took place. The undermanned forces of the law, normally if not always safely tucked in their beds during the night, became less equipped to deal with night smuggling. It was thus not unusual to observe almost nightly flotillas of large canoes, loaded to the gunwales with moose meat, silently floating by in the moonlight, propelled downstream by the swift current. Occasionally, bursts of noise might arise, punctuated even more rarely by gunfire, as some flotilla had the misfortune to encounter law enforcement officers lurking around a narrow bend in the river to intercept the canoes. I never heard of any fatalities from such encounters. The worst that usually happened to the hunters was that their supply of moose meat was confiscated and small fines levied against those in possession. It was but a small inconvenience for the hunters to try again, the moose population being so prodigious. I am convinced the whole process was more gestural than of serious intent since I suspect many a local police officer and magistrate frequently tasted the delights of moose at the dinner table. Also begging the question is what happened to the meat under seizure.
The river also held an attraction for Prince and he appeared happiest when gamboling on its shores and immersing himself in its waters. His skills as a swimmer were impressive, his smooth movement in the water belying his bulk. Running deep and silent, this river carried major volumes of water and had a powerful current, probably in the nature of five to six miles an hour. Without a motor attached, boat navigation was restricted to the downstream direction. For a human being, swimming in the river would be a virtual impossibility as it indeed it would be for most dogs. Not this Prince of a dog however. Scattered along the banks of the river were logs that had been stranded after not making it around one of the river’s bends or had found the shore when the river’s water levels dropped as the summer wore on. These logs were of considerable weight, being perhaps some four feet long and nearly a foot in diameter. The game was, with considerable effort and sometimes on the part of two people, to toss one of these logs as far out into the river as possible. Prince would then leap into the water to retrieve it, a feat of considerable challenge on a number of fronts. Caught by the current the log swiftly headed downstream and had to be pursued by the dog. Once caught, the log had then to be manoeuvered back upstream to twits like me who had tossed into the river in the first place. This problem was accentuated by the fact that the diameter of the log was far too great to be grasped in the dog’s mouth. It therefore remained for him to continually nudge the log back upstream as his massive paws paddled hard to overcome the strength of the current. I never witnessed any failure on Prince’s part to successfully retrieve the log to me during the many occasions that this game was played. I did however come to question Prince’s mental faculties in this regard. I have seen him literally staggering on his feet from the exhaustion of repeated retrievals, but still ready and willing, if diminishingly able, to go after yet another log toss into the river. I firmly believe that if I had not consciously ended the game on such an occasion, Prince would have continued to retrieve the logs I threw into the river until one time he drowned from the exhaustion.
That summer’s end brought a sad goodbye to not just a dog but to someone who had become my best friend. I briefly and irrationally contemplated taking Prince back to Montreal with me, knowing that that was not only an impossibility but that it would also do him a disservice. Prince belonged to the natural environment, not to the confines of a crowded city. That rationale clear in my mind, it was nonetheless with strangely blurred vision that I gave him a fervent farewell hug. Often a rider in the back of our pickup truck, Prince seemed to know that this time there was to be no ride. As we pulled away for the last time, he made no move to pursue us, sitting head held high in regal majesty, seeming to know that he was once again on his own.
I have often wondered about his fate. Did he go back to the reservation or did he decide to run wild, his genes driving a return to a life that emulated his ancestors? Whatever that fate, I was sure he would remain indomitable, for as Prince, he was a king.
“A forest bird never wants a cage.”
Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906)
Copyright 2010 Ian de W. Semple
