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Farley Mowat - The Dog Who Wouldnt Be

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Product Description

Farely Mowats best-loved book tells the splendidly entertaining story of his boyhood on the Canadian prairies. Mutts pedigree was uncertain, but his madness was indisputable. He climbed tress and ladders, rode passenger in an open car wearing goggles and displaying hunting skills that bordered on sheer genius. He was a marvelous dog, worthy of an unusual boy growing up in a raw, untamed wilderness.

From the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Farley Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921. He served in the Second World War from 1940 until 1945, and began writing for his living in 1949 after spending two years in the Arctic. Since 1949 he has lived in or visited almost every part of Canada and many other lands, including the distant regions of Siberia. He is the bestselling author of forty-seven books, which have been published in more than twenty languages in more than sixty countries.

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BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT People of the Deer 1952 The Regiment 1955 Lost in - photo 1

BOOKS BY FARLEY MOWAT

People of the Deer (1952)
The Regiment (1955)
Lost in the Barrens (1956)
The Dog Who Wouldnt Be (1957)
Coppermine Journey (editor) (1958)
The Grey Seas Under (1959)
The Desperate People (1959)
Ordeal by Ice (1960)
Owls in the Family (1961)
The Serpents Coil (1961)
The Black Joke (1962)
Never Cry Wolf (1963)
Westviking (1965)
The Curse of the Viking Grave (1967)
Canada North (illustrated edition 1967)
The Polar Passion (1967)
Canada North Now (revised paperback edition 1967)
This Rock Within the Sea (with John de Visser) (1968)
The Boat Who Wouldnt Float (1969)
Sibir (1970)
The Siberians (1971)
A Whale for the Killing (1972)
Tundra (1973)
Wake of the Great Sealers (with David Blackwood) (1973)
The Snow Walker (1975)
And No Birds Sang (1979)
The World of Farley Mowat (edited by Peter Davison) (1980)
Sea of Slaughter (1984)
My Discovery of America (1985)
Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey (1987, renamed Gorillas in the Mist, 2009)
The New Founde Land (1989)
Rescue the Earth! (1990)
My Fathers Son (1992)
Born Naked (1993)
Aftermath (1995)
A Farley Mowat Reader (edited by Wendy Thomas) (1977)
The Farfarers (1998)
High Latitudes (2002)
Walking on the Land (2002)
No Mans River (2004)
Bay of Spirits (2006)
Otherwise (2008)

For my parents who made the hours of my youth And for Mutt who shared that - photo 2

For my parents,
who made the hours of my youth
.
And for Mutt,
who shared that time with me
.

CONTENTS

12 Squirrels, Scotsmen, and Some
Other Beasts

1
THE COMING OF
MUTT

The Dog Who Wouldnt Be - image 3 n oppressive darkness shadowed the city of Saskatoon on an August day in 1929. By the clock it was hardly noon. By the sun but the earth had obliterated the sun. Rising in the new deserts of the southwest, and lifting high on autumnal winds, the desecrated soil of the prairies drifted northward; and the sky grew dark. In our small house on the outskirts of the city my mother switched on the electric lights and continued with the task of preparing luncheon for my father and for me. Father had not yet returned from his office, nor I from school. Mother was alone with the somber day.

The sound of the doorbell brought her unwillingly from the kitchen into the hall. She opened the front door no more than a few inches, as if expecting the menace of the sky to thrust its way past her into the house.

There was no menace in the appearance of the visitor who waited apologetically on the step. A small boy, perhaps ten years of age, stood shuffling his feet in the gray grit that had been falling soundlessly across the city for a day and a night. He held a wicker basket before him and, as the door opened, he swung the basket forward and spoke in a voice that was husky with the dust and with the expectation of rebuff.

Missus, he asked in a pale, high tone, would you want to buy a duck?

Mother was a bit nonplussed by this odd echo of a catch phrase that had already withered and staled in the mouths of the comedians of the era. Nevertheless, she looked into the basket and to her astonishment beheld three emaciated ducklings, their bills gaping in the heat, and, wedged between them, a nondescript and bedraggled pup.

She was touched, and curious although she certainly did not want to buy a duck.

I dont think so, she said kindly. Why are you selling them?

The boy took courage and returned her smile.

I gotta, he said. The slough out to the farm is dry. We ate the big ducks, but these was too small to eat. I sold some down to the Chinee Grill. You want the rest, lady? Theyre cheap only a dime each.

Im sorry, Mother replied. Ive no place to keep a duck. But where did you get the little dog?

The boy shrugged his shoulders. Oh, him, he said without much interest. He was kind of an accident, you might say. I guess somebody dumped him out of a car right by our gate. I brung him with me in case. But dogs is hard to sell. He brightened up a little as an idea struck him. Say, lady, you want him? Ill sell him for a nickel that way youll save a nickel for yourself.

Mother hesitated. Then almost involuntarily her hand went to the basket. The pup was thirsty beyond thirst, and those outstretched fingers must have seemed to him as fountains straight from heaven. He clambered hastily over the ducks and grabbed.

The boy was quick to sense his advantage and to press it home.

He likes you, lady, see? Hes yours for just four cents!

Less than a month had elapsed since my parents and I had come out of the verdant depths of southern Ontario into the arid and dust-shrouded prairies.

It had seemed a foolhardy venture then, for those were the beginnings of the hard times, even in the east; while in the west the hard times the times of drought and failure were already old. I do not know what possessed my father to make him exchange the security of his job in Windsor for a most uncertain future as Saskatoons librarian. It may be that the name itself, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, attracted him irresistibly. It may have been simply that he was tired of the physical and mental confines of a province grown staid and stolid in its years.

In any case he made his decision in the fall of 1928, and the rest of us acquiesced in it; I, with a high heart and bright anticipation; Mother, with grave reservations and gloomy prophecies.

Father spent that winter building a caravan, a trailer-house which was destined to carry us westward. It was a long winter for me. On Saturdays I joined my father under a shed and here we hammered and sawed industriously, and the caravan took shape. It was an unconventional shape, for my father was a sailor at heart and he had had but little experience in the design of land conveyances. Our caravan was, in reality, a houseboat perched precariously on the four thin wheels of an old Model T chassis. Her aspect was bluff and uncompromising. Her sides towered straight from the frame a full seven feet to a gently cambered deck (which was never referred to as a roof). She was big-boned and buxom, and she dwarfed poor Eardlie our Model A Ford convertible as a floating derrick dwarfs the tug which tows it.

Some of Fathers friends used to come by now and again to watch our progress. They never said much, but when they went away it was with much thoughtful shakings of their heads.

Perhaps our caravan 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.

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