Military titles were de rigeur. All memos were signed Captain-this or Lieutenant-that if they originated from the lower echelons; or Colonel-this and Brigadier-that if they came down from on high. Those members of the staff who had not had the opportunity to acquire even quasi-military status were reduced to the expedient of inventing suitable ranks—field ranks if they were senior men, and subaltern ranks for the juniors. Not everyone took this matter with due solemnity, and I met one new employee in the fishery section who distinguished himself briefly by sending a memo up to the Chief signed “J. Smith, Acting Lance-Corporal.” A week later this foolhardy youth was on his way to the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island, there to spend his exile living in an igloo while studying the life history of the nine-spined stickleback.
Levity was not looked upon with favor anywhere in those austere offices, as I discovered for myself while attending a conference concerning my first assignment.
A tentative list of the material requirements for this assignment lay on the conference table, surrounded by many grave countenances. It was a formidable document, made out in quintuplicate—as was the official rule—and imposingly headed:
DESIDERATA FOR THE LUPINE PROJECT
Having already been unnerved by the gravity of the gathering, I lost my head completely when the assembly began to consider the twelfth item listed in this horrendous document:
Paper, toilet, Government standard: 12 rolls.
An austere suggestion by the representative of the Finance Department that, in the interest of economy, the quantity of this item might be reduced, providing the field party (which was me) exercised all due restraint, sent me into an hysterical spasm of giggling. I mastered myself almost instantly, but it was too late. The two most senior men, both “majors,” rose to their feet, bowed coldly, and left the room without a word.
The Ottawa ordeal drew toward its end; but the climax was still to come. One early spring morning I was called to the office of the senior officer who was my direct chief, for a final interview before departing “into the field.”
My chief sat behind a massive desk whose dusty surface was littered with yellowing groundhog skulls (he had been studying rates of tooth decay in groundhogs ever since he joined the Department in 1897). At his back hung the frowning, bearded portrait of an extinct mammalogist who glared balefully down upon me. The smell of Formalin swirled about like the fetid breath of an undertaker’s back parlor.
After a long silence, during which he toyed portentously with some of his skulls, my chief began his briefing. There was a solemnity about the occasion which would have done justice to the briefing of a special agent about to be entrusted with the assassination of a Head of State.
“As you are aware, Lieutenant Mowat,” my chief began, “the Canis lupus problem has become one of national importance. Within this past year alone this Department has received no less than thirty-seven memoranda from Members of the House of Commons, all expressing the deep concern of their constituents that we ought to do something about the wolf. Most of the complaints have come from such civic-minded and disinterested groups as various Fish and Game clubs, while members of the business community—in particular the manufacturers of some well-known brands of ammunition—have lent their weight to the support of these legitimate grievances of the voting public of this Great Dominion, because their grievance is the complaint that the wolves are killing all the deer, and more and more of our fellow citizens are coming back from more and more hunts with less and less deer.
“As you may possibly have heard, my predecessor supplied the Minister with an explanation of this situation in which it was his contention that there were fewer deer because the hunters had increased to the point where they outnumbered the deer about five to one. The Minister, in all good faith, read this fallacious statement in the House of Commons, and he was promptly shouted down by Members howling ‘Liar!’ and ‘Wolf-lover!’
“Three days later my predecessor retired to civilian life, and the Minister issued a press statement: ‘The Department of Mines and Resources is determined to do everything in its power to curb the carnage being wreaked upon the deer population by hordes of wolves. A full-scale investigation of this vital problem, employing the full resources of the Department, is to be launched at once. The people of this country can rest assured that the Government of which I have the honor to be a member will leave no stone unturned to put an end to this intolerable situation.’”
At this juncture my chief seized a particularly robust groundhog skull and began rhythmically clacking its jaws together as if to emphasize his final words:
“You, Lieutenant Mowat, have been chosen for this great task! It only remains for you to go out into the field at once and tackle this work in a manner worthy of the great traditions of this Department. The wolf, Lieutenant Mowat, is now your problem!”
Somehow I staggered to my feet, and with an involuntary motion brought my right hand up in a smart salute before fleeing from the room.
I fled from Ottawa too…that self-same night, aboard a Canadian Air Force transport plane. My immediate destination was Churchill, on the western shore of Hudson Bay; but beyond that, somewhere in the desolate wastes of the subarctic Barren Lands, lay my ultimate objective—the wolf himself.
2
Wolf Juice
THE AIR FORCE transport was a twin-engined plane capable of carrying thirty passengers, but by the time all my “desiderata” were aboard there was barely room left for the crew and me. The pilot, an amiable flight lieutenant wearing a handlebar mustache, watched the load going aboard with honest bewilderment writ large across his brow. His only information about me was that I was some sort of Government man going on a special mission to the Arctic. His expression grew increasingly quizzical as we swung three great bundles of clanking wolf traps into the cabin, following these with the midsection of a collapsible canoe which looked like nothing so much as a bathtub without ends. True to Departmental precedent, the bow and stern sections of this canoe had been shipped to another biologist who was studying rattlesnakes in the south Saskatchewan desert.
My armament was loaded aboard next. It consisted of two rifles, a revolver complete with holster and cartridge belt, two shotguns, and a case of tear-gas grenades with which I was expected to persuade reluctant wolves to leave their dens so that they could be shot. There were also two large smoke generators prominently labeled DANGER, to be used for signaling to aircraft in case I got lost or—perhaps—in case the wolves closed in. A case of “wolf getters”—fiendish devices which fire a charge of potassium cyanide into the mouth of any animal which investigates them—completed my arsenal.
My scientific gear followed, including two five-gallon cans at the sight of which the pilot’s eyebrows shot right up under his cap. They were marked: 100% Grain Alcohol for the Preservation of Specimen Stomachs.
Tents, camp stoves, sleeping bags, and a bundle of seven axes (to this day I do not know why seven, for I was going to a treeless land where even one would have been superfluous), skis, snowshoes, dog harness, a radio transceiver and innumerable boxes and bales whose contents were as inscrutable to me as to the pilot, followed in due course.