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FOREWORD

Good wine needs no bush. This glowing narrative by my friend Grey Owl scarcely requires a word of mine to bid people run and read. To those in Canada who know merely the bare outline of Grey Owl’s achievement in our western country, his own story in detail of his magnificent work (the phrase is mine — he would disagree with it) will be sheer delight. To those beyond our borders it will come, I fancy, as a revelation alike of a character as lovable as he is unusual, and of sights and sounds and scenes which will entrance them. But his story will speak for itself.

I may be allowed to say one or two things, by way of explanation, of the narrative and the man who wrote it.

This is Grey Owl’s book. It appears between these covers precisely as he wrote it. His publishers in Toronto, London, and New York have suffered no hand to touch it. Written in the Wilderness (a capital W for you, Grey Owl!) he loves so well, in the time he could spare from his Little People and their care, it came, copied into typescript, to me. Grey Owl’s eye was on it, page by page, to watch that from pen and ink to typewritten copy no word, no phrase, even no slightest punctuation mark should have been introduced into what was, in every particular, his own story. “It may be doctored by nobody,” said Grey Owl. “It is to be published, if it is worth it, just as I wrote it. It is my work, good or bad, and nobody else’s. Nobody else is going to tamper with it.” He was, of course, quite right. To attempt to shape, to edit, to dress such a story as this in any way whatever, would result in robbing it of its simplicity and its beauty. Grey Owl wrote his own story. Nobody else could write it. Nobody else has written it. Nobody else may, in any way, seek to varnish it. This is to be said because all sorts of wild legends have grown up about him, about his first book, The Men of the Last Frontier, and about this, his second.

The, to me, delightful sketches which are reproduced in this volume are also Grey Owl’s own work.

I can think of few books more revealing of their writer than this. The very essence our Canadian hinterland is in these pages because Grey Owl is so completely of it, and one with it. All his years, but for the briefest of intervals, have been spent in his beloved Wilderness. He loves it with a deep and abiding love. Somehow it is part of him and he part of it. “The only way I can live happily,” he says, “is wandering over the face of the Wilderness.” He is almost missionary about it. Nothing delights him so much as to try to communicate to those who don’t know them at first hand something of his own affection for our forests and lakes and streams and those who dwell in them. He will forever be restless till every last one of us shall come to know for ourselves the loveliness which he knows. He would have us all be in truth “Pilgrims of the Wild.”

Grey Owl was born in 1888 of Scotch and Indian parentage. He went to England for a little, and returned to this side quickly thereafter, taking part in the Cobalt silver rush of 1905. He was then, as he has been ever since (but for the space of his war service), a canoeman and packer. He never forgets his great debt to the Ojibway Indians. He was still a youth when he was adopted into their tribe. It was they who named him Grey Owl because of his habit of nocturnal travelling. He learned their language. From them he derived his forest lore. He lived their nomadic life. Early becoming one of them, he feels that they are his people and that all he is and has he owes to them. They taught him to love Northern Ontario and to think of it as his homeland. Their land was his land and their folk his folk. The Indian influence, or rather the Ojibway Indian influence, is naturally very marked in all his reminiscences and portrayals of wilderness life.

A canoe is to Grey Owl what a horse is to a cowpuncher or a good vessel to a sailor. Prior to his becoming so deeply interested in what has turned out to be his life work, namely the preservation of the Little People, his days were spent in guiding, exploration, and transportation of supplies up and down and across and about the north country. He trapped every winter, and for a few summers served as a forest ranger for the Ontario government. He was singularly successful, and his ability to penetrate easily through unexplored territory gained for him a roving commission. The war stopped his activities for three years. He returned from it pronounced unfit from wounds in 1917. As soon as he was able he resumed his former manner of living, and his speed and endurance and extraordinarily intimate knowledge gained for him the post of assistant chief ranger over a large area in the Mississauga Forest reserve. After a few years during which he came to know every nook and cranny of this region to his own satisfaction a ranger’s life became monotonous and far-off horizons beckoned. He closed his old trapping camp on the Spanish River, threw together a light outfit, and set out on new wanderings, hiring out, canoe and man, wherever guiding, packing, and the like provided means of renewing supplies. He tramped over a new hunting ground every winter.

He tells his own story in the present book.You learn how he came to realize that our wildlife was becoming scarcer and scarcer so that in certain areas native game was almost extinct. This was particularly true of beaver. In 1928 he gave up trapping altogether and devoted, indeed consecrated, his life to conservation of game generally and beaver in particular.

I have spoken of him as being almost missionary in his quality. He is. The cause of preservation and conservation of the Wilderness and its folk is his lifework, and he feels himself as surely called to it as a man of the cloth is called. He might paraphrase John Wesley and say, “The Wilderness is my parish.” In Grey Owl’s own words, “Give me a good canoe, a pair of Ojibway snowshoes, my beaver, my family, and ten thousand square miles of wilderness and I am happy.” He does not add, but I may for him, that he has in ample measure another requisite for happiness: he is a happy man because he has learned to help others to happiness, and amongst those others not the least, his friends the Little People.

Hugh Eayrs

Toronto

October 1934