The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. Farley Mowat
seemed hopeless. Yet Father persevered with such determination that toward the end of the season he began to see some meager prospect of success. On those rare occasions when Mutt allowed us to shoot a bird we would force the corpse into his jaws, or hang it, albatrosslike, about his neck, for him to bring back to the car. He deeply resented this business, for the feathers of upland game birds made him sneeze, and the oily taste of duck feathers evidently gave him a mild form of nausea. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to pick up a dead Hungarian partridge of his own volition, but he did this only because Father had made it clear to him that there would be no more cow chasing that day if he refused to humor us. Finally, on a day in early October, he stumbled on a dead partridge, without having it pointed out to him, and, probably because there were no cows in sight and he was bored, he picked it up and brought it back. That first real retrieve was not an unqualified success, since Mutt did not have what dog fanciers refer to as a “tender mouth.” When we received the partridge we got no more than a bloody handful of feathers. We did not dare complain.
Being determinedly optimistic, we took this incident as a hopeful sign, and redoubled our efforts. But Mutt remained primarily a cow chaser; and it was not until the final week end of the hunting season that the tide began to turn.
As the result of a book-distributing plan which he had organized, my father had become acquainted with an odd assortment of people scattered all through the province. One of these was a Ukrainian immigrant named Paul Sazalisky. Paul owned two sections on the shores of an immense slough known as Middle Lake that lies well to the east of Saskatoon. On Thursday of the last week of the season, Paul phoned Father to report that huge flocks of Canada geese were massing on the lake. He invited us to come out and try our luck.
That was a frigid journey. Snow already lay upon the ground and the north wind was so bitter that Mutt did not leap out after cattle even once. He stayed huddled up on the floor boards over the manifold heater, inhaling gusts of hot air and carbon monoxide.
We arrived at Middle Lake in the early evening and found a wasteland that even to our eyes seemed the essence of desolation. Not a tree pierced the gray emptiness. The roads had subsided into freezing gumbo tracks and they seemed to meander without hope across a lunar landscape. The search for Paul’s farm was long and agonizing.
Paul’s house, when at last we found it, turned out to be a clay-plastered shanty perched like a wart upon the face of the whitened plains. It was unprepossessing in appearance. There were only two rooms, each with a single tiny window—yet it held Paul, his wife, his wife’s parents, Paul’s seven children, and two cousins who had been recruited to help with the pigs. The pigs, as we soon discovered, were the mainstay of the establishment, and their aroma was everywhere. It seemed to me to be a singularly unpleasant odor too—far worse than that usually associated with pigs. But there was a good reason for the peculiarly powerful properties of that memorable stench.
Like most of the immigrants who came from middle Europe in response to the lure of free land in Canada, Paul was an astute and farsighted fellow. As soon as he had taken over his homestead on the shores of Middle Lake, he made a thorough assessment of the natural resources at his disposal. He soon discovered that a narrow channel which flowed through his property, connecting the two main arms of Middle Lake, was crowded with enormous suckers. There was no commercial market for these soft-fleshed fish, so they had remained undisturbed until Paul came, and saw, and was inspired. Paul concluded that if the fish could not be marketed in their present form, their flesh might very well be sold if it was converted into a more acceptable product—such as pork.
He surprised his wheat-farming neighbors by going into the pig business on a large scale.
He acquired three dip nets, and began to raise hogs on suckers. The hogs prospered almost unbelievably on this pure protein diet, reaching marketable weight in about two thirds the length of time required by corn-fed swine. They bred with abandon, and their progeny were insatiable for fish.
Paul was a bit of a mystery man locally. None of his neighbors knew about the fish, and there were two good reasons for Paul’s reticence. First of all, he had no wish to share a good thing with duller folk; and secondly, he had sometimes tasted fish-fed swine in the Ukraine. Because of this experience he chose to ship his hogs all the way to Winnipeg, disdaining the more accessible local markets, and cheerfully shouldering the extra freight costs. The local people thought that this was foolish, but Paul saw no reason to explain that he had chosen Winnipeg because it would be practically impossible for the retail butchers in that large city to trace the origin of certain hams and sides of bacon which seemed to have been cured in cod-liver oil.
In later years Paul became a powerful and respected figure in the west. He was of the stuff from which great men are made.
He was still in the preliminary stages of his career when we knew him and he had few physical amenities to offer guests. Nevertheless, when Eardlie drew up at his door, he took us to the bosom of his family.
That is to say he took Father and me to the family bosom. Mutt refused to be taken. Sniffing the heavy air about the cabin with ill-concealed disgust, he at first refused even to leave the car. He sat on the seat, his nose dripping, saying “Faugh!” at frequent intervals. It was not until full darkness had brought with it the breath of winter, and the wailing of the coyotes, that he came scratching at the cabin door.
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