This is not goodbye

I lost another friend recently. His name was Farley Mowat and I learned a lot from our association.

He wasn’t a member of my family and I never met him. But he had a way with his writing that opened worlds for me.

Children of the Deer allowed this pasty white suburban kid learn about the Inuit and also about social justice – or rather, lack thereof. But for whatever reason, it would be years before I would again share time and attention with Mr. Mowat.

I believe it was my brother who talked me into seeing the movie version of Never Cry Wolf. It helped that Charles Martin Smith played Mowat in the film but it was the story itself that grabbed me. So within the week I had found a copy of the original book without the movie edits and read it overnight. And the conversation was renewed.

This book was and remains controversial among wildlife naturalists, conservations and especially ranchers whose image of wolf predation were at odds with his findings. And maybe they have some good points. But anyone on any side of the discussion would have to admit that Mowat forever changed that discussion. Never again will the Big Bad Wolf mythology define our view of this long misunderstood and irrationally feared mammal.

Mowat did his research without tracking devices or fancy datasets. He simply went out and lived among the wolves in their own range. And noticed. With neither assumption nor prejudice. And then he turned his observations into a book that is both accessible to non-scientists and undeniable to the scientists themselves.  

Somewhere in my used bookshelf pruning I came across a much-thumbed copy of The Grey Seas Under: The Perilous Rescue Missions of a North Atlantic Salvage Tug. A veteran of the Sicilian Campaign during World War II, it would have been understandable if Mowat had simply cranked out his own war memoir and then moved on. Instead, he chose to chronicle the wartime exploits of oceangoing salvage tugs and the heroic people who crewed them.

Mowat told real stories about real life. In real language. I could not have learned what I did through him by reading any other writer.

 Believe it’s time I looked up some more of his books.