Grey Owl
By Kenneth Brower, Atlantic Monthly, January
1990
He became famous as a half-Scot, half-Apache defender of wildlife, and some believe he should rank with John Muir and Rachel Carson in the environmentalists' pantheon. But he was not exactly what he seemed.
The trail to Grey Owl's cabin began among aspen under a big prairie sky. In late September, when I set off in pursuit of the old Indian, the aspen -- poplar, he would have called them -- were nearly leafless, all their green turned yellow-gold, all the gold fallen to the ground. The beaked hazel had dropped its leaves too. The rose hips and high-bush cranberries displayed themselves on naked branches. Puddles in the trail were covered with half-inch panes of ice. On the 1,200-foot escarpment of Riding Mountain, summer is abbreviated, ending a few days before its conclusion on the Manitoba plains below.
An elk had crossed the trail in one spot, and in several places moose. They had left deep tracks, which last night's freeze had set as hard as fossil hoofprints in stone. The moose tracks were the larger and more pointed. They were a day or two old, yet each time I passed a set I took a nervous, reflexive look into the forest around.
Here and there pocket gophers had pushed mounds of black
tailings from their burrows onto the trail. In passing I nudged a mound with
the toe of my boot. It had no give. It had lost the fine, airy lightness the
mounds have in warm weather. Now and again my boots detoured for the pocket-gopher
mounds. They did so because of the same powerful obligation that caused them
to veer occasionally and tramp on those first panes of autumn ice. I dutifully
kicked a few mounds apart. They were black with moisture on the outside, gray
on the inside. The wet black exteriors gave the impression that this prairie
soil was even richer than it was.
My trip to Grey Owl's cabin was part hike and part pilgrimage. I went in curiosity
and a certain embarrassment. Americans know so much less of Canadian history
than Canadians know of American. I had grown up in a California household
where environmentalism and its poets and heroes made most of the table talk,
yet before coming to Manitoba I had never heard of Grey Owl. No man was more
important to Canadian environmental consciousness, or to the environmental
consciousness of the entire British Commonwealth, for that matter. If his
deeds had been done at a slightly lower latitude, we all would have heard
of him. In the pantheon Grey Owl belongs with Henry David Thoreau, John Muir,
Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson -- or perhaps with Lewis Mumford and Joseph
Wood Krutch, on the level just below.
I was curious about Grey Owl because he is doubly now a fossil. He has been dead in a personal way for half a century, and he is said to be dead as a type.
In the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s bureaucratization has been the trend. Those old clarion voices in the wilderness and from the wilderness -- Thoreau's, Muir's, Leopold's, Grey Owl's -- have done their job in alerting mankind to the environmental threat, according to the new wisdom. The day now belongs to pragmatic, reasonable men who know the art of compromise and can work effectively with Congress and Parliament. The era of the "stars," those seminal, charismatic, flawed, larger-than-life characters whose eloquence and example brought the natural world back into the world; is finished -- or so the bureaucrats themselves assure us.
The trail to Grey Owl's cabin, in more than one sense, was cold.
He-Who-Flies-by-Night
By his own testimony, Grey Owl was born in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 1888. His mother was Katherine Cochise, of the Jacarilla Apaches, his father George MacNeil, a Scot who had served as a scout in the Southwestern Indian wars. MacNeil was a good friend of another old Indian fighter, Buffalo Bill Cody, who in 1887 invited the MacNeils
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