Grey Owl

Born an Englishman, he came alone to Canada at the age of 16. From that point on, he constantly tinkered with his identity and seldom went by his real name, Archie Belaney. He was a poseur, a bigamist, and a drunkard, but what he is best known for is his role as a conservationist.

He wrote four books, three of which appear in this volume, Collected Works of Grey Owl:

The Men of the Last Frontier (1931)
Pilgrims of the Wild (1934)
Sajo and the Beaver People (1935)

Sajo is a children's book. The rest -- including his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) -- are memoirs that fall somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, for much of what he wrote about himself was made up. 

The book I enjoyed most in Collected Works is Pilgrims of the Wild, the first half of which is about the beaver kits that he and Anahareo adopted. He touched upon them in a chapter of Men of the Wild Frontier, but in his second book the writing is much more assured and a masterpiece of nature writing. His portrayal of the kits is tender enough to melt anyone's heart.

Biography

From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (1990) by Donald B. Smith is the definitive biography, its name derived from the title of second chapter in Men of the Last Frontier. The footnotes alone take up 70 pages, yet it's not a tedious book.

Earlier contributions came from Thomas Raddall, who wrote a perceptive essay in his book Footsteps on Old Floors (1968), and from Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's publisher, who wrote Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (1973).

It was Dickson who arranged two wildly successful reading tours in England. Grey Owl was a gifted speaker, as was no more evident than when he gave a command performance for British royalty, and which so delighted young Princess Elizabeth that, as the talk drew to a close, she jumped up from her seat, clapped her hands, and urged him to continue. He took his leave of the king by touching his shoulder and saying, “Goodbye, brother.”

Anahareo

Anahareo deserves to be more well-known. She persuaded Grey Owl to save the kittens, McGinty and McGinnis, who so won their hearts that Grey Owl began his crusade to preserve the beaver, which had nearly been trapped out during the Depression. It was not until after his death in 1938 that she learned he was English.

Her memoir My Life with Grey Owl was published in 1940 by Lovat Dickson, who asked her to avoid mentioning the issue of Grey Owl's identity. Later this bothered her enough that she took to visiting libraries and tearing out the first chapter of the book.

In 1972 she published a revised version, Devil in Deerskins. In it she writes: "When finally I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that I had been married to a ghost."

Though wounded by the deception, she defended his legacy as a conservationist. At first glance the book's title seems like a rebuke, but in fact is a tribute, as Grey Owl planned to use that title for a final book in which he planned to reveal the truth about himself.

Later she married a Swedish count and in 1983, two years before her death, she received the Order of Canada.

Images

Collected Works, Land of Shadows, Wilderness Man, and Devil in Deerskins all contain several pages of B&W plates.

Two vintage film clips, both named "Beaver People," can be viewed at the National Film Board's website. One, at approximately 9 minutes in length, shows Anahareo interacting with beavers. The other, at approximately 16 minutes long, shows only Grey Owl and the beavers.

A 1999 movie, Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, was less than memorable, in part due to the miscasting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl.

Casterologia

Many years ago I wrote a whimsical short story about a beaver family that meets up with Grey Owl and McGinnis. Entitled "Casterologia," it was published in the 1997 Spring issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, along with this delightful illustration by James Beveridge.

The story concludes with a list of references, only one of which is made up:

Dallman, J.E. 1968. Giant Beaver from a Post-Woodfordian Lake. J. Mammal. 50: 826-830.

Heter, E.W. 1950. Transplanting Beaver by Airplane and Parachute. J Wildli. Manage. 14: 143-147.

Huey, S.W. and W.H. Wolfrum. 1956. Beaver-Trout Relations. Prog, Fish-cult. 18: 70-74.

Martin, H. 1892. Casterologia: Or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. Wm. Drysdale Co., Montreal.

Owl, G. 1933. Sajo and the Beaver People. Macmillan, Toronto.

Studios, U. 1957-63. Leave it to Beaver. CBS and ABC.

Shakespeare, W. 1603. Hamlet, Prince of Beavers. Ling & Trundell, London.