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anything less lethal) a solidified form of alcohol called Canned Heat. We children were allowed to consort with these ragamuffins, and I especially remember a lanky redhead called Bunny-Boy who had once worked in a circus and could juggle half a dozen tins of Canned Heat at a time. These men also carved toy boats for us and showed us how to catch catfish on trotlines. If they posed any sort of threat, sexual or otherwise, we never knew it.
    We fished whenever and wherever, but nowhere more assiduously than from the harbour wharves. Our catch was mainly perch, rock bass, and sunfish—“panfish”—which Angus encouraged me to bring home as my contribution to the family’s larder. However, Helen, who had to clean and scale the bony little creatures, discouraged me. I think this was my first experience of being caught in the middle of the battle of the sexes. I compromised. I would bring home half my catch and give the other half to the neighbourhood cats.
    Many fishermen still made a livelihood on the bay working single-handed from small open boats. Their rickety wharves and spindle-shaped net-drying racks seemed to be everywhere along the shores. A crony of my father’s by the name of Milt fished out of Onderdonk’s Cove and occasionally took me with him when he hauled his nets and lines or lifted his fish traps. Like most of his ilk he was a “general purpose” fisherman, catching lake trout, white fish, black bass, pickerel, pike, eel, smelt, and something called a sheepshead. This was a large and coarse-scaled fish chiefly remarkable for its voice. While sitting silently with Milt in his boat, I would sometimes hear loud grunting sounds from the depths below. “That’s old man sheepshead talkin’ to his woman,” Milt would say.
    Of course I did not spend all my childhood hours on or near the water. In winter we would go trundling noisily around the countryside in Henry, visiting the farms to which Angus brought the benison of books.
    We were rewarded with gargantuan farm meals and with sleigh and cutter rides across frozen marshes and ice-bound ponds into the deep recesses of cedar swamps and hardwood forests. Here I saw deer, snowshoe rabbits, ruffed grouse, and foxes. On one occasion we encountered a lynx which paused in the deep snow fifty feet away to stare through slit, green eyes at half a dozen human beings staring back at it over the steaming back of a big Clydesdale. Experiences like this fuelled the fascination I was beginning to feel for animals.
    A favourite visitation of mine was to Charlie Haultain’s fox “ranch,” which consisted of half an acre of waste land on the edge of a swamp. It was surrounded by an eight-foot fence roughly made of sawmill slabs set on end. This stockade enclosed a dozen fox pens together with the shanty where Charlie lived. In one corner of the enclosure stood a tower of peeled poles about thirty feet high supporting a tiny cabin reached by a rickety ladder from which I could observe the foxes unseen by them. It was like having a window into their secret lives and I was happy to spend hours watching them eating, at play, and making love.
    The establishment may have been a “ranch” in Charlie’s eyes—the imagery of the Far West loomed large to young men in those days—but for me it was more like one of the fur trader’s forts portrayed in a picture book about the old-time voyageurs which I had unearthed in the library. Charlie fit the picture. He was swarthy, swift of movement, and familiar with everything that lived in the fields, woods, and waters. He would have been perfectly at ease clothed in buckskin with feathers in his hair.
    In fact, he was generally clothed in the powerful aroma of dog-fox, which is similar to skunk. It permeated his cabin, and his garments, which he did not often change. I thought the aroma rather marvellous (it smelled to me then, and still does, like the essence of