Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  Between 1850 and 1885, more than 75 million buffalo hides had been handled by American dealers. Most were shipped east on the railroads, which had contributed heavily to the extinction both directly and indirectly. William Frederick Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” who was hired as a meat hunter by the Kansas Pacific Railway to feed its work gangs, gained much of his fame from having butchered 4,280 buffalo in a single eighteen-month period.

  The railway companies also used buffalo to entertain their passengers. When a train came within rifle range of a herd it would be slowed or halted, the windows would be rolled down, and the passengers would be invited to have some sport, using guns and ammunition thoughtfully provided by the company. Men and women took advantage of this opportunity to enjoy themselves. No attempt was made to make use of the resultant carcasses, except that a trainman would sometimes cut out a few tongues to be served to the ladies and gentlemen at their next meal in tribute to their marksmanship.

  Apologists for the destruction of the buffalo admit that their end was unfortunate, but they insist it was inevitable. The buffalo had to go, they say, to make room for more effective use of the land. That is another example of the dubious rationale used by modern man to justify the destruction of other species. Specialists studying the question of the meat-producing capacity of various ranges and grazing animals have recently concluded that the ability of the western plains to produce beef under human management has never exceeded, or even equalled, the ability of the same range to produce buffalo meat without human husbandry. All that was achieved by exterminating the buffalo and replacing them with cattle was to substitute a less successful and less valuable domestic animal for a more valuable and more successful wild one.

  In any case, the buffalo were not butchered to make room for farmers. That excuse had not yet been invented at the time of their massacre. The brutal truth is that one of the most magnificent and vital forms of life on this planet was destroyed for no better reasons than our desire to eradicate the Plains Indians and an insatiable lust for booty... and for blood.

  10. Wild Cats and Dogs

  The Cats

  North America’s Great Cat is the cougar—a tawny, long-tailed creature that can measure nine feet from tip of nose to tip of tail and weigh more than 200 pounds; and its frightful screams at mating time can be a source of terror to the uninitiated.

  Before the arrival of Western man, the cougar (mountain lion in the West, puma in the South) inhabited the most extensive territory of any New World mammal, ranging from northern British Columbia and Yukon, east to Nova Scotia, and southward throughout the whole of the United States, Central America, and on to Patagonia at the southern tip of South America. The eastern race, often called painter (panther), roamed the forests of all Canada’s Atlantic Provinces except Newfoundland, south to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

  They were much feared in New England in early times. Higginson, in the 1620s, refers to them as lions, and William Wood, about 1634, wrote of them: “Concerning lions, I will not say I ever saw any myself, but some affirm that they have seen a lion at Cape Anne, which is not above six leagues from Boston. Some likewise, being lost in the woods, have heard such terrible roarings as have made them aghast, which must either be devils or lions... Besides, Plymouth men have traded for lions’ skins in former times [on those coasts].”

  By 1720 it had become well known to the French, through their contact with the Indians. Charlevoix describes it under its Indian name of carcajou.

  “The moose has other enemies besides the Indians... The most terrible of all is the Carcajou or Quincajou, a kind of cat, with a tail so long that he twists it several times round his body... As soon as this hunter comes up with the moose, he leaps upon him, and fastens upon his neck, about which he twists his long tail, and then cuts his jugular. The moose has no means of shunning this disaster, but by flying to the water the moment he is seized... [if the moose is successful] the carcajou, who cannot endure the water, quits his hold immediately... This hunter too as he does not possess the faculty of smelling with the greatest acuteness, carries three foxes a hunting with him, which he sends on the discovery. The moment they have got scent of a moose, two of them place themselves by his side, and the third takes post behind him; and all three manage matters so well, by harassing the prey, that they compel him to go to the place where they have left the carcajou, with whom they afterwards settle about... dividing the prey. Another wile of the carcajou... is to climb upon a tree, where couched along some projecting branch, he waits till a moose passes, and leaps upon him... Under what [other] climate can we find brute animals, indued with so strong an instinct, and so forcibly inclined to industry, as the fox... and the carcajou?”

  The reputed co-operation between carcajou and foxes may make Charlevoix seem credulous, but it is a fact that foxes regularly scavenge cougar kills.

  Despite its ferocious reputation, the carcajou proved no match for European arms and wiles. It would run from a pack of dogs or even a single dog and frequently take refuge in a tree. Here it could easily be killed even with the primitive firearms of the seventeenth century. Professional cat hunters considered it cowardly, but it only wished to avoid conflict with men. That avoidance, however, proved impossible and the carcajou of the northeast—the painter of the southeast—was harassed and harried, usually with a bounty on its head, until it had nowhere to hide except such havens as the great swamps of Florida, a few enclaves in the Appalachians, and the enormous tangle of forests in Gaspé and New Brunswick.

  The last Quebec carcajou was killed near Sorel in 1863 and, with its death, even the name was lost, eventually to reappear attached to the wolverine in northwestern Canada. The last cougar known from Ontario was killed in 1884. By the turn of the century it was believed to be extinct everywhere in eastern Canada and the United States, with the exception of Florida where a few still held out in the depths of the Everglades.1

  * * *

  1 The Florida cougar is of a different race from the eastern cougar. As of 1984, it is thought that no more than two or three dozen Florida cougars still survive.

  After World War II a peculiar phenomenon began to manifest itself in eastern North America. Rumours began to be heard, at first few and widely scattered, but eventually mounting almost to a flood, of cougars reappearing from Georgia to New Brunswick. Although such reports now number in the hundreds, all except four remain unsubstantiated. Four cougars have actually been killed in the eastern region since about 1950; but three seem to have been strays from the Florida swamps, while the fourth was an escaped, semi-domesticated animal. Nevertheless, the wish to believe that the eastern cougar still exists is so strong that even otherwise sceptical scientists have been caught up by it.

  Beginning in 1948, Bruce S. Wright, then director of the Northeastern Wildlife Station in New Brunswick, began investigating reputed cougar sightings, and he was still doing so up to his death in 1975. By then he had collected 300 reports and had even found what he believed to be the track of a cougar. In a book he published in 1959, Wright maintained that the eastern form of the great cat not only survived but might number as many as a hundred individuals, mostly in Maine and New Brunswick but extending west to Gaspé and east to Cape Breton Island.

  I, for one, would give a great deal to see Wright’s optimism vindicated. Yet, despite the animal’s great size, a heavy annual traffic of hunters through its supposed territory, and a mushrooming of visual reports from, among other unlikely places, the outskirts of the city of Truro, the hard fact is that not a single cougar has been reported killed and no scrap of flesh, bone, or hide has been found in eastern Canada or Maine in this century. Most reluctantly, I have to conclude that the wish has been father to the thought, and that the great cat of the eastern forests is now a ghost.

  In the Gaspé region about 1680, according to LeClercq, there occurred “three kinds of Wolves. [One of these] the Loup Cervier has a silvery fur and two li
ttle tufts of wholely black fur on its head. Its flesh is pretty good though rank to the taste. This animal is more fearful to the eye than savage in reality.”

  LeClercq’s three kinds of “wolves” are a good example of the confusions encountered in reconstructing the natural history of this continent. While there were indeed three species of canines in the Gaspé, neither the Loup Cervier nor another of LeClercq’s trio, the Loup Marin, belonged to the canine family at all. The Loup Marin is in fact a seal, while the Loup Cervier is the lynx.

  The chunky, short-tailed, long-legged lynx was probably never common in southern parts. It ranged from the northern tier of the United States to the tree line in the Arctic. It was of only moderate interest to early fur traders whose European markets demanded short, densely haired pelts; nor does it seem to have initially aroused much animosity in European man, probably because it was so shy and nocturnal that men seldom encountered it or even knew it was about.

  Then it fell victim to an absurdity of human categorization. English colonists, who had no name of their own for the creature, adopted the French Loup Cervier, but corrupted it to Lucifer or Lucifee. Soon, the old adage about giving a dog, or in this case, a cat, a bad name came true. The godly Puritans assumed that any animal called after the Prince of Darkness had to be an enemy of man; consequently, the Lucifer, now endowed with satanic qualities, joined the bobcat on the list of proscribed animals.

  Although at first contact it seems to have been common along the eastern seaboard at least as far south as Chesapeake Bay, the Lucifee got such short shrift from the settlers that, by the mid-1800s, it had been exterminated from all but the most heavily forested portions of the northern United States. By then it had shed the name of Lucifer and was carrying the name originally given to its Eurasian relative, the lynx. But the removal of the devilish stigma brought no relief from human persecution, for its soft, pastel-coloured fur had become valuable over the centuries with the result that, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was being hunted commercially all across northern North America.

  By the beginning of World War II it was virtually extinct in the United States, except for a few score individuals widely dispersed through northern New England. It was totally extinct in Prince Edward Island and so scarce in the other Canadian Maritime Provinces that only a handful could be trapped in any given year. This despite the fact that the price paid for lynx skins, even in the Depression era, ranged as high as $40.

  Newfoundland was a special case. First mention of the lynx in the history of that province would appear to be a reference to the presence of “tigers” found there by the Corte Real brothers in 1500–01. By 1505, at least one live lynx from Newfoundland had been carried across the ocean as a gift for King Henry VII of England. Other references make it clear that the Lucifer or Luzarne, as it was sometimes called, was fairly common throughout Newfoundland until the nineteenth century, when it suddenly seemed to vanish. Its apparent disappearance was so striking that some biologists conclude it had never been in Newfoundland at all until the later part of the century, when lynx from Labrador crossed frozen Belle Isle Strait.

  This misapprehension seems to have arisen from the current belief that the lynx is so dependent on the varying hare that it cannot exist without it, ergo, it could not have survived in Newfoundland before the introduction of that hare into the island in the 1880s. The truth is that, before the arrival of Europeans, the Newfoundland lynx (which had evolved into a separate subspecies) made a good living on the indigenous Arctic hare, and, to a lesser degree, on straying calves from the immense herds of caribou that roamed the island. It was the massive destruction of these two species by white men that nearly brought an end to the Newfoundland lynx and, by an ironic twist, it was the human introduction of the fecund varying hare that saved it from extinction.

  The lynx has retained a hold in Newfoundland, but its fate elsewhere has been grim. Beginning about twenty years ago, lynx fur was elevated to the heights by the arbiters of fashion as a “superb natural fun fur.” Lynx pelts immediately shot up in value. By the late 1970s a good pelt was worth $200 and the market was so avid that entrepreneurs were chartering aircraft to fly trappers into previously untouched country where, by the use of traps, snares, and poison, they swept enormous regions clean of lynx. The slaughter had become so extensive by 1982 that pelt “production” was in sharp decline. In accordance with economic law, this shortage sent the price up just as sharply. Thus, although the 1983 catch of Canadian lynx was just half of what it had been in 1982, the price per skin had soared to an average of $400–$500, with as much as $1,000 being paid for a single pelt.

  So drastic has been the consequent collapse in lynx populations that Ontario is contemplating a closed season in 1985. In the eastern seaboard region, where it was once abundant, the lynx is now so rare as to have been declared a protected species in New Brunswick. It may still be hunted in Nova Scotia, assuming it can be found, but only a handful of pelts have been taken in that province during the past several years.

  On Cape Breton Island, which according to the always-optimistic Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forests supposedly harbours a “healthy Lynx breeding stock,” I have only once seen a lynx track and have not been able to confirm a single sighting during the past three years. Trappers tell me that, to all intents and purposes, the species is extinct, not only in Cape Breton, but in the remainder of the province as well. It is commercially extinct everywhere in the eastern maritime region of North America, except possibly Labrador, and it is not in notably better shape across the continent to the westward.

  At a weight of around twenty pounds, the stump-tailed bobcat was the smallest, and probably the most abundant, of the three wild cats initially inhabiting the region. Preferring a more southerly climate than the lynx, the bobcat ranged only as far north as the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf.

  Its rather coarse and brittle fur was never worth much in the fur trade, but this did not save it from becoming the object of a vendetta waged by the invading Europeans who convinced themselves that the wild cat was an insatiable killer, not only of wild animals that men coveted, but of domestic stock as well.

  As early as 1727, Massachusetts was paying a thirty-shilling bobcat bounty and, as late as the 1930s, was still offering a bounty of ten dollars. Similar treatment almost everywhere that the invaders settled eventually reduced the cat to vestigial numbers throughout most of its formerly widespread range, virtually extirpating it from the eastern portion of the continent except for the few forest sanctuaries that still endure in the eastern States and Canada’s Maritime Provinces.

  So secretive did it become as a result of centuries of persecution that it was not until the late 1960s that the existence of a relatively large bobcat population in the wilderness regions of central Nova Scotia was revealed as a result of a survey of fur-bearing animals conducted by the provincial Department of Lands and Forests. Once discovered, it was decided to “utilize this resource” as a means of attracting hunters to the province.

  This led to the establishment of the World Bobcat Hunt, centred on the town of Truro where, in the words of one advertisement widely published in U.S. sportsmen’s magazines, “there are always plenty of cats for your hounds to kill.” The first World Bobcat Hunt was literally a howling success as something like 600 hounds, mainly from the eastern and central United States, were loosed in the Nova Scotian woods. Hunters followed the hounds in 4x4 trucks or all-terrain vehicles. Some of the more affluent ones used helicopters. Like most cats when pursued by hounds, bobcats tree readily. They can then easily be shot, but many hunters do not kill the animals outright, preferring to disable them only enough so they will fall to the ground, where the hounds can tear them apart while still alive.

  The highlight of the annual hunt is the suspension of a captured bobcat in a wire cage from a tree limb, while as many as a hundred frenzied hounds form a milling mob at the base of the tree
. It is of interest to note that, while Nova Scotia’s Department of Lands and Forests forbids the private possession of captive bobcats, its officers supply the ritual sacrifice for this event.

  The Truro-centred hunt has been a tremendous success. During the winter of 1969–70, 1,729 bobcats were reportedly killed in Nova Scotia. By 1975–76, the kill had risen to 1,862, with an additional 752 slaughtered in nearby New Brunswick, mainly by sport hunters. However, the great days of the World Bobcat Hunt are now rapidly declining as the last stronghold of the bobcat in the eastern seaboard region is systematically destroyed... for fun and profit.

  The Dogs

  Three wild members of the dog family inhabited the eastern seaboard region at first European contact, together with several kinds of domesticated dogs. Two of the wild kind have since disappeared, along with most of the aboriginal domestic ones, but—and this is a unique event—a new species has appeared and bids fair to making a niche for itself in a portion of the world where its cousins suffered annihilation at the hands of modern man.

  Let us first look briefly at the domestic dogs. They included the so-called husky of the Inuit, several sorts of smallish hunting-cum-sled dogs belonging to mainland Indians, and a mysterious black water dog that seems to have been peculiar to Newfoundland.

  The aboriginal husky could still be found on the Labrador coast as late as 1890. Photographs show it to have been similar to Arctic Eskimoan dogs, but rangier and not so heavily furred—as befitted an animal living in a more moderate climate. The disintegration of the human culture to which it belonged brought an end to the husky, too. Until the 1940s, some cross-bred relicts of the breed existed at a few Labrador settlements such as Nain, where they still served a useful purpose as sled and pack animals. During the succeeding years they have been displaced by snowmobiles, until now only a few mangy and generally unwanted individuals remain, and they carry the blood of so many introduced canine strains as to make them unrecognizable.