There was a dark side to all this familial bliss. My grandfather had a cruel streak that he would unleash on the unsuspecting and the innocent, like using a six year old to mock her own father's language or rounding up the grand kids to witness him brutally beating a porcupine to death. We were appalled and fascinated by the execution. What had the poor porcupine done? It wandered into the woodshed. It is a wood eating mammal a little larger than a raccoon. It's a non-aggressive, slow moving vegetarian that defends itself with raised, sharp quills that puncture skin, but not an axe.
Grandpa seemed to enjoy killing things, because I also remember that he tormented and finally killed a large milk snake - a truly beautiful creature. The way Grandpa carried on, the snake was putting everyone in serious danger. Milk snakes are harmless and are a danger to frogs and mice only. Even when I was little, I would think what had the victimized creature done to deserve so much wrath? I never dared ask out loud though. We kids, organized a nice funeral service for the deceased snake, with Hildie (Hildebrand) Guerrin, the only Catholic among us, conducting a solemn mass.
I was seven and learning how to swim. It was slow going because I preferred playing in the water to practicing swim strokes. A deal was struck, if I learned to swim by August, Mom would take me to see the movie "The Yearling". I really got serious about my swimming then because I badly wanted to see that movie. It was about a boy who raised a faun from the wild. Oh bliss - I wanted to hand raise a deer and dreamed about it all the time. I was making progress at the Dog-paddle when Grandpa decided to accelerate the learning. He threw me off the dock and then held me underwater to show me I could survive. I bobbed up to the surface in terror, when he did it again. My grandmother was furious. I remember her calling "leave the child alone" and "you're scaring her". I don't remember what my mother was doing but he did stop "toughening me up". Swimming practice ended abruptly and I didn't learn to swim till the following summer.
I didn't see "The Yearling" in August either. I did learn that life isn't fair.
My mother's kid brother Ken was my hero. He was in his early twenties, drove a coupe with a rumble seat and paddled a canoe. He worked days in Ottawa as an architectural draftsman in his brother Watson's firm. He drove home to the lake in the evenings and would take the canoe out for a paddle after supper. I admired everything he did and wanted to be just like him. Ken knew a whole lot about wildlife and birds. He would paddle into the back bays to observe and photograph the swamp life behind Davie's Island.
I desperately wanted to go with him so I helped him load the canoe, hold the bow and never never begged him. I was smart enough to know that a nuisance is not taken anywhere. Sometimes on weekends, he would look at my eager face and say "you can come if you sit still and be quiet". Oh bliss I was going on his adventure. Ken never knew until years later, what a positive influence he had on my life. Every iota of information he passed on I absorbed like a sponge and I became a naturalist like him. We talk now and compare our observations. We support the same organizations and read the same conservation literature. Had he not been kind enough to share his observations and explain what he saw, my interests today might have been very different. His respect for and enjoyment of nature has been handed down through me to Maya.
