Animals have only their silence left with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us.
(COETZEE 2003:70)
Excluding perhaps his still controversial attempt to pass as a Scottish-Apache halfbreed, Grey Owl today is best known as the trapper who experienced a life-changing conversion in the 1930s and became an internationally famous conservationist and nature writer. More specifically, he emerged as the great champion of the animal on which he had relied the most to make a living, Canada’s own national emblem, the beaver. However, what is not generally known about Grey Owl is that he often attributes his identification with the beaver to their language, which he describes as humanlike. Grey Owl’s attitude toward the beaver, as that toward other wild animals, is paradoxical. On the one hand, he asserts that he does not anthropomorphize them. On the other hand, he maintains that the “kinship between the human race and the rest of our natural fauna” is real and “very apparent to those of us who sojourn among the latter for any length of time” (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]:preface, para. 9; see also Dawson 2007:119–121). These inter-species affinities, argues Grey Owl, become most evident in the similarities between human speech and the languages of wild animals. As he says of what he terms the “queer language” of the beaver, it is so akin to ours that “it seemed we could almost understand [it], so human did it sound at times” (p. 93). Indeed, as I will attempt to show in this chapter, Grey Owl comes to believe that the beaver are “small ambassadors from a hitherto unexplored realm” (p. 129) and that it is the responsibility of humans to strive to decipher their speech so that we can communicate with them.
The question of what differentiates human from nonhuman animals has long captivated writers and other thinkers. For someone like Margaret Atwood (2008), the main difference between the two is technological. As she states, somewhat humorously, “All animals eat, but only human beings cook” (p. 9). However, the critical distinction between human and nonhuman animals is much more frequently ascribed to our possessing some kind of consciousness or reasoning, notably the mechanism that is believed to make thinking possible, language. According to Oscar Wilde (1972), for one, there is “no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with lower animals” (p. 20). The sole exception is speech. “It is only by language,” he asserts, “that we rise above [other animals], or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought” (p. 20). In short, to be human is to speak. Or, to phrase it differently, language is us.
Although broadly embraced, the thesis that it is speech that distinguishes human from nonhuman animals is highly problematic. To begin with, it is hard not to notice that it is humans, notably writers and philosophers, who appear most determined to prove that “the [nonhuman] animal is without language” (Derrida 2002:400). Moreover, even among humans, the idea that the possession of speech defines the human is suspect. As Erica Fudge (2008) has cogently argued, if that were true, then the deaf would not be considered human. Likewise, when one suffers a stroke and loses the ability to speak, one would cease to be part of the human family. The divide between human and nonhuman animals is a fluid one, and, historically, “many members of the human species have been relegated to the ‘animal’ side of the line,” usually because of gender, national, or racial differences (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2007:192–193). Still, the equation of speech with the human is so transparently arbitrary that it begs to be challenged, something that Grey Owl does throughout his writings.
Grey Owl, who lived between 1888 and 1938, was born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney to an upper-middle-class Scottish-English family in Hastings, England. He migrated to Canada in his late teens and moved to northern Ontario, where he eventually assumed an Indigenous identity, adopted the name Grey Owl (Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin, or He Who Walks By Night), and became a trapper, forest ranger, and river guide. However, in the early 1930s he underwent a major intellectual crisis, which led him to abandon trapping and become a conservationist. Soon after, while claiming to be partly Indigenous, he began to metamorphose himself into one of the foremost nature writers and conservationists in the world. Grey Owl owed his renown to four books—two collections of essays about life in the wilderness, a much fictionalized memoir, and a children’s novel—as well as to his extensive lecture tours of both North America and Great Britain. The impact of his lectures, which were often accompanied by short documentary films about the beaver he was raising, cannot be overestimated.1 Grey Owl was not only a magnetic speaker but, as befits someone who wished to be perceived as Indigenous, also tended to address his audiences clad in buckskins and sporting an eagle feather in his long, braided hair. This may explain why people could not get enough of him and his message that the main “difference between civilised man and the savage” is that “civilised people try to impose themselves on their surroundings, to dominate everything” (as cited in Smith 1991:120), and that the only way the wild would be preserved would be if “civilised” people embraced the Indigenous ethos. For example, during his second British tour, in 1937, in just under three months, he gave “138 lectures” (Dickson 1938:16), speaking to “close to half a million people in audiences that sometimes exceeded three thousand at a time” (Grey Owl 1938a:38; Dickson 1938:20). Partly as a result of his talks and interviews, his books sold extremely well, with translations appearing in “all the main European languages” (Dickson 1973:242) and in several Asian ones (Smith 1991:266–267). Most importantly, his celebrity enabled him to undertake a crusade to save the beaver from imminent extinction.
Grey Owl’s interest in the beaver is evident in all his works, beginning with the first one, The Men of the Last Frontier. Originally entitled The Vanishing Frontier, and renamed by the publisher without the author’s permission (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]: 209, 253), the collection of essays is fascinating, not the least because, in the course of the book, the central subject appears to go from being a trapper of European descent to one of Indigenous ancestry, without any explanation for the change (Grey Owl 1973 [1931]:1, 252; see also Braz 2005:55–59). However, the text is also significant because of the way it reveals Grey Owl’s growing identification with the beaver, an animal he eventually comes to see as his “patron beast” (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]:47). From the outset, Grey Owl (1973 [1931]) is struck by the beaver’s humanlike “sagacity” (p. 23), which he states has led “those who know most about them” to believe that “they are endowed to a certain extent with reasoning powers” (p. 155). He acknowledges that building dams and houses and collecting feed does not make beavers unique among wild animals, since “muskrats also erect cabins and store food in much the same manner” (p. 155). Yet, asks Grey Owl, “where do you find any other creature but man who can fall [sic] a tree in a desired direction, selecting only those which can conveniently be brought to the ground?” While he accepts that instinct may explain why the beaver “build their dams in the form of an arc,” he fails to see how, other than through their native intelligence, they can “gain the knowledge that causes them to arrange that curve in a concave or a convex formation, according to the water-pressure” (p. 155). Interestingly, Grey Owl underscores that the beaver’s acumen does not always have positive consequences. On the contrary, “by the very nature of his work,” the beaver “signs his own death warrant. The evidences of his wisdom and industry, for which he is so lauded, have been after all, only sign-posts on the road to extinction” (p. 160), since they make it extremely easy for predators, particularly trappers, to locate the animal.
In any case, for Grey Owl, the most concrete demonstration that the beaver are intelligent is that they have speech. The United States conservationist Enos Mills (1913), whose ideas on the beaver are remarkably similar to Grey Owl’s, once noted that he often wished “an old beaver neighbor of mine would write the story of his life” (p. 175). He also contended that when beaver become “separated from one another” when traveling, “they give a strange shrill whistle or call,” which “appears to be a call of alarm, suspicion, or warning” (pp. 26, 27). Grey Owl goes even further than Mills. He claims that the beaver not only make sounds like “the moaning of a child” (1973 [1931]:148), but also that they have the ability to recognize human voices, such as his and that of his partner. “Their voices,” explains Grey Owl, are “really the most remarkable thing about them, much resembling the cries of a human infant, without the volume but with a greater variety of expression, and at all hours of the day and night there was liable to be some kind of new sound issuing from the interior of the box” where they were being kept (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]:33). According to Grey Owl, “A human voice easily takes on a beaver call because the inflections are very like our own. It’s wonderful, how close you can get to the animal kingdom, if you fetch a sympathetic heart with you” (1936:282). As he describes the beaver: “They have a large range of distinctly different sounds. The emotions of rage, sorrow, fear, joy, and contentment are expressed quite differently, and are easily recognized after a short period of observation. Often when a conversation is being carried on they will join in with their vocal gymnastics, and the resemblance to the human voice is almost uncanny to those not accustomed to hearing it, and has been partly the cause of their undoing, as they are a very easy animal to imitate. When in trouble they whimper in the most dolorous fashion, and become altogether disconsolate” (1973 [1931]:197). In fact, Grey Owl maintains that one of the reasons people should ensure the beaver do not become extinct is that “this little beast who seems almost able to think, possesses a power of speech in which little but the articulation of words is lacking” (p. 153). Again, the beaver’s language makes them distinct.
Actually, it is his gradual awareness of “the almost human mentality” of the beaver that leads Grey Owl “to quit the beaver hunt altogether” (p. 191), a fateful decision he relates in his most influential book, Pilgrims of the Wild. In his memoir Grey Owl credits his transformation from a trapper to a conservationist largely to the influence of his Mohawk wife Anahareo. The fourth of his five wives or common-law partners, and eighteen years his junior, Anahareo was a compelling figure on her own. An urban Mohawk, who ironically tried to rediscover her ancestral roots through the man she called her “Jesse James, that mad, dashing, and romantic Robin Hood of America” (Anahareo 1972:2), she joined Grey Owl on the trapline soon after they married. Her fascination with life in the wild was short-lived, though (Braz 2007:210–213). Anahareo became disturbed both by the wholesale slaughter of fur-bearing animals and by “the great numbers of harmless birds and squirrels caught accidentally” in the traps, “often still alive, some screaming, others wailing feebly in their torment” (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]:23; Anahareo 1972:83). Because of her reaction, Grey Owl began to become conscious of “the cruelties” of his “bloody occupation” (1990 [1935]:23, 24). That is, by her presence on the trapline, Anahareo led Grey Owl to see himself as he was—or at least as he imagined she saw him—prompting him to reconsider his right to kill other animals in general and the beaver in particular.
The pivotal incident in the alteration of Grey Owl’s attitude toward wild animals involves a family of beaver. It is late in the season, and the only reason he is still trapping is that, because of a combination of missing game and low fur prices, his financial circumstances are so dismal that he has no other option. Grey Owl (1990 [1935]) relates that, while setting a trap at an old beaver house, he hears “faintly the thin piping voices of kitten beavers.” He tries to camouflage the sound from Anahareo, but she has also heard it and implores him “to lift the trap, and allow the baby beaver to have their mother and live” (p. 27). As he describes his response, “I felt a momentary pang myself, as I had never before killed a beaver at this time on that account, but continued with my work. We needed the money” (pp. 27–28). However, the next morning, Grey Owl changes his mind. After he realizes that the mother is missing, he decides to look for the young beaver and, when he finds the kittens, he agrees with Anahareo’s suggestion to “save them” as some kind of “atonement” (p. 29). Indeed, it is primarily because of this episode that Grey Owl comes to believe that it is “monstrous” to hunt such creatures and determines to “study them,” instead of killing them or “persecuting them further” (p. 53). Consequently, he and Anahareo start a beaver colony, a development that will lead him to write books, lecture, and even join Canada’s National Parks Service as a naturalist (Smith 1991:89–92).
In addition to Anahareo, Grey Owl (1990 [1935]) usually credits his “newly awakened consideration” of wild animals and their habitat to what he terms his “imaginative ancestry” (pp. 24, 25). He claims that Indigenous people have a special affinity with wild animals, notably the beaver. Although Indigenous people “must kill” some beaver in order to support their families, Grey Owl writes, they have much respect for the rodents, and perceive them “almost as separate tribes of people, of a kind little different from themselves” (1977 [1935]:5). “Beavers are especially respected,” he elaborates, “and some Indians can understand to a certain extent what they are saying to one another, as their voices are not unlike those of human beings.” Such is the kinship between Indigenous people and the beaver that the former call the latter “Little Brothers” (pp. 5–6). In fact, it is because of his ostensible Indigenous heritage that Grey Owl develops “a guilty feeling” about his role in the near annihilation of so intelligent a creature (1973 [1931]:142). It is also purportedly because of his broad knowledge of Indigenous history that he resolves to ensure the beaver will not suffer the same fate as the bison, drawing a parallel between himself and the bison hunters of the second half of the nineteenth century. As he confides, while he has “ably assisted in the destruction” of the beaver, now that the animal is threatened with extinction he has “a sudden feeling of regret, something of that vacant feeling of bereavement that comes upon us on the disappearance of a familiar land mark, or on the decease of some spirited, well-respected enemy. Thus the hide hunters must have felt as the last buffalo dropped, so that some of them abjured forever the rifle and the knife, and strained every nerve to bring them back again” (1990 [1935]: 47). He simply does not want what happened to the bison to befall the beaver.
Grey Owl’s transition from a trapper to a conservationist was considerably facilitated by the fact he became a writer and, subsequently, a lecturer. Like other “rugged” outdoorsmen-turned-authors (Glotfelty 2004:128), Grey Owl experienced serious anxieties about his new profession, wondering “at times if it was quite manly to feel as I did toward these small beasts” (1990 [1935]:36). Yet he could not help but discern that there might be some tangible benefits to his being a conservationist and nature writer, even from an economic perspective. As he and his fellow trappers were only too well aware, their industry was in a deep crisis because of overhunting. In his apocalyptic description of the situation, when he meets veteran trappers on the trail, there is “a vague foreboding in their speech,” for everyone realizes that the “fur [is] gone” (pp. 12, 13; see also Braz 2007:217–220). So he starts looking for another way to support himself and Anahareo, a process that leads him to surmise that he may be able to do it through writing. Moreover, in an epiphanic moment, it dawns on him that wild animals are “more fun alive than dead, and perhaps if I could write about them they would provide many times over the value of their miserable little hides, beaver included, and still be there as good friends as ever” (p. 141). As he adds, “I inwardly rejoiced that the bloodless happy hunting ground of my imagination was now within the bounds of possibility” (p. 150). That is, in a way, Grey Owl continues to make a living from the beaver. The crucial difference is that, like other naturalists in the early decades of the twentieth century who staged a vigorous campaign “to substitute animal photography for hunting” (Altmeyer 1995:108), he now can do so without having to kill the animals.
That said, the main reason Grey Owl becomes such a passionate defender of the beaver has to do with his evolving attitude toward the beaver themselves, particularly their language. Anahareo asserts that it is the two orphaned kittens they rescue, which they later name McGinnis and McGinty, that are “responsible for the change” in her partner (Grey Owl 1990 [1935]:90). This is a view that is supported by Grey Owl in Pilgrims of the Wild and other writings. As he interacts with the kittens, Grey Owl comes to see the beaver not as antagonists but as his “co-dwellers in this wilderness” (p. 49). They are his “comrades-in-arms” as well as his “unarmed fellow-country men,” whom he must protect from the unscrupulous part-time trappers who have recently flocked to the North, those “alien interlopers who [have] nothing in common with any of us” (p. 50). For Grey Owl, the beaver are “the Wilderness personified, the Wild articulate, the Wild that was our home” (p. 203). Consequently, he develops “a transhuman ethic” (Braz 2007:207, 222), an idea of citizenship that includes all the legitimate denizens of the wild, both human and nonhuman, not least the beaver.
Grey Owl’s identification with the beaver, as noted, reflects the fact that he is profoundly affected by their voices, which both he and Anahareo perceive as “almost” human, “Just like ours” (1990 [1935]:111). Yet ultimately the voices of the beaver create a major dilemma for Grey Owl, since he does not know exactly how to classify the rodents. Sometimes he states that the beaver seem “almost like little folk from some other planet, whose language we could not yet quite understand” (p. 53). They are strangers with a peculiar accent, which is the reason he refers to McGinnis and McGinty as “Immigrants” (pp. 93, 119)—as well as “Little Indians” (p. 42; see also Dawson 2007:121). Other times, though, he contends that the beaver are congenitally “different from other animals; they are very like persons” (1977 [1935]:176). As one of his characters says in the children’s novel Sajo and the Beaver People, the beaver often appear “to be, not wild things at all, but hopeless, unfortunate little people who could not speak” (p. 125). In other words, it is not always clear whether humans do not understand the beaver because they come from some other celestial body, and we do not yet grasp their language, or because we deem them too insignificant to warrant listening to their voices.
What Grey Owl’s fascination with the language of the beaver also illustrates, of course, is that he tends to favor them over all other wild animals. As other scholars have pointed out, there is an inherent “slipperiness” in the line differentiating humanity from animality. This instability has allowed individuals and groups “to suggest, in effect, that some animals have been mistakenly relegated to the animal category, when in fact they are sufficiently human-like to be placed in the human category” (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2007:194). To a certain degree, this is the strategy employed by Grey Owl. It is true that he advocates for the protection of other animals, even stating that animals other than the beaver “too might have qualities, which whilst not so spectacular perhaps, might be worth investigating” (1990 [1935]:129). However, there is no avoiding the fact he places the beaver in a special category of their own, as befits a creature that he says has “developed a degree of mental ability superior to that of any other living animal” (1973 [1931]:155). For instance, when describing the porcupine, Grey Owl writes that it is the “dumb cousin to the beaver, whom he resembles very closely except for the tail, the webbed hind feet, and his bristles. But it seems that when the brains were handed out between the two of them, the porcupine was absent and the beaver got them all” (p. 39). Similarly, he calls the fox “the evil genius of the north country” (1930:574) and the weasel “the gangster of the beaver country, a murderous, slinky no-account” (1936:270, 282). For Grey Owl, the porcupine, the fox, and the weasel clearly should not be equated with the beaver and one of the reasons for this is the beaver’s purported intelligence, which is manifest in their ability to build beaver damns and, above all, in their speech. As he responds to a correspondent who inquires if the beaver can reason like humans, “Beaver are able to experience a great variety of emotions and can express them very well both by voice and action” (Grey Owl 1935:3). Once more, one of the pivotal elements that make the beaver special is that, like humans, they possess speech.
Needless to say, the human desire to communicate with nonhuman animals is not devoid of either political or psychological complexities, if not outright contradictions. Many writers and philosophers actually believe that it reflects less our empathy toward other species than our hubris. For someone like James Fenimore Cooper (2004 [1841]:568), “It would exceed all the means of human knowledge to pretend to analyze the influences that govern the acts of the lower animals,” such as brown bears. Atwood (2008), in contrast, perceives it as one of those profoundly paradoxical human longings not only to have it all, but to have it both ways. In her words, “We want to drink a lot without having a hangover. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be as gods” (p. 11). Atwood, in fact, seems to agree with Wilde when it comes to the critical differences between human and nonhuman animals. She contends that, besides fire, which made cooking possible, the only other technology that was “developed by human beings, and by humans alone,” is “grammar.” While most “animals have methods of communication,” and some even have “systems that can be called languages,” she writes, “only human languages have complex systems of grammar—systems that allow us to formulate thoughts that dogs, for instance, most likely don’t bother with” (p. 9). Yet Atwood illustrates why humans find it difficult to dissociate ourselves from other animals. As she says of trappers:
I can understand
the guilt they feel because
they are not animals
the guilt they feel
because they are
(Atwood 1968:35)
The predicament faced by trappers, which easily might also have been that of the trapper-turned-conservationist Grey Owl, is the human quandary. The reality is that we cannot help but sense that our responses to nonhuman animals are always conditioned by the fact we know that we are not like them—and yet we are.
In the end, the one solid conclusion one can reach about Grey Owl and the beaver is that he is deeply affected by their utterances. Whether those utterances constitute speech or are merely guttural noises remains open to debate. For instance, no less a figure than the animal studies scholar Temple Grandin (2008) maintains that “animals do not have verbal language” (p. 0212). Considering that Grandin is autistic and is fully aware that a significant number of “philosophers think that if you don’t have language, you don’t have true thought” (as cited in Allemang 2009:F4), Grey Owl’s view on animal language is obviously not the dominant one. Yet given the way the beaver were able, through their utterances, to influence the mind of a professional trapper, it does not seem wise to dismiss those utterances as nothing more than purposeless cacophony.
Furthermore, whatever one may think of his views on the beaver and their language, it is evident that Grey Owl does not subscribe to the idea that nonhuman animals are responsible for the lack of communication between themselves and humans. He certainly would not share the sentiments expressed by J. M. Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, which serve as the epigraph to this essay, that the only weapon nonhuman animals have “left with which to confront” humans is “their silence” and that, for generations, they have employed it by “refus[ing] to speak” to their captors (2003:70). For Grey Owl, if there has been no interchange between humans and other animals, it is because humans have not made a sustained effort to study the latter’s speech. Another significant aspect of Grey Owl’s writings on the language of the beaver is that he tends not to reach categorical conclusions. Unlike someone like Grandin, who claims that her autism gives her special insights into the minds of domesticated animals and enables her to determine why they do “the things they do” (Grandin and Johnson 2005:7), Grey Owl is much more tentative about the meaning of what he observes. He has no doubt that humans have numerous affinities with nonhuman animals. Thus he argues that it is “utterly unsportsmanlike” to hunt “other living creatures by means of a horde of dogs, causing pain and terror for amusement,” because we are all related. As he reminds his listeners and readers, nonhuman animals “are your fellow-dwellers on this earth; and if you met on Mars you would be inevitably drawn to one another like fellow-townsmen meeting in a foreign country” (Grey Owl 1938b:84). Still, even though Grey Owl is positive that the beaver speak, he is never quite certain what their language means. This is the reason that he exhorts us to study the beaver, and presumably other wild animals, the way we study human groups.
Note
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