Dan McCowan, Upland Trails

The past is a different country, and I rarely feel this more intensely than when I read the work of long-ago natural history writers like Dan McCowan, whose final book Upland Trails I've just finished wandering through was published in 1955.

He remarks off-handedly in the foreword, incidentally, that he hadn't meant to write a book like this one. He'd meant to carry on the same vein as his previous Hill-Top Tales, but "a rather long illness intervened," and he decided simply to pull together various things into Upland Trails "in order to free [himself] from the mental morass which seems inevitable following unaccustomed illness." I don't know that his death followed on from this illness, or indeed whether the foreword was a kind of subterfuge for his more loyal  readers, but there's a poignancy to it.

Also poignant is how a writer looks in archives after one's death. McCowan was quite a celebrated naturalist and natural-history writer, writing innumerable articles, delivering even more public talks, and being the first naturalist regularly featured on CBC radio. His papers are held by the University of Calgary, and unfortunately his bio there alleges that he spent 26 years working in the CPR's department of "pubicity" (sic, most decidedly sic).

Anyway, and more to the point, I thought this book was a delight.

McCowan's a keen observer and a knowledgeable one, so along with the accessibly phrased scholarship you get lots of highly localized information and reportage: a tale about why the minutes for a May 1926 meeting in Edmonton of the Grand Masonic Lodge acknowledge a pair of robins (because they were continually flying through to feed their young in a nest atop the antlers of a taxidermied and mounted moose head, for example: p.123), or a story about the tent of "a naturalist friend" being invaded during a thunderstorm by a porcupine (p.91). Along with this is the 1950s state of knowledge about bird migration, the impact on wildlife of highway expansion, and species distinction, and if you need a change of subject, well, there'll be one in another page or two.

It's puttering along in the company of one's nature-facing uncle or great-uncle, this book, and it's exactly what I was needing.