One of the things you do as you get older is peek backwards at the things you held dear when you were a kid. Sometimes the old favorite is found wanting, and occasionally, it holds up. And when you are really lucky, you learn something. Something you missed back a long time ago….
It surprises people sometimes when I tell them I was a “reluctant reader”. That’s teacher talk for a kid who hates reading. This surprises them because I am an author and a teacher. They just assume that I was one of the wonder kids who got everything quick on the first try. How far from the truth…
And a good example of this is the books I chose to read, before I loved reading. You’d have to know what I was like to really understand. I was obstinate. If you told me I had to read a certain book I would do anything but. (I even had that problem in University when profs would assign Jane Austin or Leonard Cohen. I never read them. Instead, I was pilfering the good stuff out of the U of A library, like a complete set of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & Grey Mouser or Oliver Onion’s Widdershin. Good thing I learned how to write essays without reading the books. Profs as a general rule like to have their own pet theories regurgitated ad nauseum.)
I was a rebel. Even at eleven. Now, another thing you have to understand is that I lived in a hunting/fishing/trapping family. My ancestors were true pioneers and my father shared that legacy with us. Animals were part-and-parcel of our home. Dead animal heads on the wall. Animal books were a natural choice for young adult reading. I can remember trying Rascal and White Fang and one about a crossbreed cat (called Crossbreed, I think) but these weren’t any more successful than the Tom Sawyers and Hardy Boys. Except for one book. Windigo by Jane and Paul Annixter. I recall reading it and loving it. I’ve just finished re-reading it. It wasn’t easy to find. Thank goodness for Inter-Library Loan and these old Alberta libraries that cherish old books and don’t throw them away. And the experience of re-reading it was quaint and fun and ultimately, truth revealing.
The authors were once famous writers. Paul Annixter (his real name was Howard Allison Sturtzel) was best known for writing animal stories for magazines like Colliers, Esquire and Liberty. Jane Annixter was the daughter of Will Levington Comfort, a famous writer in his own right. The couple began writing together in the 1920s and did so until their deaths in the 1990s. The duo wrote Those Calloways for Walt Disney in 1965.
Windigo (published in 1963, the year I was born) tells the story of Andy Cameron, a Scottish-Canadian boy living in the Quah Davic, in Quebec. Hunting and trapping, he lives with his father, Rod and his mother, Evva. The father dies while chasing a rogue bear named Boniface Black. Andy and his mom continue on, acquiring a small dog named Chinook. The boy and dog face off against terrible odds as their traps are robbed by various thieves. The first is a wolverine that Andy kills while rushing around on skis. The second opponent seems to be an ancient Indian spirit named Windigo that has been haunting the woods near Andy’s cabin. Eventually Andy, with the help of his dog, is able to shoot the terrible spectre. He finds out that it is no monster but rival trapper, Le Brunnec. Andy and Evva save the dying thief’s life, and eventually make him partner on the trap-line. Le Brunnec dies later at the hands of Boniface Black. Andy faces off with the bear, and with the help of Chinook, proves finally he is master of his woodland home.
The plot, wilderness detail and false monster story were all well handled. I may not have read a lot of dog books while a kid, I have become fond of them since, the novels of Jim Kjelgaard in particular. The Annixters have written an adventure equal to the classic Kjelgaard and Terhune books. I can see why such a book held my interest at eleven. Here was a hero who hunted, trapped and fished and loved dogs. What I didn’t remember was the innate racism of 1963. The character of Tom Gunn, the Algonquin Indian, is typically racist, as is the idea that Scottish trappers are brave and kind while French ones are crafty and evil. It was a typical kind of wish-fulfillment presented in many Northerns in the years between 1880-1950. I doubt any of this worried me back in 1974. As an adult now, I find it an unfortunate practice that will keep this excellent adventure from getting reprinted today.
But now for the learning experience. I can recall that after I read Windigo I had a hard time finding another book of equal awesomeness. And I never really thought about why?
A year later I would discover Edgar Rice Burroughs on a family vacation and everything would change. Within a year I went from a reluctant reader to a bibliophile. Burroughs’ Pellucidar and Tarzan, in particular, seem pretty far afield from Windigo. But not really. What I had loved about the book wasn’t the trapping or any silly idea of Scottish superiority. It was the false monster angle. The supernatural seeming Windigo creature, who I have since become much more familiar with through Algernon Blackwood and Robert Colombo. It was the unearthly I sought. And now I realize no animal book was going to scratch that itch. I was a reader, only reluctant for the down-to-earth. My father read DIY books and my mother romance novels. My parents would not understand this desire for tharks and Cimmeria and Cthulhu and even Sherlock Holmes.
One last incident I want to tell you about. My parents pretty much gave up on me ever being a “pragmatist” after twelve. They knew I was a dreamer and a reader and that simply wasn’t going to change. In my thirties I went through a phase of writing Christmas ghost stories. I wrote one for my dad called “What Child Is This?”, based on his father, my grandfather, Ara Thomas, the trapper. In that story I have an old trapper alone for Christmas until he discovers a young girl out in the freezing cold. She, of course, turns out to be a vampire. My dad read the story, avidly at first, until the ending. He handed it back to me with, “It’s pretty good, up until that vampire part.” Oh well, I guess I wasn’t going to change him either. I wrote more trapper horror tales and it seemed so natural. I guess Windigo must have been somewhere in the back of my mind. And I have to thank the Annixters for showing me the way, blind as it certainly was.
Addendum: A little digging recently produced the short stories from which the Annixters drew their material. “Gulo the Devil” (Adventure, January 1932) tells of Gulo a demon even among the wolverines and how he meets his fate at the hands of a trapper named Handy. “The Devil of the Woods” (Esquire, July 1945) has a trapper named Laban Small fight it out with a wolverine. “The Woods-Devil” (Cosmopolitan, February 1948) is the story of a boy named Nathan who has to run the trap-line when his Pa gets hurt. A wolverine threatens to destroy everything until Nathan faces down the animal and kills it. “The Hunt on Conibear” (Boys’ Life, November 1958) has a wolverine and grizzly face off. The other story of note is not one by Paul Annixter but George T. Marsh, “The Valley of the Windigo” (Scribner’s, June 1917) in which a trapper faces off with a creature that appears to be the supernatural being but ends up being a crafty native man. This classic of the woods must have been familiar to Paul and Jane. All these tales contributed in different ways.
