Fishduck Lake

Fishduck Lake is where Farley Mowat tests a dramatic accusation against the Wolves and finds that the tracks tell another story. The lake’s most consequential appearance in the book is not proof that Wolves had slaughtered Caribou, but a scene exposing how commercial trophy hunting could produce the very destruction blamed on them.

A Lake in a Disputed Landscape

Fishduck Lake enters the narrative during Mowat’s winter work at Brochet, where antiwolf feeling was strong. Local people recalled killing as many as 50,000 Caribou in a winter two decades earlier, while now they might secure only a couple of thousand. Wolves were widely blamed for the decline; Mowat’s argument that Wolves had lived alongside Caribou for tens of thousands of years without decimating the herds did little to persuade his listeners.

That controversy had a material context. Mowat knew that 1,800 trappers worked across parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and southern Keewatin within the herd’s winter range. In an Ottawa poll, trappers and traders had denied killing more than one or two Caribou each year while attributing enormous losses to Wolves. At Fishduck Lake, the landscape itself would provide a way to examine such claims: not through competing accounts alone, but through the marks left on the snow.

The Reported Wolf Kill

A trader challenged Mowat to travel to Fishduck Lake after a trapper reported fifty dead Caribou on the ice, supposedly killed by Wolves and barely eaten. Accompanied by a Cree companion, Mowat reached the lake late that afternoon. They found twenty-three carcasses. Most had not been touched by predators; the limited scavenging described was by Foxes, jays, and Ravens.

The remains did not, by themselves, establish what had happened. The tracks did: there were no wolf tracks on the lake, but the snow bore the distinctive triple trail of an aircraft’s skis and tail-skid, crossing it in repeated lines. The Caribou had been shot. Some had been hit more than once, and the account notes wounds that showed how badly some animals had been left injured before they died. What had been offered as proof against Wolves instead pointed to organized human hunting.

Trophy Hunting and Misattribution

The explanation lay in a provincial tourist bureau’s decision, two years earlier, to use Barren Land Caribou to attract wealthy hunters from the United States. Organized safaris flew parties into the subarctic and charged a thousand dollars per hunter for a guaranteed set of Caribou antlers.

The arrangement made the lake’s open ice useful to the hunt. Caribou spent daylight hours gathered there after feeding in the woods at dawn and dusk. A pilot could circle low over a herd to bunch it together, land, and keep the aircraft moving around the animals so they could not disperse. Hunters then fired from the aircraft’s open doors and windows until enough animals had been killed to select trophies. Fishduck Lake thus reveals the human mechanism behind a scene initially presented as wolf predation: the aircraft tracks were evidence not merely of presence, but of a hunting method.

Narrative and Ecological Significance

Fishduck Lake provides a concrete counterexample in a debate otherwise shaped by accusation and denial. The reported number of fifty dead animals gave the trader’s challenge its force; the twenty-three carcasses Mowat actually found, and especially the absence of wolf tracks, changed what the scene could mean. The snow functions as a record against a ready-made explanation.

The episode also sits within Mowat’s broader reconsideration of the Wolves’ place in the ecosystem. His observations and Ootek’s knowledge had already widened the picture of wolf feeding beyond Caribou: Wolves could live largely on mice, eat ground squirrels, and catch fish. Against this evidence of dietary adaptability, the Fishduck Lake scene complicates the claim that Wolves alone explained the herd’s decline. The lake becomes a place where ecological judgment depends on attending to specific evidence—and where blaming an animal can obscure the human practices visible on the ground.