Oakville, Ontario, is the first important place in Farley Mowat’s account of how he came to study animals. Its family home, Greenhedges, frames a childhood episode with catfish that he later treated as the beginning of a path leading from natural history to his time among wolves in central Keewatin.

Setting and Childhood

At five, Mowat was left in Oakville with his grandparents while his parents went on holiday. He recalled Greenhedges as a genteel household in which he felt out of place. Without a close companion there, he took to wandering alone, a habit that brought him to a nearby creek and its stagnant pool.

The Catfish Episode

At the pool, Mowat found three catfish barely covered by green scum. He pulled them onto the bank and watched them gasp, then put them in a tin can and carried them home when they continued to survive. Wanting to keep them, he had to find a temporary place for them: Greenhedges had no washtubs, and the bathtub would not hold water. He settled on the bowl of his grandmother’s old-fashioned toilet for the night.

The encounter startled his grandmother during the night. Its effects continued beyond that episode: she refused to eat fish afterward and carried a powerful flashlight on her nighttime walks. Mowat’s cousin eventually flushed the catfish. The family incident thus joined childhood curiosity to a lasting consequence for the household, even as the fish themselves did not survive.

A Beginning in Natural History

Mowat said the affair gave him a lasting affinity for the lesser animals and marked the beginning of his career, first as a naturalist and later as a biologist. In the book’s framing, Oakville is more than a place-name in his early biography: the bathroom encounter becomes the first step in a journey he connects to the wolf den in the Barren Lands. The movement from a child trying to keep catfish alive to a later life of animal study gives the domestic setting its particular narrative significance.