Pie Jesu (1)

The chorus sings Grey Owl's text about Ajawaan Lake, where his cabin had been built in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan.

As the opera began, it is bookended by the same English location; Lovat Dickson is wandering through the house of Ada Belaney - Archie's spinster aunt. He thanks her profusely. As he walks along the beautifully flowered front lawn, two young boys appear and are oblivious to the world around them as they play.  One of them is dressed as an Indian.

“I’ll be seeing you, brother,” whispers Dickson, satisfied that Archie Belaney and Grey Owl were one and the same man.

A strong editorial appeared in the Ottawa Citizen on April 23, 1938:  "Few stories in recent years have contained more of the elements of human interest, literary romance and legendary adventure than that being written about the life of Archie Belaney or Grey Owl.  Of course, the value of his work is not jeopardized.  His attainments as a writer and naturalist will survive and when in later years our children's children are told of the strange masquerade - if it was a masquerade - their wonder and their appreciation will grow.  He is assured a place in the annals of his adopted country.”

Ajawaan

It is the winter of 1928, and Grey Owl and Anahareo are checking their trap line. A huge blizzard suddenly comes upon them and they have to take refuge. As the blinding snow subsides, the two set out again surrounded by a magical wintry wonderland. They witness some of the most beautiful animals the Canadian wild has to offer; white rabbits, a Canada lynx, silvery ptarmigan, and packs of wolves. They also watch an incredible light show in the cold night sky as the Northern Lights undulate spectacularly. Finally, Anahareo comes across a marten in one of their traps.  It had stayed alive by eating snow and gnawing at its trapped paw until the bones were bare of flesh.  Anahareo sobs at this horrible sight and makes Archie promise that he will never trap again.

This audio clip ends with Grey Owl's Command Performance at Buckingham Palace (1937) in the presence of the King and a ten year old Princess Elizabeth.

Within the year, Grey Owl died.  He was barely fifty.  The North Bay Nugget printed the story of his real ancestry which shocked all those who had heard of him and loved him.  Lovat Dickson, his friend and biographer had no idea that he wasn't half Indian.  Neither did Anahareo, who in her disbelief, wrote:  "When, finally, I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling for all those years I had been married to a ghost.”

Blizzard&Northern Lights

Now that the spring hunt is over, Archie and Anahareo travel to Doucet, a little village in Quebec which consists of about fifty families and a hotel with a store combined.  Here, Archie meets up with some of his old trapper and prospector friends.  Jim the proprietor is also a fur buyer from whom Archie gets his grubstake for the upcoming year.
Also at the hotel are a disapproving couple – a town gossip, and her obnoxious friend, the local priest. They chat about the iniquity of the place and its clientele, especially Grey Owl and his dubious partner. It’s time for a square dance! A lone fiddler starts the tune, and with each entry, the music gets more and more raucous until everyone is hooting and stomping around the room. Anahareo is not having a good time and finds people unfriendly toward her.  She orders a bottle of whiskey to take to her room so that she can get drunk enough to tell everyone to go to Hell.  She gets so drunk she starts loading Archie's gun so that she can run downstairs and shoot everyone.  Archie gets hold of her and both tempers rage.  Anahareo grabs his hunting-knife and strikes him in the arm.  As his blood rapidly spreads she becomes hysterical.

Suddenly, two RCMP officers appear at the General Store with a pair of trappers and two Indians in handcuffs. Jim calls for Grey Owl. Archie learns through his sparse Cree that the Indians have gutted a shack belonging to two white trappers. Their offence is a serious one, for they had not only burned down the cabin but had also flattened the stove-pipes beyond repair and dumped the trapper's winter provisions in the snow, pouring coal oil over them as well as over a bag of traps.  The traps were now useless - one whiff of kerosene and the animal is headed across country.

Archie is asked to go to court as spokesman on their behalf.  Jim the Proprietor is also the local magistrate and transforms his General Store into a courtroom! The Indians defence for what they had done rest on the fact that the trappers, the winter before, had polluted the country with strychnine (used as bait for wolves and foxes) and had failed to pick up the unused bait after the hunt.  Consequently, the Indians lost many of their prized huskies.  Also, these Indians were superstitious and thought that the strychnine possessed supernatural power.

Archie decides to defend the Indians, even though he knows it will take a miracle to save them from a long sentence.  Since it was strictly against the law for the trappers to use strychnine for trapping purposes, the Indians only get thirty days for their retaliation, instead of two years in jail! The whole gang cheers and one of the Indians tells Archie in broken English that Chief Papati wants to see him. Anahareo comes down from her whiskey high and tells Archie for the first time: "I think...I love you."

They travel sixty miles by dogsled to meet the people of the serenely beautiful Lac Simon. There is furious drumming in their honour and they are eventually married by Chief Nias Papati against an ethereal backdrop of candles.

General Store

Anahareo introduces Archie to her dad and the two men get along famously.  Archie talks of his 'ancestry', that his father was a Scot and his mother was an Apache Indian from Mexico.

Anahareo loves the lengthy notes which Archie sends her.  "They were something like a Walt Disney picture - had everything in them from soup to nuts.  One contained a lengthy story about a weasel, and all that Archie saw of that weasel was its tracks in the snow, but yet he knew all about it, including its forefathers on both sides of the family."

Finally, he sends a letter asking her to join him for a couple of days.  Her father gives his consent and the visit will change her life.  She is nineteen, Archie is thirty-six.

After a fair train ride, her first day with Archie consists of snow-shoeing seventy kilometres to his camp.  She is a wreck by the time she makes it to Archie's home.  She sees nothing except three feet of tent protruding from a mound of snow, and a skinny stove-pipe poking through.  Suddenly, Archie isn't there!  He has disappeared into the snow.  Anahareo tries to follow, with her snow-shoes on, which Archie finds wildly funny.  Angrily, she crawls through the opening and nearly drops four feet to the floor before being caught by Archie.

Archie loves playing jokes on Anahareo and decides to show her the 'bear den'.  Off they go into the bush until they come to a lean-to so covered with snow it looks like an igloo.  Terrified, she clings to Archie as he lights a match and peers in.  With bulging eyes she looks into the shadows expecting to see a bear.  "I guess he hasn't come yet," Archie said, as he reaches in and brings out a roll of toilet paper.  "I'm using this for bait." Of course, it is the outhouse.

Again, more flashbacks and stories; stories which are real from England, but in Anahareo's mind, take place in Mexico. She sits in amazement as she learns how Archie walked 130 miles to Temagami before collapsing from starvation and fever.  He was found by a master woodsman, Bill Guppy, who took him to an Ojibway medicine man.  It was in this shack that Archie fell in love with his 'nurse' - the one who had served him a bowl of boiled fish heads, and eventually married her. This was Angele from Bear Island - his first wife.

Papa Final

It is 1938 and Archie Belaney, better known to the world as Grey Owl, is dead.  Lovat Dickson has arrived at the doorstep of Ada and Carrie Belaney, Archie's spinster aunts, in Hastings England.  Dickson had been Grey Owl’s biographer and friend and is still reeling from the recent exposure as to Belaney’s true identity.  A very cold Aunt Ada lets him in.

He wanders around the house, looking for clues; (is it possible there were two Archie Belaney’s?)  He imagines the young Archie at the old grand piano, taking lessons from Ada and getting whacked across the knuckles with a ruler for making a foolish mistake.  Eventually, Dickson wanders over to a glass-fronted bookcase.  Proudly displayed are Grey Owl's four books, The Men of the Last Frontier, Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, and Tales of an Empty Cabin. Ada notices Dickson's mind is drifting off into another time and place.

It was during the moon of the Windigo in the summer of 1925.  A young Iroquois girl sits in the shade of some pines at Wabikon, a resort on Lake Temagami.  Her name is Anahareo.  Suddenly, her reading is interrupted by a grating sound from the beach.  Looking up she sees a man “dressed in brown deerskins stepping with the speed and grace of a panther from a canoe, gazing wistfully across the lake in the direction from which he had come.”  What really sets her imagination afire is his long hair and wide-brimmed hat.  Anahareo thinks this man looks like the mad, thrilling hero of her youth, Jesse James.  
However, after a couple of annoying and embarrassing incidents involving Archie, Anahareo decides she dislikes this man with the 'hateful, teasing grin.'    While Archie is on a fishing trip, Anahareo receives a wire telling her a five year old niece has died.  She leaves Wabikon immediately without seeing Archie again.

Anahareo stays with her father in Mattawa, constantly dreaming about her Jesse James.  She decides to write a letter to him and is shocked to find him walking through her front gate the next day - when he couldn't possibly have received her letter.

Archie is shy at first but then remembers his old brazen self and starts quarrelling with Anahareo again.  He comments her skirts are too short.  She asks about his oilskin since it isn't raining.  Archie flips his coat open and reveals a revolver hanging from his hip.  This piques her curiosity about him even more.

His stories begin, and Anahareo is taken on a very judicious whirlwind tour of his life. All he will say at first is that he had slugged the station agent at Bisco a couple of times, that the police had been sent for, and that a warrant had been sworn out for his arrest.

He goes on to make a fine tale of his first brush with the law:  There had been an attempted rape of a little girl, who had identified her assailant, a local man.  Archie had taken his knives, gone after the man, cornered him in his own home and threatened to 'disembowel him and drop his guts to the floor if he didn't come clean.' Archie proceeded to frighten the life out of him by standing him against the door, and throwing knife after knife, framing him in.  Unfortunately, the man had moved his arm and a knife went into his hand.  Terrified, the man had gone to the police at Chapleau and Archie had to take to the bush.

Anahareo knew now that she was in love.

Prelude

Performed by Montreal-based Voces Boreales, Andrew Gray, director
Composed in 1978 - my earliest choral work, (19 years old)

The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither'd and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd;
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride:
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

—Lord Byron

Destruction of Sennacherib - Kevin Reeves/Lord Byron

Stanford's Magnificat in G, sung by St. Matthew's Choir, Ottawa (Brian Law) Kevin Reeves, treble

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