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AROUND THE WORLD IN BOOKS / CANADA
The Dog That Couldn’t Hunt Straight
An acclaimed Canadian writer remembers a lovable mutt and its bizarre identity crisis
This is the third of 30 reviews of 30 books from 30 countries that are appearing on this page daily during the first 30 days of March, all in alphabetical order of the country names. Tomorrow: Denmark
Some people own their dogs. Others are owned by their dogs. Farley Mowat says his family fell into the second group, and he offers lighthearted evidence of it in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.
Mowat was 8 years old when he and his parents moved from Ontario to Saskatchewan on the eve of the Great Depression. His father had taken a job as the chief librarian of Saskatoon and hoped to hunt, in his off hours, for the Hungarian partridges on the surrounding prairie.
Angus Mowat’s goal required a bird dog, and the family acquired one that was “part black-and-white setter and part everything else,” according to the biographer James King in Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat (Steerforth, 2002). As Mowat tells it in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, his mother bought the pup for four cents from a boy who had showed up at their door with one to sell; King says it was a gift from a man who had bought it from a…
