Interviewed by Goddard for the Saturday Night article, Mowat admits cheerfully to a certain liberty with the facts.

He called 'despicable' Goddard's discussion of difficulties Mowat was having with his then wife according to his journals, those woes depressed him. Mowat said he had understood the materials were not for publication without his permission. Goddard's primary source materials are Mowat's own notes, which the author sold to McMaster University. He did not once set foot in an Inuit camp.' He did not once - contrary to the impression he leaves - see a starving Inuit person.

'Two summers and a winter' living among the wolves, Goddard found, really was only four weeks.Ĭontradicting Mowat's accounts, 'he did not casually drop in alone but traveled on both occasions as a junior member of well-planned scientific expeditions. Goddard concluded that Mowat did not, as he claimed, spend two years in the Keewatin District, the remote territory hugging the western shore of Hudson Bay, but only parts of two summers. Long before rugged wilderness scribes crowded the stage, Mowat was hailed as a two-fisted crusader against official neglect and extermination of the Inuit, or Eskimos, and as a protector of wolves, seals and whales.īy Goddard's published account, however, Mowat inflated or twisted what he was learning. Mowat, 74 and living in Port Hope, Ontario, an hour east of Toronto, is a Canadian icon and a hero to older environmentalists the world over. 'Naive as it may seem to some, I believe the truth will out, regardless of how facts are manipulated to conceal or pervert it,' he wrote.

Mowat shot back in this morning's Globe and Mail newspaper, describing the attack as 'character assassination.' In seeking to 'portray me as an unconscionable liar,' he said, the article was intended to 'invalidate the legitimacy of the causes I espoused.' He said he would not sue the magazine, which is owned by Canadian media tycoon Conrad Black. 'By selling fiction as nonfiction, he has broken a trust with his readers,' writer John Goddard concluded after describing numerous instances that indicate Mowat was not where he said he was, for as long as he was or under the circumstances he said he was.

The article, titled 'A Real Whopper,' is heralded by a cover photograph of Mowat with a digitally stretched nose. Author Farley Mowat, who cut a dashing figure as a chronicler of the Far North's wretched peoples and threatened creatures, has been accused of misrepresenting and fabricating some his fabled researches in the wild.Īccording to an article just published in Canada's venerable Saturday Night magazine, the intrepid legwork chronicled in Mowat's international bestsellers of the 1950s and '60s, 'People of the Deer' and 'Never Cry Wolf,' is not fully substantiated by known facts - including what Mowat was writing in his private contemporary journals.

Farley mowat wolves