Earlier this month, after returning from the hardware store and replacing a switch at his home in Port Hope, literary icon Farley Mowat mentioned he was not feeling well.

The feeling proved fatal. He died shortly thereafter, just shy of his 93rd birthday, leaving Claire, his beloved wife of 55 years, as well as his entire family, myriad friends, and millions of fans the world over feeling bereft, as if a clear, loving voice of and for the wilderness had moved on.

For many, Mowat epitomized Canada, and helped give voice to its wild northern spaces, its aboriginal lifeways, its whales, owls and wolves.

A remarkably gifted and disciplined storyteller, Mowat penned over 40 books, which were translated into 52 languages and sold over 17 million copies. Five of his tales, including Never Cry Wolf, were to find additional homes on the big screen.

While Mowat, as noted by long-time friend and federal Green Party MP Elizabeth May, was known internationally as “a champion of the wild things,” my first encounter with him was actually as a chronicler of the Second World War.

In July 1942, as a young infantry lieutenant, Mowat had joined the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known as the “Hasty Ps,” and found himself on a troop ship bound for Europe.

In his cogent war reflection, The Regiment (1955), Mowat describes his devastating experience in the Italian campaign, which blunted his idealism. He writes of friends killed or maimed or receiving “Dear John” letters from sweethearts back home, of his fellow soldiers and himself, for political reasons, remaining unrelieved in their blood-soaked foxholes.

No one in his regiment was fighting “for King and Country,” he claimed. Their only loyalty in those bleak days was to the men on either side of them. It remains one of the grimmest anti-war reflections ever recorded.

Later, in his 1979 memoir, And No Birds Sang, Mowat recalls in visceral detail the unspeakable horror of warfare in the Sicily campaign. He notes that he came back from the war “rejecting my species,” aghast at what he had done and what humans had wrought upon each other and the natural world in the greatest human conflagration the planet had ever witnessed.

Intriguingly, the book’s title, taken from John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” echoes Rachel Carson’s 1962 environmental blockbuster, Silent Spring. Carson, writing about the devastating effects of DDT and other pesticides on wildlife and ecosystems, wondered if we were creating a world without birdsong, a “silent” world “where no birds sing.”

It makes one wonder if Mowat saw in war a dystopia similar to the chemical-drenched future discerned by Carson. Did both perceive that the same forces of greed, selfishness and disdain for “the Other” that silenced songbirds on the battlefield were deleting the sounds of nature in the postwar world as well?

In his fierce defence of wild spaces, the war-weary Mowat was perhaps seeking a vital reconnection with nature, a connection he had as a child but which was rattled by the shells and machine guns of the European theatre.

This gives a different cast to the notion of Mowat as a “curmudgeon,” a misanthrope who merely rejected the human species en masse. Perhaps he was more rejecting the human in the context of war and its cataclysmic destructiveness. What comes out so forcefully in his descriptions of the battlefield is a critique not only of a human-destroyed topography, but an environmentally razed landscape, in which nature itself is erased.

Were Mowat’s voyages into the wild, then, the opposite of his journey into the earth’s war zones?

As an “environmentalist,” it seems that Mowat was not simply defending wolves, whales or endangered species; he was also seeking a different context for the human, one that cherished something as ineffably beautiful as “birdsong,” and something as mysterious as “wilderness.”

In his last CBC radio interview, just one week before he died, Mowat commented on the decision by Parks Canada to introduce Wi-Fi to the national parks. He decried the decision as “disastrous,” and “idiotic.”

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As one who survived the ravages of the Second World War, Mowat had firsthand knowledge of what “disastrous” meant — and the temerity to tell us.