Muskrat Funk
A Manitoba Mudlark's Origin Story
During the pandemic, I walked along the riverbanks of Winnipeg. An old habit of mine – gazing at the ground for treasure – was reawakened. I was vaguely aware at the time that what I was doing was mudlarking. A mudlark is ‘someone who scavenges in the river mud for objects of value.’
The first place I went to – near my house -- was under the railway bridge spanning the Assiniboine River where uprooted trees and logs had washed up against the footings. I noticed a flat matted clump of brown fur on a patch of ground under one of the logs. It was a muskrat corpse. An odor arose from it, a kind of hide-stench, raw and smelling of the wild.
That corpse had been there some time; there was no sign of a head or face. It just smelled powerfully.
When things stink, you want to get away from the odor or get rid of the thing causing it. I chose the former. I moved away, but the odor lingered.
***
One of the best places to mudlark is under bridges. Bridges are elemental human-made architecture. Affixed to the land at either end with footings in between, they span the waters, enabling humans to cross over to places where they could not have gone previously. There are many bridges across the two major rivers – the Assiniboine and the Red – that flow through Winnipeg.
In my neighborhood of Wolseley within easy walking distance of my house, there are three bridges – two that span Omand’s Creek – a footbridge and a road bridge on Portage Avenue – and the previously mentioned railway bridge that spans the Assiniboine.
Washed up things accumulate by the pillars of a bridge and settle into the mud or sometimes catch onto the branches or roots of trees that are jammed against the cement footings. Further up the hill where the bridge begins, there is a sheltered dark area covered in graffiti and one finds there the usual trash associated with trollish under-bridge activities like drinking and drugs. By the footings, I have found messages-in-bottles, railway spikes, a horseshoe, bottle caps, and even a cellphone. Wherever there is a flat surface like the walls of the cement footing or the water-smoothened grey bark of a log, there is art – - graffiti or poetry, expressing the sacred or profane, or both. For example, there is a crude spray-painted image of a phallus on a crumbling cement slab, or rhyming lines about God, the Devil, and Jesus on the worn surface of a log. Scattered around are beer bottles or cans. There might be syringes on the ground; I once found a steak knife plunged into the mud. It was probably used for hot knifing.
I don’t usually pick up these items, but sometimes I can’t resist. Once, when I was heading up the bank by the end of the railway bridge near a wooded area where there had been homeless encampments, I found a crudely carved billy club with electrical tape wound around the handle, and the remnants of a whetstone. I took these items home but never posted them as finds on Facebook or Instagram. They had a kind of bad juju about them. Still, I found them fascinating and kept them around for weeks. The club intrigued me. Although likely fashioned to be a weapon, I thought of other uses for a club like for fishing, for example.
When I looked up fishing clubs on the internet -- mostly what I found were various fishing associations or ‘clubs’ in North America. My search term was off. When I put in the verb ‘clubbing’, then the occasional image of an actual club came up. There was one beautifully carved northwest coast club of indigenous design with the distinctive image of a fish – the sacred artistry of which somehow redeemed the violence of the clubbing, but no other clubs appeared anything like the item I had found. No, this was a home-made club that was more billy than fishy.
***
The only North American animal that builds anything close to resembling a bridge would be the beaver. Well, technically not ‘bridges’ but ‘dams.’ But in places of human habitation, these ‘dams’ can act like bridges like they do where I live. The beavers build dams across the creek, and if you’re small and agile like a child, you can cross the creek on one of these rodent-built bridges. Looking at that ‘dam’ recently, I imagined this conversation:
– Look Ma, I crossed the creek on that bridge.
– That’s not a bridge, honey, that’s a beaver dam.
– Well, can’t a dam be a bridge, too? I crossed to the other side of it. That’s what bridges are for, aren’t they?
– I suppose. But the reason the beaver built it is to dam up the water; it didn’t build it to use it as a bridge.
– I seen it use it as a bridge. I seen it cross over to the other side of it.
– Are you sure? Maybe you imagined you saw it. It’s faster for a beaver to swim across the creek than cross it on its dam.
– Well, I saw what I saw.
***
I speak of ‘beaver’ and not of ‘muskrat’ which is how I began this essay. And muskrats do not build bridges, dams, nor lodges, even. Apparently, they build dens. I’ve seen one on the frozen pond connected to the creek. Built of marsh grasses, reeds, and mud, it’s a little mound with a hole in it, presumably the entrance.
At least I think it’s a muskrat den; I could be wrong.
“Muskrats also on occasion use abandoned beaver lodges.” I read that somewhere. It’s a believable statement like the one a child might proclaim authoritatively by experience about a ‘dam’ being a ‘bridge.’ But if you look at the words of this statement closely, you must wonder whether this is an observed truth, or a speculative one. Of course, the writer of the website where I read this information, could have just made it up.
The thing is, a beaver might have built a lodge (observed truth), but who said it ever ‘abandoned’ it (speculative truth)? Maybe in time, that beaver would return to it. Or what if it was renting it out to the muskrat? What if there was some unseen negotiation between the two creatures? Well, that would be stretching it a bit, you might say. Animals don’t have language so how could they ‘negotiate’ a ‘rental contract’? However, they could be observed to have ‘abandoned’ a lodge, but only if muskrats have moved in, which would be the logical conclusion because why else would a smaller rodent move into the place of a larger one? Language can be used to observe actions, but inevitably at the same time, also interprets them.
Animals that talk in literature make that literature anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphizing is a trick humans do with language. One of my favorite anthropomorphic characters is Professor Muskrat in Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. Here is a wonderful passage in which Professor Muskrat does what humans—particularly, writers—love to do with language:
“I’m always looking for the Hows and the Whys and the Whats,” said Muskrat. “That is why I speak as I do. You’ve heard of Muskrat’s Much-in-Little, of course?”
“No,” said the child. “What is it?”
Muskrat stopped, cleared his throat, ruffled his fur, drew himself up, and said in ringing tones, “Why times How equals What.” He paused to let the words take effect. “That’s Muskrat's Much-in-Little,” he said. He ruffled his fur again and slapped the ice with his tail. “Why times How equals What,” he repeated. “Strikes you all of a heap the first time you hear it, doesn't it? Pretty well covers everything!”
***
After the snow fell and stayed on the ground in November, I didn’t go mudlarking as often. The river was frozen, and the banks were covered. In the meanwhile, the pandemic worsened. As Christmas approached and infection rates and hospitalizations started trending upwards, there was a second lockdown, and despite the rollout of vaccines, things got worse. Because all indoor events were cancelled, and the weather continued to be mild after Christmas, people went outside. Omand’s Creek and the Assiniboine River were filled with folks walking alongside the river or skating or skiing on its frozen surface. Kids were tobogganing on the hill near where the creek meets the river.
I walked, too —somewhere I hadn’t before because in winter, it’s possible to go places you can’t in other seasons. I walked up the frozen creek bed, curious as to how far I could go on it. I’d been watching mudlarking videos of a Yorkshire man who larked along the creeks and rivers of his town, narrating the town’s history with the mills and pubs situated on the banks.
Omand’s Creek has a rich history of commercial activity. The creek flows past a mix of industrial and retail strips alongside a rail-line. At the end of this semi-industrial retail strip is an area officially known as Westview Park, but the place is more commonly referred to as Garbage Hill. Garbage Hill was a former municipal landfill, hence the name. I had it in my sights as a potential larking spot for some time and now I could get there by walking on the creek. Instead of the street, the creek would take me places under railway trestles and through drainage tunnels, under parking pad overpasses. It would give me the river rodent view of the city, quite different from that of the everyday pedestrian’s.
Near the Portage Avenue overpass, someone had set up a shelter on the creekbank. It was mound-like, and now covered with snow. I had not paid much attention to it, but in my weeks of walking in the early autumn, I had slowly seen it coming into being. At first, I noticed a shopping cart parked by the bridge and a bunch of black metal curved poles with coverings on them. I had no idea what these things were, but their shape and size indicated to me that these were going to be used for building something. And indeed, they were. As the days progressed, they slowly disappeared out of the cart, and onto the bank, and eventually formed the frame of a round dome-shaped shelter with a blue tarp. There was an entryway, a hole with a flap over it. And there was a path to it, discernible once the snow arrived, packed down enough to indicate the place was lived in. The shopping cart was also now parked beside it. All this I observed from the paved path through Omand’s Creek Park used by all the bikers, joggers, and walkers in the area. But when later I could walk down the creek, I saw this human abode from the back. The back end was covered in garbage – plastic bags, food packaging, dirty clothes spilled down the bankside like entrails of waste. I found a black lacy bra there, its two cups folded over. Not far from it, were pens and pencils, and toy figurines. I wondered who might be living in the shelter – a youth possibly, maybe even a young woman.
Under the Portage Avenue bridge, the creek flows past the old Winnipeg landmark restaurant Rae and Jerry’s and then past an apartment building before it curves sharply west where it flows under another railway bridge and emerges into a marsh pond just east of Polo Park shopping centre. There were more makeshift shelters evident on the creek’s banks between the Portage Avenue vehicle bridge and the railway one, and it occurred to me now why. The car bridges provide easy access to the street where the residents can foray out for their fast food, and other amenities, some of which they transport in their shopping carts and dump the remains under the bridge. Once you are past the railway bridge into the marsh pond which is now completely frozen, there are no more shelters on the creek banks. The marsh pond is a lovely oasis and has been maintained by the city as a park alongside which is a walking trail. There is an arched bridge over the pond that resembles one you would see in a Monet garden painting. One can take the trail to the bridge, then walk over it on their way to Polo Park for an afternoon’s shopping. The view from this bridge of the marsh grasses and bulrushes is pretty, sandwiched as it is between the railway line, the street, and box stores on either side. It was on this marsh pond that I saw the muskrat den. It blended into the scenery in that pleasingly aesthetic way that reflects its utility to its maker in the place of its building. And the entrance opened to the water—for the pond and the creek are, of course, the muskrat’s street and railway.
***
In the Anishinaabe origin story of the great flood and the creation of Turtle Island, Muskrat is a hero. (I must be careful how I tell this story to you and what words I use, because there are different versions and the story itself is told in another language with words which might have other meanings.)
In the story, the great spirit Kitchi-Manitou flooded the earth after seeing its inhabitants, the Anishinaabe people, acting in discord and in disharmony with each other and the world. (In the account I read, Kitchi-Manitou is not said to ‘punish’ the ‘people’ but acts to ‘purify’ the world by ‘destroying’ it.) Only Nanaboozhoo and a few other animals – those who can swim and fly – remain. Nanaboozhoo attempts to save the creatures by diving down into the waters to get a handful of earth to make land enough for them to live on; however, the water is too deep, and he fails. Other creatures try also and fail, until finally …
little Wa- zhushk”, muskrat stepped forward. “I’ll try,” he said. Some of the other, bigger, more powerful animals laughed at muskrat. Nanaboozhoo spoke up. “Only Kitchi-Manitou can place judgment on others. If muskrat wants to try, he should be allowed to. “So, muskrat dove into the water. He was gone much longer than any of the others who tried to reach the bottom. After a while Nanaboozhoo and the other animals were certain that muskrat had given his life trying to reach the bottom. Far below the water's surface, muskrat, had in fact reached the bottom. Very weak from lack of air, he grabbed some Earth in his paw and with all the energy he could muster began to swim for the surface. One of the animals spotted muskrat as he floated to the surface. Nanaboozhoo pulled him up onto the log. “Brothers and sisters,” Nanaboozhoo said, “muskrat went too long without air, he is dead.” A song of mourning and praise was heard across the water as muskrat's spirit passed on to the spirit world. Suddenly Nanaboozhoo exclaimed, “Look, there is something in his paw!” Nanaboozhoo carefully opened the tiny paw. All the animals gathered close to see what was held so tightly there. Muskrat's paw opened and revealed a small ball of Earth. The animals all shouted with joy. Muskrat sacrificed his life so that life on Earth could begin anew.
***
The city of Winnipeg and its waterways is Treaty One Territory, the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Anishinaabe people. So, Muskrat and the story of Turtle Island is relevant to where I live. But I can’t help comparing it to the flood story I grew up with – the story of Noah and the Ark in the Bible. In that story, the world, according to the King James Version “…was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.” So, God declares:
Behold, I even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and everything that is in the earth shall die.
In this account, there is a lot of ‘I’ talk mostly by God but like the Anishnaabe account, both Kichi-Manitou and God ‘destroy’ their creation by flooding the earth. Noah and Nanabazhoo are similar, but in the Anishinaabe account, it is Nanabazhoo who comes up with the idea to dive into the waters. When Muskrat offers to go into the deep, Nanabazhoo remarks: Only Kitchi-Manitou can place judgment on others. If muskrat wants to try, he should be allowed to. Noah, on the other hand, judged by God to be righteous, is instructed on how to build a boat.
In the Genesis account, there is no anthropomorphizing but in the Anishinaabe account, Nanabazhoo talks with the animals, and it is the mammals and birds – the creeping, crawling, swimming, diving people as they would more properly be called in an indigenous language – that can best negotiate the aquatic world. In the biblical account, the animals are under the stewardship of Noah, and must be saved by him and his boat. This makes the biblical account anthropocentric.
In the Anishinaabe account, Muskrat, becomes the ‘saviour’ of the world by bringing back a little ball of earth in its paw. Muskrat dies for Nanabazhoo’s idea. And so, little Muskrat is given agency in a story in which the human and humanity’s relationship to God is not all about them but rather about other creatures in the world whose bodies and abilities are more adapted and facile than the human’s.
However, because in the Anishnaabe story, Muskrat can talk or namely, use words, we can read/hear that Muskrat has chosen to serve humanity, and for that, the creature deserves credit by being immortalized in a story only humans can tell one another. Its sacrifice is honored in the story. The sacred story.
***
It is the sacred stories that are told repeatedly in places of worship where people gather. I admit I have not been to the place where the sacred story of Nanabazhoo and the flood is told; I have read that one on the internet. (It is on the internet that I’ve seen a picture of a sweat lodge, which incidentally, looks like a muskrat den.) I have, however, been to where the sacred story of Noah and the flood is told, and that is to the church. I go there weekly. And from the pulpit and from the readings, I hear, sing, recite the sacred stories. With the pandemic, however, I was unable to go. And that was sad for me, for I love the sacred stories and how they interpret and animate the life I live.
There is a church, St. Peter’s Dynevor, on the Red River north of Winnipeg that I visited as a tourist during the pandemic. It is one of the oldest churches in the province, built in 1852. Its door faces the river, for back in the time it was built, the river was the main mode of transportation. The priest of that church, a self-proclaimed ‘Scotsman’ named William Cockran, (who, incidentally, was a big man at 7 feet and 300 pounds) was friends with the local chief there, Chief Peguis of the Salteaux First Nation. Their friendship enabled them to share the fruits of their ways of life with each other – the one providing hunted meat and fish, the other providing cultivated vegetables and plants. Each believed in their own god – Kitchi Manitou and the trinitarian God – who was sometimes the same god in attributes, and other times, not.
***
I am a poet and poets are a kind of storyteller. Their materials, after all, are words. We like to see things, name them, and delight in the words and what they evoke in us.
I have a poet friend, Joanne Epp, who loves walking by the creek and who has written many poems about it. She and I walked down the frozen creek together. She had just published a poem recently that was now in her book Cattail Skyline:
Affirmation
The slopes are dull as pavement,
creek’s edge dry with last year’s cattails.
Coffee cups, bright red faded to brick,
lodge in bushes. Wind-blown fast-food logos,
disguised by dirt and sun-bleach,
entangle in the yellowed grass.Step sideways—the picture changes:
new grass threading up through the old,
willow twigs bursting with leaves, rosehips
still orange after winter, the advertisement
of blackbird’s scarlet shoulders.Tomorrow, neighbours will come
with gloves and garbage bags, kick up dust
from blades of bluestem. They’ll comb out
the cardboard and plastic that’s drifted in.
Push back the boundaries yet again.
I read this poem after weeks of mudlarking and after having another, environmentally conscientious, poet-friend tell me how I should be picking up the plastic I see. At first, I felt guilty, then irritated; I did not mudlark to collect garbage – mudlarking and waste collection were not the same. Mudlarking is curating; waste collection is cleaning.
In my friend’s poem, her sense of humanity is ‘affirmed’ when she sees the ‘neighbours’ picking up the garbage in the creek. She is not picking up garbage herself and writing a poem about that. She is merely witnessing those who do and is affirmed by that. She is treading that fine line of the words being ‘activism’ while at the same time, also being poetry.
As we walked down the frozen creek together, I told my poet friend about the other poet suggesting I pick up the garbage on my larks. She laughed and said, once, when she was walking through a favorite area in Saskatchewan, she did notice with dismay the garbage around, but did not pick it up because she had nothing with her to put it in. Then just as she thought this, she saw a plastic bag. She took that as a sign, plucked the bag and began picking up garbage along the way.
She asked me if I participated in the yearly spring clean-up of the creek, organized by the local MLA, and I said ‘no.’ She hadn’t participated either, but was wondering now if she should. She said, loving the creek by writing about its environs made her feel proprietary about it as if she owned it and had a responsibility towards keeping it clean. By keeping a ‘natural’ place like a creek ‘clean’ essentially means removing the waste humans have put there.
When Kitchi-Manitou aka God flooded the earth, were they ‘cleaning’ it, I wonder? In the Anishinaabe account, ‘purify’ is a word that is used alongside the word ‘destroy.’ ‘Destroy’ is used in both accounts.
Of course, humans have been using creeks and rivers to wash away their garbage for a long time. I told my friend about the litter I saw on the creek from the homeless encampments – the plastic bags, the coffee cups, pizza boxes – and as we walked, we conscientiously began picking stuff up until we were past where most of the garbage was in that section of the creek between the bridges before the marsh pond. Once we were past the railway bridge—the trestles of which loomed above us—and past the nubbly bit of beaver dam that formed the entrance to the frozen pond, we were in the clear. Here the scenery was dazzling, with the snow glittering brightly on the grasses around the pond. We walked the well trodden path towards the arched bridge when suddenly, we spotted something round on top of the ice under the bridge. It was a frozen furred creature curled up so tightly we could not make out its head nor its tail.
I had been pondering on muskrat all week, and now here it was, in the flesh. Dead.
I poked and prodded, gently turning the ball around. On the other side, there was something like a tail split open with a seam of fat along it, and the tail was string-like rather than the flat paddle shape of the beaver’s.
Was Kitchi-Manitou trying to tell me something, I wondered. The writing about my mudlarking, the river, the conversations with other writers about it had led, propitiously to this moment.
I wondered how Muskrat had met its death this time. Had a dog ferreted it out of its den? So many people were walking outside these days, the creek was a well-worn path. Was there no watery section of the creek it could swim in anymore?
It was a mystery.
One thing, however, was for certain. We weren’t going to pick up the animal and put it in a garbage can.
Later, its curled-up body remained snagged in my conscience like a fishing hook. I should have picked it up and deposited it at the entrance of its den, which was only a few hundred meters away. That was the least I could have done. An act that acknowledged its death. I felt this way towards the muskrat, only because I’d read a story about it. Not the Hoban one, but the Anishinaabe one, and it made me feel something I hadn’t felt before about this little native rodent, Wa-zushk.
Wa-zushk had now become a character in my writing. And because it was named and had a story of self-sacrifice, I looked upon its death, its corpse differently.
***
I first encountered the word ‘animacy’ when a creative writing student mentioned it to me. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:
Animacy is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.
Animacy is a different word from ‘anthropocentric’ or ‘anthropomorphize.’ It shifts the emphasis away from the human and focuses on sentience, which is something other living creatures possess, and which is recognizable to humans. In fact, even with humans, animacy is ‘acquired as early as six months of age’ – so, acquired even before a child is literate.
Animacy. I like this word; it is a word of the middle way which is where I find myself now in the river of my thoughts. But when did Wazushk enter this river? When I smelled it on the riverbank. The muskrat’s dead body emitted a powerful odor, pungent and raw. And as I said earlier, I left that spot to get away from the stench. The muskrat had entered my senses but not yet to the place where the senses become words. That did not happen until much later. After the snow fell, and Christmas had come and gone, I went back out to the riverbank to go larking. Not far from where I first smelled muskrat is a little carved-out section of the riverbank. I could never access this part of the bank when the river was flowing because the water there was too deep and the embankment too steep, but now that the river was frozen, I could inspect the bank at this spot. There was a hole there, and in it was something that looked like a bone. I fished it out. It was brown and wing-shaped, tapering to an end that looked like a ball-joint cup. I felt instinctively that this was a muskrat bone and when I got home, I looked it up. Sure enough, it matched the pictures of the hip bone of a muskrat skeleton.
Bones are a common mudlarking find, and I’d seen many on the bank and left them alone. But this bone was small and peculiar in shape, so after looking it up, I sketched an outline of it in my art journal and posted the drawing on Instagram.
A Maori writer friend, Whiti Hereaka, in New Zealand saw it, and suggested we do a sketchbook exchange. I had just gotten a sketchbook from another friend at Christmas. It was a Robert Bateman one, pocket-size, to be used for drawing scenes of nature from across Canada. I suddenly had the idea that I would like to draw a muskrat in this sketchbook because that is who lived in my natural neck-of-the-woods. So, I looked around the internet for images of muskrats and found a photographed one to draw. But knowing this sketchbook was going to a writer of indigenous background in New Zealand made me think a little harder on what I was drawing. I thought I’d like to tell Whiti who Muskrat was and draw it according to the indigenous stories from here about it. And that is when I looked up the story of Nanabazhoo and the flood.
While looking up the Nanabazhoo story, however, I was reminded of the other memorable muskrat of my childhood reading, and that was the Muskrat of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. The stories began to coalesce in my imagination and ferment there in a mash of unrecorded impressions and observations I’d formed while mudlarking. And as all fermented things do, the mash began to smell, giving off an odor I could either run away from or acknowledge the presence of by putting it into words.
Muskrat funk.
The muskrat who lives in stories is why I am a writer. Muskrat plunges into the formless deep of my unconscious where all the treasures of the cultures I grew up with in Canada float around me, and Muskrat retrieves a clod of earth for me – this clod is language. I set it on the back of Old One (my name for the Turtle) and make out of the words a terrain of essays, poetry, and stories, a terrain where I learn how to be and how to belong.
*Creation story with Muskrat found here: https://ied.sd61.bc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2019/02/Ojibway-Anishinabe_Creation_Story.pdf I have also consulted with an indigenous writer as a sensitivity reader for this piece, and she confirmed the Creation story as Anishinaabe and that it is not culturally inappropriate to mention it as such in this essay.