The Vagrants of the Barren and Other Stories

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914.

When he died in 1943, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts was considered Canada’s
foremost “man of letters.” He had not only written voluminously
himself—history, poetry, novels, short stories—and inspired many
other Canadians to emulate his achievement, but he, as Thomas Haliburton
did long before him, made Canada known to the world. Foreign magazine
editors vied for his “animal” stories, which were new and
different—by virtue of being realistic, in that they tried to avoid
the old-fashioned anthropomorphism of the fabulists and the
sentimentality of the romantics; they tried to face nature as the
animals faced it. The public loved these stories, and Roberts published
many hundreds of them in leading American and British magazines.

The task of choosing a representative collection, therefore, is a
difficult one, for the stories range from pure reflection to overt
adventure. What Martin Ware has attempted to do is to represent the
diversity of Roberts’s talent as a story writer, in terms of the
animal protagonists, the forms of the stories and their date of
composition, and their prevailing tone. He has, I think, succeeded
admirably. From the Arctic Tundra to the Tantramar Marshes, from
“Mothers of the North” to “Queen Bomba of the Honey-Pots,” we
can see, as Ware suggests, that “the workings of inexorable
necessity” can sometimes be “chance aberrations” or an animal’s
deviation from an expected course of action. One could perhaps suggest
that there are better stories (one thinks of “The Young Ravens That
Call Upon Him,” “the Master of the Pool,” and “The Pitcher
Plant”), but that would be to indulge in second-guessing. The volume
before us is valuable if only because we can never have too many modern
reprints of works by such a masterful storyteller.