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The Wildman of Oliphant

By Paul Kastner
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Spring broke finally, and once again, lots of fresh fish. He openly repeated the cycle of foraging, but the little Oliphant community that at first seemed to pity him, and often deliberately left clothing and vegetables and cured meat out for him in the long daylight hours, had become hostile. Had he outworn his welcome? Paddling at night near fishermen’s campfires he’d hear talk about himself, the ‘Wildman of Wildman’s Island.”

Yet, he began to become comfortable with his ability to survive, and his chances of not being found by Mary’s family. He thought ahead to a second winter, and the preparations he’d need. Perhaps, he’d build a winter shack on the mainland. But he stayed on the island through another winter, spring, summer and autumn.

That third autumn, barely into its onset, a violent early storm raged for several days. The sound of smashing waves reminded him of a visit to Goderich when he was in his teens and the continuous roar made by railway engines traveling on iron rails. The Rowan Island camp had gone back to Southampton with all the fish barrels it could stow. But the Main Station Island camp where Duncan now was lookout had yet to leave, he knew. Maybe the constant scream of wind and pounding surf had gotten to him, but he had an urgent need to hear human voices again. Late on the third day of the blow, figuring it was due to settle by nightfall, he set out for Main Station, paddling in the lee of islands that largely had calm waters despite the gale.

The only unprotected stretch was Main Station Channel. At the sight of its violent waters, and the loud roar of the wind, he considered whether to paddle across to Main Station Island. As was his nature, he quickly decided: He’d become a master at handling the tipsy dugout, and if it was too bad, he could always turn back. But once poked into the channel he realized he had misjudged his abilities and that of the dugout. He had no chance of turning about. The dugout tossed violently out of his control. In an instance, it tipped and he was in the water. Swimming across to the island was his only choice. By kicking, he’d propel the overturned dugout and cling to it for safety. But such was the gale’s fury, he couldn’t hang on. Helplessly he watched the dugout bob to and fro and disappear into the driving rain at the speed of frightened horses.

Struggling, he realized it was futile. Thoughts of his lass, Mary, came to him. His final moments with her. They’d been riding in his buggy, out for a drive while it was still light, and he’d been trying to show off, urging his mare on faster and faster. Then the horror he’d never forget. A buggy wheel hit a rock, and as it tilted they’d been thrown to the hard packed ground. Mary’s head had hit a rock, killing her instantly. He’d screamed over and over again, “Oh, my beloved Mary, I killed you. I dinna mean it.”

Was this his punishment, in the Fishing Islands, in the water, in the midst of a terrible storm, fighting for his life, yelling for help again and again against the roar of waves and wind? He kept swallowing water. He gave up attempting to swim. “Oh, Mary, we’ll meet again,” was his last thought.

Overnight, the three day blow blew itself out. Jamie’s overturned battered dugout was discovered by the Main Station seiners. They looked, but didn’t find a body. Some of the fishermen mentioned thinking they’d heard cries for help during the blow, but discounted it as the noise of the wind in the trees.

Several days passed. A concerned Duncan and a mate rowed over to what they now called Wildman’s Island. A search uncovered no evidence of his presence.

“Hey, lookit what I found here,” Duncan yelled to his mate. He was standing before a young birch tree. Pointing to writing carved into the tree, he asked, “What does it say?”

His mate, who could read, slowly traced the carving’s message with his fingers. Finally, he said grimly, “MacAuley Lloyd. I killed Mary.” With a start, he added, “Och, he weren’t Jamie Bell at t’all. He were a murderer.”

A stricken Duncan.shouted, “It coulda been did ‘fore Jamie. Somebody else cut that.”

“Don’t be daft, laddie,” his mate snorted, “I reckon he never drowned. Gone off somewheres else. Took hisself a new name.”

“No, I jist know he’s deed,” Duncan said. “Drowned hisself. He were lonely.”

But Duncan was wrong. Unknown to the Main Station camp, against all odds, the Wildman did survive. For at the moment of accepting his fate, first his sagging feet, and then his body abruptly scraped across a ragged limestone reef. Pain replaced serenity. He’d been so close to joining Mary, but surely he’d been given an angelic message: Fight for your life, our time will come. With a sense of spiritual awe, he welcomed the series of surging waves that propelled him helplessly over the blessed reef and tumbled him onto the comfort of a soft shore of sand and reeds. For a time, he lay hurting and spewing out water, wondering the why of it all. Mary had to be looking after him.

Gradually conscious now of the roaring gale with buffeting northern strength full on his face, he realized that he’d been saved by a precipitous change in the wind’s direction, from west to north, affecting the wave direction. Instead of landing alive or lifeless on Main Station Island he’d been swept the opposite direction to a closer shore. Alive.
He fully sat up, and peering through the continuing curtain of rain thought he recognized the darker shape of Rowan Island against the black western night. Good, he knew where he was -- on Sunset Island. With renewed hope he crawled farther up on shore toward the shelter of trees, only to flop exhausted short of the thicket.
Hours later the torrential rain stopped, and eventually the wind dropped into utter stillness. Dawn was breaking. It was going to be one of those typical post-storm days when the sky has been swept fresh and the world looks clear and bright.

Despite himself, the sparkling day, and ozone laden air made him feel truly alive. “I probably should be grateful,” he thought, “But what’s the point, aye, without Mary.”

Grudgingly, he got up and busied himself. First, to wipe the blood off his scrapes. Next, to figure a course of action. Without his dugout, he was like a man without a horse and buggy. He couldn’t get around. How was he going to get back to his island? Should he try and hail the fishing camp on Main Station across the channel?

Exploring the south and lee sides of the island, he made up his mind. He wouldn’t seek the help of the Main Station Islanders. He’d proved he could fend for himself. Lake Huron water levels were low this year, and he mentally laid out a plan. It would be an easy swim over to Frog Island. Then he’d skirt the edge of the Squaw islands, and wade through the shallow eastern end of the Indian Channel, then to the north to south Gut Channel. There, he’d turn and walk eastwards toward Oliphant across the sand. Perhaps he’d find a boat there, and scrounge what he needed to get back to his island home.

He had long given up wearing boots, except in winter, and the soles of his feet were tough as leather. So, he trod quickly over sharp pocketed flat island limestone before reaching reeds and into soft sucking sand on the way to shore. Only the distant whine of lumber being cut at a steam-operated sawmill on southerly Whiskey Island marred the beauty of stillness. The climbing morning sun shone down on the high sandy and treed mainland ridge before him. On top the homesteads began. There lay help. “Despite everything, I am a survivor,” he couldn’t help exulting with accepting arms stretched wide in embrace as he strode toward the glory of a new dawn over Oliphant.

Yet, once ashore, within days of trying to feed himself and looking for a canoe, his sense of well-being turned into deep depression. With dismay, he recognized it as a familiar cycle of mood highs and lows that’d plagued him as he grew older. He grew angry that he hadn’t joined Mary. Adding to his misery, foraging had become a problem.

As the days grew colder, he’d sneak into a hay loft for the night, leaving before dawn. He’d look for fresh eggs hidden by hens about a barn. Occasionally, he’d kill one for later roasting over a fire. Cows in a burn field with swollen teats were milked by him. As he’d suspected earlier, Oliphant farmers definitely were hostile. When they caught sight of him around their barns or sown fields, they shouted at him to go away, calling him names, such as “filthy beast” and “crazy man”. Once a firearm was aimed at him. His despair grew, along with a worsening inability to cope mentally or energetically with his island returning plans.

As if looking on outside his body, he became aware that he was howling more and more. Or, he couldn’t stop laughing and giggling at the antics of the farmers trying to get rid of him. “I am becoming a real Wildman,” he muttered to himself fearfully in rare calmer moments, wondering what was taking place in his mind.

Despite his feeling of being weighed down by life, he hadn’t been wholly inactive. He’d constructed a rough lean-to in the woods as a refuge from weather, for sleeping and for storing whatever he’d pilfered. It was well-hidden, he thought. He lost track of how long he’d been ashore. He was getting thinner, though he managed to eat reasonably well. He’d successfully broken into milk sheds, and pulled vegetables from gardens. His game snaring abilities remained. About this time, he began noticing with surprise that the days were getting shorter. Didn’t this mean, he tried to recollect, a need to prepare his island shack for winter? He had no canoe or boat yet, but soon the lake would freeze and he’d walk to his island. Brief snowfalls were occurring, but soon melted away.

Then, it was all decided for him.

Early one morning with shallow snow still on the ground, a gang of angry looking men burst into his lean-to. They’d found it by following his footprints. Held down by others, he heard two of the gang announcing they were constables. One of them began reading something to him. The Crown. Queen Victoria. Queen of Canada. Dazed, he barely grasped any meaning. Something about legally ‘warning him out of the community’. With the fright of sudden clarity, he recalled hearing that term once back on his parent’s farm when a crazy neighbor had been taken away to an asylum. The policeman said to the Wildman, “you’re going to gaol.” Somewhere in the recess of his mind, he remembered what that meant: A procedural next stop to a lunatic asylum. Suddenly, he relaxed. “I don’t care any more,” he thought. “No one will find me there.”

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Postscript:

The 19th century lapsed, and the 20th century began. Fish stocks dwindled, as did the numbers of seiners. There was an influx of island-buying cottagers. In all sincerity, the remaining seiners simply repeated to them the story of the Wildman of Wildman’s Island as they knew it: How the love-struck Wildman had drowned in a ferocious storm. Or else, they were protecting his memory from the dreadful reality of a lonely man gone mad, taken away to spend the rest of his days in a lunatic place, grieving terribly aloud on his bad days about a ‘Mary’ and his awful sin. While large-scale fishery was ending, many farmers from Oliphant and Red Bay added fishing as a means of livelihood. Sail was abandoned for inboard gasoline engines. Pound nets replaced beach seining: Stakes driven into deeper waters, linked by fish ensnaring netting to be hauled aboard boats. Catches were still good. But for whatever reasons mainlanders left the island Wildman legend alone, though most knew of his banishment and commitment.

Asked today if they know why the record has never been set straight, the seventysomething descendants of the first farmers of Oliphant when the Wildman was ‘warned out of the community’ suggest with a smile, “who wants to ruin a good story?”

Unbothered by its name, Wildman’s Island was bought by a succession of owners. The latest would build family cottages on it and rediscover the inscription, and wonder if that was the name of the Wildman. Others would fruitlessly search microfiche files of old newspapers for reports of a murder of a county woman whose first name was Mary.
Yet for all that the privately-owned island has been for its present owners a cheerful place of wonderful family cottaging spanning 65 years. Any ghosts of the past have long been exorcised by the happy laughter of generations of children. They work at keeping it that way so that privacy is preserved with a strictly enforced no trespassing policy.

Whatever the facts about the Wildman’s fate, there is no questioning that Oliphant even today won’t let go of the romantic version, perhaps deliberately overlooking the institutionalized one if they’re aware of it at all. Death in a raging storm, and an end to one’s successful try for lonely self-preservation, is the more dramatic story, ever fresh, worth the retelling. For, on stormy nights, on nearby islands, cottagers swear they hear the cries of the doomed Wildman calling and calling for help. Some even claim as lightening shimmers across the night sky that they see him paddling his dugout.

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By: Paul Kastner August 2004
Lonely Island
Oliphant, Ontario

Acknowledgement: Background material for this story was based on the 1912 booklet, “Oliphant and Its Islands . Lake Huron. Historical and Descriptive sketches”, written and produced by Roy Fleming and Irene Monkman, Frog Island campers. Pam Daniels, Preachers’ Point, Oliphant, whose late husband’s family bought Wildman’s Island 65 years ago, supplied information on the tree carving. Her family still own the island. The McKenzie brothers, Donald and Mac, on Oliphant ridge, told of the true ending of the Wildman as heard from their grandparents. PK

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