QI The Book of the Dead

managed a short stint in a timber yard before being sacked for detonating a home-made bomb in the works chimney. In exasperation, his aunts allowed him to pursue his dream of moving to Canada to study farming.
    Archie at once fell in love with the wild, unspoilt Canadian outback. He also fell in love with, and married, a Native American woman, Angele Egwuna, an Ojibwa from northern Ontario. His affinity for the land, and for its indigenous peoples, took firm root and, gradually, Belaney began to abandon his English background. He worked as a trapper and guide and soon took to using an Indian name – Washaquonasin, translated into English as Grey Owl, or ‘Walks-in-the-Dark’. But, dogged by the shadow of his past, in 1912, like his own father before him, he left Angele and their two little daughters, Agnes and Flora, and moved in with Marie Girard with whom he had a son, Johnny. At the same time, he buffed up his biography. He was now the son of a Scottish father and a half-Apache mother, born in Mexico but since accepted as an honorary Ojibwa.
    On the outbreak of the First World War, Belaney joined the Canadian Black Watch: as an Indian. He earned the respect of his comrades for his exceptional marksmanship and knife-throwing skills, and for his uncanny ability to move undetected across no-man’s-land. He became a sniper, but was wounded badly in his foot. After it developed gangrene, he was sent back to England to recuperate. There, in 1917, he met and married his old Hastingssweetheart Ivy Holmes. The marriage lasted for five years till Ivy found out about Angele and divorced him for bigamy. Belaney, by then honourably discharged from the army and with a disability pension, headed back to Canada and the great outdoors. He made no attempt to contact Marie Girard, or his first wife Angele Egwuna (although he never divorced her).
    By 1925 he was living with Gertrude Bernard, a beautiful Iroquois woman eighteen years his junior, whom he renamed Anahareo. It was Anahareo who seems to have put the idea into Archie’s head that killing animals for money wasn’t a good thing. With her encouragement, he began instead to write for the Canadian press about life in the wilderness. By the early 1930s, he had become a naturalist for the Canadian National Parks service. The couple lived in a cabin on a lake in central Saskatchewan with Rawhide and Jellyroll, their two adopted beavers, whose lodge took up almost half the cabin.
    During this period Grey Owl became famous as the first environmentalist activist to achieve an international following. A sequence of books about his life with Anahareo followed and, in 1935, at the request of his publisher, Lovat Dickson, the Canadian who ran Macmillan in London, he began a high-profile lecture tour of England. Dressed in full Indian headdress and buckskin, Grey Owl was dubbed the modern Hiawatha. The tour was a huge commercial success but the workload put a strain on his relationship with Anahareo. In 1936 she moved out with their small daughter, Shirley Dawn, while Grey Owl entered into another bigamous marriage with a medical assistant called Yvonne Perrier. At their wedding in Montreal, he used the name Archie MacNeil, to fit in with his supposed Scottish heritage.
    A second international lecture tour saw him mobbed bycrowds wherever he went. He was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the young Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, and gave a royal command performance, attended by the young Richard and David Attenborough, both of whom later said that the experience had a significant influence on their careers. (Sir David was captivated by the naturalism, and, over sixty years later, Lord Richard was to make a movie of Grey Owl’s life.) Though now a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, Grey Owl’s triumph was short-lived. After an intense schedule of over 200 lectures, he returned to his cabin in Canada in 1938 suffering from exhaustion and died of pneumonia shortly afterwards.
    Within weeks of his death, newspapers began to unearth Grey Owl’s true identity. It wasn’t an edifying picture. The latter-day Hiawatha was an English bigamist who had dyed his hair and his skin to appear more authentic. He had walked out on at least four women, fathering children by three of them. Several native Canadians had clearly been aware of his true identity – or at least his racial origins – but it seems they kept quiet about it: he was such a fine ambassador for their way of life