The Wild Animal’s Story: Nonhuman Protagonists in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature through the Lens of Practical Zoocriticism

Last of the Curlew
for 
The Murrelet 
in 1995 
states: “here is a good example of the fictitious narrative, carefully told, which 
will reach a wider audience with a far more powerfully told and palatable 
message than the scraps of fact available ever do” (13). Just as Edwards 
argues that the bare science would have lesser impact without the story, the 
historical extracts alone would be less moving without the curlew. It is the 
combination of the archive evidence and the curlew’s defamiliarizing 
questioning which drives the force of Bodsworth’s critique. The male Eskimo 
curlew poses an unspoken question and “The Gauntlet” provides the answer. 
Moreover, the curlew’s sympathetic narrative would be less intense if he were 
not the 
last
 
of his species. His solitary life is all the more distressing for his 
strong emotional responses, loneliness dominating above all. On a grand scale, 
the extinction of a species is terrible but without the individual narrative the loss 
is reduced to statistics and dates, and the inconceivable mass of deaths. Again, 
as in 
Return
, we find an emphasis on the connection between the suffering 
individual and the suffering species. Bodsworth takes the general extinction of 
the Eskimo curlew and transforms it into a unique individual’s story of isolation 
and grief. He also demonstrates that those individuals each have a 
biography
. 

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Allmark-Kent 168 
Scholtmeijer notes that the “sense of the tragic in 
Last of the Curlews
is held 
somewhere between the vision of the world in which there will be no more 
curlews and the experiences of the lone remaining individual
” (128).
If these experiences were bare biological facts
—the insignificant 
movements of an instinct-driven automaton
—the ‘tragic’ quality of the tale would 
be lost. Despite Bodsworth’s repeated claims that the curlew possesses a 
“simple” (28) and “slow-working brain” (92) the reader is presented with the 
proof of his intense, wide-ranging emotions: 
“feverishly” (9); “passion” (9, 14, 
16, 117); “ecstasy of home-coming” (9); “excitedly” (14, 90, 115); “tormenting” 
(14, 73); “frenzied” (14); “a fury as passionate as his love” (16); “maddened” 
(17); “a pressing desire for companionship” (25); “hope” (33); “torn between the 
two torturing desires” (45); “restlessness” (46); “nostalgic yearning for home” 
(74); “love-making” (80); “felt as if he had been reborn and was starting another 
life” (80); “love display” (81); “their own companionship was so complete and 
satisfying” (83); “agony of loneliness torturing him again” (86); “frightening” (92); 
“mounting emotion” (114); “frantic display of love” (114); “tenderly” (116); 
“satisfied them emotionally” (117); “passion became a fierce, unconstrainable 
frenzy” (114); “terrified and bewildered” (120); “frantic pleas” (121); “plaintive 
cries” (121); and “fear” (121). Evidently, the actions and feelings of Bodsworth’s 
protagonist are at odds with his reductive descriptions. Whilst she enters into no 
in-depth discussion, Janice Fiamengo mentions that Bodsworth claims that the 
brains of curlews have little capacity for conscious thought or memory, yet 
“ascribes to his main character a passionate emotional life” characterized by 
“emotions seemingly inseparable from thought and memory” (1). The emotions 
listed above demonstrate the validity of Fiamengo’s statement. Nonetheless, I 
suggest that Bodsworth’s insistence on ‘instinct’ may, paradoxically, strengthen 

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Allmark-Kent 169 
the effect of the curlew’s autonomy. Driven by Bodsworth’s repetitive assertions 
that the curlew possesses only a “rudimentary brain” (24), the reader’s 
expectation of a simplistic, instinct-driven bird is disrupted by his intense, heart-
wrenching emotions, as well as his defamiliarizing interrogation of his own 
lonelin
ess. The effect is startling and, again, reinforces the curlew’s status as a