Grey Wolf Has Gone From My Valley

The grey wolf has gone from my valley.

No longer I hear his sad song,

As I sit where the pine logs flicker

On a cold winter's night, dreary and long.

The cougar is gone from the hillside,

Deserted and cold is his lair.

No longer he prowls through the jack pines

In search of his favourite fare.

The white tail has gone from the timber,

Antlered buck and slender-legged doe.

The night wind sighs through the runways

As the fir branches sway to and fro.

In the river that waters the willow,

The beaver no longer hold sway.

His earthworks are broken and scattered;

His lodges they rot and decay.

The wild stud has gone to oblivion.

Undaunted and fearless was he,

As he foiled the hopes of a rival

Or herded his band o'er the lea.

The haunts of the lynx and the bob cat 

Are silent and empty today, 

Where once through the heavy forest 

They padded their noiseless way.

The fisher and martin no longer 

Hunt by the hurrying creek, 

Nor scout through the pines way yonder, 

For squirrels on which to feast. 

The black fox has gone from the outland 

Along with the silver and grey.

I hear not his bark in the gloaming 

Nor catch sight of his cubs as they play.

The wild geese are fewer in number;

Their echelons once filled the sky.

Like that of many wild creatures.

Their day of extinction draws nigh.

The crane that once filled a wide skyway

Year on year in the spring and the fall,

Are reduced to a vanishing remnant;

Few remember their flight or their call.

The swans I remember them only

Long ago in the days of my youth.

Many fell to the gun of the hunter;

Some few to the predators tooth.

The big horn is gone from the mountain.

No more is he seen on the height,

Guarding his ewes and their offspring

Or flashing, in well-timed flight.

The elk he bugles his challenge 

Over mesa and canyon no more,

Nor fights for the right to his harem

As he did in the days of yore.

The lily pads in the lake shallows

Are thicker than ever before.

The moose he disturbs nor molests them,

He browses amongst them no more.

On his way to a patch of wild berries,

Bruin ambles no more down the trail.

The berries they grow as of old times

No they end in a sodbuster's pail.

The grizzly is gone to a far place

Where the snow caps reach up to the sky.

A rifle equipped with a cope sight

Will drop the last one by and by.

In past ages the Indian hunter

Killed only for skins or for food.

He was driven from the land of his fathers

To exist in a hut dark and rude.

The white man with high powered weapons

Kills only for lust not for need.

Then in the lodge or the gun club

O'er cocktails he brags of his deed.

He takes home a head for a trophy,

Sometimes leaving the rest to decay.

So by man's lust for slaughter,

Nature's children grow less every day.

On the trail of war and destruction

Which the white man follows today,

It would seem by the sign on the pathway,

He will destroy himself on the way.

Then the grey wolf may return to my valley.

The cougar come home to the hill,

The wild stud come back to the mountain,

And the martin will hunt by the rill.