Lögberg-Heimskringla - 21.10.1994, Blaðsíða 2

2 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 21. október 1994
lllustrated by Barry Morris
Translated by Emil Bjarnason
from an article that appeared in Morgunblaöiö
Magnús B. Magnús was born
the sixteenth day of Nov-
ember, 1912. His father was
Björn Magnússon, carpenter and
hunter. He moved to America at age
eleven with his mother in 1887.
Magnús’ mother was Ingibjörg
Þorsteinsdóttir from Horðadal.
Ingibjörg moved from Iceland at the
age of two in 1876.
In Magnús’ childhood home
Icelandic was spoken and he still
speaks it so faultlessly that one has to
listen for some hours before recognis-
ing a North American accent. Magnús
visited his ancestral homeland for the
first time in June of this year.
In 1939, Magnús married an
English lady, Anna Cobb and they had
four children, two daughters and two
sons. Anna died last fall.
In recent years the spirit of adven-
ture associated with the hunting of fur
bearing animals has faded and Magnús
is not inclined to make much of his
hunting, for when he married he quit
it in favour of carpentry.
“It never occurred to me that
Morgunblaðið in Iceland would want
to interview me about fur hunting in
Canada. Hunting was entirely differ-
ent in the old days. We travelled in
canoes and dog sleds.”
But the Morgunblað man wouldn’t
drop the subject.
“How many dogs were there?”
“Dad and I had seven dogs
(huskies) that were not unlike wolves,
big, patient and intelligent animals.”
Björn Magnússon, father of
Magnús was a quite unusual man, a
widely read ‘nature lover’ who
answered the call of the wild and
made his living by fur trapping for
forty years. Björn was a forestry
enthusiast in Iceland and by reason of
that and of his occupation he was
known as ‘Skógar-Bjöm’.
Magnús B. Magnús first went hunt-
ing at eleven years of age when his
father took him, his mother and sister
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into the wilderness by the Slave River
in Northern Alberta. After the start of
winter, the two women returned to
Winnipeg, but Magnús and his father
continued hunting in the wildemess for
two more years.
“You were eleven years old. Didn’t
you have to go to school?”
“Therein lies a story. I learned to
read at my mother’s knee and Dad
taught me a little arithmetic. When I
started school they put me in the sec-
ond grade instead of the first. I was
therefore ahead and to tell the tmth I
soon tired of school. A man leamed a
lot in the wildemess and grew up fast. I
was eighteen when I was twelve.”
“Were your conditions pretty bad?”
“No, and they had just then
declared the area a national park
(Wood Buffalo Park) and it happened
that the working crew of the park lost
one man to an accident and there was
nobody but me to replace him. But the
govemment didn’t employ men under
eighteen so I suddenly became eigh-
teen, getting three dollars a day and...”
“But tell me now about the hunting,
wasn’t it a long way from communi-
ties?”
“That is a fact. The nearest place,
Fort Smith Landing was thirty miles
away. And that place was practically
emptied of people in winter. A proper
town wasn’t to be found nearer than a
hundred and twenty or thirty miles
away. Trapping time was in the winter
after the lakes and rivers were frozen.”
“Could anyone go and hunt ani-
mals?”
“No, not entirely. You needed a
permit, then you were free to hunt
where you pleased. But that changed
in 1935. Then hunters were restricted
to assigned areas. In my opinion that
was a better arrangement. I had an
area in Northem Manitoba but in 1939
I got married and the children soon
came, so I quit hunting altogether and
I have stuck to building since then.”
“Do you regret having quit hunt-
ing?”
“It is a rare autumn when I don’t get
a longing for the woods. There is
something about the forest life. A free
life, you do what you please. What is of
value is to know the forest and the ani-
mals, to see what paths they follow.
You leam that in time. Nowadays I go
into the woods only to take pictures,
not to kill I have killed enough.
“First of all, we were seeking furs.
Larger animals, such as caribou and
bears were shot but others were caught
in snares or traps, steel traps. It is a
sore point, an emotional matter, when
one speaks of animal hunting. Traps
are undeniably bmtal hunting gear and
Paul Watson of Greenpeace and other
such devils have taken advantage of
that. People are shown pictures of
foxes or other animals that are left
writhing and tortured in traps. No
hunter with any conscience allows
such a thing to happen. In the first
place they have no desire to torture
animals needlessly. Apart from that,
they would get little for the pelt if it
had been handled that way. Half dead
Cont'd on page 3
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plan on beginning regular consignments of a larger size to Newfoundland and
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Hafsteinn Lámsson as saying.
He added that the company’s agent in Sweden was also hopeful about start-
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“This is all reason for optimism, but we’ve got both feet planted firmly on the
ground and take one step at a time,” Lámsson commented.
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