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The quest for creeping Charlie.

Article Excerpt
IN THE EARLY 1950S, GEORGE Muir, a college student with his librarian mother's love of books, often stopped to browse at the sale bins outside a used bookstore on Yonge. The street had recently been chosen as the site for Toronto's first subway line, one constructed by the trench-and-cover method. This meant digging up the roadway and temporarily replacing much of the sidewalk with wooden planks and railing.

The bookstore owner sat just inside the door wearing a look that said this too will pass, meaning the dust, noise, and drop in foot traffic. But as the subway work dragged on he moved his chair deeper and deeper into the gloom of his shop and the sale bins brimmed.

One day Muir pulled from a pile an old volume called Ponder's Hornbook, a collection of aphorisms and anecdotes in no seeming order. It fell open at this anonymous entry: "When asked to name the smartest of all the animals an ancient wise man replied, 'Surely the megamensalopes, because they have avoided discovery by man.'"

Muir laid the book aside. But the megamensalopes remained in his thoughts. If they existed, he could understand why they kept their distance from man. How many animals had men hunted to extinction or worked to death or sent to the slaughterhouse? Before falling asleep that night Muir vowed he would be the one to find the sly creatures. Later he told this to some college friends over beer. When they laughed, Muir, who had his father's thin skin, never mentioned his quest to anyone again.

After college he went to work in his family's hardware supply business. He also joined the Toronto chapter of the Explorers' Club, with their pith helmets, easy chairs, and trophy heads on the walls. Like the other members, Muir was drawn to those...

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