Farley Mowat is different, and is a northern national icon. Mowat's books -- "People of the Deer" (1952), "Never Cry Wolf" (1963) and "A Whale for the Killing" (1972), among many others -- tell stories of the wilderness, the animals and the people of a hard, cold, sublimely beautiful land. It's Canada as the world knows it (when the world spares it a thought). But even aside from his celebrations of terrible northern grandeur, Mowat has two other attributes crucial to any quintessentially Canadian celebrity. First, Mowat is openly suspicious of America. And second, Canadians are suspicious of Mowat.

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In a country that is definitely on the short end of a sibling rivalry -- the Frank Stallone of the Western world -- a little resentment is inevitable. Farley Mowat would be considered a Canadian national treasure just for the frequent kicks he delivers to the American shin and the official enmity he has earned in return. "We Canadians are hardly more than house slaves of the American empire," he wrote in the 1985 book "My Discovery of America." "Of course, we are better off than the field slaves of South America."

That's the book Mowat wrote after he was included on a U.S. government list of undesirables and was subsequently refused entry into the States for a lecture tour. You can hardly blame them -- Mowat once claimed to have fired his .22 at U.S. Strategic Air Command planes flying over his home in Newfoundland. No surprise then that Mowat is prominently featured at a Web site called Canadian World Domination HQ. (Of course, the CWD Web site is only mock-belligerent. As a world threat, Canadian jingoism ranks right up there with Tibetan soccer hooliganism.)

To an extent Americans would never understand, a large part of the Canadian identity involves arguing about whether or not we have one. A recent contest to come up with a northern equivalent of the phrase "As American as apple pie" produced the suggestion "As Canadian as possible." Hockey, curling, government health care, gun control, kick-ass beer, eh, a few idiosyncratic pronunciations, the faint vestiges of Peter Jennings' accent -- these are the paltry exhibits for the defense. And the case against our distinct ethnic nationhood? Shania Twain. There's more, but why pile it on?

Faced with the disconcerting evidence of our indistinguishable North-Americanness, Canadians turn in desperation to persistent Yank-bashing. Mowat excels at this, and thus is much beloved. Conversely -- and this is crucial to understanding the Canadian psyche, but pay attention anyway -- Mowat's credibility as a Yank-basher stems almost entirely from the fact that he is successful in the States. According to publisher Key Porter, his 36 books have sold over 14 million copies in 52 languages. Another source puts it at 24 languages -- at any rate, one of them is American. "Never Cry Wolf" was made into a Disney movie. Americans like Mowat, muses the Canadian, therefore Mowat is.

Mowat's status as a national hero is probably aided by the number of Canadian towns that can lay claim to him. Born in Belleville, Ontario, on May 12, 1921, Mowat bounced around the country with his librarian father and kept the rambling habit as an adult. During World War II he fought in Italy, later recounting the experience in "And No Birds Sang." He traveled to the Northwest Territories in 1947, beginning an association with the far north that first bore fruit in "People of the Deer." The book was a tremendous success. In it, Mowat told of hitching a ride with a bush pilot who dropped him in the middle of nowhere, then of being led by a trapper to an Inuit camp -- the first white man to see it. Mowat detailed Inuit life and the threat of starvation that resulted from white encroachment on Inuit hunting grounds. A young person's novel, "Lost in the Barrens," followed in 1956, and three years later "The Desperate People" returned to the plight of the northern Inuit tribe. "Never Cry Wolf," perhaps his best-known book, described Mowat's lengthy study of wolf behavior as he fought to save the animals from human hostility and government-sponsored extermination.

From the beginning Mowat established himself as both passionate advocate and master storyteller. The educational aspects of his works made them natural homework for resentful students, but this was nutritional cereal that tasted great, too -- readers got first-hand accounts of life in the wild packed with scientific information, but also man-runs-naked-with-wolves adventure tales. Autobiographical stories of his youth, like "Owls in the Family" (1961) and "The Dog Who Wouldn't Be" (1957), captured kids' imaginations, while works like the 1984 "Sea of Slaughter" rallied them to environmental action once they had grown up. Eight years spent in Newfoundland led to several books centered on that most idiosyncratic of Canadian provinces, although Mowat and his wife, Claire, now divide their time between Ontario and Nova Scotia. Books as varied as "The Regiment" (1961) and "The Farfarers" (1998) have ranged over landscapes of earth, time and memory -- stories of history both national and personal.

His northern tales mark Mowat as a distinctively Canadian writer. That those early books are now mired in controversy deeper than spring trail mud may be a different kind of Canadian marker -- the kind of scar that this country often inflicts on its most uppity citizens. An illustrative joke: A man waiting to be seated at a seafood restaurant notices that one of the lobster tanks has no lid. He alerts the mâitre d' to a possible escape in progress. "Ah," says the mâitre d', "don't worry, sir. Those are Canadian lobsters. If one of them starts to crawl out, the others will just drag it back down."

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