The backs of our coins are resplendent with natural life. The polar bear, the caribou, the loon and the beaver. Noble creatures all — except I sometimes have doubts about that beaver. One problem with these coin creatures is that while they live in the wild, they don’t actually reign there. They are potent but not supreme. Indeed, the true power in the forests lies with another group.

For example, let me tell you of a canoe trip I took years ago. My 10-year-old son and I set out down a small river from the western edge of Algonquin Park. Rich with grasses on either side. A moose was browsing 50 yards away. This day in early July was hot and sultry, a perfect time to be on the water. We planned to cover 10 miles. We were wrong.

We set off smoothly downstream, and after perhaps 30 feet, my companion in the bow called for more bug spray. Fifty feet later, he wanted the bug hat and then he asked for gloves. As I paddled along, soaking up Nature, he flailed with his paddle at deer flies and mosquitoes. They were out in swarms and making life miserable.

After a mile, I dug my map out and hunted for an escape. What I found was a thousand-yard portage to a lake. A couple of hours later, we were drawn up on a point of land where a western wind swept down the open lake and cleared out the bugs. With the help of a smoky campfire.

The deer flies and mosquitoes, the supreme rulers, had driven us off our path with ease. We might well have just paddled past a bear, but we couldn’t deal with deer flies. They weren’t as thick as the hordes of mosquitoes but they would attack the back of one’s head and leave craters in the scalp. And, yes, they are worse than blackflies.

(Although people who are susceptible to blackflies when they go out on sunny days find that they can rack up so many bites around the eyes that when their faces swell up later in the day, they have to prop open their eyes with toothpicks. Truly.)

I have no proof, but I believe the current onslaught of biting bugs picked up steam with the melting of the polar ice cap. Years ago, no bugs would dare appear on the Victoria Day weekend, which was always cold and wet and bugless. You could usually get to June before the blackflies appeared in cottage country. But no one complained about them because no one spent weekends at the cottage in June.

By Canada Day, the blackflies were mostly gone and the mosquitoes stayed in the woods, coming out only on humid and windless days. As for the deer flies, they hadn’t been invented when I was a kid.

There was and still is the dreaded horsefly, about the size of a hummingbird and attracted by the splashes of swimmers. Luckily, horseflies don’t travel in packs and they can be slow enough that you can sometimes smash one into your hair. Not pleasant. But better than a bite.

I have left to the last the hornets and wasps of late summer, sources of severe pain and a peril to the pickers of raspberries. When I was a small child on the Moon River, my 90-year-old grandmother was the scourge of these insects. She specialized in the extermination of the wasps that liked to build nests under the eaves of our cottage.

As dusk fell, she would put on a long cloak called a “duster” and a flat bonnet that tied under her chin. Then, she would pull on thick gloves and pick up a long pole with a rag soaked in coal oil on one end. She would light this rag with a kitchen match and torch the wasp nest under the tinder-dry eaves of the cottage. My mother would stand by inside with a pail of water.

It will come as no surprise, I am sure, when I tell you that the cottage eventually burned to the ground. Charred eaves and all. Although my grandmother was long gone by then. Which is a shame, because I sure could use her on canoe trips. IE