France has Napoleon, America has John Wayne, Canada has a way of making you stop reading mid-sentence. Head for the movie reviews if you must, but make no mistake -- the Great White North does have its heroes. Typically, though, there's nothing intrinsically Canadian about them. In fact, their fame is usually the result of having shed that confining distinction. A truly Canadian celebrity is one who elicits the reaction, "I didn't know X was Canadian." Right. That's why X went to a speech therapist.

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.

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 mbitre d' to a possible escape in progress. "Ah," says the mbitre 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."

In Farley Mowat's case, though, it's hard to argue that the problem was only Canada's national brand of small-town envy. The scandal began with the May 1996 issue of Saturday Night, one of Canada's most prominent national magazines. On the cover was a black-and-white photo of Mowat, the northern sage, looking woodsy with his full beard and wool sweater. Another woodsy touch was the Pinocchio nose, electronically added to Mowat's face by the waggish art department. It wasn't a good sign. Seeing that cover, Mowat must have felt something like the guy whose girlfriend has just announced that she wants to tell him something -- on the Jerry Springer show. Sure enough, John Goddard's heavily researched story, "A Real Whopper," made devastating accusations about Mowat's first three nonfiction books: "People of the Deer," "The Desperate People" and "Never Cry Wolf."

Wrote Goddard: "Documents recently made public at the National Archives of Canada, and papers that the author himself sold years ago to McMaster University, show that Mowat did not spend two years in the Keewatin District in 1947 and 1948 as the books say. He spent two summer field seasons in the district -- totaling less than six months -- and mostly in a more southern part of the district than he describes. He did not casually drop in alone but traveled on both occasions as a junior member of well-planned scientific expeditions. He did not once -- contrary to the impression he leaves -- see a starving Inuit person. He did not once set foot in an Inuit camp. As for the authenticity of his wolf story, he virtually abandoned his wolf-den observations after less than four weeks."

The article reported that residents of the Northwest Territories often refer to Farley Mowat by the derisive nickname "Hardly Know-it." After noting the claims of scrupulous authenticity Mowat made within the books themselves, Goddard described a very different Mowat attitude displayed in notes and conversation. "I never let the facts get in the way of the truth," Goddard claims Mowat told him. Goddard also came across Mowat's self-proclaimed motto in a catalog of the author's papers: "On occasions when the facts have particularly infuriated me, Fuck the Facts!"

Ironically, the article confirmed Mowat's preeminent status in Canada by causing a national furor. Even political cartoonists weighed in -- the Edmonton Journal's Malcolm Mayes depicted Mowat's wife informing her husband, "The wolf's at the door, and he's got a few questions."

Mowat's friends -- including virtually the entire Canadian literary establishment -- rose to his defense and anxiously awaited the great man's rebuttal. It was swift and disappointing. Mowat gave interviews describing Goddard's article as "bullshit, pure and simple ... this guy's got as many facts wrong as there are flies on a toad that's roadkill." (On the other hand, he didn't mind the rude cover trick. "You know what they say about men with long noses," he reasoned.)

In a widely published statement, Mowat excoriated Saturday Night as another National Enquirer and savaged Goddard as a "hired gun" and "despicable." "His piece is stuffed with factual errors," Mowat wrote. "I don't have the space here to catalogue his errors of omission and commission ... Even more to the point, he consistently misses the truth behind the 'facts.'"

Putting the word "facts" in quotation marks hardly inspired confidence. Nor did his refusal to refute Goddard's major claims. Tellingly, both Mowat's attackers and defenders quickly staked out the same ground -- namely, the author's admitted reputation as a "teller of tales." Critics pointed out that similar accusations had been made before, notably by Frank Banfield of the Canadian Wildlife Federation in a 1964 article published in the Canadian Field-Naturalist. Banfield compared Mowat's 1963 bestseller to another famous wolf tale: "Little Red Riding Hood." "I hope that readers of "Never Cry Wolf" will realize that both stories have about the same factual content," Banfield wrote.

Sure, sure, replied the FOFs (Friends of Farley). That's the secret of his charm. Wrote one correspondent to Saturday Night: "There is more truth in one of his outrageous exaggerations than in a shelf-load of pretentious twaddle." A news story quoted naturalist and author Stuart Houston: "Anyone who knows Farley knows that he has a difficult time understanding where truth ends and his imagination begins ... and we love him for it." Mowat must have been touched -- it was the kind of stirring endorsement that his heirs could use to dispute his will.

"The primary consideration for a writer is to entertain," Goddard quotes Mowat as saying. "Using entertainment you can then inform, you can propagandize, you can elucidate ... As far as I'm concerned 'People of the Deer' did nothing but good for individual people, the survivors ... Nobody was going to pay any attention to them unless their situation was dramatized, and I dramatized it."

The pro-Mowat camp succeeded in pointing out that Goddard's attack overreached on some charges and inappropriately downplayed very real problems the Inuit faced. But many of Goddard's claims, among them that Mowat demonized the federal government and significantly distorted the official attitude toward both wolves and Inuit, went unanswered. More fundamentally, Mowat's reputation as a nonfiction writer was compromised, perhaps permanently.

Permanently, like a life sentence for murder. Three years later, few traces of the 1996 Saturday Night shootout are evident. Online reviews and biographies rarely mention the controversy, which apparently went largely unnoticed outside of Canada anyway. In the end, John Goddard appears to have been Farley Mowat's very own Gennifer Flowers. Charges were made, much harrumphing ensued, the charges remained unchallenged and no harm was done. Onward and upward for Slick Farley.

But some readers, particularly historians, will not forget so easily. The University of Toronto's Michael Bliss called the fudging "utterly appalling," while the University of Alberta's Rod Macleod suggested that those who lie for a good cause ultimately do that cause "more harm than good." But if the tempest has had any lasting effect for most Mowat readers, it seems to have been this: They identified what they valued about his writing and found themselves agreeing with the author's contention that, while they may fall short as history, his stories survive as ripping yarns that serve a greater good. Hollywood's attraction to "Never Cry Wolf" now seems perfectly fitting -- both Mowat and Tinseltown value storytelling over strict accuracy.

(Harder to interpret is maverick Vancouver writer/filmmaker Ken Hegan's short subject, "Farley Mowat Ate My Brother." Adapted from a radio play, the eight-minute flick tells of a Hegan frhre who, irked by having to write boring book reports, leaves to lodge a personal complaint with the famous author, then mysteriously disappears. The joking accusation of cannibalism won Best Short at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996, capping what was just a generally bad year for Mowat. Since Hegan's CBC-TV productions also include the short film "William Shatner Lent Me His Hairpiece," this work appears to be another example of the aforementioned national tendency to savage our most cherished national symbols.)

As for Farley Mowat the Canadian icon, today that role fits the man better than ever. You powerful nations can go on and choose as your national heroes any titans you want -- conquerors, noble patriots, swaggering studs whose names can serve as battle cries for bar fights or amphibious landings. But every country reserves the right to select the figureheads that represent it best. We've chosen Farley Mowat. Because, as you know, we Canadians are not real sure what we're all about.