Who Has Seen the Wind

Who Has Seen the Wind is a 1947 novel by Canadian author W.O. Mitchell that sold almost a million copies in the author's home country. Set in 1930s Saskatchewan on a prairie homestead, Who Has Seen the Wind observes a boy named Brian O’Connal at the ages of four, six, eight, and eleven years old as he comes to terms with life, death, and other big spiritual and metaphysical topics.

At the beginning of the book, Brian O’Connal is an eight-year-old boy from a fairly conventional Canadian farm family. He lives with his mom and dad, little brother, and Scottish grandmother. While the biographical details of Brian’s life are relatively mundane, Mitchell depicts the rich inner world of the childhood mind through the boy’s early experiences with life and death. For example, while at his friend Forbsie‘s home, they see birds hatching out of eggs. Brian has difficulty grasping the concept of birth so, as he usually does when he needs help, he asks his father Gerald to explain it to him. But his father’s explanation only confuses him further, as he now thinks the father bird places the baby in the egg and then the baby pigeon grows during the process of its mother laying the egg.

Brian’s understanding of birth expands when he and Forbsie watch a rabbit giving birth. The lack of eggs, along with the lack of hair on the baby rabbits, makes the reproductive cycle seem even more mystifying to Brian. Meanwhile, Forbsie is content to imagine these baby rabbits having babies of their own, and so on and so on until there are infinite rabbits.



Brian once again asks his father about the mystery, asking point blank, “How do rabbits get started?” His father explains that rabbits are more like plants than birds, and that they grow out of a seed that is planted. Despite the fact that it’s much more complicated than that, something clicks in Brian’s young head about the nature of birth, which will make the revelations about death he’s set to have in the following chapters that much more powerful.

One rainy day, Brian comes across some baby pigeons, not unlike the birds he saw hatch from their eggs when he was younger. Spurred by curiosity, Brian picks up one of the baby pigeons and tries to transport it home. Unfortunately it is too young to be away from its nest for too long, especially in the cold rain. And by the time Brian returns home, the pigeon has stopped moving. This is Brian’s first exposure to death, which his father describes as the way a living thing ends. That doesn’t quite resonate with Brian, and instead the child’s main takeaway from the experience appears to be that when something dies you dig a hole and bury it in the ground, though he still doesn’t understand why.

It’s not until Brian’s dog Jappy dies that he begins to understand the tragic nature of death. Unlike the bird, which was never a major part of Brian’s life, there were things his dog did—wagging his tail, licking or playing—that gave Brian joy. And the realization that these things would not always happen and not always be a part of Brian’s life is extremely traumatizing for him. When he tries to remember the things Jappy did that brought him happiness, all he can see is the dog’s limp body in the hole. Moreover, when Brian cries it does not bring the dog back, underlining for Brian the realization that he is powerless in the face of death.



These lessons learned, Brian is nevertheless wholly unprepared for his next encounter with death. After Brian is a little older still, his father grows very sick and eventually dies. This time Brian doesn’t cry right away, perhaps because he’s already learned that crying doesn’t bring the dead back to life, and also maybe it’s because he’s a little older and better understands that, as the man of the house now, society expects him to act a certain way. Regardless of the reasons, it’s young Brian himself who most poignantly gives voice to the emotions he’s feeling, saying, “It was like getting a licking and trying to make yourself cry so you wouldn't get it so hard."

There is very little plot in Who Has Seen the Wind, but in its place there is a deep well of emotional feeling and an extremely original and resonant depiction of the inner lives of children and their thought processes. The lessons Brian learns about death may be simple, but as Mitchell puts it in the book's Preface, many people spend their entire lives trying to learn these lessons. In addition to Brian’s revelations about life and death, there is “the wind” of the book’s title, which in turn comes from a classic 19th-century poem by Christina Rossetti and represents a sort of indescribable spirituality—call it God or whatever the reader wishes—that transcends what we can observe and learn about the physical world. Mitchell captures this feeling in one of the book’s most famous and evocative passages:

“The wind could do this to him, when it washed through poplar leaves, when it set telephone wires humming and twanging down an empty prairie road, when it ruffled the feather on one of Sherry’s roosters standing forlorn in a bare yard, when it carried to him the Indian smell of a burning straw stack…. Always, he noted, the feeling was most exquisite upon the prairie or when the wind blew.”