Free Life in the Court of Matane by Eric Dupont Page A

bird of prey, a larger cousin of the owl, captured the attention of Quebec’s National Assembly in 1987 when it was made the official bird of La Belle Province. That’s how things work in North America. Each tribe choses its own totems. New Jersey opted for the American goldfinch, Louisiana for the brown pelican. Recently Quebec even chose an official insect, which to everyone’s surprise wasn’t the mosquito. Instead, a democratic vote crowned the white admiral butterfly, which might not be very well known or particularly common, but does have pretty colours. It was a tight race against the common eastern bumblebee.
    As for the snowy owl, you have to admit that the animal is a powerful symbol, a reminder not only of the splendours of winter, but also of the importance of environmental conservation. A daytime hunter, it feeds on small rodents and is particularly fond of lemmings. The snowy owl builds its nest right on the ground, an act of negligence you can’t hold against it, since it reproduces at a latitude where even the hardiest spruce tree would throw in the towel. Some snowy owl couples are known to be monogamous and, year after year, they nest in the same spot and feed their young with the same affection, offering their fledglings a stable, diligent, and faithful couple for parents. You’ll understand that the choice of this particular bird as the official bird of my province left me perplexed. A bird that, on clear February days, would often look down on me with a knowing air from the top of a fencepost in the fields of the Gaspé countryside, one that inspires nothing but the dignity of parental duty. What might I be implying, you ask?
    It’s not the first time that Quebec has been wide of the mark.
    It was over Easter break that nature and propriety forced the royal court to undertake a migration of its own. Tradition had it that we would lay down our arms to speed west on the still dangerously icy roads of the Gaspé Peninsula to visit my father’s parents, who lived in Saint-Antonin, a sleepy little village running along the plateau behind the town of Rivière-du-Loup. A three-hour drive along a carpet of snow. We usually set off on Good Friday morning for a three-day visit to these people of an altogether different age. Leaving Matane behind was no hardship. We were simply serving our sentence there and half my captivity was given over to planning my escape, in any case. And so I sat in the back seat of our American car, rattling off the names of the hamlets standing between us and our goal. Saint-Ulric, Baie-des-Sables, Les Boules, Grand-Métis, Sainte-Flavie, Rimouski, Trois-Pistoles, L’Isle-Verte, Cacouna, and, like one last prayer before reaching salvation, Rivière-du-Loup appeared to me like Manhattan must have appeared to the
Titanic
survivors. Some will wonder how a mere three hundred kilometres could have seemed like a return to Ithaca. Because family visits, as long as they led to Anne Boleyn’s family, were so frequent they were not even announced twenty-four hours in advance. When the time came to hop aboard for these destinations, no questions were asked. My sister and I followed because that’s what children do: they follow. Visits to my grandparents on our father’s side, on the other hand, were limited to New Year’s and Easter.
    For a long time, I would sleep on car journeys. But after the Great Upheaval I tried to keep my eyes open because it turns out you can never really know where they might be taking you. Sometimes you have only to close your eyes for an hour and you can end up far from home, in distant lands not of your choosing. There was no way I was going to let that happen again. The king and queen would take me wherever they pleased, but I was at least going to know what was happening this time. It was also following the Great Upheaval that car journeys began to make me feel incredibly sick. No one has ever been able to