Free Guide to Animal Behaviour by Douglas Glover

half-timbered manse for the seigneur, and a makeshift dock with the pitch still dripping from the timbers (which fell down when the ice went out in the spring), where pigs outnumbered the human inhabitants by five to one.
    There were but three hundred English yards of muddy street in all, and the narrow fields running down to the river were studded with stumps as tall as a man’s shoulders between which a few meagre spikes of Indian corn struggled for life.
    I was much torn up leaving Arlette behind, but my good friend and medical consultant, Nickbis Agsonbare, eased the pain of departure by agreeing to remove with me.
    I was also somewhat relieved to be temporarily out of the bishop’s eye, whence I had heretofore found nothing but censure and contempt, despite my good efforts to win favour.
    Unfortunately, the ignorant villagers took me for the bishop’s man, there being considerable jealousy between the Jesuits of Québec and the Sulpician monks of Montréal (including disputes over who could produce the best miracles).
    They gave me a former hog barn (“former” only in the sense that they moved some hogs out that I might have the space) for accommodation and refused to entertain construction of a parish church until their crops were in, after which they decided it was too cold to commence extensive outside work. (I was blamed for this delay when the bishop moved me to Sorel two years later.)
    Meanwhile, I discovered that Nickbis Agsonbare was trafficking in illegal beaver hides and was using his friendship with me to conceal this activity from the authorities. (After seven years in the colony, I had yet to see a live beaver — something like a large, flat-tailed rat, I supposed.)
    Nickbis assured me that this was not the case, but I could not forbear remonstrating with him about the piles of beaver pelts which reached the ceiling on all sides, and I did not afterward trust him in quite the same old way.
    I took to wearing an old shirt done up around my head like a turban and calling myself a priest of the prophet Mahound, but no one paid any attention.
    I heard by the express canoe foreman that in my absence, a fresh, new face had appeared on the Québec art scene, a Recollet brother called Frère Luc, styled Painter to the King. In two months, Frère Luc had surpassed my total output since arriving in Canada, having already completed a portrait of the intendant and three large religious scenes for the Church of Our Lady.
    All at once, painting and sketching, which had heretofore been a great joy to me, seemed tedious, nothing but daubs of colour and stark lines, without any meaning.
    Nickbis, seeing my melancholy, suggested a trip to visit his in-laws hard by the Lac des Chats, or Lake of the Erie Nation, far inland.
    At this time, it was a capital offence to spend more than twenty-four hours in the forest — a measure meant to stem the traffic in illegal beaver hides and keep young men from running away to the savages. Nevertheless, I agreed, scarcely caring if I was hanged or not.
    We set off in June, without a word to the congregation, in an elm bark craft that would have sunk except for constant bailing with an alms bowl. For paddlers, we had Nickbis and his nephew Henderebenks, a simple-minded boy with a snapping turtle tattooed on his left shoulder and two fingers missing from his hand.
    We cleared Montréal in a day and carried the canoe past the rapids at La Chine that night. Thence we threaded our way upriver through myriad rocky islands infested with black flies and mosquitoes. We saw no other human for a week, which made my heart lighten.
    It is customary for explorers’ accounts to include lists of wonders encountered and lands claimed for the King. I saw eight fire-breathing dragons, a tribe of elves which shot arrows at us the size of knitting needles, a giant bustard as big as a house, with a beak as hard as stone, two man-like creatures which bounced rapidly