Free Guide to Animal Behaviour by Douglas Glover Page A

over the ground on a single leg, and a mermaid (possibly a large pike).
    I claimed the following lands for King Louis: Pommierland, Pommier Island, the River Pommier, Lac Pommier, Baie Pommier, Painter’s Reach, etc. (Our progress was delayed considerably on account of my insistence that we get out of the boat and put up birch bark signs to mark these geographical features.)
    On the eighth day, about five leagues from La Salle’s trading fort at Cataraqui, we were captured by a roving band of Anderhoronerons who fell upon us in our sleep (we generally took a nap after lunch). There were nine of them, two old men without teeth, six teenage boys and a younger lad of about seven years, all stripped naked, covered with grease and red war-paint against the flies, and nearly starved.
    We spent two more days in camp while the Anderhoronerons ate what was left of our provisions.
    On the third morning, we set out for their village, but had only gone a league or two when the little boy began to weep petulantly, saying it was his first war, and he wanted to kill one of the enemy.
    The two eldest Anderhoronerons consulted and agreed to let him kill Henderebenks who immediately fell on his knees and began to sing his death song, “Woe! Henderebenks, the dancing turtle, is no more. Woe! Woe! Woe! The dancing turtle is no more!”
    I gave him the sacrament of Extreme Unction, after which he and Nickbis Agsonbare fell into a theological argument as to whether the sacrament was any good without wine and wafer (these having been eaten by the Anderhoronerons).
    The little boy struck Henderebenks with a stone club, knocked him to the ground, then proceeded to scalp him with a flint knife barely sharp enough to cut the skin. Henderebenks woke up part-way through the operation and resumed singing, “Woe! The dancing turtle is no more!” until one of the older boys clubbed him with Nickbis’s arquebus.
    Nickbis said he was sorry I had had to see this, that he hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him, that really he had taken all the precautions he could, and that these Anderhoronerons were nothing but filthy savages to whom his people would never have given the time of day.
    After a five-day forced march, we reached the main Anderhoroneron village or “castle” (a pleasant little town of thirteen bark-covered sheds or longhouses, with a sort of picket fence all around) where a young, wolf-clan widow named Sitole adopted me to replace her late husband.
    Sitole took my tattered cassock and presented me with her husband’s beaded moccasins, his breech clout, a five-point trade blanket, a bear lance, two bows, a dozen iron-tipped arrows and a complete set of polished stone wood-working tools.
    The next day the clan mothers elected me to the post of civil chief, or royaneur, with the name (which had also previously belonged to Sitole’s husband) Plenty of Fish.
    Nickbis admired my moccasins, but said to watch out that I didn’t get my paint brush caught in the honey pot, a turn of phrase I did not at once comprehend. Nickbis had been adopted by an old man whose wife had died in childbirth, leaving him with twin girls to bring up.
    Indeed, as I began to get about and observe things, I came to realize that more than half the Anderhoroneron population consisted of prisoners taken in war: Passamaquoddy, Mississaugua, Nanticoke, Mahican, Winnebago, Tutelo, Delaware, Chippewa, Maqua, Cree and enough French, English and Dutch to make a small interdenominational congregation for Sunday service. The ragtag war party we had encountered at our camp on the St. Lawrence River was the entire military strike force remaining to this once thronging nation.
    To tell the truth, I have never felt so welcome as I did living with Sitole among the Anderhoronerons.
    I took my duties as a tribal chief seriously from the beginning, sitting up many a night before the fire, smoking tobacco and sipping trade brandy (called