Free Guide to Animal Behaviour by Douglas Glover Page B

“darling water” or “spirit helper” by the savages), discussing local political issues with the other head men (and warrant I would have had a notable impact on their history had it not been for the language barrier which made it difficult for all but one or two of us to understand each other).
    Sitole’s cornfields were ripening beyond the stockade and required little attention. We lolled together day after day in a nearby creek, naked under the hot summer sun. I even began to sketch and paint a little, taking classical subjects such as Leda and the swan (for which I substituted a wild goose Sitole was raising for the pot), the judgment of Paris, Venus at her bath, that sort of thing.
    By the end of the second month, she was with child. (Nickbis, who was called Mother Nickbis by the Anderhoronerons, scowled at the news and said we ought to be thinking harder about escape.)
    Instead, I learned to hunt, finding myself adept at tracking deer and bear in the nearby forest, though I hardly needed to as the savages were more than happy to trade me supplies of meat for portraits. These I rendered on stretched doe skin with paints Sitole helped me manufacture from herbs and minerals. By first frost there wasn’t a longhouse in the village without an original Pommier hanging in the place of glory.
    At midwinter, I helped the Anderhoronerons kill the white dog and myself ate of its heart. I joined the Little Water Medicine Society, participated in the ancient dream-guessing rites and laughed uproariously at the antics of the False Face dancers.
    But as the winter wore on, food became scarce. The deer no longer rushed to impale themselves upon my arrow points. Sitole was forced to cut my beloved paintings into strips and boil them with tree roots to make a soup. One by one, the old people began to die. Nickbis Agsonbare’s husband was the first to go, despite my old friend’s valiant efforts to keep him alive.
    The last day of February, our son, Adelbert Pommier Adaqua’at, was born. I baptized him and said mass, and we ate the last of the pictures (Venus-Sitole admiring herself in a hand-mirror) in celebration of his name day, inviting as many of the neighbours as could fit into our home to join us.
    That night a stranger stumbled into the village, a half-starved white man, burning with fever and covered with festering boils. He had come, he said, because he had heard there was a Black Robe, or priest, among the Anderhoronerons, and he wished to receive absolution before dying. As I made the sign of the cross upon his forehead, I recognized the face of young Boisvert, my former student, Arlette’s husband, now aged and deformed beyond belief.
    The next day Boisvert died. Within a week, half the Anderhoronerons followed him. The other half fled into the forest where many starved or froze to death. Sitole went mad with the fever and drowned herself in the icy creek where the summer before we had been wont to dally. Adelbert expired in my arms one or two days later. I don’t know when exactly, for I carried him about for at least a week without noticing, while I nursed the sick.
    Nickbis Agsonbare and I were spared, God alone knows why.
    We knelt in the centre of the village, surrounded by corpses, for two days and nights, singing our death songs to no avail. Then we set fire to the place and started off together on foot, heading west, away from New France, toward the Anderhoroneron Land of the Dead.
    Last Years: Something of Me will Remain
    The epoch of martyrs and apostles was passing. My own great works were behind me. Many of the best people I called friend were in the grave. My hemorrhoids were chronic and most of my teeth had broken off as a consequence of gravel in the native corn-meal.
    Nickbis and I wandered among the Far Indians for a year (I saw my first beaver that winter near Fond du Lac, a small juvenile afflicted with mange, which was immediately clubbed to death by a local