Guide to Animal Behaviour (8 page)

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 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 “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 hunter and sold for a cup of inferior brandy), then made our desolate return to Boucherville.

The village had swelled to a dozen log hovels, all sinking into the spring mud at a great rate. A horde of infants, barely toddlers, the hope and future of Canada, raced shrieking up and down the street, tormenting the hogs and fighting with them for scraps of food. Raw-cheeked housewives screamed at each other over their laundry tubs.

There was a letter from the bishop waiting for me at my pig-barn manse.

Once more, His Grace complained (in that pious tone he affected), I had proved lazy and inattentive to my priestly duties. I had failed to begin construction of a church, had performed no marriages, baptisms, burials or sick-bed visitations, and had neglected to post my annual letters to the King's minister and the papal curia. I was to remove immediately to Sorel, a problem parish downriver, where I would surely learn the necessary lessons of discipline and humility.

At Sorel, I built an Indian house and sweat lodge at the edge of the village, a hermitage where I passed my days in solitude, ignoring my parishioners who I felt certain would find something to complain about no matter what I did. The bishop heard of it and had me moved again.

This happened more times than I care to remember. The years were trammelled with uprootings, forced marches and fresh failures.

It was in Sorel that I began work on a definitive French-Anderhoroneron dictionary and an illustrated treatise on native customs, with my memoirs to follow. These documents, along with my notes and sketches, were lost when a bâteau loaded with my belongings foundered off the Beauport shore during a subsequent transfer.

At Ile d'Orléans, Nickbis caught a head cold and went off in a day, without a whimper.

At Lévis, I drank myself into stupors between weddings and confessions, until my health broke from too much adulterated trade brandy. Since then, I have lived on a diet of water and sagamite, a sort of Indian porridge.

(They say that God tempers the souls of artists with suffering that their works might speak to the ages. I think it more likely He means to muffle them.)

A month ago, Bishop Laval recalled me from domestic exile to paint yet another saintly corpse, Mother Marie de l'Incarnation of the Ursulines this time, my last full-scale portrait in oils while in Canada.

The mourners had just lowered the old trout into her grave and were about to nail down the coffin lid when everyone noticed a radiance emanating from within which could only have been of divine origin. Eager to record this miracle for posterity and against the Sulpicians, the bishop ordered the body exhumed and sent his man Houssart to fetch me and my paint box. (They had to consult their records to discover what distant pulpit they had last assigned to me.)

But Mother Marie had died suddenly of a gastric blockage, and I could see well enough that the illusion of radiance resulted more from putrefaction of the gut than saintliness of spirit. Nevertheless, I put onions up my nose and stretched the job out as long as possible, since His Grace rarely allowed me to visit the capital.

Working from memory, I painted Sitole naked, with her hands upraised, in the centre of the Anderhoroneron village, with the sun shining down and a garland of lilies and marigolds in her hair. I placed Adelbert at her knee and myself next to them in my Indian clothes, my face painted half-red, half-black, the sign of the Whirlwind from which the Anderhoroneron say we are descended.

I signed it H. Pommier-Plenty of Fish.

Then I painted Mother Marie over top of Sitole in the grand manner, just the way Frère Luc would have done, with a halo like a China plate behind her wimple, a great wen on her chin, a pious squint, a bit of needlepoint in her hand and that mysterious radiance which was nothing more than Sitole and the Anderhoroneron sun gleaming through.

I blacked the background and put in a narrow cruciform window such as the sisters had in their cells, a sacred heart and a Bible on a lectern with little beaver tails for bookmarks.

It was a third-rate portrait (I didn't bother to sign it) much admired in the colony, though the bishop noticed the beaver tails, which he chose to regard as a satirical interpolation and evidence of my spiritual incorrigibility.

It was on account of the beaver tails that His Grace finally lost patience and ordered me back to France.

One evening, while I was still engaged on the
Mother Marie,
I paid a call on Mistress Arlette Boisvert and we wept an hour together for our youth (she with eight children and a ne'er-do-well shipwright she called Bo-Bo for a husband).

She had a boy, she said, who took much after me and could draw like an angel. She had apprenticed him to a stone mason, so he could learn to make his living carving religious images.

I found the boy the following day in the stone-yard next to Our Lady. He had my eyes and the long arm and leg bones that give me my awkward, grasshopper look. I asked to see his work, and he showed me a gargoyle he was cutting for the transept roof. Then I asked to see the work he loved.