“This isn’t working.” Bruno and Titi exchanged long-suffering glances. “I guess we should change canoes. There, that bit of ground looks stable.” Bruno nodded to the densely vegetated bank, so thick with leaves, grass, and branches that his foot would sink in it to mid-calf before hitting the ground he couldn’t see.

“Don’t get out of the canoe!” I yelled.

The hysterical bride thing was getting a bit old by then, so they just rolled their eyes at me. “What, are you afraid we’ll get eaten by an alligator?”

“No, I was more concerned about poisonous snakes.”

“There are poisonous snakes around here?” two female voices shrieked.

I abruptly remembered the dearth of deadly animals in France and strove for a nonchalant, this-is-normal tone. “Well, sure. Rattlesnakes and copperheads and water moccasins.” I tried to think of some good news. “You don’t really have to worry about the coral snakes much, because they don’t have good teeth. They have to gnaw on you a while to get the venom in, and who lets a venomous snake gnaw on them?” I thought of Sébastien with the squirrels and added as a precaution, “Umm—don’t be letting any red, yellow, and black snakes gnaw on you while you try to get someone else to take a picture. I’m serious.”

“Exactly how many poisonous snakes do you have? Are we surrounded by them?”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know about surrounded. There are probably a few around us on the banks somewhere, but that doesn’t mean you . . .”

“Tata, quit running us into the banks!” Gaëlle shrieked, paddling frantically and burying them farther in grass.

“And the water moccasin swims, so it’s usually in the water.” Okay, I probably shouldn’t have added that, but they had fed me horse.

Everyone jerked his paddle out of the water. Bruno and Titi replaced theirs right away and looked tolerant, convinced I was trying to scare them. “Claudine, I’m sure it will be fine. Laura wouldn’t have led us into a place where we could actually get bitten by snakes.”

“Ah . . .” All heads turned toward me. I smiled feebly. “Well, I grew up in a place where I could get bitten by snakes.” During the NO DRIVE speech, Claudine had been sitting on the exact spot where my mother had once reached down to wrench out a weed and come up with a copperhead instead. I guess I was close to the terroir, too. “Around my parents’ house, I nearly stepped on a copperhead two or three times a year.” Completely unreceptive silence greeted this explanation. “So, um, I didn’t think about it.”

Everyone just stared at me.

“That’s probably true,” Sébastien admitted. “She didn’t think about the pasteurized cheese, either.”

“I told you to get a guidebook! I can’t think of all these things.”

They laid their paddles across the canoes and folded their arms.