I sat with Ronnie in the Highlands, lured by that drum. I was used to thinking of a drummer as practical: a way to keep men apprised of one another’s coordinates in fog or in artillery smoke—his drumming an audible sign to keep us from scattering.

The first thing Ronnie did when we arrived in the New World was make his own drum out of the skin of a deer he’d shot, and wood from a cedar he cut after lightning struck it. He let me sniff the wood and it emanated deep sugar. On Île d’Orléans he lifted the drum to my ear as he hit it and I became aware that its vibrations were more than sound: they reverberated and entered my body as a man enters a woman. The reverberations dislodged my own bad vapours. Warmth suffused me where all along had dwelt my old remorse. And I realized the function of drums in battle is this: to infect soldiers’ blood with the fleetness of the wild animal and strength of the tree that fashioned the drum.

“Sound it to me through this temporary slumber,” I asked Ronnie as we lay on these plains to rest before our battle, and he laid me down to sleep better than any apothecary’s concoction. It’s a wonder I woke in time.

But wake I did.

I never woke up on any day better or with more courage than I did from that half-hour sleep on the thirteenth of this month in 1759, my men slumbering round me like maidens before we rose to slay Montcalm. I’ll never forget the thrum of Ronnie’s drum in my sacrum.

I wish it sounded in me now.

23 The Foulon

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12.

MORNING.

Quebec City, Quebec

MY DESCENT OF THE FOULON path feels strangely gradual and I realize some sort of machinery must have been employed by the parks people to gentle what was far steeper of old. The gentleness irritates me, and I can hardly believe my eyes when I come to a juncture where earth gives way to sinuous pavement that inclines by such tiny degrees anyone at all might ascend or descend without becoming out of breath. I halt at a lookout equipped with a guardrail over massive riverside tanks, noisy cranes, transport trucks, and endless traffic speeding along Boulevard Champlain.

A woman in a business suit appears to instruct a gaggle of well-dressed men on some point about the scene below and I inquire, “What’s in those great round containers down there below the boulevard?”

“Those are the grain silos of the Old Port of Quebec.”