Harold has given me Veronica to accompany me while I clean up Madame Blanchard’s house and sell it. He has loaned me her bottomless understanding.

“How do you think,” he asked as we parted on Abraham’s Plains, “I came to understand who you really are?”

They call her a seeing-eye dog, he said, but she will show you what can’t be seen except by fathomless observation.

He gave me her green leash and red harness.

He gave me her snow-boots and her bag of Working Friend. The salmon-flavoured one, her second-favourite next to the flounder and other wild foods that I will be able to feed her through the fall and into February, there being no shortage of fish and hares in our cove.

I have always loved dogs.

You can sell a Gaspé house to Americans these days. You won’t get much for it, hardly more than twenty thousand if you’re lucky, but someone will love that house, if only in the summers. Someone who’s never had to live in it alone with Ghundy Ghar.

The hills become massive and snow-bedecked, the sky bigger, the sun lofty overhead. More rivulets. The round-topped hills give way to tableland hilltops, flatter, and clouds catch along their edges. All the lines of the earth are sweeping, undulating—rich, dark browns and tans and the reddish-dark heath-shrub, and always water glittering, snaking, or standing in little puddles in and around the pockets and creases and bog-veins of the terrain. Steep inclines, but with gentle, sweeping hollows.

Veronica—are you with me?

OCTOBER 5, 2017

RUE DROLET,

MONTREAL

Dear Jimmy Blanchard,

When you and I met, a year ago at the Fisher Library, I was, I confess, ready to dismiss you. I tried to concentrate on Wolfe’s letters, on the man who died, in 1759, on the Plains of Abraham. I did not, at first, take into serious consideration the idea that you might have anything to add to my understanding of an English general who belongs to history.

Forgive me. I have finally met Monsieur Hippolyte Choinière, the handwriting expert!

He went on Tuesday to spend the morning perusing the following original documents in the archives at the McCord Museum:

• a letter Wolfe wrote to a Mr. Weston on December 29, 1741, when Wolfe would have been fourteen years old;

• a letter written at age twenty-eight from Southampton to his Uncle Walter on September 15, 1755, four years before the siege at Quebec;

• Wolfe’s personal, handwritten Quebec journal, lost for many years, written during the siege, out of which Wolfe is said to have torn some of the pages complaining about his insubordinate officers. I believe this may be the journal to which Heather Forest at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library referred when I first visited her.