“ARE YOU ASLEEP?” IT WOULDN’T be the first time Sophie has let me tell stories while she conks out. I often wonder if she’s heard a word I say.

“I’m listening. Delouche and the burning dragons.”

“Hold me? I’m chilled. I feel my old cough deep down.”

“General Wolfe,” she declaims, turning to address the walrus painted on our tent wall, “has no idea what true cold is.”

“I’m uncommonly susceptible!”

“Nor does he understand heat. He swans in here every September and has no clue about our stifling July, and he especially knows sweet fuck all about our brutal winters.”

“I get the shivers. I’ve told you it’s why I need to get up so early and walk. All my life I’ve broken camp at daybreak to get moving—the cold seizes my nose and fingers. It distresses me considerably….What are you doing? Can’t you stop that? Always getting that thing out and staring at it.”

“Hang on, hang on…listen.” From her phone sings a man in the Québécois cadence that bears no resemblance to any French I learned in Paris.

“Who’s that?”

“This man knows more about Quebec than a British general can ever fathom. Everyone in Quebec knows this song!”

In the white ceremony where the snow

marries the wind—

“Is he singing about winter?”

“It’s Vigneault. No one knows his exact intent.”

“Voltaire!”

“No. Vigneault! The famous fisherman’s son.”

“But he’s saying the whole of—of New French Britain—isn’t—”

“New French Britain!”

“Well, what am I supposed to call this place?”

“Em…Canada?”

“Does he even call this Canada? Listen—he says his country isn’t a country, it’s snow and ice—nothing but winter—that’s exactly what Voltaire—”

“Vigneault, not Voltaire.”

“May I talk to him? Here, give it—hey!”

“I’m hardly on the phone with Gilles Vigneault. Shut up while I put him on repeat.”

My chorus is not a chorus,

it’s a gust of wind…

Half-awake, I attend the chansonnier’s wedding where the snow marries the wind. It’s a cold night. I try conjuring warmth from my fire-ships story, but Vigneault has ignited his ceremony of white fire instead, into which I slowly drift.

“Quit thrashing.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m feeling your military nightmares here.”

—

SUNRISE—TIME TO CRAWL OUT AND STRAIN my snail juice into a bottle containing salt and the night crawler I snatched when I wriggled out for my four-o’clock piss. With each sip I command my cough to arrest itself, as I gaze at the trees facing our camp.

Do I recognize any of the tree spirits I see? Sophie professes I dream them. But they whisper on Avenue du Parc’s grand sweep downtown toward the Saint Lawrence. The first tree, crammed with women frozen in frenzied dance, seems unconcerned about my perusal.

Is one of its captives my beloved Eliza Lawson?