I SENT MEN TO CATCH that woman who made the blueberry pie. They dragged her back with her three small sons and her old father who’d been the cause of their capture, for he’d insisted on carrying his lame old bird dog.

“Pitou!” the old man wailed as we shot the animal. He did not glance at his house, or at the barn in flames, nor did he appear to care about my men going off to our fleet with wagonloads of his cabbage and swedes. His eyes never left the dog.

This nearly made me sentimental. But we already had one dead Frenchman’s dog for a ship’s pet, and it had made such sentimental fools out of the toughest of my Highlanders that I hardly wished to add another softening influence.

The old man’s dog made me remember my dogs at home. For a perilous moment I was almost plunged out of my soldier’s mind and into that man’s. When this happens I force myself to look down at my uniform, and to remember that when it covers my body it also covers my sonship, my loverhood, and any private nature known by my mother, or by Eliza, or by George Warde or Elwyn or…I try not to think beyond this.

Those who love me know what a whimsical sort of person I am.

They know how variable I am, and how unsteady—how, like the habitants we scorch and kidnap, all I desire after retirement from this soldiering life is a house, a very little one, remote on the forest edge or in a meadow like Kamouraska farmhouses. But this is my younger self, the one who knew no motive other than beauty.

The loveliness of dogs! I couldn’t help but think, as we shot that poor half-setter, of my own dog Ball in our yard at Blackheath—me coaxing his belly with a cherry branch to make him stop chasing the Newfoundland puppy of a friend who’d come for tea. How I miss dogs—how good they are at quenching the bitter end of loneliness.

I miss dogs now and I missed them in 1759, and had it not been for that old habitant’s dog, or his daughter and her pie with the juice running and the pastry piped to a pretty frill by her hand, I would not have remembered my personal self at all in Kamouraska.

I grew afraid when I looked at that woman and dog: afraid I was becoming warped into a peculiar fierceness of temper brought on by war.

I unfastened my buttons and let the equinoctial wind blow on my chest and reminded that wind to bring me warriors into whose hands I might fall early, rather than be converted by degrees into a barbaric, unholy man; a man who has forgotten his humanity.

10 A Soldier’s Exile

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

AFTERNOON.

Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

Don’t you know me?