“So then what did you do?” asked Jack.

“Nothing. I went to sleep,” she said, making a funny face.

“Did you dream?”

“Yes. I dreamed about my mother.”

She rolled up her sleeping bag and put the flashlight inside.

“Tell me about it, just to see . . .” he suggested.

“I dreamed about things she used to tell me, to put me to sleep. She’d tell me what it was like when she was little. In the fall, she and her parents would leave the river bank where they’d spent the summer fishing and go north for the winter to hunt and trap, like the other families in the tribe. The women prepared the pelts that the hunters brought back to the cabins from their expeditions, and sometimes they’d take part in the hunt. The children were free to do whatever they wanted, and they weren’t punished when they made errors in judgement. My mother said that the Indians never suffered from the cold and they never ran out of food. If a snowstorm went on for days and the hunters couldn’t bring back fresh meat, they would eat the dried or smoked fish they’d brought from the south, and no one complained. And that’s what I dreamed.”

“So then you can’t say that nothing happened at all,” said the man. “As you can see . . .”

“That’s true,” she said. “Besides, I remembered an observation by another Indian chief. The great Chief Joseph. He said, ‘My young people will never work, men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes to us from dreams.’”

“That’s a fine observation,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “Shall we go?”

VIII

A Very Quiet Place

“Where are you from?” asked the customs officer.

“Quebec,” said Jack.

“Where are you heading?”

“St. Louis, Missouri.”

“How long will you be there?”

“I don’t know.”

The customs officer, who was noting the responses on a form, chewed his pen. It was after four p.m. and there was a long line of cars behind the Volks waiting to cross the border between Windsor and Detroit.

“Vacation or work?” asked the officer.

Jack hesitated.

“I’m looking for my brother,” he said.

“Are you? And what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer.”

The agent jotted something at the bottom of the form.

“Park your truck over there and go to the Immigration Service,” he told Jack, handing him the form. “Give this paper to the officer. And take some identification with you. Passport or driver’s licence. Understand?”

Jack parked the Volks where the officer had indicated. He suddenly remembered that the cat hadn’t been vaccinated, and he asked La Grande Sauterelle to put him in her sweatshirt hood in case the minibus was searched. At the immigration office he was received by a girl with very short hair and a severe expression. He handed her the form and his driver’s licence and said, smiling, “I don’t know why they sent me here. I don’t want to emigrate to the United States!”