Abruptly the girl’s face became impassive and her expression grew sad and obstinate. They returned to the Volkswagen. The cat got back in the glove compartment.

LA GRANDE SAUTERELLE gave the impression that she had spent her whole life at the wheel of a Volkswagen van. To climb hills, she would get a good start, shift down just as the motor was beginning to strain, accelerate as she got to the top and then start the descent in fourth, taking on speed until, on the approach to a curve, she pumped the brakes to reduce the speed of the motor and shifted down into third to harness the compression force.

“I really like the way you drive,” said Jack. “Where did you learn?”

Looking glum, the girl peered at the road without a word. A few minutes later, however, she replied that she had learned from her father.

“He was a trucker,” she said. “He drove trucks along the North Shore and at James Bay. When I was little he’d sit me on his knee and let me drive. Once he was sick and I drove a ten-ton Mack from Baie Comeau to Manicouagan. At first he watched and gave me advice, but then he lay down on the seat, wrapped in a blanket, and went to sleep . . . When he woke up we were at the fifth Manicouagan dam!”

“And how old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

He whistled. She smiled briefly, but at once her face closed up again.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “But I’ll try. I was born at La Romaine, on the North Shore. My mother’s a Montagnais. She’s the woman you saw at the Gaspé museum.”

“And?”

“When you talk about the discoverers and explorers of America . . . I’ve got nothing in common with the people who came looking for gold and spices and a passage to Asia. I’m on the side of the people who were robbed of their lands and of their way of life. And . . .”

She stopped to look at a freighter travelling down the river.

“And apparently the Indians came from Asia and reached America by means of an ice bridge that used to cover the Bering Strait. We came from the West and you came from the East. There’s 7,000 kilometres between us!”

All at once she burst out laughing.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I was starting to take myself seriously! Anyway, I’m not a real Indian. My father’s white. I’m a Métis.”

The girl laughed again, but her laughter was beginning to ring false.

Then the man announced, “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“What story?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

“The story of Eldorado.”

He cleared his throat a couple of times, and began. “On the high plateaus of the Andes in South America, two thousand three hundred metres above sea level, in a region unknown to white men that was called Cundinamarca or ‘the land of the Condor,’ a solemn ceremony was held every year. The chief of an Indian tribe would shed all his clothes, coat his body with a resinous substance, and roll in powdered gold. When he stood up, the sun made his gilded body glow, and he would march at the head of his tribe to the shore of a lake ringed by mountains, Lake Guatavita. There he got into a dugout canoe that took him to the middle of the lake, where he dove into the water. All the members of the tribe, even those who had stayed behind on shore, marvelled at the luminous gleam produced by the body of their chief, the gold-covered man, el hombre dorado, when he dove into the pure water of the lake. They talked about it among themselves, overcome with admiration, and word spread from tribe to tribe and from region to region, farther and farther, that somewhere in America there existed a rich, mysterious land that was the kingdom of gold, Eldorado. And that’s it. That’s how the legend of Eldorado was born.”