They met at an art college in London, England, not at the posh Slade or arty Goldsmiths, but at what was actually listed as a charity, near Covent Garden. It was 1969. The college had one communal lavatory in the basement that was of Thomas Crapper’s vintage – a chasse d’eau – pulling the chain to the overhead tank sent it into a coughing and gargling spasm.

For all that, it was a good school, with few pretensions; a roster, half-comprised of English students and half of overseas origin, flocked to the former warehouse. The staff, dedicated to technical training and the freedom to experiment, gave lectures at the roomy topmost floor that had old factory planking and a skylight offering a grandiose view of dismal weather. Wintertime, with no central heating, students often wore caps or hats to class; only two rooms were cozy comfy, the office belonging to the pot-bellied principal, and the registrar’s alcove where a secretary hardly ever lifted her eyes from her typewriter. The registrar was his lordship’s matrimonial solvent; flinty-eyed, but rather attractive, and tough as nails when it came to students avoiding her summons for late payments.

After two years of this gloomy dampness, brightened with students winning prizes at festivals, he and she met during the spring of the graduating term; the two had been like phantoms, as they had bounded up and down the whitewashed brick-walled stairwells, without ever taking stock of each other. He had broken his ankle skiing in the Alps during the spring break, and she wondered, seeing him in the corridors hobbling with a walking cast and a cane, why he bothered coming in at all. Approaching the finals, they felt but little prepared for the professional vicissitudes that lay beyond the heavy wooden street door. The buzz in the poorly lit antechamber, where two young women recently returned from India sold tea and sandwiches, was all about the prospects of finding work when ‘liberation’ came.

She had told him she was already in the film technicians’ union, as a seamstress, and how she wanted to parlay that category into a design job at the BBC. He felt bright and energized, but beyond that, launching himself into the world meant returning home to Montreal.

After spending their first night together in his Golders Green bedsit room, she showed him an unseen part of London. Fortified with modest picnics they brought with them, she led him to the canals that spread like leaf veins through the urban core. As they ate on a sunny embankment, he had said to her, ‘This is my first dill sandwich.’ He liked its thin but gamey taste. ‘After two years, here?’ she asked. ‘It’s as English as the Queen.’ He laughed. People lined up every day at Buckingham Palace to catch a glimpse of the Royals.

She had a sewing machine, her pride and joy that she had lent to an acquaintance of hers, who let it stray from his possession. When she finally reached this person by going to a call box – mailed letters, more efficient, reached any destination inside Greater London the same day if posted before 10 a.m. – she was informed by him that he had tried leaving her a message, to say he’d lent it to someone else, but this other person was presently on holiday. How long? Her friend wasn’t sure, exactly. But he would send her news as soon as possible.

He watched her, as she returned from phoning at her pub around the corner, flushed from climbing the stairs to the fourth floor. She didn’t immediately announce the devastating news about her sewing machine. She made them both a cup of tea, and then explained the situation; her hand, trembling, jiggled the cup in the saucer as she stared out the window of her three-and-a-half overlooking workaday Camden Town. ‘I’ll get it back eventually,’ she announced firmly, but barely audible to him, averting his gaze. ‘It’s just, I’ve some new fabric and I wanted to try a pattern for a dress.’ He came and put his arm around her, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, belatedly.

Standing by the window, her cheeks had a suffused glow, but he wasn’t sure how much was due to the slanting sunlight, or to her anger in the casual way her friend had taken liberties with her valued property. But instead of reassuring her of its imminent return, he went on a jag chiding the English as pusillanimous. She stood neutral, neither flinching nor disagreeing with his invectives against British inefficiency.

He made her chuckle over his story of Murphy, a classmate, an American draft dodger who had just married a sweet young English woman, and her parents had set them up in a cottage on the Northern Line, on which this Murphy commuted to school, intent as he was in getting his diploma in June. Murphy had explained to the principal as to why he was late for an exam. The morning train was late, and in arriving at the platform, was further delayed while the engineer and the conductor went into the station for a tea break. The portly principal, a former director of B films, and of whom the graffiti in the loo made passing remarks, such as ‘Bob should go to Hollywood, the walk would do him good,’ merely nodded at the imperious-jawed Murphy, and told him he would likely graduate just the same.

Murphy opened his mouth to say something more, about needing high marks to get a job at VizNews, but Bob raised his eyes levelly, and stared him down, like a Napoleon silencing an upstart general.

He imitated, to her, Murphy’s crowing to his classmates, ‘Everyone on the platform like a bunch of anxious penguins, and nobody says anything.’

And she nodded, in that puzzling way she had about her, often leaving him entirely confused. He had been meaning to tell her about this growth he felt inside her, during their love making, and he wondered how he might broach the subject to her, concerned that she should see a doctor, when one night, after they had awoken together and responded to their passion, he had heard a rubbery suction, that he passed off without mentioning it, and she had apologized for it the next day, in that endearing, quiet manner of hers, and said it was her contraception device, and that she would remedy the problem. Flummoxed, more than embarrassed, he had said, relieved, ‘Oh well, sure, so you’re all right, then?’

‘It’s a good thing,’ he had said to her during their ‘budding’ romance – it was spring and he made bad puns – ‘we’re not competitive. You’ve got talent. I’m not sure I do.’ He wanted to get into films but had no real idea how. He felt she knew what she was doing. Yet, she disdained the go-getter world of the professional arts.

Her mini-skirt slashed across her thigh. It was the height of Mary Quant’s bold fashions. He loved riding on the London busses and watching the matrons clucking over the risqué attire. And once, seated on a bus, he made her giggle by imitating her, squeezing his legs together (as modesty dictated for the mini-skirt), and he recognized that, though not high-spirited, she was adventurous just the same.

He couldn’t stay in England, not just because of the visa problem, but his attitude and lack of connections would have made it an arduous if not insurmountable task of landing a job. And she could get a one-year work permit to return with him, as they found out at Canada House, where he often went to lounge in the comfortable lobby, to read his home newspapers.

It was on a leisurely springtime walk at Kew Gardens – the rhododendrons were in a cascading bloom – when she had turned to him, and asked him, ‘What’s the equivalent in Canada?’ And he had described the subtle shades of lilacs and their deeply scented arbors. And she decided on the spot she would come to Montreal with him. They would leave just as soon as their year-end results were posted.

Once – and it amazed him how gentle she was, like a filly nuzzling his hand, expecting a treat, a carrot or a lump of sugar; at how she found the exact moment to tell him things – she had said to him, ‘I don’t get really turned on with you, not like I used to with this fellow I once went out with.’ And her comment felt like a silver rapier piercing his heart, hardly feeling the thrust but understanding the deeper implications. And he thought, ‘Uh oh. Trouble’.

Eventually, they talked about their intimacy, and the question was defused, of whether she enjoyed their love-making more, simply because he became more adept, or that she appreciated his concern for her pleasure. She would take his hand and squeeze it sometimes on a walk. ‘I like when it’s spontaneous,’ she had said about their flights of ardor.

And upon their arrival to Montreal, he immediately did well. He found a three-and-a-half on MacGregor Avenue, near the heart of town – a bit too glaring with arborite kitchen counters, but she softened the brightness with a few touches – just like she smoothed out his rough edges. A colleague in London had shown him the intricacy of loading an Éclair camera, used in news and sports reporting, and his newfound free-lance work as an assistant cameraman paid a king’s ransom, compared to the humble begging they were used to in London, hanging about fish-and-chip stands late at night, just before closing, and the good-hearted vendors giving away fresh leftovers, plaice and fries, in a large newspaper cornet – all you had to say was please, and that you were a student.

He bought an old Dodge Rambler. She marveled at the changing autumn leaves, quince and scarlet and brilliant yellow. They went on camping trips into the northern wilderness, and got caught out a few times – an unexpected overnight snowfall obliterating an unplowed logging road, or the panic of losing their bearings while bushwhacking. And she marveled at how he remained very collected; she tempered his other extremes, now his outpourings were all about Canadian ‘dorkiness’ – everything from CBC kitchen-sink dramas, to the ‘demolition derby’ going on with Montreal’s downtown heritage buildings. ‘Little boy,’ she would respond to his diatribes, half-amused, half-concerned about him.

He became extremely fond of her, and she appreciated his concern for her happiness. His friends bent over backwards to make her feel welcome. But no amount of February fairytale-like snowfalls can make up for the slog of March and endless slushy days. The man next door to their apartment sold Scott’s Industrial Directories over the phone, his gargly laughter in dealing with clients pierced the wall; they bit their lips laughing over his products and prices that they soon knew by heart; they rolled their eyes in mute derision at his oily manner in calling up airline stewardesses from a nearby apartment building that often saw them coming and going in their prim uniforms, sexy scarves and carry-alls.

But she soldiered on. She loved the needle trade, the vast, old-fashioned showrooms with their ogee windows and the offices with their ‘detective story’ transom corridor windows; the hearty, energetic, quickly calculating managers, and she found part-time work doing routine designs for lingerie. She also found an old tailor who taught her the art of sewing buttonholes. The tough-talking salesmen loved her British accent; it made her sound efficient.

Saturday mornings were dedicated to speaking French; she had learned a bit at her private school. But they invariably ended up giggling in mid-conversation, making up silly phrases – ‘Je vous demande le spoon en marriage pour le sucre.’  He remembered an anecdotal elementary school lesson about an Englishman staying with a friend at a Paris hotel, when rooms still had fireplaces, and on his way out, of having the misfortune to say to the concierge, ‘Ne laissez pas sortir le fou.’ And then his poor travelling companion confined to his room all day by a locked hotel door, and the concierge implacable to his plight.

Towards spring, she clarified what she missed the most about London. ‘I always get a buzz going out into the street, there.’ And which – understandably, he thought, as Montreal didn’t have as exotic-sounding places as Elephant & Castle, the south London Tube stop that meant Enfant de Castile, and referred to Henry VIII’s Catherine of Aragon – she didn’t get here in Montreal. ‘Perhaps St. Denis Street, a bit,’ she had relented. And to which he had no ready answer.

He felt he couldn’t compete with her English upbringing, but he could make her laugh. Once, when she had worn her mini-skirt on a cold spring day, he had walked alongside her pretending he was Groucho Marx, imitating the comedian’s crouched duck walk. ‘Little boy,’ she had said, blushing, but amused nonetheless.

He was waiting for her to say she would leave. Of course she could stay if she wanted to; she could re-apply at Immigration Canada. He watched with brooding calculation, as the mist and the rain drew winter to a close, while the slush melted in brown stews around the curbside drains, and the yellow mounds of dog pee and runlets of sidewalk sand disintegrated under lashing storms. And she appreciated that he had grown so attentive, they spent large swaths of time at home, reading, listening to music, and simply threshing old straw, about what had become of their classmates.

There was Tirosh, who blew an interview with Granada TV, that he’d obtained through pull, when he’d said he didn’t think much of Coronation Street, the network’s mainstay; or Aubrey, who had spent the summer at the hippie caves at Matala, the fabulous ocean beach on the far side of Crete, where one cave was the communal toilet, that stank to high heaven, where they all shat and then jumped into the water to clean their bums, and who had returned to London, convinced that enemas were a natural elixir, and through his enema-minded circle, had landed a job at Apple recordings; or of Luigi and Carla, who had started a modest casting office that had now picked up bigger productions – and yes, he couldn’t deny this was exciting, and to which she responded as if it were a magnet luring her back to London.

She had been very ‘open’ with her mail, the aerograms and finely printed envelopes that seemed like invitations to pop over for tea. And both they laughed heartily over a story of hers, that actually brought tears to his eyes: she’d recounted the recent marriage of a friend of hers, an old classmate from Lady Compton’s School for Girls. This friend had married a fellow her mother considered unsuitable to their social standing, and how, tipsy at the marriage ceremony, the mother had referred to her new son-in-law as a good ‘starter husband’.

And so he found himself on a late March day, blustery, walking west along Sherbrooke Street, with gales of east wind pouring in from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, and rather than returning home right away, lugging his grocery bag up the hill to MacGregor, he entered the stone portal passing through the long fortification wall of the Sulpician college.

In the grounds lay a 500-foot long mediation pool, under an alley of spreading maples. Here, he and she had often come in the fall, while the ducks were gathering prior to migrating, and the days had grown grayer, and chillier. An old shambling priest brought the mallards crumbs – and the ducklings, grown like a spanking new football team, flocked around the man’s soutane, splashing out of the water as they hopped up onto the footpath, rising on their webbed feet, imploring him with their beady eyes for handouts. Only the mother duck stayed in the pool, summoning her brood back with an imperious quacking. Soon, they flew off, and the old Sulpician, his eyes grown dim, told them that the original pair had been returning for nine years.

‘I wonder if he married them,’ he quipped to her, as they went trudging up the hill to their apartment.

And so, on this spring day, laden with his food bags, going up the hill to MacGregor, he detoured to take a look at the long pool – banks of snow still lingering in the glade that had brought such welcome shade in the heat of summer, but the mallard pair had not yet returned.

And he knew that when the inevitable came, as he sensed it would, soon, he must be supportive of her, and her decision. And in his luckless way, he wondered at the supremacy of natural mating, how anonymous the pairing seemed, the wild yonder, and the return to mystical habitats.

He knew that they would think of each other, just as memories recede in time but do not grow dim, their defining elements sparkle in the worldwide orbit of goings and comings; they might even correspond by mail, or gossip heard via his milieu, or recall each other, as with the passing of geese overhead that summons a peculiar joy; they might even meet one another, if the occasion befitted the quick flutter of a lark, and they might – this would truly be a mistake – spend the night together if he happened to find himself in London while working on a film. Their bond, he felt, as haunting as the fluting call of a loon.

And tethered to no name.

Susanna Moodie, pioneer author, Anne Cimon, XYZ Publishing, 2006.

Of the many immigrant groups that streamed into Canada, none is so curious and interesting, as the Victorian gentry emigrating here. Susanna Moodie arrived in 1832. Educated, impecunious, idealistic, her story reveals much about the misconceptions these 19^th century people had of the New World.

Susanna (née Strickland), at 29, recently married to John Moodie, an ex-army captain, along with their first child, Katie, all arrive at Coburg, Ontario, to claim his officer’s land allotment. Thus begins the couple’s saga at eking a living from a wilderness farm. In her genteel yet modest Suffolk youth, Susanna had published poetry and she thought she would host literary teas in her adopted country.

The reality proves very different. Susanna struggles against adversity, thriving for a time, but virtually homeless at age 82, at the end of a remarkable life that encompassed a wealth of experience few ever achieve. During her ‘bush years’, as she refers to the wilderness, she and her family rely on presents sent from England to save them from perdition. Luck sometimes blesses her. Her sister, Catherine Parr Traill, settles nearby. Susanna talks about the cleaving of one’s soul in leaving one’s homeland.

Anne Cimon, a Montreal author with several acclaimed collections of prose and poetry, spent five years researching and writing her biography. Cimon felt drawn to Susanna’s resolve, and her belief in a ‘psychic link between people’. Cimon credits her spiritual presence as providing her with solace during her own life crisis. With a fluid, intimate style, Cimon gathers the length and breadth of Susanna’s reversals and occasional good fortune as a pioneer author defining the quintessential Canadian settler experience.

She bears four children during the seven years that she and John farmed the land. Captain Moodie resumes his service during the 1837-38 Rebellions, and Susanna is left alone to battle poverty and isolation. Despite this, she writes ceaselessly by candlelight, nurturing her hopes and dreams of establishing a better life for her and her family, struggling for a life of the mind,  a quest that is difficult as the forbidding ground.

She is visited by hardship, disaster, sickness, rejection and personal tragedy that would fill volumes. Cimon distils her narrative with a raconteur’s blend of interesting and significant detail. In 1852, Susanna publishes ‘Roughing It In The Bush’, a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. However, inadequate copyright protection translates into scant improvement in her financial circumstances.

Eventually, by pluck and sheer determination, she and John prosper, moving to a stone house in Belleville. Rebellion turmoil and partisanship embroil their lives, the more so as John is sheriff. The Moodies befriend Robert Baldwin, also a Belleville resident. An accomplished poet, the Reform prime minister admires Susanna’s writing. The Moodies name a son after him.

Susanna’s arduous efforts (using her new china tea service) at creating an intellectual circle are spurned by the self-righteous, ignorant ladies in her community. Her dashed hopes are echoed in Lord Durham’s 1839 Report, which scathingly decries English provincial philistinism.

Aided by literary allies like Montreal publisher, John Lovell, Susanna carves out a niche for herself. Travelling, her poetic freshness opens onto the disappearing wilderness. A trip to Niagara inspires: ‘The Falls…flow down upon your vision like moving mountains of light.’ Her peregrinations include a visit to the Toronto Lunatic Asylum, and Kingston Penitentiary where she meets infamous murderess Grace Marks.

Her love relationship with John is strengthened by their travails. But their trusting natures spawn trouble. Dunbar, their son, besotted with an adventuress, bilks them of their home and savings. Lifelong scrounging has Susanna trying her hand at virtually anything. She reveals herself as an accomplished painter of nature studies that augment her income. Susanna’s creativity is evident amongst her brother and sisters, all published writers (more venturesome Brontës?). Even John publishes a book on his South African sojourn.

The publishers include an appendix with a handy historical timeline but unfortunately don’t include a footnote about the seminal Reform movement that so shaped the times.

This delightful, well-written, biography of an intrepid and thoughtful woman, set in the era of burgeoning rail travel, would make a thoughtful gift for any young adult. Both giver and recipient will end up discussing this treasure.

The British, ever adroit in matters related to furry-four footed creatures (except perhaps for the English beaver that disappeared in the 1500s), report that there are forty to sixty thousand urban foxes in England. They’re everywhere. Church lawns. Looking at you from beside a wall.

At night

And here too, especially Montreal. You might say we’ve welcomed them with open arms. The postwar demographic shift from rural to urban entirely reversed the one-third’s two-third’s dichotomy of city and country people. So it’s natural, perhaps, that fox joined this influx to our expanding urban environment.

The fox has long represented the cultural trickster, a figure that breaks the rules and catalyzes change. Popularized in legends and stories. And there’s something special in the way in which the fox is attuned to humans. They understand our boundaries and know exactly how to co-exist.

Changing habitats: Moving to the city, of course, entails adaptation. And here, the fox is simply a hands-down winner. In the bucolic state, foxes are shy of one another. They need lots of room. Their rural profile is that of a loner. But in the city, for instance at the Mt. Royal Cemetery on the south-facing slope that yields to the northern vista of the U of M, there’s a rock haven one might call a fox hotel. They’ve learned to live ‘together’. In harmony!

Fox Snoozing

Adaptation:

Two years ago at the Cemetery, I was on a bird-watching tour with about 75 people. Right where the cannons are, a mother and her very curious older cub, became a star attraction. And they weren’t fussed. They know they’re safe.

Their other amazing adaptation – and here’s where humans can take note – they regulate their populations, in town, that is. They seem to know exactly what food supply to depend (and forecast), and how to go about exploiting an environment equitably.

From pictures taken of mothers with their cubs, there’s every evidence that the young get very good parenting. That’s true of all species. A mother duck and her raft of ducklings at any public ‘venue’ like the long Sulpician meditating pool (Sherbrooke & Atwater) or at Beaver Lake (Duck Lake, shurely!) the amount of dependency the female parent allows with humans and their food handouts is fascinating to watch, especially as the migratory season approaches. The mother plays a very strong role in calling her ducklings to order, even when they have morphed over the summer into what looks like a duck football team. Like a coach she will emit a growly quack and they swim away together.

Bonjour Montréal: Railway lines extend to the core of the city, and the vast railway yards that existed until recently at the Glen Yards (Westmount) with lots of brush and wildness, and the easy accessibility to the mountain – Mt. Royal & Westmount – are like a magnet for this four-footed migratory impulse, a phenomenon that includes coyotes, and on the west island, pockets that still have marten.

Hmmm

More than poutine:

Mt. Royal, with its peanut-fed squirrels, many more than could ever exist on their own without tourists like Parisians coming here and saying O! l’ecureuil! (It’s so funny seeing these sophisticates in an ecstasy over our ‘wildlife’ because the City of Light has no such blandishments.)

So: easy access, places to stay, and a natural squirrel larder. One might add, no game laws, no tiresome people unloading shotguns and 22s in town.

Habits, regular: Chances are, if you see a fox, you’ll see it again at the same time and place. One recent summer I often went at daybreak to the Cemetery. At six AM the same fox crossed Camilien Houde. The same pair of cubs are gamboling around the tombstones. The same siblings enjoying a sunny snooze at their summit perch. But the circumstances have to be right. They like a warm sun just breaking over the trees after a night on the prowl. And they all have their comfort zones, as to how close you may approach.

How smart? Very smart. Exceedingly so. Two examples:

It’s easy to get locked into a pattern with the same fox or foxes. Wintertime I went cross-country skiing at Meadowbrook with my old dog. And exactly at a juncture on the back nine holes, we would see a fox returning to the hedgerow. There’s a big dumping area for garden debris, broken branches and the like, about 80 feet square and six feet high (the ice storm added a lot). I call it the Brer Rabbit Exchanger.

Looking

See fox run. See dog take after fox. Fox enters exchanger, where there is a profusion of tracks and pee and whatever, that takes the fastest sniffer hound a few moments to figure out which is the freshest track. Meanwhile the fox has already emerged at the far side and is safely headed across the next fairway, to another, even denser wood lot.

I’m cross-country skiing in the Jura. It starts to snow thick heavy flakes. Open pasture, a solitary beautiful huge spruce in the middle of the slope. Along comes a fox, it wants comfy place. Goes under tree, but the comfort zone with me in the vicinity bothers him. Takes off. I follow. It’s perfect tracking conditions, and I have some speed. Somehow, this fox makes me feel competitive.

The nimble creature leads me to a bluff with big boulders. No problem. I’m not far behind. Suddenly, it’s gone. Vanished. Aha! It has doubled back on its tracks. It must’ve walked backwards placing each paw in its matching print, because I couldn’t discern any altered trace. And then it sprang into a convenient cleft. No, I didn’t hear any laughing from its den.

Old bones

The thrill

: There’s something about seeing an animal in the ‘wild’, there is that moment of contact, when they drill you with their eyes (this happened to me with a puma, once, outside of Geneva), and in the case of the fox (this is no fat raccoon), you sense that upon contact, all of its sensors whirr like a mental computer, during which, and in that split second or two, it is sizing you up with total and unerring instinct. The fox will forever have you pegged, what your job is, what kind of a car you drive, how fast you can accelerate.

The killing ground: Once a pattern is established, it’s great to ‘click’ with an animal.

Wintertime. on the north face of the summit woods, there’s a gully, and several times a week during February and March, every time I went past there, this fox’s tracks that had crossed the circle road and descended from the Summit Woods. To a spot with fresh blood in the snow, a well-satisfied pee, just the leftover of a squirrel tail, and the tracks leading away again.

There's someone home

Last summer, I noticed what looked like a lot of blackened banana peels, and it was later I realized they were squirrels eaten by foxes, likely that in the plentiful season, they eat only ‘the steak’ as it were. And leave the skin.

Habitats: This north face is very interesting. It has what is probably the last virgin cover of oak in the downtown. At the foot of the slope is a basalt outcropping. And what used to be, the best summertime blackberries. It was a place I visited for a decade, with this old dog, and we marveled at the fox dens. A huge foxhole, the local mogul presumably at the elbow of Belvedere heading down to Côte des Neiges. Year after year, fresh mounds of earth expelled in what must’ve been housecleaning.

And we also came across two snow dens, where a fox had spent the night in an igloo-type of shelter. And I also realized, that the foxes were using our trails that we maintained on snowshoe (at great effort). Talking to a friend of mine, a biologist, whose opinion was that they’re just as lazy as anyone when it comes to getting around.

But in all those years I never saw a fox there. All the consistent signs, but no fox. Then when my dog died and I went around alone, I saw the fox one spring dusk taking a snooze lying on the snow. They’re not big. The size of furry chickens with a long tail they wrap underneath themselves for warmth. It’s comfort zone was 18 feet. Closer than that and it flashed me a desultory look, like ‘give me a break’. I went back the next day, same time same place. Same fox walking along.

Beautiful: It’s always a thrill to see wildlife. For two years running a family of partridge lived on the upper slope of Villa Maria. There were seven, and in the evening, they would congregate to roost exposed on the brow. I realized this gave them a 360-degree unimpeded view of any predators.

And most days at dusk a fox came tripping in a south-north direction across the field. It’s funny to see them scurrying, they really do have that roadrunner padded whirr of their legs. But the most breathtaking, was on two occasions, under a blue sky in February on garbage pickup day on Sunnyside (la crème de Westmount), I chanced upon a fox, as saucy a creature if ever there was. And it’s coat in the snow and sunshine, was of a Vermeer chalky vermillion that dazzled my eyes.

Conclusion: The adaptation of the foxes to an urban environment is inspiring. There’s a sense that these animals are a perfection of nature, they find a balance that is intrinsic to the process of coexisting.

Not inspiring, is the loss of free passage between natural habitats in places as for instance in the upper slope of Villa Maria school, and Marianopolis, institutions that have gone ‘fence crazy’ insofar as the access is now choked in a chain-link prison. No easy fox ‘holes’ to let them through.

So if you see a fox in town, by the floral town clock or checking out your back yard, it’s probably a good thing. They are an addition, welcome I believe, to our ecosystem.

Le fils de madame Locarno a écrit un roman.

Mon dieux dite-elle,  à tous ceux qui l’interpellent

Cette vie fructueuse à Sas Fé, là, où les montagnes

Hérissent le dos un contre l’autre                             

Une énorme famille qui somnole      

Depuis longtemps.                             

Ce livre

Bat les records, bouscule,                  

Ce village pas loin d’où

Hannibal a su prendre le chemin

Du col, brilliant exploit

Avec ses elephants trompetant la

Victoire.

Hannibal, superb général

Inspire la loyauté des gaullois

Et les tribus affligé par la

Puissance de Rome, un meneur

Charitable et juste.

Ce récit, l’offrande du jeune Locarno 

Offre-t-il l’invasion de mots féconde,

L’exemple à suivre dans un monde

Pris en otage par un méfiance profonde?

Mais non, ça traite de drogue

Sexe, média, la mafia, une allusion

Au Pape sécurisé par les Cents Suisses         

Et par le bord, toutes sortes de crapules,

De gonsesses, de pirates modernes

Rendu propres avec leur lavage d’argent,                  

Son oeuvre, une gloire qui tremble

(mais chic alors pour les redevances!)

Pas de 13ième chapitre où tout s’explique

De remors obscures, les abcès d’une garniture

Littéraire, un regard au moins vigilant

Ce qui pourait rendre intéressant, les yeux

Croches, un language moche, de gens

Qui fabriquent un pétrin orgueilleux.

C’est une bonne poire

Oui, cette mère, sa lecture à faire,  plus                                                        

Excitant, son revu de Paris Match et les

Les manchettes qui sonnent l’alarme,                                                            

Un glas d’église morne, cette maman

Veuve depuis vingt ans se borne à répandre      

La gazette du village.

S’avance avec son chariot de commission

Roues qui grinçent dans la rue, où les moineaux

Chippent des miettes sur des terraces ouvertes,

Sa canne qui bat le rythme d’un aveugle

Pourtant, Madame Locarno se porte très bien.