Guide to Animal Behaviour Read online

  The men who could count counted.

  Somebody said, “Oh, sweet Baby Jesus, if there’s a one, there must be a thousand.”

  I should say that we had about four hundred — the 1st and 2nd Norfolk Militia, some Oxfords and Lincolns, six instructors from the 41st Foot and some local farmers who had come up the day before for the society.

  Colonel Bostwick (the men called him Smiling Jack) stood higher up on the ridge behind our line, watching the enemy across the valley with a spyglass, his red coat flapping at his thighs. He stood alone mostly. He had been shot in the leg at Frenchman’s Creek and in the face at Nanticoke when he walked into the Dunham place and stumbled on Sutherland and Onstone’s gang by accident. The wound on his face made him look as though he were smiling all the time, which was repellent and unnerved his troops in a fight.

  Injun George, an old Chippeway who kept house in a hut above Troyer’s Flats, was first up from the creek. He said he had seen a black snake in the water, which was bad luck. He said the Kickapoo had disappeared when he shot at them, which meant that they had learned the disappearing trick and had strong medicine. He himself had been trying to disappear for years with little success. Later, he shot a crow off the mill roof, which he said was probably one of the Kickapoos.

  A troop of Kentuckians came down the hill with ammunition pouches and Pennsylvania long rifles and started taking pot shots at McCall’s company hiding behind a barricade of elm logs strung across the road. We could not reply much for lack of powder, so the Kentuckians stood out in the open on the stream bank, smoking their white clay pipes and firing up at us. Others merely watched, or pissed down the hill, or washed their shirts and hung them out to dry, as though fighting and killing were just another domestic chore, like slopping pigs or putting up preserves.

  Somebody said, “They are just like us except that we are not in Kentucky lifting scalps and stealing horses and trying to take over the place.”

  The balls sounded like pure-D evil thunking into the logs.

  Someone else tried to raise a yell for King George, which fell flat, many men allowing as it was a mystery why King George had drawn his regulars across to the other side of the Grand River and burned the ferry scow so that they could not be here when the fighting started.

  Thunk, thunk went the balls. A melancholy rain began to fall, running in muddy rivulets down the dirt track. Smoke from the Republican cook fires drifted down into the valley and hung over the mill race.

  Colonel Bostwick caused some consternation coming down to be with his men, marching up and down just behind the line with that strange double grin on his face (his cheek tattooed with powder burns embedded in the skin) and an old officer’s spontoon across his shoulders, exhorting us in a hoarse, excited mutter.

  “Behold, ye infidels, ye armies of Gog and Magog, agents and familiars of Azazel. Smite, smite! O Lord, bless the children who go into battle in thy name. Remember, boys, the Hebrew kings did not scruple to saw their enemies with saws and harrow them with harrows of iron!”

  Sergeant Major Collins of the 41st tried to make him lie down behind the snake fence, but the colonel shook him off, saying, “The men must see me.” The sergeant took a spent ball in the forehead and went down. The ball bounced off, but he was dead nonetheless, a black knot sprouting between his brows like a third eye.

  A sharpshooter with a good Pennsylvania Dutch long rifle can hit a man at three hundred yards, which is twice as far as any weapon we had could throw, let alone be accurate, So far we had killed only one crow, which might or might not have been an enemy Indian.

  Edwin Barton said, “I dreamt of Tamson Mabee all night. I threw her down in the hay last August, but she kept her hand over her hair pie and wouldn’t let me. She ain’t hardly fourteen. I’ll bet I’m going to hell today.”

  Somebody said, “You ever done it with a squaw? A squaw’ll lay quiet and not go all herky-jerky like a white woman. I prefer a squaw to a white woman any day.”

  And somebody else said, “I know a man over at Port Rowan who prefers hogs for the same reason.”

  This was war and whisky talking.

  We lay in the rain, dreaming of wives and lovers, seeking amnesty in the hot purity of lust — yes, some furtively masturbating in the rain with cold hands. Across the valley, the Kentuckians seemed like creatures of the autumn and of rain, their amphibian eyes slitty with analysis. Our officers, Salmon and Ryerson, said we held good ground, whatever that meant, that the American army at Niagara was already moving back across the river, that we had to stop McArthur from burning the mills of Norfolk so we could go on feeding King George’s regulars.

  Trapped in that valley, waiting for the demon cavalry to come whooping and shrieking across the swollen creek, we seemed to have entered some strange universe of curved space and strings of light. Rain fell in strings. Some of us were already dead, heroes of other wars and battles. We had been fighting since August 1812, when we went down the lake with Brock to the relief of Amherstburg. At times like these, we could foresee the mass extinction of the whole species, the world turned to a desert of glass.

  Everything seemed familiar and inevitable. We had marched up from Culver’s Tavern the day before. We had heard firing in the direction of Brant’s Ford at dusk, and awakened to see Kentucky cavalry and Indians emerging from the forest road and smoke rising from barn fires behind them. Evidently, given their history, Kentuckians are born to arson and mayhem. Now they sniped with passionate precision (thunk, thunk went the balls), keeping us under cover while they moved troops down the steep bank.

  Shielding our priming pans with our hats, we cursed the rain and passed the time calculating angles of assault. The mill pond, too deep except to swim, protected our left wing. That meant Salmon’s boys would get hit first, thank goodness. Mrs. Malcolm and her Negro servant were busy moving trunks and armoires out of the house in case of fire. No one paid them any mind. All at once, we heard shouts and war cries deep in the woods downstream. Colonel Bostwick sent a scout, who returned a moment later to say McArthur’s Indians had out-flanked us, crawling across a deadfall ford.

  We stared at the clouds and saw fatherless youngsters weeping at the well, lonely widows sleeping with their hands tucked between their legs, and shadows moving with horrible wounds, arms or legs missing, brains dripping out their ears.

  Someone said, “I can’t stand this no more,” stood up and was shot in the spine, turning. He farted and lay on his face with his legs quivering. His legs shook like a snake with its back broken. The Kentuckians were throwing an amazing amount of hot lead our way.

  The colonel smiled and shouted additional remarks against Azazel, then ordered McCall to stand at the elm-tree barricade while the rest retired. This was good news for us. We could get by without the mills of Norfolk; it was our bodies, our limbs, lungs, nerves and intestines we depended on for today and tomorrow.

  McCall had Jo Kitchen, a noted pugilist, three of the Austin brothers, Edwin Barton and some others. We left them our powder and shot, which was ample for a few men. At the top of the valley, Swain Corliss turned back, cursing some of us who had begun to run. “Save your horses first, boys and, if you can, your women!” He was drunk. Many of us did not stop till we reached home, which is why they sometimes call this the Battle of the Foot Race.

  Swain Corliss hailed from a family of violent Baptists with farms on the Boston Creek about three miles from Malcolm’s. His brother Ashur had been wounded thirteen times in the war and had stood his ground at Lundy’s Lane, which Swain had missed on account of ague. Swain did not much like his brother getting ahead of him like that.

  He had a Brown Bess musket and a long-barreled dragoon pistol his father had bought broken from an officer. He turned at the top of the hill and started down into the racket of lead and Indian shouts. Musket balls swarmed round McCall’s company like bees, some stinging. Swain took up a position against a tree,
guarding the flank, and started flinging lead back. Edwin Barton, shot through the thighs, loaded for him. Men kept getting up to leave, and Captain McCall would whack them over the shoulders with the flat of his sword.

  Swain Corliss, pounding a rock into the barrel of his gun with a wooden mallet, kept saying, “Boys, she may be rough, but she sure is regular.”

  Bees stung him.

  That night, his father dreaming, dreamed a bee stung him in the throat and knew. Swain Corliss was catching up to Ashur. He killed a Kentucky private coming over the creek on a cart horse. Then Swain Corliss shot the horse. Smoke emerged from the mill. Mrs. Malcolm ran around in a circle, fanning the smoke with a linen cloth. (Thunk, thunk, buzz, buzz went the balls.) Though we were running, we were with them. It was our boys fighting in the hollow. Colonel Bostwick sat on his race horse, Governor, at the top of the track.

  The company gave ground, turning to fire every few yards. Martin Boughner tied a handkerchief to his ramrod and surrendered to an Indian. Swain Corliss tied up Edwin Barton’s legs with his homespun shirt. Deaf from the guns, they had to shout.

  “By the Jesus, Ned, I do believe it ain’t hard to kill them when they stand around you like this.”

  “I mind a whore I knew in Chippawa —”

  “Ned, I wished you’d stop bleeding so freely. I think they have kilt you.”

  “Yes.”

  They were in another place, a region of black light and maximum density. On the road, sweating with shame in the cold, we heard the muskets dwindle and go out. We saw Swain Corliss, white-faced, slumped against an oak amongst the dead smouldering leaves, Edwin’s head in his lap, without a weapon except for his bayonet, which he held across his chest as Kickapoo warriors came up one by one, reverently touching Swain’s shoulders with their musket barrels.

  The Kentuckians had lost one dead, eight wounded and a couple of borrowed horses. That day, they burned the mill and one downstream and sent out patrols to catch stragglers, which they did, and then released after making them promise on the Good Book not to shoot at another person from the United States. The Indians skinned and butchered Edwin Barton’s body, Ned having no further use for it.

  During the night, three miles away, James Corliss dreamed that a venomous bee had stung him in the throat. Rising from his bed, he told the family, “Yonder, yer baby boy is dead or something.” Then James Corliss went out into the darkness, hitched his horse to a stoneboat, placed a feather tick, pillows and sheets upon it, and started for the scene of the battle.

  WHY I DECIDE TO KILL MYSELF AND OTHER JOKES

  The plan begins to fall apart the instant Professor Rainbolt, Hugo’s graduate adviser, spots me slipping out of the lab at 11 p.m. on a Sunday. Right away he is suspicious. I am not a student; the lab is supposed to be locked. But, like a gentleman, he doesn’t raise a stink. He just nods and watches me lug my bulging (incriminating) purse through the fire doors at the end of the corridor.

  Problems. Problems. Professor Rainbolt knows I’m Hugo’s girl. He’s seen us around together. Now he’s observed me sneaking out of the lab at 11 p.m. (on a Sunday). He’s probably already checked to see if, by chance, Hugo has come in to do some late night catch-up work on his research project. Hugo will not be there, the lights will be out, and Hugo will be in shit for letting me have his lab key (I stole it).

  Now, I didn’t plan this to get Hugo into trouble. At least, not this kind of trouble. Other kinds of trouble, maybe. Guilt, for example. But now, when they find my corpse and detect the distinctive almond odour of cyanide, they will know exactly where the stuff came from, whose lab key I used and Hugo will lose his fellowship, not to mention his career, such as it is. Let me tell you, Hugo is not going to lay this trip on me after I am dead.

  Also, the whole Rainbolt thing raises the question of timing. Let us say that a person wants, in general, to kill herself. She has a nice little supply of cyanide, obtained illegally from a university research lab (plants, not animals), which she intends to hoard for use when the occasion arises.

  She might, for example, prefer to check out on a particularly nice day, after a walk with her dogs along the River Speed. Perhaps after sex with Hugo — and a bottle of Beaujolais. In bed, by herself. (Hugo exiting the picture; forget where he goes. Probably a bar somewhere, with his guitar, flicking his long hair — grow up, Hugo — to attract the attention of coeds.) Her Victorian lace nightie fanning out from her legs and a rose, symbol of solidarity with the plant world, in her hand.

  But now she has to factor in Professor Rainbolt and the thought that her little escapade into the realm of break, enter and theft will soon be common knowledge on the faculty grapevine, the campus police alerted, the town police on the lookout (slender blonde, five-ten, twenty-six years old, with blue eyes and no scars — outside — answers to the name Willa), and that Hugo will be, well, livid and break something (once he broke his own finger, ha ha).

  A girl decides to kill herself and life suddenly becomes a cesspit of complications. Isn’t that the way it always is? I think. And suddenly I am reminded of my father who, coincidentally, was waylaid and disarmed on his way to the garden with the family twelve-gauge one afternoon, after kissing Mom with unusual and suspicious fervour because, he claimed, of her spectacular pot roast (why he kissed her, not why he was going out the door with the gun — target practice, he said).

  He was already far gone with cancer, in his brain and other places. Trying to sneak into the garden was the last sane thing he did. Can you guess that it was me who wrestled that gun from his pathetically weakened hands? That I spent the next six months lifting him from room to room, feeding him mush, wiping his ass? That in my wallet I still carry, along with other photographic memorabilia, a Polaroid of Dad in his coffin?

  Let me pause to point out certain similarities, parallels or spiritual ratios. Gardens play a role in both these stories. That lab is really an experimental garden full of flats choked with green shoots. Hugo breeds them, harvests them, pulverizes them, whirls them, refrigerates them, distils them, micro-inspects them — in short, he is a plant vivisectionist. It is a question of certain enzymes, I am told, their presence or absence being absolutely crucial to something … something — I forget. We have made love here amongst the plants, me bent over a centrifuge with my ass in the air and my pants around my ankles, which did not seem seriously outre at the time. (On one such occasion, I noticed the cyanide on the shelf above, clearly marked with a skull-and-crossbones insignia.)

  Gardens and suicide run in the family. Failed suicides, I am now forced to conjecture. Clearly, one did not foresee the myriad difficulties, or that fate would place Professor Rainbolt at the door as I left the lab/garden, feeling sorry for the plants — I have heard that African violets scream — thinking, why, why can’t they just leave well enough alone?

  The time factor is crucial. I do not relish being rushed. But when will I have another chance? Also, quite suddenly, I realize I have forgotten to find out if cyanide poisoning is painful. I have a brief, blinding vision of blue me writhing in the Victorian nightie, frothing vomit and beshitting myself. Someone would have to wipe my butt, and I, like my father, never wanted that. Never, never, never.

  I see I have reached my car, our car, Hugo’s and mine, a wine-coloured Pinto with an exploding gas tank. We both like to live cheaply and dangerously. Bismarck, the Doberman, and Jake, the mutt, greet me with preens, wriggles and barks of delight. It is nice to be among friends.

  The dogs sniff at my purse where I often carry treats — rawhide bones or doggy biscuits or rubber balls. This time we have cyanide, which I ponder while the car warms up. The winter outside corresponds to the winter of my spirit, which is a dry, cold wind, or the snow crystals on the windshield remind me of the poison crystals in the jar.

  I will be the first to admit that I have made mistakes. Once I was crossing Bloor Street at Varsity Stadium, being a cool, sexy lady withou
t any underpants, when the wind lifted my skirt and showed my pussy to eighty-five strange men. And once I confessed to Hugo’s mother about my affair with a lead guitarist named Chuck Madalone.

  Hugo called this fling with Chuck an affair on a technicality. In my opinion, Hugo and I were not: a) officially going together, b) in love. I was in love; Hugo was in doubt, which is an entirely different thing. In my opinion, my date, tryst, rendezvous or whatever with Chuck (the innocent in all this) was pre-Hugo. Hugo said we (he and I) had had sex. These are his words. Hugo, like many men, appears to believe that ejaculation is a form of territorial marking, like dogs peeing on hydrants. I say, it washes off.

  How was I to know, as Hugo claims, that he was in love, though in a kind of doubtful, non-verbal way, or that he would follow us home that night and spy through the window in a hideous state of guilt, rage and titillation? Hugo says “affair.” I say, meanings migrate like lemmings and words kill.

  Here we have, I think to myself, a jar of cyanide, which, as we who live with guitar-playing scientists know, is a simple compound of cyanogen with a metal or organic radical, as in potassium cyanide (KCN). Cyanogen is a dark-blue mineral named for its entering into the composition of Prussian blue, which I think is rather nice, giving my death an aesthetic dimension. The cyanide (in this case KCN) will also turn me blue, as in cyanosis, a lividness of the skin owing to the circulation of imperfectly oxygenated blood. Something like drowning — inward shudder.

  The time factor, as I say, is crucial. I do not wish to die in this Pinto with my dogs looking on. Life will be sad enough for them afterward. With dogs, as with women, Hugo displays a certain winning enthusiasm, which is charming at the outset, though it soon wears off as he develops new interests.

  I must use guile and cunning; I must be Penelope weaving and unravelling. The trick will be to secrete enough of this snowy, crystalline substance, which turns people blue, in, say, yes, a plastic cassette box, which when filed in Hugo’s cassette tray will resemble in external particulars every other non-lethal cassette box. Then I can surrender the jar to Hugo for return to Professor Rainbolt with beaucoup d’apologies. I will look like an ass, but this is not new.