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dreamed myself of a similar ride after seeing the ponies in a National Geographic magazine.
    â€“ Another island! And where does this one lie?
    â€“ It’s a crescent moon of a shape lying southeast off Nova Scotia. The ponies from sinking Spanish galleons swam there hundreds of years ago, have managed to survive, breeding hardy and foraging for surf grass, galloping all night over dunes and the days surrounding a lighthouse.
    â€“ What about yer father? The sailor.
    â€“ Well, he remained neutral. He’d actually been born in Drumheller, far from the Atlantic or the Pacific, and it wasn’t until he was eighteen that he went to the sea at the end of World War II. So at heart he belonged to the prairie, too, and his uncle, the oldest man I have ever known, carved for us a land-going dinosaur out of hickory root. Its mouth was open, showing teeth and tongue, and two chips of amethyst were planted in its eyes.
    â€“ Get back to the journey.
    â€“ Well, we drove through a long string of prairie grain towns, clusters of houses, elevators for the dusty crops, wheat-coloured people tight-lipped in the general stores where we drank cream soda, and everywhere the dust, the chaff, the distance. You could stand and look for miles and not see the end of your vision. In cities like Brandon or Regina, there were fountains that sprayed our faces and felt like breakers if we closed our eyes, but they did not smell of salt. All those Historic Site Ahead signs my father noticed. He told us stories of uprisings . . .
    â€“ And sure don’t we know about uprisings? Isn’t Pearse’s cottage where he learned the Irish just over in Rossmuck?
    â€“ of Riel and Dumont, and he took photographs of my brothers and myself lounging on restored wagons and mastodons.
    â€“ Not real ones, surely? Yer codding us there.
    â€“ No, I mean reconstructions. You know. Or else fossilized. I don’t remember much of the detail. I was anxious to take that ferry to Swartz Bay and to stand still at the prow until we arrived. In the past, on short trips away from Vancouver Island, we had pretended we were the first explorers watching the Gulf Islands grow out of the mist, hearing the first croaking of the ravens, seeing the original waves breaking over the backs of killer whales. But we stayed a long time in Alberta. My father was a young boy, showing us where he’d cycled miles on Sundays for ice cream. He took us to the badlands. I remember not much colour but an eerie wind. And we were taken to a game farm to be shown sleepy-eyed animals. I was the impatient one, felt like a tiger in a page-wire field, camera-snapping tourists waiting, breathless, as she rose and stretched, then started pacing.
    â€“ A tiger! I’ve not seen even a picture of one, but in the books they tell us them tigers and such are related to the cats. My Boots and Festy’s Frisky. Striped, though, if ye can believe such a thing.
    â€“ I can, Bridie. And my father’s sisters cooked for us. The food he grew up on, the pirogy and holopcha, seemed as exotic as quail’s egg or caviar. He talked the whole journey of the Sturgeon River. A boy he knew dived from the bridge, never came up. When we went there, I imagined his corpse and the others it spawned resting among the weeds.
    â€“ Aye, the way ye think that the oars will touch the drowned man whenever we row out near Fahy.
    â€“ Yes. And when we went back to the aunts’ house that day, my father drank whiskey with an uncle, and they looked through the yearbook of their thirteenth autumn. That young man on the Sturgeon’s muddy bottom. He smiled. He will never look older than that. He never knew about the war to come that we, as children, had to learn to imagine. My brother, older though younger, showed me pictures of shaved heads and pits of bodies. I, younger though older, knew about Hitler.
    â€“ I’ve read about that monster. Like Cromwell, he was.
    â€“ It did