BACKGROUND/DECLARATION (IMM 0008, SCHEDULE 1)
You must account for every month since your 18th birthday. Under “Activity”, print your occupation or job title if you were working. If you were not working, enter what you were doing (for example, unemployed, studying, traveling,etc.) Attach another sheet if necessary.
From How to Apply to Immigrate to Canada

I am sitting in log cabin in a Canadian provincial park, filling out an application for permanent residence as a skilled worker. I have been doing this all day long for four days, and with luck I’ll gather all the materials I need to apply by October. Canada is not the only option—I’d happily move back to the US, or to Ireland or Britain—but I like to nurture as many possibilities as I can. It’s an ENFP thing.

But Canada plays hard-to-get.
I must sit a four-hour French test that has to be booked a month in advance.
I must get police clearances from every country and state I’ve lived in. They all want a processing fee in local currency. The FBI requires a full set of official fingerprints.
I need a notarized employment contract from every job I’ve worked at. And a full, up-to-date letter of reference, stamped with the company seal.
I need full college transcripts and originals of my diplomas. My marriage certificate and separation agreement. My passport. A certificate from a full medical examination by an approved doctor. A bank statement that proves I have more than $9,420 in Canadian dollars. (This will all be worth it if one really can live on $9,420 Canadian pesos a year.)

My sister is in Ottawa, filling out simpler forms that allow her to stay here as an MBA student. We exchange complaining emails.
‘I just got the worst passport photos in the world,’ she writes. ‘My chin is deformed. They could refuse me simply on the basis that i’m too ick.’

I haven’t worked at an office job in a year, and yet here I sit in the woods making a detailed Excel spreadsheet of tasks and dependencies.

1. Get fingerprinted
2. Order French audio tapes from Alliance Française.
3. Find out where I lived in Spain…

I plough through the Canadian National Occupation Classification and try to make my work experience fit the descriptions that qualify as skilled-worker occupations. The accepted list dates from 1992. Few of my job titles existed in 1992.

I track down my employers. In the Age of The Deal, they are shape-shifters, too. JP Morgan merged with Chase and left the lovely old building overlooking the Thames on Victoria Embankment. The Presentation Company became pres.co and is now Wheel UK, though astonishingly, my old boss is still there seven years later. Another company moved out west somewhere, part of something called United Online. The startup with a silly name is now kaput. Sturdy little Vindigo is still strong.

I draft letters for each of them, frowning, mouth-breathing. I couch my duties in terms of Skill Level A or B occupations, and I ask old friends or bureaucratic strangers to print them on letterhead, stamp them with a company seal, sign them, and attach a business card. A notarized contract is probably too much to hope for. My own contracts are buried in storage somewhere. I don’t have a phone, so my sister calls JP Morgan London to find out where I should send my request.

And then I get to the fun stuff. The application forms look innocuous: small, neat tables of numbered cells labeled in gnat-sized font. There are two or three lines for answers.

11. Personal history
Give details of what you have been doing during the past 10 years or since age 18, whichever period is longer, starting with the most recent information. Include jobs held, periods of unemployment, periods of study and any other use of time, such as time spent traveling in search of a country of refuge, stays in hospitals, prisons or other places of confinement, and periods spent at home as a homemaker. You must not leave gaps.15. Addresses
List all addresses where you have lived since your 18th birthday. Do not use P.O. box addresses.

What colour are your eyes, they ask. Have you ever been a member of an organization that is or was engaged in an activity that is part of a pattern of criminal activity? Have you ever had any serious disease or physical or mental disorder? What is the total number of years of your formal education? What height are you? Tell me about your mother.

And so I sit here, the archeologist of my own life, unearthing layer after layer from silty memories. They demand nothing less than a stop-motion progression from teenage girl to grown woman.

Oh, Canada. Do you really want to know?

I was a schoolgirl who cheered and cried when Ireland made it to the quarter-finals of the World Cup.
I was an usherette in a London theatre, scolded for eating three tubs of Haagen-Dazs and then falling asleep in the lobby.
I wore a sandwich-board in Copenhagen and lived on breadrolls stolen by my chambermaid roommate.
I felt caged as a Barcelona houseguest.
I was a trainee sophisticate trying to force down bowls of Moroccan soup in East London.
I was a first-year English student who auditioned for my future husband, the big-shot Dramsoc director.
I was an English teacher, pretending to be 25.
I was a flatmate and resident diva to three lovely college boys.
I was the waitress who flubbed orders in that Mexican joint in Boston.
I was a business student, lost in the self-serving flatness of my class.
I was a Londoner, riding my bike to my first big job.
I was a baby banker in a scratchy suit, looking out the window in despair as it dawned on me that I had to come back the next day, and the next day, for the rest of my life.
I was a Web Producer, newly-capitalized, full of gratitude for my reprieve. I tried to learn about this Internet thing faster than the clients who asked me to fax them the web site. I laughed when I was called The Webbitch.
I was a bride. I was a New Yorker. I was a hausfrau waiting for a work permit.
I was given a title I didn’t understand and surrounded by slick Ivy Leaguers.
I was vice-president in a company where we all fit in one room.
I was a proud company wife.
I was in a team that I loved. I watched a bubble stretch then burst, so close I could see the rainbows and the greasy splotch.
I was harried.
I was unfettered, bouncing gently from welcome to welcome across ten countries.

I am a woodsy, dreamy summer hippie who washes in a cold lake. I’d like to stay.

My parents were very young when I was born. Most of their friends didn’t have children yet, and I was a portable kid who could amuse myself under the table if lugged to a dinner party. I liked to listen, and I learned how to camouflage myself as an uninterested innocent so that I wouldn’t get sent to bed when the gossip started. I didn’t know many other kids, and those I did know seemed dull compared to the grownups whose world I preferred.

I still mostly seek out people my own age or older. Many of my friends ten, twenty, or thirty years older than me, but few are in their teens or early twenties. I read Graham Greene, not Banana Yashimoto. I have the musical taste of a middle-aged man: Elvis Costello, The Kinks, Fats Domino, Emmylou Harris.

There is nothing better or worse about preferring the company of those either younger or older. It just depends on what draws you more: stories or potential. The 20-year-old backpackers I met on the road didn’t interest me. They seemed unformed, interchangeable, and oddly conservative, huddling in groups and following predictable paths. The 30 year olds were braver, and had stories. The 40 year olds had more stories. The 70 year olds told the best tales of all.

When I talk to younger people, I want to give them maps and shortcuts.
Warn them: ’29 is weird for women. You might go a bit nuts.’
And: ‘Find out what certainties you stand on. What would you do if they collapsed?’
And: ‘Don’t worry. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.’
And: ‘Keep doing things you think you can’t do.’
And: ‘Try to be a little kinder.’

What I don’t do well is listen. I don’t listen the way my older friends listened to me when I was eighteen, kindly, attentively, as if I were another interesting human being, not just some dumb kid. As if they might learn something by listening to an eighteen-year-old.

I know people who do it by instinct. They blend without prejudice. They are excited by potential, not accomplishments. They see flexibility where I see ignorance. They are ambassadors from the future, who come back to tell the rest of us crumblies what’s really new long after we’ve convinced ourselves that buying car commercial music is okay. That Moby is hip.

At Vindigo I had a beloved co-worker who was just four years younger than me, but who slipped smoothly in with ‘the kids’. ‘I’m from The Future,’ he used to joke, but it was true. I interrogated him on the language, the stars, the clothes, but I could never pass, nor did I want to. I studied the gadgets and trends he adopted to figure out coming attractions. Sometimes he was really wrong: the Modo. Sometimes he was right: online personals became hip. Well, sort of. He works at MTV now, another lab rat gig.

People who shape the world are those who have a little power and experience, and who use it to work with kids. Never trust anyone over thirty, the hippies used to say, but most of their leaders were that ancient. John Zerzan, a guru behind the Seattle WTO protests, is 57. The Beats were a generation older than the generation they inspired; so was Timothy Leary. John Hughes was well past sixteen when he defined for a generation what it meant to be sixteen. And Avril Lavigne’s songs are not written by a teenage girl.

Rick is my bucket-trap mentor. He is a park superintendent who has lived all his life in these woods, and he is wise in the ways of mouse murder. For instance, if you don’t put water in the bucket to drown them, the first mouse becomes a cannibal who preys on fellow victims. Rick described coming home after a trip to the city to find one fat mouse, red in tooth and claw, and eleven skeletons in a bucket trap.

   ‘Yeah, mice aren’t the only ones with bloodlust,’ said Tim. Once, during a freezing Ottawa night in an unheated farmhouse, buried under a stack of comforters, he had dreamt that someone had his nose in a pincer vice. He woke up to find a shrew clamped to his septum. Shrews are tiny, busy creatures who need to eat three times their own body weight to stay alive. When the temperature falls to twenty below, they start wondering if they could maybe wrassle down the large, sleeping mammal in the corner.

With a bucket trap, plain water stinks as the mice rot. So does antifreeze, but not as badly, and they die faster. Rick had tried a mixture of water and vinegar to pickle them, though possibly he didn’t use enough vinegar. They still stank.

One fall, when the mice were plentiful, there was a whining inspector-type who used to come around to his cabin uninvited. Rick couldn’t stand him, and couldn’t get rid of him. So he took a dozen drowned mice from his bucket trap and stuck them in a pickle jar. He topped it up with vinegar and added lemon slices, rosemary sprigs, and garlic cloves. The mice floated like sea horses, their eyes milky-white from the acid. He put it on the table at the seat the inspector liked, and the man sat down, a long complaint in full flow. Then he caught sight of the pickled mice. He was not a profane man, but he jumped up, shaking, and yelled.
   ‘Vosper! You fucking motherfucker!’
   ‘And the fucker never came back,’ said Rick with satisfaction.

The jar of mice added to Rick’s wild man reputation in the backwoods. His staff asked what they tasted like.
   ‘So I told ‘em, the texture’s just like a peach gone woolly. That threw ‘em off stride. Heh!’

Bigger

I can do the J stroke. I’m developing a tender spot at the base of my right thumb that might develop into a trophy callous if I nurture it. The J stroke, if you don’t know it, is the key to solo canoeing. A canoe feels strange after a snug kayak, like sitting in a bathtub bailing with a wooden spoon. But the movement, once you get it, is more elegant and peaceful than the churn of a kayak paddle. I kneel in the boat, three-quarters back from the bow and edged up close to one side. I hold the top of the cherrywood paddle in my left hand, like a gear stick, and with my right grip just above the blade. I reach up and forward, dip the spoon—sorry, the paddle—in the water, and draw it smoothly back. At the end of the stroke, I bend my wrists down, and describe a small outward curve to complete the J. This flick rudders the canoe, so that at least in theory I go in a straight line. More often it’s an awkward beginner’s slalom.

The Laughing Brook cabin is only accessible by water or by overgrown hiking trail, so the red canoe has opened up new independence for supply runs. I paddle over from the Beaver Rock cove, and from out on the water can see the three humps on the rock outcrop—tail, body, and head—that give the cove its name. On still evenings I hear nothing more than the swish of the paddle and the shrieks of the falcons. The setting sun warms the pink granite of the cove, and the beach sand too is as pink as Bermuda’s.

From inside the cabin, the Laughing Brook sounds like a kettle perpetually on the boil, and sometimes I make sleepy, cranky movements to get up and turn it off in the night. There are voices in the brook too, if you listen, though it takes a few days before they share their gossip.

The cabin has no electricity, but running water is fed by gravity from the brook to the kitchen sink. There’s a little Coleman stove seasoned with mouse droppings. By candlelight the floaty mosquito net turns the modest futon into a four-poster bed. The kerosene lamp smells good, though I’m out of fuel now and I’d forgotten to buy more. It’s bright until 10 pm anyway, and I can fall back on my Radioshack booklight if I’m desperate.

Someone has left a board game called Midlife Crisis and a cribbage set. There’s a book about Lake Superior, a chewed-up copy of Diet for a Small Planet, a John Irving, and an SJ Perelman collection. A roll of toilet paper on the floor gets chewed for a mouse nest by morning.

When I wake up I stagger out the door wearing nothing but pink flip-flops, and give a good old yawn and stretch over the beach. Sometimes the squirrels scold me and I tell them to bugger off. At 6.30 the other morning a chunk of rainbow rose straight up from an island offshore, though I was too sleepy to care for a vertical wonder. Instead I got dressed, and climbed into the canoe to meet my friend Rosalinda for a hike.

Brooklyn seems very far away.

From June’s Harper’s Index:

Seven mice and a black vole died in the cabin on Friday: a horrific rodent bloodbath that had me shrieking in the middle of the night as the little broken bodies twisted in their death throes behind the chesterfield. (It’s a Canadian couch, so I guess it’s a chesterfield. Even though no one seems to use the term.) The vole looked especially pitiful dangling from the trap by the bridge of his snout. Fortunately it had cracked his skull.

Ranger Tim emptied and reset the traps for me—I’m not steely enough yet—and explained that you had to spread the peanut butter right right into the mechanism, so that they put their whole weight on the spring as they tried to lick the last smears. Ten minutes after he laid the traps:

Whiffle. Snuffle.
CRACK
Squeal! (mouse)
Squeal! (me)
Flap. Flap. Flap.
Silence.

I wanted to blubber. They were small, and cute, and just trying to stay warm and fed in the woods, like me. If only they were continent. But Tim says I too will become ruthless and coldblooded the first time a mouse runs over my sleeping face or shreds my birth certificate for a nest. He padded out to the porch to throw the warm bodies into the woods for the weasels. I shouted after him.
    ‘Did you wash your hands? Don’t come back in here ‘til you wash your hands!’

The next day I recounted my rodent trauma in the staff kitchen. Derek, a very young maintenance ranger, perked up.
   ‘See, what you need is a bucket trap.’
   ‘What’s a bucket trap?’
   ‘Oh, it’s great. Just the thing for bulk killing. You get a bucket, a wire, and a tin can. The tin can is open on both sides, and you string it across the bucket on the wire, so that it rolls like a barrel. Then you spread peanut butter on the can. You put a little ramp up the side of the bucket, so the mouse can run up when he smells the food. He can see it, he can smell it, but he can’t reach it, see, cos it’s in the middle of the bucket. So he jumps from the rim onto the can, which spins and dumps him in the bucket.’
   ‘And there’s water in the bucket? The mice drown?’
   ‘Yeah. Well, you can do a lot of things once they’re in the bucket. You can put a heating element underneath so they boil alive as soon as they hit the water. Or you can trap ‘em in a dry bucket and just put ‘em in a bag and crush ‘em, or what have you, eh?’
   ‘Jesus Christ. That’s really grisly.’
   ‘But the drowning is cruel, see, because the little fellers will swim for hours. Better to crush ‘em or boil ‘em. Or collect ‘em and drown ‘em fast. But the bucket is great, eh? You catch so many mice so fast, no screwing around with emptying traps.’

Now I know how they occupy themselves all winter long up here.

I took the path up the mountain directly behind Banos. At the lookout point halfway up, a little girl and her brother played outside the restaurant. They had shoved a white plastic tub under a small brindled bitch. The boy cupped the dog’s chin—he was about two—and the girl pulled rhythmically on its stubby teats. The dog’s eyes were closed, its head back in pleasure.
   ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘what are your names?’
   ‘Sheer-lay. My brother is Darwin. I am nearly four.’ She didn’t pause with her task.
Shirley. Ecuadorians delight in exotic names, and the harder they are to pronounce in Spanish, the more they like them.
   ‘And what are you doing, Shirley?’
   ‘I’m milking the dog,’ she said, as if I were a perfect fool. Why, milking the dog, of course.
   ‘Are you getting any milk?’
   ‘Yes, of course. The milk is going into the bucket here, and then we’re going to take it to the dairy on the mule, and then we’re going to make butter. Look, here’s the milk.’ She made squirting sounds. The bucket was dry. The little bitch rumbled with pleasure.
   ‘Milk! Milk! Milk! Dog milk!’ said Darwin, and danced.

On my way back down, I passed them again, this time with their parents. Shirley was swinging her bucket.
   ‘Hi Shirley, how’s the little milkmaid?’ Her parents looked startled.

Canadian immigration is very sensibly points-based (have I mentioned how wonderful Canada is?). They assess work experience, age, education, language skills, and adaptability. If you score 75 out of a possible 100, you stand a good chance of getting residency under a Skilled Worker Program. By passing a fairly stiff French test set by the Paris Chamber of Commerce, you gain an extra eight maple leaf points.

So I spent yesterday studying for the Test d’Evaluation de Francais on the beach at Lake Superior. I ran through multiple choice tests, getting advanced scores on comprehension and terrible scores on grammar, as usual. And I enjoyed it greatly, schoolgirl swot that I am. In particular, the French slant to the questions tickles me. Sample question 27 is Recette Gourmande: Coulis aux Poires, which describes the four steps needed to make Pear Coulis, but in the wrong order. The student is expected to pick the correct sequence. Do not guess, they warn. You will be penalized for wrong answers.

Do you add the vanilla and lemon juice first, and then mix in the sugar? Or is it the other way around?

What, are you a crazy American barbarian? Of course you mix the sugar in first to make a Coulis aux Poires! Minus one point for the MacDonalds-chewing savage!

It’s the little things that make me want to move to Paris.

I am Canadian

(clears throat)
Hey.
I’m not a lumberjack,
or a fur trader…
and I don’t live in an igloo
or eat blubber, or own a dogsled…
and I don’t know Jimmy, Sally or Suzy from Canada,
although I’m certain they’re really, really nice.

I have a Prime Minister,
not a President.
I speak English and French,
NOT American.
and I pronouce it ABOUT,
NOT A BOOT.

I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack.
I believe in peace keeping, NOT policing.
DIVERSITY, NOT assimilation,
AND THAT THE BEAVER IS A TRULY PROUD AND NOBLE ANIMAL.
A TOQUE IS A HAT,
A CHESTERFIELD IS A COUCH,
AND IT IS PRONOUCED ‘ZED’ NOT ‘ZEE’, ‘ZED’!

CANADA IS THE SECOND LARGEST LANDMASS!
THE FIRST NATION OF HOCKEY!
AND THE BEST PART OF NORTH AMERICA!

MY NAME IS JOE!
AND I AM CANADIAN!

Do you know this ad for Molson Canadian beer? It was a phenomenon here in Canada when it started to run in March 2000. Crowds cheered the Jumbotron at hockey matches. The Calgary Herald reported that high-school students began reciting it spontaneously in corridors between classes. Over three years later, I’ve bumped into so many references to the rant that I searched for the transcript. For a new arrival, it helpfully clarifies that Canadian national identity is based solely on not being American. I was beginning to piece this together anyway from the number of news articles I’ve read that slam the neighbo(u)rs with savage Canadian politeness.

Below the transcript, there are two dead links that sum up the geopolitical situation with tragic brevity:

Canadian Beer ‘Rant’ Stirs Nation’s Pride
—Reuters, April 18, 2000

Americans haven’t noticed We Are Canadian
—canada.com news, April 18, 2000

We too understand what it’s like to feel like a flea on a moose. Irish actors, broadcasters, and comedians have been London’s court jesters for years. I’ve spent a shameful amount of time reclaiming Irish writers from my English friends, who have the temerity to act pleased for us over these discoveries.
“No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.”

We grew up in a British cultural soup. Our cities are lined with UK high-street chainstores. Drunken English stag parties spill out of Dublin pubs every Friday night. British television was always more popular than our own underfunded, parochial channels. British tabloids outsell home newspapers, which causes occasional editorial complications: famously, when four Irishmen were released after fifteen years of wrongful imprisonment, the Irish edition of The Sun ran the headline “Guildford Four Freed”. In the British edition: “Guildford Bombers Freed”. (The film In the Name of the Father was based on this case.)

We were steeped in their media and absurdly sensitive to any slights we found there. We got chippy at every mention of “the mainland”, which implied that our republic was still an offshore island in the Kingdom. BBC newsreaders routinely mangled our leaders’ names:
“The Irish teashock, Charles Hockey…”
They called the country “Eire” when trying to be culturally sensitive, which baffled us.

We tallied each acknowledgment and oversight. While Europe poured in the funds that made us a rich, modern nation, we continued to look for approval from England (not caring much what our fellow Celts thought). Sometimes we found startling ignorance instead.
“Now, Dervs, remind me: is Belfast in the Republic?” asked a well-educated English colleague a few years ago.
“No, Sally, it’s in your country. I suppose you could say that’s the trouble.”
But aside from the rabid few who assumed we were all hateful, ungrateful terrorists, the most common English reaction to Ireland, if any, was puzzled, paternal benevolence and genuine goodwill. What did we really want? When it came to the Irish Question, the Irish, apparently, kept changing the question. Many English friends have told me they feel awkward in Ireland, unsure of the reception they’ll get in a country supposedly famous for welcomes. It makes me sad.

The complex feelings are inevitable. We are a tiny three and a half million people, next to Britain’s 56 million. The country has been independent for just 80 years, and ours is the relationship of an adult child to a parent. For centuries we were dependent on a parent country that was often cruel and authoritarian, though sometimes benevolent and protective. They shaped us, and were partly shaped by us. As an adult (or adolescent) nation, we still look across the puddle, sometimes with resentment, sometimes with fondness, to measure how far we have come. We note our similarities and our differences with a fascinated, narcissistic eye. England seems smaller to us now, and frailer, as we take our place in the broader world.

But as historical peers Canada and the US have a different relationship. I’ve heard Canada described as the little brother, but it seems more like the responsible older son who worked hard at college and now slogs away at a good career. Canada spends summers at the cottage with its lovely family, and volunteers at the soup kitchen in its spare time. Canada calls Mum. Life is great, but the responsible eldest is still needled by the brash kid brother who became a rock star, and who now pontificates about saving the world from his Long Island mansion. The one who sends a Christmas card but never visits. The one who married Pammy. Canada wants the rockstar kid brother to look up to it, to ask its opinion occasionally, to give a shout-out from the world stage from time to time. But the little asshole takes phone calls through an assistant now, and barely knows the children’s names.

It is easier for the Irish to assert an independent identity, perhaps. We have a full library of stereotypes to work from, and none carries the sting of a charge of blandness. Canadians, the lazy wisdom goes, are polite, civilized, and nice: what can you construct out of that but a list of We Are Nots?

(lifts pint)
Howya.
I’m not a potato farmer
or a hod carrier

and I don’t live in a thatched cottage,
or drink whiskey, or own a horse and cart
I probably do know Jimmy, Mary or Sinéad from Ireland
and I’m sure they’re really, really good crack.

I have a Taoiseach
not a Prime Minister
I speak English and Irish
not Received Pronunciation
and I never say ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to ye’

I’m too cool to sew a shamrock on my backpack
but I believe in peace keeping, NOT policing.
SPONTANEITY, not respectability
AND THAT MICHAEL FLATLEY’S HAIR IS A TRULY PROUD AND NOBLE ANIMAL.
‘FECK’ IS BETTER THAN ‘CRIKEY’
TACKIES ARE TRAINERS
A PRESS IS A CUPBOARD
AND THE PLURAL IS PRONOUNCED ‘YE’ NOT ‘YOU’. ‘YE!’

IRELAND IS THE LARGEST CONSUMER OF TEA IN THE WORLD (per head)
THE FIRST NATION IN RIVERDANCING
AND IT IS THE MAINLAND

MY NAME IS DERVALA
AND I AM A PADDY

Lake Superior Provincial Park is a family destination. There’s a small family of snowshoe hares that lives right outside my cabin. They snack on tender leaves under the window, though they haven’t yet invited me to lunch. They look like gawky eleven-year-olds who haven’t yet grown into their huge feet. In the winter, their brown summer fur is replaced by white to camouflage them in the snow. How many generations does it take to evolve paws that can walk on powder, and fur that changes color with the seasons? I wish I could see the failed prototypes: hot-pink hares with footbinding fetishes, perhaps.

A family of shiny Merganser ducks goes fishing on Lake Superior every afternoon: mother, father, and four ducklings. There were eight in the original clutch. Mergansers have big families to compensate for holes in their loss-prevention program. Sitting on the beach yesterday, I saw what might have happened to missing ones. A peregrine falcon swooped straight out of the rockface and divebombed the little family as they bobbed for food. The ducklings had the sense to duck, and they stayed down while the falcon wheeled and tried again. The alarmed mother quacked and flapped, and gathered her babies in a tight knot. Dad seemed untroubled.

The falcon young are almost ready to fledge, and I felt sorry for the mother going back empty-clawed to her large, demanding offspring. The beach is littered here and there with gull remains, their staple. They eat everything but the wing and the breastbone, and the spread, abandoned wings look like driftwood sculpture.

The squirrels here are the tiny reds that have all but died out in Europe, hunted or interbred with the large, rattish gray ones. One just ran over my shoe in a dramatic chase sequence. I was proud to be less threatening than an eight-inch-long fellow rodent.

A fecund family of mice lives in my cabin. We each pretend that they live outside, but they and I know I can hear them nibbling in the night. I rescued a Webster’s Dictionary this morning, which was being shredded to make a cosy nest somewhere (probably in the tangle of laptop cables). They are very cute, these deer mice, if you overlook their incontinence. I have a horror that I will actually catch one in the traps soon and have to—ugh—throw out its stiff little body and reset the trap. I am too afraid to ask the manly rangers to carry out such a task.