Black Bird by Michel Basilieres

confusing Quebec with a totalitarian country, of confusing Canada, a Western capitalist state in which he was free to organize whatever political or labour unions he wished, to speak and vote freely, to work as hard as he felt necessary to effect political change, with countries where people were tortured and murdered for these things. In his confusion he adopted the methods and rhetoric of revolutionaries from such countries, because all over the West it was becoming the thing to do. Germany had its Baader-Meinhof, Italy its Red Brigades, Peru its Tupameros. He explained to Marie that “louder votes count for more. Votes that explode are supreme.”
    Hubert, Marie and the other felquistes rejected much that was common in Quebec. They rejected foremost the idea of a nation that spread from sea to sea; they rejected the idea that a social conscience and responsibility could cross linguistic lines; they rejected the thought of common goals providing common solutions. They rejected even the feeble Canadian notion of patriotism. But they held dear conceits that every people regards with a sentimental nostalgia: that by birth they were entitled to their land, that blood will out (one way or another), that outsiders were depriving them of their natural rights. They would not allow Ottawa to administer social programs and they would not allow English to sully the French face of Quebec. But because nationalism glorifies bloodrelations and the extended family of a common religion, they would sell their souls to the Devil to be home at Christmas.
    And they couldn’t see the irony in that.
    Instead, they celebrated the fact in myth, made it a cultural sacrament taught in their schools and literature, and elevated it to the status of a founding paradigm. Fur traders stranded far from home at Christmas were carried by the devil to their families in a flying canoe. It became a sentimental Christmas display on a downtown Montreal street, a giant inflatable parade float for the Fête Nationale and the illustration on a beer label: Les Maudits. The Damned.
    Jean-Baptiste was visiting the shrunken heads at McGill University.
    McGill still maintained a small Victorian museum housing the various trophies, plunder and knick-knacks retrieved by the pompous during years of empire building. A great domed central area housed the skeletons of several dinosaurs, surrounded by second- and third-floor galleries displaying insects and geological specimens. Other wings contained stuffed mammals, large and small, set against painted dioramas of the settings they’d been shot in. A sequence of enormous glass cases held a parade of simians from tiny spider monkeys through chimps and apes, each slighter taller and more upright than the last, culminating in a human skeleton displaying a sign that read: Darwin’s Proof.
    Jean-Baptiste had been visiting the Redpath Museum since childhood, when Mother and Angus had brought the children to the campus for picnics. When he was old enough, he came by himself. In truth it was a small and unimportant museum scientifically, but it did have its treasures, which lured him back time and again. It was here he’d first seen skeletons of any sort, and here they were in abundance. Tiny rodents, bats, larger predators; serpents, from garden snakes to giant constrictors out of darkest Africa, sabre-toothed tigers, the aforementioned dinosaurs and, yes, even humans. Here was a display of marvels more chilling than any Hollywood movie, because these were real.
    They held an eerie fascination for him, these relics, because on the one hand he knew them to be the real remains of once-living creatures, but on the other, the manner in which they were displayed was itself a relic of a once-living era. The mammals, for instance, were stuffed and posed and set against a backdrop painted to look like the wilds of nature—yet so obviously artificial—and had been in place since before the vogue for zoos (that is, for actual living