River City by John Farrow

misty morning, the Indian men were taken to hunt deer on the king’s land. They were astonished to finally find a familiar animal: deer! In France! Domagaya was invited to slaughter one, so walked toward the animal, silently and quickly at times, and the Frenchmen watched from a low hill, fascinated by his movement. He stole through the bushes, although this was a forest unlike any he had known, as it suffered from an absence of trees and underbrush and, from time to time, sprouts of water rose into the air out of circular stones on the ground. Domagaya moved towards the deer, creeping forward now. The deer studied him. The Indian man crept forward. The deer stared into his eyes. Domagaya’s heart sank. He had been spotted. He had beensmelled. The deer continued to sniff and stare. Then resumed a calm graze. Domagaya walked up to the deer and slit its throat.
    Across the lawn, where the courtiers were watching, men and women collectively gasped. Then suddenly burst into cheering. That night, the conversation around the king’s table was all about the sauvage who had used a knife—a knife! —to kill the deer they were eating.
    Taignoagny and Domagaya discussed why a deer in France would let him do that. “She saw you,” Taignoagny repeated. “She smelled you.”
    “She does not know how an Iroquois smells.”
    “This is true.”
    “It’s like with pigs? They wait until the king wants to eat one, then they die.”
    “Deer are not pigs,” Taignoagny pointed out. “Pigs are fat … pigs are slow. Pigs make strange noises.”
    “The hoof of a deer and the hoof of a pig are alike.”
    “The mind of a deer and the mind of a pig are unalike.”
    “The deer knew I had come to kill her, Taig. I looked into her eyes. I saw her thinking. She thought to herself, I am on the king’s land. This red man has come to kill me so that he can eat me. I will let him do that, because I love the king.”
    “Is that what she was thinking, Dom?”
    “I saw in her eyes what she was thinking.”
    If Domagaya could comprehend the thoughts of the pale-skins’ deer, then Taignoagny considered that he might be able to comprehend the thoughts of their women. They stared into his eyes so often, virtually compelling him to interpret their thoughts. They’d lift their startling, half-bare chests, and giggle, and twirl their dresses, then scurry away laughing. How would it ever be possible to understand them? And yet, he believed that he had begun to discern patterns in this strange world. The gardens demonstrated that the trees, plants and flowers of France were willing to live according to the pleasure of their keepers’ vision, just as animals lived and died according to the whims of their keepers’ hunger. The chickens laid their eggs purely for the sake of the pale-skins’ morning diet. Taignoagny had begun to suspect that the women of the king’s court might similarly be in favour of offering themselves for the sake oftheir men, although whether they would do so for one they called a sauvage, he was not sure. From the way they looked at him, he was beginning to wonder, so for reasons quite different than his brother’s, Taignoagny also vigorously applied himself to the study of French.
    That winter, while the brothers were being initiated into court life at Fontainebleau, the seafarer Jacques Cartier took a Mediterranean trip to Sicily. Aboard an Italian vessel as a passenger, he spent long, uneventful days preparing his supply list, for the king had consented to provide three vessels for his next voyage, the largest undertaking of his career, which made an obsessive review of his requirements necessary. In the back of his mind he was already musing about the possibility of wintering in the New World. Of this notion, he would not whisper a word in case it slipped back to the king’s ears, yet he had vividly imagined the triumph of his return a year later than expected. He’d be assumed dead, together with the ship’s company.