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began to show, I emerged from the forest onto the road near the fish hatchery where the pickup truck stood. My cousins and the fish men were there and welcomed me with relieved shouts. I told them I had flung my berry bucket in a bear's face, cleverly gaining time to make my escape. None of them noticed that I stank slightly of pipi. My brother Don did look at me strangely, and I was aware of a question hovering just behind his lips. But then he scowled and was silent.
    I got double whipped cream on my raspberry slump that night.
    I told nobody about the Family Ghost.
    ***
    To understand the mind of our family, you should know something of our heritage.
    The Remillards are members of that New England ethnic group, descended from French-Canadians, who are variously called Franco-American, Canado-Américaine, or more simply Canuck. The family name is a fairly common one, now pronounced REM-ih-lard in a straightforward Yankee way. As far as I have been able to discover, no other branches of the family harbored so precocious a set of supravital genetic traits for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation. (The "bodiless" mutagene came from poor Teresa, as I shall relate in due time.)
    Our ancestors settled in Québec in the middle 1600s and worked the land as French peasants have done from time immemorial. Like their neighbors they were an industrious, rather bloody-minded folk who looked with scorn upon such novelties as crop rotation and fertilization of the soil. At the same time they were fervent Roman Catholics who regarded it as their sacred duty to have large families. The predictable result, in the harsh climate of the St. Lawrence River Valley, was economic disaster. By the mid-nineteenth century the worn-out, much-subdivided land provided no more than a bare subsistence, no matter how hard the farmers worked. In addition to the struggle required to earn a living, there was also political oppression from the English-speaking government of Canada. An insurrection among the habitants in 1837 was mercilessly crushed by the Canadian army.
    But one must not think of these hardy, troublesome people as miserable or downtrodden. Au contraire! They remained indomitable, lusty, and intensely individualistic, cherishing their large families and their stern parish priests. Their devotion to home and religion was more than strong—it was fierce, leading to that solidarity (a species of the coerceive metafaculty) that Milieu anthropologists call ethnic dynamism. The Québec habitants not only survived persecution and a grim environment, they even managed to increase and multiply in it.
    At the same time that the French-Canadian population was outstripping the resources of the North, the Industrial Revolution came to the United States. New England rivers were harnessed to provide power for the booming textile mills and there was a great demand for laborers who would work long hours for low salaries. Some of these jobs were taken by the immigrant Irish, themselves refugees from political oppression and economic woe, who were also formidably dynamic. But French-Canadians also responded to the lure of the factories and flocked southward by the tens of thousands to seek their fortunes. The migratory trend continued well into the 1900s.
    "Little Canadas" sprang up in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. The newcomers clung to their French language and to much of their traditional culture, and most especially to their Catholic faith. They were thrifty and diligent and their numerous offspring followed the parents into the family occupation. They became American citizens and worked not only as mill-hands but also as carpenters, mechanics, lumberjacks, and keepers of small shops. Most often, only those children who became priests or nuns received higher education. Gradually the French-Canadians began to blend into the American mainstream as other ethnic groups had done. They might have been quite rapidly