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side of the road.
    Beached on the gravel, eyes turned skyward, a large sturgeon, a casualty of the road, watches the clouds sail by.

Tête-à-la-Baleine

    JOYCE OPENS ONE EYE. The alarm clock says a quarter to five. She dresses in silence, without turning on the light. She pulls her duffel bag from under the bed, hoists it onto her shoulder and tiptoes out of the room. Her uncle’s snoring upstairs blends with the purring of the refrigerator.
    Outside, a cloud of mist rises from her mouth. To the west, the moon has just gone down and the faint winking of the last stars can just be made out. Joyce sets out at a brisk pace and avoids looking at the neighbours’ houses.
    A few minutes later, she reaches the high school.
    She glances blankly at the schoolyard—orange gravel under the mercury arc lamp—and realizes she feels nothing anymore, neither disgust or contempt. She is surprised at how quickly the past and forgetting have fallen into step behind her. Twelve hours ago she was still a prisoner of this enclosure, yet now the place seems completely foreign to her. Not even the despicable Frost fence bothers her now. Of course, theappearance of a fence changes considerably depending on which side of it you are standing. And on this side, the latticework is reminiscent only of the harmless grid of a geographic map.
    She lengthens her stride.

    When she was six years old, Joyce used to slip furtively into her father’s office. She would close the door without a sound, weave her way among the piles of Fisheries and Oceans Department publications, the boxes full of government forms, the catalogues of buoys, and withdraw from the cabinet some long rolls of paper. She would remove the elastic bands and unfurl on the floor dozens of nautical charts of every scale and colour, most of them covered with notes, calculations and hastily delineated fishing zones.
    Joyce developed a particular preference for chart 274-B, an immense projection on a scale of 1:100,000 of the coastline of the Lower North Shore with, at its very centre, the tiny village of Tête-à-la-Baleine. She had unrolled this chart so many times that its edges had turned a parchment colour. When examined against the light, the blue of the sea revealed an intricate archipelago of greasy finger marks interspersed with currents, depth markings, buoys, seamarks, lighthouses and channels.
    In one corner of the chart, near the legend, was this printed warning:
    THE READINGS TAKEN IN THE COASTAL ZONES BETWEEN SEPT -Î LES AND BLANC-SABLON DO NOT MEET MODERN STANDARDS. UNMAPPED ROCKS AND SHALLOWS MAY EXIST IN THIS AREA. CAUTION MUST BE EXERCISED WHEN NAVIGATING THESE WATERS.
    And, indeed, the local topography displayed an astonishing number of islands, islets, reefs, peninsulas, mirages, wrecks and buoys, as well as innumerable rocks that surfaced here and there at low tide.
    While the nautical charts of the region showed an abundance of islands, there was at the same time a glaring lack of roads. This might have been put down to an omission intrinsic to nautical charts, whose primary function is to facilitate navigation, but the reason was much less obscure; the maps showed no roads quite simply because there were none. The 138 stopped at Havre-St-Pierre and resurfaced briefly at Pointe-aux-Morts. The stretch between those two points— 350 nautical miles strewn with the aforementioned shallows—was serviced by ship and airplane.
    This dearth of roads produced two significant effects.
    The first was that the people of Tête-à-la-Baleine travelled very little. They were content to practise aseasonal variety of nomadism known as transhumance, which involved spending the summer on Providence Island, a few miles from the coast. This collective migration had in times past made it possible to move closer to the cod shoals during the fishing season. Which raised a question: Now that the cod fishers moored their boats at the Tête-à-la-Baleine municipal wharf, why had no one