LENNOX ISLAND AND MICMACS 213

and games—and then I spied awedding ring on her finger.

She interrupted my question.

“Are you married?”

“ No, ” I admitted, and wondered why she asked me.

Gradually she gave me the outline of her life. She was Indian, she said, and had married a Frenchman. They had three children. And still, I thought, she did not look old enough to be out of school. Her oldest child was nine.

“Can you speak Micmac?” I asked her.

“No, ” she admitted softly, and after a pause, “but I speak Indian. ”

“And French?”

H Yes. 71

”And English?”

H Yes. I,

Apparently the Indians are the Island’s best linguists.

“Try some Indian,” I coaxed her.

With a twinkle in her eye she spoke some unintel- ligible jargon.

Did I dare, I wondered, try that one about the green umbrella on her. Perhaps not. But I did.

She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

At me . . . or my accent . . . or sentence, I wondered.

“My man can speak Indian, too,” she remarked proudly. “He couldn't speak it when I married him. ”

“ Have an apple?” she proffered two green ones.

“Thanks!”

And off she went.

I returned to the sheep that was stuck on that last hurdle. Just as he was getting nicely over again.—