No Safeguards (29 page)

Of course, we mourn all deaths, much like we cry upon meeting the cold when we fall from our mothers' wombs. And mourn we must, for death of whatever sort discords, dishevels, dismembers. And as for the new life this death clears the way for — we fear even the most exciting of beginnings — and in the new life that's adulthood, we've already read in our parents' lives what's waiting.

Now I begin to see why Treadwell forsook humanity for the company of the grizzlies, why Gulliver found solace among the horses in his stable after sojourning in the land of the Houyhnhnms: the one real, the other invented. But to be human is to live with the belief that tomorrow will be better than today; and to bear the burdens of our species, even when alone with grizzlies in the wilds of Alaska; and to know that alone, we're prey for grizzlies. Jay, brace your back. Begin.

I offer my thanks to the members of Ilona Martonfi's writing group for the valuable critiques they offered, to Michael Mirolla for a rigorous editing of the manuscript, and to David Moratto for his evocative cover design.

H[ubert] Nigel Thomas was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and has been living in Canada since 1968. He was a mental health worker, a high school teacher and finally a professor of US literature at Université Laval. He is the author of several essays in literary criticism as well as three novels:
Return to Arcadia
(2007),
Behind the Face of Winter
(2001 — to appear in a French translation in autumn 2015),
Spirits in the Dark
(1993); three collections of short fiction:
When the Bottom Falls Out and Other Stories
(2014),
Lives: Whole and Otherwise
(2010 — translated as
Des vies cassées
, 2013);
How Loud Can the Village
Cock Crow and Other Stories
(1995); a collection of poems:
Moving through
Darkness
(2000); and two scholarly texts:
Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists
(2006), and
From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel
(1988). In 1994 he was shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award; in 2000 he received the Montreal Association of Business Persons and Professionals' Jackie Robinson Award for Professional of the Year; and in 2013 was awarded Université Laval's
Hommage aux créateurs.

Copyright © 2015, H. Nigel Thomas and Guernica Editions Inc.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

Michael Mirolla, editor

David Moratto, cover and interior book design

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2015936503

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Thomas, H. Nigel, 1947-, author

No safeguards [electronic resource] / H. Nigel Thomas. -- 1st edition.

(Essential prose series ; 113)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55071-984-0 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55071-985-7 (epub).--

ISBN 978-1-55071-986-4 (mobi)

I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 113

PS8589.H4578N67 2015 C813'.54 C2015-902311-4 C2015-902312-2

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