Pierre

His hatred had become a palpable thing. I could see it perched upon Pierre's shoulder, a darkness whispering into his unhearing ear as he drove us through the rolling russet-dashed greenery of the British Columbian autumn.

Fifty years before, he had arrived in Vancouver, a fearful child, a refugee from occupied Paris. Today, the bitterness of the Seine still pulsed in his twisted veins, his hatred a jackboot forever pressing his winter-leathered face into the mire.

The darkness shone through his tight grey eyes, the bitterness curled his whitened hair into unruly knots. He gripped the wheel, tendons and sinews distorting the thin skin of his clawed hands, echoing the unrelenting clutch of the eagle's talons upon his lost childhood.

Half a century of exile under Canada's yawning skies, amidst the richness of snow-fed lakes that nestled deep in valleys carved by long dead giants, hadn't eased his hateful pain. Instead the black succubus on his shoulder gnawed away at his withered compassion.

Pierre slowed the car to point out a miserable huddle of log cabins squatting in a lakeside hollow. "That's the reservation," he spat at us, "Where the Indians live tax free since the government gave it to them."

Eagles soared above these mountains once, ranging a thousand miles in every direction, before their wings were broken, before Pierre and his succubus settled.

Pierre gestured once more, dismissive, resentful, his claw describing the tiny valley. "All this," he snarled, "all this is Indian land now."