Northern Negociation

Mario was headed for the Hudson Bay to live there. He was lying on the rocks convulsing. From the
darkness beneath, his eyes would open to fix on the far-away spires of pine trees. These spindled
shapes, half-luminescent, half-etched black against the glowing night sky, were standing watch over
Mario. Abruptly, at a lower break in the branches, innumerable bats traced mercurial stills across a shaft
of moonlight. Mario was covered in cold sweat. His abdomen and limbs relaxed and racked.
In the morning he lifted his left arm to see two puncture wounds in the center of a swelling beneath his
elbow. He gazed at the wounds, perfectly parallel in their shallow, miniscule glance a half-inch apart.
He slowly raised his torso from the rocks. He stood up. He picked his way down the embankment to the
road. He waited at the side. When a small sedan approached, he stuck out his right thumb.
The driver took him to a small roadside store. He told Mario to buy something to drink. Mario bought a
small carton of milk, mindful that he did not know when next he would find food to eat.
Roger took the call from a cottage hospital in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers to the north.
He lied to the nurse on the line that Mario was his half-brother. He informed her that he would be there
as soon as he could.
Mr. McNaughton, we cant keep him very long, said the nurse. After a brief pause in which she
decided upon how best to phrase it, she said levelly, There is a partial snakebite on his arm. Otherwise,
he is healthy.

When Roger saw Mario, Mario was sitting in a waiting room chair, a dinner tray eaten stark clean on the
side table, his face mechanical.
The doctor prescribed some medications for Mario. It was when Roger paid for them that he began to
consider applying for Marios legal status.