Barkskins

23. dogs and villains

He sat for an hour on a knotty and punishing pine bench before the governor’s secretary beckoned him in. As a young missionary Louis-Joseph Crème had first served in New France. Later he had been sent to Port Royal in Acadie, a true wilderness, and among the Mi’kmaq he began to keep a notebook of their rich vocabularies of geological structures, weather and season, plants, animals, mythological creatures, rivers and tides. He saw they were so tightly knitted into the natural world that their language could only reflect the union and that neither could be separated from the other. They seemed to believe they had grown from this place as trees grow from the soil, as new stones emerge aboveground in spring. He thought the central word for this tenet, weji-sqalia’timk, deserved an entire dictionary to itself.

Now, with receding hair and arthritic joints although he was only forty, he stood before the governor, shivering, for he felt a coming illness. Sleeping on the ground did not suit him. He was not of this place, he had not sprouted here and so to him the ground was hard.

The governor was a haughty snob, un bêcheur with a cleft chin and a bulge of throat fat. He gave off an air of having hung in a silk bag in the adjoining room until it was time for him to emerge and perform the duties of his position. His eyes focused on the wall, never meeting those of Père Crème.

“Surely I do not need to tell you that the English in Hudson Bay press down from the north, they press in from the sea, they squeeze Acadie, they press east from the Ohio valley. New France is awash in spies, scouts, Englishmen and rangers from New England. The coast fishery is ravaged by English and Boston vessels.”

The missionary thought that every sentence the man uttered had a subterranean meaning — if only he could grasp what it was. “Your Excellency, the Mi’kmaq are constantly called to fight for France although they have very few fighting men these days. They were once a vigorous tribe, as many as the hairs on ten men’s heads. Today they have but a few hundred warriors. As they die they lose their sensibilities, their knowledge falls away.” He hoped he, too, would not fall away. He felt quite dizzy.

“Their sensibilities! These people are masters of inventive cruelties. I mention to you the example of the young sailor captured from a fishing boat. The women, who are even more inhuman than the men, tortured him by fire and knife. They burned his feet with fiery brands, his legs, his privy parts. They cut him until he was pouring blood like an April freshet, then thrust his charred feet into an iron pot of boiling water. So speak not to me of their ‘sensibilities.’ It is your concern to care only for their souls. And to inculcate in them love and respect for le Roi notre prince—the King, our prince. And urge them to fight the English. That is your duty.” He spoke as one confident in his position of power.

Père Crème knew that temporal power had its limits, some of them very abrupt if one observed recent history. “I humbly try to do so at every chance,” he said, feeling his chills switch suddenly to feverish heat. “And in any case that sailor was an English, a Protestant.”

“That is beside the point. You seem to regard the Indians as special persons. They are no more than men, and not very reliable men at that. We are forced to use them as fighters when our territory, when the great fort we are now building at Louisbourg is menaced by the English. It will be the gateway to our North American possessions. You know how important Acadie is to New France. France must retake it. It is vital sea access.” Now he was locking his fingers together and stretching them out.

Père Crème forbore to mention that the fort could not protect the seaway; that was the responsibility of the French fleet. But he only said, “Your Excellency, the Indians do suffer. They do have feelings. They love their country, which we are taking, they love their children, whom we are corrupting with our goods and forceful ways. They say France regards them as of little value. And this has long been their land, where untold generations have lived undisturbed.”

“Indeed. You know, Père Crème, you seem to me to be lacking in zeal for the cause of France.”

“No, no. I only pity them. They have lost so much, so many.” Why could the man not grasp that the Mi’kmaq wished only to live their lives as they had for many generations, and that as every day passed that was less possible?

“And France has lost so many. You would do better to think of them rather than these libertine heathens who are dogs and villains. They are not Christians as you, a designated man of God, might have noticed.”

Père Crème, dismissed, tacked for the door, his feet at odds with each other and his neck wry. He prayed silently for the governor to become more observant, more kindly. Or better yet, to fall down in a fit and never rise. He immediately withdrew this cruel wish and requested forgiveness.

Several days later he addressed a letter to his sister Marguerite, one of hundreds of letters never sent, for he had no sister. It eased his mind to have an imaginary confidante, and he was able to work out his sometimes chaotic thoughts this way.

Dear Sister Marguerite.

For a minute he imagined her, slender and pale, sitting in a green chair and opening his letter with a silver knife. She might wear a gold locket with a wisp of her brother’s hair in it — or a miniature of their mother, whom Père Crème could scarcely conjure from his faded memories.

They do not have orderly Lives as we do. Their time is fitted to the abundance crests of Animals, Fruits and Fish — that is to say, to the Seasons of the Hunt and ripening Berries. One of the most curious of their attributes is their manner of regarding Trees, Plants, all manner of Fish, the Moose and the Bear and others as their Equals. Many of their tales tell of Women who marry Otters or Birds, or Men who change into Bears until it pleases them to become Men again. In the forest they speak to Toads and Beetles as acquaintances. Sometimes I feel it is they who are teaching me.

He stopped for a long time before continuing with the feeling that he was getting it wrong.

To them Trees are Persons. In vain I tell them that Trees are for the uses of Men to build Houses and Ships. In vain I tell them to give over so much hunting and make Gardens, grow Grains and Food Stuffs, to put order in their Days. They will none of it. Therefore many French people call them lazy because they do not till the Earth.

I have heard a Story that in some earlier time…

24. Auguste

The children of Mari — Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Noë and Zoë—were trying to find their place in a world so different from Mari’s stories of the rich Mi’kmaw past. The realities were difficult.

“Dîner!” called Noë without bothering to step outside, slapping down the worn wooden bowls, the old spoons. There was no response, not even from Zoë, who always had a remark. Noë stood in the doorway, listening. The offshore wind had shifted slightly but carried the fading clatter of boots on rock. They were wearing boots instead of moccasins. Noë knew what that meant but denied it. She stepped out onto the path. Auguste clutched her skirt. She saw them far down the shore crossing naked rock. If it were just Elphège and Theotiste — but no, it was all of them. Achille, Theotiste, Elphège and Rouge Emil, all three of her brothers and the cousin, and at the end, half-running to keep up with the striding men, the slight figure of Zoë. Anguish and rage mingled in her like a kind of soup made from nettles and grit. She shouted, “Go on, then!” and pulled Auguste up in front of her so he could see and mark this event.

“That’s them,” she said through clenched teeth. She picked up a small stone and pressed it into Auguste’s hand. “Throw it,” she said. “Throw it at the no-goods that has run off.” Her voice rose again. “Go on then, you hell brothers and damnation sister,” and to the boy, “Throw it, throw your stone at them we’ll likely never see again.” But even as she said it she knew it was untrue, that she was acting out an imitation of drunken Renardette’s angry fits. She did not know why she sounded like someone she detested, nor why she spoke this way once again. She was not behaving as a Mi’kmaw. Why did she even think of Renardette, who was now deep in the past?

The child cast the stone; it fell on the path. As it rolled, the boy saw Zoë, the smallest figure, turn and look back, Zoë who responded to his outstretched arm and waved. The lead figure turned as well and his arm cut an arc in the air, a kind of salute from Achille that made Noë groan. The men should be setting out to hunt moose, but because of the boots she knew they were going to work for the French logger.

“Come, dear Auguste. We’ll eat all the dinner, just you and me.” Their house was a wikuom and although Mi’kmaq sat on the ground to be in contact with the replenishing earth, there was a low single-board table, the nails hammered into the legs from above. Before the stew redolent of duck meat, meadow garlic, wild rice and greens had cooled in the kettle the door flap was pushed aside and Zoë slid in.

“Not what you think,” she said before Noë could start in. “They will cut trees on the St. John again. Rouge Emil heard from Eyepatch they should come. Just this winter. Elphège said tell you money is in his good moccasin. You use it for what we need, says he. They come back spring, those cut logs go in the river. Come back a little bit rich, maybe. But not Achille. He goes moose hunting.”

Noë nodded. If Zoë stayed it was all right, and if Achille came back from his hunt in ten days or so, they could manage for a winter. It was the idea of abandonment she dreaded. All her life she had been afraid of being left alone while everyone around her vanished. She filled a bowl with stew for Zoë and set it before her. When the bowl was empty Noë filled it again.

“They didn’t want to go, thinking what happened before. Rouge Emil’s father comes to stay with us so that don’t happen another time. He comes soon, I think. Other people see those brothers leave, think just you and me here.”

“They think just me — they see you go with them.”

Zoë shrugged and made a face. “Maybe. Maybe they see me come back, too.”

A little later Rouge Emil’s father — Cache Emil — appeared in the doorway. He threw something large and heavy wrapped in bloodstained canvas on the floor.

“Moinawa,” he said. “Bear meat.” He looked at the stew pot. Noë filled a bowl for him.

“Good.” He told them he had shot the bear hunting with Achille a few weeks earlier. Not only bear meat, but he had brought his blankets and his flintlock. He would sleep outside in the small wikuom that Theotiste and Elphège shared.

“I am here. No male persons will bother you.”

• • •

Three years before the brothers had made a trip to La Hève to the lumber mill to ask if there was any work for them, but a man with a patch over one eye said the local Indians were sufficient, go away. The cousin, Rouge Emil, was persistent. He stood beside a stack of cut planks.

“You got work for good axmen cut pine?” Everyone knew that the mast pines of Mi’kmaw lands were superior to the trees that grew along the St. Laurent, which were coarse in grain and more liable to snap. Eyepatch nodded. “It’s summer, but there’s always work for good choppers. Let’s see what you can do.” He fetched four axes from the mill, then filled his pipe. “See two spruce in front of the rocks? Take them down.” His tone was contemptuous, for he knew Indians were lazy and stupid. Eyepatch’s pipe was not finished before the spruce lay side by side on the ground, topped and limbed. He reversed his opinion of Indians.

He nodded and they cut mast pines on the St. John River despite the summer heat and biting insects. In a few days they were crusted with black pitch, a kind of woodcutters’ armor. When they first had arrived the pine candles had been in bloom, each great tree pulsing out tremendous volumes of pollen until the sky was overcast and the choppers and even ships at sea wondered at the brilliant yellow showering down.

• • •

That summer while they were swinging distant axes, Noë, barely fourteen winters old, gathering wild onions, was raped by two boys from the French settlement, one of whom she recognized as Dieudonné, a fisherman’s son who returned again and again for his pleasure. She could not evade him. He seemed to live in the underbrush near their wikuom. He was only a boy, a fisherman boy, with a red chapped face and eyes flicking as though he feared the priest was near. He was strong from hauling nets and pulling oars. At first she loathed him, but after some weeks he became affectionate and, although he was two years younger, she began to return the sentiment. He said he wished they could marry and would press the matter on his parents when he was older.

When the brothers came back from the St. John her condition was obvious. No one mentioned it. But the next day Elphège looked at her in silence for a long time. He waited. And she told him how it was. By then Dieudonné was weeks dead along with his father and uncle and several other Acadians, for their fishing boats all had been caught in a concentrated snarl of storm that strewed the shore with broken boats. She thought of Dieudonné in the grip of the relentless sea as she had been in his grip. The result of the dead boy’s life had been Auguste.

In their childhood days in the forest, Noë thought, none of them had imagined they would come here to the ocean’s edge, far from René and Mari’s house. But they were here. She had not thought to have a child, but now there was Auguste. All this had happened because Theotiste and Elphège had brought them to Mi’kma’ki, the land of memory.

25. sense of property

Their great change had come about because of Renardette, who caused their lives to become as different as those of strange people. For years at René’s old place, heavy drinkers from Wobik lurched out of the trees calling for Renardette. One, “Démon” Meillard, appeared often and Renardette went into the woods with him. The day after René died, Renardette rushed to Wobik, to Meillard, a widower whose taste for spirits matched hers.

Achille, Noë and Zoë stayed on alone at the house in the ever-larger clearing. Achille trapped fish and hunted, cut firewood as had René, and made hardwood potash. He sold this stuff to the traveling merchant who came with his wagon every month or two in the warm season. Noë and Zoë gathered berries, cowslips, fiddlehead ferns in spring, nuts, calamus root, mayapples, sassafras and many barks for the medicines they had learned from their mother. They made maple syrup. They had a garden but it was small and weed-choked for they had adopted Mari’s distaste for cultivation. A few pumpkins sometimes matured in the fireweed. Noë made rather awkward willow baskets, which Achille sold to the potash man. Zoë milked and tended the cow. There had been two cows but one died the month after René was killed, perhaps, thought Zoë, out of sympathy so that René’s spirit might be comforted by a familiar cow spirit.

Their lives were marred by unwanted visits from swill-wrecked Renardette and her paramour. It was unclear at first why the couple kept returning to René’s old house, but they came often, lugging demijohns of spirit, which they urged on Achille. Renardette swaggered into the house looking at each spoon, each wooden cup. Often she would examine a pot or a cloth and say, “Well, that’s mine!” Noë would wrest the object from her.

“Nothing in this house is yours. There is nothing here for you.”

“This house is mine,” said Renardette. “René gave it to me. He said, ‘When I am gone, Renardette, you have this house.’ ”

“What lies!” cried Zoë.

“Go away!” said Noë, swishing the broom.

Achille began to think the drunkards wanted René’s house and property and would be pleased to murder all of them to get it. He refused drinks from their jug, which he knew would make him insensible and give them the opportunity to butcher him and his sisters and blame the deaths on bounty killers. He slowly came to the belief that they were the ones who had murdered René.

Tales of the alcoholic couple drifted far east to the ears of Elphège and Theotiste along with the rumors that they planned to kill Achille and the twins and seize the property. They heard of Renardette’s claim that the house belonged to her.

“They are white people and they think they can seize it,” Elphège said to Theotiste.

“They will likely get it.”

Elphège was troubled by the idea of inherited property. Was the house René’s to give? Was it even Trépagny’s? All this was French, French ideas, French ways. English ways, English words, French words. Invaders’ ways.

• • •

The older brothers had lived for some years at Odanak, the Indian village of Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and mixed tribes, fighting for the French and raiding New England settlements for bounty captives. Once warring enemies, they banded together, lamenting the submergence of their ancestral lands under a flood of white settlers.

At Odanak, Theotiste had married and fathered a son, who died of measles in his third year, two days after the mother succumbed to the same burning illness. Elphège was secretive about women and even wary because of his long infatuation with the youngest wife of Sosep, an elderly sagmaw.

Theotiste came to his brother one day. Elphège was sitting near the river shaping a handle for a crooked knife. “Brother,” he said, “I have thought much of our younger brother and sisters. Achille, Noë and Zoë. I think we should get them.”

“Ho,” said Elphège. “Get them? Live with them here as kin? In Odanak? Or make a visit to them?”

“No. I wish for us to be united. I wish them to be with us, wherever we go. They are part of our band. More and more I do not care to stay longer in Odanak.”

Elphège said nothing and after a long silence Theotiste said, “Perhaps this is not a very good idea.”

Elphège looked at him. “Brother, you have ever put forward good ideas. I will think about what you say.” After a little while he said, “Maybe it is good if we go to that place of our mother.”

Theotiste said, “Here we are just some Indians. There we will be Mi’kmaw people.”

Elphège was silent for a long time. He had no taste for whitemen’s “conversation.”

“René was a good man,” he said at last.

“He was. Do you recall that winter when we gave him a snake and showed him how to play snow snakes and he didn’t want to stop at dusk?”

“Yes. Trépagny threw his snake in the fire.”

“Small matter, that was only a stick. Maman carved him a better one. It could slide far. I remember that well.” He looked at the river. “The children of one mother should be together. We have the same blood.” Elphège nodded and bent over his work.

Several days later Theotiste said more. “First it would be good to bring them here to Odanak. And then go with them to our mother’s country and make a home there. There are Mi’kmaw here at Odanak who would come with us. Sosep wishes to return. We could find wives. I was happy when my wife was with me.”

“Yes, a Mi’kmaw woman. But if our sisters and brother come with us, will they abandon René’s house?”

“It is only a white man’s house.”

“Our mother’s thoughts were always in her childhood country. She called it ‘the happy land.’ It is our place more than Odanak. Even though Sosep says it has changed greatly and there are many troubles.”

“It will be good. I dreamed it will be good.”

Elphège shifted to his brother’s view and said, “Let us go then, first to René’s house, then to Mi’kma’ki.”

• • •

They reached Wobik, much grown, with many paths twisting this way and that. The woodland, which had once wrapped around the village, now began nearly a mile from the most distant house.

They slept in the woods. Elphège woke, staring up at the birds-of-fire stars already folding their wings. It was the time—wopk—when dark became grey, quivering night shapes slowly solidifying and returning to their daytime forms. Theotiste rose and stretched his long arms above his head.

“It will be a good day,” said Theotiste, ever hopeful.

• • •

Smoke coiled from René’s roof hole as always. Theotiste pushed in. Noë was making cornmeal porridge and dropped the spoon when he came through the door. “Brother! You terrified me. You know how our father died — I thought…”

Zoë came in from the cow carrying a bucket of milk. She shrieked with joy and embraced first Theotiste, then Elphège. Her cry brought Achille up from the river, where he had been mending eel traps.

Achille was almost too handsome a young man to look upon. He was tall but sinewy and as flexible as water, of perfect form. His glossy hair fanned out in the wind, his dark eyes were warm and amused. His mouth, like Mari’s, curled at the corners, and all who noticed this curving smile thought of her.

The twins, still children, were more like René with stiff black hair and slanted eyes. They were active as all women were, bending, folding, picking up and reaching, handing out and taking, caressing, scooping good things into bowls, offering their brothers delicacies.

The older brothers looked around, seeing the objects of their childhood — the old table marked with knife cuts. Theotiste remembered Mari wiping it with a piece of damp leather. Those wooden household plates — René had shaped them, Theotiste had smoothed them with a fine-grained stone. Mari’s old wikuom had sunk back into the earth but they remembered sleeping in it as children, remembered reeds of moonlight shooting through the tiniest holes.

“Brothers,” said Achille, “I must tend my potash kettle. Come outside and talk with me.” They walked some distance to his potash works. He stirred the kettle’s contents with a stick.

“It is our source of cash money — and the firewood I cut.”

Money! thought Theotiste with scorn but he said nothing. They talked all day and far into the night. Achille said, “After Renardette left we burned her evil brew house. But men still came out of the woods looking for beer — and her.” Theotiste’s glance caught something shining on the high shelf against the entry wall. Something like a small snakish eye, he thought.

“None here have married,” said Elphège.

“Ah,” said Achille, “the Wobik girls are not Mi’kmaw girls. Should I not find a Mi’kmaw woman?”

Theotiste nodded. “We all should do so. Even Elphège.”

“Ho,” said Elphège.

“Zoë and I never see a good man to marry,” said Noë. “We are out here in the woods and the only ones who come by are bad ones.”

“So perhaps this place is not so good for you?” asked Theotiste.

“No, no. It is not, even though in childhood it was pleasant, but what else can we do?”

“We want you to come with us,” said Elphège, as though it had been his idea. “Theotiste and I are the oldest, but we are of the same blood and we will care for you always.” For Elphège this was long oratory.

Theotiste spoke with the assurance of one who knows. “We intend to seek out the land of our mother. Even if it be greatly changed, there must still be a place for us among our people. Mi’kmaq still live there, perhaps even kin. I spoke many times with Mi’kmaq at Odanak. Some of them will come.”

Achille nodded.

“I had a vision some time ago that we must do this,” said Theotiste very softly. “First we come for you, then all go to Mi’kma’ki. I saw it fair and beautiful as our mother told us.”

“But what will we do about Papa’s place?” asked Achille, waving his hand, encompassing the house, the river, the weeds, the potash kettle filled with the results of his labor.

With some sadness Elphège thought that Achille might be more French than Mi’kmaw. “If you follow the white man’s ways of property you could sell it,” said Elphège. “Or, if you are not that way, just leave it and come with us. What are your thoughts?”

It was clear what Achille’s thoughts were. He could not just walk away after so much chopping and burning. He was wedded to the idea of ashes as something of value. He had a sense of property. Elphège wondered if all Mi’kmaq were not changing into Frenchmen, wanting money and goods. Few could resist the luxuries, and Achille, Zoë and Noë were métis, half French, half Mi’kmaq.

Theotiste nodded. “You maybe sell it. Is that old captain still alive? Bouchard?”

“He was alive last week,” said Achille. “He is very old but strong. Yes, he would have ideas.”

“Shall you go see him and ask what disposition might be made of this property, all this sad ravaged land? He may be helpful to us.”

• • •

The next morning Achille and Theotiste set out to paddle to Wobik in René’s canoe, but less than three miles from the house something whistled overhead.

“Vite! To the shore!” said Achille through clenched teeth, swerving them under hanging willows. The canoe scraped through tearing branches. Before the willows played out they crept up onto the bank and dragged the canoe behind them.

“The forest is alive with bounty hunters. Let us leave the canoe here and go by foot. But warily.”

Theotiste touched Achille’s shoulder in assent and they began to weave through the trees.

• • •

“What, sell René’s house?” said Captain Bouchard. “Yes, such a thing can happen. There is a man, Jean Mague, a farmer from France looking for a property with cleared land and a house. He does not intend to waste the good years of his life chopping trees. I think he would pay a fair price. He will soon be here.” Jean Mague, he remarked, had two brothers, three grown sons, their wives, two nephews and their wives to farm with him. They were a strong group and handy with firearms. As the old man spoke, Jean Mague himself came through the door, a lipless face, legs and arms as long as wikuom poles.

Mague was interested to hear about René Sel’s place and wondered how it had come in the possession of these Indians. He liked the sound of a sturdy French house, a potash kettle, cleared land. He looked Achille and Theotiste up and down rather insolently but agreed to walk back with them to see René’s property.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said when they mentioned René’s death. “Bounty hunters will never molest my family.” And because he was who he was he wished he had brought some beads and cheap whiskey to trade. He carried his gun and followed.

Before the house came in sight Theotiste ran ahead. He dug quickly in a certain place and put what he found in his pack basket, then rushed to the house to tell Elphège and his sisters that Jean Mague was coming. Noë ran into the back room and rummaged for the small birch-bark box decorated with colorful quillwork, a box from Mari’s childhood and precious to Noë. Inside the door Theotiste reached up to the high shelf. His hand grasped René’s old snow snake. They went out where Achille was already talking with Jean Mague, the newcomer looking around the property with narrowed eyes to show no one could put anything over on him. His squared shoulders and long heavy steps showed he already felt himself the possessor.

“Will we give him the potash I made?” Achille asked Elphège in a low voice.

“Yes.”

• • •

Before the talk of price even began, they were interrupted by Renardette and Démon Meillard, who came out of the trees riding tandem on a black horse. They were sober and grim. Démon, his rum-red face shaped like a hazelnut, the modest chin augmented by a pointed black beard, spoke only to Jean Mague and said that the previous owner, René Sel, who had held the notarized title to the property, had bequeathed it to Renardette, his adopted daughter. René and Renardette, he said knowingly, were both pure French. Renardette owned it, not the half-breed Indian squatters who claimed it, who said they were René’s children. Demonstrably a falsehood. What Indian knew his true parentage? None!

Démon spoke directly to Jean Mague. “Renardette will sell this good property to you. We will record the sale in Captain Bouchard’s great ledger and all will be legal and binding. This is white man’s business. These Indians have no claims, they are nothing at all. Nothing.”

Achille whispered to Theotiste. “But is it not recorded in the ledger that the house belonged to René? And that René married Mari, our mother, following the whiteman law?”

Theotiste whispered back: “Perhaps it was, but when I asked Captain Bouchard he went in the back room with the ledger, came out a moment later and showed me there was nothing. But I could see rough bits of torn paper in the cleft of that book.”

In the end Jean Mague, Démon and Renardette Meillard stood apart under the trees and made their arrangement. They shook hands, turned and faced Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Zoë and Noë. Jean Mague said, “I have agreed to buy the property from the owners. You must now leave.” He raised his gun, ready primed and loaded, to his shoulder.

Achille stood stiff with rage but Elphège touched his arm and said in a low voice, “Brother, it is only a whiteman house. You do not wish to be tied down to a potash kettle like such a one. Let us go. We will hunt and fight. We will not burn trees into dirty ashes.”

Achille’s voice was tight. He felt his blood curdling with poison. “It is clear that Captain Bouchard informed them, that he removed René’s claim from the ledger. He was friendly to our father — for our father was a white Wenuj. But to our mother and to us his friendship was false.”

“What does it matter? Before you there lie many good years of hunting. That is a better life for you.”

Achille stood silent for many heartbeats, then said, “We will come with you to our mother’s country.”

“Good. First we go to Odanak.”

26. Mi’kma’ki

At Odanak, Zoë, Noë and Achille turned shy, unused to such a moil. The village, with its wikuoms, and even some log cabins, frothed with people working, cooking, softening hides, splitting canoe ribs, lifting a tangle of gaudy roots from a dye kettle. Two men played waltes, the bone dice leaping up when they slapped down the wooden bowl. Jen, a round-faced Mi’kmaw woman with three children, looked at Zoë and Noë, at their soiled whiteman dresses.

“Sit down. Eat,” she said. “You are good strong girls who will make a journey to Mi’kma’ki.” Zoë and Noë, starved of female company for years, began to thaw. Noë had brought three of her baskets, which she presented to them, but these were not admired. In Odanak there were basket makers of great skill and the women brought out several to show her: an oval birch-bark container sewn with spruce root and worked with such intricate designs the eye could not hold them. Noë touched a basket with a decorative rim of artfully twisted black root. Some baskets were tiny, woven of sweet-grass, some were splendid with red- and green-dyed root strips.

“I wish to learn how to make such beautiful baskets,” said Noë, kicking at her own poor efforts.

“We will show you,” said a young and heavy woman with callused hands who told the story of Ai’ip, the lazy woman who split and twisted roots around her fingers and somehow made the first basket. “No person could name this object. And they had to call it ‘that root thing.’ ”

“I am choking with new thoughts,” said Zoë. “We know nothing,” for they had only ten winters.

Theotiste, Elphège and Achille wanted to start at once for Mi’kma’ki, but Sosep, an old trapper sagmaw, took them aside and spoke at length.

“I am going with you. But it is not good to go now when winter is advancing. There is nothing to eat at that place in the winter. People go up the river. We better wait until spring.”

Achille itched to go.

“What does he mean, there is no food at Mi’kma’ki? Mari our mother told us it was a place of great richness, fish, lobsters, clams and oysters, birds by the thousand, succulent plants.” Sosep overheard this and laughed. “Mi’kma’ki is a summer place. Winter very hard there unless you cached ten moose and sixteen bears.”

For more than four cycles of the moon the Sels waited at Odanak. Theotiste, Elphège and Achille hunted and fished, talked with the men about the best route to Mi’kma’ki. The women helped Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for their journey. Noë, determined to become a maker of fine baskets, worked at it until her fingers blistered.

The approaching journey with their older brothers to their mother’s country filled their thoughts. From Mari they had heard of the parts of their homeland: Wild Potato Place, Skin Dresser’s Territory and Land of Fog. They were discarding memories of their forest childhood. Would spring never come?

Theotiste told Zoë one day that Mari’s spirit would surely be there in the trees and wild plants, perhaps in the rocks, in the fish and animals. It would be a reconnection.

“I wish we had brought Maman’s bones,” said Zoë.

Theotiste nodded. “I have brought them,” he said.

“That is good!” Then a moment later she said, “I wish I had brought the little wall basket she made to hold René’s comb.”

“Noë will make one. It will hold new combs.”

When at last they set out, the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife came with them as well as old Sosep, who had the solid reputation of an important trapper-hunter, the wavering reputation of a sagmaw and the faded reputation of a local chief. His scarred face was serious. He had a grave manner that indicated character and wisdom. His teeth were large and yellow, his black eyes squinted, for his sight was failing. “It is good you waited. Even now it may be too early. But we can advance. My trapping run is still in Mi’kmaw country — if those French have not built their square houses on it. I wish to return. I wanted to see what Odanak was like — but even here there were whitemen. The worst is this Odanak priest, Father Lacet.” He imitated the priest’s sly expression, his dabbling hands. “He is boring holes in all the waltes bowls so they cannot hold water and give us divinations. I will help you. I know your father’s favored trapping places, for his brother told me.”

“His brother!” said Theotiste. “Do we then have an uncle? Living?”

“Very alive. Cache Emil. He will show you that place and others. But these days whitemen want those places, too. And they take them without courtesy or talk. They take them.”

For Theotiste and Elphège this was earth-shaking news. They had believed their father, whom they did not remember, and all of their father’s kin were dead. This magical uncle was a proof that they had made a correct decision.

Sosep said, “We will be pressing through the end season of snow. We must make snowshoes as you did not bring any from that place you were before you came here.” And he sat with Elphège and Theotiste and Achille making the ash-wood frames while the woman friend of Theotiste’s dead wife, Zoë and Noë wove the caribou rawhide webbing in a close mesh to better support the weight of their loads.

• • •

They began to walk toward the ocean, which none of the Sels had ever seen except in imagination. The journey was rough underfoot and circuitous in their minds. They lived on their dried meat and sacks of maize, for at this time of year wild creatures were still deep in the forest, plants had not broken through the ground. Every morning the streams were edged in ice. But in the second week Theotiste got two fat beaver.

Winter returned with a snowstorm, a giddy flying mass, heaping drifts behind logs, covering all. When the storm cleared and night became as day with reflected moonlight the cold increased. In the next weeks they twice had to build temporary wikuoms and take shelter from the snows.

“Oh, what a late spring. If it snows more,” said Sosep, “we will have to construct a toboggan.”

“Perhaps it will not snow,” said Theotiste.

“Perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow,” muttered Sosep.

“I am hungry,” said Nöe.

Sosep laughed. “Mi’kmaw persons can stand hunger for a long time without dying.”

In the waiting days inside the wikuoms Noë and Zoë plagued Theotiste and Elphège to retell their mother’s stories about Mi’kma’ki. They never tired of hearing about the blueberry patches, the elderberries with their drooping umbels, serviceberries, chokecherry trees, the succulent crayfish, roasted beaver, the fattest eels, even oily walrus, all part of the rich Mi’kma’ki life where one had only to step outside the wikuom and take a plump turkey. Later Elphège wondered if it had been a mistake to fill their heads with stories of a summer world, so different from what they found when they reached their destination. Others told stories about Kluskap when life for the Mi’kmaq was good.

• • •

“Listen to me,” said Sosep. “This is a bad time to return to our country, not only because of this untimely weather. Do you not know that the French king gave our lands to the British?”

Theotiste looked at him. “How can that be? It is not the land of the French king to give. It is ours.”

“This happened some winters ago. Surely you heard the talk of it in Odanak?”

“I thought it was only foolish talk. I heard the British seized Port Royal, but you say ‘our lands.’ ”

“Yes. It is our land but we suffer advances from both French and English. The French see us as soldiers to fight for them, our women good only for fucking. The priests see us as bounty for their God as we might see beaver skins. They do not see us as a worthy people. The French use us for their protection. They do not understand that we are allies of the French king, but not his subjects. We are not obliged to him. That is why he gives us presents — to buy our favor. Now the British greedily claim even more land than the French king gave that was not his to give.” He stopped, raised his chin. “And the British give no presents.”

“But Mi’kmaq are going back there. As we are. And I have heard that French and Mi’kmaq often marry. As our father René married our mother, Mari.”

“Yes, it is true. And that is good because there are so few of us left. Now that the beaver are so few we must marry someone, ha ha! I fear we will soon find the English putting their houses on our trapping grounds.”

“I heard some French families live near us Mi’kmaw and they are not unfriendly.”

“That maybe is so, the French have long been our friends — somewhat — but now the English think they possess everything. Their settlers move in. The English king pays good money for Mi’kmaw scalps. So we make a war against the English. Many Mi’kmaq are fighting in canoes. We are good fighters and capture many English boats. But we are so few. We are so often ill.”

• • •

They reached the Mi’kmaw country in late March with spring trembling behind the wind. Bird migration flights had started. In a small stream they saw numerous small fish surging up against the current. Sosep pointed out a dozen French families living along the shore. He spoke of the woodlands and fruitful edges that had supplied so many generations with berries and edible roots but warned that now much land had been plowed up and given over to maize fields and turnips. These French Acadians had drained many of the salt marshes to grow salt hay for their livestock. The larger game animals, moose, caribou and bear, had all retreated. The beaver were greatly reduced in number so severely had they been taken, for their skins could be turned into guns and metal pots. Yes, the beaver had become a kind of whiteman money and the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave had fallen away.

“Still,” said Theotiste, “we can trade meat for maize and pumpkins. Will not the Acadians be glad of venison as they always are? As we are glad of bread. And I think the sky and land must be the same as they forever were, for not the Plets-mun nor the English have the power to level cliffs, they have not the power to drain the sea nor eat the sky. Can we not live side by side?”

“We have little choice,” said Sosep with a puckered expression. And soon there were so many birds the sky rattled, so many fish the bay boiled like a pot. There was enough for all.

Despite the old man’s complaints that all was spoiled, the Sels were astounded at the unfolding bounty of Mi’kma’ki. The great bay with its powerful tides, its estuaries and islands, its freshwater rivers and the nurturing ocean supplied everything. The newcomers stared at the ocean beating in ceaselessly, stared agape as the tide went out exposing miles of mudflats riddled with tiny holes from which came the hissing noise of mud shrimp below. Equally fascinating was the swift return of the ocean, the saline water coming in stealthily.

They had to learn this new country, its red cliffs, the changing tides, the seasons for herring, for shad, a different pattern of weather and storms than they had ever known. At first the ocean seemed all-powerful, but they came to understand that the true richness of Mi’kma’ki was in its rivers. They had to learn the names of unfamiliar fish. Farther out from shore there swam several kinds of great whales, porpoises and dolphins. There were varieties of seals, lobsters as big as women. The Sel men, as hunters and trappers, had to learn their ways quickly.

They saw that the foolish Acadians were diligent gardeners and because of this they felt themselves superior. The local surviving Mi’kmaq lived on the edges of old trapping areas, somewhat away from the French settlers.

“But we newcomers have no wikuom. We have no shelter,” said Noë, who longed for the stability of a wikuom or even a house. A whiteman house was impossible. She knew that. There were several of those geometric structures at Odanak, but here people despised them and there was the example of the young Mi’kmaw hunter a few years earlier who had been to a white settlement and there he had seen English drinking brown water from a saucer. The saucer was very beautiful with a deep blue rim. Somehow he had gained possession of this saucer — or one like it — and brought it back to Mi’kma’ki. His scandalized and outraged neighbors saw him drinking from it and killed him for a traitor to traditional ways. The repulsive object was smashed on a stone.

“But,” said old grandmother Loze, “two families have saucers now and no one has killed them. Everything does change.”

27. blood kin

With some ceremony Sosep brought Cache Emil, Elphège and Theotiste’s uncle, to them. Cache Emil, a tall, powerful old man with hulking shoulders and a deeply lined face as though flint-gouged, stepped forward and put both hands on Elphège’s shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “I know you, the children of my brother. Often my life has been heavy with loss and sadness, but today I feel so much joy that I have no good words for it.” He grasped first Elphège, then Theotiste; his cheeks were wet. For Elphège and Theotiste in that moment Cache Emil became the center of life. They had longed for a father without knowing it. Cache Emil said he had a son, Rouge Emil. Their own blood, their cousin.

“You,” he said to Achille, who had only fourteen winters. “You are the son of Mari, long-ago wife of my brother Lolan before he ceased his existence. I welcome you. When Rouge Emil returns we will have a feast. But come with me, Elphège, I will take you to some old places where my brother who was your father often got his quarry, fur or flesh. And good places at the river mouths for fish weirs. Sosep and I will speak together of choice trapping lines for Theotiste — and Achille.” Sosep pompously and formally assigned Elphège their father’s old trapping territory and told Theotiste and Achille they would have productive areas adjoining his own. No priest could do that!

But Rouge Emil made a face; neither his father nor Sosep understood that the old custom of assigning trapping and fishing territories was no longer in the power of Mi’kmaw men; white men and their rules of land division had taken over. Such territories were house sites, garden plots and cow pastures.

Achille respected Cache Emil but gravitated to old Sosep, not Sosep as a sagmaw, but Sosep the renowned hunter. Achille had been a natural hunter from childhood; René had been a wood chopper who hunted only when pressed by necessity. Now Achille became passionate. It was his new identity in this new world that had enclosed him. He preferred to hunt and stalk on land — and let others concern themselves with the life of rivers and the ocean.

• • •

At the welcoming feast Theotiste, who believed drink was an evil spirit’s brew, saw Cache Emil drank only one small cup of brandy, but Rouge Emil swallowed cup after cup.

“Will you not drink, Cousin?” asked Rouge Emil, but Theotiste turned his face away.

“I have ever disliked the white man’s whiskey,” he mumbled. Rouge Emil drank on until he surrendered to the weight of the spirit and fell senseless.

A few days later many Mi’kmaq came to help put up a big wikuom, large enough for all of them, on the edge of the forest overlooking the sea where a path bent down to the shore. Here they buried Mari’s bones. After a long search Achille killed a beaver and put its skin on the burial place as they did in the old times, but a few days later it was gone. Someone had taken it to sell.

Achille and Theotiste said they would later make small wikuoms in suitable places, but for now it was better if they all stayed together. Zoë laughed to see a band of Mi’kmaw seamstresses sewing their house as one would sew a garment, until they put her to work painting the moose-hide door in whirls and double curves of black, purple and red.

“Sister, there was never a more beautiful entrance,” said Elphège. Inside the wikuom was floored with reed mats, a central stone circle for fire. Inside was quiet. Inside was their haven.

“A fine wikuom,” said Cache Emil. “The French brag of their great tall houses in their home villages, but why does one need such a tall house? Men are not so high in stature. Perhaps they have giants for visitors? Nor can those houses be moved, they say. And if those houses and those villages are so fine, as we often hear, why did they leave them, leave their friends and wives and come here? Truly these must be the rejected ones from their own people so stupid, so hairy and grasping.”

The elderly Mi’kmaw grandmother Loze, who had been at Odanak, bossed the sewing. “But everything is changed,” she said, as she always said. “Because our fathers killed so many beaver to trade with the Europeans the beaver are angry and have left the country, and now strike us with illnesses.” She pointed at Alit Spot, who had ulcers on his neck and hands that refused to heal. Many of the old beaver hunters had suffered those sores, and when the disease went inside the body they had died coughing blood. “But you know well,” she said, “after eel, beaver meat is the best meat for the Mi’kmaq. We destroyed our best food to trade their furs to the white men. Now these people from far away try to push us off the shore, push us into the interior, where the biting insects live. Here, near the ocean, the breeze teaches insects kind ways.” She said enviously that she had heard a true story that at one place the Mi’kmaq had shot the settlers’ cows, but French soldiers came and arrested the hunters. “They should have arrested the cows.” She said that as a child she had been shown the place where the rattling plant—mededeskooï—grew, that magic plant that could cure many illnesses and even grant wishes. Even in the old days it had been elusive. Her accounts always ended “that was a long time ago.” Yes, that was the old life.

When the weather warmed she came with the Sels at low tide, showing them how to dig clams, their feet sinking into the rich mud, shorebirds running before them and crying out warnings to each other. Loze told Noë that the dog whelks made the beautiful purple dye the Mi’kmaw people liked.

“I will show you how to do it one day,” the old woman said, and she urged them to gather armfuls of seaweed to flavor the clams they would steam on hot rocks.

• • •

The summer and autumn passed. It was time to reinforce the wikuoms with skins and weighty poles. The loons called in their storm-coming voices, a sign that otherworld being without legs, Coolpujot, would soon send winter gales. For the men the cold and deepening snow made easier hunting. Achille went into the woods on snowshoes, sleeping out many nights. In January he hunted seals on the ice with Rouge Emil. Achille preferred to hunt with Sosep, whom he called Nikskamich—grandfather. He did not smoke the pipe as it dulled the senses. He shuddered to think that he had once stood over a reeking potash kettle. Although January and February were the best months to hunt moose, for dogs could drive the animals into the deep snow, where they floundered and made easy targets for men on snowshoes, Achille hunted them in every season. Before a summer hunt he took a steam bath and then rubbed himself with earth and leaves to dampen his human odor. Unlike other hunters he did not use dogs to find moose except in winter; he could smell them from a great distance and he knew their minds and habits. Old Sosep told Cache Emil that Achille was such a hunter as only emerges every few generations, almost a megumoowesoo, one of those fortunate Mi’kmaq whom Kluskap honored with extraordinary abilities. But to Achille he said jokingly, “Now you must marry and have a woman to bring home the meat you catch. Now you must learn to play the flute to attract such a one.”

In spring Achille went with Rouge Emil to an island where Apagtuey, the great white auk, nested. They took two each, for the birds were good eating and their gullets made the finest arrow quivers. But the next year when they went to that same island there were no birds, only a litter of feathers and bones, for English and Boston whalers had come before them.

Gradually people began to say that Achille did not care about Mi’kmaw girls because he must be married to team, a moose, as he knew moose ways so well. He traveled into the interior and one time went far northwest. When he returned from one long journey he spoke privately to Elphège and said that Captain Bouchard would betray no more Mi’kmaw people, for his tongue had come loose and fallen to the ground.

Elphège nodded and said, “My brother, it is good.”

• • •

Mi’kma’ki was richer in birds than the forests of New France, but when the annual migrations began, the volume of birds, as many as the snowflakes in a blizzard, the smell of their hot bodies intensified by millions of pulsing wings, stunned them. It seemed every bird on earth was here — especially sandpipers, so many they covered the shore like a monstrous twitching grey blanket, gorging on mud shrimp. They poured out of the south sky like froth-crested waves. It was the time of birds roasted and steamed, broiled and boiled. The wood pigeons, which they had seen in childhood in Kébec, darkened the world. Predatory birds arrived, too, pierce-eyed ospreys, eagles, hawks, falcons. Old Sosep commented that Europeans would soon be arriving in numbers rivaling the birds. His listeners shuddered. The sagmaw seemed to ricochet between two thoughts: he foresaw billows of overseas white people arriving in countless ships — but he spoke and acted as if the old traditions still governed their world.

Theotiste and Elphège went out at night in their canoes with others during the migrations. They lay quietly in the bottoms of their canoes and let them drift like logs into great flocks of sleeping ducks. Then Cache Emil and old Sosep lit birch torches and held them high over their heads in the darkness. The ducks awoke, shrieking, and flew confusedly around the torches while the younger men knocked them down with poles. In this way they filled five canoes with fat ducks in one night.

“Now, Brothers,” called Elphège, “you will see how well we eat. We do not go for long solitary journeys to get one tough old moose, we go together and quickly get an abundance of delicious fat greasy ducks.”

• • •

Theotiste and Elphège sat in fog-softened sunlight making ax handles, for the new white settlers coming into Mi’kma’ki thought of nothing else until they had taken down enough trees to build their heavy square huts. It was not interesting work to make the same shape of wood over and again, but they left the hunting to Achille, who was so quiet and stealthy he could creep close to a fever-eyed ruffed grouse on a hollow log rolling out his crescendos of wingbeats, and slip the leather noose at the end of a long stick over the bird’s head. Making ax handles for a little money helped, for there were many things that now must be purchased, things that had never been known in the old times. They had to have metal pots and utensils, nails, wire, tools and weapons.

As they scraped and whittled the ash handles, a group of men and women came down the slope. One of the women — Talis — stopped. She was tall, with smiling eyes that crinkled at the corners, her flawless teeth bright.

“Why do you not put away those sticks and come help us mend the weir?”

“Why indeed,” said Theotiste, getting up and setting aside the handle he had begun to shape. “I will go with you.”

The rivers of Mi’kma’ki were not solitary currents of water but strands in a great net of liquid motion that defined the land and mingled with the sea in outward flow and inward rush of tide. Each tiny runnel, each roaring raceway, torrent and trickle, cascade and flood had its own habits and ways, and Mi’kmaq had to know those ways. This was the water world that Theotiste and Elphège began to learn.

“My head is swollen with all this fish lore,” said Elphège.

“Yes,” said a sinewy old fellow with long earlobes, “as long as there are Mi’kmaw people there will be knowledge of fishing.”

• • •

The French king sent money to build roads to the interior (where they wished to push the Mi’kmaq, said Sosep), and now, when time allowed, many men, including Theotiste and Elphège, took temporary work as chainmen for surveyors and as laborers on the new road for hard cash. Chopping trees was another thing that had to be done, said the new people.

When a whiteman lumber outfit set up a sawmill and began cutting trees in the interior country, there was more work for money that could be used at the trading post. The missionary, Père Crème, urged them to put aside trapping and fishing for a time in favor of this occupation. With the money, he said, they could buy salt pork and flour. Although salt pork was a disgusting food, flour made bread and the people had come to like bread. Elphège, Theotiste and Achille had all labored long hours with René clearing the forest, they were skilled with the ax and found work with the French company Duquet et Fils. Rouge Emil was less skilled, but he joined them. It was not the Mi’kmaw way, but it seemed necessary.

• • •

One who was not pleased with the newcomers from Odanak was Père Crème. He was disturbed that old Joseph, the one the Mi’kmaq called Sosep, had returned. And the Sel family, what a calamity! All of them could speak French, and it was best that Indians did not learn French. The two older brothers could read and write, using the Roman alphabet, a serious error on the part of some mission cleric decades earlier. They were capable of doing much harm and stirring up trouble. And they resisted farming, the men preferring to work in the woods, on the rivers or at odd jobs for some of the year, reserving the autumn and winter for trapping and hunting. He wrote,

Dear Sister Marguerite.

While I have great Sympathy for the Indians, they are difficult. The sorest Point is their Refusal to grasp the Fact that Land belongs to the Man who improves it as Scriptures show. They only fish (an idler’s occupation) and wander through the Forest taking Animals and Plants for Sustenance, but when a White Man comes and cuts the oppressive encroaching Forest, builds a House for his Family and Shelter for his Beasts, the Indians complain that he takes their Land, Land they have done nothing to improve, but rather have allowed to ever thicken with more and more Trees. They do not understand that the White Man who struggles and strives to reduce the Forest’s grip has exerted his God-given Right to claim the cleared Land as his own. By virtue of the suffering of Indian Attack and severe Labor as well as the adversities of removing from their Homelands to take up a Place in the Wilderness it is the Destiny of the French to hold this Land as they have earned moral Title to it from God.

Nor did Sosep like what he saw. He immediately counted harmful changes. One of the French settlers, Philippe Null, had inherited a sum of money from an uncle in France, and with this windfall he bought three cows, a bull and two horses. The huge animals roamed freely and within days had consumed all the nutritious and medicinal plants within a day’s walk.

“Those animals must have been very sick,” said old grandmother Loze, “for they have eaten herbs to cure headache, lingering cough, prolapsed uterus, fevers, broken bones and sore throats.” Sosep added that once butchered and cooked, the cows, though not as tasty as moose or caribou, looked the same in the pot. But one had to be very private about it.

Other Acadians, sharpened with envy of Null’s increasing livestock herd, bought pigs. No pasture nor pen was necessary as the animals grew fat on forest forage and very quickly learned to dig clams. Now the Mi’kmaw women had difficulty getting clams, for the hogs were on the sands as soon as the tide ebbed, rooting and gobbling. There was a tragic loss when a hog attacked and killed a lagging Mi’kmaw toddler who was trying to imitate the clam diggers. The child was dead and partially eaten when the others finally saw.

It took hours, even days, to find many once-common things. But of uncommon weeds there was no lack — mallows, dock, stinging nettles, sow thistle, knotgrass and adder’s-tongue, aggressive clovers. Sosep filled his lobster-claw pipe with dried wild tobacco and spoke out one evening.

“We are sharing our land with the Wenuj and they take more and more. You see how their beasts destroy our food, how their boats and nets take our fish. They bring plants that vanquish our plants. Most do not mean to hurt us, but they are many and we are few. I believe they will become as a great wave sweeping over us.” His deep voice became charged with intensity, a conduit of spiritual power. “All these woods once ours,” he said, “and we went anywhere we wished without hindrance. That time has passed. But I wish to tell you that if we Mi’kmaw people are to survive we must constantly hold to the thought of Mi’kmaw ways in our minds. We will live in two worlds. We must keep our Mi’kmaw world — where we, the plants, animals and birds are all persons together who help each other — fresh in our thoughts and lives. We must renew and revere the vision in our minds so it can stand against this outside force that encroaches. Otherwise we could not bear it.”

Noë muttered to Zoë, “Does he mean we must give up metal pots and go back to boiling food with hot rocks in a hollow wood pot as Loze said they did in the old days?”

Sosep had not heard this and continued. “If we had not harmed so many animal beings they would fight with us against the outsiders. Especially the beaver. But no longer. I know that some of you love the French, and that is unavoidable lest we die out, but remember that you are Mi’kmaw, remember.”

Achille told himself he would live the Mi’kmaw way, imagining all was well. He would take a wife and he would tell his children that they, too, must imagine that they lived in a Mi’kmaw world though it was ceasing to exist. They must remember how that life had been, not how it now had become.

But even as old Sosep spoke he knew very well that many Mi’kmaq welcomed the ways of the Acadian French — their clothing, their stout boats, their vegetables and pork roasts, the metal tools, glass ornaments and bolts of fabric, their intoxicating spirits and bright flags and even their hot bare bodies, so pale. Already the Mi’kmaw language was awash in French words with remnants of Portuguese and Basque from the days of those earlier European fishermen on their shores. And he himself, as a connection to the spiritual, as a former sagmaw, saw that the priests had already replaced him and the wise old men of former times.

28. the secret of green leaves

The years went by and the white settlers, many from La Rochelle in France, doubled and redoubled in number. Familiar with the arts of drainage dike and ditch, they were demons to reshape the great grassy marshes into farm fields, and where there was forest they felled the trees. They set their immovable houses in rows along mud-thick streets where hogs wallowed and domestic fowl strutted. They encased themselves in thick woolen clothes so that bodily odors were never wafted away in the wind. The Mi’kmaq tolerated and even befriended them, although they did not understand the newcomers’ zeal for surplus — clams, berries, fish, logs, hay, moose hides — which they sold or exchanged for more cows and horses, more chickens and pigs.

The Sels married: Noë to Zephirin Desautels, an Acadian fisherman who was a cousin of the dead boy who had fathered Auguste; Zoë to Paul, an older Mi’kmaw man whose left shoulder in childhood had been grievously hurt by an enraged moose, an injury that damaged his hunting abilities. But he became a superior eeler and their wikuom was never empty of food. Achille married a Mi’kmaw beauty named Isobel, already well known for her strong fingers and skill in making the new kind of basket, not of roots but of thin cedar and ash splints — always she had a splint, ligpete’gnapi, in her hand. Elphège had found and courted Delima, the widow of a man killed in an ambush, and Theotiste at last married Anne-Marie, the woman who had been his first wife’s friend. They settled into a way of living away from the white settlers, though more and more men went to cut pine in the winter camps.

Achille grew proud of his hunting skill and he imagined there was no beast he could not understand and kill.

“To be sure, on the land,” said Rouge Emil, “but you avoid the creatures of the sea. You are no fish hunter,” and he laughed.

This remark smarted and Achille kept thinking of the stories of old times, when the Mi’kmaq had hunted whales in their bark canoes. Everyone said canoes were best in rivers and along the seashore; in deep water they could be dangerous when certain bad fish attacked. Achille did not believe that a fish could harm a canoe; this was a story to frighten children. He said he would go far out in the bay and fish alone in a canoe, and twice he did so and caught cod half his own length each time. He carried a fish spear — in case of English attackers, he said. But one hour’s experience changed his opinion of fish.

He persuaded two others, his friends Barth Nocout and Alit Spot, to paddle their canoes out with him. They could see the people onshore as small as their little fingers. From the corner of his eye Achille saw something briefly rise from the water farther out. The fishing was good; they made jokes. Then his canoe lurched. He peered into the water but could see nothing. A few moments later Nocout’s canoe rose high out of the water and they saw the enormous black and white orca that had lifted it up on its back. The whale sank and Nocout’s canoe tipped and rocked but did not go over.

“Do not paddle!” called Nocout, whose father had told the stories of dangerous fish. “Take up your spears! When it comes near again strike it hard.” For long tense minutes they waited and then, ten canoe lengths from Nocout, they saw a dorsal fin like a monstrous pine stump rise from the water and slowly sink again. They gripped their spears. Achille saw the gleaming white oval patch behind the invisible eye as the creature rose below him. He stabbed the spear with force into the sleek side as it came up. The animal rolled away and dived at once, wrenching the spear from his hands and carrying it away. Before the animal disappeared it spoke to Achille in a familiar voice.

“You are not,” it said in Sosep’s deep voice. Then it was gone.

“It may leave us now,” said Nocout. “I pray there are no others.” They waited, motionless, terrified. Then Nocout whispered, “Let us paddle to shore.”

As they paddled, they constantly searched the distant water for the great fin, the near water for the black and white giant.

“We were protected by spirits,” Nocout said, panting, as they reached the shallows.

“Did you hear them speak?” asked Achille.

“I felt their presence.”

Nocout and Spot told their story many times that evening and Nocout’s father shook his head and said that in the old days when Mi’kmaq had to make sea journeys in frail canoes they would put many leafy branches in the prow and stern.

“Those evil fish smell the leaves and they think the canoe is a little island and they are in danger of being stranded on its shore. So they veer away. You were fortunate there was only one. Had there been a pack they would have toppled your canoes and thrown you in the water. They have eaten many of our people. They know the trick of tipping canoes from their way of bumping ice floes. The seals fall in the water and they are caught. Perhaps they think men are seals.”

Nocout’s father went to a storage basket where he kept curiosities and brought out a single tooth the length of a man’s hand. “They have a hundred such teeth,” he said, passing the heavy ivory around.

Achille saw that he had been a fool. He looked across the fire at Sosep. He wanted to ask him what the fish meant when it said “You are not” in Sosep’s voice. Had it truly spoken? What was the meaning of those words? The old man was staring at him, and as their glances met Sosep raised his eyebrows. But Achille was unable to find a way to ask.

29. roast moose head

Sosep died suddenly after a hard day’s moose hunt. The old man sat by the fire with a piece of meat in his hand. Achille saw he had fallen asleep. He could not be roused. Perhaps an easy death for an old man tired from a successful hunt, enjoying the warmth of a fire and rich moose meat, thought Achille. But Sosep had long been planning his death song, a great recounting of his hunting feats, journeys, his children, wonderful things he had seen in his time as when, during a long battle, an enemy had transformed himself into a bear. Now he had fallen silently into the world of the departed with no death song at all.

Achille went down to the sea and looked out. The water was nearly flat, a dull color under a dull sky. The sky seemed gone, there never had been sky and Sosep was down there, under the water. A gull floated, quietly asleep.

“Grandfather,” called Achille. “I wish you a good journey under the sea even though you told me ‘you are not.’ ” At the sound of his voice the gull awoke and, after some effort, lifted into the air.

• • •

He had thirty-three winters entering his middle years now. Because game was scarce he was away for many days on each hunt. He had somehow lost the respect of the animal persons. His wife, Isobel, sighed at his frequent absences.

“Why can you not work in the forest cutting lo’gs as do others?”

“I cut lo’gs after good hunt if we got plenty food.” His children and wife wore French clothing as he did, and rumors flew that this time the English settlers were coming in truly large numbers to seize the land. You are not, he said to himself. The thought never left his mind.

No one knew if they were at war, or with whom. Bloodthirsty woods rangers came from Boston in armed ships and killed indiscriminately. The English dug up their graveyards and threw Mi’kmaw corpses into fires. Aloosool, the black measles, killed so many there were few left to bury them and in one place they had to put the bodies in a pond to keep them from the whitemen’s devouring hogs.

Although the Mi’kmaq resented their Acadian neighbors’ incursions, they married some of them, taught them their language and beliefs and absorbed many of their ways, moving ever more deeply into their double lives, the interior reality warring with the external world in a kind of teetering madness. For their part, the Acadians, conservative and serious agriculturists, passionate marsh drainers, wished to be left alone and resented the priest’s exhortations to take arms against the English. Père Crème occasionally thought that a new kind of people, part Mi’kmaq, part Acadian, seemed to be forming. Then the English king urged volunteer English on retirement from the army or navy, and colonial New Englanders, to take up free land in Nova Scotia. Thousands upon thousands came.

• • •

Achille, once again beset by the spring urge to travel north, planned a hunting trip of two or three moons with his oldest son, Kuntaw, named for a powerful stone with bright copper specks, and his nephew Auguste, light-eyed and brown-haired like an overseas person, Alman’tiew. Years before, when Kuntaw had passed three winters and it seemed he would survive, Achille had made him a tiny bow and miniature blunt-ended arrows.

“Now you shall hunt,” he said.

The child imitated Auguste, who was older and already knew how to kill birds and frogs. He notched the arrow, drew the little bow and released the string. The arrow traveled only the length of his shadow. Late in summer he was successful. At a distance the length of a wikuom pole, a large grasshopper rested on a stalk of tall grass. Kuntaw, eyes narrowed, aimed and shot. The grasshopper flailed in midair, fell to the ground and lay on its side, legs drawn up. Kuntaw picked up his kill and rushed to Achille. He might have bagged a moose for all the congratulations. The grasshopper was displayed on a piece of birch bark. They celebrated with a feast and a grasshopper dance. In this way the family welcomed a new hunter.

Kuntaw reached eleven winters and looked longingly at a certain girl, Malaan. He wanted to marry but this could not happen until he killed his first moose. Auguste, who had already killed his moose two winters past, suggested Kuntaw seek out a giant grasshopper instead. But Achille drew the boys close and said they would go with him to the land of little sticks in the far north, the taiga where the black spruce grew, wind-stripped of branches on their weather side, wind-forced to lean aslant, giving way to the rolling tundra studded with lakes and boulders, a land of birds that stretched to the horizon.

“After eight or ten days we will be in a forest of masgwi—birch — and spruce. Here we stop to hunt and fish, to smoke meat, make our canoe, for farther north than this place the birch does not grow. When we find good game country we hunt.”

Each made up his pack of necessary things. Achille brought flint and a supply of the black fire-starting fungus, but, he said, they would also carry fire with them. The morning they left he put a hot coal from the home fire in each of three clay-lined clamshells, tied them tightly closed with strips of hide.

“We will be able to make a fire quickly,” he said. “Every morning that we travel we will do this. Each will carry a fresh fire coal. We will hunt with bow and arrows. Bring your spears. We will not use European firearms. We will be Mi’kmaw men.”

Jenny, one of Noë’s daughters, watched all this. One evening in the wikuom she whispered to a friend. “You know those whiteman pigs get our e’s—our clams?”

“I do. A big grandmother pig is the leader.”

“Yes. I have a plan.” She reached behind her and took up a skin sack filled with empty clamshells. She whispered to her friend and the other girl laughed.

“I will help you,” she said.

They were up before the tide turned. From the banked night fire Jenny and her friend took hot coals and put them in the clamshells, joined the halves together with clay so the clams seemed their usual unshucked selves. They placed the shells temptingly just above the waterline, then sprinkled a little sand over them. They waited, high up on the shore. A great sow and six lesser beasts came down to ravage the clams. The first clam was rooted up and as it fell open the old sow seized the hot coal. The watching girls were gratified at the terrific squealing and roaring and rolled on the sand in laughter. The old sow rushed away to the village emitting unearthly squalls. The other hogs rooted up the rest of the burning clams and in a short while the Acadian village trembled with porcine uproar. For the women it was a wonderful day.

• • •

The hunting journey began well. Auguste and Kuntaw were excited by the new territory and the chance for a real hunt as Mi’kmaw men had made in the old days. On the third day Auguste shot a swimming beaver, then dived into the water to retrieve it and his arrow. Before he was back onshore another beaver came up out of the depths and Kuntaw shot it. Auguste brought both to land. They ate well that night. Achille had picked willow and kinnikinnick leaves on the way and tied the stems to his pack basket; as he walked they cured. At night they smoked their pipes before bed and told stories.

The new territory refreshed their eyes, everything infused with the spirit of mntu. They camped beside waters so crowded with hungry lake trout it was the work of a few breaths to net six. They saw bears at the rotten logs, noticed the small creatures that made their livings in cavity-riddled snags and the many owls who lived on this bounty. This was a world Wenuj never noticed, even when walking through it.

After a rainy night they woke to a spider’s world of spangled webs. Heavy mist silenced footfalls and the sound of movement through brush. It was a good morning for hunting and many more good mornings followed. Kuntaw saw that Achille was very strong in his body and in his understanding of the unseen forces that bound all into one — animals, spirits, people, fish, trees, ocean, winter, clouds.

“We got not much food now,” said Achille, sharing out two small woodcock. “We hunt today, go a little east.” They walked toward the sun all morning and while resting at noon near a small lake, their prize came to them. Out of a tangle of small spruce a lustrous black bear ambled onto a grassy bank. The bear was so fat his belly trembled with each step. Achille shot first, Kuntaw and Auguste simultaneously, then Achille again. The bear lay still.

“How we get him back to camp?” said Auguste. “He’s too big.”

“Ho, you will see. Come,” said Achille. “First we gut this bear, leave for wolves.” They eviscerated the huge animal and Achille dragged it to the edge of the bank. “Watch. I show you.” Achille took sinew cords he always carried and bound the bear’s hind feet to the front feet. He jumped down off the bank, turned his back to the bear, slid his arms into the loops formed by the bound paws, leaned forward and with a heave and lurch stood almost upright, the bear like a monstrous knapsack on his back. He alone carried it to their camp, his feet making deep impressions with every step. After he let the burden down he made them examine his footprints. “You see how deep when a man carries a heavy burden? Sometimes that person is carrying supplies, sometimes fur packs. And sometimes a bear.”

• • •

A full moon passed before they neared the end of the birch forest. Here the hunting party stopped early one evening on the shore of a small lake. Achille looked about. “The masgwi—white birch — of this forest is good. And I see trees encumbered with knots of the fire-starting tinder. We make two canoes with this bark,” he said, “even though it is not the correct moon.” Auguste, who had brought his crooked knife, would fashion the paddles. They made camp in the dying light. Auguste, who had a way with naming, called it Canoe-Making Place.

While Auguste resoled his worn moccasins, Kuntaw and Achille set out for the east end of the lake in the wavering darkness of early morning, frost crackling beneath their feet. From the distance of an English mile they could see a moose-shaped dot at the end of the lake. As they came closer Kuntaw could see it was a young female moose in the shallows; the rising sun caught the glittering water dripping from her muzzle. They left the shore lest she see them and backed into the woods, circling closer, each step painfully slow and carefully placed. Long before they were near, the moose raised her head and stared in their direction. She had heard them. Kuntaw was shocked by the acuteness of hearing that let her sense their distant approach. A cloud of steam swelled into the bitter dawn with each of her exhalations and Achille thought that these puffs were like the lives of men and animals, brief, then swallowed up in the air. Kuntaw had no room in his mind for thoughts; he was so tense his jaw ached. “Wait, now,” whispered Achille. “Let her become sure there is no one.” After a long time the moose splashed closer to them. “She will feed along the shore, she will come to you,” signed Achille in pantomime. Closer she came until they could hear the tearing of the water plants. When she clambered onto solid ground again Achille motioned and Kuntaw raised his bow, drew back the string and released it. The moose bled and fell.

“Now you are a man,” said Achille. “I show you how we get this moose back to our camp.” He tied his useful sinew cords around its neck, plunged into the water as did Kuntaw, and together they towed the cow along the shore.

Auguste said, “We now may call you Moose Killer instead of Grasshopper Slayer.”

They dragged the heavy animal onto the sloping shore and gutted it. Kuntaw and Auguste carried the head up to the cooking fire and Achille followed with the heart, liver, a handful of fat and several choice cuts.

“So,” said Achille, “do you make up the fire now and broil liver slices, and cook the heart slices in moose fat. And heat many small stones. I will prepare the head for baking.”

They ate the liver slices half-raw. While Achille split the moose skull, removed the eyes and washed the head in the lake, Kuntaw set a flat rock in the fire. When the rock was hot he dropped moose fat on it, then laid the slices of heart in the sizzling grease. Achille half-filled their biggest birch container with water and dropped hot rocks into it. The water boiled and he put the moose head in. It was too large and he had to keep turning it end on end. He kept it boiling for several hours, and while they waited they feasted on the fine-grained heart meat. After many hours of boiling Achille could twist the jawbone loose from the steaming head. While he pulled out the bones Kuntaw and Auguste dug a deep hole and made a strong fire in it. They continued to eat the heart slices and to throw fuel into the roasting pit while Achille gathered the herbs he needed. He scooped out half the coals, wrapped the moose head in cattail leaves, wild onions and other flavorsome greens, put the head in the pit, raked coals on top, covered all with soil.

As they finished two Cree stepped out of the trees. They said they and their families had a fishing camp on the far side of the lake. Achille invited them all to the moose head feast of the next morning.

“I have heard of this food,” said one of the Cree, “but never enjoyed the taste.”

“In the morning you will have the best food of your lives,” said Achille.

• • •

The Cree came in the morning with all their bundles and dried salmon trout, for they were moving on that day to another good fishing lake. The group included two passably pretty girls and some small, noisy boys. Achille put the cooked head on a large slab of birch bark and they all leaned forward to appreciate the enticing aroma. Kuntaw and Auguste sat beside the Cree girls, eating. In the following days, as they built their canoes, they fed on moose and more moose until the Cree returned to their fishing camp.

“Moosehead Lake,” said Auguste.

Achille, Kuntaw and Auguste, laden with smoked moose meat, went on, hard traveling by labyrinthine waterways interrupted by beaver dams that forced them to portage packs and canoe overland. The birch became scanty, submitting to white spruce. And finally even those trees fell away and they entered the land of little sticks, the meager black spruce and dwarf birch, and beyond them the endless tundra. They saw a vast expanse filled with feathery puffs of arctic cotton grass. Auguste called this Walking-in-White-Things Place. Here, too, was the hairy-stem mastodon flower catching the low sun so that thousands of plants glowed with unearthly light.

The bird millions that had passed through Mi’kma’ki earlier were in this north country, every kind of duck and goose, loons, ptarmigan, ravens, owls and jaegers. Herds of caribou drifted across the tundra. There were broken eggshells and unripe berries without number; sometimes they saw heavy grizzly bears in the distance. The expanse of tundra trembled in the distorting heat waves; in the distance lay great grey rocks, their surfaces brilliant with orange, black, green and ocher lichens. On many days it was breathlessly hot, and the biting flies were a savage danger.

“Truly, Father,” said Kuntaw, “this is the country of insatiable biting flies. No one could live here. Only birds.”

“We are here. We are alive,” said Achille. “But did we not rub ourselves with grease and ashes we would not last long.” The ground quivered, dark water welled up around their feet when they stepped on land. Their canoe angled through the twisting waterways and at every turn they saw strange new sights. At last early frosts that turned the willow stems red warned them to turn back. So ended the summer of their great hunting journey, which would last in their memories as long as they lived, but tinctured with irremediable rage and grief.

• • •

Achille carried a moose quarter for the feast that would mark their return. As they approached their home place, Achille’s wikuom, they heard a terrific hubbub of tree chopping and voices calling in a fractured language. And then they walked into two hundred English settlers cutting trees and building log houses where Achille’s wikuom had stood. They did not speak French. Thirty armed English soldiers stood ready. The remnants of Achille’s wikuom smoked on the ground.

“Where is my wife? My children?” Achille demanded, his eyes swollen with anger, and the soldiers pointed their guns at him. Six of them rushed forward and seized the moose meat, hitting and kicking. One fired, and the ball gouged a furrow in the side of Achille’s head above his ear. More than pain he felt the heat of his own blood streaming down his neck. As he fell he saw on the edge of a debris pile that once had been the furnishings of his wikuom a still-shapely hand and blackened forearm, the skin burned away, exposing the heat-spasmed muscles. He knew the hand well, for he had caressed it, many times seen it preparing his food. Isobel. His wife.

Everything in his memory emptied out and refilled with the smell of burned wikuom bark, scorched bearskin beds, the caressing hand metamorphosed to charred meat, the corpse-white face of a soldier and his black oily hair, the groan of a falling spruce and English laughter.

Kuntaw seized his arm, pulling with reckless, frightened strength. “Father, get up,” he screamed. He, too, had recognized his mother’s severed arm and hand. “Run! They will kill us.”

Achille knew this was true and he longed for death, but Kuntaw and Auguste dragged him on and, shot whizzing above their crouching runs, they arrived at Elphège’s wikuom. And so Elphège learned the English had killed Achille’s wife and his younger children, their bones incinerated in the burning wikuom. When Elphège’s wife tried to treat his wound Achille thrust her away; he preferred the wound. Kuntaw wept while Achille went outside and reeled up and down, silent but with hard, lurching footfall. Numb and disconnected, he tried to think of small things such as weather clouds to rid himself of what he had seen. Useless. The scene burned his mind as though he still stood before his ruined life. Everything smashed. He went back inside and sat speechless beside his brother. The day passed and twilight softened the interior of the wikuom before Achille spoke, his voice rough in his constricted throat.

“The English have taken my wife, my children,” he said. “There are hundreds of them and armed soldiers. It is what Sosep foretold.” The brothers sat in silence. Achille shuddered, his heart and entrails knotted with pain, spoke in a trembling unnatural voice.

“This place, Mi’kma’ki, is indeed rich and beautiful, and because of its richness now they will take it, as Sosep told us. I hunt no more. My life here is finished. I am not. I leave this land of our mother. I will go south, do lumbering in Maine. I will despoil their land.”

“They will not notice. They believe despoiling is the correct way.”

“You are right, but I will do it anyway.”

“Brother,” said Elphège, “we may follow you if more English come.”

“They will come.”

“Father! I am going with you,” said Kuntaw passionately. And Auguste, outside the wikuom, heard this and called that he, too, would be with them. But several days passed taken up with funerals, mourning and serious talking before Achille left, a great scabby welt above his left ear, the ruined ear, which now heard nothing but a roaring sound. He said Kuntaw and Auguste would stay with Elphège until he sent word for them to come. He must find a safe place first. He had to be alone to bury the memory of what had fallen on him. Elphège would help Kuntaw and Auguste. But no one could help Achille.

30. losing ground

Achille went into the disputed border region between Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick. He found Georges Fraude, a middle-aged Frenchman with a great bald dome to the apex of his head from which line of demarcation his hair flared back in thick silver waves.

“I got a woods crew two days south. Pay choppers good wages. I got some Indans — you all go together down to the camp. Right away.” He snorted and spat on the ground. “Got to be fast. Everywhere there’s falls there’s a sawmill nowdays. We’ll cut pine all the winter.” He spat again and hitched at his drooping trousers. “I want men to work the rafts when the ice goes.” Achille signed up.

Men were chopping pine in hundreds of places. The big softwoods fell. New seedlings burst up on cutover ground, but now there was a break in the density of the woodland, and as new trees sprouted, the species succession shifted a little in each cutover tract. The forest began to alter in small ways. It still lived but it was not what it had been. Few noticed. The forest was a grand resource and it was both the enemy and wealth. Achille felt it was the same with the Mi’kmaq; the white settlers used them and took them down.

• • •

Four of them walked to the camp, all Mi’kmaq. There was a little snow on the ground. As they walked, the kookoogwes called and called — René’s name for this little owl had been chouette—and the English bent it into saw-whet. The youngest of them, Perrine, was making his first attempt at a paid job. He was not more than eighteen winters, thought Achille. Watching over him was his uncle, Toosh, also from Cape Breton.

They reached Fraude’s camp boss, Alois LaGrange, in late afternoon. The man was a block of muscle, with a knife-scarred face and whiskers like pinfeathers. He gave them a sour look, pointed in the direction of the camp.

They found a clearing full of stumps and two rough and windowless hovels built by the loggers; one had a stick chimney in the roof and a fire pit in the single room below. Achille put his head inside the door, but the insufferable whiteman stink made him reel.

“I rather sleep with wolves than whitemen,” said Toosh. They would build their own wikuom and keep to themselves.

In the greying daylight they quickly cut sapling poles and slabs of spruce bark, made a large but rough A-frame wikuom some distance from the reeking hovel of the whitemen. They weighted the slanting sides with poles. It was shelter. In a few weeks it would be half-covered with insulating snow.

When he saw the new lodging Alois LaGrange said, “Bien! Less trouble that way, keepin men separate.” He was thinking of the inevitable fights and lost days of work. “Got two other Indans, Passamaquoddy, in the crew, better they move in with you.” LaGrange said this would keep all the chickens in the same coop, so to speak. Achille nodded. At least the Passamaquoddy were Algonkian relatives of the Mi’kmaq.

There were three groups: Maine men, French-Canadas and Indians. The Maine men, crouched around their indoor fire pit, put their various fixings in one gigantic frying pan and, cursing and blowing on their burned fingers, ate directly out of the hot utensil. The French buried a cast-iron Dutch oven filled with beans in the hot ashes of the central fire pit to cook overnight. When they had pork they added it to the beans. These beans smelled very delicious and when the Maine men could stand it no longer they stole the cast-iron pot, carried it into the woods and ate the contents. The empty Dutch oven was found a mile from the camp, near where they were cutting, and there was a tremendous fight with ax handles, rocks, knives, one man dead and the iron pot recovered by the supperless French. Most of the Maine men left the camp the next day. When a new crew came in from Bangor, they brought a Dutch oven and a bushel of dried beans.

The Indians cooked meat outdoors on the coals on the lee side of their wikuom, protected from the wind. They had no iron kettle, but the Passamaquoddy shared two good bark baskets so they could heat water for spruce tea. The Passamaquoddy had a little bag of China tea but the Mi’kmaq preferred spruce tips and black birch bark. During the daylight hours while chopping Achille kept an eye open for game, or even put down his ax for an hour or two and hunted the ridges. When at last he found a bear’s den under the snow they spent their free Sunday killing it. The frozen meat lasted a month, and the pelt went on the wikuom floor, the best place to sit. None of them had more than a few words of English, but Achille began to learn the tongue-twisting talk.

He had several axes, including an old one that had belonged to René. Hard use had worn away much of the cutting-edge metal and the thick remnant dulled quickly. He wanted an American falling ax with a heavy poll and, if he had enough money, a good goose-wing hewing ax. He planned to buy these when Fraude paid him for the winter’s work. He thought of René and his inimitable chopping style. At this moment in among the big pines he missed him and wished they were cutting together again. Every chopper had his own way of doing the work, but René had been notable for quick light strokes with his very sharp ax; he could go on chopping for hours without tiring. As a boy Achille had found it difficult to chop in rhythm with him.

• • •

As spring began its slow crawl up from the south, Georges Fraude arrived on a heavily breathing horse one morning and said they had to get the logs into the river immediately. The ice was going, and with one more warm day the snowmelt freshets would pour into the heavier water. But they still had hundreds of logs to drag out of the woods.

“Forget them! Roll what we got in the water.” The man’s haste seemed desperate and Achille remarked on it to the swamper.

Leon LaFlèche, one of the French choppers, said, “Did you not know that we are in the New England colonies and that we have cut their forbidden mast pines all the winter long?”

“Know nothing that. Thought we was in — what they call it? — Brunsick.”

Leon laughed. “That is why Fraude is in a hurry. The owner of this forest tract must be sendin his men to seize the logs and Fraude heard of it. The owners always know where we cuttin and let us do the work. Then they take the logs the last minute before we get them into the river.”

Getting the logs in the water was the trick. The river flowed north into New Brunswick, where they would be pulled out by Georges Fraude’s sawmill men and metamorphosed from the English king’s mast pines into New Brunswick planks. Fraude shouted and ran back and forth, urging the men to roll the logs faster. But before thirty timbers were in the drink a gang of woodsmen and Bangor toughs armed with ax handles and chains burst out of the forest and the fight was on. The militant ox teamster led Fraude’s troops in joyous resistance; the Maine men enjoyed fights above all else. They were grossly outnumbered, for the landowner had rounded up scores of men from the saloons with the promise of pay and an exciting fight. Those of Fraude’s men who could swim plunged in and made for the far shore.

The logs were captured by the landowner. Fraude paid no one. Most of the Mi’kmaq headed north, but Achille, who had meant to go back to Elphège and fetch Kuntaw and Auguste, could not return empty-handed. He drifted south looking for work.

31. follow me

Elphège, now sixty-six winters, was half-blind but sat outside in fair weather. The smell of autumn, the tick of waxy leaves hitting one another on their descent to earth let him remember the fierce colors. The leaves fell, the first winter winds swept them into hollows, rain and new snow pressed them flat. Then the woods went silent.

Winters he huddled next to the fire, buried in thoughts of colors and fog, of hunts and journeys, of the terrible day six years earlier when scorching tears burned his cheeks as he knelt beside Theotiste’s headless corpse. Despite his fifty-nine years Theotiste had become a warrior. In August 1749, when Cornwallis, ignoring Mi’kmaq territorial rights, declared Halifax an English settlement, Theotiste’s band attacked some English tree-choppers. He escaped the avenging rangers, but fell the next week to an unknown assassin, his head a prize to a bounty hunter.

Elphège was now composing his death song. Noë’s daughter Febe, after the death of her mother, had moved in to care for him. Sometimes they guessed at what might have befallen Achille, the youngest brother, who went to Maine to chop trees years before.

“Kuntaw,” said Febe. “Kuntaw will find him,” for Kuntaw, after much trouble with his wife, Malaan, left her and their boy, Tonny, and went south to search.

“If he lives,” said Elphège. “If he lives. Many evils could befall Kuntaw as he is headstrong.”

“Not so headstrong as Auguste.” Auguste spent much time with the English; he broke many English laws, drank whiskey, stole, he was imprisoned and beaten but remained defiant. The English called him a bad Indian and he took pleasure in the epithet.

“One day they will kill you,” warned Elphège.

“No. I kill them,” said Auguste. It was true that occasionally some villager was found drowned in the lake behind the town, or washed up on the shore, the white puckered body lacerated with knife wounds. Children had wandered into the forest and never emerged, their bones found years later with great crunched holes in the skulls. No one knew how these things had happened but Elphège had thoughts he did not wish to explore.

It was amusing to Elphège that with age he was presumed to be a wise man, even a sagmaw. Many people came to him to ask what they should do when an English housewife threw scalding water on a Mi’kmaw child begging food, or when another asked for magic help. It was a punishment to see his people half starved, skulking around the English and asking for employment or food. There were not many Mi’kmaw people left in the world, and each of them seemed plagued by sickness, hunger and sadness. They died easily, for they wished to die.

• • •

Years went by and Achille did not go north to his people. He kept to himself. He had the reputation of a skilled axman. The camp toughs stayed away from him. He fought with intensity and cold malice, and a man who had come up behind him in the woods and tried to club him at the base of the neck was spouting blood from the stump of his forearm — his severed hand hit the ground before he could strike. Another who crept up in the night with a firebrand to burn Achille’s wikuom was himself roasted though no one knew quite how it had happened. The man’s charred body was dumped in front of the shanty. Newcomers to the logging camp were warned to stay shy of the killer Indian, the reincarnation of the bloodthirsty savages who had massacred settlers in earlier times.

Kuntaw heard some of these stories as he made his way from camp to camp after leaving Malaan and Tonny in Mi’kma’ki. He hired on as a swamper for Duquet et Fils. It was becoming difficult to find good chances of pine on fair-size streams, so the swampers worked summers, constructing dams on the smallest rills. And the forest was dangerous; the fighting, ambushes and skirmishes continued. Men were in a killing mood.

There were more Indians in the Maine camps, and occasionally he heard some news of one named Sheely. He thought it might be Achille. This Sheely was a very good hunter, a good axman. All Kuntaw could find out was that Sheely was working in York state, cutting pine on the Raquette River. He made up his mind to go there in spring. It would take two weeks of walking, he thought. Maybe he would join Achille’s crew. How surprised his father would be. Maybe they would go to Mi’kma’ki together after they drove the logs down to Montreal. He would have his wages and they could arrange passage in a trade canoe until the river forced them to walk.

The spring of 1758 came on uncommonly fast; one day the shrinking snow was frozen and he could make good time, the next it was mush and mud. The forest gurgled and slopped. It was slow going and when he reached the river Frenchmen rolling logs into the black water said Sheely had gone with the first logs.

“Hey, Indan, you look him Montreal,” they said. “Maybe Nouveau Brunswick. Maybe Terre-Neuve. Maybe l’enfer.” Suddenly the long chase seemed foolish. He turned back and headed for Maine. There was still time to hire on a spring drive. It wasn’t meant for him to find Achille.

• • •

A month later he was on the west shore of Penobscot Bay in Catawamkeag, where crews were loading timber onto ships for export. There were several shipyards and a straggle of whiteman houses, one great log house and a tiny settlement of the few surviving Penobscots. He walked along the street fronting the bay following five or six other lumberjacks headed for the loggers’ bar where most of the rivermen would drink, wake up the next day penniless and amnesiac.

Kuntaw felt very well. He was strong, his muscular body hard. He was relieved to have given up the search for Achille. Maybe someday they would find each other, but now he would enjoy being alive and vigorous. He strode along, his eyes flashing left and right as he took in the sights. After six months in the woods even the poor settlement of Catawamkeag looked like a city.

“You!” called a strident voice in English. “You there, you Indian!”

He turned and looked behind him. There was a young woman on a brown horse and she was pointing at him. He guessed correctly that she had only eighteen winters, a double-handful less than he.

“Come here.” Her voice was firm.

He hesitated, then shrugged and walked toward the horse. It was a valuable horse, nothing like the big scarred beasts that drew logs to the landings. He stood a few yards back from the horse and looked at the girl. She was elegant, wearing a black cloak edged in red. Something about her dark-ivory face said she was part Indian.

“You like to make some money?” she asked, moving close. She lifted her head and inhaled his odor of smoke, meat and pine pitch.

He shrugged. “What do?”

“Split wood, of course.” She enunciated very carefully. “You carry an ax. Do you not know how to split firewood?”

He nodded. “I know.”

“I need you, Indian man. Follow.” Beatrix Duquet turned her horse and trotted gracefully toward the big house; he had to run to keep up with her. Watching her long crinkled hair sway, the bright heels of her boots, he felt a wave of enchantment strike him like warm rain. So, in his thirtieth spring, began the strangest part of his life as he seemed to stumble out of the knotted forest and onto a shining path.

Were not René Sel’s children and grandchildren as he had been, like leaves that fall on moving water, to be carried where the stream takes them?