Barkskins

38. the house on Penobscot Bay

A month after Kuntaw’s leaving in the year 1754, his wife, Malaan, sat in the weak autumn sunlight outside the English trading post when a whiteman they called Simon kicked her leg lightly and gestured for her to follow him. He said nothing and she said nothing, but he kept her in his room all winter. In the spring the man returned to England and she went with Richard Tarbox. Her son, Tonny Sel, grew up around the post running with the omnipresent dogs and scruffy knot of untended children. They made themselves a kind of wild den under the old canoes. Malaan showed only a fitful interest in Tonny or in the women from the Mi’kmaw village who came several times to coax her from the current white man who kept her, but she was furious when they tried to take Tonny away.

“He should be brought up by Mi’kmaw people,” said the women.

“And am I not a Mi’kmaw person? I will keep him here at the post. He will learn whiteman ways. Mi’kmaw ways not good now.” Too deep in private despair to bother with the child who did well enough on his own, she existed on a narrow ledge of life that was neither Mi’kmaw nor white, going with whichever man nodded at her or gave her food. She grew fat. She slept prodigiously, night and day, difficult to arouse, as though it was too painful to rise from submergence.

“Ah,” said one of the old women, “I remember when she was a girl, she was clever. She made fine quill embroidery.” No one knew what had changed her into the somnolent, distant woman. Some said she was sick with the whiteman whiskey disease, others said it was for love of Kuntaw and shame at his abandonment. They had all heard that Kuntaw was living with a whiteman woman in Maine. He had not come back and no one had gone to talk him back. Some said Malaan had divorced Kuntaw.

They had married as children, soon after Kuntaw, Auguste and Achille had returned from their moose hunt to find ruin. In sorrow Achille had left his lonely and grieving son, a boy so sore in heart he could not accept that he and Malaan were too young for marriage. Elphège had forbidden it, but Kuntaw argued that he had killed his moose, now he was a man, he would marry! Elphège was not his father and could not deny him. They married and Malaan bore their son, Tonny. She had only thirteen winters and her labor was long and painful. Before the child was three Kuntaw left for the lumber camps and Malaan discovered whiteman’s whiskey. The boy ran with a pack of orphaned and abandoned children.

From the older women who sometimes coaxed Tonny into their wikuoms to feed him good moose meat, to tell him that he could always come to them for food and shelter, he heard stories about his father, Grasshopper Slayer, and his skill with bow and arrow at a time when Mi’kmaw men preferred whiteman guns. It embarrassed him to have a father called Grasshopper Slayer. Now only a few feeble oldsters still kept their unstrung bows and time-warped arrows. Every Mi’kmaw man had a gun and it was possible even for an inept hunter to kill five or six geese from a distance. Food was easier to get and there was little reason to spend long hours tracking and stalking keen-witted prey.

Tonny was a sly thief and beggar; he had neither bow nor gun and depended on his wits for food and shelter. He ran errands for whitemen, slept under an upturned canoe or in a sapling lean-to he had scuffled together in the broken woods. At fourteen he and Hanah, a girl whose mother also hung around the post, began to sleep together under old canoes and while still very young they made three children, Elise, Amboise and Jinot, who all managed to live, scrabbling around the post like young turkeys. Then Hanah, too, who liked rum and the free wild feeling it gave, began to go with whitemen and when she was twenty she was beaten to death by Henry Clefford, a jealous and bellicose trader who kept two other Mi’kmaw women. It was early spring, windy cold days mixed with sleet and intermittent sunlight.

“Here I leave,” said Tonny to his mother, Malaan, smarting with hatred and sorrow. He despised her; why should he tell her anything? “I am grown. I am a father. I go, my children go with me.”

“You leave here,” she said flat-toned. “Always I know this.” She nodded and turned away, yawning one of her deep, deep gaping yawns. He could say nothing else; her wretched life was with the post. He was now grown, strong but without hunting skills or weapons, ignorant of animal behavior, which was men’s correct interest and work. He no longer belonged here, if ever he had. He woke one morning, his eyes fixed on the underside of the broken canoe, the children wedged under his arm, and turned away from this life. He would no longer be part of the tattered Mi’kmaw people, whose customs had fallen off like flakes of dead skin. But he still believed that his children should live with blood kin. He felt a bitter sadness for them, nearly orphans with a dead mother and a worthless father. He could not leave them at the pernicious post. He knew only that his father was in a place called Penobscot Bay. Unannounced, paddling a stolen canoe and walking for weeks in mud and old snow, often carrying Jinot, the youngest, he found the house, the house of Kuntaw and the whiteman woman.

• • •

Year after year the logs of the old house had darkened almost to black. It seemed to be settling into the earth, but new cedar shingles shone like precious metal in the sunrise. The paint on the door and shutters had faded to a moss-grey color, something that made Beatrix think they must be repainted. Kuntaw paid no attention to house chores beyond getting in the winter wood and hunting.

“Enter you,” Beatrix Duquet called when she heard the scratching on the door. Tonny and the children stepped inside, ragged and travel-worn. They stood on the polished boards smelling the strange odors of the household, seeing the slant light dropped through glass windows, reflecting from mirrors.

Beatrix, grey-black hair streaming down her back like water, drew in a quick breath.

“Who are you?” She stared at them. “Who are you?” But Tonny thought she must know.

“I Tonny. Kuntaw Sel my father. These my children, Kuntaw their grandfather. Their mother dead. Names Elise, Amboise, Jinot.” As he turned them toward her he touched each child on the forehead. “No good live Mi’kmaw place now. I grown man but no good. I pretty bad man. I come my father Kuntaw, you. Help them.”

“Ah,” said Beatrix. She looked at the children; Elise at nine the oldest, withdrawn and shy; seven-year-old Amboise, also shy but with a winning smile; and Jinot, almost five, with a plump merry face.

“Sit at the table. I will give you food.” The chairs were strange and high, the table like the goods counter in the post. Jinot struggled to get on a chair until Beatrix lifted him up, found him warm and heavy, gave him a small squeeze.

“There you are, snoezepoes—sweetie pie,” she said, then turned to Tonny. “Oh poor Tonny, you must tell me everything, everything that has happened. Kuntaw is out hunting with our sons, Francis-Outger and Josime. They are close to the ages of your children. I know Kuntaw will weep with happiness to see you. He has spoken to me many times of his son, Tonny, and wondered if he still lived and how things were with him.” She felt a flash of compassion for this young man who resembled the handsome Indian striding into her life years past. “And now you are here. How happy he will be. But you, you are so young to be the father of three such big children.” She looked at them.

“Elise, Amboise, can you read or write?” They bent their faces low.

“Jinot, what do you like best?”

“Get sugar stick at post.”

“Ah, well, I have no sugar sticks, but I think you will like pancakes and some Dutch cocoa.”

“You good,” said Tonny. “I dream it you good.” He and Beatrix exchanged looks, Beatrix’s steady eyes a promise that the children were safe. Tonny’s returned gaze showed a distance that could not be traversed.

They were licking their plates for the last drops of maple syrup when Kuntaw came in with Francis-Outger and Josime. Tonny’s children threw quick shy glances at their uncles, their black eyebrows and hair; their pale eyes. Josime carried a tom turkey by its feet, the bloody beak dragging along the floor.

When Kuntaw grasped who the strangers were his face swelled, his hands trembled. He could barely speak, but croaked, “Stay, stay, we all live here.” He looked at Beatrix, his eyebrows drawn together beseechingly.

So that is how it is, Tonny thought coldly; Kuntaw likely had to plead for favors from this tall woman who looked Indian when she stood in the shadowed corner of the room. He thought she was not one to stand in shadowy corners and in full hard light she showed her whiteman blood in those water-clear eyes. But she spoke the Mi’kmaw language better than Tonny or the children, who got along with a rough scramble of Mi’kmaw, French and English words.

While Kuntaw, Francis-Outger, Josime and Tonny went upstairs, she took the children around the big house, explaining the use of each room to them, especially the room with a vast table. This, she said, was the schoolroom, the schoollokaal, where they would learn to read and write. She would teach them. She sat at the table and took Jinot on her lap, whispered to him that on the morrow she would make him a little toy horse, drew Elise and Amboise close. She spoke to them in a low intimate voice, confiding her reasons. “Our people had special ones among them, those who remembered old stories — old ways. My mother died when I was a baby and she told me nothing. But from my father, even though he was a Dutchman, I learned that Indian people must take whatever is useful from the whitemen. It is just, because they have taken everything from us. Many of our people died with secrets locked in their heads. Now it is good for us to learn how to read and write so we may know how we make useful things, how our grandfathers lived. That is why we learn to read — so we can remember.”

• • •

Jinot was afraid of the tall staircase, for he had never seen more than three steps, and sniveled until Beatrix took his hand and led him up very many, counting “zeven, acht, negen… dertien.” Up in the attic they found Kuntaw and big Josime pushing ancient trunks, broken furniture, boxes of books and Kuntaw’s worn-out bows and old quivers against the wall to make room for pallets.

“You will have this for your sleeping place,” Beatrix said. Jinot saw Josime roll his eyes as though she had said she was going to give roast moose to a pack of wolves. He smiled at Josime as only Jinot could smile and Josime twitched his lips in amusement. Jinot wanted to please — this woman; his father, Tonny; his grandfather Kuntaw; even Josime and Francis-Outger, who were ready to dislike their new kinfolk.

Tonny and the children were awkward eating at a table, but Beatrix signed they should not sit on the floor. They were cowed by the many dishes of meat and bread, unknown pottage and something that looked like a fish. Francis-Outger and Josime whispered and laughed together, took up their bowls and headed outside to eat far from the newcomers. Kuntaw called them back.

“In your places.” They ate in silence.

After dinner Beatrix put Tonny’s children to bed. Josime leaned against the doorframe, listening.

“I will tell you two stories,” said Beatrix in a low, slow voice. “Listen. Here is the first one. Long ago in the old days three children were lost in the forest, and in that forest they saw a tree, a very strong big tree so tall its leaves tickled the clouds. The tree was old, old, so old all the other trees called it Old Woman Tree, except the clouds, who said it was Old Foolish Tree. It was big”—she stretched her arms wide apart to show its girth—“and for many years it grew in the forest. It was so big it had a great hollow at the bottom and in there lived two bear-people…”

• • •

As they went down the stairs, hearing Beatrix’s murmuring voice above, Kuntaw put his hand on Tonny’s shoulder.

“Come outside with me and walk to the river. The recent rain fattened the river and disturbed the weir. While we mend it I want you to tell me of Malaan and Mi’kma’ki. Do not spare me.”

They waded in, shifted stones. Tonny watched Kuntaw to see how it was done, replacing those the current had dislodged. The sky was overcast, a leaden dreary day of biting damp. The water numbed their feet and legs. Tonny talked haltingly, then furiously, told of Malaan’s lethargy, her withdrawal into a silent world, the whitemen who pulled her about. He told of Hanah and how her wildness with the same whitemen had brought about her death. “Henly Clawfoot. I would kill him if I stayed there. Many times I want kill all.”

“You did well, my son, to bring your children here. I will care for them as I should have cared for you. I will pay for my neglect of Malaan and our people. I know well my earlier life was one of wrong behavior and loss. I did not teach you the things you need to know.” They came out of the water, pulled on their mkisn and began to walk back to the house in silence, Kuntaw opening his mouth several times until at last he began.

“It is not winter, but I will tell you the old stories of our people and the great ones in our lineage.” He did not wait for Tonny’s reply but began to speak of warriors and hunters, of ancestors, but could not tell of the horror of seeing his mother’s severed arm, of Achille’s disappearance, his own years searching for that missing father. All the time he spoke he felt he was talking to the sky. The sky, as unmoved as Tonny, responded with a chill fine mist that thickened into steady rain. Kuntaw said, “I went from one tree to another, unthinking, never reflecting on you, my first son. But now I see I was not a good man. I should not have looked for Achille. I should have stayed with you and Malaan. So I say you should not leave your children.”

Tonny shrugged. The more Kuntaw spoke the colder grew his feeling for this father. He called him by name.

“Kuntaw. I do not belong here. I do not belong in Mi’kma’ki — Nova Scotia, they say it now. I am apart from every person, English, Mi’kmaq, French, American. I have no place. Many Mi’kmaw people in the village pretend all is well, but the animals are scarce and no one knows the correct way to live. White people take the berries, the clams, the fish and sell them. I cannot pretend. I have told you how things are at the English post. You, you have this woman. I have no one. I not belong. No place good for me. I go away. Maybe somebody kill me soon. Then I be done.” So he said, with rain trickling from his hair, soaking his shoulders.

The rain became a deluge. Kuntaw felt needles of fear in his throat when he heard these words. Was this his son or a malignant spirit in his shape? It was true that Tonny appeared different — not as two-spirit people are different, but more… white. Bad white. He was nicked everywhere with old scars, his features bunched in a scowl, he spoke in a hoarse voice. He was dirty and ill-clothed. Kuntaw wondered what he truly was, this isolate and unknowable young man. But he smiled numbly and said, “Foolish words. You still young. You have a place here. You did a good thing to bring the children here. Do not inflict the wrong that I did you on them. Stay here with me. Stay.”

He was afraid the whitemen had broken this abandoned son.

It rained all night and a heavy fog made the world impenetrable, yet Tonny said he would go, he would try New Brunswick for work.

“I hope to come back for you,” he mumbled to Elise, Amboise and Jinot. He met Kuntaw’s censorious eyes boldly. Had he not done the same? Yes, Kuntaw wordlessly agreed, he had done the same.

• • •

There was little work. The lumber camps were the only places that would hire Indians, considered disposable labor — good enough, as long as they lasted, and for water work the best, while they stayed among the living. From a lumber camp, Tonny thought, he could always move deeper into the forest though he had no gun. He thought about trying to live in the forest without a gun. Without knowing the ways of animals. Would he go to a city? To Boston? Would he find something or someone? He had to find a new way. He would try the lumber camps first. And so he went to a chaotic world of groaning trees that ripped holes in the canopy, felled other trees, snapped off halfway, exploded into splinters. Some trees refused to come down, locking their branches into nearby neighbors, teetering on half-gnawed stumps. A few, on the edge of a new clearing and unprotected by the fallen hundreds, waited for the windstorms that would sweep them flat in great waves, uprooted, clods of dirt dropping with small sounds. He worked through the winter limbing felled pine and in the spring drive the boss ordered him into a bateau: he was an Indian and by birth skilled with the paddle. But Tonny’s knowledge of bateaux was that they were shelters, roofs that had protected him from the rain in his childhood. He was no riverman. Before he could collect his season’s pay, he drowned below Wolf Falls and, like countless other fathers, slipped into the past.

At the house on Penobscot Bay, Kuntaw’s failure to make Tonny into an instant Mi’kmaw wrenched his heart; he withdrew a little from Beatrix. He spoke to Amboise, too young to understand. “I am shamed I left Mi’kma’ki, my people and my son.” He saw himself without pity as one who was witlessly destroying the ancient ways. Although he reflected that the larch loses its needles, the maple and beech their leaves, standing bare until gleaming new leaves open again, Mi’kmaw people were putting out very few fresh leaves. And he, none at all.

• • •

A thousand times Kuntaw had heard Beatrix say, “I need you, Indian man,” as she had the day she rode up to him on her horse. At first he thought she meant she needed him to split wood for her. As the weeks passed he thought she meant she needed him for sex. But one day he understood. She needed him because she was a half-Indian woman who had been brought up as a whiteman girl. She needed him to make her an Indian. She had been leading him into books. But now that he knew he pushed the books aside.

“Woman,” he said, “now I will teach you to read,” and he led her into the forest, patiently explaining, as he should have done with Tonny, how to understand and decipher the tracks of animals, the seasonal signs of plants and trees, the odors of bears and coming rain, of frost-leathered leaves, the changing surface of water, intimating how it all fitted together. “These are things every Mi’kmaw person knows,” he said. “And now do you understand that the forest and the ocean shore are tied together with countless strings as fine as spiderweb silks? Do you begin to glimpse Indian ways and learning? I would not wish an ignorant wife.”

“Yes,” Beatrix said. “But it is too much to remember.”

“Not to remember like a lesson,” he said, “but to know, to feel.” He knew this was hopeless.

She soon begged off these excursions. “I have told you my Passamaquoddy mother died when I was very young, before she could teach me anything. It is a pity. What I know I learned from my father. I had to learn the medicinal plants. He often wrote to me from Leiden and asked to have certain pungent leaves sent to him.” But this father, Outger, who never returned yet bombarded Beatrix with letters and advice, with packets of books and outmoded European garments, died abroad a year before Kuntaw came out of the woods to her. He thought of Beatrix’s father, if he thought of him at all, as a whiteman, all fiery will and command but with many affectations. He was glad that an ocean and death lay between them.

Beatrix taught the children their letters and numbers, gave them books to read, and Kuntaw, who had failed to teach Tonny, now showed his grandchildren what Francis-Outger and Josime already knew — how to hunt, to paddle a canoe. The boys stuck to him like burrs, and together they prowled the shrinking woodlands, carved and whittled, mended garments, stewed eels, coaxed fish into their hands. “You must learn these things,” said Kuntaw, “you who are more unconscious of the world than stones. You are Mi’kmaw blood but you know nothing.” He showed them animals, plants and yes, grasshoppers as prey. He fashioned child-size bows for Amboise and Jinot. Let them hunt grasshoppers, even as he had! Let them not be ignorant of Mi’kmaw ways. Yet he found it impossible to teach them everything he knew unless all could live inside the Mi’kmaw life; it was more than knowing how to use certain tools or recognize plants. What he taught was not a real life; it was only a kind of play, he thought gloomily. That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it.

• • •

All around the Penobscot settlement the trees fell, tracks inched through the forests, only one or two, then seven, then webs of trails that over the decades widened into roads. The roads were muddy, sometimes like batter, sometimes thick and clutching until late summer, when they metamorphosed into choking dust so fine it hung in the air long after a horse and carriage passed, settling on the grass as the English people settled on the land.

The years passed and logging companies and settlers stripped the banks of the bay and moved up the Penobscot. Fields of wheat and hay took the land, these fields enclosed by linked stumps, the root wads of the forest that had once stood there turned on their edges to bar the whiteman’s cows and sheep. Along the shore settlers’ houses were stitched into tight rows by paling fences. The old Charles Duquet house sat alone in its acreage, surrounded by forest that had never been cut, a relic of the wooden world.

• • •

A day came when Beatrix noticed her son Josime giving Elise glances that were not brotherly and said to Kuntaw that perhaps it was time she was married. Elise was fifteen, rather old to be single. Kuntaw’s advice was to send her to Nova Scotia to stay with his sister, Aledonia; there she might find a Mi’kmaw husband. There she might live a Mi’kmaw life. He had forgotten what Tonny had said of the place, remembered only the good days before the moose hunt of his childhood.

• • •

Everyone noticed how the little girls of the settlement, whether Indian, French, métis or English, wanted to be with Jinot. They ran to meet him, told him their small secrets and swore him not to tell — he never did — brought him pieces of ginger cake stolen from the home pantries. Beatrix, who watched them whispering, asked, “What do they tell you, Jinot?”

“Tell me worms, funny frogs. Just nothing.” The conversations were loaded with giggles. Few girls, or later, women, could resist Jinot’s impish, smiling ways.

“Stay that way, dear child,” murmured Beatrix, who was not immune to his charm.

Kuntaw also watched Jinot and noticed he was different as some Mi’kmaw of the old days were different. The name for the difference escaped him.

• • •

The wooden world extended out into the bay in the shape of watercraft. Amboise and Jinot Sel played with the village boys on the wharves, ran, balanced and jumped on the floating logs in the sawmill ponds, pretending they were on a log drive. The heroes of all were the rivermen riding the logs down the surly Penobscot. The boys around the bay paddled canoes and rowed skiffs; as they grew, they worked with fishermen, learned to mend and cast nets and haul lines, and the sons of the fishermen pulled for deeper water when they, too, joined the maritime trade. Day after day the children watched men loading mast ships with the great pine spars, stacking plank lumber on decks. The Sel children went with Kuntaw to mend the weirs, to help drive and catch eels — their dependable and favored food. For the town boys the ideal future was to chop great pines and ride the boiling waters of the spring freshets. For Jinot and Amboise Sel it was an irresistible pull.

• • •

The children grew up too rapidly, Beatrix thought. One day they were children, still full of questions and innocent enthusiasms, and the next day they were grown men with tempers and ideas who preferred Kuntaw’s company to hers. When Francis-Outger turned twenty-one and married a half-French, half-Mi’kmaw girl, he and the girl’s father built a small cabin for the young couple. Then Josime left home, going to the New Brunswick lumber camps. A month later it was Amboise’s turn to go to the woods. For Jinot Sel, the only one left, time passed very slowly. For him the year dragged on, spring arrived and he watched the acres of logs that escaped the mills float down the river and into the bay, envied the jaunty rivermen who prodded and corraled the dumb timber. After the drive Amboise, broader and stronger, came home with tremendous stories. And money, too. Summer came and faded. Amboise left again to work as a swamper for a New Brunswick outfit. For weeks the cries of geese rang like blacksmiths hammering lofty anvils. The moon waxed full, lunatic clouds racing across its face. Jinot suffered from a restless urge to go somewhere. One morning, his decision made, he went to Kuntaw.

“Grandfather, I am old enough and I want to go to the forest camps to cut trees,” he said. Kuntaw nodded. “I know you think of starting a man’s life,” he said, “although there are many girls who maybe think you better stay. You have been warm with these girls. Is it not possible many children here will call you father?”

Jinot, shocked, said no, no. “Grandfather, the girls only talk to me. Girls like to talk to somebody. We are friends.” Kuntaw looked at his grandson with an assessing, weighing eye, putting wispy thoughts together.

“Yes, I see. I see you. I am old, Jinot, but do not take me for a fool. If you were among Mi’kmaw people they would see no wrong in a man who has a double spirit. But whitemen call it bad. And those church men.”

There was nothing to say to this. In a moment Kuntaw continued.

“When will you go?”

“Today. I have warm clothes in a hide bag. Shall I take an ax?”

“Have an ax if you wish, but the lumber camp will give you as many as you need. They provide the tools. This I know, for I, too, worked in those camps chopping trees, even as my father, Achille, did, and his father, the Frenchman René Sel, before him.”

“I did not know of the Frenchman René. He is our ancestor?”

“He was my grandfather, murdered, they said, by a girl he adopted. So you see we have French blood in us. But René Sel did not work in lumber camps. He cut trees for himself. Jinot, before you go into the forest I want you to travel with Amboise to Mi’kma’ki and see Elise, see if she is well, if she has children. We have heard nothing. And I want you to inquire if my cousin Auguste, son of my deceased aunt Noë, is still alive. He was a person always in trouble so he may be dead. Though I have noticed that many people who cause trouble live long lives. If he is alive I want him to come here and stay with us. And take care. The woods and rivers are full of English and Americans fighting. Stay distant if you hear firearms.”

• • •

Amboise, who was very strong and heavy-shouldered, and Jinot, waving farewell to a bouquet of girls on the wharf who called his name, went by ship up the coast to Halifax, made a foot journey to the post.

“I do not have a good feeling for Elise,” said Amboise. “I remember Tonny said Mi’kma’ki was a bad place.” In his pocket he had a small wooden turkey he had carved long ago, an object that amused Elise when she was young.

“If she has children,” he said, “I thought maybe they like to play with this.”

“Amboise, that is a good idea. I wish I had brought something — even a pinecone.”

Kuntaw’s sister, Aledonia, thin and with many teeth missing, made much of them, pointed out certain people with the patronym Sel, and told them that yes, Auguste still lived. “That one! He is too bad to die!”

But Amboise and Jinot saw the Mi’kmaw village was a hungry sad place, a mix of wikuoms and whiteman cabins. The eel weirs were in disrepair and rarely did the men make an effort to put them in order. It was easier to eat bread and pork from the agency than catch eels. Luçon Brassua, Elise’s husband, lay drunk in the mud beside their wikuom, whose torn bark covering needed repairs. They were sorry for Elise, who cried and said she had lost a baby girl whom she had called Bee after Beatrix.

“I thought married would be like Beatrix and Grandfather Kuntaw, nice, laughing, you know?” She wept women’s tears.

While they were in the chopped lands of what once had been Mi’kma’ki they heard stories of Kuntaw’s father, Achille the Great Hunter. For some reason these stories made Amboise resentful. “Everything yesterday! Everything good happens long ago! Now — oh now…” His eyes narrowed. “Elise, if Brassua is not good to you, you must come with us.” They knew that Brassua was not good to her. Guilty and uneasy, they wanted to get away.

Old Auguste had succumbed to drink. They found him at the wikuom of one of his granddaughters, bleary and nodding, sitting outside squinting at whatever happened there. When they told him they were Kuntaw’s grandsons he roused a little, huffing out rum breath, gave a bitter smile and said Kuntaw had had a fortunate life, unlike him. He spoke in an old man voice, then clamped his mouth shut. They sat together and watched the dozen idle Mi’kmaw men who hung around the post like flies on meat. Amboise was surprised to see tears running down wicked old Auguste’s face as he watched them.

“They have nothing to do. When Kuntaw and I were of those years,” he said, “we were always ready for a hunt or go for eels, fish or seals or sturgeon. We made our bows and arrows, we made crooked knives and good canoes, we fashioned the paddles. We had good war games then, not like fighting foreigners with guns. The young men — yes, even I — committed brave deeds and there were feasts and dances such as are no longer performed. But you see what we have become,” he said and he pointed first at the idlers, then at himself. His hand groped beneath his thigh for the flat bottle.

• • •

“Elise,” said Amboise. “Come away now.” She threw her few possessions into a turnip sack and outstripped them running for the boat landing. Luçon Brassua was not there to hold her back.

“He is drunk with his friends,” said Elise. “We go now, now!”

“Wait. We must get Auguste. Kuntaw wants him to live in the Penobscot house.” The old man got up, trembling when he heard he was to come with them. He looked around. The idlers stood near the post doorway, a dog scratched its fleas. He sat down again, smiling slyly.

“No. Too late. You go. I stay.”

No matter what they said he refused. “Someone must stay. I will be the One Who Remains.”

He was always good at naming.

• • •

Amboise used the money Kuntaw had given them to buy passages on a vessel going from Halifax to Boston, then persuaded the owner of a fishing boat bound for Georges Bank to detour and drop them at Penobscot Bay. Elise said very little to them on the return journey, but when the boat sailed into their home port she sucked in a great deep breath and exhaled. Beatrix, who saw them coming up from the wharf, threw the front door open. She looked at Elise, saw the fading bruises and brimming eyes and understood everything. She stretched out her arms.

“Oh, thank God, my poor Elise, you are with us again. You are safe at home now.”

“Mother,” Elise cried. Beatrix embraced her and both women began to sob. Amboise and Jinot looked at each other; they had never seen Beatrix cry.

“This is a woman thing,” muttered Amboise, his eyes stinging. “Let us go out.”

Though Jinot wanted to be with Elise and Beatrix, he followed Amboise.

39. Dr. Mukhtar

“What is wrong with me?” demanded Beatrix of Elise’s dog, Ami, a wolfish creature who could not ignore porcupines. The dog, flinching from her angry tone, looked at the floor. For months a pain had been twisting in the woman’s belly, came like a crab in the night to pinch at her gut. She had days when she rushed about as usual, teaching a boy from the village to read and write, concocting elaborate meals for Kuntaw, who turned away. He only wanted the spare foods of his childhood.

A new path had opened to Kuntaw — guiding whitemen to hunt and fish. It started when a Boston man, Mr. Williams, came to him and said he wanted to go in the Maine woods and hunt, and he needed a guide; he would pay. Kuntaw knew the forest, streams and lakes from his years in the logging camps. And they went north together on the train, then by buckboard, then by canoe. Mr. Williams returned to Boston dirty, scratched up, his eyes red from campfire smoke, thinner and more agile; he felt himself a tough woodsman. He had caught more than fifty trout in a single day and described his taciturn Mi’kmaw guide to envious friends. Not only that. The war for independence had linked the idea of freedom to a country of wild forests. Americans saw themselves as homines sylvestris—men of the forest.

Kuntaw worked tirelessly at this odd business; he carried the packs and canoe, hacked trails through young spruce thickets, and at the campsite he built the lean-to, chopped firewood and got a fire going, cooked samp, trout, wild meat, seasoned only with shreds of wild ginger and garlic. Soon he had regular customers who wanted to hunt moose or caribou, whitemen who wove these trips into tales of manly adventures.

It seemed to Kuntaw he had blundered into the strangest occupation in the world, helping men have a “holiday,” men ignorant of the tattered forests, ignorant of canoes and paddling, ignorant of weather signs and plants, of fire building. They angered him sometimes. Judge James, whom the others treated with deference, said, “You Indians have a nice life. Just hunt and fish all the time, let the women do the work.” He laughed. Kuntaw said nothing then but later, smoking a pipe with Ti-Sabatis, another guide he saw sometimes at the boat landing, he said, “Whitemen never see it was our work. For them hunt and fish is only to play. They think we lazy because we only ‘play.’ ”

Ti-Sabatis smiled a little. “These men don’t know nothing about the woods, but they pay good money and I don’t know how they get that money, so they do somethin pretty smart.”

“It was our life and we lived it, but it was not easy like those whitemen think.” Yet he enjoyed these excursions.

• • •

The illness had made Beatrix a different person from the energetic long-haired beauty on a sorrel horse. They had had many happy years, but she was old now, as was he. She was ill and the illness frightened him. Kuntaw wanted to turn it back, to return her to the old Beatrix. He brought her cups of tea. She drank slowly, slowly, smiled at him and then vomited. It was now, when she most needed him, that he veered away from her. He could not help it. His feelings had begun to change years earlier, when Tonny arrived with his three children, bringing the old Mi’kmaw life with him. In his shame at his neglect of Tonny and Malaan, Kuntaw began to regard Beatrix as Other. The feeling was always there, even when they were glad to be together and with their children. Like a faraway drumbeat something inside him said, She is not Mi’kmaq. He had not made her into an Indian. He had betrayed his people by leaving Malaan and Tonny for her. He had betrayed Beatrix by failing to fullfill her wish. Every spring when he readied to take a Boston man on a fishing trip he was a little more pleased to be away from Beatrix’s house, to be back in the forest.

• • •

Beatrix’s good days became fewer; the pain always returned as though refreshed by its holiday and bit into its victim with greater force. If Elise brought cod broth to her she would sip a few drops from the spoon and then vomit. Her bowels became untrustworthy, her face gaunt and drawn, arms and legs like reeds, but the treacherous stomach swelled and grew enormous. The pain was the size of a beaver and gnawing with a beaver’s yellow chisel teeth.

Elise washed Beatrix’s soiled linens and hung them out to be sweetened by the chill wind off the bay. She cooked for herself and Kuntaw, kept broth simmering for Beatrix, who often could not swallow it. Elise knew little of herbal medicines and came to Kuntaw.

“Grandfather Kuntaw. Beatrix has been ill for six moons and I do not know how to ease the pain. It grows. She won’t eat nothin. Do you not know a healer who understands this sickness?”

But Kuntaw shook his head. “Maybe still in Mi’kma’ki, but here, no. She will want a whiteman doctor.”

“If he will come,” said Elise. “I have heard that he is haughty and says he will only treat white people.”

“Well,” said Kuntaw. “Beatrix’s father was whiteman. He had doctor friends. Maybe all dead now.”

He spent an uncomfortable quarter hour with the sick woman and prized the names of two medical men from her. The first, elderly Dr. Woodrit, sent a message that he had a full list of patients and could not come. The second, Dr. Hallagher, an Irish fellow new to Penobscot Bay, visited Beatrix, examined and talked with her for some time. When he came out of the sickroom he sat beside Elise and shook his head.

“She knows many big words, this Ind — this lady. I think she has a bad sickness, and I advise to call in a certain learned doctor from Boston — Dr. Mukhtar — if he will come. He has much experience with — with stomach ailments. Of this kind.”

Elise wanted to ask what “this kind” was, but only stared at him with pleading dark eyes.

Hallagher continued, studying the tense woman. “He is a foreigner, and his ways are not our — your — usual ways, but he is very learned in medicine. If anyone can do anything…” He promised he would write to Dr. Mukhtar himself and see if he could be persuaded to make the trip to the Penobscot Bay house. Elise’s face changed for a moment and she smiled at him, the roguish Sel smile.

• • •

When Kuntaw heard all this he exhaled between his teeth, a hissing sound like that of an angry animal, furious to feel so helpless, and went outside. He could not bear to see her suffering.

• • •

Dr. Hallagher returned on a weekday afternoon ten days later, shining with cleanliness and fresh linen, hoping to find Elise alone. But Kuntaw was also there, repairing his guide equipment for another Maine trip.

Kuntaw nodded and nodded when Dr. Hallagher said that the Boston doctor — Mukhtar — would arrive any day and examine Beatrix. He was making the arduous trip. But, said the Irishman, Kuntaw should not get his hopes up expecting a cure. Beatrix’s illness was profound. Kuntaw nodded, then asked a brutal question.

“How long she live?”

Hallagher stuttered out that he did not know, that God would decide, that Dr. Mukhtar could perhaps say, but he — no, he could not say. He left without a chance for a few private minutes with Elise.

• • •

It was a cool autumn afternoon when Dr. Mukhtar arrived on a black Arabian mare that had turned heads all the way from Boston. As he was removing his saddlebags, Elise came out and said that if he liked he could turn the mare in to the horse pasture or put her in the stable, as he preferred. He chose the pasture with its shady maples and rattling brook. He was a small, wiry man with a foreign face, wet black eyes and a nose like a falcon’s beak. Elise thought his dark face was frightening, even devilish, his voice somewhat rough but kind. A little reluctantly she led him into the house.

As soon as he stepped into the hall he sniffed the fetid air and knew what he would find. Elise took him first into the schoolroom, where Beatrix always served visitors and brought him a cup of tea. He put his saddlebags on the great pine table. He asked Elise many questions, demanded she show him Beatrix’s soiled sheets, examined them closely. He looked at Elise with his glittering foreign eyes.

“Is there another person who can help you? You are thin and very tired. Nursing someone with an advanced stomach cancer is exhausting. We must get you some help.” Elise was shocked to hear Beatrix’s sickness named and knew at once there must be a fatal conclusion. Then came his questions; never had she been asked so many. He wanted to know everything about Beatrix, about Elise, Kuntaw and the family, their circumstances, how they came to be in this house; he even asked about the foods they ate and nodded as if he already knew when Elise told him Beatrix was uncommonly fond of meats smoked in the chimney. It was unnerving how many questions the man could ask. She saw how he looked around the schoolroom. Their two porcelain cups looked small and frail on the table’s wood expanse.

The house on Penobscot Bay had always been the great possession of Outger and Beatrix. But Outger had left and she had stayed. New people were building bigger houses with clapboarded painted sides all around the bay now. Charles Duquet’s great log house had become a decaying eyesore derided by the white settlers as “the wood wigwam.” When at last she sold the woodlot stumpage, the house, black with age, stood naked and decrepit.

With the trees gone Beatrix saw the decaying house. The roof and sills could not wait and just as she fell ill Beatrix sold the last big pines in her woodlot to pay for the repairs. Kuntaw simply did not notice such defects; it was a house, a big immovable house.

• • •

Elise showed Dr. Mukhtar to the sick woman’s room. Under the single window was a table piled with books Beatrix had been reading before they became too heavy for her to hold. He looked at the titles, then sat beside the bed in a rosewood chair with a cracked leg. The woman lay in an uneasy sleep of shallow rapid breaths, febrile and wasted. He looked at her steadily. Suddenly she moaned and her eyes flew open.

“Am I in hell now?” she whispered as her eyes took his measure.

Dr. Mukhtar, who quite understood that the pain had awakened her and that she thought he was the devil, said, “No, madam, you are not, although it may seem that way. Allow me to introduce myself and let us work together to see how I may help you. But at the moment I believe you are in too much pain to carry on a rational conversation, so I will just fetch a sedative that will allow you some ease for a while.”

He went to his saddlebags and came back with a black vial and a teaspoon.

“Please open and swallow.”

“I will vomit,” she said.

“No, you will not. You will be calmed and the pain will back away. For a while. Open.” He watched her swallow painfully, half-retching. He held her up until the easing began.

In a few minutes Beatrix, panting with relief, looked at Dr. Mukhtar. “Oh,” she said, “oh, oh. Oh how good. Thank you.”

“The pain will return but we shall fight it in every way we can.”

He examined her legs, palpated the great lump of stomach, asked her if she was able to eat anything, how long it had been difficult to swallow, did she vomit blood, was there blood in her stool, black and grainy, was she often breathless? In the midst of a reply she fell asleep again, but breathed deeply.

The next time she woke the light in the room was dim. Dr. Mukhtar still sat in the chair, his dark face hidden in shadow, his black clothing blending in to the chair’s indigo shadow. Beatrix’s pain was still at bay and this pleased him.

“I know my death is approaching,” said Beatrix. “What is wrong with me, is the pain returning soon, how long…” Her voice fell away.

“You have a stomach cancer but also much fluid in your stomach, which I can relieve, though it, like the pain, will return. It is a battle, Mistress Beatrix, a battle that at this stage you cannot win. Perhaps another month, perhaps two. I will do all I can to smother the pain. Will you allow me to stay here? Your daughter, Elise, needs rest and I must be on hand to attend you. Do not worry, I have brought enough elixir to soothe elephants for a decade.”

“I want to die,” she said. “I want to be done with the pain, done with this life.” But this was not entirely true. Over the next six weeks Beatrix developed deep feelings for Dr. Mukhtar as they spoke of books and ideas, of places imagined but never seen, of peace and quiet, of horses, for Mukhtar knew much about these animals. It pleased Beatrix to think of galloping horses, fluttering silky manes. At first it was the doctor who spoke while she listened, half asleep, half dead. The pain elixir became less effective and he tried another. Kuntaw came in now and then, but Beatrix could not look lovingly at him nor he at her.

• • •

To Dr. Mukhtar she said, “My father told me once that swallowing Guatemalan lizards was a cure for this illness.”

“Never can this be. It is the rarity of Guatemalan lizards in Boston and its environs that earns them the reputation of a great cure. One might also name unicorn milk as a cure. There is no cure. When it becomes resistant to all I have, I will give you a sleeping draft that never fails to bring the final relief.”

He came in every morning, opened the window, which shrieked in its warped frame, and gave her the blesséd elixir. From the bed Beatrix looked at the sky and saw a thin cloud like a ribbon of spilled cream on blue satin. In the hours of respite from pain she began to talk to him in her hoarse voice, sometimes whispering when her throat was too painful for speaking.

She told of her lonely childhood, Outger’s obsessive teaching, books and books, his declaration that when she was sixteen he would send her to Europe for “finishing,” likely to Switzerland, which was fashionable, something that never happened, the usual way of Outger’s promises. She spoke of the enmity of the Dukes, who did not acknowledge her existence after their failed efforts to wrest Outger’s big pine table from her. She told him of Kuntaw and their happy years, her children, Francis-Outger and Josime, spoke of Tonny and the grandchildren, now grown, but always she circled back to Outger and his hours drilling her in Latin and Greek, assigning books for her to read, his discussions of theories and inventions.

“I can see now,” she said, “that all his pedagogy was an experiment.” The books and instruction had been his attempt to make her into something like a learned whiteman, like himself. After he left for Leiden the instruction continued in the form of boxes of books, papers, long letters of advice and orders, but she gradually understood that she herself was not wanted — she was nothing to Outger but a subject on which to practice his ideas of intellectual development. She had failed in some way to become an Enlightened Savage, and so remained alone in the house on Penobscot Bay. When the solitude became a monstrous frustration she began to look for one who could help her become an Indian. Kuntaw had come with her to split wood and had stayed for many years. They had made children together.

“But,” she said sadly, “I could not become an Indian.”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Mukhtar. “There is a whole world of signs, symbols and spirits which all must be absorbed from birth. You could not hope to grasp the meanings except by living the entire life.”

She could not, she explained to Dr. Mukhtar, express affection except by teaching, holding out books as tokens of love. When at last light the doctor, exhausted from listening, stood to go to his room above for the night and pinched out the candle, she begged him to leave the curtains and the window open. The door closed gently and she could look at the moon, a blood-streaked egg yolk rolling in the shell of sky.

• • •

In the last week of her life Beatrix had the illusion she was suspended in an immense bowl of water. At first the water was as easy to breathe as air, but gradually as the mass in her stomach pressed on her lungs it became viscous as old honey. The bowl was similar to the yellow crockery bowl in which she had mixed bread dough. Occasionally she surfaced and in the distance could see its pale rim. Some days the water was limpid and yielding, others, shot through with strong orange currents of pain. Underwater storms raged, and then she had tried to draw up her legs to protect her throbbing gut from the lightning strikes.

Dr. Mukhtar tried many ways to make Beatrix’s fading existence more bearable. Francis-Outger, whose house was only a mile distant, came every day with balsam boughs for the sickroom so the spicy scent of the forest could cleanse the air. He brought juniper berries and Dr. Mukhtar crushed these and their dry bitter perfume made Beatrix smile, a smile more like a grimace, but all she could manage. She died in this cordial of fragrance. Fifty-two strange years and then to fall in love on her deathbed.

Elise stood weeping at the window. Francis-Outger said to her, “I will go to Josime’s camp and tell him. Maybe he knows where Amboise works now, maybe he knows where Jinot is. Did they not tell you their camps?”

“Jinot sent a letter asking if we all were well, but I have not found a moment to answer. He said he was working for a Canada man — Marchand. Up north. Amboise I don’t know.”

• • •

Kuntaw had hardened himself to resist the pain of losing Beatrix. He had lost Tonny, he had lost Malaan. He had lost Beatrix. He had lost himself. He turned his painful feelings into rejection, told himself his years with Beatrix had been wasted. She was not an Indian but an overeducated white woman in an Indian body. In those years with her he had become weak and powerless. Yet he knew he could regain his lost strength, for he felt young, though perhaps not young enough to dance and drive his feet deep into the earth up to the knee with each crashing step.

He would go to the north, where there was still half-wild forest. He thought of the way his people had lived in it when they were not on the coast, thought of Achille, his father, standing up with the great dead bear on his back; it must have weighed four hundred pounds. He, Kuntaw, could not carry full-grown bears, but he could live in the old way, even though the trees of the forest were now mere stuff, whiteman stuff. Whitemen looked at trees and saw they were good only to build flat-sided cage-houses or ships. Kuntaw wanted to know trees again as the old people knew them.

The year before Beatrix was ill he had killed a moose — for there were still a few moose for men who knew how to find them — and made himself a proper Mi’kmaw jacket. He had never given up greased mkisn for whiteman shoes. He had his beaver cloak and deer-hide leggings, pliable and silent when he moved through brush. And now, with Beatrix dead, he would go to the northern forest and he would build a camp as if for two, just as he did for his clients, but there would be no client. He would have everything for two — clothing, bed robes; he would have no whiteman’s metal pots for they would spoil the magic of his camp. He would cook for two people, setting out the dish for the One Who Would Come. He had once believed Beatrix was that One, and surely she herself had believed it of him.

He mended his bows and made new arrows. He would live among trees until the One Who Would Come appeared, and he knew it would be like the shadows of moving leaves at first, gradually becoming more solid until the day the One accepted the extra set of clothes and appeared before him as firm and real as a tree. They would hunt together, deep companions, and he, Kuntaw, would share his new friend’s magic power. He would be strong again. He would be a Mi’kmaw man again.

40. choppers and rivermen

At seventeen Jinot Sel’s smiling face had been at once amusing and dissolute with full cheeks, heavy-lidded eyes. His hair was thick and springy as a bear’s pelt, his mouth thin and curled, a face with something of a mink’s eager expression. He was quick of movement like Grandfather Kuntaw. Not only girls and women wanted to sit with him, mature men also looked at him, and in a certain way.

After a year as a swamper-limber in a decrepit Penobscot camp, he hired on as a chopper and riverman with Simon Marchand. The camp lay on a feeder branch of the big Penobscot. Marchand, a subcontractor, had taken on a tract of aged monster trees judged by most lumbermen as too big, too awkwardly placed on a gullied ridge to be worth getting.

“Nah,” said Marchand, “what I say is this is a long route — take two seasons cut up to them old trees. Then we might get them big boys, if we cut good track for a ice road. Biggest log in the world comes along sweet on a ice road. It’s a pretty good show.”

Marchand seemed to have started life as an ash tree, barked, scraped and whittled down to sinewy fiber. His hooded eyes glinted. His neck was encircled by coarse hair foaming up from his chest. He was a hard-nosed Maine man who had kicked his way up and was still kicking.

God-fearing Marchand did not allow holy names to be used as curses in the camp. “You know the man that oaths like that, will be a judgment on him.” He cited scores of examples of men who had cursed and without fail they had been mashed, drowned, frozen, quartered, speared and fried. Every logger knew of such things. And so Marchand’s camps were fueled by imprecations of “all-fired tarnal dickie bird,” “by dang,” “dern,” “by gar!” Jinot kept a holy silence.

Like most camps Marchand’s looked impermanent; the cookhouse was crowded into the north end of the shanty. Downslope stood a slipshod ox hovel. A constant stream of red-shirted choppers came and went, men from the north and coastal fishermen — Irish, Bluenoses, Province men, a few French Canadians, St. Francis Indians, Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq, and P. I.s — men from Prince Edward Island — and sometimes a man from foreign shores. There were always two or three Québécois running from the impoverished habitant life. The border between Maine and Québec was so twisted by the waterways that men passed freely over the unknown line — a place that could be what you wanted it to be.

In the lumber camp they were a brotherhood of the ax. A kind of pride in excess and risky work knitted them. Up before daylight to gnaw on cold salt pork and gulp boiled tea, they walked to the cut carrying their sharpened axes and private thoughts. They walked back to the shanty in near dark to more pork and watery bean porridge, then fell into stunned sleep until the bull cook’s wordless catamount shrieks woke them — too dark to see, too dark to cut until the faintest light arrived. They stood in the still and merciless cold, ax heads beneath their jackets thrust up into their armpits to keep the steel from freezing, waiting for the light, so cold they could feel the arcs of their eyebrows, ice-stiffened nostril hairs.

There were no bunks, only the dirt floor, moist with tobacco juice and tramped-in food scraps; along one wall lay a greasy blanket to cover a row of louse-infested men. At night they heard wood borers rasping through the logs. If rain slanted in and soaked the blanket it took a week of multiple body heat to dry it out again.

After the spring drive most blew their wages in the log-shanty bars and whorehouses of the nearest town, bummed around until some contract logger came looking for raw labor. This calling of destruction was suited to them: no chance for other work, nothing to lose but their lives — but they were young and immortal, and you were safe if you were fast. A few worked for Marchand all year, chopping in the winter, driving in the spring, sawing in his mills through the summer. Jinot chopped and worked the drive that first year, tried the sawmill but after a few days of wood dust and noise he went home to the big house to gorge on eel and fresh garden truck, luxuriate in the attention of Beatrix and Kuntaw, then back to the camp with the autumn frosts.

• • •

Like most woods bosses Marchand tagged Indians and métis for river work. Indians were the best rivermen for the long-log drives. Their quick reactions and inborn sense of balance, he said, made them agile on moving logs. “Them sons a porcupines born in a canoe,” Marchand said, and described himself as half French, half Malecite, half Penobscot and half Scots and, as a 200 percent man, was naturally more than a little skillful in a bateau. Every spring drive most of the choppers went back to their farms, leaving Marchand and the Indians in charge of the river and its blanket of hurtling, jackstraw-prone logs.

From his first season Jinot fit into the life. At the north end of the shanty Peter the cook and his helper Panette produced pork, fried cornmeal mush and yellow-eye beans, potatoes, bread, boiled beef and mashed turnip; Jinot relished it all. In late afternoon before the men came in the cook set out a bowl of water with a dipper in it. Every man chewed tobacco and after drinking put the dipper back in the bowl. A thin film of tobacco-flavored spit spread over the water surface. Jinot tried the dipper once and then whittled out a wood canister, which he filled with clean brook water.

“What,” said Panette menacingly, “common water ain’t good enough for a dirty Indan? You got a have your own special water?”

“Don’t drink tobacco flavorin.”

“Hell you don’t,” snapped Panette, “keeps ye from gettin worms,” and then shut up, but a half-chewed plug of tobacco showed up on Jinot’s morning plate of beans and the coffee tasted of tobacco — and worse. He left his plate standing and beckoned the bull cook outside.

“What you think you can do about it, Indan?” said Panette, bouncing on his toes to remind Jinot that he was a well-known fighter of the saloon alleys. Only one reply to that: Jinot limbered his knees, then from a standstill leapt high, driving his heels into Panette’s chest, and when the bull cook went down, kicked and trampled him from forehead to toenail.

It had all happened too quietly and the loggers felt cheated of seeing a good fight, but the head cook gave details and Jinot found himself with elbow room. He slept with his ax under the rolled-up marten pelt he and his friend, Franceway, used for a pillow.

• • •

Evenings the men sat on the deacon’s bench staring into the flames, arms resting on thighs, hands dangling; they chewed and smoked, they talked and their lives crept out of the stories as moths out of chrysalises. The first night with a new crew in a shanty was cautious, men measuring the others; where they came from, who had brought a fiddle or a harmonica, who was the insufferable fool, did anyone carry new songs in his head, who were the storytellers, who was comical, what rivers had the others worked, what had each seen in his time in the woods? There were five or six fair singers and a whipcord little Montagnais known only as Franceway with a skinny kid’s neck, who brought them all to attention with his true-pitched mournful voice. Franceway and Jinot had been together from the first day they saw each other. Franceway knew songs most had never heard before, as “The Randy Shanty Boy,” and when he sang his version of “Roy’s Wife,” he gave a little twist to the words that expressed lechery and wounded pride. Those who could only croak and bellow listened. He was a limber and a riverman, dexterous and elastic. His dark eyes glowed with concentration as he filed his ax. He often sang as he worked — old songs and now and then made new songs himself, celebrating river heroism or describing accidents — even the cook’s more inventive dishes, as the cherry pie made from dried prunes.

In late November the winter set in hard. After their silent supper some men threw themselves down and slept, but most sat looking into the fire.

An ex-sailor in his late forties, one eyebrow missing, was one of four men in the camp who knew how to sign their names. He claimed to have sailed distant oceans on fifty ships in his younger life, told of seeing elephants and chained slaves before he took up the ax.

Sash was the shortest man; he always talked in a monotone about his homeplace and large numbers of dead kin, mostly drowned. “Then next spring Sis slipped on the riverbank and drowned,” said Sash. “Drownin’s in our family.”

“You’ll be next,” said someone, sotto voce, and Jinot shuddered. Now it would happen.

Sam Keyo and his sons, Ted and Stinking Tom, left their farm and came to the woods every winter for the hard cash. Sam left the laborious agricultural work to the sons while he scoured the woods with his dogs, and claimed the first year on his land he had shot ninety-five deer and eighteen bears, trapped eleven wolves, six catamounts and a “tremenjous large sortment of varmints.” He was one of several Indian haters in the camp and Jinot stayed clear of him.

His son Ted spent his Sundays hunting for spruce gum and knurls. A crazy-grained knurl brought fifty cents in town and made a superior maul head that would never split. Brother Tom had enough energy after a hard week’s work to set traps in the dark on Saturday night and run the line the next afternoon. He stank more than anyone in the camp, a kind of bitter animal musk from his traps.

One who worked silently was Op den Ool, who kept to himself in the back of the ox hovel, where he had a straw bed. The oxen were his company. At the end of the day he picked ice from their hairy legs then massaged them with a liniment he mixed himself of healing herbs, bear grease and crushed ocher-red pigment. Anyone could recognize his red-legged animals from half a mile away.

• • •

They all knew that river work was the most dangerous; there were countless wooden crosses along the banks. That was why the boss gave the water work to the Indians. “Walk the river after ever drive and you’ll find Indans floatin in the backwaters. They drown just as good as white men.”

Hernias, sprains, broken arms and legs, smashed patellas were part of the work, and the possibility of a mangling death rode on all the men’s shoulders even as they defied death with flourishes. The young men had style and they knew it, swaggering about in their pants chopped off below the knee, red shirts and jaunty hats. “A short life and a grieving song,” said Byers after Sash’s foot was caught between logs rolling off the landing and into the river, where he followed the rest of his family into the water. They recovered his body the next day, fitted him into two flour barrels and buried him.

“Guess he’s got enough biscuit dust now,” said Byers, for Sash had been famous for polishing off the biscuits, and when they thrust his legs into the first barrel a floury rain fell from the staves onto the wet pants, mixing with the blood seeping from his crushed legs. Franceway sang a grieving song and the lonely fall of his voice was as much for all of them as for Sash.

• • •

After the cut Marchand sorted his rivermen. The most important were the dead-water men, who worked the logs like fractious cows with twenty-foot-long pike poles. Most men wrangled hung-up sticks with a swinging bitch, a handle with an irritatingly movable dog on the business end that gave enough leverage to shift the log. All day they were running and jumping, riding the bucking logs, moving so quickly they seemed to dance on river foam, shifting to keep their balance, even in fast water. “You,” said Marchand, pointing at Jinot and jabbing his thumb in the direction of the bateaux.

The dark river was flecked with rotten ice, rocks studding its course glistening like fresh-mined coal. The current frothed and boiled, standing waves at the head of a rock and a quiet lozenge of still water at the tail, where, in the old days before the rivers carried millions of bobbing, colliding logs, big salmon would lie.

All day and into the night, their legs festooned with bloodsuckers, the watermen fended off logs trying for the shore, a shore as deep in mire as a hog yard, mud that gave no purchase to a straining man. Days in the icy water caused chilblains, swollen and redly itching legs that swelled and blistered; some men could not bear to sit by the fire for the pain.

Yet twice, despite their labor, the river logs knitted together, bobbing and rising, a huge wooden knot forming to block the river, which began to back up and flood the land. Farmers ran down to the shore shouting that their hay meadows were ruined. Twenty men attacked the first jam, prying and separating logs that seemed to grow into each other. Minutes changed to hours and suddenly a quiver trembled through the mass and the men ran like squirrels for the shore, turned and looked back at what they had escaped: thousands of logs shooting downstream, picking up speed, riding up on each other, hissing with the speed of the current, acres of pine forest on the ride. But the second jam was a killer and they all saw it.

The day was overcast and dark grey. Marchand hoped for rain, a good hard rain that would lift the water level. The rain held off and the difficulty came right where they knew it would. A granite ledge like the backbone of the world ran halfway across the river, plunged underground leaving an opening of two or three rods, then rose again on the other side of the river. The logs had to go through the central channel. The ledge was no problem at high water; logs glided over it with grace. In low water the trick was to have good men standing on each side ready with their pike poles, and more men in the bateaux to guide logs into the narrow passage. Jinot Sel was in one of the three bateaux. Downriver he saw James Ketchum and Franceway standing up to their knees in water herding strays. The orderly procession of logs slowed and almost stopped as tenders upstream jabbed at bunching troublemakers. Onshore, Tom Keyo saw one slightly crooked log, a good forty-footer, elbow its way into a crowd.

“Lookit, that’s a bad one, you see it?” he said.

As he spoke the men upstream shoved scores of hustling logs out into the faster current and these swallowed up the troublemaker.

“Goddamn!” yelled Tom Keyo, with no regard for Marchand’s rule about swearing. A great batch of logs reached the ledge all at once, and among them was the crooked stick, which hung itself on the ledge. The rest of the logs began to pile up on Old Crooked, as they were already calling it, like sheep struggling through brush to escape a pack of wolves.

“All hands and the cook!” someone screamed.

Higher and higher the logs rose on each other’s backs, a vast sheaf of wheat for giants, covering the ledge and forcing Franceway and James Ketchum toward the shore. So high did the logs stack that a few top ones began, of their own volition, to roll down into the central current.

Marchand was dancing with frustration. “From the top, roll ’em in from the top,” he shouted, unaware of the crooked key log at the bottom holding the main bunch in place. A dozen men scrambled high and began rolling logs down into the current. But the central jam did not move and new sticks continued to build up. Franceway put down his pike pole and ran for his ax. He shouted at Marchand, who didn’t hear him, “There’s a key down there, crooked ol son of a goddamn jeezly bitch key!” Gripping his ax he ran out onto the ledge toward the jam, got into the hung-up bunch at the bottom and spied the ill-shaped jam maker. It was crisscrossed by half a dozen big stems and he beckoned to James Ketchum to come help him chop down to the problem.

“Marchand!” screamed Byers over the roar of water, “you got a key hung on the ledge.” Marchand nodded. A few of the men on top came to the lower level and began prying at logs. Franceway and Ketchum chopped their way down to the bad log and began to cut into its crooked bend. Crackling sounds came from it and Ketchum shouted “Run!” suiting his action to the words. But Franceway lifted his arms and smote the bent devil a final blow. It broke, the jam quivered and immediately began to haul. Logs gushed over the edge. Jinot, in his bateau above the jam, saw a thirty-foot log rear up at the top of the releasing pile and plunge down like a falling arrow, striking Franceway square in the center of his back. Men onshore heard the crack. Franceway folded backward like a sheet of paper, his heels came past his ears and now a butcher’s package of meat, he went under the grind. Jinot opened his jaws to scream but his throat was paralyzed. In that moment his childhood ended.

• • •

The workday lasted until after sunset, the long summer light slowly giving way to darkness, and Jinot bereft, weeping in rasps and chokes, crept under the bateau to lie beside Franceway’s empty place. He did not sleep but wept and rolled back and forth. It was the first of many sleepless nights. Trying to get past the misery he worked. He cut trees with a surety and rapidity that made him difficult as a chopping partner. He always volunteered for the spring drives and people up and down the rivers recognized his fluid, quick-footed style. “Jinot!” they called. “Jinot Sel.” And waved.

He worked for Marchand again for two years, then, like his brothers, moved on to different camps, different rivers. He went home in the summers and chopped the winter’s firewood for Beatrix and Kuntaw — eighty cords to keep the old house warm, sometimes also for Francis-Outger, who lived nearby. It was good when Josime or Amboise was there and they sawed, chopped and split in comradely fashion. He went fishing with Kuntaw and Francis-Outger’s young son, Édouard-Outger. Once Beatrix made a picnic with roast chicken and potatoes cooked in hot coals. Another year Kuntaw and Beatrix went to the mudflats and came back with a bushel basket of clams, which Kuntaw cooked Mi’kmaw style smothered in seaweed. Jinot helped Elise by lifting great boiling kettles off the fire when she put up vegetables and fruit for the winter, gleaming purple beets in their glass prisons on the cellar shelves alongside varicolored jars of blueberries, peas, beans, applesauce, pickled eggs, and pear halves. Then came the morning when he’d had enough of domesticity, packed his turkey and set off for Bangor and the hiring bosses. If Josime or Amboise was at home, this itch to leave was infectious and they went the distance together. Sometimes they hired out together and hiring bosses fought to get them; it was well known the Sel brothers were the best in the woods.

The years slid by distinguished only by accidents, injuries, wildfire and strange events. Then, around the time of the new century, for some unclear reason, they again began to work at different camps. Once more Jinot joined Marchand, by mistake, as he had come late to Bangor and the best camps already had their quotas of men. Marchand’s camp was as rough and primitive as in the old days, but he was cutting in the Allagash watershed, where Jinot had not been. The trees were some of the best remaining white pine, and he wondered how Marchand had come by such a choice woodlot. He slept under a bateau rather than in the bunkhouse, thinking of Franceway in their young days. How would it have been now, with both of them close to thirty winters? He would always think of Franceway when he slept under a boat.

Someone called his name in a hoarse voice.

“Jinot! Jinot! Wake!” His heart leapt. He had been dreaming of him. It was not Franceway, it never would be Franceway again, but his half brother Francis-Outger, holding a lantern in his left hand and shaking Jinot’s knee with the other.

“Get up! Come. Now.”

“What? What?”

“Mother is dead. Kuntaw wants you to come. I told Marchand. He cursed me hell to breakfast — a bad-swearin man. Josime rode to tell Amboise. You come. Now!”

• • •

Beatrix was buried in the plot that Outger had laid out behind the house. The judge read the will directly after the funeral as the family was at hand. Beatrix had left the house, furniture and property to Elise in gratitude for her care and in atonement for sending her to a miserable marriage when she was a girl. All her books she left to Dr. Mukhtar. The secret pine woodlot she owned in northern Maine, a property of forty thousand acres, went to her sons, Francis-Outger and Josime. To Kuntaw she left two of the five horses they kept, a red English wool blanket he had always liked and a letter. He opened and read the letter of only a few sentences, gave a short laugh and turned silent. Beatrix had made him laugh once again, and once again she had puzzled him. He said he would go back to Canada. Jinot and Amboise each received a small package. Amboise pulled away the paper and found a small watercolor Beatrix had painted depicting Elise, himself and Jinot sitting on a bench under the apple tree. He had a very faint memory that long ago she had sat them in a row and made a drawing in her red sketchbook. He had never seen this painting. There was a small deerskin sock containing five gold pieces. Mopping his eyes and putting his inheritance carefully in his breast pocket he said he would go to New Brunswick for the drive that was barely under way. Jinot opened his own package — it was a familiar stuffed toy horse, four inches tall, that Beatrix had made for him the day after Tonny brought them there. And he, too, had a deerskin pouch of coins. A folded paper written in her unsteady hand said, “Remember me.” How could it be otherwise?

That evening Amboise said to Jinot, “You come my camp end of July and we talk where to go. I got some ideas. But first go find Marchand and git your pay. I can tell you got some trouble, not just Mother’s death — better come work.”

• • •

Marchand said, “I shouldn’t give you nothin. You left me in the lurch, just walk off like that middle of the night.” But he paid him and Jinot found himself with nearly two hundred dollars in his pocket as well as Beatrix’s coins. Yet his heart was sore with the loss of Beatrix. He had loved her since the day she lifted him onto the chair and called him snoezepoes. He had loved the little stuffed horse with its yarn mane and painted eyes; it had been lost, and it seemed he was holding his childhood again. He put it with his other precious memento — Franceway’s tiny songbook, two or three reminder words for many songs. He could feel Beatrix’s warm closeness, could hear Franceway’s beloved voice.

This last day at the Penobscot house he stuffed his pack basket with clothing, a crooked knife, flint, extra moccasins as if he were going on a long journey. He came into the kitchen for the last time. Elise was sitting at the table writing a list of chores. She looked up at him.

“When will you come again?” she said.

“I do not know. I can’t tell. I will work awhile, maybe find Amboise, maybe go back up north. Maybe find Grandfather Kuntaw? I don’t know.”

Taking down the trees was his anodyne. The forests of New England vibrated with chopping. Swarms of men limbed and hauled the windfall to the rivers. Mills sawed day and night and the great glut of lumber brought new settlers and encouraged an unprecedented construction boom.

Another year passed and another and Jinot counted his more than thirty winters. It was time he found Amboise, if he was still in that New Brunswick camp.

41. Gatineau camps

The New Brunswick camp was deserted except for a mournful ex-logger with a bandaged head and scabbed face sitting on the cookhouse steps peeling potatoes. “Wal, they tell me I am lucky. They tell me I am lucky I can peel taters. Lost half my teeth, see?” He exposed empty purple gums. “On the drive, log took half my face, bled like a busted dam. They give me a job of cookee but I spect by fall I’ll be good agin.”

“Looking for my brother, Amboise Sel?”

“Yah, I see it — you got a Indan phiz like Amboise. I seen him come out the bunkhouse with that old Indan pack basket and known he was goin his own way. He talked about makin a shack in the woods, out by our cut. Liked it out there, but I don’t know what there was to like — just swamp. Say, have some tea! I take some this time a day. Name’s Mikla. Joe Mikla.” Like many who spend time alone he could not stop talking. They went into the cookhouse. Jinot noticed shrouded mounds of rising bread, raised his eyebrows at the cookee.

“Yeah, there’s a crew a swampers workin, but no choppers. Here, show you where we was cuttin.” Dipping his finger in his tea he drew a wet map on the table marking the old cut where Amboise might be found. “Can’t miss a cut like that. Guess Amboise’d pick a good spot next to the swamp, get the full benefit a the mosquitoes. I was glad to get out a there.”

• • •

He found Amboise at the end of three days of swamp slash, bent over and whittling on something. To one side Jinot saw a row of dressed tree roots.

“I’m gettin these,” said Amboise, gesturing at the row of roots. “It’s old Perley Palmer’s show. He don’t care if I take the knees — all stumps to him anyways.”

Maybe, thought Jinot, Amboise had lost his mind. He shifted the subject and asked about Kuntaw.

“Grandfather Kuntaw? After her buryin he rolled up and went north. Back to Canada. Back to where he come from. Last I heard. Maybe he writes to Elise?”

“She’s in Boston with that doctor husband, Hallagher.”

“Who is livin in the house?”

“I don’t know. Francis-Outger looks after it now. Maybe Elise sold it? Nobody told me.”

There was silence while they thought about Kuntaw, an old man heading into the north woods. Their thoughts were envious.

“Brother,” said Amboise. “I have work we can do together.”

“What work? Not swampin out roads. Told Marchand I’d be back in November. If I could.”

“Not swampin; I talked with some fellers down in Portsmouth shipyard after — after the drive. I heard they’d pay good for them things.” He waved at his root assembly. “Workin this cut I seen the swamp full a hackmatack. They want ship timber, knees — knees for ships. They say ‘ships get built in the woods.’ ”

Jinot looked at the root knees lined out in a row. Hackmatack, hard as iron, prized for its tough and twisted root fibers.

“We just do it for a while, eh? You go with Marchand when he starts. Winter, I chop again.”

“Guess we can. This a good hackmatack-juniper swamp?”

Amboise said that it was better to get the knees late in the year, when the sap stopped running. In summer it was a sticky business. “But it’s dryin up pretty good now. I figured work on them until frost. And then go back in the camps.”

They dug around the roots of likely hackmatacks. When they found one with a good bend, they cleared away the soil, cut the end two feet out from the tree and went after the taproot. The tree teetered, went down and they bucked off the root stump a good five feet up.

“Now we got a knee,” said Amboise, and he showed Jinot how to measure and mark the line and hew to make a ninety-degree angle at the heel, a smooth throat on the inner curve, the back and bottom smooth and flat.

Jinot didn’t much like grubbing in the swamp for knees and he did not want to go back to Marchand. He felt as Kuntaw, that he had to get away.

“Brother,” he said to Amboise. “Let us go west. I have heard there are great forests west. I do not want to get these hackmatack knees.”

Amboise looked upward at the treetops. “Yes,” he said.

• • •

It was dark when Jinot came awake. There was something — someone — outside the shack. He reached over and touched Amboise and knew by his rigid shoulder that he had heard it and was awake. Slowly, soundlessly, Jinot sat up. His ax was near the door flap. He began to stretch toward it when a voice said, “Long ago in the old days three children were lost in the forest—”

“Josime!” yelled Amboise. “You fool! Could of shot you.”

“If you had a firearm,” said Jinot, groping for the candle. Josime built up the fire outside, Amboise filled the kettle. They sat in front of the fire, brothers in stained shirts, spark-holed hats. In the first light their uncle-brother Josime saw the hackmatack knees.

“Is this man’s work?”

“No, we are now travelers and hunters. Go to that west forest, Pennsylvany, Ohio, we don’t know how far. Kuntaw said that forest goes to end of the world. We go there,” said Jinot. Amboise nodded. “That is our plan.”

Josime laughed. “That is not your plan. That is my plan. I care nothing for that woodland I was to share with Francis-Outger. He was happy to hear me say, ‘Brother, you can have it all.’ I think about you, my nephew-brothers. You better come with me, but I am going. Today. It is my plan.”

• • •

The decision began a welding of their lives and work as they angled north through the forest, leaving behind them a world of chopped and broken trees, woodland changed to cornfields and pasture. They yearned to go to a place where the trees still stood thick and wild. Josime said he had heard of a timber operation in the Gatineau country to the north.

“There is a man from Boston went there. He got three camps, sendin log rafts down to Montreal. I say go north.”

The important word for them was north. They were of the north and they would go north.

• • •

In ten days they walked to Three Rivers — Trois-Rivières — where they found some Omamiwinini downriver people preparing to go beyond Montreal up the Kichisìpi. These travelers, many women and children, in the care of a tall man with a dark and serious face, were happy to have three more strong men to help on the portages, to move along before the hard cold. Already there were morning frosts.

When they stopped for the first night a knot of girls enclosed Jinot. Some of them were exceptionally pretty. The Omamiwinini told Josime that some of them were Odaawa people on their way to Manitoulin Island, where other Odaawa people lived. Once, long ago, they had all lived on that big island, but whiteman’s diseases had come and the survivors set their villages afire; some moved to Trois-Rivières. Now they were returning home, for the diseases had disappeared. They would break their journey for a few days at First Meeting Place — Montréal. Josime, in another canoe, stared at one girl for a long time before he turned away and asked the men questions about the Gatineau. Yes, said the man with the serious face, it was true, whitemen cut pine up that river. They were making round logs to be flat on all sides. Very strange.

Jinot disliked the Ottawa River, deceptively smooth for many miles, then bursting into tumbling, roiling falls. He sensed its malevolent character. The onshore thickets of old wooden crosses below the falls indicated a death river. He bent to the paddle.

At First Meeting Place one of the loveliest Odaawa girls gave Jinot a fern frond, hastily plucked as the canoe passed close to a verdant rock face. The paddlers did not linger but called farewell, farewell and pushed on up the Ottawa with the Sels.

They stopped below the Chaudière Falls and the serious-faced man told Josime the lumber camps were a two-day walk upstream. Or come with them to Manitoulin and lead a good life away from the whiteman’s doings. They themselves, he said, would now double back, pick up the Trois-Rivières Odaawa party and continue up the river, portage to Lake Nipissing, down La Rivière de Français and on to Manitoulin. “Two, three more week,” he said.

“You are good people,” said Josime, his eyes following their canoe. “Now, brothers, we walk.”

On the path around the falls they passed two parties of whitemen talking about starting log businesses. The leader of one party was white-haired and stout with a crimson face.

“Why? England needs timber,” he said to Josime, who had asked him why he ventured far from home. The man turned away, adding that he had no time to waste on idle talk with savages. A second group was friendlier and the leader said, “Do you not know that England is hungry for timber? The pine most gone in New England so lumbermen comin into this Ottawa country. Still fresh country with big pines. Make a fortune here.”

It was in these encounters with whitemen they learned that they were not Indians but métis or, as one Anglo entrepreneur pejoratively called them, “half-breeds.” In Maine their white-settler neighbors knew confidently that they were fading from the earth; yes, said Josime to his brothers, they were disappearing, not by disease and wasting away in sorrow as the whites supposed, but through absorption into the white population — only look at their sister, Elise. “Her children are almost whitemen already,” for she had married Dr. Hallagher, the Irishman who had first examined Beatrix. Here on the Gatineau the Sels were a different kind of people, neither Mi’kmaq nor the other, and certainly not both.

“What we are,” said Josime, “is tree choppers.”

• • •

Sawmill site prospectors and timber lookers, men seeking good pine stands, had pounded the trail into a broad pathway; pine remained the ideal. Small entrepreneurs from the east hurried along, buying tracts of land and stumpage, damming the small streams to power their sawmills. The big money went to men with good credit and connections who could quickly get out the most squared timber for the British market. The most important was William Scugog, a Massachusetts man who had fought against the British in the Revolution and now claimed he repented of it.

“Lot of camps,” said Josime. They heard of logging outfits along the Ottawa itself, on its tributaries; to the north the Black, Dumoine, Coulonge, the Gatineau, Rouge and the Lièvre, on the south the Rideau, Madawaska, Petawawa, Mattawa, the Bonnechère, powerful streams that swelled the huge rush of forest water flowing into the mighty St. Laurent; all the valleys were packed with big pine.

• • •

The Sel brothers hired on with William Scugog. He sent them to a camp up on the Gatineau. Before the Sels got there they set their minds against the camp, against the men in the camp and against Scugog. But Scugog had hired an outstanding cook, Diamond Bob, so called for a tattoo on his neck and a flashing ring on his finger. He did elegant things with a caribou haunch, but understood that the logger was strengthened by beans and biscuits and supplied them in plenty.

Scugog and his oldest son, Cato, traveled between their houses on the Gatineau, in Montréal and Québec, cajoling promises of money from timber-shipping merchants for pinewood still uncut and in most cases unseen.

The Gatineau forest was noisy, echoing with ax blows and the rushing crackle of falling timber, with shouted warnings and orders. The axmen cut the great pines, but only a few in each plot were suitable for squaring. The rest were left to rot on the ground. Jinot did not like to bend over for hours scoring trees for the hewer; he preferred to chop down trees. Amboise, whose arms were longer, did not mind scoring and Josime was a fine hewer with the weighty broadax, trimming the log smooth and flat within a fraction of the chalk line. The waste was terrific — twenty-five percent of each squared tree lost; unwanted trees lay prostrate, severed branches everywhere, heaps of bark and mountains of chips. But squared timber made up into rafts more easily and would not roll when packed into ships for transport to England. There were so many trees, what did it matter? Maine men were used to waste — it was usual — but this was beyond anything even they had seen. The slash and chips from the hewers’ axes was knee-high.

The Scugogs had enough squared timber for two rafts at the end of the winter. The bigger raft, made up of fifty cribs, belonged to old William, and the smaller raft to son Cato. The rafts traveled well enough on smooth water but broke apart at the falls. There was nothing for it but to disassemble them and send the cribs through, one by one, then put all together again. Jinot often thought of free logs surging through the boisterous spring freshet of the Penobscot. But of course rafts did not get into killing jams.

When the rafts arrived in Montréal they could not find a place to moor. Scugog had made no arrangements for the unwieldy mass of timbers. And it seemed to the choppers and rivermen that they were paid off grudgingly, that Scugog’s fingers lingered over the money. The tavern word was that he was having difficulty selling his timber.

• • •

A second son, Blade Scugog, was running a shanty farther up the Gatineau. The Sels shifted to this son’s shanty, glad to work with round logs. It was too bad to leave Diamond Bob’s grub, but the regret faded when they heard the famous cook had abandoned Scugog père in midseason in favor of Montréal, where he opened an oyster house. This younger Scugog, whose deep scratched-up voice was familiar to the river’s lumbermen, despised not only the uncertain rafting enterprise but his father’s stupidity in cutting without permits and permissions. He quickly got a cutting permit for himself after declaring he intended to make lumber for domestic enterprises, not for export.

“What do you imagine you are doing?” shouted the older man at his contrary offspring.

“After the war ends there will be thousands of settlers coming into this country. They will need boards and shingles to build houses.” To himself he added, “Not bloody squared warship timbers that the Crown can seize without remuneration.”

“You are, sir, a reckless fool. There will always be wars, always a need for squared timbers. You will fail with your trust in chimerical men who will never come to settle such rude lands. Do not ask me for aid when poverty brings you down.”

“And do you not come to me with your square timbers hoping for an introduction to purchasers,” said the son in his rough voice.

• • •

Blade Scugog’s sawmill ran through the summer, but at the end of dry September it was caught in a fast-moving wildfire and burned to the ground. The ambitious son refused to see he was ruined, rushed to Québec and leveraged money to rebuild. “I may not know much about square timbers,” he said, “but I know how to make money.”

• • •

The settlers did come and with them came bridges, lightning-fast clearing, plans for crib-size timber slides around the worst falls, canals to bypass rough water, large new settlements, cemeteries, flour mills and postal service. They pushed back the wildwood. Civilization rushed into the trees.

The Sels moved on to other camps after Scugog’s fire. Pine choppers from Maine arrived every season, now and then someone they knew. On Jinot’s first day on the Fischer-Helden cut, walking to the marked trees behind a knot of choppers he recognized the familiar jaunty stride of Joe Martel from Marchand’s long-ago Penobscot camp at the time of Franceway.

“Joe!” he called. “Joe Martel, what you do here?”

Martel turned around, his black beard ruffed out like a grouse’s breast, a gleam of teeth, a happy exclamation.

“Jinot Sel, Jinot. You are here?” He waited until Jinot came up to him and they walked together.

“I seen four, five Penobscots up here in the Canada trees. It’s bad in Maine now, you know. The white pine give out. Cuttin spruce and hardwood now. But this here”—he waved his arm at the riches of the Gatineau—“looks like a pretty good chance, eh?” He said Marchand had gone broke and was swinging an ax like the rest of them somewhere on the Gatineau. Tom Keyo was dead, decapitated by a flying log. That night after supper they talked on about the old days when they were Penobscot rivermen running on bubbles, the best in the world. “We made our mark, by gaw.”

• • •

The next winter was windy and bad for accidents. One man’s ax head flew off its handle, sailed twenty feet and sheared a young chopper’s face away; widow-makers caught three, killing two outright and breaking the third so badly he never worked again. Two buckers cut their feet to the bone and night after night the men talked about the need for stouter boots. Most of them still wore heavy elk-hide midcalf moccasins. An ax cut through one as if it were a syrup-soaked pancake.

The Sel brothers and Martel made the Saturday night trek to the near settlement “to drink and watch the fools” as Amboise put it, “to talk with the girls” as Jinot said. He only came for drink and company. So he said. In the settlement’s two whorehouses the girls made much of Jinot, and if Amboise or Josime came in alone always asked, “Where is Jinot?”

“What is it they see in him?” Martel said. Jinot was only Jinot — a good riverman, easygoing in character, but off a log nothing special. He couldn’t sing, did not play the fiddle, wasn’t much of a step dancer. It had to be his smile and chaffing banter, for Jinot was always good-natured when others were gloomy and he listened to the girls’ complaints with real interest.

“By now he knows more bout women than anybody in the world,” Josime told Martel. “He been listenin to them jabber long, long years now. I guess half the brats in Maine come from Jinot.” Martel, thinking of Franceway, raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

• • •

A few winters later in the Ottawa drainage they were again squaring timbers, this time at Harold Honey’s camp. The shanty was crowded with dirty, lousy men who were strong beyond modern comprehension. The interior was always drafty and smoky. At night, exhausted by the constant swing of the ax against the living tree, they thought the rough accommodations of bare ground luxurious.

The days were longer and the taste of spring was in their mouths. The drive was only a few weeks away. At the end of one day Honey came to them in the shanty.

“Well, boys, I guess I got some bad news. The log market’s fell out the bottom. Scugog’s got all the Canada business. I can’t sell them logs we got on the rollway. I am broke and will have to go back to Maine and hire out again. I can’t pay nobody, but you are welcome to the logs if you can move ’em.” His smile was painful. There was nothing to do but pack up and head downriver with the rest of the crew.

• • •

Jinot was the only one with any money. The Sels agreed to spend it on a blowout in Montréal and then decide whether to go back to Maine or stay in the Ottawa valley.

“They still cut trees in Maine — water pine is gone but there’s red pine and spruce and hardwood. There’s work. Plenty work on the booms. There’s still some long log drives.”

“Let’s go west,” mumbled Amboise. “Not go back to the Penobscot and that — all that.” They knew what he meant: Beatrix’s grave, the old house, the choppers they knew, scabby woods and stump forests, the ghosts of dead men. Martel said that if they went west he would go with them.

In Montréal they hit the Golden Pine, the dingiest whorehouse, but good enough for woodsmen and fur traders — even métis and “savages.” They agreed to meet up afterward at the Wing King saloon, where the proprietor not only sold liquor but rented beds for the night in the big storeroom.

The focal point of the Golden Pine was an upright log carved like a membrum virile and painted “golden” yellow supporting the ceiling. No food was served, but a fierce kind of fermented apple cider Madam Georgine called “calvados” or “Napoleon brandy” or just “spirits” depending on the customer. The room was crowded when they went in. A long row of chairs ranged against one wall and on the chairs sat the merchandise. There were stout Irish girls with flaming cheeks, some blue-eyed milk-skinned English blondes, one sultry Jewess, a smattering of French-speaking farm girls and, in the bargain corner, a few native women. Martel made his little joke, asking Jinot if he would like a chair with the girls, then began talking with one from Kébec, asking her foolish questions about her family. Madam Georgine, who knew Jinot, tugged at his jacket sleeve.

“Come over here,” she said and led him to a murky alcove. “Here, try this.” She poured liquor from a black bottle into a tiny glass and handed it to him. “Go on, drink it. It’s the real thing. Brandy. Napoleon brandy. We had a swell in here and he left it behind.” Jinot swallowed the fiery stuff and thought that if that was what Napoleon drank his death was imminent. He smiled, pinched Madam Georgine’s encarmined cheek and turned back to the line.

“Jinot! Look.” It was Josime, pointing with his pursed lips at a woman bent over her lap, avoiding the stares of the men. “See who that is?”

“No. Who is it?”

“It’s that girl in the canoe when we come here. Long time ago. The Odaawa. The one give you that fern.”

He studied the figure. Who could tell, the way she was slouched over? Fern, what fern? Who could remember after six or eight years what a girl in a canoe had looked like? Josime, Josime could remember. Jinot walked over to her, said, “Heyo, pretty girl.” She looked up. She said, “Jinot?” Her eyes gleamed with tears. She was thin, half-starved, he reckoned. He didn’t remember her but she remembered him. “It’ll get better by and by, don’t cry.” He went back to Josime, who was breathing hard.

“Don’t remember,” he said.

“How that gal git here?” he asked Madam Georgine.

“How you think? Some men brought her in and left her. Traders, fur traders. Bad-trouble girl, her, a no-good. Scratch and bite. I get rid her pret’ soon.”

When he looked again Josime had led the girl to one of the tables and was talking earnestly, asking questions in the way he had of stretching his head forward as if to catch the faintest whisper. Suddenly Jinot was sick of the place. He could feel the rotgut wrenching his innards.

At the door he looked back again. The girl was looking beyond Josime to Jinot with a pleading expression. Josime’s head was close to hers and he was still talking.

“She don’t hear a word he’s sayin,” Jinot murmured. Then he remembered he had all the money. Once more he went to Madam Georgine and stuffed the money into her hands.

“I’m payin for my brothers and our friend Martel. They sposed to come to the Wing King later. They know it, but tell ’em anyway.”

He walked along the plank sidewalks. He thought of Josime, he thought of the girl. He still did not recollect her. What he remembered about the time in the canoe was Josime’s hard bright stare, he had assumed it was aimed at all of the girls, a fixed gaze that went on and on. But it must have been for only that one. He felt a little sorry for Josime.

• • •

In the morning Amboise and Martel were waiting for him outside the Wing King.

“Where’s Josime?” He had a headache and saw they, too, were suffering.

Amboise shook his head. There was a long silence. “Got to make tea,” he said at last.

“Where’s Josime?”

“He took that girl off. Old Madam screamed like wild cat she can’t go, he’s got to pay her money, so he didn’t have any money but he give her somethin, maybe he found some money he forgot in his pocket, and she shut up. Josime said tell you he’s gone Manitoulin with that girl, says we better wait — he comes back.”

“Wait where? No place here we can wait. We got no money.”

“Get work — plenty sawmills here. You know, move the logs up into the mill. Sort logs in the millpond. Other jobs. Plenty work, if you know logs and water, hey?”

He was right. They all found jobs at sawmills and the cross-eyed toothless owner of the Wing King, once a logger and riverman, said they could stay on as long as they could pay. They could, but Amboise and Martel began to drink their money up. Amboise said he didn’t care, he liked to drink whiskey. Jinot, who also liked to drink whiskey and who didn’t know how far it was to Manitoulin, hoped Josime would come back soon so they could get away from the city, back to the sober life of the camps.

• • •

More than two months later Jinot came into the Wing King storeroom and Josime was there, lying on his bed, his eyes closed. He sat up.

“What took you so long time come back?” said Jinot.

“Brother, my life has changed greatly. I chop trees no more. I stay always with that girl on Manitoulin Island and give up whiteman ways, whiteman work. That girl my wife. I come tell you I go back to her now.”

“You are like Kuntaw,” said Jinot, “slaved to a woman. And you talk different. Much time with that Manitoulin girl.”

“It is right for me to be with her in the forest, away from stinking men and the wounding of the land. It is — what I want.”

Jinot thought he looked very much like Beatrix, especially his pale eyes. “I know,” he said.

“It is a joy that you do not know,” said Josime stiffly. They sat silent for a long time, then Josime spoke again.

“I wish you come with me. I know you will not but I wish it. We are not so young now. You would feel a happiness to eat whitefish, see those people living good lives, not false whiteman lives like we do in lumber camp. One day you come to Manitoulin and learn what I say is true.”

“I sure to come, Josime, come visit, see you, your children. But you doin this makes me afraid. Maybe I wish I was the one do it.”

Josime laughed. “You! You leave the ax? No, I do not think so. But I want to tell you something I have seen a day’s paddle south from that country. Brother, I have seen with my own eyes the largest white pines that ever grew in the world. The Manitoulin people told me that pine tree forest is very big, maybe a thousand English people’s miles. It is their forest and they move through it, their rivers and they travel on them for they are traders and have been traders for many generations. They are good people who have not forgotten the old ways. You must never tell any white man about this pine forest for they will come in numbers like ples—passenger pigeons — and cut it down. Never speak of it to anyone. Never.”

He would not speak of it but they would come anyway.

• • •

A few weeks later Jinot, Amboise and Martel drifted back to Maine. Before they went to Bangor to look for work they returned to Penobscot Bay. Josime had a too-small shirt that he wanted to give to his nephew, Francis-Outger’s son, Édouard-Outger. He must be near-grown by now.