Barkskins

49. stupendous conflagration

In the years since the Sels had worked on the Gatineau, Maine had been freed from Massachusetts, although there were many people who expected all-out war with the Bay State; a meteor dashing its bloody sparks through the sky had foretold it. But nothing happened and Maine swelled with men, not only rough lumbermen on a three-day guzzle, but jobbers and land agents and Boston men eager to buy pieces of the dwindled pine forest, talking also of spruce and hackmatack, hemlock bark and hardwood. The remaining pineries were scarce and remote, but there were growing markets for other woods. The push was to clear the beetle-browed forest and a profit. Everywhere the great mantle of forest had been torn into small pieces, hundreds of thousands of acres converted to stumps and stubs. The lumber cuts bared once-shaded stream banks, exposing the water to harsh sunlight. Silted pools and gravel bars discouraged trout. Towns were noisy with saloons, eateries, hotels and palaces of pleasure, with the spring and summer rumble of logs. The sawmills ran day and night, the saws constantly under repair, the danger of fire omnipresent. Countless wagons hauled cut lumber to the wharf. Bangor bragged of being the world center of lumber shipping.

A crazy taste for invention and improvement blew through the state like a dust storm. Shingle mills used small circular saws and men swore the time was just around the corner when round saws would replace the old up-and-down and even gang saws. Already there was a forty-eight-inch circular saw in a mill on the Kenduskeag, and another in Waterville that was rumored to cut an amazing four thousand board feet an hour. Steam engines were taking over the world. In Boston the new gaslights burned as brightly as high noon. It was too much progress to swallow in a lump. Amboise and Jinot Sel — Josime was still in far Manitoulin — did not like it and after one season on the much-cut Penobscot among crews of griping farmer-loggers they went north to New Brunswick, to the monkish silence of the old-fashioned woods camps where they found other broad-cheeked Mi’kmaq living the hybrid lives of woodsmen. Their people could no longer live without whiteman goods and food; instead of hunting and making the things they needed they worked for pay.

Jinot could fall a little six-inch pine in less than a minute. Down they went, the small pines. The brothers, pressed between the white world and their own half-known and disappearing culture, settled back into the woodsman’s life. Amboise was highly susceptible to rum. In the camp he was sober and thoughtful, but when they went south for a blowout he became a Drunken Indan, lying sodden in the muddy street, where boys thought it funny to thrust burning splinters into the toes of his boots.

• • •

One year Jinot, like a man visiting his old homestead, went back to Penobscot Bay. He walked down to the Duquet house, just to look. He felt nothing. It was run-down and dilapidated, the roofline sagged, two damaged wagons stood in the yard. But someone lived in it — he could see dogs under the porch. There were sheets hanging limp on a line. Was Elise still there? He walked past the house several times, unable to go to the door. But there were two shops now in the settlement and he went into one to buy tobacco.

“Them that live in that old log place down by the water? Doc Hallagher, years ago?”

The old shopkeeper, walnut-stained color, long thin fingers, looked up.

“They did live there. Move to Boston five, six year past. Bay folks too healthy for the doc to make a livin. Kids to feed.”

“Lot a kids?”

“Course she was Indan, so what can—” He broke off, recognizing that the man he was talking with might take offense at what he almost had said. He had some not too distant Indian ancestors himself. He squinted at Jinot. “You related?”

“Yah. She’s my sister. I didn’t see her long time.”

“You go down Boston way you might find her. Don’t know who’s in that house now. I think Elise sold it or give it to Francis Sel, rich stuck-up bastid. Ask him. He owns it, leases it out. He lives in that house next the sawmill. Sawmill owner. If he’s feelin good he might tell you.” He thought a moment, then said, “But if Elise is your sister, then Francis is your brother? You better go ask him yourself.”

• • •

But Jinot did not care to see Francis-Outger. If young Édouard-Outger was at home it might have been a temptation, but the storekeeper said the nephew was working in the camps somewhere. Jinot wasn’t going to Boston. He went back into the Miramichi woods. But not back to Mi’kma’ki. Better to be in the lumber camps.

• • •

It was a dry winter, cold enough, but no amount of snow compared to the old days. It made woods work easier except for getting the logs to the stream. They ran the water wagon at night to make a slick runway. While the choppers ate breakfast the driver ate his dinner, told of seeing lynx and once a black catamount, its eyes catching the yellow moonlight for a moment and then gone like pinched-out candles.

They rolled the logs into the scanty freshet. Logs grounded on gravel bars and it was hot, hard work prying them off. Sun glint off the river made them half blind and when they walked into the woods the shade throbbed with green blaze.

“Crimes, it’s like hayin season. Hot!”

With half the drive stranded along the river until heavy rain or the next spring drive the farmers went back to their homesteads, complaining, “ ’Tis only June, but I never see it so unseasonable hot. And dry.” Few seeds sprouted. Those that managed to send up shoots withered when no rain came. The wells quit. Women scraped water from inch-deep brooks for their gardens but as the long hot August blazed on, the plants remained stunted and starved. By September potato plants prostrate, maize stalks like faded paper foretold a hungry winter. Even impious men prayed, staring up at the monotone sky.

The only farmwork that could be done was more clearing. Work was the cure for every trouble. And it was thirsty work. The tough French and English farmers came from generations who had burned fallow fields and they saw no reason to change. Burning was part of farming — piles of slash from months of clearing, heaps of deadwood and dry rushes from drained swamps. The easiest way to clear woodland was to set it on fire and later grub out the black stumps. In that crackling dry autumn when dead weeds shattered into dust and brittle grasses crunched underfoot hundreds of settlers set their clearance fires as usual.

• • •

In the camps swampers were building roads for the winter cut. Most smoked pipes and now knocking the glowing dottle onto the ground started a swift little fire. The habit was to let fires burn. Fires were inevitable. It cheered settlers to know a little more of the forest was going down.

By early October the air was smoke-hazed violet, thick with heat, so humid that sweat-soaked shirts could not dry. Everyone moved slowly, cranky with rash and sweat sores. The choppers drank gallons of water from the shriveled brooks and their steaming hair hung lank. No evening breezes cooled and people lay in their smelly beds praying for the heat to break.

On the seventh of October the prayer began to be answered. Dry air from the west crossed an invisible frontal boundary, encountering the stagnant wet air. The winds began to mix with ferocious results, blasting oxygen like myriad bellows into the many small fires.

• • •

Amboise and Joe Martel, their old friend from the Penobscot, had hired on with a jobber on the Nepisiguit. Amboise seemed to land in Bartibog jail every time he left the camp. Miles south on the Miramichi, Jinot, another half Mi’kmaw named Joe Wax and Swanee, a bullnecked limber, were cutting for one-armed old Lew Green.

Jinot’s crew was two miles upstream from the shanty, just starting the show on a marked-out plot. The terrain was level enough where they were cutting, but to the west and southwest steep hills and inaccessible ravines were packed with big timber, deadfalls and heavy underbrush. That morning Swanee had laid his pipe down on an old stump and it had smoldered on sullenly after he took his pipe up. There were little smoke spirals in every direction, always fire somewhere. They let the stump burn; whenever they wanted to light a new pipe they could put a dry splinter into the smolder and have an instant light, but a sudden rush of wind out of the southwest set the stump ablaze in seconds and they stood amazed, watching it rise into a towering column of fire. They heard the sound then — faraway thunder, then a roar like the rumble of logs coming off a rollway. It went on and on and grew louder.

“Hell is that?” said Swanee. The wind increased and it bent the stump’s tower of flame to the ground. Immediately fire spread out like spilled water. They could see bulging black smoke to the southwest. Cinders and ash flew overhead. Joe Wax pointed south and Jinot saw a sight he could never forget. Behind the pine ridge billowed a mountain-scape of smoke and a brightness grew behind the ridge, silhouetting the jagged crest of pines. The roaring sound was tremendous, and with fear they now grasped that it was the wind and fire in a concert of combustion. With a harsh snarl like an exhalation from hell, the entire five-mile-long ridge burst into orange streamers that ran up the pines. Great slabs of flame broke free from the main fire and sprang at the sky. A hail of burning twigs and coals came down on the men. Rivulets of fire snaked up trees they had planned to cut. A nearby pine exploded. The noise from the approaching holocaust and the hurricane wind deafened them. Trees burst open. Nothing could exist in that massive furnace.

“The river!” someone shouted. “Run!” The river lay half a mile beyond the shanty. It was a long journey and the fire raced with them, bellowing and booming, jumping its hot sparks over them and getting a head start each time. It was like being pursued by a ravening, demonic beast and Jinot was terrified. He saw Joe Wax’s hair on fire, the man oblivious to the pain, running, running. Now stumbling and falling, they passed the shanty, its smoking roof. The cook, Victor Goochey, stood in the doorway holding a long fork.

“The river!” screamed Swanee and ran on. The cook stood rigid and unmoving, his eyes fixed on the lusty springing flames behind the men. Jinot saw that the man could not move, swerved and ran to him, wrenching the cook from the doorway and shouting, “Run! Run! Run! Run!”

• • •

They leapt into the pool where the cook had often fished. The water was warm but deep enough to let them submerge, rise, submerge again. The teamster was in the pool with his oxen, sharing it with several deer, a wildcat and a black bear cub. The cook arrived, still clutching his long fork, his greasy apron smoking.

“Shanty’s afire,” he yelled and jumped in.

Joe Wax put his hand to his head, which was badly charred and blistered. Soot-stained river water ran down his face and neck. He was sobbing with pain. “Got me, most got me.”

The fire jumped over the heated river and the shallows quivered. The wind veered, fire greedily gobbled the landscape. Night fell and the pool was lighted by the lurid flames of the great fire. Near morning the wind lessened and in the first terrible day’s light Jinot saw ash swirl and ruffle. The pool was choked with dead fish. The cook, still holding his long fork, crouched in the shallows near the bear cub and was saying something to the animal in a low voice. Joe Wax floated facedown, the top of his head a massive red blister like a satin cushion. Swanee was nowhere. Jinot tried to call, but his throat was swollen shut and no sound came out. He sucked in a little of the river water, noticing with detachment that his hands and arms were deeply wrinkled from long immersion, and marked with welts and burns. Although his legs seemed strangely stiff he waded toward Joe Wax and shook his shoulder. No good, he was dead. The bear cub suddenly climbed out of the pool and, bawling, began moving over the burned ground, ashes accumulating on his wet fur, running toward a horrible shambling shape coming down the slope, a half-blind sow bear with most of her fur burned off and showing great raw swatches of roasted skin. She passed the cub and lumbered on toward the river, where she fell in, half-stood and began to drink and drink and drink.

The teamster, Jinot and Victor Goochey came out of the river and began the long walk to Fredericton. They had only shuffled half a mile when Jinot understood his legs had been burned. His charred pants had mostly disappeared and in places the wool cloth baked into the flesh. In the river he had hardly felt the pain, but in the open air and with gritty ash blowing against the open wounds the pain rose up in great waves. His endurance had burned down to a clinker and he fell.

• • •

He was lying naked on a rush mat. Above, birch bark slanted upward to a cluster of pole ends and a blackened smoke hole. He thought about it a long time. The realization came very slowly as he drifted in and out of consciousness; for the first time in his life he was in a wikuom. He was alone. His eyes were sore but he could see. He could smell something sweet and faintly familiar that attached to memories of pond edges. His legs itched and hurt intolerably and his thinking wavered and blinked out. When he woke again the light was very soft. It was twilight. He could smell honey, even taste it. He tried to put his hand to his mouth, but his arm was weak. It fell back and lay inert. His legs itched and he was violently thirsty. He slept again, half-woke when something sweet and wonderful dripped into his sore mouth.

The sound of wind woke him. It was grey dawn light. Slowly he remembered pieces of the fire, the burning, his legs, Victor Goochey holding his fork, the swollen red dome of Joe Wax’s head. He tried to move his legs but they were somehow stuck together. He smelled the honey. And the sweet swamp-edge fragrance.

A voice spoke, but he couldn’t understand the words. He thought it was Mi’kmaq but he had forgotten too many words to be sure. An arm half-lifted him up; a cup pressed against his mouth. The liquid was fresh with the taste of pine resin and soothing and after he swallowed it a deep lassitude overcame him and he drifted into the dark again, but not so soon that he couldn’t smell and almost feel that someone was dripping honey on his legs.

A long time later, days or weeks, he knew not which, he came out of his medicinal torpor and saw the broad face of a Mi’kmaw man of middle years, perhaps a few years older than himself. His hooded eyes had the protective coolness of a man deeply acquainted with suffering.

“Where am I? Who?” he whispered.

“Inui’sit? Parlez Mi’kmaw?” the man said.

“No, few words.”

“Français?”

“Un, deux, trois, quatre — c’est tout.”

“So.” The man said nothing for a long time, then, in a resigned and sad voice he continued in English. “This Indiantown. By Shubenacadie. Men bring you here tie like turkey. Leg burn. Name my Jim Sillyboy. Help burn people. I burn one time, enfant fall in fire. Know pain. Now burn people here come, Mi’kmaq, Iroquois, even whitemen. Some better. Some die. Burn is very bad, die. You little bad. I think walk one day.”

Jinot had heard the name Shubenacadie before and knew it was in Nova Scotia, part of old Mi’kmaw territory. How had he come here from New Brunswick? Who brought him here? Was it that cook, Vic Goochey? What did he mean “walk one day”? Of course he would walk, he would dance on the logs again as soon as he had his strength. He had been hurt many times and always he had healed quickly. He wanted to know about the fire.

“Big fire…” was all he could say.

“Ver, ver grand incendie. New Brunswick place. All burn up.” There was another long silence, then Jim Sillyboy sighed.

“Tomorrow maybe we start clean leg, both him. See you move leg. Now drink medicine. Sleep. Sleep good for burn.”

Over the next days Jinot learned that Jim Sillyboy was a renowned burn healer, that people came to him from far distances, bringing children scalded with hot oil, drunks pulled from fireplaces, woodsmen trapped in burning shanties, farmers half-roasted in flaming barns, and now he tended five from the Miramichi fire. This wikuom, and three others like it, were special healing places. Jim Sillyboy’s son Beeto helped him with the burned people.

“Long time burn pain. Long time.”

His two other sons, he said, spent much time roaming in search of bee trees, for honey was essential for treating burns. “Use much honey.” He took no pay for his services though he was poor.

“Kji-Niskam say one, spirit place. Black robe say brothers, help, do good.” His unease in speaking English showed in his rough sentences.

Slowly Jinot learned that many of the people in Indiantown were poor and miserable, so poor that there was not enough food. The old hunting places and the game had been destroyed, the salmon rivers clogged with logs, bark and sawdust from mills. Now, said Sillyboy, his people talked of changing Mi’kmaw ways, of growing gardens like the whites so at least there would be food.

“Our chief go London, speak king. Ask how make jardin. We never know this. We try.”

Were the Mi’kmaq now embracing even more doings of the white men? Jinot thought suddenly of Amboise, his embittered brother who liked saloons best in the white man’s culture if he had to like anything. And Martel, what of their comrade Joe Martel? Did the fire reach Bartibog? When Jim Sillyboy came in the evening Jinot asked him for information.

“Can no one tell me about the fire? You say it burned up New Brunswick? Could not burn up all New Brunswick. Très big place, many rivières,” he said, hauling out a few French words.

“I hear all burn. I look somebody. For tell you. Maybe find that man you bring.”

The next day Sillyboy gently cleaned the honey from his legs. He rolled Jinot on his side, said the back of the right leg was the worst.

“Big scar come you, I think.”

This meant nothing to Jinot. Scars were common, scars didn’t kill you. Scars were the proofs of survival. But as the weeks and months went on he discovered their cruelty. The cicatrices made him a walking dead man, for the scarred back of his right leg contracted painfully and made it almost impossible for him to walk. When he tried, it was to hobble with tremendous pain and he could manage only a few steps. The scar froze his leg in an unnatural position.

All through the winter he lay in the wikuom. Early in his recovery, when Jim Sillyboy examined the itchy healing wounds, he explained in words and gestures that the scar was “too enfant” for his special massage that would make it a little softer and more flexible. Beeto would do this — it was his skill. He would use a special salve Jim Sillyboy compounded of the mila-l’uiknek, the seven kinds of healing herbs, roots, bark and needles. He made another good salve of beaver fat and the gum of kjimuatkw, the white spruce. And there were useful decoctions and teas which he would teach Jinot to make himself from the good ingredients. For the scar was now his master and it would demand a lifetime of care. The fire had been the salient point of his life. He had an absolute knowledge that nothing — nothing — would ever be as it had been.

• • •

One day, sitting outside the healing wikuom in a special chair, he had a visitor. A lanky whiteman came striding down the path. Jinot didn’t know who he was but hated him for his good legs. The man stopped in front of him.

“Member me? Vic Goochey? Borned Gautier but they all call me Goochey. We was in the fire and the river? Brung ya here with Lew Green? Dragged a damn wagon with a old black horse. He got burned up, y’know. Most a the crew got it. But Lew heered about this Indan, Jim Sillybub, he’s a burn healer. I had to get away from New Brunswick anyhow, place is all black and stinkin, so we brung you here. Lew Green had his right ear burned off and Sillybub fixed him up good. Course his ear is gone, just a little bit a skin left, but he’s up and around. Figured he might do the same for you. Seein you got me to run down to the river. I was goin a stay in the shanty, figured the fire would never take it, but when you come runnin and half on fire yellin ‘run! run!’ I change my mind. So I’m alive and hardly got scorched. Remember that sow bear on fire? She died right there and the cub just kept on tryin to suck. It was a bad fire.”

“God save me,” said Jinot. “I want to know about that fire. How big, what they say. I got a brother, Amboise, workin up on the Big Bartibogue.”

“Ver bad, that place. Fire come in, burned her up. They say three million acres a good timber burned. Towns, houses, jails, lumber camps, sawmills. Half a Fredericton got it.”

“Amboise and Joe Martel,” said Jinot. “Oh my brother, my friend. It can’t be the fire killed them.”

“Must of. More’n a hundred people got it.”

Jinot could not speak for choking. Goochey waited. He sighed to express sorrow for Jinot’s people, then he spoke softly. “We was lucky we made it, specially me. How your legs comin along?”

Jinot snuffled a little, then spoke in the hard and angry voice of someone who puts bad news behind him and gets on. “Slow. Sillyboy says it takes a long time. The scar draws up my leg, so I can’t walk good. Can’t do much.” He slapped the side of his right leg to indicate that it was the most damaged limb.

“Well, I come to ask if you want to go back out west, work the Gatineau?”

Jinot, unable to stop thinking about Amboise, shook his head. “I just told you I can’t do nothin now. And I got no clothes cept what Sillyboy got from the priest, can’t do no work. Not a chance I can do woods work now.”

“Hell, y’can cook, can’t ya? That’s the law, people get hurt in the woods, they cook.”

“I can’t cook nothin but fish. Can’t stand up for long, just two, three minutes. I tell ya, the burn pulls my leg up hard. I don’t know how I’ll get along. I want to get away from here. Sillyboys, all of ’em, been good but this is a hard place, hungry, poor, no money, no job, no huntin, nothin. I don’t belong here no more. If I ever did. If I could maybe get to my other brother on Manitoulin, let him know what happened, I might work out some things.”

“Hell, Jinot, I’ll take you out a here, Manitoulin if that’s where you want a go. You save my life. I ain’t forgettin that.”

“I got to get healed up, first. Sillyboy says couple more months, this fall, maybe, I might be walkin. Some. I got to get so I can move around better. I’m just cripple this way.”

“Say what, you get Sillabub fix you up some more and I’ll come git you. Lessee, it is now just about June, drives are on, what say I come back October, see how ya go? Maybe you be better and we’ll see what.”

He left, and Jinot thought Goochey was a good man, though he’d never paid him any attention before the fire. He cried again for Amboise, his older brother, a drinker, a dreamer of past days he never knew, now lost to him forever. Amboise, who hated cutting the forest but did it because when they went into new woods he felt he was entering a past world. Amboise, who drank whiskey to get away from the present.

• • •

The son, Beeto Sillyboy, showed him there was something more that could be done besides the gentle massage and softening salves. He coaxed the stiff, scar-bound leg into positions that hurt, very gradually stretching the clenching scar, moving the leg carefully, carefully, not to tear the stiff tissue. So by September, almost a year after the fire, Jinot could limp slowly. The leg was dreadfully painful, a kind of pain like no other, tedious and biting, angry and gripping, and he could see how the scar held his leg under tension. He said one day to Jim Sillyboy, “If you was to cut right here — seems to me it would let the leg stretch more. That scar is like a rope tyin me up. Just a little cut where that thick place binds, eh?” But Jim Sillyboy did not want to make such a cut. So Jinot was no good for the woods, or other heavy work. He had no money, everything lost in the fire, and when Goochey came back he would have to say he could not go with him. He would have to stay in Indiantown until he died, poor, hungry and crippled. He saw that life in front of him. But he tried once more with Beeto Sillyboy, saying that one little cut might make the scar easier. Beeto thought he was right.

“We do it. I get good knife, old kind, black stone she ver sharp.” And he came the next day with a wicked little slant of fresh-flaked obsidian and made the cut, put on healing salve and an eel skin binding to hold the leg in a more open position. In a week Jinot was hobbling around and Jim Sillyboy admitted the cut had been useful. “But some it don’t work. You lucky.”

“Oh, yes, I am lucky,” said Jinot.

• • •

When Vic Goochey came in October, Jinot told him he wanted to go to Boston and find Elise, to see his nieces and nephews. He wanted next to find Josime on Manitoulin Island and count up more nieces and nephews. He had come out of the year of trial by fire wanting children.

Goochey looked at him and drew down his lips. “You want kids? Way most folks git ’em is git married and do that thing. Find you a woman-girl and git married. Hell, I been married twice and got some kids in Bangor, two more in Waterville. Why I keep workin — send them all the money I make. You know plenty women — I seen you jabberin with ’em four at a whack. Snatch one out.”

Jinot knew a trip to Boston was stupid. He had no money, he would not know where to begin the search for Elise in a city squirming with people. And Goochey said he had maybe promised too much when he said he could get Jinot to Manitoulin. He was grateful for having his life saved, but he wanted some time to live it.

“Your talk about kiddos made me itch to see the ones I got, turn over a new leaf. But I’ll keep my eyes open, see if I find any work you kin do. I know you kin learn cookin and git took on with a lumber camp. It’s all beans and pork, anyway. Easy. Hell, I done it for years. Nobody never died from beans and pork.”

Jinot did not want to cook. To hobble around the shanty cook stove while strong men cut and limbed in the fragrant forest — no. He borrowed a dollar from Vic Goochey, shook his hand and thanked him for his trouble, said he would send him back the dollar when he found work.

He went with the dollar to the first saloon he could find.

“Whiskey.” Though he preferred rum, whiskey was the cheapest drink. For twenty cents he bought a bottle of the cheapest. This was his first binge since the fire. The pain faded and faded as he drank and he suddenly felt very well, even happy. He smiled to himself and poured more in his glass.

“Spare some a that?” said the man next to him, a heavyset fellow in wool pants with callused hands and a long grey face. He was a lumberman from his looks.

“Hold on,” said Jinot. “Here she comes,” and he poured liberally. He discovered the man was Resolve Smith, part Passamaquoddy, and had worked the Penobscot as a master driver, knew the river country well. He, too, had crippled legs, both broken in a rollway accident. “Whole damn pile knocked me flat, come down on my legs and I could see ever one a them logs comin before it hit me. Broke my legs into pieces like a stick and they set crooked. Awful when it rains.”

Jinot told him about the fire on the Miramichi that swept New Brunswick and how Amboise and Martel had perished in the fire, and he himself had been crippled. The next hour was devoted to stories of woods fires, Amboise, Martel, injuries. They finished the bottle together and Jinot bought another. After a long time they fell silent, then Smith said, “You lookin for work?”

“Lookin for work but I can’t do woods work no more.”

“Me neither, but there’s something I heerd. These fellers in Massachusetts or somewhere are startin up a ax factory, make the heads in numerous numbers. They lookin for men know axes. So I heerd. You been a axman a long time, you know axes.”

“Like I know a tree,” Jinot said. “All kind of ax. All my life since I was a kid I live with a ax in my hand.”

“Let’s go up there, see can we get us a job. Hell, we’ll have good drinkin and good times.” They agreed to meet the next noon in front of the saloon.

50. a twisted life

Mr. Albert Bone pushed his baby face forward, the whitest face Jinot had ever seen, ice-blue eyes set deep and mouth fixed in a knot. He resembled a wizened child but spoke in a voice that was asymmetrically large. He fitted two fingers of his right hand into his watch pocket, gazed at Jinot, who shifted his weight, uncomfortable in the confines of the office.

“What can you tell me of the ax? Have you made axes?” The questions rumbled.

“Never made one. Wore out a good many fallin pine on Penobscot and Gatineau. Twenty years a-choppin. Know a bad ax, used quite a few.” He was exhausted by all this talk.

“So, Mr. Jinot Sel, would you say this was a good ax or a bad ax?” and Baby Face turned and grasped a fresh-faced ax that lay on his desk, gave it helve first to Jinot, who, after the shock of being addressed as Mister, hefted it, turned it every which way, sighted down the handle, peered closely, looking for the weld (which he did not see), ran his thumb carefully along the bit edge. He took an attenuated swing. “You got a tree or a log?” he said. “Better try it before I say nothin,” for he knew this was a test.

They went out into the fresh morning, mist lifting from the river. Two crows cawed amiably from the invisible far side. Mr. Bone pointed at a chestnut tree, perhaps ten inches through, on the bank. Jinot limped over to it, took his stance, swung the ax; it bit and the chips flew. It was a young tree and did not deserve to be cut. It was not as yielding as soft pine but he had it on the ground in minutes and thought that if he had had any half-submerged thought of chopping for a living again he could drown it; he was slow now and each stroke shot a pang through his scarred leg.

“Good ax,” he said. “Quality.”

“Yes. I and the men I have trained are dedicated to making the best axes. Quality is everything, and a man who works for me must swear to uphold the growing reputation of these axes. This is the Penobscot model. Let me ask you a question. You are an Indian, I suppose?” A tiny ding came from his vest pocket.

Ah, thought Jinot, he only hires whitemen. “I am Mi’kmaw. From Nova Scotia. They say there’s a Frenchman way back there. Great-great-grand-père Sel.” He half-turned to go. There was still time to find Resolve Smith in one of the saloons and tie one on. But he added, “I lived in Maine most a my life.”

Bone talked, his words flowing into the mist. “I have a particular regard for Indians. I know English newcomers practiced great injustices on them and in my life I have tried to make up for those malfeasances. I have ever believed that if your people had resisted the first explorers you would still be living in the forest gathering nuts. I have, in my own way, sought to repair injustices when I can.” As he talked he strolled back to his office, limiting his stride to accommodate Jinot’s limp. “To that end I hire some Indians. I find Indians have an instinctive ability for mechanical improvements and invention. My foreman, Mr. Joseph Dogg, for example.” The little mouth twitched.

Jinot stood speechless. He had never heard a whiteman make such talk. He didn’t like it.

When they reached the door Mr. Bone drew a gold watch from his pocket and pressed a button; it sang sweetly, telling the nearest hour. The sun found a hole in the thinning mist and the watch glittered. “Mr. Jinot Sel, you will learn the processes of forging and tempering. I need good men in those skills. And grinding and filing — we will try you there. It would be to our mutual advantage if you learned every facet of ax manufacture. What do you say? Yes? All right. I will take you on and may you do good work, for I know I will lose money until you grasp the essentials. Go with that man there, my foreman, Mr. Dogg. He’ll show you the ropes, as mariners say.” He nodded at a hunchbacked métis who stood inside the hallway, grinning, not more than thirty years old.

Jinot nodded, but trembled inside. He was hired. It had been so easy.

• • •

“Iroquois-Seneca,” said Joe Dogg to his unasked question. “Come on.” And they rushed back out the door and through the yard, Dogg pointing out Mr. Bone’s array of buildings. “He’s a fair man,” said Dogg, “no matter what you hear.” They walked into the forge shop, a room of fire and hammering where men cut hot iron stock. “You think I’d ever git hired by somebody else? Nossir. Ha-ha, Mr. Bone says I am his Hephaestus, though I have not yet forged any thunderbolts.”

“And do you have two comely maidens to help you?” asked Jinot, dredging up Beatrix’s accounts of the Greek gods. Joe Dogg laughed with delight. “Hah, y’are an educated Injun, ain’t you? And it don’t do you no good at all, hey? Tell you, there’s more than Jinot Sel can read books,” he declared, indicating himself. Jinot watched a mope-faced man take up a metal bar and lay it on an anvil. While he held it in place another man scored it with hammer and cold chisel, and broke the bar. “Them patterns is the start, they make up into axes,” said Dogg. “A man — if he’s any good — makes eight axes a day. If he’s no good he can make ten or twelve.”

They walked on into the din. Jinot had never seen a trip-hammer before and here were six of the pounding things, tireless in their idiot strength. The stone floor trembled.

“Ever one a them bastids got its own waterwheel for power,” bellowed Dogg.

At the grinding shop they stepped into an oppressive roar punctuated by the soft coughing of men who inhaled steel dust all day long. A row of stone wheels six to eight feet in diameter stood along one wall, their rotation making a hoarse wet whisper; men grasping the new axes bent over the speeding stones.

“Now,” said Dogg in a normal voice when they stepped outside, “over there is workers’ lodgin. Y’go there and they’ll give y’own room. Anything y’want to know, y’ask me.”

• • •

Jinot began to learn the skills and subtle judgments of ax makers. In the forge house his old river-drive reactions to the quixotries of moving water and rolling logs translated into recognition of gradations of the shapes and colors of hot metals, quickly, delicately turning the ax under the descending hammer blows, all motion in the deafening heat like running dream-like through a chamber of the inferno; it was the Miramichi fire compressed into a bed of coals, the hurricane wind blowing only at the command of the bellows. Those dark wraiths in the room were not men of nerve and skill but demons, beckoning him to their damned society.

Dogg, his tutor, talked about himself. “How I come to leave that Iroquois country in upstate York, why, smart whitemen they get our property. Iroquois don’t think that way. Sell it but we so foolish think it still ours. Whiteman give whiskey, give little presents — and get our huntin land. That land be theirs. They say, ‘Indan, give up them ways you people, Indan, get civilize.’ So I come here to get civilize, get job. That blacksmith, Mr. Bone, pretty nice to me — he see me down by river, I try catch frog — hungry — he fix me up, learn me to be smith. You maybe never think Mr. Bone can find end of his thing but he make a good ax. Good smith. He make a good ax.”

This was difficult to believe, Mr. Bone looked so small and childlike. Later, covertly, Jinot began to study the small frame beneath the black suit, the small hands. He had been deceived by the baby face. The body was small but steely, the little hands callused and hard.

• • •

He was drawn to the trip-hammers. The hammerman had to be something of an artist, shifting the position of the glowing ax clamped in his tongs for the perfect shape, and he had to be fast. Most wracking was the tempering process, which demanded experience and a good eye. Hugh Boss, in his fifties, tall and lopsided from spine-twisting scoliosis, heated a new-shaped ax, then dropped it into a vat of water.

“Makes it so damn brittle the bit will break first time you use it,” said Boss. “So — you got to draw the temper, eh?” He winked at Jinot and again the ax went to the forge, where it was reheated; he worked a file over it. “Watch the colors edge down to the bit.” Jinot saw the color parade from pale yellow to orange, to dark orange to brown. It went again into the water.

“It’ll go all the way to blue, but brown is where we want a ax. There. She’s fixed, now.”

The months slid into years before Mr. Bone was satisfied that the tools Jinot made could withstand thousands of heavy strikes.

• • •

It was the richest and strangest part of his life, for he felt he was no longer Jinot Sel, but someone else, a hybrid creature in a contrived space. Mr. Bone took an interest in him. There were many good Indian men in the factory but he had fastened on Jinot, who, with his fresh, smiling face, looked younger than he was.

• • •

One day, when Mr. Bone had to make a trip to Boston, he told Jinot to come with him.

Alone in the coach neither spoke for an hour until Mr. Bone said earnestly, “I want you to understand all the intricacies of the ax business. I have undertaken to educate Indans such as yourself in the mechanic and manufacturing arts. But there is more to a business than that. The sooner your people leave the forests and adopt useful trades, the sooner the woodlands will become civilized and productive. That is not to say that it will be goose pie all the way — no. I wish you to know the business end of ax making. You must learn how to consort with men of quality.” He took out his repeater and pressed the knob; the watch chimed.

“There are problems and troubles that keep me awake at night — competitors who make an inferior product painted up to look like a Bone ax, workmen who complain they are not paid enough, some who agitate, some who are spies for other ax makers. Now it is time you learn how to conduct yourself and speak with businessmen.” Jinot wanted to say that he did not want to speak with businessmen — he preferred the company of the forge, where, under the blanket of noise, men communicated with hand gestures as did workers in sawmills. He preferred — he didn’t know what he preferred except to be more distant from Mr. Bone’s solicitous interest.

But Mr. Bone’s vaunted enthusiasm for native people did not extend to the forests and shorelines they had inhabited. For Mr. Bone, only when the trees were gone, when houses crowded together and the soil was cultivated to grow European crops was it a real place.

On the return journey he said abruptly, as though he had been long arranging the words in his mind, “I came from Scotland to Philadelphia with my father. My mother died when I was but an infant. And two days after we arrived in this country Father also perished, a victim of some shipboard pestilence. So I was orphaned and thrown on my own resources.” He said nothing more.

• • •

Months later they were again alone in a coach that stank of stale urine on the way to Bangor, and Mr. Bone, who seemed unable to speak of his past unless in jolting motion, continued his history. “Relative to the events of my youth, after I found myself alone in a strange city, at first I begged bread and then coins from passersby, then I fell in with some boys who, like myself, were homeless. We contrived a society of cooperative thievery, taking chickens, garden plunder. For amusement we loitered near the stage stop, the farrier and blacksmith shops, places of interest to all boys. One day I happened to be alone watching one of the smiths and the man looked at me and said, ‘Pump the bellows, boy, my helper run off.’ I pumped that bellows. At day’s end he told me I was employed. I filled the tempering baths, pumped the bellows, ran errands and learned the best uses of the hardies, swages, bicks, holdfasts and mandrels, the twenty kinds of hammers, the fifty kinds of tongs, the punches and chisels. When Mr. Judah Bitter, the smith, saw I was interested he undertook to tutor me in the arcane lore of the forge and anvil. Even blacksmithing has its heroes and Mr. Bitter was such a one. He inculcated in me a love for the black metal. Well do I remember the day I made my first adze.”

Embedded in this strew of words Jinot scented a clue; Mr. Bone favored him because he glimpsed something that made him equate Jinot’s situation with that of the poor orphan emigrant. Jinot could understand that for Joe Dogg, but not for himself. Or did Mr. Bone see him as a lump of raw iron that needed heating and pounding to be made into a tool? His employer drew his gold watch from its pocket and smiled at it. “My family treasure.”

The coach stopped and three more travelers boarded, but Mr. Bone was wrought up and he continued, in a hissing whisper he imagined reached only Jinot’s ear. His breath reeked of strong peppermint from the candy he kept in his pocket.

“Mr. Bitter favored me with an invitation to join him as partner in his smithy. There would be a new sign—‘Bitter and Bone’—it sounds well, does it not?” He noticed then that the entire population of the coach was staring at him agog. And shut up.

But when they were at the rough inn, Mr. Bone returned to his subject. “As I said, Mr. Bitter offered me a partnership. I accepted. But before the arrangements were complete, Mr. Bitter, on his way home from the smithy, was run down by a profligate jehu swilled to the gills. The smithy went by inheritance law to an idiot nephew who could not tell an anvil from an anthill, and once more I was bereft and alone and without resources.

“I looked about me to discover what I might do. I saw the vast forests, saw the great need of thousands of people to build houses and barns, and so I decided on the ax. I recognized the opportunity and vowed my axes would be the best.”

Emboldened by the toddy Jinot had to ask. “Why favor me, Mr. Bone? I do wonder.” There was a long silence, then Mr. Bone stirred, sighed and spoke.

“When I saw the great injustices that my race visited on the native population I took a private vow to encourage young Indian men to take up a trade. It is the Christian way. Had I not become a smith I might have been drawn to the missionary life among the heathen. It is my hope that you may become the first Indian businessman, a part of the society in which you now live. Do you visit your people often? If not, you should, for there may be excellent business opportunities to be discovered. I think I have shown you how to see those opportunities.” Jinot shuddered inwardly.

• • •

Hugh Boss, the hammerman, became a friend, and Jinot began to spend Saturday evenings at the family household playing checkers. The Boss family lived in a large cabin a mile from the factory. Mrs. Boss, a pretty woman with wheat-colored hair and wide hips, was usually swollen with pregnancy. She hovered constantly over the cast-iron cooking range and was a notable cook. But what Jinot liked were the children, for the Boss family was large, from Minnie, at sixteen the oldest, to Baby, barely a year old, and eight more in between.

Minnie, petite, dark-haired and dark-eyed, had inherited Hugh Boss’s scoliosis and once a month had to visit Dr. Mallard for cruel stretching exercises. In the doctor’s “stretching room” she removed all her clothing above the waist, for the doctor had to observe her spine; stepped under an enormous tripod, where he fitted her into a complicated system of straps and pads that was his own invention. She was mightily stretched, almost hoisted into the air while Dr. Mallard adjusted the tension to force her spine into a straighter position. She told Jinot that at first she had been ashamed to stand half naked before the doctor but he was indifferent to anything but the curve of her spine and she no longer went crimson with embarrassment. After each treatment Minnie was carried home exhausted by the ordeal. Jinot, who understood the pain of stretching recalcitrant muscles and tissues, sometimes read aloud to her while she lay on the kitchen daybed with the coverlet drawn up under her small chin. She was not a pretty girl, but kind-natured despite the pain of her infirmity, and she responded to Jinot’s sympathy with growing love which did not escape Hugh Boss’s eye. For a long time nothing was said and he got used to the idea of Minnie and Jinot together, despite the years between them.

When Dr. Mallard said Minnie was much improved and he would allow two months between stretching sessions, the family declared a celebration. Hugh Boss gave her money for dress fabric. That Sunday she appeared in the new dress and Jinot’s eyes went wide. The dress was the marvelous blue of Beatrix’s old dressing gown and it was silk.

Hugh Boss took Jinot out to the cow barn, where he kept his jugs of hard cider.

“See here, Jinot, you know Minnie likes you a terrible lot.”

“I like her, too.” He fidgeted.

“Well, there’s nothing to it then — we’ll get the hitchin post set up.” A month later they were married in the front room of the Boss house. Minnie wore her blue silk dress and through the brief ceremony they could all hear the oaths and struggles of the men heaving up logs for the bridal couple’s cabin in the back corner of Hugh Boss’s pasture. Minnie thought of the flower game she played as a girl pulling petals off a daisy to discover who she would marry: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Well, he wasn’t a chief.

With the birth of his and Minnie’s first children — twin boys Amboise and Aaron, who resembled Kuntaw more than Hugh Boss — it seemed to Jinot that now he was like other men and could nearly understand once-mysterious truths. It could not last.

• • •

Minnie was a nervous mother, daily inspecting the posture of the boys to see if there were signs of scoliosis. She took Amboise and Aaron to Dr. Mallard as soon as they began walking, but he saw no sign of the deformity. “Of course, my dear, it can always appear later in life, often not visible even to the expert eye”—he blinked modestly—“until well under way. We shall keep a close watch on the children. Bring them in for consultation every six months, and we shall hope to catch it early if in fact it appears and correct any malformation. As for yourself, I had hopes that childbearing would help augment the stretching sessions you so bravely endured, but it seems it is not so. It has come to endurance rather than cure.” It was so; Minnie bent more and more to the left, her posture at table a decided lean. The left shoulder of her old jacket hanging on the wooden hook near the door hung low. She worried, worried about everything — that her father would catch a hand under the relentless hammer, that Jinot would disappear (for he often enough went away with Mr. Bone on business), that disease or pestilence would take them all. Many nights she woke shuddering from dreams of her children being torn apart by hydrophobic dogs, stretching out imploring little hands to her and she, straining every muscle but bound by her twisted back, unable to reach them but forced to hear their piteous cries.

Hugh Boss made play objects for the children, one winter, a glass-smooth birch plank with strips of polished steel embedded in the underside for snow sliding, a kind of toboggan. There was a stand of young spruce at the bottom of their sloping land, a favorite resort for the neighborhood children in summer as the narrow passages between the trees were a twisted maze, greenish and shadowy tunnels ideal for I Spy and the noisy intricacies of Sheep and Wolf. Jinot sometimes joined them in this game, they the sheep scampering through the tunnels, Jinot the ferocious howling wolf. In winter the snowy slope was the neighborhood sliding place. The winter Amboise and Aaron were six, a freakish rain storm gave Sam Withers, a prankish neighbor boy, the idea of sprinkling even more water on the already icy slide that it might freeze. A sharp temperature plunge converted the slope to a trackless icy pitch. Sam Withers, claiming responsibility for the ice, took the first ride. The plank swerved and curveted at speed, Sam screeching with excitement at his brilliant success. “Me! Me next!” Three boys squeezed together on the plank for the second ride, Sam in the back, then Aaron and in the front, Amboise. The greater weight gave the object more speed and a less wavering track. The toboggan could not be steered and remorselessly curved toward the spruce bosque, the metal strips on the underside of the ride setting up a whine, and every tiny ridge in the ice producing a clatter that gave proof of great speed. There was no avoiding the spiky trees and the conveyance plunged into the naked lower branches like a meteorite.

Minnie heard Aaron’s shriek and Sam Withers’s bawling roar for the whipping he knew he would get. She ran out in her apron, one shoe lost in the snow. On the icy slope she saw the boys entangled in the spruce, saw bloody-faced Aaron on hands and knees crawling toward her, saw Sam Withers stumble deeper into the trees, saw Amboise inert. She slipped and fell and had to creep to reach him.

Amboise lay on his right side, pierced through the neck by a dry stick-spear one of the children had left in the trees during the days of summer games; the pulsing fountain of blood was already down to a trickle, and she gave a cry that shook the limbs of the forest.

• • •

Jinot became grave and serious after the death of young Amboise. Away with Mr. Bone, he had not found out until late that evening, when their coach returned. By then Minnie and Aaron had fallen into a fatalistic calm. The three-year old twins, Lewie and Lancey, slept, unknowing, uncaring. Jinot went outside and walked the night with spasmodic spells of choking cries, returning to the house a little before dawn.

When he came in, cold and exhausted, Minnie, driven by habit, was making tea. They sat together at the blue-painted kitchen table, their hands locked as though all that could not be said could be understood through gripping fingers. The firelight shone from the grate and colored red the tears on their cheeks. The house was somber for days until Lewie and Lancey began to laugh and run again.

• • •

The loss of Amboise reawakened Jinot’s hunger for relatives and he decided to find Elise and Josime. He began by constructing a careful and painful letter to Francis-Outger, for at least he knew he lived on Penobscot Bay and he was sure the half brother would know where Elise and Dr. Hallagher were. He sent off his letter with trepidation and doubted he would ever receive a reply. It was almost comical how quickly a letter came.

Dear Jinot.

I was inexpressibly delighted to have your missive. How glad I am that mother’s lessons were not forgot. We have long wondered what adventures you have undergone, and your description of the terrible Miramichi fire, your injuries and the loss of our brother Amboise and your little son was painful to read. But it seems you have fallen on good times from your benefactor, Mr. Albert Bone. You have been fortunate too in choosing a wife and in your wealth of children.

I can grant your wish to know the whereabouts of Elise. She and Dr. Hallagher have a domicile in Boston. The address is below. Their youngest son, Humphrey, has an unusual medical condition where the muscles of the body somehow convert to bone. Learned doctors come to the house to examine and prescribe, but nothing really makes the ailment better. The poor child likely has not long to live before he is solid bone. I am sure Elise would skreech with joy if you were to pay a call on her. Boston is not so far distant from you. (Nor is Penobscot, and you are ever welcome here.)

As for Josime, your account of parting with him in Montreal is the most recent news. I have felt rather pained that he has never seen fit to write me as we are full blood brothers. I suffer bouts of pleurisy and debilitating headaches but suppose one must expect such ailments as one ages.

I will close now as I wish to get this off in the next post. I hope we may soon meet again and exchange news, at the very least, that we may continue to correspond.

Your affectionate half brother, Francis-Outger Sel

Penobscot Bay, Maine

Now Elise was on Jinot’s mind constantly. A fortnight later, on a brilliant April day so enriched with untimely summer warmth that the horses took pleasure in being alive, tossed their heads and looked at the azure sky, he took the stage to Boston and began his search on foot. He had not written, thinking a surprise visit would be better, a bit of drama for Elise. He took half a day asking directions before he found the Hallaghers’ plain brick two-story house. There was a clapboard addition on the south side and a sign reading: DR. HALLAGHER, M.D.

Elise herself opened the red front door. She had become a middle-aged woman with a knot of black-grey hair. But she had the same impish sparkle in her eyes, the same curling smile and pointed teeth as all the Sels.

She knew him at once. “Jinot. You are my brother Jinot.” They embraced in a mighty hug and Elise began to cry. “Oh, how long I have waited to hear something of you. Francis-Outger wrote and told me he had a letter from you asking news of us. Come with me, dear brother, come with me for a moment. And then we shall go in.” She drew him to a side yard, removed six fragrant loaves of wheaten bread from an old clay oven, wrapped them in a piece of muslin and carried them to the kitchen.

“Now, Jinot, you must tell me everything.” He followed her down a dim hall, the plaster walls hung with likenesses of stags drinking from mountain pools, into a stuffy parlor, where his own reflection in a tall mottled mirror frightened him. A pale, listless boy of ten or twelve lay dozing on a daybed with a closed book resting on his breastbone.

“This is my boy Humphrey,” said Elise, bending over the child and kissing his hair. The boy opened his eyes and looked at Jinot.

“This is your uncle Jinot,” said Elise.

“Ahhhh,” said the boy and closed his eyes.

“Come into the kitchen, Jinot, I will make us a pot of tea,” said Elise. “Or coffee, if you like. It is almost time for the doctor to come in for his pick-me-up. He will be very pleased to see you.”

But when Dr. Hallagher came in he was less than delighted, gave a brusque handshake then sat at the table blowing on his tea.

“So, you’ve found us out,” he said in the tone of a captured criminal.

“I thought that as so many years have passed, for the sake of our children it would be good to be in touch with each other again.” He told them of the great Miramichi fire, of Amboise’s death in that fire, without mentioning the town jail or drunkenness. He told them of Minnie, of his children, of little Amboise’s accident. It was only when he described the kindness of Mr. Bone and his favors over the years that Dr. Hallagher relaxed. Jinot guessed that he had been expecting to be asked for a loan and that he was relieved to hear Jinot was independent enough to support a wife and four — no, three — children. When he returned to his surgery the visit became jollier with Elise and Jinot trading old stories and “do you remembers,” plans for a family gathering on the Fourth of July, and bits of gossip about distant Mi’kmaw relatives, for there were countless Sels in Nova Scotia, all descended from René Sel, the little-known Frenchman who had started their history. Elise remembered a few of them, but Jinot knew none.

“We even heard something of our grandfather Kuntaw, can you believe that? He went back to the old place, all English settlers now except a part they call Frenchtown, and another part they call the Diggins. That is where the Mi’kmaw people live, the ones that are left. Not many, now, not even a hundred they say. So he married a Mi’kmaw woman and had more children. Yes, that old man, can you believe it!”

They laughed, the talk shifted to their children. Elise’s oldest boy, Skerry (a Hallagher name), was clever, a great reader and had a powerful inquiring mind. “He wants to go to that Dartmouth school,” she said, “as he is, y’know, at least part Mi’kmaw, and they are said to take an interest in Indian scholars, so it could come to pass. I don’t know if it will, but Doctor wants it. Don’t it seem strange, from how we lived at the post when we was — were — little? We’ve had big changes in our lives, Jinot. And maybe Josime? If Amboise had lived…”

Jinot thought that if Amboise had lived he would have been run over by a freight wagon as he lay stuporous in the roadway. But he did not say it.

The brief hours of family affection began to fade and by the time the stage left, the sky had clouded over. The coach traveled through a storm that came in repetitive squalls with a few tremendous claps of thunder, minutes of hard rain followed by a breathless silence until the next wave caught them. The cleansed air chilled and he thought it would clear, but the interludes of rain turned to sleet and then to snow, a strange end to the summery day. And Jinot, recollecting the visit and the wasted boy lying on the daybed, thought of his own little Amboise, who could never be twelve, and the barely healed old wrenching began afresh.

51. dense thickets

Minnie had vowed there would be no more children. They were too fragile, too precious. She could not bear to have her heart torn so savagely again. How true, she said, was the often heard, and now proven, old adage that life was a vale of tears. Of all Jinot’s children Amboise had been especially beloved, a kind of resurrection of Amboise, his burned brother. Jinot knew, guiltily, that he had granted Aaron less affection. Now he vowed to make up for this, and from that moment he and Minnie favored Aaron with love and gifts.

Jinot, indifferent to Minnie’s long speech telling him she would never again sleep with him — somehow he felt she blamed him for Amboise’s death — put a worn bison robe he had used on the Gatineau on the back porch and slept there summer and winter. The children could come to him any time they wished but he was not the old affectionate silly father. So remote was his stare, so remote was he, except with Aaron, that he did not see Minnie’s slow decline, how she grew smaller inside the fine-striped dress, did not hear her constant wet cough. In the two years since Amboise had died she became gaunt as her spine twisted. She suffered and pulled at her hair to shift the pain. The cooking deteriorated, the children grew out of their ragged and dirty clothes. Jinot made a great kettle of pease porridge once a week and the children were to help themselves until he discovered Lewie laughing as he threw handfuls of — something or other, assuredly filthy — into the pot. Then he hired a neighbor widow, Mrs. Joyful Woodlawn, to feed the boys and look after Minnie.

“Of course I’d be glad to look after poor Minnie and the boys. I’ll make soups to build Minnie up and beef and taters for the lads. And will bring over some water from our well, as it is known to be the best water in the town. There is no better thirst quencher than good water. Mr. Woodlawn was always proud of our well water.”

• • •

That winter ended like a snapped cable with days of sudden heat and flooding brooks, thrusting skunk cabbage growing three inches a day. The crows began to take their seasonal places, the males stretching their wings to show the long primaries, fanning their tail feathers, their dark eyes aglitter, the lady crows watching coolly from nearby perches, measuring the presentation of every point with critical eyes. Hugh Boss, stumping along on his canes, came over on a Saturday morning and spent several hours sitting beside his daughter’s bed. When Jinot came in from the factory Minnie was sleeping. Hugh Boss got up from his chair and jerked Jinot into the parlor.

“Jinot, Minnie is sick, very sick. Have you had the doctor in?”

“I didn’t— No, I did not know it was so bad. I thought she was just poorly but — I did get Mrs. Woodlawn to care for her betimes.”

“Betimes! To me she seems not long for this world. I will send the doctor.” And he stalked out, no friend to Jinot.

The doctor, not Dr. Mallard but a mealy-faced old gent with a silk cravat spotted with pork drippings, said it was consumption. Advanced consumption. Nothing to be done though they could try raw eggs and brandy alternating with hot beef broth. He offered to bleed the woman but Jinot would not have it. He wished he knew of a Mi’kmaw healer such as they said his great-great-grand-mère had been.

• • •

He thought he had scraped dry the dish of deep sorrow, but time brought a helping of worse. Mrs. Woodlawn bustled into the Sel kitchen one morning with her famous jug of well water, swigging a large glass of it herself, bringing some to Minnie. When Jinot came in at noon he found the widow had gone a ghastly blue and was braced against the table, her hands clenching the edge. She looked at him with a terrible expression and then doubled over in dual spasms of explosive diarrhea and violent vomiting. There was no doubt of the cause — the cholera had been rampant in New York and was now encroaching on smaller towns.

“Save us all!” said Jinot, running into Minnie’s room. But the galloping disease had got there first and Minnie was sinking, fingers and toes clenched with spasm. The twins, Lewie and Lancey, still clung to life, but died while their father stood gaping down at them. It could happen so quickly.

“Aaron. Aaron!” he called, but the boy was not in the house. He found him in the woodshed with a book of tales. He said he had been there since early morning, had breakfasted on a piece of ham fat left over from supper. No, he had not taken Mrs. Woodlawn’s water. He felt well, he said, and he looked well.

They walked together to Hugh Boss’s house. “Hugh, it’s the cholera,” said Jinot. “It took them. Just me and Aaron’s left.” The big man cursed them both, broke down, buried his face in his hands. He was not well. Mrs. Boss, pregnant again, was abed with an illness that resembled cholera and the youngest children were ill. Mrs. Woodlawn had brought them some of her delicious water before she went to Minnie. Hugh Boss lived, but Mrs. Boss and the three youngest children all died on the same day.

• • •

After the funerals weeks passed, dragging their crippled hours like chains. Hugh Boss and Jinot hated each other for months until they met in the cemetery to put up the seven fresh-cut stones and were reconciled in grief. The memorials bore only the names and dates and the word cholera.

They agreed that Jinot and Aaron would live with Hugh Boss, sleeping in the haymow and helping with the surviving children until Mrs. Boss’s sister could come from Danbury, Connecticut. Jinot swore he would keep Aaron with him, keep him safe until he became a man. Yet there was something new to worry about as Aaron several times said that he wanted to go to Nova Scotia and know his Mi’kmaw relatives. He wanted to be an Indian. By the time young birds were crowding the crows’ nests the cholera plague had eased and Jinot and Aaron returned to their silent house.

• • •

For Jinot the palliative was work and he spent much time with Mr. Bone, now shrunken and stooped, but still making great plans and filled with energy unseemly for an old man. He spoke of starting a handsaw manufacturing factory. He talked of setting up a rolling mill and making his own steel. Anything could excite his fertile imagination.

Though axes remained Mr. Bone’s true love, he wanted new lands to conquer. He sat up nights roving over the world through the pages of his swollen atlas (for it had been dropped in the bath and dried page by page over the stove) and reading foreign newspapers.

“I think,” said Mr. Bone, after a year of consideration, “that the best course is to set up an ax manufactory abroad. Trees grow all over the world and everywhere men need houses and buildings, they need axes. My life has ever been dedicated to the removal of the forest for the good of men. I have studied countries where there is a burgeoning population, plenty of trees and a need for axes. The list is not a long one, but I would value your opinion before I take any steps.”

Jinot laid his hand on the atlas and waited. Mr. Bone’s peculiar list named Norway, Russia, Java, New Zealand and Brazil. Jinot said, “Why not go to the western forests of this country? They say there are forests that cannot be measured from Ohio westward to the end of the land.” Mr. Bone ignored this.

“It will be simpler for a swift establishment of the factory if the inhabitants speak English; that removes four of the countries from the list and leaves us with New Zealand.”

“They speak English in New Zealand?”

“Those in government and control do so. The country is allied to England, where they do speak English. The New Zealand natives speak some gibberish of their own, but many have learned English.”

“But do they have trees there?” asked Jinot, who fancied New Zealand was mostly desert and salt flats. He had only a vague idea of the country’s location — perhaps near India.

Mr. Bone leaned back in his chair. He smiled the smile of a man who knows a great secret.

“Yes. They have trees. Especially do they have certain ‘kauri’ trees, which experts describe as the most perfect trees on the earth, truly enormous trees that rise high with all the branches clustered conveniently at the top. The wood of these trees is without blemish, light, odorless, of a delightful golden color, easy to carve and work, strong and long-wearing. I have learned that a nascent trade in poor-quality axes is in progress through the efforts of a bumptious Australian entrepreneur who was once a convict now working in New Zealand. Before I make my decision I have decided to go to New Zealand and see these forests for myself. They are said by men who know timber to be one of the wonders of the world. You must accompany me. I have arranged passage. We leave in a fortnight, Mr. Joseph Dogg will manage the factory while we are away. He is thoroughly competent to do so.”

Jinot opened his mouth to say something, then consulted the atlas. It was far, far — a long skinny wasp-waisted country at the bottom of the world.

“I— Mr. Bone, I have sworn to keep Aaron close to me until he attains manhood. You know my sad history, sir. He is all I have left.”

“Quite simple. Tell him to pack his trunk. He shall come with us. A husky lad is useful when traveling.”

• • •

But Aaron only shook his head and went into one of his long, silent spells. For days he did not respond to Jinot’s badgering and pleading. He smiled distantly as if his thoughts were too lofty to share.

“Father, I do not wish to go on the ocean. It is my desire to go to Nova Scotia and find our family, whatever Sel relatives may be there. I wish to know that life.”

“Then you would do better to go west to Manitoulin Island and seek out your uncle Josime. He returned to the old ways.”

“But not Mi’kmaq!”

“No, because Mi’kmaw old ways no longer exist. And because he loved that Odaawa girl I have told you about many times. If you wish to know the old forest life of our people you must find Josime. But you are too young to make that journey alone. Come with us to this New Zealand and on our return I will go with you to Manitoulin Island and together we will find Josime.” But secretly he thought the shadow of whitemen ways might have lengthened far across the land to touch even Manitoulin Island and the Odaawa.

Aaron listened to all of this; it did seem best to find Josime, a person with a name and a place. But he would not go over the ocean. He wrote a short letter and pinned it to Jinot’s black coat.

Dear Father. I do not go to Newzeelum. I go Nova Scohsia then I go find uncle Josime. When I return you hear my good stories.

He believed the old Mi’kmaw ways — whatever they were — could not be utterly lost, and started walking north, hopeful.

Jinot wrote to Elise that he was going with Mr. Bone across the ocean. Anything might happen to him, for he was crippled and not young, and he wanted her to know where he was. Aaron, he wrote, had refused to come with him. “I will write to you,” he promised. Two days before he left he had a long answer from Elise, who was unhappy with his news of New Zealand. “It seems everyone is going far away Aaron is repeated here with Skerry i fear we must allow these boys their desires even know how cruel the world may treat them.” She described the upsetting scene between Skerry and Dr. Hallagher.

Skerry come home from that dartmouth college very sad What is wrong with you Skerry are you not pleased to be at home again among those who love you you are unnatural quiet said the doctor dear Jinot I fetched a venison pasty from the pantry Skerry’s favorite food I thought sad because he was morning Humphrey we all morn him you know but doctor told us many times that the end was come we try to make his hour on earth with us as happy Skerry said i have known that for years as you then what is the matter is it the school Doctor spoke very loud but Skerry would not say nothing doctor said it is the school something has happen is that not so Skerry made a sore face and said they want us who came there because we have Indian blood they want us to be missionaries All are to be missionaries, return to our tribe and preach gospel I was never in a tribe I have no body to preach to I want study law but they said the onli study for Indans was thology and preachin so it is useless for me to go to that school Instead Skerry said papa I wish you let me read law with judge foster I wish you to ask him I can do this Jinot to Doctor this was unwelcome request as he once treat judge fosters daughter lauraRose for consumption and she die he explain to the judge that disease was far gone nothing save her but the judge turned his grieve into hate for Doctor So he could not ask that And Skerry left home he said he would go to canada and find his tribe he was very angry and he left

Ps forgive I forget writing like Beatrix showed us

52. kauri

Jinot felt as a fallen pine must feel, hurled into another world. London was not the larger Boston he had expected but a sweating, boiling turmoil of thieves, cloudy-eyed horses with bad legs, miry streets, each with its equine corpse, the stink of excrement and coal smoke and burned cabbage and extraordinary glimpses of silk and exotic feather where crossing sweepers with brooms cleared a way for pedestrians. Mr. Bone had leased quarters for a month in a shabby-genteel neighborhood a mile from the great wharves and bustle of shipping. The ax maker’s rooms were pleasant with a sitting room and a bedroom featuring a carved mahogany bedstead enclosed by only slightly moldy bed curtains. Jinot’s adjoining room was small and dark, but Mr. Bone graciously invited him to share the sitting room.

“Come, Mr. Jinot Sel,” said Mr. Bone on the first morning ashore. “Let us walk about in this greatest city in the world. I will show you the wonders of the place. Let us go down to the wharves.”

They left the avenue of decaying Georgian residences for a street of ironmongers, red piles of metal and dumps of coal. Jinot flinched at the sight of a family of ragged adults and their swarm of filthy, emaciated children—“likely refugees forced off rural lands by enclosure,” Mr. Bone remarked. Hundreds of workers rushed about, navvies and dockworkers, cobble setters laying stones, scavengers, sooty sweeps emptying their buckets into the river. They heard cheers and shouts nearby.

“What is that hullie-balloo?” said Mr. Bone. “Let us see.” Rounding the corner they came on a pair of fighting men circled by forty or more shouting onlookers. Jinot remarked that the English seemed to enjoy fisticuffs as much as drunken barkskins.

“We are a fighting race,” said Mr. Bone with relish as they walked on. Newspaper hawkers thrust their wares in the men’s faces, and among a dozen bills pasted on the side of a warehouse one shouted in swollen letters: EMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND.

“Ah, Mr. Edward Wakefield, the gentleman behind the New Zealand Company, is an immensely clever Englishman,” said Mr. Bone. “He has very sound ideas on colonization. He has a sense of feeling for the solid English workingman and small businessman as well as the gentry. He understands that random settlement, as happened in the American colonies, is contrary to clear reason and scientific method. His plan of systematic colonization is admirable, for then society is stratified from the beginning with correct classes. Had England done this with the American colonies and Canada, those countries would not be ruled by the pigheaded creatures of today.” He looked at his watch and said, “Enough sightseeing. Let us hurry. I have a meeting.”

Mr. Bone’s chief adviser was a missionary of obscure Protestant denomination, the Reverend Mr. Edward Torrents Rainburrow, possessed of a thick jaw blue with crowding whiskers, a mouth as wide as his face and inside it a set of pale green teeth. His basso completed the picture of an overbearing bully, but he had tamed his voice to a quiet pitch, and he smiled.

• • •

There were a dozen travelers at the meeting. A tall-headed fellow speculated how long the voyage from London to New Zealand might take. “Depending on weather and the favor of God it might be as swift as five months — or considerably more,” said a jowly missionary who repeatedly filled his wineglass. “First port of call will be Port Jackson, the convict colony which will also be the departure point for New Zealand. The convict transports go on to that island and pick up a load of masts before returning to England. The trees are of high quality.”

One of Mr. Bone’s correspondents had sent him a letter saying the Maori inhabitants, embroiled in constant wars with one another, were the most ferocious savages on the planet, bloodthirsty cannibals. Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter.

Another missionary — there were seven in the group — Mr. Boxall, with a young girlish face, spoke directly to Mr. Bone. “I have heard differently — that the Maori are an intelligent and even spiritual people held under the sway of the Prince of Darkness. They are hungry for messages of peace.” Mr. Rainburrow resented this incursion into his own friendship with Mr. Bone, and, after their dinner of pork cheek and withered potatoes prepared by one of the missionary wives, he put his lips close to the factory man’s ear. “Dear Mr. Bone, I will let you know about passage from Australia to New Zealand, accommodation I am trying to secure even as we speak.” From the other side of the table Jinot begged his attention: “Sir, Mr. Bone, I wish to return to Boston. I have no desire to meet those wild people.” But Mr. Bone was enthusiastic about visiting the cannibals. “Thank you, Reverend Rainburrow,” he said, then turned to Jinot and said in a low, severe voice, “I sincerely doubt that they are truly eaters of human flesh. It is one of those sailors’ tales. And you, of all people, are being unjust. I can well believe they are only protecting their land from men who would seize it unfairly. With kind treatment, in time they will come to see how pleasant their lives would become with some of the whiteman’s inventions.”

• • •

Frugal missionaries often took passage on convict transport, and though Jinot objected he found himself swept aboard the Doublehail with Mr. Bone. Seasickness doubled most of the passengers, but not Mr. Rainburrow, who continued to enjoy his morning bacon. Jinot had never seen such a busy man, for the missionary rushed about from first light to lanterns-out. Mr. Boxall, his friend again, followed in his wake with his little yellow notebook.

Belowdecks the dangerous felons crouched in chains and cramping cubbies, the convicts England was pleased to remove from her finer population.

• • •

Jinot was wearied by pitching decks, the missionaries’ zeal, the ocean’s monotonous view of a horizon as flat as a sawed plank. Everywhere the spread of ocean showed it was not the Atlantic, which had given Jinot the odor of life forever. Even deep in the Maine lumber camps certain weatherly days would bring the salt taste of it to him a hundred miles distant. Stern, cold, inimical, resentful of men, rock-girt and often flashing with cruel storms, for him, for all Mi’kmaq, it was the only true ocean, and like a salmon he longed to go back to it.

When Australia finally came in sight as a great recumbent sausage at the edge of the world, he wondered how he could bear to sail still farther on to New Zealand. Only the thought of the interminable return voyage to Boston and a lack of passage money — for Mr. Bone had paid him no wages since they left Boston — kept him silent. He was fated to continue with the ax maker.

Port Jackson smelled different and unfamiliar, a somewhat dry roasty odor like parched coffee and burning twigs.

Through the strange trees flew birds of shocking colors, iridescent and violently noisy, birds with headdresses and wings like burning angels, flying apparitions from dreams. But in the month the travelers lingered in the colony awaiting passage, whenever they walked out they saw creatures that surpassed any nightmare, springing fur-covered beasts with rudder-like tails, lizards swelling out their throats in gruesome puffs, assorted spiders said to be fatally poisonous.

In Port Jackson the missionary arranged with a Maori who had come to sell New Zealand flax, that he should give lessons in his language to himself and Mr. Bone. Soon Mr. Bone was flinging such words as tapu, waka, wahine, iti, ihu about, and imagining himself a fluent speaker of this Polynesian language.

• • •

Jinot was disheartened to see that the same detestable Doublehail that had carried them from England would now take them to New Zealand. There were several Maoris on board and Mr. Bone spoke to them in what he imagined was their language. The energetic Mr. Rainburrow had better luck and began proselytizing whenever he caught one of the Maoris gazing out to sea. Jinot was surprised to see that they listened with interest and asked questions. As for Jinot, the natives immediately classed him as an inferior servant to Mr. Bone and ignored him.

• • •

They sailed up a river past gullied stumpland and the voyage ended in a busy settlement. The dominant building was near the wharf, a trader’s huge whare hoka. Next to this warehouse stood a chandler’s shop ornamented with an old anchor for a sign. Two shacks leaned off to one side. The larger bore a sign that said NEW ZEALAND COMPANY. The houses of the pakeha traders and government men ranged along streets terracing the hillside. Behind a screen of distant trees was the Maori village—pa—fenced round with poles; farther back loomed a fantastic tangle of ferns, trees, creepers and exotic fragrances, a fresh world.

“A translator will soon join you, Mr. Bone. You must excuse me as I am going to see the site chosen for our mission,” said Mr. Rainburrow.

Mr. Bone and Jinot waited for the translator, a Scotsman, John Grapple, whom they could see descending the steep path. Grapple walked gingerly and Jinot guessed he was wary of falling on the precipitous way. He reached them at the same time a Maori canoe drew up on the beach and a muscular native man jumped out and walked toward them. They came together under a motte of trees.

“Well, then,” said Grapple, showing his crimson face and fiery nose. “This chief speaks no English, so I will translate for you.” The moment Mr. Bone heard John Grapple’s Scots burr he loved him and the two talked for a quarter hour working out a remote kinship before they turned to the Maori who stood waiting, his heavy arms folded across his chest. Mr. Bone showed off some of his Maori words and amazingly, this man, his brown face a map of curled and dotted tattoos and clad in a sinuous flaxen cloak that tickled his ankles, understood some of the compromised phrases. At first the two men seemed pleased with each other. The chief wondered if Mr. Bone had come to buy flax. No? Sealskins? No? Spars? No? What then?

Mr. Bone, casting his limited vocabulary aside, looked at John Grapple to translate as he tried to describe ax making and his plan for a factory. With a stick he drew figures on the ground that represented an ax on a forge and a looming trip-hammer. To further illustrate Mr. Bone removed a Penobscot model ax he carried in his valise and handed it to the chief.

The chief’s eyes widened with pleasure as he examined the quality and beauty of the ax. Too late Mr. Bone realized that the man believed it was a gift rather than a demonstration of goods.

“Well, no matter, I have others,” he muttered to himself.

“You got others?” asked the chief in fluent if rather sudden English.

“Let me congratulate you on your rapid command of our language. As to the axes, yes, I have others but they are only to show. I hope to manufacture them here as soon as we establish a source of good iron ore in New Zealand. I am the owner of an ax factory in the United States. I hope to construct one here.” A crowd had gathered around them, stretching their necks to see the ax.

“What is wrong with these people?” said Mr. Bone to John Grapple sotto voce. “One would think they had never seen an ax before.”

“I think that may be the case,” said Grapple.

The chief smiled delightedly.

“Oh my friend,” he said to Mr. Bone. “That is good. Good, good. Come with me. We wish to make a powhiri and hakari feast for you and your whekere,” he said, glancing at Jinot.

“I think, sir,” whispered Jinot, “that he believes I am the factory. He sees a factory as a kind of servant. Or slave.” For he reckoned that the Maori had slaves.

“Oh, what bosh! You do not understand the situation, Mr. Jinot Sel. He is in complete accord with me. He understands everything.” Mr. Bone, as was his usual habit, withdrew his repeating watch from his pocket. Before he had completed the motion the crowd sucked in its breath as one and stepped back, horrified expressions on their faces. They murmured “atua” at each other. Mr. Bone looked to John Grapple for an explanation.

“Hum hum,” said Grapple, with a twisted expression, putting aside his Scots speech in favor of plain English. “They fancy your watch is a demon, they say they can hear its heart beating.” Mr. Bone smiled to hear such simple suppositions and added to the tension by pressing the button that activated the chiming mechanism. A soft ding-ding came from the watch. A man in the crowd shouted something.

“What did he say?” asked Mr. Bone.

“He said the demon wishes to escape from his prison,” said Grapple. “I suggest you put your watch away, sir, as the Maori have strong feelings about such instruments. Some years ago a whaler stopped here to rewater and gather spars. The clumsy captain managed to drop his watch in the harbor and a number of fatal illnesses and calamities fell on the people in the following weeks. They ascribed those troubles to the evil spirit that was lurking beneath their harbor.”

But Mr. Bone decided to display his whiteman power. Frowning, he shook his watch and then spoke to it harshly as though to a disobedient child before putting it back in his pocket, where once again it seemed to call impetuously to its master to be released. The crowd breathed and drew back a little further.

When Mr. Bone asked Grapple sotto voce where the chief had learned his English, Grapple said it was likely he had served as a sailor on an American whaler or sealer and was of a secretive nature that led him to hide his knowledge in order to gain advantages. Mr. Bone smiled at the chief. He took note of the tattoo pattern that he might recognize him again.

“So, sir,” he said, “do you mostly fish, or make war?”

“Sometime fish, sometime war.”

“Ha. And what do you suppose I do with my life?”

“You travel about?”

Mr. Bone spoke slowly and loudly as one did with foreigners, and also because the birds in the branches above them overwhelmed their voices. “No, I rarely travel about. I live in America and, as I said, I make the best axes. Like that one.” He pointed to the Penobscot ax the chief still held in his hand. Mr. Bone extended his hand and waggled the fingers with a beckoning motion to show he wanted the ax returned to him. The Maori looked at Mr. Bone, his eye darkened and he fled with the ax.

“Here!” cried Mr. Bone. “You ruffian! Bring that back at once.” But the man had disappeared into the ferns.

“You are impetuous, Mr. Bone,” said John Grapple. “Metal tools are highly prized here.” He smiled and his voice wheedled, the Scots accent thickened. “He believes ye gae at tae him as a gift. Why do ye not come tae ma hoose and we’ll hae a wee dram and gab eh? Let us move awa frae thes bickerin blaitherskites.” Indeed, the birds were fiery in their declamations.

• • •

Jinot and Mr. Bone ate and slept in a hut in one of the established missionaries’ enclaves. Gourd plants grew up the sides, extending their tendrils to the roof peak, and jeweled geckos hunting insects rustled through them. “When Mr. Rainburrow’s mission buildings are in place we will shift houses, or when I find a factory site and put up our first dwellings. But for the time being we must accept this small guesthouse under the trees as our temporary home,” said Mr. Bone.

“Do I hear my name mentioned?” called the missionary’s voice as he came into the twilight hut smiling and humming a hymn. “I am well pleased with the site for our mission. It lies on a moderate bluff overlooking the harbor and has a brisk stream of excellent water running through it. We have already begun the construction. Before I left fifty or more Maoris were cutting great poles and lashing them together with vines, a curious but effective way of construction.”

At the end of the second week the missionary had become a partner with the trader Orion Palmer, a Maine man who had come to New Zealand years before in a sealer and had no intention of returning to the pine tree lands, where trees burst with cold in the winter nights.

• • •

Jinot rose before dawn to the sound of intertwining birdcalls, haunting organ-like notes, slow and deliberate as if the bird was deeply considering the composition. Low notes and harmonics seemed to express both sadness and resignation. A distant bird answered from far in the forest and the somber voices laced together. He twisted his head this way and that trying to find the feathered creature that made such a poignant song. And he saw it, a large blue-grey bird opening and closing its wings, fanning its tail. It showed a black mask and under its chin hung two blue wattles. The bird arched its neck, opened its strong curved beak and called lingeringly: … ing… ong… ang ang… cleet!.. ing.

Outside Jinot climbed up to the ridge through a forest so unlike the pine forests of Maine, New Brunswick and Ontario, or any other he had ever seen, he never could have imagined it. He sensed antiquity in the place but could not know that he was walking through the oldest living forest on earth, part of a world never scoured by encroaching glaciers, never overrun with grazing mammals. With the industrial ugliness of London fresh in his mind, New Zealand’s beauty moved him powerfully. It was a fresh world pulsing with life and color, the trees dripping vines, epiphytes, scarlet flowers and dizzying perfumes spilling from cascades of tiny orchids, supplejack knitting the forest together, red-fluffed rata — a place hidden from the coarser world by its remoteness. He had the feeling he should not be here; perhaps it was one of the tapu places the missionaries had joked about. The ground was cut with wooded ravines. At the bottom of each ran a clear stream. Threads of water twisted through tree roots. Birds crowded the tree branches like fruits and the crowns twitched with their movements. He would come to know many of them and the trees — totara, beech, kahikatea, rimu, matai and miro, manuka and kanuka, the great kauri and nikau palms. When he came on a secluded stand of kauri, their great grey trunks like monster elephant legs, he touched bark, looked up into the bunched limbs at the tops of the sheer and monstrous stems. He imagined he felt the tree flinch and drew back his hand.

In his desire to see every part of this new forest he left the trail and descended into a ravine. It was like a somewhat nightmarish dream when he ignorantly touched a glistening leaf and received a burning jolt of pain. Looking closely at the leaves of this small tree, the stinging nettle tree, he could see silvery hairs. Alas, not a true paradise. And there were mosquitoes. A wave of anxiety suddenly washed over him and he felt he had to get out of the ravine quickly. His feet tangled in creepers and rough vines, in the maze of supplejack. An extraordinary jumble of plants, grasses, vines, trees, shrubs were crowded together in huge knots. His clothes, decayed by long exposure to sun and salt, began to tear as he climbed up again, slipping on the muddy slope, hoping to find the trail again, his pants in ribbons from cutty grass.

Above him, at the head of the ravine, lay an old kumara field which in recent years had reverted to bracken. Eight or ten women and girls, their ko sticks laid aside, were resting from their labor of digging aruhe — fern root. The roots, many of them ten and twelve inches long, fat and heavy, were piled in great heaps. “What is that sound?” asked a small girl, cocking her head, alert to everything out of the ordinary. They all listened; yes, breaking branches and scrabbling slide of soil, a kind of thrashing in the ravine below. They half-rose in trepidation, ready to flee. The noise came closer and then a frightful creature came up over the rim and ran straight at them.

Jinot, stained with mud, panting and itchy, clawed up out of the ravine. His bloodied clothing hung in shreds, his hair was spiky with sweat. To his delight he saw the women surrounded by their piles of fern roots. He could not resist. All his life girls had welcomed his company. But this time as he ran toward them smiling and stretching out his arms, waiting to be welcomed, they fled as if from an indescribable terror, some crying in fear. He shouted at them, “Come back, I mean no harm!” They were already out of sight. And the old, smiling, merry Jinot evaporated, in his place an aging man who had known sorrow and difficulty and now, painful rejection.

• • •

Mr. Bone had spread a mat on the ground and was sitting cross-legged on it drinking tea and eating baked yam and fruits. Jinot returned his greeting with a peevish grunt.

“How I wish we had possessed the foresight to bring sacks of coffee. Tea is all very well, but it is not coffee.” Jinot said nothing, but he knew Mr. Bone’s Scots “cousin,” John Grapple, had a store of coffee. He had smelled it on the path out of the forest that ran behind the pakeha houses.

• • •

Several days later while Jinot was mending his torn clothing with a borrowed needle, and Mr. Bone scratching in his Idea book, the chief with the many-colored flax cape reappeared.

“Oh, Mr. Captain Sir,” he said in a wheedling tone, “you have many ax?”

“I have fifty in a crate,” said Mr. Bone, putting down his pen and waving at the hut where the crate stood, “for demonstration only. As I explained, it is my hope to establish an ax factory here. It is my hope to teach the Maori how to make axes of quality. I feel there is a great need here.”

“You want see good deck for whekere? You walk me.” He gestured to an oblique trail leading into the bush.

“Is it a place with a stream of running water?”

“Oh yes. Too many water.”

Mr. Bone smiled, turned to Jinot and said, “You see, it was very easy to interest this man in my idea. I’ll warrant he knows of a good location for the factory.”

“Mr. Bone, it is not possible. The trader says there is no iron ore in the entire country and laughs at you. You cannot make axes without metal.”

“I think I know better than you, Mr. Jinot Sel, what I can and cannot do. It is not that there is no ore, it is only that it has not yet been found.” The cloaked Maori stood outside the hut stepping backward along on the trail and beckoning to Mr. Bone.

“I would not go with him,” said Jinot in a low voice. “He may be planning mischief.”

“Bosh! I’ll be perfectly safe. He is friendly. For a savage, Mr. Jinot Sel, you are timid. Nor do you understand these people any more than you understand establishing yourself in a new place,” he went on, for he had heard how the women had fled from the awful stranger lurching out of the ravine. It was the talk of the missionary enclave. “This is why whitemen get ahead. They know how to command. He will be my first recruit. In a year he will be running the trip-hammer. I take no satisfaction in saying that after all these years you prove a sad disappointment to me.” Mr. Bone left the hut and followed his eager guide up the trail.

• • •

After a mile and a little more the trail became faint and disappeared, but the chief pushed on, following a way marked with ponga ferns turned silver side up (invisible to Mr. Bone). Two more Maori fell silently in behind the ax entrepreneur, who was so absorbed in looking at the massive tree trunks that he did not notice. Huge, huge trees, giants of the earth, the pale grey columns as wide as European houses. Who could believe such immensity? Was it possible an ax could take such monstrous trees down? Could they be—?

Much moved, he called to the chief, “Tell me, are these kauri trees?”

“Kauri,” said the man, turning around and flashing his eyes at someone behind Mr. Bone. But so stunned was Mr. Bone by the impossible trees that he was not aware of the descending club that burst his brain. His last shattered thought was that a great kauri had fallen on him.

“Quick!” said the chief to one of his comrades, pulling out a fresh-edged obsidian knife. “Do you run back and get the axes. Then return here and help me carry the meat.” Before he severed the limbs he gingerly withdrew the Quare watch from Mr. Bone’s pocket. The demon’s heart was pounding, pounding!

“We know how to deal with you,” said the chief, placing the evil thing on a large leaf and covering it with another protective magic leaf while he got on with the cutting up. He spoke true words for that night he cast the watch into the fire and with satisfaction all the sated assembly saw the demon fling his wiry arms out as he cried aloud, then perished.

• • •

Two days later when Mr. Bone had not returned, Jinot felt mildly uneasy but the headstrong old man had had his way as always and would likely make some kind of a success of his venture. No doubt he was looking for iron ore. Jinot, his captive, now wanted to find a ship going to Boston and work his way home, although the mariner’s trade was unfamiliar to him. He would quit Mr. Bone, for he knew a South Sea ax factory was an improbable dream; there was no metal ore in New Zealand from all he had heard — miners and explorers aplenty, but no mines. Even if there were grand mines he was finished with ax making. He wanted only to go back to whatever was left of the places he knew. The wild New Zealand forest had moved him in incomprehensible ways, yet it repulsed him with its violent tangle of vegetable exuberance, its unfamiliarity and ancient aloofness. To escape he would have to get to Port Jackson first unless an American whaler put in to a Hokianga port. Mr. Bone could not hold him. He would leave with or without the old man. He was planning his escape when Mr. Rainburrow marched into the hut, breathing heavily, his eyes slitted.

“Where is Mr. Bone?” His voice was penetratingly loud and Jinot saw people standing outside the hut, listening and watching.

“I do not know. He set off several days ago with a native man wearing a grass cloak. Against my advice.”

“Your advice! Who are you, a servant, to give advice to Mr. Bone! Which native man did he go with?”

“I do not know, sir, only that it was a native man, much tattooed, and wearing a cloak.”

“I beg to inform you, sir”—there was a sneer in his voice—“that there is much apprehension as to his whereabouts. It is thought he has come to harm and the one under suspicion is not some mysterious native in a grass cloak, but you, his servant, who have prowled the ravines of the locale with an eye to disposing of your master’s body.”

“Untrue!” said Jinot. “You have only to ask Mr. Grapple. He knows the native man and first introduced Mr. Bone to him.”

“What a pity. John Grapple is in Port Jackson for a month on business. You must be confined to this hut until he returns. I will arrange for food to be brought to you, but you, Sel, are our prisoner, pending verification of your statements. We shall mount guards against any attempted escape.”

Back in his mission Mr. Rainburrow put fresh ink in the inkwell, selected a steel nib and composed a letter.

Reverend Rainburrow To Mr. Joseph Dogg, Bone Ax Company, Massachusetts

Sir.

I am prompted to get in touch with you re circumstances relating to your employer, Mr. Albert Bone whom I had the pleasure of traveling with these past eight months. We esteemed each other greatly, indeed, I may say we became close friends. Within the last few days a worrisome circumstance has arisen which I feel I must impart to you. Mr. Bone was accompanied by his servant, Jinot Sel a dark-skinned man much given to exploration of the forest and who has frightened some of the natives by suddenly appearing from behind a bush and screeching at them. It is with concern that I write that his forays into the forest may have a sinister motive. Mr. Bone disappeared entirely from our enclave three days ago and has not been seen since. Within this hour I have quizzed Mr. Sel on his knowledge of Mr. Bone’s whereabouts. He insists that his employer went away with a native wearing a grass cloak. As many do wear grass cloaks there is no way to discern the truth of this statement except, as Sel claims, by a witness, that is the respected interpreter in these parts, Mr. John Grapple, who is unfortunately away on business for some weeks and therefore cannot vouch for Sel’s statements. I have taken the liberty of confining Sel to his quarters until Mr. Grapple returns and we can get at the truth of this matter. I have also taken Mr. Bone’s money box into care as I suspect it is the motive for Mr. Bone’s disappearance and for Sel’s forays into the trees. His claim that Mr. Bone owed him money lends weight to my suspicions.

Should Mr. Bone have come to harm I can assure you that I can act for him as his friend and spiritual adviser in every way. I have considerable influence in the country and can arrange to have his possessions returned to Boston and see to it that the servant Sel receives British justice — for New Zealand has recently been annexed by the Mother Country. I can oversee any legal matters that may arise. To my knowledge he has made no will in the colony but perhaps you know more than I of such a document if it exists at all.

I will inform you at once if we learn anything in the matter.

I am, &c.,

The Rev. Edward Torrents Rainburrow, Church Missionary, New Zealand.

Confined to the hut Jinot’s days passed slowly. One of the missionary wives brought him roasted yams and fish. She never spoke to him and if he asked a question she scuttled away. He thought about this often, that here in New Zealand every woman he had seen ran from him, shunned him. The four powerful Maori guards lounged around outside waiting for his escape, two of them scratching at pieces of dark green stone, the other two talking and laughing with each other. He stood in the doorway on some days, sat on the veranda on others, listening for the kokako, but always watching the harbor. From the doorway he could see a rock outcrop in the near distance crowned with half a dozen old pohutukawa trees setting the world on fire with their crimson blossoms. He would rather have seen a ship. If an American ship put in he would risk everything to get to it. But only English ships arrived to take on kauri spars. Every day he looked out past the pohutukawa trees to scan the sea for vessels. One morning he saw that the oldest tree at the end was down. As he stared he caught the flash of an ax and made out two whitemen attacking the trees. As the trees fell each sent up a puff of red blossoms like an exclamation. By late afternoon they were all down and he looked no more in that direction.

It was more than a month before Grapple climbed up the hill to his house again, followed almost immediately by several of the missionaries. The reverend men started back down the greasy steep slope a quarter of an hour later. But it was not until dusk that Mr. Rainburrow and his crony, Boxall, came to the guesthouse, both looking sour.

“It is my duty to say that John Grapple has returned from Port Jackson. He does corroborate your tale of the native in the grass cloak, but he says he did not know the man. He is a chief from other parts who somehow heard of Mr. Bone and wanted to know him. He may have been one of the rare bad Maori. There is no way to tell as his name and place are unknown here.”

Boxall said in a rush, “So there is no reason to hold you. You may leave.”

“That is very well,” said Jinot Sel. “I would like to return to my country. I ask you to pay me my wages from Mr. Bone’s money box. He has not paid me since we left Boston more than a year ago.”

Mr. Rainburrow wriggled his shoulders as if his coat was out of order. He cast his eyes around the hut as if looking for the money box. “Sir, you must know I — we — cannot do such a thing. The money in Mr. Bone’s strongbox belongs to him, and if he does not return it will go to his heirs and family — I doubt you are among that number. In any case I shall take it for safekeeping lest you be tempted to help yourself.”

“But I have no money for my passage.”

“I suggest that you take up the ax again. Mr. Bone said you were once a good woodsman. You can earn your way back to where you came from. And to show there are no hard feelings I will tell you that after discussion with Mr. Palmer I understand there is suitable work for you felling trees. Mr. Palmer owns several shore stations with allied timber camps in the kauri bush. You shall leave tomorrow.”

Yes, it seemed he must do that and save his wages until he could buy passage; he was old now but his scarred leg had improved over the years and he felt he could swing an ax. What else could he do? And he would be away from the swarm of missionaries and their ukases.

53. in the bush

At the Bunder shore station Jinot was disturbed to see some Maoris selling tattooed enemy heads to eager whiteman sailors as curiosities. He thought suddenly of Kuntaw and imagined him laughing at the gruesome sight — Kuntaw always laughed at horrors as though they were nothing much. Jinot walked away for fear he might see Mr. Bone’s old grey head among the wares. He went into the trader’s whare hoka to see the show of goods — brilliant bolts of cotton, wooden flutes, tambourines, buttons and spools of thread in twelve magical colors. This was the place to find precious needles, choose from an array of hats — and yes, axes of poor quality. A Maori would come in timidly for the first time and stand in the center of the whare hoka, then turn slowly, slowly to see everything, dazzled and made to desire many strange objects of unknown use. Imprisoned in the hut Jinot had overheard the missionaries say that Sydney merchants were filling all the good harbors of the Northland with shore stations — in the Hokianga, on the Coromandel, anywhere there was deep water and handy timber. “Opening the country right up,” they said with approval.

Miles apart, the stations were not only logging camps but trading posts dealing in flax, spars and lumber. Separate enterprises — chandlers, warehouses, sawmills and small shipyards — drew Europeans to them. They skimmed off the cream of the shore forest and moved the camps on to the next good show leaving behind smoldering stumps and shoulder-deep waste. The intense assault fell first on kahikatea, then on the kauri, cutting and cutting. In some places men could walk for days on the downed timber that carpeted the ground. Then the great mass was set alight, the fastest way to clear the forest, brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, twigs, ferns and forest litter. The newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them.

• • •

Trader Palmer had two logging camps, Little Yam and Big Yam, named for nearby Maori plantations of sweet potatoes. Many of his warehouses and camps stood on land that had once belonged to members of his wife’s clan. Smart and wily, a fluent and persuasive talker, he moved people to his advantage as a cook moves gobbets of meat around in the hot pan.

Temporary or not, Jinot had never seen a camp so flimsy and ragtail-bob as the Little Yam. The quarters that passed for a bunkhouse were nothing more than ridgepole tents with fly openings, thatched with great hairy masses of nikau leaves from the cabbage palm.

Almost every small mixed-race child that Jinot saw in New Zealand looked like Waddy Baker, the bush-boss, swart, pale-eyed, jug-eared and quick-handed whether catching something or striking someone with his wadi. The bush gang at the Little Yam was small, not more than twenty choppers — ex-sailors, ex-convicts, Irish, British settlers, Maori. Half of them had never worked in the woods before.

The evening meal was a “Captain Cooker” stew from descendants of the pigs Cook had released, and a loaf of bread for each man. Jinot hoped to find a partner who knew woods work; if luck was with him a partner who knew the ways of big kauri cutting, for he reckoned there was something to learn about taking down these giants beyond the swinging of an ax. The young rickers they would cut first would be easy, but when he thought about it he did not see how they could do more than nibble around the circumference of the grey-bark giants. They were just too massive. He had heard that the Maori got them down by cutting into them and then making and tending a fire in the cut until the tree burned through. It was a poor method as the burning hardened the wood so that no sawmill could get through such a log. As for getting the logs to the sawmills on the shore, he hoped there was a better way than what he had seen while standing in the doorway of the missionary hut in detention.

One morning, smoking his pipe and regarding an offshore pod of spouting whales, he heard a distant rhythmic chant, a call and response chant such as a ship crew’s capstan shanty stamp-and-go used when weighing anchor. At least eighty Maori men emerged from the forest hauling on a hawser bound around an immense kauri spar. A muscular headman stood on the log, which was decorated with flowers and feathers, and it was he who called out the urging chant, and the pullers who drew deep breaths, opened their mouths and roared a response as they heaved. The great spar moved forward a few feet on the roller roadway. Again and again the pullers answered the caller and the giant mast moved down to the ship.

Jinot worked one day with a half Maori named Arana Palmer who spoke English with what sounded like his own familiar Maine accent. He was young, not more than twenty, and strong, said, “I worked in the kauri since I was a boy.” When Jinot told him he was a Penobscot man from Maine, Arana laughed. “Orion Palmer, the trader, is my father. He come here from Maine years ago after seals. Them times not many pakeha. So I say I am part Maine. He talks once a while about his old life there. You come talk with him sometime. He likes talkin Maine, goes down to the ships, says, ‘Anybody from Maine here?’ Sometimes there is and he’ll keep ’em up all night guzzlin rum and talk, talk, talk, get jeezalum drunk.”

Jinot had not heard anyone say jeezalum in years and was glad to hear it now, in Arana’s inherited accent. Arana showed Jinot how to stuff a large sack with bracken fern for a mattress. Better, said his new partner, was to get a wool fleece — nothing more comfortable. They agreed to work together and share one of the thatched tents. Before he fell asleep Jinot looked forward to replacing the ferns with a fleece.

• • •

He was no longer the man he had been the last time he chopped trees. His scarred leg would carry him in the mornings; by the end of the workday it burned and ached intolerably and could barely take his weight. He was too old for logging.

“What troubles your leg?” asked Arana, and Jinot told him of the Miramichi fire that had nearly caught him, that had burned his brother Amboise. It was a great ease to have conversation with someone he liked. It had been a long, long time since he had had the pleasure of friendship. He went with Arana to meet his father, Orion Palmer, the trader from Maine. The white-haired old ruffian launched into a flood of reminiscence about his early days in Maine and a long involved story of why he could never go back, something to do with killing a rich man’s horse.

• • •

The labor of axing down a tree with the girth of a village church was monstrous. The bushmen tried every way, whittling around the sides for weeks until the trunk began to resemble a pencil, chipping and chopping until a saw could finish the cut. Or chopping out a commodious room within the living tree, room enough to swing an ax, a great waste of good timber. They built platforms to lift them above the stack of debris at the base of every kauri. It took weeks to bring down a single giant. The ax alone was not enough and the trader ordered ten-foot felling saws — double-tooth rakers every four teeth — onto the job. When the saws arrived the kauri began to come down by the hundreds. “Now we’re doin it,” said Shuttercock, one of the choppers. On the shore near the wharves Palmer’s roaring steam-powered sawmill, specially equipped to handle kauri, spat out the most desirable lumber in the world day after day. Hundreds of Maori hauled vast logs to these mills, inching them up out of the ravines, easing them down the steep slope below the ridge. They could not bring them in fast enough to suit Palmer, who began to talk of getting bullocks from Australia. “Queensland,” he said. “Where there’s good timber-broke beasts to be had.”

• • •

On Saturday nights Arana went home to his father’s house to exchange his filthy work clothes for fresh, sink into his mother’s large family clan again and eat his favorite dishes, to be Maori once more. Jinot stayed in the camp, washed and mended his single garment, a pair of canvas trousers torn off at the knee.

Arana came back one Sunday evening with a home delicacy, a basket of eels that had been wrapped in leaves of green flax and roasted over the coals. “We worked all day fixin our eel weirs. Some settlers pulled up all the manuka stakes that show the eel the way into the hinaki.” Between mouthfuls of the juicy meat they talked about weirs and nets and eel pots, the different ways to make good weirs. “Mi’kmaq make weirs with river stones,” said Jinot, arranging pebbles on the ground. “Takes a lot of attention, the river shifts them.” Arana explained how brush and ferns could be worked in between the manuka stakes to make a good fence, and spoke eloquently on the importance of a strong and beautiful hinaki net that did the eels honor.

• • •

For Jinot, cutting his first big kauri was pain. He had to clear away a mountain of debris around the tree with ax and brush hook, with hoe and mattock. Then it had taken three days to chop out a large enough “room” so he could climb up and get inside the tree and, in a twisted half crouch, swing his ax. At last the true assault began. He managed the first hour, but the pain in his leg was bad, very bad. At noon he moved like a crab to the edge of his chopping hole to get down to the ground and some cold tea. He was not hungry. He jumped and felt something give way in his knee. When he tried to stand upright the bad leg folded. He could not straighten it and fell again, the knee hitting the mattock point. Arana saw him down, loped over and looked at blood seeping through Jinot’s pants. “We’ll get it fixed,” he said, “we’ll get you right.” He cut a forked sapling and made a makeshift crutch, helped the injured man up. Jinot, standing because he could not sit, drank a quart of tepid tea, leaned against the maimed kauri and panted. He put his head against the old tree’s grey bark and whispered, “You got me this time.”

“You can’t work,” said Arana and helped him back to the bunkhouse, pulled off his trousers and looked at the knee still oozing blood from the blue and swelling cut. The knee looked strangely flat. He got water from the cook and tore a bit of rag from his extra shirt, mopped the wound and left Jinot to lie there all afternoon trying to find a position that would ease the pain.

There was no doctor. Palmer did any necessary doctoring or burying. Arana brought him in the next day and the trader looked at Jinot’s knee, deformed when the ligament had torn and the patella moved up into the thigh; the mattock wound was red and swollen. “Christ,” he said. “You better lay up. Maine men heals pretty quick so we’ll see.” He noticed Jinot’s graying hair — the man had aged in New Zealand. He went up to the store himself and got two bottles of opium-heavy patent medicines — Sydenham’s laudanum and Dover’s powder. “Course he’s not no chicken now — older feller, you don’t heal so good.” While he was gone Arana put his hand on Jinot’s burning cheek, leaned over and said into his ear, “Rest, rest.”

Jinot slid in and out of narcotic dreams in the bunkhouse for a week while the infected wound broke free from restraint, galloping headlong toward victory. Bright with fever, panting, he did not recognize Arana, called out to Franceway. Arana and Palmer regarded the leg, one vast black blister. Arana sighed.

Arana and Shuttercock buried Jinot near the river at the edge of the hay field where they had cut rickers two years earlier. Before the last shovelful of earth topped the grave it began to rain. They walked back up the steep tree-bare slope sloughing off muddy soil as the rain increased. It was the beginning of a great lopping storm that loosed unreasonable torrents. The mountain streams, joined by other runaway water, raced flashing down the hills carrying rocks, ricker slash, logs, gravel, soil, the old cookhouse, and, disinterring Jinot Sel, swept his carcass out into the Pacific.

• • •

The old year ended trembling in storms of wind after a wild winter, but once again a fresh spring morning, pastel and calm, gave Mr. Rainburrow pleasure as he sucked in the sweet air. He left the door open and hoped for no interruptions. If he finished all his correspondence within the hour he would have the afternoon free to count and arrange the flax bales in his storeroom, but before he had written half a page he heard tramping on the earthen path and a figure loomed, entered his sunny workroom. Another followed. He thought that he had rarely seen uglier customers than the two men who stood with folded arms staring at him. One was hoop-backed and swart, an aging hunchback with obsidian eyes in a flat American Indian face. The other had even more marked Indian features and a wiry body. His inward-drawn mouth showed that he cared for neither Englishmen nor missionaries. To Mr. Rainburrow the pressed-in lips and knotted eyebrows indicated a particularly disagreeable nature.

“Yes?” said the missionary in the brusque voice he used to dust off time wasters.

“Joe Dogg,” said the crooked man, fishing in his pocket, then extending Mr. Rainburrow’s own letter written several years earlier. It was stained and tattered, one corner quite torn away. “I am Mr. Bone’s foreman and acting manager of the ax works. Your letter came to me. Has Mr. Bone now returned? My inquiries have remained unanswered.”

“Oh, he — no, he — he has never returned. We are quite satisfied that he was decoyed and killed by a renegade Maori — it is quite sure that poor Mr. Bone is dead. Quite sure.”

“What basis have you for that surety?”

“Well,” blustered Mr. Rainburrow, “well, because it is known by some — I am not at liberty to say whom — that he was — killed. Killed and likely”—his voice dropped—“in the custom of some of these heathens, eaten.”

Dogg grimaced, shook his head as if driving off an irritating sweat bee. “We will have proof of your assertion, sir. People do not just ‘disappear,’ people are not just ‘eaten.’ ”

“In New Zealand it can happen. Mr. Bone was headstrong and showed no reticence in going into the forest with a native he did not know. Guile is part of the Maori nature.”

“I ask you to produce those people who ‘know,’ ” said Joseph Dogg. “A great deal depends on being sure. And what of his money box, do you have it?”

“I keep it in a safe place, it is in my cupboard in my sleeping room. I will get it directly.” The words tripped over each other like a too-often-repeated prayer.

The hard-faced Indian clenching and unclenching his fists spoke loudly and angrily. “Where is Jinot Sel? I wish to see Jinot.”

Mr. Rainburrow also had a wish — that he might be instantly transported to a desert isle. If he had never written that letter these men would have remained forever in their wretched land of rebels and upstarts.

“He — he, too, is dead.”

Dogg, the hunchback, who had been looking out at the harbor, spun around, spoke in a tigerish voice. “What! Jinot dead? Not possible. Never. How? When?”

“Last year, in, in— I have forgotten the month.”

“He died how? Or did he also ‘disappear’?”

“He died of illness. Of blood poison. He worked as a bushman and hurt his foot. Or leg. His friend, Arana Palmer, was with him and no doubt can tell you all the particulars.”

Joseph Dogg said in a low voice, “Perhaps you do not know that Jinot Sel was not Mr. Bone’s ‘servant’ as you surmise, but was greatly favored by him as a friend and business associate and it is to him that Mr. Bone has willed all his works and possessions, which include the ax factory in Massachusetts. And if truly he is dead, and if Jinot is also dead, then likely Mr. Bone’s holdings will shift into Jinot’s estate and go to his son, Aaron. I have the responsibility to bring all details back to Aaron Sel, who could not make the interminable journey.”

“I am also Sel,” said the dark Indian. “Etienne Sel, an uncle of Jinot Sel although he was older than me by many years. We came to reclaim him and take him back to his home country. If what you say is true we must have his bones that he may be returned to the land where he began. This is important.”

“I cannot speak to the whereabouts of his grave,” said Mr. Rainburrow, seeing an escape route. “I can only advise you to search out Arana Palmer, one of the sons of the trader here, Mr. Orion Palmer. He was a friend of Jinot Sel — and, I think, did bury him — where I do not know. So, I wish you good day, gentlemen, and good fortune with discovering what you wish to know.”

“The money box, sir,” said Joseph Dogg. “I will take it in hand before we leave this place. I trust you have not availed yourself of any of the funds?” A cloud passed over the sun, briefly dimming the flood of light through the open door.

“How dare you, sir, imply that I am a thief?” Mr. Rainburrow swelled up. The word sir hissed through his teeth.

“Why, Mr. Rainbillow, I see that you are a clergyman of sorts, and it has been my experience that pastors, ministers, clergymen and church officials of all kinds feel entitled to use any stray funds that come their way to further their influence and control of local affairs — as well as building new churches, adding wings to existing churches, gilding the altar and such so-called good works, especially improving the parsonage or the wine cellar.”

“I will have you know that I have not touched a ha’pence,” lied the missionary, who had, in fact, used more than a hundred pounds of Mr. Bone’s money to build the storeroom where he cached his bales of flax.

“It will be a simple matter to judge,” said Joe Dogg, “as I know to the last penny what Mr. Bone had in that box. I have his monthly accounts up until three years ago, when correspondence ceased. He was meticulous in noting his expenditures. Before we depart I will conduct my examination of the contents of the money box and any papers he may have left. Also, you will present that proof of his demise.”

They left the missionary biting at his thumbnail. Sunlight washed the room as before.

• • •

Orion Palmer leaned on his counter near the open door, his narrow temples surmounted by a wave of cresting auburn hair, his hard blue eyes wide open. Etienne stared at his odd face, for below the earlobes the jaws swelled out, fleshy and full, carried down to a thick neck. “My son? Which one? I have more than a dozen, all fine fellows, but I certainly do not know the whereabouts of each. Most with their mother’s people.” The trader, in an easy mood and pleased with the fine day and the flock of sheep-like clouds marching overhead, sized up the two men.

“Your son Arana Palmer, sir,” said Etienne in the weighty voice he used with assertive whitemen. “We have heard that he knew my nephew Jinot Sel.”

“Ayuh, he did.” The trader sighed and thought for a long moment. “Pret’ sure Arana is workin the kauri yet.” He picked his teeth with a long fingernail. “Yep, he did know Jinot, we all known him. He frighted the women wicked when he first come here. So some took a dislike to him. He died of a poisoned wound — nothin we could do. Too late for amputation and no white man doctor here — just me, and I don’t go in for cuttin men’s limbs off.” As he warmed up he became more voluble, his limber mouth stretched in the smirk of a self-regarding man. “I say he was not young or strong enough in the first place to work cuttin kauri, but the missionary put him to it so’s he could earn his passage back home. He tried. Choppin kauri calls for strong young men,” he said. “He was not so young, pret’ lame though he knew well how to handle the ax. You could see that. He said he was a Penobscot man, and maybe he was a long time ago. Them days is gone, y’see — we got circle saws and trained bullocks. Now bullocks—”

He was ready to tell them his brilliant innovation of importing bullocks to New Zealand, for the trader had to get some indication of his importance into every conversation, but something in their intent leaning postures, their serious eyes following his lips as he spoke deterred him. He told them instead to take the steamer two harbors north and, following the map he sketched out on a broken packing-case slat, to walk the track to the Big Yam camp, where the choppers and sawyers were laying the kauri down. He wished them luck. “And I guess you want to finish your business here pretty quick as the Vigor is leaving for Port Jackson next week. We don’t get that many ships these days since the whales is all gone. Catch the Vigor and return to your own place.”

Etienne spoke. “We only just come here. Long long trip. We see something of this new land, not leave so soon. Country pretty different to K’taqmkuk.” He stared out at the bulging forest line beyond the cutover slope hardly believing the size of the stumps.

“Arana can show you — his mother is Maori. The Maori got a good many tapu places you best not disturb.” And the trader drew the edge of his hand across his throat.

• • •

The calm morning had changed; intermittent clouds now cast their stuttering shadows over the landscape. Arana, when they found him at work, was, like many Maori, handsome and strongly built with great leg muscles. There was little of the trader Orion Palmer in his appearance beyond a slightly oversize jaw. His hair hung long and snaggled. He listened to them, then said, “Come with me,” and led them through the stumps to an awkward place — a huge kauri stump surrounded by slash and the great pale arms of its severed limbs. He jumped on the flat top, the size of a barn floor, and beckoned to them to join him. “This is the very stump of the kauri Jinot was cuttin when his bad leg give way. There’s the cuts he made,” he said and pointed to the ax marks on the outer rings. Etienne touched the greying wood, old ax marks all that remained here to show that Jinot had walked the earth.

He diverted the conversation to the peculiarities of these curious tree giants that tempted woodsmen with their perfectly knotless bodies, for he, too, had chopped trees in Maine and Nova Scotia and had never seen anything like them. Arana said they were a kind of pine.

“Many men say,” said Arana, “that kauri is the best wood in the world.” They smoked their pipes in silence for some time. Etienne said, “What can you tell us of Jinot here?”

“He wanted to return to you but could not. He had no money. What else could he do? Become a trader? My father would not allow that. A cook? Perhaps. But he knew the ax, he knew how to bring a tree down even if it were the biggest tree of the world. He was very skilled with axes. He made a chair one Sunday, all with his ax. I think he was lonely here, nobody talk with but me and some of the choppers. He said he never meant to come here but that man, Mr. Bone, made him do it. He did not want to cut kauri — he said they were trees of power, and we also believe this. I do not think he ever told me of his uncle.” He squinted at Etienne as if he had just jumped down from the sky.

“He could not, for he did not know me, ha? His grandfather — my father — Kuntaw, left Penobscot a long time ago and returned to his Mi’kmaw people near Sipekne’katik river. Kuntaw got two wives after that whiteman woman, and one of them, my mother. Settlers pressed on us, the Scotlands, destroyed our eel weirs, burned our wikuoms.” Arana nodded at the mention of eels; they were his bond with Jinot. “The government give our reserve to those Scotland people with burning hair color, so Kuntaw led us across the water to K’taqmkuk — as the whitemen say, Newfoundland, where there were good eel rivers, good fish, and some Mi’kmaw people. For us it was good because the whites did not go into the rough parts of this place. But we did and now we live well. We come to bring Jinot back with us. Aaron was there for two years. He went to Boston. We look, we can’t find him to come here with us.”

Joseph Dogg, who had been silent during this recitation, asked softly if whitemen were not pushing into such a bountiful country. “Yes,” said Etienne, “but it is rich only for us Mi’kmaw. For whitemen who want something that makes money it is not promising. They come not to make houses, but only hunt caribou and get fish. These whitemen come to Kuntaw and ask him to take them to good fishing places. No harm can come from that.”

Joe Dogg rolled his eyes and said emphatically, “It is dangerous to bring whitemen into your country. However rough the trail, they remember it and soon begin to want it.”

Etienne said, “We live our Mi’kmaw life. That is what we want give to Jinot.” Looking at Arana, he shifted the talk. “The trader said you were a friend to Jinot. Maybe you will tell us about this place that he came to. Maybe you will show us how you and your mother’s people live. We like to know this.”

Arana was silent for long minutes, then said, “We will go in the bush with my sister Kahu—he kanohi komiromiro—she has the eyesight of that little bird that finds invisible insects. She knows the forest with all her senses.”

Their excursion fell on a day of days, clear and bright at sunrise in the time of nesting birds. They were five in number, for not only did Arana’s elder sister Kahu come with her pet parrot on her shoulder, but also their young cousin Aihe, muscular and as quick of motion as the dolphin in her name. Aihe’s crinkly hair seemed alive and moving, as though each strand was a tendril reaching for a hold. Kahu’s pet kaka flashed his red underwings and shouted whenever he felt like it, which was frequently, a call that sounded to Joe Dogg like someone ripping boards off the side of a barn.

Arana and Kahu tried to explain their country (despairingly, because it could not be explained but only lived), saying all land was owned by Maori tribes and clans, who kept forests intact for birds and only cut trees judiciously. Aihe interrupted, saying hotly that some tribal chiefs were greedy and sold their relatives’ land to whitemen of the New Zealand Company. As they walked Kahu pointed at some gnarled pohutukawa trees and said they were sacred. Springs of purest water bubbled out of the ground. In the distance they could see the swell of the forest like a great wave.

They entered what Kahu called “the forest of Tane,” and the air became still and heavy. Above them the westerly wind stirred the treetops and always some birds rose crying out. They went silently as Kahu pointed out the tallest trees making a top roof over the forest, the lesser trees below. Joe Dogg was scandalized by the way of the rata, which began life in the high branches of other trees and, as it grew, sucking the life force from its host, sent roots downward until they reached the earth and twisted together into a distorted trunk until the host tree became part of the rata.

Late in the morning the small pieces of visible sky clouded over and Kahu said they might have a little fast-moving storm. Before she finished speaking they could hear the rain pelting down above them, beating on the leaves, though so interlaced were the treetops that no drops reached them.

They came out of the trees as the storm pulled away, and from a lookout rock they saw pillars of mist exhaled from the folded hills. Aihe said it was Papatuanuku, the earth mother, sighing for Ranginui, the sky father, and that in the Beginning they had been glued tightly to each other in amorous conjunction, making great darkness for their god children. The children decided to separate their parents and let in light, she said, and Tane, the forest god, held them apart with trees. She asked Etienne for Mi’kmaw stories. He remembered several imperfectly, but stayed silent as he thought they would show empty against her accounts of a Maori world teeming with so many gods. The Mi’kmaq had lost their spirit world to the missionaries’ God.

When they passed near an ongaonga Aihe pulled at Joe Dogg’s sleeve, pointed and told him it was a dangerous plant with a poison sting. “They tell of a whiteman sailor who ran away from his ship in the night. He ran into a forest where there were many ongaonga plants and he fell in them in the darkness, crying out. But the ongaonga did not spare him and he died of its stings.” A little later she caught something and passed it to Etienne—“here is a pepekemataruwai for you, we call it ‘insect with a silly face.’ ” He flung it from him, laughing.

• • •

Etienne was impressed that everything they saw or heard or smelled was linked to Maori gods and their feverish vengeful lives. He promised himself that when he returned to K’taqmkuk he would find old people and ask for stories of ancestors. He stared at the ocean below, glinting through the trees, and thought it looked back at him. Never in K’taqmkuk had the Atlantic Ocean fixed him with its watery eye. Was this a sign?

At the new moon Joe Dogg and Etienne Sel worked their passage to Port Jackson and after a long wait signed on to a London-bound ship and on to Boston. “We must find Aaron,” said Etienne.