Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

René felt the power in this ax, its greedy hunger to bite through all that stood in its way, sap spurting, firing out white chips like china shards. With a pointed stone he marked the haft with his initial, R. As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

Elphège told René that Iroquois women had severed Monsieur Trépagny’s leg tendons, then had sewed him up tightly, closed every orifice of his body—ears, eyes, nostrils, mouth, anus and penis—and that after two or three days Monsieur Trépagny had swelled like a thundercloud and burst.

“Not yet!” blurted Duke. “I’m not done—” But at the age of fifty-three with his fortune only half-secured he was done.

He prayed silently for the governor to become more observant, more kindly. Or better yet, to fall down in a fit and never rise.

A cloud of steam swelled into the bitter dawn with each of her exhalations and Achille thought that these puffs were like the lives of men and animals, brief, then swallowed up in the air.

I will go south, do lumbering in Maine. I will despoil their land.” “They will not notice. They believe despoiling is the correct way.”

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.

Armenius Breitsprecher gazed into the fire and said nothing. Not for the first time he saw the acquisitive hunger of Duke & Sons was so great they intended to clear the continent. And he was helping them. He hated the American clear-cut despoliation, the insane wastage of sound valuable wood, the destruction of the soil, the gullying and erosion, the ruin of the forest world with no thought for the future—the choppers considered the supply to be endless—there was always another forest.

Hopeless, hopeless to try to describe the situation in North America, where people spurned the age-old craft of forestry, a craft he knew only partially from books, his father’s lectures and his own observations. He had to get Dieter to come and see for himself the Michigan forest, a massive but innocent forest standing complete before the slaughter began.

“Yes, but Armenius says he is a forester on a great estate in Germany. He manages a large forest. He might be useful to us.” “God’s sake, how on earth does he ‘manage’ a forest?” snorted Edward. “Cut ’em down! That’s forest managing. Tell Ichabod to take his managing back to Germany. No use to us.”

Mein Gott, the forests are constantly on fire, but not controlled fire—the settlers set vast acreages ablaze to clear the way for farms and houses. Then, disappointed that the soil is poor, they move on west, always west, and do the same elsewhere. Not one in a hundred American farmers can tell you the characteristics of soils. The Indians were better managers of the forest than these settlers. They were very good observers of water, weather, all animals and growing things. And they forbore to cut lavishly. They used many parts of many trees for different tools and medicines, not unlike the old German peasantry.”

Duke owns everything you see. He got it free from the govmint, the big giveaway, stealin public forest land, cut it down and get rich.” “Save it for later.” “Don’t you worry, I will.

Tell you how they get the power and legal rights, fix the laws, them takin everything got value—trees, copper, everything—for

everyone coming to it with a common hunger, coming to take and take and take again. Chicago was raw greed and action, and would perhaps become the most important business city in the world. He decided to shift his own enterprise to Chicago immediately.

They all knew everything was for the tourists, the despised tourists who kept Nova Scotia alive.

“Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this. “A little like absent presence—when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow—absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and

our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants—dark diversity.”

All her life she had assumed polar ice was a permanent feature of earth. She had not understood. “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself.