Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

Would they work as a group? Not everyone was suited to the life. She thought Felix would be good—he was hungry for the work. Tom Paulin was her rock, he would carry this group—if he stayed alive. Jeanne might be the finest kind once she found her way. Wait and see. Hugdis would leave in November. And there was Charlene, Charlene sulking again over some imagined wrong. And Mayara—no, she did not want to remember, she would not! But there was Mayara, rising in her memory, dark mestizo activist Mayara, sister, daughter, lover. Yes, and beautiful, too. And the treacherous memory would not stop there but leapt to Mayara on the day she had taken the foreign journalist to see a savagely destructive cut in a protected sanctuary, red mahogany logs lying on the ground, the butts still wet, when the cutters returned carrying guns instead of chain saws. As if they had known. Of course they had known. It was over in seconds, short bursts of gunfire. The photographs had shown Mayara cut in half, folded as though she were trying to kiss her own knees. Her knees! Her beautiful brown, rounded knees.