Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. George Santayana

In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. Lynn White, Jr.

“It is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning. No one has ever seen its farthest dimension.”

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.

“Someday,” Monsieur Trépagny said, pointing into the gloom, “someday men will grow cabbages here. To be a man is to clear the forest. I don’t see the trees,” he said. “I see the cabbages. I see the vineyards.”

René learned he had never before in his life experienced extreme cold nor seen the true color of blackness. A burst of ferocious cold screwed down from the circumpolar ice. He woke in darkness to the sound of exploding trees, opened the door against a wall of palpable chill, and his first breath bent him in a spasm of coughing. Jerking with cold he managed to light his candle and, as he knelt to remake the fire, he saw minute snow crystals falling from his exhaled breath.

René was astonished at the boy’s knowledge. He was an Indian hunter, and he was, as Trépagny had prophesied, well versed in trickery and deceit.

Five years of Monsieur Trépagny’s talk of supernatural horrors in the forest, the mnemic ethos of the region, had damaged his French rationality. He had come to believe in the witiku and its comrades as he believed in the devil and angels.

It seemed both of them were subject to outside forces, powerless to object in matters of marriage or chopping.

“You are ignorant of the coureur de bois life. The woods runner’s way is no road to wealth. We and the Indians do the dangerous work and the company gets the money. We are all fools.”

But for Duquet the loading procedure was impossibly slow—without teeth he could not bite off the end of the cartridge, but had to tear it open with his fingers. Instead, he took as his weapon the French tomahawk, practiced endlessly until he could cleave the tail off a flying bird, gather up the body, have it gutted and half roasted while a comrade was still loading his musket.

He went through a rare hour of introspection, seeing that his nature chilled other men. He consciously began to act as a smiling, open fellow of winning address who always had a good story and who, in the tavern, treated with a generous hand. He was sharpening his claws, and in his private center he was an opportunistic tiger—if he had to tear and maul his way to wealth he would do so.

“If a man could get the logs out, there are a hundred thousand fortunes all around us the like of which the world has not seen since the days of Babylon. It is entirely a question of moving the wood to those who need it.” Duquet nodded and began to look at trees with a more acquisitive eye.

“Tabernac,” said Toussaint Trépagny. “I pressed against the cliff face so passionately I left the imprint of my manhood on it.” They carried their canoes for many miles that day.

The forest was unimaginably vast and it replaced itself. It could supply timber and wood for ships, houses, warmth. The profits could come forever.

Duquet did not quite see the garden as itself; in his mind he regarded it as though he were suspended some distance above and looking down at himself walking along the mosaic paths. His presence in such a curious place made it notable to him. And it stirred him with an indefinable sensation.

I see that men in China make gardens that seem the essence of forest and mountain, but in miniature. But what of the real forests? It is my belief that forests are everlasting and can never disappear, for they replenish themselves, but I have seen in France that they are . . . diminished. And I have noticed that even in New France the forest is drawing back—a little, wherever there are settlements. How far back can a forest withdraw before it replenishes itself?”

“So the forests of France and China are not everlasting,” said Duquet unhappily. “And I have heard that Italy’s mountains are stripped.” “Perhaps. But nothing is everlasting. Nothing. Not forests, not mountains.”

“We do not forget the forests when we have removed the trees. We make gardens to give us the pleasurable illusions of wilderness.”

any case we Dutch do not mind taking a risk. If business and enterprise is a fruit, we understand risk is its inner kernel.”

There is more to the sea than water—there is the land that constricts it.” “The sea is the master of all men.”

“And if he dies?” asked the tailor. “Will you accompany him on that voyage as well?” “Ha ha,” said Toppunt, “we’ll see. It depends on his port of call.”

“The powder on the wigs, you know. It’s quite irritating. I have lately changed to a powder made from curious lichens that grow on rocks, and it does not trouble me so severely. I have heard they use it to poison wolves, so rest assured that your fine wig will never be plagued by those ferocious animals.”

“They call this Queen Anne’s War, but it seems the continuance of our old antipathies,” Toussaint said. “I blame the Indian factions. One day a tribe is your enemy. The next you are fighting beside them, or they stand back from the battle and smile, like the Iroquois.”

“He is one of those who cannot be other than lonely. He was born to it. And I dislike the idea of him clambering aboard Cornelia as if she were an Indian canoe.” Piet Roos paused for a long moment. “I might do business with him but I do not want him for a son-in-law.”

In this life we meet difficult people. We must take the time to listen and try to understand them. We must never take an adversarial position.”

And yet he was not interested in them in any way except an eagerness to recognize proofs of their success. They were the sons he needed.

He prayed silently for the governor to become more observant, more kindly. Or better yet, to fall down in a fit and never rise. He immediately withdrew this cruel wish and requested forgiveness.

When they first had arrived the pine candles had been in bloom, each great tree pulsing out tremendous volumes of pollen until the sky was overcast and the choppers and even ships at sea wondered at the brilliant yellow showering down.

“René was a good man,” he said at last. “He was. Do you recall that winter when we gave him a snake and showed him how to play snow snakes and he didn’t want to stop at dusk?” “Yes. Trépagny threw his snake in the fire.” “Small matter, that was only a stick. Maman carved him a better one. It could slide far. I remember that well.”

The sagmaw seemed to ricochet between two thoughts: he foresaw billows of overseas white people arriving in countless ships—but he spoke and acted as if the old traditions still governed their world.

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

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

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

“We are sharing our land with the Wenuj and they take more and more. You see how their beasts destroy our food, how their boats and nets take our fish. They bring plants that vanquish our plants. Most do not mean to hurt us, but they are many and we are few. I believe they will become as a great wave sweeping over us.”

if we Mi’kmaw people are to survive we must constantly hold to the thought of Mi’kmaw ways in our minds. We will live in two worlds. We must keep our Mi’kmaw world—where we, the plants, animals and birds are all persons together who help each other—fresh in our thoughts and lives. We must renew and revere the vision in our minds so it can stand against this outside force that encroaches. Otherwise we could not bear it.”

They must remember how that life had been, not how it now had become.

“The Indans. That is our problem. The Indans do not use land correctly because of their raw roaming and hunting. As the Bible tells us, it is a duty to use land. And there is so much here that one can do what one wishes and then move on. You cannot make the Indans understand that the correct use is to clear, till, plant and harvest, to raise domestic stock, to mine or make timber. In a nutshell, they are uncivilized. And un-Christian.”

Bernard dipped his head, not wishing a quarrel, but thought to himself that King Philip’s War had not come about through some vague whim of the Indians. They had fought like rabid dogs to keep their lands and they had lost.

And he once or twice remarked that the reason New France did not prosper was because of the fur trade, which pulled all the able men away from the settlements and thereby cost a great deal in enterprise and development.”

“And,” said Birgit, “we have heard that after his spring ‘success’—if we may call it that—over the English at Port Mahon, his chef invented a sumptuous dressing of olive oil and egg yolk. The duke called it ‘mahonnaise.’ ”

“On the face of it, Uncle Bernard, it could have been construed as yet another example of the common tendency of Massachusetts court judgments in favor of colonial lumber millmen accused of trespassing on private land and cutting what they found there.” “Yes,” said Nicolaus. “Those liberal courts were one of the attractions of the region for our father. And we have endured Surveyors General of His Majesty’s Woods, those damnable wretches, for more than sixty-five years. It is right that they suffer in the courts.” He gave a small whinny.

The door opened and through it came a bolt of cold air and the men lurching under the weight of a monstrous green beech log eight feet long and two feet in diameter. They got it into the great fireplace with grunts and swaying and shoving, with remarks on its hundredweights. The innkeeper rushed forward with an iron bar to lever the great log to the back. Then came a hemlock forestick of considerable dimension, and the innkeeper heaped ashes onto the fresh wood to slow combustion. A boy brought in a basket of pitch pine splinters and in a minute or two a young blaze filled the room with heat and dancing light.

Into George’s mind leapt a cruel sentence he had read somewhere in his London days, the comment about colonial American women by a Mr. Ward: “the Women, like Early Fruit, are soon ripe and soon Rotten.”

They talked for a while about the ongoing wars, Major Rogers and his bands of ruffians,

He made a face, emptied his half-smoked pipe again and put it in his pocket. Sedley, on an adjacent stump, waggled his feet, slapped at mosquitoes. He saw a fine tendril of smoke coiling up from the duff where Bernard had knocked out his pipe. The lecture continued.

“Come. We can be back at the inn by nightfall if we ride at once.” Behind them the pipe dottle glowed in the pine duff, waxed and grew into a small licking fire. In Boston the next day Bernard saw the distant smoke and reckoned it was in Duke & Sons’ forestland; but fire could not be helped. Forests burned, according to God’s will.

It was too bad to miss France, which he had always heard was the apogee of depravity.

I had thought we might send Henk Steen to oversee the plantation if you wished to travel for a few months, but he made a scene. He said he was unsuited for the responsibility. Apparently he has moral scruples on slavery.

“Yes. And now that we’ve got the spleenishness out of the way shall we try for civility as we must travel in each other’s pockets for the next six weeks?” “That would please me inordinately. And I am glad to see you.” They were like two terriers sniffing and circling.