Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

“Miss Heinrich. I think you had better take this proposal in to Miss Duke and tell her that it caught your eye. She may not have read all the way through when it was first presented last year. I agree with you that there may be value here.”

No one could argue with this, for some of the old Breitsprecher lands he had planted twenty years earlier were bristling with sturdy trees and would indisputably be valuable timberland in another three or four decades. It forced the Board to think in new ways, on a scale of decades rather than months or a few years. Very frightening

She kept her jaw clenched against falling agape when Mrs. Oval entered the room. Nashley Oval stood up. Dieter rose, smiling. The woman who came toward them was tall and shapely, beautiful in balance and bone. She wore a costume of orange cotton skirt fringed with feathers, and on top a long garment of supple flax that left one shoulder bare. A river of black hair streamed to her waist. Her chin was tattooed with a curious design and a delicate tattooed line enhanced her shapely lips. Lavinia realized with a shock that she was a Maori. “Welcome, welcome to our land,” she said in perfect upper-class English, her soft voice dropping at the end of her sentence.

Ahorangi touched Lavinia’s arm and with a sad half smile said, “I must ask you something. I am afraid for the rimu. My husband says you are an important lady who owns a timber company and that you come here to look at the trees with a thought to cut them. I hope you will love our trees and not cut them. They are our lives. To live happily in this place we need the trees. I am afraid for them. You will not cut them, please?” Lavinia said nothing, and in a few minutes Ahorangi understood the silence and walked back to her husband and brothers. For the rest of the day she stayed with them and made no effort to speak again with Lavinia.

“One must have faith in the power of a seed,” said Dieter. “We plant them knowing we will never see them when they are grown. We plant them for the health of the world rather than for people not yet born.”

Ahorangi spoke to Lavinia. “You have not yet seen the young kauris—they call them rickers, and they look rather different than the mature trees. Tall and thin, like young girls before they—develop.

The woman sighed but nodded when Lavinia told her that Duke & Breitsprecher would pay Mr. Oval to set up a kauri nursery and maintain it, to plant young seedlings when the cut was finished.

Dieter asked himself why humans reached into the ancestral pot for infant names, but found no answer.

“You see, Charles, it is a tree. Your life and fate are bound to trees. You will become the man of the forests who will stand by my side.”

Now that he was here he did not know what he should do. He had no understanding of eel weirs, could not tell a blueberry from an enchantment. He could not hunt caribou or beaver. In any case there were no beaver or caribou.

“You want too much,” said old Kuntaw, the Sel clan’s elder and sagmaw. “Here you must learn to give, not take.” But after two restless years in Mi’kma’ki, Aaron went back to Boston, looked for Jinot, who was still in New Zealand, and drifted around the waterfront.

It was on the waterfront that two jovial men got into conversation with him, invited him to the alehouse and bought him drink. Later he had a misted memory of walking between his two new friends toward the docked ships, but no recollection at all of how he came to be aboard the Elsie Jones. He woke the next morning to the painful strike of the bosun’s rope end. “Git up, you stinkin Indan beggar brat.” He was a green hand on the Elsie Jones bound to London with a cargo of spars and masts. “You cannot do this! I know my rights. You cannot keep me against my will.” “What! Are you a sea lawyer? One of them always prating about ‘rights’ and ‘free speech’ and such? I’ll learn you what your ‘rights’ are. You’ll toe the mark and the mark will be high.”

snarled confusing orders salted with vile epithets such as “toad-sucking gib-cat,” and “scabby jackeen,”

In those weeks he began to feel he had somehow changed, and in no minor way. Physically he felt well, strong and alert. He was nineteen, had become watchful, more inclined to read the body movements and faces of people around him.

His presumption of himself as the central figure in any scene had been scuttled by the bosun James Crumble.

Ye ain’t green, are ye? Not a landsman? Sailed afore the mast, have ye?” Aaron said he wasn’t so very green as he’d sailed on the Elsie Jones. Binney raised his eyebrows. “And so you attended Miss Crumble’s Academy for Poor Sailor Lads?” “I did, sir, and enjoyed a rigorous education. And survived.”

And the niggling question he had been pushing down kept kicking its way back into his thought: why was he going back to the Mi’kmaw life? He had a calling now, he could make a sailor’s living. He could go back to the sea if he had to, as long as it wasn’t a-whaling.

“The death of my father does not surprise me. He went away so many years ago. I grieve. I wish I had gone with him. I was a bad and stupid person before, maybe I still am that person but I think I am different.”

“I know how it is,” he said. “I have felt this. Look you.” He took up an empty wooden bowl, put in a dipper of water, asked Maudi to bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the pot and added it. He stirred the water and oil briskly with a forked twig until it whirled into an amalgam of froth. “Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw. In the bowl is mix-up métis,” he said, “whiteman and Mi’kmak. Now watch.” They all stared at the bowl. The glistening mackerel oil rose and floated on top of the water. “That’s how it was with me, long ago. I tried to be whiteman, but Mi’kmaw oil in me come to top. That same oil come up in you. Sometime I hope for this Canada that the Mi’kmaw oil will blend with the water and oil come to the top. We will hold our country again someday,” he said, “but we will be a little bit changed—a little bit watery and the whitemen be a little bit oily.”

Men could die in distant lands, as Aaron’s oldest son, John, died across the ocean in trench mud in 1917 watching the slanting rain become the final mist. Men could die at home, as on the December morning in the same year when two ships, one packed with munitions and explosives for the war in Europe, collided in the Halifax narrows causing the world’s largest explosion and a tsunami that wiped out the Mi’kmaw village in Tufts Cove. Among the mangled and drowned were Lobert’s brother, Jim Sel, and four of his children.

He followed the shoreline for many weeks, begging food or offering to work at farms he passed, slowly made his way to Barnstable and because he smelled frying fish from the galley begged a ride on a fishing boat headed to Martha’s Vineyard. The fishermen gave him a hot chunk of scrod and he was theirs forever.

Captain Giff Peake, himself half Wampanoag, taught Egga how to read a few words, but watching the boy try to write was, he said, like watching a dog try to play the piano. Still, Egga was an eager worker, cheerful, every morning full of hope for a good day as escaped or released prisoners sometimes are.

In the sweep of his twenty-first year he volunteered for U.S. military service and was turned down as an alien resident, applied for citizenship, met, courted and married Brenda, a Wampanoag girl.

Few parents knew of the atrocities practiced on their boys and girls by genocidal nuns and priests. The children were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.

Scrawny Miss Heinrich still sat at the front desk, the office anteroom unchanged since the company’s near collapse decades earlier. She would never forget how everything had fallen wrong—the depression, when construction fell off and lumber prices dropped. Then, just as the timber business was recovering Lawyer Flense disappeared with Annag Duncan and the embezzled funds. It was the logging company’s worst time. What an uproar!

The chief accountant inclined his head a little and said, “Mrs. Breitsprecher, may I recommend you to read Adam Smith? It is a truism that men do only what they are rewarded for doing. Flense received a rather modest salary for his legal work on behalf of the company. And in future keep in mind when doing business with Chicago lawyers—homo homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man.”

Flense took my ancestral heritage.” But she exaggerated. Flense had not touched her personal property, had not sold her Chicago land holdings, now worth millions; it was the company assets he had rifled.

cannot understand how she fell into Flense’s grasp.” She clenched and unclenched her hands. “Lavinia, did you never notice how attentive the lawyer was to her? He praised her cookies, brought her little bouquets, always had a smile and drove her home after long meetings. I believe she was smitten with his attentions. Neither I nor you praised her—we took her for granted—that

He suffered through the last quarter of the century as again and again Congress congratulated itself on enacting a series of logging laws—Timber Culture Act, Timber Cutting Act, Timber and Stone Act, all supposedly aimed at conservation but all written with more loopholes than a page of Spenserian calligraphy. “From what eggs do these fools hatch? They cannot see!” cried Dieter. “The greatest ill is waste. Only a minuscule fraction of the standing forest ever becomes lumber—most is burned or abandoned. Mein Gott!

The infamous ‘land-lieu’ clause that allows anyone to ‘donate’ woodland to a protected forest in exchange for an equal amount of land somewhere else. Lumbermen love this ‘clause’ that lets them swap their logged-off woods for acres of untouched timber.

Then came word that Flense had truly been tracked down to an alley behind the Mulo Rojo, a restaurant in Valparaiso, where he lay dead, stabbed and robbed. Of Annag Duncan there was no word. She had truly disappeared into the wilds of Scotland, where no stranger dared go.

Lavinia sat down, took up her cup, sipped once, turned to look out at the slanting rain and collapsed, chocolate drenching her thighs. When the doctor came he said heart attack, no one knew why these things happened. Sometimes people just—died. As did Lavinia.

after a bit of tinkering, there was only one inscription for her stone: Call for the robin-redbreast Here lies a friend

She had made no changes in her will since the days before Annag Duncan’s and Flense’s scarper; bequests of properties and wealth no longer in existence made the reading of it painful to those who should have become wealthy but instead found themselves with barely enough to live modestly.

There was an odd addendum—that should a Canadian claimant come forth to seize a share of Duke-Breitsprecher assets that person should be resisted in every legal way. No one knew what this meant but it trailed a black thread through the day.

Dieter had sent Charley to study forestry at Yale, where he ran up stairs three at a time, contradicted his professors. He was passionate about forests, but disappointed by the school’s lack of similar enthusiasm; it was all about “management.” He went to Germany to see firsthand the results of two hundred years of woodland supervision, but chafed under the lectures and begged Dieter and the Board to let him travel and learn the ways of forests through observation. They agreed on a stipend and he began a wandering journey.

to New Zealand, where he was embarrassed by Duke & Breitsprecher’s vandalism of the ancient kauri and used a pseudonym rather than give his name. In a nightmare he had to lift and replace the fallen monsters on their bleeding stumps.

He had seen too much and now believed that a managed forest was a criminal enslavement of nature. His views were unpopular. Nothing he could do but wait until the hourglass turned.

“The only buildings that survived were those constructed of redwood. Nothing could have better displayed its flame-resistant qualities. People demanded—still demand—redwood lumber to rebuild. Andrew accepted the challenge. He had men in the woods before the ashes were cold, and they worked every minute there was light to see. The mills ran twenty-four hours a day.”

With no irony Dieter paraphrased Coué—“Every day, in every way, he strives to become better and better.”

“I give it my support, as we start replanting a year after they get out the cut. It is a balanced process.” “I can’t imagine what you think will replace two-thousand-year-old redwoods—Scotch pine seedlings? And what of the diversity of species? What about the soil? Erosion? All those qualities you once cared about? Are you cutting old-growth fir and cedar and planting pine? You mentioned Oregon and Washington.”

Sophia and Andrew Harkiss were the family showpieces. Andrew’s even-featured red face and intensely blue eyes, his slender but muscular body gave him an advantage. Yet under the fashionable exterior Dieter saw a hunger that made him think of a dog in the rain watching the master walk to and fro behind lighted windows. And there was James Bardawulf, baring his teeth in a caustic smile. His wife, Caroline, in a modish silk dress, Sophia very pretty. And Charley in his worn tweed lounge suit and unpolished boots. His children, thought Dieter, his dear, terrible children.

“Do you object?” He leaned forward, twiddled his fingers. “It would hardly matter if I did,” said Sophia. “You do as you please. You always have.” She paused a minute, then delivered her dart. “That is, you have done as you please so far.”

“Father, if you tried an automobile I think you would see its advantages.” “What, go rocketing along by pressing one’s foot on a knob? I find the idea effete. A man needs to acquire horsemanship, needs to hold the reins!”

But he said nothing of forests nor travel, even when questions were put to him. The next day he had that meeting with Dieter to explain how he was supposed to contribute to company capital. He had no doubt that James Bardawulf and Sophia, who both sat on the Board, were the primary sources of Dieter’s summons that he return.

He entered the familiar office, where Miss Heinrich, older than the redwoods, smiled bravely at him. “Go right in, Mr. Charley,” she whispered. “I’ll bring some coffee.”

“I’m happy to say that many of my earlier ideas on forest care and management have become today’s practice. I was pleased when Roosevelt created the Bureau of Forestry, after that vicious affair with the western senators who thought they’d scored well by forcing the abolishment of the forest reserves—that just got Roosevelt’s dander up and he sequestered a hell of a lot of forest. The reserve system was always wide open to tinkering—it

“Tell me what you thought of the forests.” “I saw many, many plantations of pine in orderly rows. But I did not consider them to be forests.” “Indeed. Then what in your consideration is a forest?” Charley said slowly, “I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests. The entire atmosphere—the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of grand wild orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.”

“I see, ‘living for itself.’ Yes, of course, but that is not managed land, where we plant and watch over trees to provide revenue to the owners, lifetime jobs to workers, shade and pleasure to nature lovers. Wild forests cannot be managed. That is why we cut them and benefit from their wood, then replace them with trees. Trees that can be managed. Your idea of a forest living for itself is not part of modern life.

Austin Cary is trying to teach—that timber can be grown as a crop that makes a good profit and can be renewed endlessly. On one side he has to persuade the men who want to cut as they always have and who see his talks as attacks to ruin their business. On the other side are people not unlike you who see the end of the forests, disaster for the rivers. Even changes in the weather....