Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

The relentless reading and studying wore them down and they decided to make a rare free evening and hear Dr. Alfred Onehube from Manitoba lecture on the state of the world’s forests. Onehube disclosed himself as a militant ecoconservationist.

As they left the auditorium Felix heard a man behind him say, “Another tree-hugging eco-nut.” Jeanne’s face was stiff. Without looking at Felix she said, “I feel completely stupid, helpless. What are we doing but cramming our heads with words? Felix, what can we do?”

Impossible to go back to the study schedule after the call to activism, but where to begin? Jeanne reorganized the stacks of paper and books on her study table. She came on the profile of Sapatisia Sel torn from the power company’s newsletter and read it with fresh interest. “Felix, I want to know why she said that the old Mi’kmaw medicine plants can’t be used anymore. I bet she knows how to help the forest. The article says she lives on Cape George. Let’s go find her.”

Mr. Stick said, “She’s a Sel. Try and find a Mi’kmaq ain’t related to a Sel! Get up pretty early in the mornin for that. I got some gneg wetagutijig cousin Sels.”

Before they could knock, the door opened and Sapatisia Sel, wearing a heavy grey sweater that looked like it had been knitted from fog and briars, stood staring at them without expression. She was not old but weathered, a plank washed up on shore. “All right,” she said in a low voice. “Here you are. Again. Why? Who are you and what do you want? Ever hear of privacy?” “We come up from Dartmouth,” said Jeanne and waited as though she had explained everything. “I guessed that. Why are you bothering me?” “I am Jeanne Sel, and this is my cousin Felix. Also Sel. We are students. I read this article”—she held the limp cutting out—“about you and I have a question.” “What question?” She did not take the clip.

“Well, you say that Mi’kmaw medicine plants from long ago can’t be used now. Why not? I mean, if we know that a certain plant cured aches or itches, why wouldn’t it be good to use it now? Our aunt Alice just had the flu and everybody brought her Mi’kmaw medicine and she got better.” Sapatisia Sel made a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. “Good God, you came all this way to ask that?”

Her unbraided hair straggled over her shoulders. “Since the conquest the air has been filled with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, with exhaust particles and smoke. We have acid rain. The deep forests are gone and now the climate shifts. Can you figure out for yourselves that the old medicine plants grew in a different world?”

“Those plants were surrounded by strong healthy trees, trees that no longer exist, trees replaced by weak and diseased specimens. We can only guess at the symbiotic relationships between those plants and the trees and shrubs of their time.”

“And I must say you are unusual young people to come here looking for answers. Are you botany students?” They began to explain their lives to her, Alice’s house and how they came to be there. “You deluded idiots,” said Sapatisia Sel. “And now you will go back and continue your studies?”

“To have careers. To be somebody.” “You are already somebody. Do you mean somebody more important than poor Mi’kmaw students?” “Yes. I guess so,” said Jeanne, and Felix, who did not want to nod, nodded.

“It’s not just ourselves,” said Jeanne. “Felix cares about the forests,” she said. “And I care. We want to do something.” Felix saw the woman’s rigid shoulders drop a little. He told her about hearing Dr. Onehube’s lecture on the boreal forest. “Well, Alfred does get people going.” “Do you know him?” “We’ve worked together on projects.” She got up and walked around, went to the door, opened and closed it. “You two are beginning to interest me now that we’re past the medicine plants. You are young and green, you do not know how the world works or that you will be punished for your temerity in wanting careers.”

“I’ve done the university things, teaching and lecturing. I, too, wanted a career, I had a career, I left the career. I’ve learned enough to know that today the world we have made is desperate for help. Help that isn’t coming. I don’t teach now. I have a project and I work at it. With others. My interests are overlapping ecosystems, the difficulties in understanding the fabric of the natural world. So if you came here looking for a discussion of research on medicinal plant genomes you’re in the wrong place.”

“We look at models, examine causation and apparent effect, we struggle with the wild cards, worry about population growth.

She seemed done with talking, thrust a notebook at them and said, “Write down your address. I’ll be in touch.” Then she sent them on their way.

few straggler tourists were still underfoot, as irritating as gravel. Jeanne, who worked weekends at an information kiosk, collected (as everyone did) their idiotic questions, especially those from the Americans who thought it might be shorter to drive from Halifax to Antigonish counting miles rather than kilometers.

On his way to the back door through the kitchen he dropped the pork chop back in the pan and picked up the buff envelope, saw “Breitsprecher Tree Project” and a Chicago address in the upper left corner. He stopped, turned the envelope over. “Jeanne get one, too, just like that,” said Alice, nodding at Jeanne’s plate, the envelope standing against it. “Late again—something she has to do at the school.”

Something fell out as he unfolded it and fluttered under the table. He read the letter and read it again, not understanding. It informed him that he was the recipient of a five-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Breitsprecher Tree Project and was signed by someone named Jason Bloodroot. What did it mean? Once more he read the letter, retrieved the check from the floor. It was made out to Felix Sel, it looked real. The letter said he was to contact Dr. Sapatisia Sel within ten days for further information about the project.

Jeanne was old enough to know that no man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.

Something dark and thin ran across the road. “What was that?” “Mink, one of those big escaped ones from the mink farms.”

“Not likely. She was married. Married to somebody we know.” “Who!” Jeanne did not believe it. How could her hero have married anyone? “Well, not somebody we actually know—someone we heard talk.” “No, you don’t mean that Onehube?” “Yes. She was his student. And they got married.”

As a slice of sunlight painted the drenched countryside, touched the sea, a flight of migrating birds cut the sky like crazy little scissors.

Jeanne began tracing her finger over the GPS touch screen. A tiny red dot on a crumpled string of a road appeared. “Look, Felix! It shows us on this road!” “All right!” said Felix. Jeanne promised herself she would buy this model of car if she ever had the money. Suddenly a loud female voice said, “In a half kilometer turn right.” Jeanne shrieked.

At the lee side of the house they saw two large tents. A sign on one read MEN. “The other one must be for women,” said Jeanne. “Are they toilets?” “Now you sound like a tourist. The outhouse is over there,” he told her and jerked his thumb toward the unmistakable small building on the cliff.

“So then. Briefly, the Breitsprecher Tree Project does forest replanting. We have ties with as many as thirty conservation groups and we often work within their programs.

We will be the only team working in Nova Scotia this season and there is a lot to do. We’ll plant trees and monitor several test plots outplanted three years ago. We keep detailed notes on how well they are doing for up to ten years. One particular plot was showing a lot of chlorosis last year. Dozens of variables. I have a pet site where we’re looking for the effects of mycorrhizal fungi on seedling growth. Burned soil is deficient in mycorrhizae and seedlings do not do well without them—their presence increases nutrient and mineral intake.”

“Come back to us, Tom.” She spoke softly. She knew a little about him: that he had been through deadly experiences in Afghanistan years earlier, and that after he came home, somehow trees had saved him.

Once you understand how to assess different geographies, soils and hydrologies, sizing up new places will become second nature.”

“For this three-month session you stay here. Next year you may work in a tropical rain forest.” Jeanne noticed that Sapatisia’s hands were dark, the nails broken. She looked at her own white, useless hands.

“If you like a particular kind of work you might specialize—Tom

Sapatisia said, “So. Essential information for our newcomers. The Tree Project will supply you with room and board and pay for your travel and all equipment and tools. Sometimes you will be living in tents, sometimes in hotels or with a host family. This month it’s tents. The team will work together on the same plot. The work is hard and dirty.

“It can be medicinal plants where they are natural constituents of an area. Don’t jump to the conclusion that medicinal plants only benefit humans—animals and other plants also use natural medicines. We often have to guess what understory plants belong in the mix because on badly degraded land we are not entirely sure what was there before the cut. You’ll see as we go along.”

And remember that where there are highlands, there must be lowlands with bogs and marshes—they are not discrete.”

“Yes, and otters and beaver, muskrats and dragonflies, mosquitoes, beetles and worms, and how do they all fit into the forest’s life? Try to approach questions from the viewpoint of the forest.” She looked at Tom Paulin as she said this.

“If you have questions about fires and soils, ask Tom. Always share your knowledge.”

“It will take thousands of years for great ancient forests to return. None of us here will see the mature results of our work, but we must try, even if it is only one or two people with buckets of seedlings working to put forest pieces back together. It is terribly important to all of us humans—I can’t find the words to say how important—to help the earth regain its vital diversity of tree cover. And the forests will help us. They are old hands at restoring themselves.

She went on. “Charlene, you’ve spent time in Brazil and Colombia. How many trees and how many tree species would you say grow in Amazonia?” “My God, who knows! The diversity is so great and the different species so scattered—” Tom interrupted. “I read the Field Museum’s report last year that said sixteen thousand species and I don’t remember how many million trees.” Sapatisia nodded. “And they estimate around three hundred and ninety billion individual trees in the Amazon basin.” Tom looked at her. “How the hell can we understand those numbers? North America only has one thousand species. Sixteen thousand!” Sapatisia crooked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yes, how do we grasp these enormous diverse numbers? But the report also said that half the trees actually belong to a much smaller count of two hundred twenty-seven species—the predominants, including cacao, rubber, açai berries, Brazil nuts.”

“Possibly. We just don’t know. Some people are sure those hyperdominants were in the catbird seat because preconquest indigenous people grew them. On the other hand, some think they were always dominant and are in a naturally stable state. Quite a nice little puzzle.

“I’m thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick—not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I’m thinking about ‘dark diversity.’ Like dark matter.” “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.

drowsy thought swam to the surface—he might now actually be doing it—forest work. Had he gotten around the barrier of college and even the university? Yes, he was at the edge of the forest. This was his start. They could not pull him back. • • • And Jeanne felt a stream of joy like a narrow sun ray breaking through heavy overcast, a sense that in this one day her life had become filled with leafy meaning. Because of Sapatisia Sel.

She had not yet told them of the dangers, that forest restoration workers were attacked and killed, that any kind of interruption to the profitable destruction of forests invited reprisal. She had not mentioned the floods of propaganda and lies that would drown them. She had not told them about the devouring fires, the rich peat-bog carbon mass of the boreal Canadian forests that burned hotter than those of Eurasia, the uncontrollable crown fires were changing the earth’s albedo. In the morning she had to tell them.

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.