Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  Jinot disliked the Ottawa River, deceptively smooth for many miles, then bursting into tumbling, roiling falls. He sensed its malevolent character. The onshore thickets of old wooden crosses below the falls indicated a death river. He bent to the paddle.

  At First Meeting Place one of the loveliest Odaawa girls gave Jinot a fern frond, hastily plucked as the canoe passed close to a verdant rock face. The paddlers did not linger but called farewell, farewell and pushed on up the Ottawa with the Sels.

  They stopped below the Chaudière Falls and the serious-faced man told Josime the lumber camps were a two-day walk upstream. Or come with them to Manitoulin and lead a good life away from the whiteman’s doings. They themselves, he said, would now double back, pick up the Trois-Rivières Odaawa party and continue up the river, portage to Lake Nipissing, down La Rivière de Français and on to Manitoulin. “Two, three more week,” he said.

  “You are good people,” said Josime, his eyes following their canoe. “Now, brothers, we walk.”

  On the path around the falls they passed two parties of whitemen talking about starting log businesses. The leader of one party was white-haired and stout with a crimson face.

  “Why? England needs timber,” he said to Josime, who had asked him why he ventured far from home. The man turned away, adding that he had no time to waste on idle talk with savages. A second group was friendlier and the leader said, “Do you not know that England is hungry for timber? The pine most gone in New England so lumbermen comin into this Ottawa country. Still fresh country with big pines. Make a fortune here.”

  It was in these encounters with whitemen they learned that they were not Indians but métis or, as one Anglo entrepreneur pejoratively called them, “half-breeds.” In Maine their white-settler neighbors knew confidently that they were fading from the earth; yes, said Josime to his brothers, they were disappearing, not by disease and wasting away in sorrow as the whites supposed, but through absorption into the white population—only look at their sister, Elise. “Her children are almost whitemen already,” for she had married Dr. Hallagher, the Irishman who had first examined Beatrix. Here on the Gatineau the Sels were a different kind of people, neither Mi’kmaq nor the other, and certainly not both.

  “What we are,” said Josime, “is tree choppers.”

  • • •

  Sawmill site prospectors and timber lookers, men seeking good pine stands, had pounded the trail into a broad pathway; pine remained the ideal. Small entrepreneurs from the east hurried along, buying tracts of land and stumpage, damming the small streams to power their sawmills. The big money went to men with good credit and connections who could quickly get out the most squared timber for the British market. The most important was William Scugog, a Massachusetts man who had fought against the British in the Revolution and now claimed he repented of it.

  “Lot of camps,” said Josime. They heard of logging outfits along the Ottawa itself, on its tributaries; to the north the Black, Dumoine, Coulonge, the Gatineau, Rouge and the Lièvre, on the south the Rideau, Madawaska, Petawawa, Mattawa, the Bonnechère, powerful streams that swelled the huge rush of forest water flowing into the mighty St. Laurent; all the valleys were packed with big pine.

  • • •

  The Sel brothers hired on with William Scugog. He sent them to a camp up on the Gatineau. Before the Sels got there they set their minds against the camp, against the men in the camp and against Scugog. But Scugog had hired an outstanding cook, Diamond Bob, so called for a tattoo on his neck and a flashing ring on his finger. He did elegant things with a caribou haunch, but understood that the logger was strengthened by beans and biscuits and supplied them in plenty.

  Scugog and his oldest son, Cato, traveled between their houses on the Gatineau, in Montréal and Québec, cajoling promises of money from timber-shipping merchants for pinewood still uncut and in most cases unseen.

  The Gatineau forest was noisy, echoing with ax blows and the rushing crackle of falling timber, with shouted warnings and orders. The axmen cut the great pines, but only a few in each plot were suitable for squaring. The rest were left to rot on the ground. Jinot did not like to bend over for hours scoring trees for the hewer; he preferred to chop down trees. Amboise, whose arms were longer, did not mind scoring and Josime was a fine hewer with the weighty broadax, trimming the log smooth and flat within a fraction of the chalk line. The waste was terrific—twenty-five percent of each squared tree lost; unwanted trees lay prostrate, severed branches everywhere, heaps of bark and mountains of chips. But squared timber made up into rafts more easily and would not roll when packed into ships for transport to England. There were so many trees, what did it matter? Maine men were used to waste—it was usual—but this was beyond anything even they had seen. The slash and chips from the hewers’ axes was knee-high.

  The Scugogs had enough squared timber for two rafts at the end of the winter. The bigger raft, made up of fifty cribs, belonged to old William, and the smaller raft to son Cato. The rafts traveled well enough on smooth water but broke apart at the falls. There was nothing for it but to disassemble them and send the cribs through, one by one, then put all together again. Jinot often thought of free logs surging through the boisterous spring freshet of the Penobscot. But of course rafts did not get into killing jams.

  When the rafts arrived in Montréal they could not find a place to moor. Scugog had made no arrangements for the unwieldy mass of timbers. And it seemed to the choppers and rivermen that they were paid off grudgingly, that Scugog’s fingers lingered over the money. The tavern word was that he was having difficulty selling his timber.

  • • •

  A second son, Blade Scugog, was running a shanty farther up the Gatineau. The Sels shifted to this son’s shanty, glad to work with round logs. It was too bad to leave Diamond Bob’s grub, but the regret faded when they heard the famous cook had abandoned Scugog père in midseason in favor of Montréal, where he opened an oyster house. This younger Scugog, whose deep scratched-up voice was familiar to the river’s lumbermen, despised not only the uncertain rafting enterprise but his father’s stupidity in cutting without permits and permissions. He quickly got a cutting permit for himself after declaring he intended to make lumber for domestic enterprises, not for export.

  “What do you imagine you are doing?” shouted the older man at his contrary offspring.

  “After the war ends there will be thousands of settlers coming into this country. They will need boards and shingles to build houses.” To himself he added, “Not bloody squared warship timbers that the Crown can seize without remuneration.”

  “You are, sir, a reckless fool. There will always be wars, always a need for squared timbers. You will fail with your trust in chimerical men who will never come to settle such rude lands. Do not ask me for aid when poverty brings you down.”

  “And do you not come to me with your square timbers hoping for an introduction to purchasers,” said the son in his rough voice.

  • • •

  Blade Scugog’s sawmill ran through the summer, but at the end of dry September it was caught in a fast-moving wildfire and burned to the ground. The ambitious son refused to see he was ruined, rushed to Québec and leveraged money to rebuild. “I may not know much about square timbers,” he said, “but I know how to make money.”

  • • •

  The settlers did come and with them came bridges, lightning-fast clearing, plans for crib-size timber slides around the worst falls, canals to bypass rough water, large new settlements, cemeteries, flour mills and postal service. They pushed back the wildwood. Civilization rushed into the trees.

  The Sels moved on to other camps after Scugog’s fire. Pine choppers from Maine arrived every season, now and then someone they knew. On Jinot’s first day on the Fischer-Helden cut, walking to the marked trees behind a knot of choppers he recognized the familiar jaunty stride of Joe Martel from Marchand’s long-ago Penobscot camp at the time of Franceway.

  “Joe!” he called. “Jo
e Martel, what you do here?”

  Martel turned around, his black beard ruffed out like a grouse’s breast, a gleam of teeth, a happy exclamation.

  “Jinot Sel, Jinot. You are here?” He waited until Jinot came up to him and they walked together.

  “I seen four, five Penobscots up here in the Canada trees. It’s bad in Maine now, you know. The white pine give out. Cuttin spruce and hardwood now. But this here”—he waved his arm at the riches of the Gatineau—“looks like a pretty good chance, eh?” He said Marchand had gone broke and was swinging an ax like the rest of them somewhere on the Gatineau. Tom Keyo was dead, decapitated by a flying log. That night after supper they talked on about the old days when they were Penobscot rivermen running on bubbles, the best in the world. “We made our mark, by gaw.”

  • • •

  The next winter was windy and bad for accidents. One man’s ax head flew off its handle, sailed twenty feet and sheared a young chopper’s face away; widow-makers caught three, killing two outright and breaking the third so badly he never worked again. Two buckers cut their feet to the bone and night after night the men talked about the need for stouter boots. Most of them still wore heavy elk-hide midcalf moccasins. An ax cut through one as if it were a syrup-soaked pancake.

  The Sel brothers and Martel made the Saturday night trek to the near settlement “to drink and watch the fools” as Amboise put it, “to talk with the girls” as Jinot said. He only came for drink and company. So he said. In the settlement’s two whorehouses the girls made much of Jinot, and if Amboise or Josime came in alone always asked, “Where is Jinot?”

  “What is it they see in him?” Martel said. Jinot was only Jinot—a good riverman, easygoing in character, but off a log nothing special. He couldn’t sing, did not play the fiddle, wasn’t much of a step dancer. It had to be his smile and chaffing banter, for Jinot was always good-natured when others were gloomy and he listened to the girls’ complaints with real interest.

  “By now he knows more bout women than anybody in the world,” Josime told Martel. “He been listenin to them jabber long, long years now. I guess half the brats in Maine come from Jinot.” Martel, thinking of Franceway, raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  • • •

  A few winters later in the Ottawa drainage they were again squaring timbers, this time at Harold Honey’s camp. The shanty was crowded with dirty, lousy men who were strong beyond modern comprehension. The interior was always drafty and smoky. At night, exhausted by the constant swing of the ax against the living tree, they thought the rough accommodations of bare ground luxurious.

  The days were longer and the taste of spring was in their mouths. The drive was only a few weeks away. At the end of one day Honey came to them in the shanty.

  “Well, boys, I guess I got some bad news. The log market’s fell out the bottom. Scugog’s got all the Canada business. I can’t sell them logs we got on the rollway. I am broke and will have to go back to Maine and hire out again. I can’t pay nobody, but you are welcome to the logs if you can move ’em.” His smile was painful. There was nothing to do but pack up and head downriver with the rest of the crew.

  • • •

  Jinot was the only one with any money. The Sels agreed to spend it on a blowout in Montréal and then decide whether to go back to Maine or stay in the Ottawa valley.

  “They still cut trees in Maine—water pine is gone but there’s red pine and spruce and hardwood. There’s work. Plenty work on the booms. There’s still some long log drives.”

  “Let’s go west,” mumbled Amboise. “Not go back to the Penobscot and that—all that.” They knew what he meant: Beatrix’s grave, the old house, the choppers they knew, scabby woods and stump forests, the ghosts of dead men. Martel said that if they went west he would go with them.

  In Montréal they hit the Golden Pine, the dingiest whorehouse, but good enough for woodsmen and fur traders—even métis and “savages.” They agreed to meet up afterward at the Wing King saloon, where the proprietor not only sold liquor but rented beds for the night in the big storeroom.

  The focal point of the Golden Pine was an upright log carved like a membrum virile and painted “golden” yellow supporting the ceiling. No food was served, but a fierce kind of fermented apple cider Madam Georgine called “calvados” or “Napoleon brandy” or just “spirits” depending on the customer. The room was crowded when they went in. A long row of chairs ranged against one wall and on the chairs sat the merchandise. There were stout Irish girls with flaming cheeks, some blue-eyed milk-skinned English blondes, one sultry Jewess, a smattering of French-speaking farm girls and, in the bargain corner, a few native women. Martel made his little joke, asking Jinot if he would like a chair with the girls, then began talking with one from Kébec, asking her foolish questions about her family. Madam Georgine, who knew Jinot, tugged at his jacket sleeve.

  “Come over here,” she said and led him to a murky alcove. “Here, try this.” She poured liquor from a black bottle into a tiny glass and handed it to him. “Go on, drink it. It’s the real thing. Brandy. Napoleon brandy. We had a swell in here and he left it behind.” Jinot swallowed the fiery stuff and thought that if that was what Napoleon drank his death was imminent. He smiled, pinched Madam Georgine’s encarmined cheek and turned back to the line.

  “Jinot! Look.” It was Josime, pointing with his pursed lips at a woman bent over her lap, avoiding the stares of the men. “See who that is?”

  “No. Who is it?”

  “It’s that girl in the canoe when we come here. Long time ago. The Odaawa. The one give you that fern.”

  He studied the figure. Who could tell, the way she was slouched over? Fern, what fern? Who could remember after six or eight years what a girl in a canoe had looked like? Josime, Josime could remember. Jinot walked over to her, said, “Heyo, pretty girl.” She looked up. She said, “Jinot?” Her eyes gleamed with tears. She was thin, half-starved, he reckoned. He didn’t remember her but she remembered him. “It’ll get better by and by, don’t cry.” He went back to Josime, who was breathing hard.

  “Don’t remember,” he said.

  “How that gal git here?” he asked Madam Georgine.

  “How you think? Some men brought her in and left her. Traders, fur traders. Bad-trouble girl, her, a no-good. Scratch and bite. I get rid her pret’ soon.”

  When he looked again Josime had led the girl to one of the tables and was talking earnestly, asking questions in the way he had of stretching his head forward as if to catch the faintest whisper. Suddenly Jinot was sick of the place. He could feel the rotgut wrenching his innards.

  At the door he looked back again. The girl was looking beyond Josime to Jinot with a pleading expression. Josime’s head was close to hers and he was still talking.

  “She don’t hear a word he’s sayin,” Jinot murmured. Then he remembered he had all the money. Once more he went to Madam Georgine and stuffed the money into her hands.

  “I’m payin for my brothers and our friend Martel. They sposed to come to the Wing King later. They know it, but tell ’em anyway.”

  He walked along the plank sidewalks. He thought of Josime, he thought of the girl. He still did not recollect her. What he remembered about the time in the canoe was Josime’s hard bright stare, he had assumed it was aimed at all of the girls, a fixed gaze that went on and on. But it must have been for only that one. He felt a little sorry for Josime.

  • • •

  In the morning Amboise and Martel were waiting for him outside the Wing King.

  “Where’s Josime?” He had a headache and saw they, too, were suffering.

  Amboise shook his head. There was a long silence. “Got to make tea,” he said at last.

  “Where’s Josime?”

  “He took that girl off. Old Madam screamed like wild cat she can’t go, he’s got to pay her money, so he didn’t have any money but he give her somethin, maybe he found some money he forgot in his pocket, and she shut up. Josime said tell yo
u he’s gone Manitoulin with that girl, says we better wait—he comes back.”

  “Wait where? No place here we can wait. We got no money.”

  “Get work—plenty sawmills here. You know, move the logs up into the mill. Sort logs in the millpond. Other jobs. Plenty work, if you know logs and water, hey?”

  He was right. They all found jobs at sawmills and the cross-eyed toothless owner of the Wing King, once a logger and riverman, said they could stay on as long as they could pay. They could, but Amboise and Martel began to drink their money up. Amboise said he didn’t care, he liked to drink whiskey. Jinot, who also liked to drink whiskey and who didn’t know how far it was to Manitoulin, hoped Josime would come back soon so they could get away from the city, back to the sober life of the camps.

  • • •

  More than two months later Jinot came into the Wing King storeroom and Josime was there, lying on his bed, his eyes closed. He sat up.

  “What took you so long time come back?” said Jinot.

  “Brother, my life has changed greatly. I chop trees no more. I stay always with that girl on Manitoulin Island and give up whiteman ways, whiteman work. That girl my wife. I come tell you I go back to her now.”

  “You are like Kuntaw,” said Jinot, “slaved to a woman. And you talk different. Much time with that Manitoulin girl.”

  “It is right for me to be with her in the forest, away from stinking men and the wounding of the land. It is—what I want.”

  Jinot thought he looked very much like Beatrix, especially his pale eyes. “I know,” he said.

  “It is a joy that you do not know,” said Josime stiffly. They sat silent for a long time, then Josime spoke again.

  “I wish you come with me. I know you will not but I wish it. We are not so young now. You would feel a happiness to eat whitefish, see those people living good lives, not false whiteman lives like we do in lumber camp. One day you come to Manitoulin and learn what I say is true.”