by Annie Proulx
The men could scarcely believe his stories of how those people split great planks from living trees, how they fashioned boxes by steaming and bending flat boards, never cutting the wood. Édouard-Outger had one such small bentwood box with him to hold his tobacco and they passed it from hand to hand, examining it closely. It had a fearsome red face painted on one side that Édouard-Outger said was an eagle. Once they recognized the eagle it gave them the feeling of looking into a strange mind. Etienne wanted to know more about how they built the huge houses.
“I wish,” said Etienne’s wife, Alli, “that we could build such a great house, where we could all live safely and in harmony.”
Peter spoke. “And those people on the western coast, do they live free from the incursions of whitemen?”
Édouard-Outger hesitated. He understood how badly his relatives wanted to hear of one place in the world where tribal lives continued unspoiled.
He sighed. “Those coast people have known whitemen for a long time just as we Mi’kmaw. They traded otter furs to whitemen for metal to make tools. Then the whitemen began to catch the otters themselves, and as they always take everything until it is gone they made the otter very scarce. The people’s lives changed. And now the whitemen diseases are burning them up even as we suffered. Sickness comes in their own beautiful canoes on trading trips, for they are great visitors and traders, traveling up and down the coast with goods and to see their friends. The most skillful canoe makers have already died, and many carvers and artists, too. In only a few years they have lost too many of their people to count. They say their world has ceased to exist in a single generation.” His listeners knew too well how this was. He changed the subject and for some time told how these people on the opposite ocean brought down huge trees without axes.
• • •
Kuntaw’s people, most of them Sels, drifted back to Sipekne’katik, now called Shubenacadie, an old Mi’kmaw village location named a reserve in 1820, not because it was better; they went despite the worthless land the whitemen allowed them, despite the crowding and racist jeering, despite the massacres of the past, the onerous government rules. As Kuntaw had said they must live in two worlds, they went because inside they carried their old places hidden under the centuries, hidden as beetles under fallen leaves, as pebbles in a closed hand, hidden as memories. They were lonely for their own kind—and for women. There were women there. Beneath the reality of roads and square houses they saw their old sloping ground, saw their canoes drawn up onshore, pale smoke drifting from wikuoms decorated with double curves and pteridoid fronds, chevrons, arched frames and high color. Yet they could not ignore the reality that wikuoms could no longer be made and that whitemen settlers had built countless sawmills on the rivers, ruining the best places for eels. Everywhere, to feed the thousand sawmills countless trees went down.
After one St. Anne’s Day celebration some tried to paddle back across the water to Kuntaw’s old place, but their canoes were caught in a storm and they perished. There were fewer Mi’kmaq every year and whitemen laughed and said with satisfaction that in forty more years they would be gone, gone like the Beothuk, vanished from the earth. It seemed true. There had never been so few Mi’kmaq since the beginning of time, less than fifteen hundred, the remains of a people who had numbered more than one hundred thousand in the time before the whitemen came. Still the people clung to their home ground though they wandered often, looking for food, for a haven, for a cleft in the rock that would open into that world that had been torn from them.
Etienne spoke seriously and long.
“We got to do something. Our women can make their baskets but us men got to find wage work for money to buy food. Everybody says, ‘Be that whiteman guide for fishing.’ But that’s not enough.”
“I rather do guide for fish than hunt,” said Peter. “They can’t hurt you with that fish rod.”
“Only other work for us Mi’kmaw is woods work. Plenty work there.”
The whiteman timber kings were taking down the forests of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Hundreds of sawmills stood on every river and stream that could be dammed. Once again Sels took up axes, and although everything was difficult they continued to talk together, to look for ways out of their troubles. Etienne built a whiteman log house and named his newest son Joseph Howe Sel to honor the fair-minded Commissioner for Indian Affairs. This took some explaining and in the evenings the remaining Sels gathered in the warmer log house to talk, each bringing a few sticks for the fire. It was a confining, immovable box, but it held the heat better than ragged wikuoms made without good bark, tanned skins or correct poles.
“Joseph Howe is one of them good whitemen. He looked and he saw our troubles,” said Alli, who had shyly suggested the baby’s name. “He tried help us. He saw us danger, all us land taken, us push away from river. Can’t make eel weirs no more.”
“Yes,” said Etienne with something like a rare smile. “He saw we was cold, hungry, give us coats, blankets. He said these days we have to give up our wikuom as the bark gone with the big trees. No skin covers, them caribou and moose gone.”
“Plenty logs and planks for a whiteman house but we got to buy them. With whiteman money,” said Peter. He drew his face into a cruel mask. “Howe is a whiteman. If he is good to us it is to get something—more land—something. That is all I got to say bout that.”
Alli asked a question. “Édouard-Outger, is it better in that Penobscot place where you come from? You got people there? Mi’kmaq already there?”
“Not anymore. No, Maine people don’t like Mi’kmaw people. There are some Mi’kmaw people live there in Aroostook County. Good basket makers, not just women, men make those big baskets, too. But Penobscot? Same like here, woods all gone, whitemen got the land. My father, Francis-Outger Sel, had a sawmill”—he paused for a murmur of admiration—“but after he die in that sawmill somebody set it afire and it burned all down and the house. I was alone, family dead, went away out in the west. When I was gone the town took the property for taxes. My father he never pay taxes. He thought if you own property you own it. But you don’t own it. You have to pay money every year to that town or they can take the land.”
There was a hum of disbelief. “They took his land. Well, it was my land then but I didn’t know about the tax. I wasn’t there. When I come back it was all gone, you see. All gone. They laughed at me, said, ‘Indian, you don’t own no land here.’ ”
“Do whitemen here pay those tax?”
“I think so. Not know for sure. It is the way of whitemen that they must pay for everything, not one time but many many many times.”
“We never did this thing with land—own it, buy it and pay and pay more tax.”
“Yes, and that is why the Mi’kmaw people now have very little land. The whitemen get land with papers that secure it. You can see for yourself that now there are a hundred times more whitemen than Mi’kmaw people. If we want to secure any of our old land we have to do it the whiteman way with papers. And money. To learn those English laws we have to know how to read. Write. In English. The children must learn these ways if they live here. Or be wiped out.”
“No. If we had a canoeful of money they would not let us own our own land. That is why there is the reserve.”
There was muttering and a father in the back said, “It is true. We are so few in number that they can crush us with ease. One day of shooting and we would all lie dead. It is only a dream that they will someday go back to their old countries. They will never leave our country. They are with us for all time. And if we want to live we must be like them.”
“It seems life is better for Indians in the States country?”
“No, it is not better for us anywhere. But here near Shubenacadie I think it is worse. Here the whitemen hate us very much.”
Skerry Hallagher took the talking stick. “I know how to read and write. I know a little bit about the laws. If I can get books and paper I can teach the children and anyone who wants to le
arn this reading and writing. But it takes a long time. It is like learning to hunt.”
“I, too, can help,” said Elise.
Édouard-Outger cleared his throat and said softly, “And I. But where are all our children? I count only five.” And he decided that he, too, would marry. It was one thing to talk, quite another to act.
Skerry Hallagher stood up. His eyes were weary and red. “Also. It is not only that the children must learn reading. Mi’kmaw men must take jobs and be paid.”
“Jobs! What jobs?”
“The jobs whitemen don’t want, the hardest jobs. Work in forest to cut trees. Cut firewood for settlers. Carry things for surveyors who mark out ways to take more of our land. Make our hunting paths into roads for whitemen wagons. Dig potato in Maine. More woods cutting there. We can do this. We can do these things. They will not crush us.”
The young men agreed. They would go to the lumber camps and ask for work.
“At least in the lumber camps we will eat,” said Alik, Peter’s son.
“You are not going,” said Peter. “I need you on the boat. Passengers. Fishing.”
Etienne’s oldest son, Molti, took the stick and said, “We can bring money to everyone.”
At the end of the evening someone tossed the stick into the fire—it was only a stick. It was the last talking stick any Sel ever held. Talking sticks were the old way.
• • •
Alik said nothing to Peter, but slipped away in the night. In the end nine of the younger men went to lumber camps scattered across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine. It was easier for them in the woods camps. Men were valued and measured by what work they could do. And for Édouard-Outger that meant increasing Mi’kmaw numbers. He took a young wife, Maddil, and did what had to be done. Born in 1877, Lobert Sel was the oldest of Édouard-Outger’s six children.
62
barkskins
For three generations the Sels worked in the woods of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, down into Maine, falling and spudding trees, making booms, cranking booms from headworks, river driving, working the sawmills, building corduroy log roads, cutting cordwood, cutting pulp, cutting pit props. As Europe disgorged its people the logging camps, especially after the Great War, became polyglot assemblies of men—English, French, Americans, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, a few men from Greenland, First Nation natives, even one or two Inuit. Injury and death were common enough in the northeast woods, but since the first logging days the most dangerous work was river driving, and until it ended it was work apportioned to Indians, those considered born to violent water.
“I’ll tell you somethin, mister,” a camp boss said to a company bookkeeper who had questioned his bateau and grub expenses. “Company wants its logs? Wants to git them to the sawmill? Water is everthing. Water moves the logs, powers the mills. They want their logs in the saw house they better swallow the drive expense cause ain’t no other way to git ’em there.” He jerked his thumb at the river where two Mi’kmaq and a Montagnais were dancing over the sticks, jabbing them along like sullen sheep.
The Sel barkskins saw the poll ax give way to the double-bitted ax, the double-bitted ax give way to the crosscut saw, the old up-and-down gang saws give way to circular saws and double circulars, to immensely long steel band saws that could cut the moon in half if they loaded it on a conveyor, saw the steady oxen give way to smart horses, horses replaced by stinking donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads punched into forest distant from water, the tumultuous river drives ended in favor of trucks and roads. Loggers began to tend whirling, thumping, boiling, crashing machinery. The Sels suffered accidents and deaths in a profession where a man had to be watchful and lucky to live more than seven years.
The huge trees of the west were hard for puny axmen. It took years to learn how to handle the big stuff and slow learners did not have time to stay alive. But technology shaped crazy daydreams into real hissing screaming machines that leveled the last of the ancient forests on the continent.
After the talking stick had been thrown into the fire the young men left to take up woods work. Etienne Sel and Mike Jacko tried to watch out for their sons, but the boys resented a parental eye and escaped to more distant camps. Mike Jacko’s son Blony, fifteen winters, and his younger brother, Pollo, started on a cutting crew for an outfit in Queens County. Blony had an inborn knack for the ax. When he wasn’t chopping, Blony and a young Swede named Erto peeled bark with spudding irons made of old carriage springs, handled and honed. On his first drive Blony discovered he liked the dodging, leaping river work. He quickly understood the geometries of jams and relished picking them apart. Twice he fell in among the churning logs but knew better than to fight toward the shore—better to travel downstream with the sticks.
But still the hateful, cramping reservation was too close and Blony and Pollo moved west, worked for a winter in Idaho, where driving on cranky, twisted rivers was still the way to get logs to a sawmill. In the spring some men in the camp kept going to California, Oregon, Washington, where they said the trees were three hundred feet high.
A man he only knew as Shirt said to Blony, “Sonny, I’ll learn you about them trees. The first Maine logger sailed up the coast and come near the shore seen a solid wooden wall a hunderd mile long with green stuff up around the clouds. Couldn’t believe what he seen, fell down in a fit. He couldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe it. But it was true. And that’s where I’m goin.”
• • •
Blony and Pollo were frightened the first time they saw the donkey engine at work. The engine was lashed to several stout trees and its steel haul cable lying loose and quiet on the ground. Five men stood casually around the engine. A signal came from somewhere distant and the puncher threw his lever; the donkey engine came to life. They watched the cable drum turn and the cable itself begin to wind on, tightening and tightening. The engine roared louder and there was a distant snapping of branches, a few faraway shouts, and in minutes the crackling and ground-shaking thumps grew louder and then out of the slash came a monstrous thirty-foot log springing into the air like a decapitated chicken in its final manic leaps, smashing down on stumps so hard they splintered, rebounding and coming straight for the donkey engine. “Holy Jesus!” yelled Blony to the delight of the puncher—the two greenhorns ran for their lives, followed by the haw-haws of the donkey crew. They looked back. The terrible log rested quietly a few feet short of the donkey engine. Pollo never imagined that a few months later he would be assigned as one of the steam kettle’s crew and that an hour after he began work, ignorantly standing near a lazy curve in the cable already fastened to a faraway log, his left foot would be amputated by the tautened wire minutes after the engineer hit the lever with the heel of his callused hand.
His brother, Blony, and the engineer carried him spouting blood down to the bunkhouse. The second cook, Andre Mallet, served the camp as medic. He rested Pollo’s leg on a junk of wood to elevate it, bound the bleeding stump above the ankle with a clean dishtowel soaked in melted lard, gave Pollo copious amounts of his medicinal whiskey for the pain and said he’d look in after the dinner hour. He sent Blony back with a cup of hot partridge broth and half a whiskey-soaked cake. This, in addition to certain Mi’kmaw sedatives—crinkleroot and lady’s slipper root—that their mother had given Blony “just in case,” and the shock, shut Pollo down like a dry oil lamp. He slept. There followed weeks of pain and whiskey but slowly he began to heal.
“You stay here until you get around, but then I need your bunk for a workingman,” the boss said. One of the choppers whittled out a pair of crutches. He was moving around the bunkhouse when Andre Mallet came in. “Hey, kid, boss cook cleared it so’s you can help in the kitchen.” What could he do but say yes? After a year he could scuttle around wearing a logger-whittled prosthesis. He was becoming a cook and some kind of permanent job might be there. But then Blony’s death hit hard and he was the one who had to write the letter home.
Blony had wanted to be a
river driver, but water work in Washington was salty, herding and corralling logs in tidewater. Because he was young he was a choker setter, the lowest job in the camp. After a few weeks in the high-lead logging camp he discovered a job even more daring than river work. He watched Napoleon Tessier, a skinny little Frenchman wearing climbing spurs and laden with saw, ax and rope, rush ten or twelve feet up the trunk of a big Douglas fir, dig in and casually flip his climbing loop to a higher position, scamper on again toward the top of a two-hundred-foot-tall tree. As he climbed he cut the limbs as flush as possible with his long-handled double-bitted ax, finally stopped thirty feet below the leader. His rope secure around the naked trunk and himself, his spurs jammed deep, he axed off the top (as large as a second-growth Maine pine); it tipped down with a crack and hiss, the wind rushing through the needles of the falling section. The bare spar, with Tessier hanging on, whipped back and forth. Tessier let out a screech and waved one arm, like a wild horse rider. Then he slid and kicked down so swiftly he blurred. On the ground he took a swig of cold tea, ate a handful of sugar and went back up to rig the pulley block, for Tessier was a rigger as well as a climber. When the job was done and the pulley block and guy lines in place they were ready to move giants.
Blony wanted to do this, to become a climber. He begged the boss to let him try. This man, a big perfect Swede with a mouth full of tobacco, did not like Blony or Pollo because they were East Coasters as well as half-breeds. But Blony kept asking, and finally Tessier said aloud that he ought to let the kid try, climbers were not plentiful, and finally the boss said, “Go ahead, Pocahontas.”
Blony put on Tessier’s spurs, buckled on the belt, tied his ax to it, got the climbing rope around the tree and himself, stuck his spurs into wood and tried to move up as Tessier had, to flip the loop up as Tessier had. Higher and higher, jamming in, flipping the rope and he reached the first branches.