Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Don’t tell Maman,” he said. “She would suffer.”

But René thought Mari would not suffer. Still, he could not bring himself to tell her that Trépagny had died so painfully, so distressed in his tender parts.

• • •

René paddled one day down to Wobik with Theotiste, who was already old enough to march in the militia and receive Captain Bouchard’s harangues on slinking, gliding Indian warfare, although he had learned more at Odanak among the fighting men than Captain Bouchard would ever know. Now he wanted to see the sights of Kébec and Trois-Rivières and would take passage on the next downriver ship. After that, he said, he would throw in with the conglomerate Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Sokoki, Cowasucks, Penobscots, Androscoggins, Missisquois and a dozen other tribal refugees at Odanak, which the French called St. François. René was sorry to see him go as workmen were scarce and expensive. If he could not do the labor himself it would not be done.

After Theotiste’s ship left he went into Captain Bouchard’s familiar office. The aging captain had news for René.

“A very good doctor from France now in Kébec and who is already renowned takes an interest in the plants of our forests. He collects information from the savages on their use. He has sent a letter to me asking if Mari would meet with him. If she would show him the curing plants that grow hereabouts he will gladly pay her. How much, I do not know, but he suggested it.”

“Who is he?” asked Rene. “Will he come to us?”

Captain Bouchard consulted his letters. “Michel Sarrazine. You understand, Mari’s fame in curing the sick and injured has reached as far as Kébec. We are not so pitiful here in Wobik as some think. Although she is only a Micmac Indan.”

• • •

The doctor was a small man with a high forehead. Wigless, his dark hair receded in front but waved down to his shoulders, his full red lips curled in a dimpled smile. Monsieur Bouchard wondered why he did not wear a wig and tried to bring him into a discussion of books and ideas, to take his measure; was he a deep-dyed conservative, or a pioneer freethinker exploring novel cures? But Dr. Sarrazine, though polite, said his time was limited and he wished to see Mari as soon as possible. He carried a linen bag containing a notebook, cardboard stiffeners and a roll of drying papers. He had a packet of French needles for Mari. Monsieur Bouchard loaned him his only horse and, rather sadly, watched him ride west. Dr. Sarrazine returned in ten days, humming and smiling, his linen bag bulging with wild vegetable specimens, some of which he would send to the Jardin des Plantes. Bouchard, still longing for bookish conversation, watched the learned man board the ship to Kébec. The doctor turned, smiled his engaging smile and saluted. Bouchard returned the gesture and went back into his office.

• • •

The smoke-thickened years passed, and Crown corvée work gangs widened the west trail to a road. More settlers came into the forest. Every morning the sound of distant and near chopping annoyed woodpeckers who imagined rivals, then, feeling outnumbered, fled to wilder parts. The trees groaned and fell, men planted maize between the stumps. The deer and moose retreated, the wolves followed them north. In its own way the forest was swallowing René Sel, its destroyer. The forest was always in front of him. He was powerless to stop chipping at it, but the vigor of multiple sprouts from stumps and still-living roots grew in his face, the rise and fall of his ax almost a continuous circular motion. There seemed always more and more trees on the horizon. He suffered the knowledge that his countless ax blows were nothing against the endless extent of the earth’s spiky forest crown.

• • •

One spring Mari fell ill, complaining little but too confused to manage the household. She became thin, the round kind face giving way to the shape of the skull beneath; she saw visions and forgot everything said to her, forgot her children, forgot René, had to be tied in a chair to keep her from the river. For a year Renardette cared for her, but one bright May morning Mari answered her long-dead sisters, who called her as owls call.

“Those sister say ‘come.’ ” In two hours she had joined them.

René could not understand it. It was well known that Mi’kmaq lived long, long lives and remained strong until the last, and Mari was not old. It was the bitterest loss.

• • •

“It is only fitting,” said Renardette to René when a week had passed, “that we should marry.” René shook his head, picked up the ax and walked out to the woodlot. Renardette, barely an adult, had become beer-swollen, imperious and hot-tempered, always smarting from imagined insults. She would not forget this one.

• • •

Ends come to everyone, even woodcutters. All his life René was a défricheur, un bûcheron or, as the ancient book put it, “a woodsman, a forester, a forest owner; an ax owner, a feller of trees, a woodcutter, a user of the ax. He cuts with an ax; he fells trees — cuts them, tops them, strips them, splits them, stacks them.” His life was spent in severe toil, stinging sweat running in his eyes, bitten by insects of the hot woods, the callused hands shaping into a permanent curl to fit ax handles, the bruises and blood, the constant smoke of burning trees, the pain of unremitting labor, the awkward saw, treacherous saplings used as pry bars, fitting new handles on broken spades and the everlasting lifting of great vicious tree trunks.

But Achille, his eleven-year-old son, found him dead on his knees in the forest, his knotted hands clenched on the ax handle, the bit sunk into a cedar, René dead at forty from a chop to his neck. A sharp scalping knife had been set above and parallel with his eyebrows and drawn around the circumference of his head, the scalp peeled off and carried away to be redeemed for the bounty. He was, until the end, a skillful woodsman, his life and body shaped to the pleasure of the ax. And so his sons and grandsons after him.

Duquet had escaped Trépagny, but what next? Gripping the sapling he had cut for a stick, his remaining teeth burning in his mouth, coughing and with a stitch in his side, he followed the river west until dark. Before full light he was on his way again, swallowing whole the chunks of fish pudding he had hidden in his jacket the night before. He drank river water and plunged on. He followed the river from the ridge above in case Trépagny and that fool Sel came nosing after him. The higher ground was rough and gullied. He could see crashing water below, trees half in the water, sodden heads thrashing in the current. Hunger drove him back to the bank, where he knotted the neck and sleeves of his shirt and held it sidewise underwater, the open end inviting fish in. He had enough success to get nourishment, sucking the juice from the raw flesh as a spider with an insect. After eight days, scratched and filthy, lost in the wild, but driven by an inchoate need, he reached another river flowing down from the north. To the northwest were rich beaver grounds, the Indians who trapped the beaver and the traders who transported the pelts down the river. He began his long walk.

In the third week of his journey Duquet awoke and opened his left eye, the right stuck shut with hardened pus. In his exhaustion he fell often to the ground and lay with his face against the leaf litter. He was beyond the pain of his abscessed jaw; swathed in veils of mosquitoes he sucked in raw air with its taste of decaying wood. On his hands and arms were five or six suppurating wounds. He had found rib bones with strings of dark meat clinging to them under a serviceberry bush, but when he put one to his mouth something wild came at him, tearing with teeth and claws. It ran with the prize. He was weak from the loss of blood, not only from the biting animal, but from blackflies, from mosquitoes. Then he lost the river. He tried every direction, but it had disappeared. For an entire day he scooped at the dirt with his hands to discover if it was underground. How much easier it was to crawl than to stand and walk. And so he crawled, weeping, mouthing syllables. It rained, the dark grey clouds like unshaven jowls. His horizon was a sawtooth jag of black spruce. He caught a slow duckling, the last in a parade of ducklings on their way to — water! He had found the river again. He thought he might be dying, but it seemed inconsequential. First he would get to the north, to the fur traders, then he would die. As he crept along the rediscovered river he found small frogs and one more duckling that he caught and ate, cowering under the hammering beak and painful wing blows of the mother. Here the riverbank was soft mud, more comfortable for crawling.