Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“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 learn 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.

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.