Annie Proulx - Barkskins

• • •

The cousins struggled with the college course work: they couldn’t get into university without the credits. Neither spoke Mi’kmaw fluently; English had come first, but some early mornings they sat together at the computer to learn Mi’kmaw words, following the Listuguj speakers’ pronunciations. Then Alice would come in and ruin everything by criticizing their efforts.

• • •

On Saturdays, Jeanne hauled laundry to the Bucket O’ Suds. While the clothes churned she flipped through a stack of ragged magazines and old newsletters that featured profiles of people in the province. One interested her; she tore the page out.

That evening, drinking tea after supper to wash down the store-bought cake, she showed it to the others. “It’s an article on this woman, Sapatisia Sel. Suppose she is a relation?”

Felix said, “If every Sel relative gave us a dollar we’d be rich. What about this Sapatisia Sel?”

“It says she collects medicine plants and trees.”

“Another one?” said Felix scornfully. Medicine plants! Over the years a stream of white people had come to “study” Mi’kmaw medicine plants and the older women on the reservation were used to being quizzed about traditional cures.

“I know Sapatisia,” said Alice, reaching for the page. She read a minute, studied the picture. “That’s Egga’s daughter. She’s a relative from the States. She come here once. This says she knows about old-time medicine plants.”

“And she plants trees.”

• • •

Felix hated the required remedial English grammar and composition that seemed unnecessary to a future study of forestry. It was not that he disliked learning — he and Jeanne stuffed their brains. 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. Several people connected with forest production and timber sales got up and walked out. But Felix and Jeanne sat on the edges of their seats drinking in the named sins against the forest.

“Budworm, for example,” said Dr. Onehube at AK-47 velocity. “Natural cycles of budworm infestation, roughly every thirty or forty years. When the insects outstripped their food supply they disappeared. Dead trees fell, waited for the fire. Fire came, new trees grew from the ashes. But after the Second World War we wanted all the trees we could get for wood pulp and paper. Everybody had new chemical weapons, and war surplus planes. So when spruce budworm invaded the boreal forests in the 1940s, the Forest Service sprayed DDT. Our Miramichi River, home of the greatest Atlantic salmon run on earth, turned into a death river as the DDT killed all the tiny water animalcules that fed the salmon.”

He stopped and drank half the glass of water on the podium, spilling some down his jacket, where the drops sparkled in the light until they were absorbed by the cloth. He looked up into the lights, seemed to draw breath, then continued in his earnest rapid-fire baritone.

“We know better about DDT now. But what makes us think we are any smarter about the effects of vast clear-cutting of a very fragile ecosystem? Hah? There are countless unknowns here. And we don’t even know how much we don’t know.”

Finally, when listeners began looking at their watches and some in the rear sidled guiltily out of the hall, he came to an end: “Incompetent forest… ignorance… wood fiber, battles… disturbances… chemical destruction … slow-growing… unstoppable. ” He lowered his voice dramatically, paused and then whispered into the microphone, “Now we are finishing off the cold land of little sticks, the great breeding grounds for millions of birds, the cleansing breath of the earth, the spring nutrient runoff to the ocean that revitalizes everything — the beginning of the great food chain. You people,” he said, looking at the audience. “We are killing… the… great… boreal… forest. ” There was a frictional hissing sound as people moved in their seats, then small applause and the noise of seats folding back into place as everyone rose. A college official came out and announced that Dr. Onehube would speak at noon the next day on overpopulation — a lecture titled “SRO — Standing Room Only.”

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?”

“I don’t know.” They walked in silence. The rain was finished, pushed along by the rising wind, its raw edge slicing off the water.

• • •

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.”

“How can we get there? No car.”

They left it there for several days. Alice came down with the flu and Jeanne stayed home from classes to run the child care and cook. Alice’s reservation friends brought Mi’kmaw medicines for the sick woman. Jeanne was delighted to see the medicines in use and to hear their clicking names even if she didn’t know what they meant: wijok’jemusi, wisowtakjijkl, pako’si-jipisk, pko’kmin, miti, pakosi, tupsi, l’mu’ji’jmanaqsi, kjimuatkw, stoqon. Morning, noon and night Alice was inundated with washes, gargles, tisanes, decoctions, brews, teas and infusions.

“You see,” said Jeanne to Felix. “The medicines are still used! That Sapatisia has some explaining to do.”

Another week and Alice was on her feet again, cured. “Layin there in bed I decided to give up meetins of the Child Help Program. Just too tired at the end of the day,” she said, and looked it, her round face mottled and puffy as a cheese soufflé.

“Hitchhike,” whispered Jeanne to Felix, who was struggling into his old torn jacket.

“You just won’t give up, will you?” And he was out into the early darkness.

• • •

Alice found the way. “You can get a ride. It seems like,” she said, “Johnny Stick is goin that way. He’s pretty good company now. He started goin to those ‘truth and reconciliation’ meetings a few years ago. Helps to know you are not alone in the boat.”

“What was the matter with him?” asked Felix, who picked up a tone in her voice.

“Oh, that bad stuff from years ago when he was a kid. The resi school.”

“Mr. Stick is all right to take a ride with?”

“Yes. He’s fine. He’s got a carpenter job up there fixin the handrail in the old lighthouse. It hasn’t blinked a blink for sailors for eighty years but the tourists like it. In the summer there’s a chips truck in the parking lot, does good business, so that shaky old handrail, got chip grease and salt all over it. He said be ready tomorrow mornin. Early. Bring your blankets. You can rough it a few nights.”

• • •

Mr. Stick was in his late middle years, his dark jowls clean-shaven. The back of his pickup held an enormous red cooler and under a tarp the handrail sections for the lighthouse. He said, “Nice maple rail. Same finish like one of them no-stick fry pans. So where do y’want to go on the Cape?”

“We don’t know. I mean, we’re looking for a woman named Sapatisia Sel. But we don’t know exactly where she lives.”