Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Those plants were surrounded by strong healthy trees, trees that no longer exist, trees replaced by weak and diseased specimens. We can only guess at the symbiotic relationships between those plants and the trees and shrubs of their time.” She looked out the window, tapped her foot. “And I must say you are unusual young people to come here looking for answers. Are you botany students?”

They began to explain their lives to her, Alice’s house and how they came to be there.

“You deluded idiots,” said Sapatisia Sel. “And now you will go back and continue your studies?”

“We have to pass the exams. So we can get into university.”

“Why do you want that?”

“To have careers. To be somebody.”

“You are already somebody. Do you mean somebody more important than poor Mi’kmaw students?”

“Yes. I guess so,” said Jeanne, and Felix, who did not want to nod, nodded.

“It’s not just ourselves,” said Jeanne. “Felix cares about the forests,” she said. “And I care. We want to do something.”

Felix saw the woman’s rigid shoulders drop a little. He told her about hearing Dr. Onehube’s lecture on the boreal forest.

“Well, Alfred does get people going.”

“Do you know him?”

“We’ve worked together on projects.” She got up and walked around, went to the door, opened and closed it. “You two are beginning to interest me now that we’re past the medicine plants. You are young and green, you do not know how the world works or that you will be punished for your temerity in wanting careers.” Outside the window in the gathering twilight Felix saw the northern harrier fly to its tree, something limp in its talons.

Felix thought of the long drive back. “You sound like a teacher. Are you a teacher?”

“I’ve done the university things, teaching and lecturing. I, too, wanted a career, I had a career, I left the career. I’ve learned enough to know that today the world we have made is desperate for help. Help that isn’t coming. I don’t teach now. I have a project and I work at it. With others. My interests are overlapping ecosystems, the difficulties in understanding the fabric of the natural world. So if you came here looking for a discussion of research on medicinal plant genomes you’re in the wrong place.”

Felix did not like her, but there was something — and Jeanne sat with her mouth open, staring hungrily at Sapatisia Sel, waiting for the next sentence.

“We look at models, examine causation and apparent effect, we struggle with the wild cards, worry about population growth. Humans now outnumber every mammalian form of life that has ever existed. Maybe unstoppable. We have nightmares about oceanic currents and sea star die-off, melting ice, more violent winter storms. And we think about forest degradation. Forest, the beginning and likely end. As Onehube says.” And then in that low voice that sounded as though she were talking to herself she said, “But others now suggest more frightening problems and ends than Alfred Onehube ever dreamed.”

She seemed done with talking, thrust a notebook at them and said, “Write down your address. I’ll be in touch.” Then she sent them on their way.

Autumn lurched clumsily out of the equinox, black ice one day, sunlight polishing tree branches the next. A few straggler tourists were still underfoot, as irritating as gravel. Jeanne, who worked weekends at an information kiosk, collected (as everyone did) their idiotic questions, especially those from the Americans who thought it might be shorter to drive from Halifax to Antigonish counting miles rather than kilometers.

“I’m late, I’m late,” muttered Felix, a white rabbit running through the kitchen, snatching a half-cooked pork chop from the pan and dashing up the stairs.

“Don’t eat that pork — it’s still raw,” shouted Alice. “Use some sense. And you got some mail.” Felix, simultaneously changing clothes and chewing on the red pork, looked at the clock. On his way to the back door through the kitchen he dropped the pork chop back in the pan and picked up the buff envelope, saw “Breitsprecher Tree Project” and a Chicago address in the upper left corner. He stopped, turned the envelope over.

“Jeanne get one, too, just like that,” said Alice, nodding at Jeanne’s plate, the envelope standing against it. “Late again — something she has to do at the school.”

Felix tore the end off the envelope and pulled out a letter. Something fell out as he unfolded it and fluttered under the table. He read the letter and read it again, not understanding. It informed him that he was the recipient of a five-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Breitsprecher Tree Project and was signed by someone named Jason Bloodroot. What did it mean? Once more he read the letter, retrieved the check from the floor. It was made out to Felix Sel, it looked real. The letter said he was to contact Dr. Sapatisia Sel within ten days for further information about the project.

“I’ll be double damn,” he said. “ Doctor Sapatisia Sel.” There was her address and her cell phone number. He whooped so loudly that Jeanne, outside in the street, heard. She came in to find them dancing around the table, tore open her identical letter.

“You call her,” said Felix. “It’s you who connected us with her. So you phone.”

• • •

The next day over the supper plates Felix studied the provincial highway map looking for an alternate route. “The trip was too long last time. But how about this”—he jabbed his pencil into the map—“a shortcut.” Jeanne was old enough to know that no man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.

And now the lime-green rental car thumped into the darkening morning. The coast road would have been better. The shortcut was like driving up a dry river bed. Despite the rental car’s chopped-off look (as though a log slasher had got it), Jeanne thought it a technological marvel. She began poking at the GPS touch screen.

The back road was a roller coaster of broken asphalt. The car could not catch the rhythm of the frost heaves. There were no towns, no houses, only third-growth spruce and brush representing the great forest of an earlier century. At the height of land they could see the dulled ocean and its grey line of rain. Tiny drops speckled the windshield.

“I don’t think this is the tourist route,” said Felix, steering around a dead branch. “Not sure where we are. And this city car doesn’t like it.”

“But we can see the water, so the highway has to be between us and the shore. When you see a right turn, take it.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven. We’ll be late.”

The car scraped through a series of potholes. Something dark and thin ran across the road.

“What was that?”

“Mink, one of those big escaped ones from the mink farms.”

“You remember what Dr. Onehube said about those farms — pollute the rivers and the minks get out and breed with wild minks and make bad genetic changes?” The road degenerated into a stew of stones and mud. Felix clenched the wheel, drove very slowly, and the car struggled forward.

“You know,” Felix said, “I found out something interesting about Dr. Sapatisia Sel. Guess.”

“What, she was elected prom queen back in the day?”

“Not likely. She was married. Married to somebody we know.”

“Who!” Jeanne did not believe it. How could her hero have married anyone?

“Well, not somebody we actually know — someone we heard talk.”

“No, you don’t mean that Onehube?”

“Yes. She was his student. And they got married.”

Jeanne shuddered. She preferred to think of Sapatisia as a Lone Heroine.