Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Duquet was gone for a long time. Hours passed. Monsieur Trépagny laughed. He said Duquet must be looking for his land. With vindictive relish he described the terrors of being lost in the forest, of drowning in the icy river, being pulled down by wolves, trampled by moose, or snapped in half by creatures with steaming teeth. He named the furious Mi’kmaw spirits of the forest— chepichcaam, hairy kookwes, frost giant chenoo and unseen creatures who felled trees with their jaws. René’s hair bristled and he thought Monsieur Trépagny had fallen too deeply into the world of the savages.

The next day they heard a quavering voice in the distant trees. Monsieur Trépagny, who had been limbing, snapped upright, listened and said it was not one of the Mi’kmaw spirits, but one that had followed the settlers from France, the loup-garou, known to haunt forests. René, who had heard stories of this devil in wolf shape all his life but never seen one, thought it was Duquet beseeching them. When he made to call back Monsieur Trépagny told him to shut his mouth unless he wanted to bring the loup-garou closer. They heard it wailing and calling something that sounded like “maman.” Monsieur Trépagny said that to call for its mother like a lost child was a well-known trick of the loup-garou and that they would work no more that day lest the sound of chopping lead the beast to them.

“Vite!” Monsieur Trépagny shouted. They ran back to the house.

With Duquet gone—“eaten by the loup-garou, ” said Monsieur Trépagny with lip-smacking noises — the seigneur became talkative, but told differing versions of his history while he chopped, most of his words lost under the blows of the ax. He had a skilled eye that could see where small trees stood more or less in a row, and these he would notch, then fell the great tree at the end, which obligingly took down all the small trees. He said his people came from the Pyrenees, but another time he placed them in the north, in Lille, nor did he neglect Paris as his source. He described his hatred of villages and their lying, spying, churchy inhabitants. He despised the Jesuits. Monsieur Trépagny said he, his brothers and their uncle Jean came to New France to enter the fur trade, although he himself had better reasons.

“Our people in earlier times were badly treated in France. The popish demon church called us heretics and tortured us. They believed they had conquered us. They were wrong. We have held to our beliefs hand, head, heart and body in secret for centuries and here in New France we will grow strong again.” He extolled the new land, said it would surpass Old France in richness and power.

“A new world that will become greater than coldhearted old France with its frozen ideas. Someday New France will extend all the way to Florida, all the way to the great river in the west. Frontenac saw this.”

René thought of it and agreed, New France was a prize if England kept away. But he did not often think of such things. He saw himself as a dust mote in the wind of life, going where the drafts of that great force carried him.

“What,” asked Monsieur Trépagny, “is the most important thing? After God, of course.”

René wanted to say land, he wanted to say seeds, he wanted to say stolen teeth. He didn’t say anything.

“Blood!” said Monsieur Trépagny. “Your family. Your blood people.”

“They are all dead,” said René, but Monsieur Trépagny ignored him and continued his history. He and his brothers, he said, went first up the mysterious Saguenay River “to barter with the Hurons for furs, and later with the Odaawa, building up trust, but we avoided the Iroquois, who love the English and who, from childhood, practice testing themselves against horrible tortures. They enjoy inflicting pain on others. The voyageurs’ life is a good life for my brothers, who still ply the rivers. For me, a very disagreeable way.

“Now,” he said, “the Iroquois are less terrible than in former times. But all Indians were mad for copper kettles, the bigger the better, so large they could not be easily moved, and the possession of a kettle changed their wandering ways. Once they had that copper or iron kettle no longer did they roam the forests and rivers so vigorously. Villages grew up around the kettles. All very well, but someone had to carry those monstrous vessels to them, someone had to toil and haul them up dangerous portage routes.” He pointed silently at his breast. “This was below my station in life.” And he smote his tree.

“The fur trade moved north and west,” he said to the tree as he told of his disenchantment. “The portages. Six, eight miles of rocks with two fur packs the weight of a cow, then back to the canoe and more packs or one of the cursed kettles. Finally, the canoe. You would not believe the enormous loads some of those men carried. One is said to have carried five hundredweight each trip from early morning until darkness.” Carrying one of the detested kettles, said Trépagny, his right knee gave way. The injury plagued him still.

“However! The fur company, with the rights the King assigned them, made me a seigneur and charged me to gather habitants and populate New France. This is the beginning of a great new city in the wilderness.”

René asked a question that had bothered him since the first trek through the woods.

“Why do we cut the forest when there are so many fine clearings? Why wouldn’t a man build his house in a clearing, one of those meadows that we passed when we walked here? Would it not be easier?”

But Monsieur Trépagny was scandalized. “Easier? Yes, easier, but we are here to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness.” He was silent for a minute, thinking, then started in again. “Moreover, here in New France there is a special way of apportioning property. Strips of land that run from a river to the forest give each settler fertile farm soil, high ground safe from floods, and forest trees for timber, fuel and — mushrooms! It is an equitable arrangement not possible with clearings taken up willy-nilly— bon gré mal gré. ”

René hoped this was the end of the lecture but the man went on. “Men must change this land in order to live in it. In olden times men lived like beasts. In those ancient days men had claws and long teeth, nor could they speak but only growled.” He made a sound to show how they growled.

René, chopping trees, felt not the act but the pure motion, the raised ax, the gathering tension in arms and shoulders, buttocks and thighs, the hips pivoting, knees loose and flexed, and then the swing downward as abstract as the shadow of a stone, a kind of forest dance. He had bound a rock to the poll with babiche to counterbalance the heavy bit. It increased the accuracy of each stroke.

Monsieur Trépagny launched into a droning sermon on the necessity, the duty of removing the trees, of opening land not just for oneself but for posterity, for what this place would become. “Someday,” Monsieur Trépagny said, pointing into the gloom, “someday men will grow cabbages here. To be a man is to clear the forest. I don’t see the trees,” he said. “I see the cabbages. I see the vineyards.”

Monsieur Trépagny said his uncle Jean Trépagny, dit Chamailleur for his disputatious nature — Chama for short — would take Duquet’s place. He was old but strong, stronger than Duquet. He would arrive soon. Monsieur Trépagny’s brothers would also come. Eventually. And he said the time for felling trees was now over. The bébites were at their worst, the wet heat dangerous, the trees too full of sap. Indeed, the hellish swarms of biting insects were with them day and night.