Annie Proulx - Barkskins

As they scraped and whittled the ash handles, a group of men and women came down the slope. One of the women — Talis — stopped. She was tall, with smiling eyes that crinkled at the corners, her flawless teeth bright.

“Why do you not put away those sticks and come help us mend the weir?”

“Why indeed,” said Theotiste, getting up and setting aside the handle he had begun to shape. “I will go with you.”

The rivers of Mi’kma’ki were not solitary currents of water but strands in a great net of liquid motion that defined the land and mingled with the sea in outward flow and inward rush of tide. Each tiny runnel, each roaring raceway, torrent and trickle, cascade and flood had its own habits and ways, and Mi’kmaq had to know those ways. This was the water world that Theotiste and Elphège began to learn.

“My head is swollen with all this fish lore,” said Elphège.

“Yes,” said a sinewy old fellow with long earlobes, “as long as there are Mi’kmaw people there will be knowledge of fishing.”

• • •

The French king sent money to build roads to the interior (where they wished to push the Mi’kmaq, said Sosep), and now, when time allowed, many men, including Theotiste and Elphège, took temporary work as chainmen for surveyors and as laborers on the new road for hard cash. Chopping trees was another thing that had to be done, said the new people.

When a whiteman lumber outfit set up a sawmill and began cutting trees in the interior country, there was more work for money that could be used at the trading post. The missionary, Père Crème, urged them to put aside trapping and fishing for a time in favor of this occupation. With the money, he said, they could buy salt pork and flour. Although salt pork was a disgusting food, flour made bread and the people had come to like bread. Elphège, Theotiste and Achille had all labored long hours with René clearing the forest, they were skilled with the ax and found work with the French company Duquet et Fils. Rouge Emil was less skilled, but he joined them. It was not the Mi’kmaw way, but it seemed necessary.

• • •

One who was not pleased with the newcomers from Odanak was Père Crème. He was disturbed that old Joseph, the one the Mi’kmaq called Sosep, had returned. And the Sel family, what a calamity! All of them could speak French, and it was best that Indians did not learn French. The two older brothers could read and write, using the Roman alphabet, a serious error on the part of some mission cleric decades earlier. They were capable of doing much harm and stirring up trouble. And they resisted farming, the men preferring to work in the woods, on the rivers or at odd jobs for some of the year, reserving the autumn and winter for trapping and hunting. He wrote,

Dear Sister Marguerite.

While I have great Sympathy for the Indians, they are difficult. The sorest Point is their Refusal to grasp the Fact that Land belongs to the Man who improves it as Scriptures show. They only fish (an idler’s occupation) and wander through the Forest taking Animals and Plants for Sustenance, but when a White Man comes and cuts the oppressive encroaching Forest, builds a House for his Family and Shelter for his Beasts, the Indians complain that he takes their Land, Land they have done nothing to improve, but rather have allowed to ever thicken with more and more Trees. They do not understand that the White Man who struggles and strives to reduce the Forest’s grip has exerted his God-given Right to claim the cleared Land as his own. By virtue of the suffering of Indian Attack and severe Labor as well as the adversities of removing from their Homelands to take up a Place in the Wilderness it is the Destiny of the French to hold this Land as they have earned moral Title to it from God.

Nor did Sosep like what he saw. He immediately counted harmful changes. One of the French settlers, Philippe Null, had inherited a sum of money from an uncle in France, and with this windfall he bought three cows, a bull and two horses. The huge animals roamed freely and within days had consumed all the nutritious and medicinal plants within a day’s walk.

“Those animals must have been very sick,” said old grandmother Loze, “for they have eaten herbs to cure headache, lingering cough, prolapsed uterus, fevers, broken bones and sore throats.” Sosep added that once butchered and cooked, the cows, though not as tasty as moose or caribou, looked the same in the pot. But one had to be very private about it.

Other Acadians, sharpened with envy of Null’s increasing livestock herd, bought pigs. No pasture nor pen was necessary as the animals grew fat on forest forage and very quickly learned to dig clams. Now the Mi’kmaw women had difficulty getting clams, for the hogs were on the sands as soon as the tide ebbed, rooting and gobbling. There was a tragic loss when a hog attacked and killed a lagging Mi’kmaw toddler who was trying to imitate the clam diggers. The child was dead and partially eaten when the others finally saw.

It took hours, even days, to find many once-common things. But of uncommon weeds there was no lack — mallows, dock, stinging nettles, sow thistle, knotgrass and adder’s-tongue, aggressive clovers. Sosep filled his lobster-claw pipe with dried wild tobacco and spoke out one evening.

“We are sharing our land with the Wenuj and they take more and more. You see how their beasts destroy our food, how their boats and nets take our fish. They bring plants that vanquish our plants. Most do not mean to hurt us, but they are many and we are few. I believe they will become as a great wave sweeping over us.” His deep voice became charged with intensity, a conduit of spiritual power. “All these woods once ours,” he said, “and we went anywhere we wished without hindrance. That time has passed. But I wish to tell you that if we Mi’kmaw people are to survive we must constantly hold to the thought of Mi’kmaw ways in our minds. We will live in two worlds. We must keep our Mi’kmaw world — where we, the plants, animals and birds are all persons together who help each other — fresh in our thoughts and lives. We must renew and revere the vision in our minds so it can stand against this outside force that encroaches. Otherwise we could not bear it.”

Noë muttered to Zoë, “Does he mean we must give up metal pots and go back to boiling food with hot rocks in a hollow wood pot as Loze said they did in the old days?”

Sosep had not heard this and continued. “If we had not harmed so many animal beings they would fight with us against the outsiders. Especially the beaver. But no longer. I know that some of you love the French, and that is unavoidable lest we die out, but remember that you are Mi’kmaw, remember.”

Achille told himself he would live the Mi’kmaw way, imagining all was well. He would take a wife and he would tell his children that they, too, must imagine that they lived in a Mi’kmaw world though it was ceasing to exist. They must remember how that life had been, not how it now had become.

But even as old Sosep spoke he knew very well that many Mi’kmaq welcomed the ways of the Acadian French — their clothing, their stout boats, their vegetables and pork roasts, the metal tools, glass ornaments and bolts of fabric, their intoxicating spirits and bright flags and even their hot bare bodies, so pale. Already the Mi’kmaw language was awash in French words with remnants of Portuguese and Basque from the days of those earlier European fishermen on their shores. And he himself, as a connection to the spiritual, as a former sagmaw, saw that the priests had already replaced him and the wise old men of former times.

The years went by and the white settlers, many from La Rochelle in France, doubled and redoubled in number. Familiar with the arts of drainage dike and ditch, they were demons to reshape the great grassy marshes into farm fields, and where there was forest they felled the trees. They set their immovable houses in rows along mud-thick streets where hogs wallowed and domestic fowl strutted. They encased themselves in thick woolen clothes so that bodily odors were never wafted away in the wind. The Mi’kmaq tolerated and even befriended them, although they did not understand the newcomers’ zeal for surplus — clams, berries, fish, logs, hay, moose hides — which they sold or exchanged for more cows and horses, more chickens and pigs.