Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“You are right, but I will do it anyway.”

“Brother,” said Elphège, “we may follow you if more English come.”

“They will come.”

“Father! I am going with you,” said Kuntaw passionately. And Auguste, outside the wikuom, heard this and called that he, too, would be with them. But several days passed taken up with funerals, mourning and serious talking before Achille left, a great scabby welt above his left ear, the ruined ear, which now heard nothing but a roaring sound. He said Kuntaw and Auguste would stay with Elphège until he sent word for them to come. He must find a safe place first. He had to be alone to bury the memory of what had fallen on him. Elphège would help Kuntaw and Auguste. But no one could help Achille.

Achille went into the disputed border region between Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick. He found Georges Fraude, a middle-aged Frenchman with a great bald dome to the apex of his head from which line of demarcation his hair flared back in thick silver waves.

“I got a woods crew two days south. Pay choppers good wages. I got some Indans — you all go together down to the camp. Right away.” He snorted and spat on the ground. “Got to be fast. Everywhere there’s falls there’s a sawmill nowdays. We’ll cut pine all the winter.” He spat again and hitched at his drooping trousers. “I want men to work the rafts when the ice goes.” Achille signed up.

Men were chopping pine in hundreds of places. The big softwoods fell. New seedlings burst up on cutover ground, but now there was a break in the density of the woodland, and as new trees sprouted, the species succession shifted a little in each cutover tract. The forest began to alter in small ways. It still lived but it was not what it had been. Few noticed. The forest was a grand resource and it was both the enemy and wealth. Achille felt it was the same with the Mi’kmaq; the white settlers used them and took them down.

• • •

Four of them walked to the camp, all Mi’kmaq. There was a little snow on the ground. As they walked, the kookoogwes called and called — René’s name for this little owl had been chouette —and the English bent it into saw-whet. The youngest of them, Perrine, was making his first attempt at a paid job. He was not more than eighteen winters, thought Achille. Watching over him was his uncle, Toosh, also from Cape Breton.

They reached Fraude’s camp boss, Alois LaGrange, in late afternoon. The man was a block of muscle, with a knife-scarred face and whiskers like pinfeathers. He gave them a sour look, pointed in the direction of the camp.

They found a clearing full of stumps and two rough and windowless hovels built by the loggers; one had a stick chimney in the roof and a fire pit in the single room below. Achille put his head inside the door, but the insufferable whiteman stink made him reel.

“I rather sleep with wolves than whitemen,” said Toosh. They would build their own wikuom and keep to themselves.

In the greying daylight they quickly cut sapling poles and slabs of spruce bark, made a large but rough A-frame wikuom some distance from the reeking hovel of the whitemen. They weighted the slanting sides with poles. It was shelter. In a few weeks it would be half-covered with insulating snow.

When he saw the new lodging Alois LaGrange said, “ Bien! Less trouble that way, keepin men separate.” He was thinking of the inevitable fights and lost days of work. “Got two other Indans, Passamaquoddy, in the crew, better they move in with you.” LaGrange said this would keep all the chickens in the same coop, so to speak. Achille nodded. At least the Passamaquoddy were Algonkian relatives of the Mi’kmaq.

There were three groups: Maine men, French-Canadas and Indians. The Maine men, crouched around their indoor fire pit, put their various fixings in one gigantic frying pan and, cursing and blowing on their burned fingers, ate directly out of the hot utensil. The French buried a cast-iron Dutch oven filled with beans in the hot ashes of the central fire pit to cook overnight. When they had pork they added it to the beans. These beans smelled very delicious and when the Maine men could stand it no longer they stole the cast-iron pot, carried it into the woods and ate the contents. The empty Dutch oven was found a mile from the camp, near where they were cutting, and there was a tremendous fight with ax handles, rocks, knives, one man dead and the iron pot recovered by the supperless French. Most of the Maine men left the camp the next day. When a new crew came in from Bangor, they brought a Dutch oven and a bushel of dried beans.

The Indians cooked meat outdoors on the coals on the lee side of their wikuom, protected from the wind. They had no iron kettle, but the Passamaquoddy shared two good bark baskets so they could heat water for spruce tea. The Passamaquoddy had a little bag of China tea but the Mi’kmaq preferred spruce tips and black birch bark. During the daylight hours while chopping Achille kept an eye open for game, or even put down his ax for an hour or two and hunted the ridges. When at last he found a bear’s den under the snow they spent their free Sunday killing it. The frozen meat lasted a month, and the pelt went on the wikuom floor, the best place to sit. None of them had more than a few words of English, but Achille began to learn the tongue-twisting talk.

He had several axes, including an old one that had belonged to René. Hard use had worn away much of the cutting-edge metal and the thick remnant dulled quickly. He wanted an American falling ax with a heavy poll and, if he had enough money, a good goose-wing hewing ax. He planned to buy these when Fraude paid him for the winter’s work. He thought of René and his inimitable chopping style. At this moment in among the big pines he missed him and wished they were cutting together again. Every chopper had his own way of doing the work, but René had been notable for quick light strokes with his very sharp ax; he could go on chopping for hours without tiring. As a boy Achille had found it difficult to chop in rhythm with him.

• • •

As spring began its slow crawl up from the south, Georges Fraude arrived on a heavily breathing horse one morning and said they had to get the logs into the river immediately. The ice was going, and with one more warm day the snowmelt freshets would pour into the heavier water. But they still had hundreds of logs to drag out of the woods.

“Forget them! Roll what we got in the water.” The man’s haste seemed desperate and Achille remarked on it to the swamper.

Leon LaFlèche, one of the French choppers, said, “Did you not know that we are in the New England colonies and that we have cut their forbidden mast pines all the winter long?”

“Know nothing that. Thought we was in — what they call it? — Brunsick.”

Leon laughed. “That is why Fraude is in a hurry. The owner of this forest tract must be sendin his men to seize the logs and Fraude heard of it. The owners always know where we cuttin and let us do the work. Then they take the logs the last minute before we get them into the river.”

Getting the logs in the water was the trick. The river flowed north into New Brunswick, where they would be pulled out by Georges Fraude’s sawmill men and metamorphosed from the English king’s mast pines into New Brunswick planks. Fraude shouted and ran back and forth, urging the men to roll the logs faster. But before thirty timbers were in the drink a gang of woodsmen and Bangor toughs armed with ax handles and chains burst out of the forest and the fight was on. The militant ox teamster led Fraude’s troops in joyous resistance; the Maine men enjoyed fights above all else. They were grossly outnumbered, for the landowner had rounded up scores of men from the saloons with the promise of pay and an exciting fight. Those of Fraude’s men who could swim plunged in and made for the far shore.