Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“What,” said Panette menacingly, “common water ain’t good enough for a dirty Indan? You got a have your own special water?”

“Don’t drink tobacco flavorin.”

“Hell you don’t,” snapped Panette, “keeps ye from gettin worms,” and then shut up, but a half-chewed plug of tobacco showed up on Jinot’s morning plate of beans and the coffee tasted of tobacco — and worse. He left his plate standing and beckoned the bull cook outside.

“What you think you can do about it, Indan?” said Panette, bouncing on his toes to remind Jinot that he was a well-known fighter of the saloon alleys. Only one reply to that: Jinot limbered his knees, then from a standstill leapt high, driving his heels into Panette’s chest, and when the bull cook went down, kicked and trampled him from forehead to toenail.

It had all happened too quietly and the loggers felt cheated of seeing a good fight, but the head cook gave details and Jinot found himself with elbow room. He slept with his ax under the rolled-up marten pelt he and his friend, Franceway, used for a pillow.

• • •

Evenings the men sat on the deacon’s bench staring into the flames, arms resting on thighs, hands dangling; they chewed and smoked, they talked and their lives crept out of the stories as moths out of chrysalises. The first night with a new crew in a shanty was cautious, men measuring the others; where they came from, who had brought a fiddle or a harmonica, who was the insufferable fool, did anyone carry new songs in his head, who were the storytellers, who was comical, what rivers had the others worked, what had each seen in his time in the woods? There were five or six fair singers and a whipcord little Montagnais known only as Franceway with a skinny kid’s neck, who brought them all to attention with his true-pitched mournful voice. Franceway and Jinot had been together from the first day they saw each other. Franceway knew songs most had never heard before, as “The Randy Shanty Boy,” and when he sang his version of “Roy’s Wife,” he gave a little twist to the words that expressed lechery and wounded pride. Those who could only croak and bellow listened. He was a limber and a riverman, dexterous and elastic. His dark eyes glowed with concentration as he filed his ax. He often sang as he worked — old songs and now and then made new songs himself, celebrating river heroism or describing accidents — even the cook’s more inventive dishes, as the cherry pie made from dried prunes.

In late November the winter set in hard. After their silent supper some men threw themselves down and slept, but most sat looking into the fire.

An ex-sailor in his late forties, one eyebrow missing, was one of four men in the camp who knew how to sign their names. He claimed to have sailed distant oceans on fifty ships in his younger life, told of seeing elephants and chained slaves before he took up the ax.

Sash was the shortest man; he always talked in a monotone about his homeplace and large numbers of dead kin, mostly drowned. “Then next spring Sis slipped on the riverbank and drowned,” said Sash. “Drownin’s in our family.”

“You’ll be next,” said someone, sotto voce, and Jinot shuddered. Now it would happen.

Sam Keyo and his sons, Ted and Stinking Tom, left their farm and came to the woods every winter for the hard cash. Sam left the laborious agricultural work to the sons while he scoured the woods with his dogs, and claimed the first year on his land he had shot ninety-five deer and eighteen bears, trapped eleven wolves, six catamounts and a “tremenjous large sortment of varmints.” He was one of several Indian haters in the camp and Jinot stayed clear of him.

His son Ted spent his Sundays hunting for spruce gum and knurls. A crazy-grained knurl brought fifty cents in town and made a superior maul head that would never split. Brother Tom had enough energy after a hard week’s work to set traps in the dark on Saturday night and run the line the next afternoon. He stank more than anyone in the camp, a kind of bitter animal musk from his traps.

One who worked silently was Op den Ool, who kept to himself in the back of the ox hovel, where he had a straw bed. The oxen were his company. At the end of the day he picked ice from their hairy legs then massaged them with a liniment he mixed himself of healing herbs, bear grease and crushed ocher-red pigment. Anyone could recognize his red-legged animals from half a mile away.

• • •

They all knew that river work was the most dangerous; there were countless wooden crosses along the banks. That was why the boss gave the water work to the Indians. “Walk the river after ever drive and you’ll find Indans floatin in the backwaters. They drown just as good as white men.”

Hernias, sprains, broken arms and legs, smashed patellas were part of the work, and the possibility of a mangling death rode on all the men’s shoulders even as they defied death with flourishes. The young men had style and they knew it, swaggering about in their pants chopped off below the knee, red shirts and jaunty hats. “A short life and a grieving song,” said Byers after Sash’s foot was caught between logs rolling off the landing and into the river, where he followed the rest of his family into the water. They recovered his body the next day, fitted him into two flour barrels and buried him.

“Guess he’s got enough biscuit dust now,” said Byers, for Sash had been famous for polishing off the biscuits, and when they thrust his legs into the first barrel a floury rain fell from the staves onto the wet pants, mixing with the blood seeping from his crushed legs. Franceway sang a grieving song and the lonely fall of his voice was as much for all of them as for Sash.

• • •

After the cut Marchand sorted his rivermen. The most important were the dead-water men, who worked the logs like fractious cows with twenty-foot-long pike poles. Most men wrangled hung-up sticks with a swinging bitch, a handle with an irritatingly movable dog on the business end that gave enough leverage to shift the log. All day they were running and jumping, riding the bucking logs, moving so quickly they seemed to dance on river foam, shifting to keep their balance, even in fast water. “You,” said Marchand, pointing at Jinot and jabbing his thumb in the direction of the bateaux.

The dark river was flecked with rotten ice, rocks studding its course glistening like fresh-mined coal. The current frothed and boiled, standing waves at the head of a rock and a quiet lozenge of still water at the tail, where, in the old days before the rivers carried millions of bobbing, colliding logs, big salmon would lie.

All day and into the night, their legs festooned with bloodsuckers, the watermen fended off logs trying for the shore, a shore as deep in mire as a hog yard, mud that gave no purchase to a straining man. Days in the icy water caused chilblains, swollen and redly itching legs that swelled and blistered; some men could not bear to sit by the fire for the pain.

Yet twice, despite their labor, the river logs knitted together, bobbing and rising, a huge wooden knot forming to block the river, which began to back up and flood the land. Farmers ran down to the shore shouting that their hay meadows were ruined. Twenty men attacked the first jam, prying and separating logs that seemed to grow into each other. Minutes changed to hours and suddenly a quiver trembled through the mass and the men ran like squirrels for the shore, turned and looked back at what they had escaped: thousands of logs shooting downstream, picking up speed, riding up on each other, hissing with the speed of the current, acres of pine forest on the ride. But the second jam was a killer and they all saw it.

The day was overcast and dark grey. Marchand hoped for rain, a good hard rain that would lift the water level. The rain held off and the difficulty came right where they knew it would. A granite ledge like the backbone of the world ran halfway across the river, plunged underground leaving an opening of two or three rods, then rose again on the other side of the river. The logs had to go through the central channel. The ledge was no problem at high water; logs glided over it with grace. In low water the trick was to have good men standing on each side ready with their pike poles, and more men in the bateaux to guide logs into the narrow passage. Jinot Sel was in one of the three bateaux. Downriver he saw James Ketchum and Franceway standing up to their knees in water herding strays. The orderly procession of logs slowed and almost stopped as tenders upstream jabbed at bunching troublemakers. Onshore, Tom Keyo saw one slightly crooked log, a good forty-footer, elbow its way into a crowd.