Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Jinot disliked the Ottawa River, deceptively smooth for many miles, then bursting into tumbling, roiling falls. He sensed its malevolent character. The onshore thickets of old wooden crosses below the falls indicated a death river. He bent to the paddle.

At First Meeting Place one of the loveliest Odaawa girls gave Jinot a fern frond, hastily plucked as the canoe passed close to a verdant rock face. The paddlers did not linger but called farewell, farewell and pushed on up the Ottawa with the Sels.

They stopped below the Chaudière Falls and the serious-faced man told Josime the lumber camps were a two-day walk upstream. Or come with them to Manitoulin and lead a good life away from the whiteman’s doings. They themselves, he said, would now double back, pick up the Trois-Rivières Odaawa party and continue up the river, portage to Lake Nipissing, down La Rivière de Français and on to Manitoulin. “Two, three more week,” he said.

“You are good people,” said Josime, his eyes following their canoe. “Now, brothers, we walk.”

On the path around the falls they passed two parties of whitemen talking about starting log businesses. The leader of one party was white-haired and stout with a crimson face.

“Why? England needs timber,” he said to Josime, who had asked him why he ventured far from home. The man turned away, adding that he had no time to waste on idle talk with savages. A second group was friendlier and the leader said, “Do you not know that England is hungry for timber? The pine most gone in New England so lumbermen comin into this Ottawa country. Still fresh country with big pines. Make a fortune here.”

It was in these encounters with whitemen they learned that they were not Indians but métis or, as one Anglo entrepreneur pejoratively called them, “half-breeds.” In Maine their white-settler neighbors knew confidently that they were fading from the earth; yes, said Josime to his brothers, they were disappearing, not by disease and wasting away in sorrow as the whites supposed, but through absorption into the white population — only look at their sister, Elise. “Her children are almost whitemen already,” for she had married Dr. Hallagher, the Irishman who had first examined Beatrix. Here on the Gatineau the Sels were a different kind of people, neither Mi’kmaq nor the other, and certainly not both.

“What we are,” said Josime, “is tree choppers.”

• • •

Sawmill site prospectors and timber lookers, men seeking good pine stands, had pounded the trail into a broad pathway; pine remained the ideal. Small entrepreneurs from the east hurried along, buying tracts of land and stumpage, damming the small streams to power their sawmills. The big money went to men with good credit and connections who could quickly get out the most squared timber for the British market. The most important was William Scugog, a Massachusetts man who had fought against the British in the Revolution and now claimed he repented of it.

“Lot of camps,” said Josime. They heard of logging outfits along the Ottawa itself, on its tributaries; to the north the Black, Dumoine, Coulonge, the Gatineau, Rouge and the Lièvre, on the south the Rideau, Madawaska, Petawawa, Mattawa, the Bonnechère, powerful streams that swelled the huge rush of forest water flowing into the mighty St. Laurent; all the valleys were packed with big pine.

• • •

The Sel brothers hired on with William Scugog. He sent them to a camp up on the Gatineau. Before the Sels got there they set their minds against the camp, against the men in the camp and against Scugog. But Scugog had hired an outstanding cook, Diamond Bob, so called for a tattoo on his neck and a flashing ring on his finger. He did elegant things with a caribou haunch, but understood that the logger was strengthened by beans and biscuits and supplied them in plenty.

Scugog and his oldest son, Cato, traveled between their houses on the Gatineau, in Montréal and Québec, cajoling promises of money from timber-shipping merchants for pinewood still uncut and in most cases unseen.

The Gatineau forest was noisy, echoing with ax blows and the rushing crackle of falling timber, with shouted warnings and orders. The axmen cut the great pines, but only a few in each plot were suitable for squaring. The rest were left to rot on the ground. Jinot did not like to bend over for hours scoring trees for the hewer; he preferred to chop down trees. Amboise, whose arms were longer, did not mind scoring and Josime was a fine hewer with the weighty broadax, trimming the log smooth and flat within a fraction of the chalk line. The waste was terrific — twenty-five percent of each squared tree lost; unwanted trees lay prostrate, severed branches everywhere, heaps of bark and mountains of chips. But squared timber made up into rafts more easily and would not roll when packed into ships for transport to England. There were so many trees, what did it matter? Maine men were used to waste — it was usual — but this was beyond anything even they had seen. The slash and chips from the hewers’ axes was knee-high.

The Scugogs had enough squared timber for two rafts at the end of the winter. The bigger raft, made up of fifty cribs, belonged to old William, and the smaller raft to son Cato. The rafts traveled well enough on smooth water but broke apart at the falls. There was nothing for it but to disassemble them and send the cribs through, one by one, then put all together again. Jinot often thought of free logs surging through the boisterous spring freshet of the Penobscot. But of course rafts did not get into killing jams.

When the rafts arrived in Montréal they could not find a place to moor. Scugog had made no arrangements for the unwieldy mass of timbers. And it seemed to the choppers and rivermen that they were paid off grudgingly, that Scugog’s fingers lingered over the money. The tavern word was that he was having difficulty selling his timber.

• • •

A second son, Blade Scugog, was running a shanty farther up the Gatineau. The Sels shifted to this son’s shanty, glad to work with round logs. It was too bad to leave Diamond Bob’s grub, but the regret faded when they heard the famous cook had abandoned Scugog père in midseason in favor of Montréal, where he opened an oyster house. This younger Scugog, whose deep scratched-up voice was familiar to the river’s lumbermen, despised not only the uncertain rafting enterprise but his father’s stupidity in cutting without permits and permissions. He quickly got a cutting permit for himself after declaring he intended to make lumber for domestic enterprises, not for export.

“What do you imagine you are doing?” shouted the older man at his contrary offspring.

“After the war ends there will be thousands of settlers coming into this country. They will need boards and shingles to build houses.” To himself he added, “Not bloody squared warship timbers that the Crown can seize without remuneration.”

“You are, sir, a reckless fool. There will always be wars, always a need for squared timbers. You will fail with your trust in chimerical men who will never come to settle such rude lands. Do not ask me for aid when poverty brings you down.”

“And do you not come to me with your square timbers hoping for an introduction to purchasers,” said the son in his rough voice.

• • •

Blade Scugog’s sawmill ran through the summer, but at the end of dry September it was caught in a fast-moving wildfire and burned to the ground. The ambitious son refused to see he was ruined, rushed to Québec and leveraged money to rebuild. “I may not know much about square timbers,” he said, “but I know how to make money.”

• • •

The settlers did come and with them came bridges, lightning-fast clearing, plans for crib-size timber slides around the worst falls, canals to bypass rough water, large new settlements, cemeteries, flour mills and postal service. They pushed back the wildwood. Civilization rushed into the trees.