Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Miles apart, the stations were not only logging camps but trading posts dealing in flax, spars and lumber. Separate enterprises — chandlers, warehouses, sawmills and small shipyards — drew Europeans to them. They skimmed off the cream of the shore forest and moved the camps on to the next good show leaving behind smoldering stumps and shoulder-deep waste. The intense assault fell first on kahikatea, then on the kauri, cutting and cutting. In some places men could walk for days on the downed timber that carpeted the ground. Then the great mass was set alight, the fastest way to clear the forest, brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, twigs, ferns and forest litter. The newcomers did not care to understand the strange new country beyond taking whatever turned a profit. They knew only what they knew. The forest was there for them.

• • •

Trader Palmer had two logging camps, Little Yam and Big Yam, named for nearby Maori plantations of sweet potatoes. Many of his warehouses and camps stood on land that had once belonged to members of his wife’s clan. Smart and wily, a fluent and persuasive talker, he moved people to his advantage as a cook moves gobbets of meat around in the hot pan.

Temporary or not, Jinot had never seen a camp so flimsy and ragtail-bob as the Little Yam. The quarters that passed for a bunkhouse were nothing more than ridgepole tents with fly openings, thatched with great hairy masses of nikau leaves from the cabbage palm.

Almost every small mixed-race child that Jinot saw in New Zealand looked like Waddy Baker, the bush-boss, swart, pale-eyed, jug-eared and quick-handed whether catching something or striking someone with his wadi. The bush gang at the Little Yam was small, not more than twenty choppers — ex-sailors, ex-convicts, Irish, British settlers, Maori. Half of them had never worked in the woods before.

The evening meal was a “Captain Cooker” stew from descendants of the pigs Cook had released, and a loaf of bread for each man. Jinot hoped to find a partner who knew woods work; if luck was with him a partner who knew the ways of big kauri cutting, for he reckoned there was something to learn about taking down these giants beyond the swinging of an ax. The young rickers they would cut first would be easy, but when he thought about it he did not see how they could do more than nibble around the circumference of the grey-bark giants. They were just too massive. He had heard that the Maori got them down by cutting into them and then making and tending a fire in the cut until the tree burned through. It was a poor method as the burning hardened the wood so that no sawmill could get through such a log. As for getting the logs to the sawmills on the shore, he hoped there was a better way than what he had seen while standing in the doorway of the missionary hut in detention.

One morning, smoking his pipe and regarding an offshore pod of spouting whales, he heard a distant rhythmic chant, a call and response chant such as a ship crew’s capstan shanty stamp-and-go used when weighing anchor. At least eighty Maori men emerged from the forest hauling on a hawser bound around an immense kauri spar. A muscular headman stood on the log, which was decorated with flowers and feathers, and it was he who called out the urging chant, and the pullers who drew deep breaths, opened their mouths and roared a response as they heaved. The great spar moved forward a few feet on the roller roadway. Again and again the pullers answered the caller and the giant mast moved down to the ship.

Jinot worked one day with a half Maori named Arana Palmer who spoke English with what sounded like his own familiar Maine accent. He was young, not more than twenty, and strong, said, “I worked in the kauri since I was a boy.” When Jinot told him he was a Penobscot man from Maine, Arana laughed. “Orion Palmer, the trader, is my father. He come here from Maine years ago after seals. Them times not many pakeha. So I say I am part Maine. He talks once a while about his old life there. You come talk with him sometime. He likes talkin Maine, goes down to the ships, says, ‘Anybody from Maine here?’ Sometimes there is and he’ll keep ’em up all night guzzlin rum and talk, talk, talk, get jeezalum drunk.”

Jinot had not heard anyone say jeezalum in years and was glad to hear it now, in Arana’s inherited accent. Arana showed Jinot how to stuff a large sack with bracken fern for a mattress. Better, said his new partner, was to get a wool fleece — nothing more comfortable. They agreed to work together and share one of the thatched tents. Before he fell asleep Jinot looked forward to replacing the ferns with a fleece.

• • •

He was no longer the man he had been the last time he chopped trees. His scarred leg would carry him in the mornings; by the end of the workday it burned and ached intolerably and could barely take his weight. He was too old for logging.

“What troubles your leg?” asked Arana, and Jinot told him of the Miramichi fire that had nearly caught him, that had burned his brother Amboise. It was a great ease to have conversation with someone he liked. It had been a long, long time since he had had the pleasure of friendship. He went with Arana to meet his father, Orion Palmer, the trader from Maine. The white-haired old ruffian launched into a flood of reminiscence about his early days in Maine and a long involved story of why he could never go back, something to do with killing a rich man’s horse.

• • •

The labor of axing down a tree with the girth of a village church was monstrous. The bushmen tried every way, whittling around the sides for weeks until the trunk began to resemble a pencil, chipping and chopping until a saw could finish the cut. Or chopping out a commodious room within the living tree, room enough to swing an ax, a great waste of good timber. They built platforms to lift them above the stack of debris at the base of every kauri. It took weeks to bring down a single giant. The ax alone was not enough and the trader ordered ten-foot felling saws — double-tooth rakers every four teeth — onto the job. When the saws arrived the kauri began to come down by the hundreds. “ Now we’re doin it,” said Shuttercock, one of the choppers. On the shore near the wharves Palmer’s roaring steam-powered sawmill, specially equipped to handle kauri, spat out the most desirable lumber in the world day after day. Hundreds of Maori hauled vast logs to these mills, inching them up out of the ravines, easing them down the steep slope below the ridge. They could not bring them in fast enough to suit Palmer, who began to talk of getting bullocks from Australia. “Queensland,” he said. “Where there’s good timber-broke beasts to be had.”

• • •

On Saturday nights Arana went home to his father’s house to exchange his filthy work clothes for fresh, sink into his mother’s large family clan again and eat his favorite dishes, to be Maori once more. Jinot stayed in the camp, washed and mended his single garment, a pair of canvas trousers torn off at the knee.

Arana came back one Sunday evening with a home delicacy, a basket of eels that had been wrapped in leaves of green flax and roasted over the coals. “We worked all day fixin our eel weirs. Some settlers pulled up all the manuka stakes that show the eel the way into the hinaki. ” Between mouthfuls of the juicy meat they talked about weirs and nets and eel pots, the different ways to make good weirs. “Mi’kmaq make weirs with river stones,” said Jinot, arranging pebbles on the ground. “Takes a lot of attention, the river shifts them.” Arana explained how brush and ferns could be worked in between the manuka stakes to make a good fence, and spoke eloquently on the importance of a strong and beautiful hinaki net that did the eels honor.