Barkskins (18 page)

Dred-Peacock looked at the spilled ale with distaste. Duquet was an ill-bred boor, quite unable to even discern the picturesque, much less appreciate it. It was only his fantastic ability to make money that interested Dred-Peacock. “Damme, sir, it is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day poxy whoresons of millmen push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white pine mast trees. You know there is a damned great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.” The dish came, three great succulent oysters gleaming wetly, each as large as a man's hand.

Duquet nodded but his face was sour. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating. “Where there is a market and money, the businessman must act. And all this will be immeasurably easier if you operate from Boston rather than bloody Kweebeck. And with my help these affairs can be managed.” He took up the first oyster.

Still Duquet hesitated. He had valuable connections in New France and a lifetime dislike of the English language. Dred-Peacock babbled on.

“And in any case I understand there are many in New France who are starting to believe that the English will one day prevail, even as a hare senses its pursuer's increasing pace. Nor is it outside the realm of possibility that the colonies will unite, drive out the English and seize New France. Stranger events have occurred. And let me point out that so hungry are the whoreson Scots shipbuilders for the excellent timbers of America that some have removed to the colonies to be close to the supply.”

Now he was in partnership with the two Dutchmen, and several ships belonging to Roos, Verdwijnen and Duquet, but flying British flags, ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was, they often told one another, like walking on a web of tightropes, but they swam in money as in a school of sardines. They had only to catch it in their nets. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

•  •  •

Over the next year, as his sons grew, fired by the detailed and advice-packed business letters Duquet wrote to each of them every Sunday, with Dred-Peacock's help he began to acquire tracts of woodland in Maine. Dred-Peacock's genius in the legal procedure of acquiring remote “townships” could not be measured, and his old acquaintance from
voyageur
days, the surveyor, Jacques Forgeron, scouted out the best timberland, Duquet learning the woods looker's judgmental process from him. To outsiders Forgeron was a dour man who overcherished his plagued measuring chains. He could use a chain as a weapon, swinging it around and around until it gained velocity and the free end leapt forward to maim. Duquet knew well that long ago he had used that chain in the Old World and then fled to New France to start anew. Duquet thought there were probably many like Forgeron but he only shrugged. The old days counted for very little. Moreover, he was now a partner in Duquet et Fils, perhaps even a friend if a business tie between two friendless men could be so described.

•  •  •

Duquet and Forgeron landed their canoe one October afternoon on a sandy Maine river shore fronting one of their new white pine properties, twenty thousand acres at a cost of twelve cents an acre. There was a narrow hem of ice along the shaded shoreline. The rich autumn light touched the deciduous trees with xanthene orange and yellow. Their swart shadows fell on the ground like fallen statues. Without speaking the men began to gather firewood. Forgeron held up his hand.

“Listen,” he said quietly. They heard the sounds of chopping not far off and began to move cautiously toward the source.

With an acid jolt of fury Duquet saw unknown men in pitch-blackened trousers cutting his pines, others limbing the fallen trees and yet another scoring them. Two men worked with broadaxes to square the logs. Duquet was sure they had a pit sawmill set up nearby. By their bulging pale eyes and doughy faces he knew them to be English colonists. Although Duquet et Fils had no hesitation in cutting big trees wherever they grew, it was intolerable to be the victims of that practice.

“Holà!”
Duquet shouted, then, in his clumsy English, “Who say you come my land, cut my tree?” He was so furious his voice strangled in his throat. Forgeron advanced beside him lightly revolving his chain.

The startled woodsmen stared, then, still gripping their tools, they ran on an oblique course toward the river, where they likely had bateaux. But one with a dirty bandage on his right thigh lagged behind.

Duquet did not pause. He drew his tomahawk from his belt and hurled it, striking the runner's left calf. The man fell, crying to his comrades for help in a high childish voice. One of the escaping men turned around and stared at Duquet, called something to the fallen one. The confrontation lasted for only a few seconds but left an unfading impression of a man swelling with hatred. Duquet did not forget the man's mottled slab of face encircled by ginger hair and beard, the yellow animal eyes fixed on him, the sudden turning away and violent run for the river.

“They come from the settlements along the coast,” said Forgeron as they ran forward.

They bound their wounded prisoner, a boy not older than fourteen, and dragged him to a pine, tied him against it in a hollow between projecting tree roots.

“You boy,
garçon,
talk up or I cut first your fingers. Then your balls. Who you are? What men you with? How you come here?”

The boy folded his lips in a tight crease, in either pain or defiance. Duquet wrenched the boy's arm and spread his left hand against one of the great humped roots. With a quick slash of his ax he took off a little finger and part of the next.

“Talk or I cut more. You die no head.”

Duquet's bloody interrogation gave him the information that the Maine thieves were in the employ of a mill owner, a man named McBogle, an agent of Elisha Cooke. Duquet had heard of Cooke for years; all described him as a passionate opponent of Crown authority. But McBogle's name was new. Although his heart was pounding with anger, Duquet thought Elisha Cooke and perhaps even McBogle sounded like useful men and he fixed their names in his memory. He would learn more from Dred-Peacock.

“Why you come here steal pine?” he said.

“We thought only to cut a few trees. Away from the surveyor's men.”

“Show your wounds.” When the boy held up his maimed hand Duquet said angrily, “No, not that. Only scratch. Leg wound.” He could smell the stink of infection from a distance. With his good hand the boy unwrapped his right leg and disclosed a deep and rotten gash in the thigh. It was a foul injury. A streak of red inflammation ran up toward the groin.

“How happen?” he demanded.

“Uncle Robert felled a big pine. Broke off a branch that gouged my leg.”

It was an evil mess. In contrast, the cut in the boy's calf inflicted by Duquet's hawk was clean though it had nearly severed a tendon, and the chopped finger was a trifle. Nothing to be done. They carried the youth to the interlopers' camp half a mile downstream, strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him near the still-smoldering fire.

“We will stay here,” said Duquet to Forgeron, “as the thieves have prepared a camp for us.” He tried to speak calmly, but he was filled with a greater anger than he had ever experienced. After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done, crossing to the New World, escaping from Trépagny, learning the hard
voyageur
trade, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, learning to read and write and cipher, traveling to China, all the business connections he had made, these Maine vermin had come to steal
his timber.

Forgeron brought their canoe up to the campsite while Duquet searched until he found the trespassers' pit sawmill. They had been there only a few days, but had the clear intention to saw. The stack of limbed and squared logs told him that. He wondered if they had planned to build a fort. It was said the English were plotting to build forts along all the rivers.

“Let us put our mark on them,” said Duquet, and he and Forgeron took possession of the logs with two deep hatchet slashes on the butt ends. They talked of ways to move them. In the end it seemed a raft floated to the nearest sawmill might be the best way, getting what they could. While Duquet stayed to guard the timber in case the thieves returned, Forgeron went to Portsmouth to hire raftsmen.

During the early evening the mildness went out of the weather. The sky filled with clouds the color of dark grapes, followed by an hour of rain; behind it the temperature dived into winter. Duquet woke at dawn, shivering. There was not a breath of wind but every twig and branch bristled with spiky hoarfrost. In the distance wolves howled messages to each other, their cries filleting the morning. They had likely scented the boy's blood and infection and would linger out of sight hoping for a chance. Duquet got up and piled more wood on the fire. The wounded boy's eyes were closed, his face feverish and swollen, cheeks wet with melting frost. Duquet thought he would be dead after one more cold night. Or he might not last until nightfall.

With some urgency he prodded the boy awake and fired questions at him: his name, his village, his family's house, how many people. But the boy only croaked for water, which Duquet did not give him, and then went silent. He still lived. Duquet spent the short day estimating the board feet in the felled pines.

The light faded early as the growing storm invaded the sky, the wind and sleety snow rattling and hissing in the pines. While there was still enough light to see clearly, Duquet walked over to the prisoner. The boy lay on his back, the right leg bursting with infection, a yellow froth of pus oozing out from under the bandage, the leg a little splayed as though it were detaching itself. Nothing could be done with this burden except wait for him to die—one more cold night. The boy opened his eyes and stared at something across the river. Duquet followed his gaze, expecting to see Indians or perhaps one of the thieves returning. He saw only a wall of pines until a blink of yellow showed him where to look. A tall grey owl sat on a branch, seeing them. Its eyes were very small and set close together like twin gimlets.

The boy spoke. “Help. Me,” he said in English. “Help. Me.”

Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pinecone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a life's pent-up rage. “No one helped
me
!” he shrieked. “I did everything myself! I endured! I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die! No one helped me!” The boy's gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet's rising arm, closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. Duquet struck the hatchet into the loam to clean it.

In the flying snow he dismantled the sawpit scaffolding and threw the boy into the pit hole, piled the scaffolding on top and set it alight. The gibbous moon rose. Hours later when the burning ceased he went to shovel in the half-frozen excavated soil, but before he hurled the first shovelful he glanced down and saw the black arm bones crooked up as if reaching for a helping hand.

“
Foutu!
Done for!”

He shoveled.

Forgeron arrived four days later with six men who began constructing a raft of the cut pines. There was no sign of the wounded boy and although Forgeron opened his mouth as if to speak several times, he did not say anything except that the war was making it very difficult to find able-bodied labor.

A
gain Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke & Sons and he was Charles Duke. Still he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

“Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” asked Duke, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I hear much deleterious talk concerning his ways. Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, sawmills, surveyors, armies of tree choppers, potash and turpentine distillers and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

“They think as I do,” said Duke, “so I cannot fault them. But although they love guns beyond telling, and protect themselves, the woods are dangerous with enemies, not only war foes, but the Crown Surveyor's men. Yet they are only men.”

“The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster in Ireland.”

“Surely they are as other mortal men?”

“No. They are different. They are damned strange, cruel men, clannish and proud to a fault, thirsty for vengeance over imagined slights, hard-drinking and inhumanly tough. The whoresons prefer to sleep outside in storms rather than in the comfort of a house. They know the country as the poxy Indians know it and to live free is their banner. The buggers are impervious to cold and heat and they bear pain as the Indians do, stoically and silently, even with relish. The ridges and watercourses are their highways, the forest their shelter. They choose to live in the most remote places. And they are bloody damned key fighters in the escalating antipathy between the French and the English.” He paused and took up his coffee cup, stared into Duke's eyes.

“Dud McBogle, his brothers and his sons are among these men.”

Duke threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I have heard bugbear stories aplenty and I would class McBogle tales among them. No doubt he eats children as sweetmeats and wears a red fur cloak bespangled with their bones. What do you say when I tell you I consider taking this man on as a partner?”