Barkskins (9 page)

•  •  •

Ends come to everyone, even woodcutters. All his life René was a
défricheur, un bûcheron
or, as the ancient book put it, “a woodsman, a forester, a forest owner; an ax owner, a feller of trees, a woodcutter, a user of the ax. He cuts with an ax; he fells trees—cuts them, tops them, strips them, splits them, stacks them.” His life was spent in severe toil, stinging sweat running in his eyes, bitten by insects of the hot woods, the callused hands shaping into a permanent curl to fit ax handles, the bruises and blood, the constant smoke of burning trees, the pain of unremitting labor, the awkward saw, treacherous saplings used as pry bars, fitting new handles on broken spades and the everlasting lifting of great vicious tree trunks.

But Achille, his eleven-year-old son, found him dead on his knees in the forest, his knotted hands clenched on the ax handle, the bit sunk into a cedar, René dead at forty from a chop to his neck. A sharp scalping knife had been set above and parallel with his eyebrows and drawn around the circumference of his head, the scalp peeled off and carried away to be redeemed for the bounty. He was, until the end, a skillful woodsman, his life and body shaped to the pleasure of the ax. And so his sons and grandsons after him.

D
uquet had escaped Trépagny, but what next? Gripping the sapling he had cut for a stick, his remaining teeth burning in his mouth, coughing and with a stitch in his side, he followed the river west until dark. Before full light he was on his way again, swallowing whole the chunks of fish pudding he had hidden in his jacket the night before. He drank river water and plunged on. He followed the river from the ridge above in case Trépagny and that fool Sel came nosing after him. The higher ground was rough and gullied. He could see crashing water below, trees half in the water, sodden heads thrashing in the current. Hunger drove him back to the bank, where he knotted the neck and sleeves of his shirt and held it sidewise underwater, the open end inviting fish in. He had enough success to get nourishment, sucking the juice from the raw flesh as a spider with an insect. After eight days, scratched and filthy, lost in the wild, but driven by an inchoate need, he reached another river flowing down from the north. To the northwest were rich beaver grounds, the Indians who trapped the beaver and the traders who transported the pelts down the river. He began his long walk.

In the third week of his journey Duquet awoke and opened his left eye, the right stuck shut with hardened pus. In his exhaustion he fell often to the ground and lay with his face against the leaf litter. He was beyond the pain of his abscessed jaw; swathed in veils of mosquitoes he sucked in raw air with its taste of decaying wood. On his hands and arms were five or six suppurating wounds. He had found rib bones with strings of dark meat clinging to them under a serviceberry bush, but when he put one to his mouth something wild came at him, tearing with teeth and claws. It ran with the prize. He was weak from the loss of blood, not only from the biting animal, but from blackflies, from mosquitoes. Then he lost the river. He tried every direction, but it had disappeared. For an entire day he scooped at the dirt with his hands to discover if it was underground. How much easier it was to crawl than to stand and walk. And so he crawled, weeping, mouthing syllables. It rained, the dark grey clouds like unshaven jowls. His horizon was a sawtooth jag of black spruce. He caught a slow duckling, the last in a parade of ducklings on their way to—water! He had found the river again. He thought he might be dying, but it seemed inconsequential. First he would get to the north, to the fur traders, then he would die. As he crept along the rediscovered river he found small frogs and one more duckling that he caught and ate, cowering under the hammering beak and painful wing blows of the mother. Here the riverbank was soft mud, more comfortable for crawling.

•  •  •

An Odaawa hunting party surrounded the creature. They had watched it for two days inching around and around the margin of a small pond, sleeping in mud under the alders, then creeping again on hands and knees.

“He is sick,” said one. They all backed away.

“He is wounded,” said another.

At the sound of their voices Duquet reared up on his knees. He glowered at them out of his left eye. A pattern of alder twigs indented his cheek. He shaped his mud-crusted fingers into claws and hissed at them. He said something.

“He wishes to attack,” said one. The rest laughed and their laughter enraged Duquet.

“He is a French,” said one.

“We cannot take him. The French bring sickness.”

“He is already sick. He cannot come among us.”

“Leave him.”

They backed away, disappeared.

•  •  •

Days later a party of French fur traders stopped at the Indians' riverside camp.

“We want peltries,” said the old trader. “Look! For you we have axes, hatchets, needles. For you we have guns! Bullets and powder.” The others displayed the goods in the bottom of their canoe.

“Oui, oui,”
said the middlemen hunters, bringing out beaver robes, well worn and of best quality, collected in the north. They had few beaver, but many marten and lynx. Before the traders left, these Odaawa, laughing, mentioned the sick French crawling around and around the little pond.

The traders discovered Duquet. The mud had dried and to get at the man underneath they had to crack and break it away. They carried him to the river and soaked him in the waters until he emerged from his clay armor. They doubted he would live, but the Indian woman with them took his case in hand. In treating him she smelled the foul infection in his mouth. In her medicine bag she had a small wood stick with a leather loop at the end. With this she removed his rotting teeth, gave him an infection-fighting mouthwash and an opiate.

“Not die,” she said.

The
voyageurs
put him in their worn canoe and set out for a distant Ojibwa village to the northwest.

•  •  •

It was spring, the rivers almost clear of ice except in early morning, the warm afternoons fragrant and easy. A few mosquitoes flew around them slowly, legs dangling. In the Ojibwa village, where a stream flowed into a small lake, Duquet rested against a log and watched the Indians making canoes, a complex business that involved the whole encampment. The
voyageurs
made themselves useful going with some of the younger men to gather the great sheets of birch bark, twenty feet long. As they brought them into camp they laid them carefully in the stream to keep them supple and weighted them with stones. Some went into the swamp and felled white cedar trees they had girdled the year before, riving the seasoned wood lengthwise. The women went out every day to gather spruce roots and gum. They sat near Duquet, skinning the roots and halving them lengthwise.

•  •  •

The Indians made five canoes for themselves and another five for the
voyageurs,
while Duquet healed. He was up and walking stiffly, eating gargantuan meals of soft foods he could manage with his healing gums. His eyes cleared, his hearing improved, he felt his arms flood with strength, and when the new canoes were finished, the
guide,
an officious imbecile with a burn-scarred face, ordered him to take a seat with the
milieux
and paddle until he dropped. The fragile craft flew down the cold, boulder-studded rivers. There were days of burn and pain in his shoulder blades, wrists and arms before his body accepted the tireless and rapid strokes, and every day he paddled longer. His neck, shoulders, arms began to swell with muscle. Always short in stature he now took on the look of the
voyageur,
almost as wide at the shoulders as he was tall. He learned to read water, to understand currents, recognize eddies, whirlpools, to listen to the old hands, whose expert knowledge of this violent, dangerous water world came from the bitterest kind of experience. In the evening he told his story of being a poor boy from the Paris streets come to make his fortune in New France.

A sinewy man with legs too long for the canoe, Forgeron, a Dutchman turned French by accident, a sailor and fisherman, a surveyor when he could get work and an unhappy
voyageur
when he could not, spoke quietly to Duquet.

“You are ignorant of the
coureur de bois
life. The woods runner's way is no road to wealth. We and the Indians do the dangerous work and the company gets the money. We are all fools.”

And in recent years, he went on, the fur trade had become unsettled and insecure. The
coureur de bois
no longer directly approached the trapper Indians to trade for furs—there were Indian specialists, middlemen, who arranged all that. Even now those good Indians were being pushed out by enemy tribes and the decline in beaver numbers. As Duquet learned the intricacies and politics of the fur trade he saw that what Forgeron said was true. Paddling in the
milieux
was no entry to wealth. The best that could come of it would be a short life of striving, of sleeping on riverbanks and looking up through the trees at a narrow slice of darkness stinging with stars like cast handfuls of salt.

Some of the men carried flintlock muzzle-loaders, most the Charleville muskets used by the French army. But for Duquet the loading procedure was impossibly slow—without teeth he could not bite off the end of the cartridge, but had to tear it open with his fingers. Instead, he took as his weapon the French tomahawk, practiced endlessly until he could cleave the tail off a flying bird, gather up the body, have it gutted and half roasted while a comrade was still loading his musket.

•  •  •

Duquet hardened. He saw how the beaver quickly disappeared from hard-trapped areas, where the Indians took every animal, so intent were they on getting European tools and spirits, so harried were they by the acquisitive traders. The beaver country moved always farther north and west. Yet there were white men who gained prodigiously. They were not penniless runaway indentured servants. Duquet set out now to get as much as he could from his lowly position in the fur trade and swore to watch for better opportunities. He had come to New France hoping for quick riches and a return to Old France, but now he wondered if his destiny was not linked to the vast land with its infinite forests and violent rivers. Was not this country his place in the world? Yes, and he would make something of value of it. He went through a rare hour of introspection, seeing that his nature chilled other men. He consciously began to act as a smiling, open fellow of winning address who always had a good story and who, in the tavern, treated with a generous hand. He was sharpening his claws, and in his private center he was an opportunistic tiger—if he had to tear and maul his way to wealth he would do so.

•  •  •

He began to barter privately for furs, offering a drink or two of cheap rum to the naïve red men, hiding his activities from the others, sometimes caching the furs and returning later to pick them up. He bargained ruthlessly with the Indians, smiling guilelessly into the savage faces as he accepted their heavy bundles of furs for a yard of cheap cloth and a cup of adulterated whiskey—a monstrous profit.

Within the year he was sick of the traders who had rescued him.

“Forgeron,” he said one day as they struggled up a portage trail. “I do not enjoy these persons, especially the
guide.
I intend to look for another opportunity. Will you come as well?”

“Why not?” said Forgeron. “One canoe is very like another. The
guide
is difficult, perhaps because of his terrible history. The Iroquois threw him into a fire to roast.”

“Then why did they not finish the cooking and eat him?”

“Perhaps you will have the chance to ask them that one day.”

•  •  •

They worked in harmony, although Forgeron attracted storms and wind. But he had a certain regard for the wild woods. He spoke often to Duquet of the forest and its great untapped wealth.

“If a man could get the logs out, there are a hundred thousand fortunes all around us the like of which the world has not seen since the days of Babylon. It is entirely a question of moving the wood to those who need it.” Duquet nodded and began to look at trees with a more acquisitive eye.

They fell in with a flamboyant company of
coureurs de bois,
among whom were the easygoing Trépagny brothers, so unlike the high-minded
seigneur.
They had a reckless style and could outhowl wolves. Duquet needed every paddling skill he had learned for some of the wild water they ran, between rock ledges that squeezed the canoe through violent chutes, and in one extraordinary place between two towering cliffs that leaned toward each other, narrower than the river so that the sky was a rock-edged slice. When they emerged from the pinching canyon the river hurled itself into a maelstrom. It was necessary to leave the water and edge upward along the Indian trail, little more than a foot width of slippery rock, somehow carrying the canoe over their heads, its weight making their arms quiver. At last they gained the cliff top and could look down on the thrashing water below.

“Tabernac,”
said Toussaint Trépagny. “I pressed against the cliff face so passionately I left the imprint of my manhood on it.” They carried their canoes for many miles that day.

One night, lying under an overturned canoe, Forgeron murmured that he intended to leave.

“My legs are no good for the canoe,” he said. It was true that his long arms worked the paddle with great power, but his legs were folded and doubled under him for many hours and when he left the canoe he often had trouble standing upright, so cramped and tightened were his muscles. Many nights he lay groaning from the pain and rubbing his thighs and calves.
Voyageurs
were short-legged and strong-armed. Long legs did not belong in a canoe.