Barkskins

4

guests from the north

During René’s third winter Monsieur Trépagny began to behave erratically. He went off for weeks at a time and when he returned he was rudely commanding, even to Chama.

In early May with snow still on the ground Monsieur Trépagny said he would be gone for a year or perhaps two, as he had pressing business in Kébec and France. He told René that Chama would be in charge of the daily work. He marked out an impossibly large area, more than five arpents (almost five English acres), for them to clear of trees. In France, thought René, the forests were controlled by laws and customs; here there were no forest laws beyond the desires of the seigneur. That Trépagny had the right to order the clearing confounded him and he sensed injustice.

Trépagny slapped his gloves on his thigh and mounted his horse. He gave a last order: “Mari, do not neglect the garden.” Mari said nothing but her fingers twitched. René knew she disliked gardening, considered it French foolishness. In the garden she felt snared. She neglected it at every chance, she and Renardette going to gather medicine plants. She knew the healing virtues of many tree barks. She kept moldy substances in a box to bind onto infected wounds. Some fungi she worked into salves.

“Of course,” Monsieur Trépagny had sneered, as though describing a vicious fault, “all the Indians are physicians and apothecaries. They alone know the secret virtues of many plants. Have you never heard how they cured de Champlain’s crew, dying of scorbut, with a broth of hemlock needles? Wait, you will hear it a thousand times.”

But now he was gone and Chama pranced around like a rooster. And, like that of a rooster, his wet eye fell on the only hens in sight. In the night René heard him slide stealthily out of his beaver robe and ease out the door, his footsteps squeaking in the stiff snow. In minutes rapid running and the slamming door brought him back.

More than two years passed before Monsieur Trépagny returned on a fine sorrel stallion. He sprang off with a flourish like the signature of a state minister. He was decked in a pea-green doublet with paned sleeves, silk breeches in darker green and trimmed with knotted ribbons. His massive belt sported three silver buckles and his boots showed crimson heels. The glory was a low-crowned hat with six red-dyed ostrich plumes wreathed around the brim. He smelled of a cloying perfume that made Elphège sneeze out a gob of snot onto the scalloped cuff of the doublet. Monsieur Trépagny knocked him to the ground and kicked him; Mari threw herself over the boy. Monsieur Trépagny gave her a powerful kick in the ribs as well, remounted his sorrel and rode west, no doubt to revel in his secret house, thought René.

At supper the next night Mari served up stewed eels and dried salmon made into a thick fish pudding. Monsieur Trépagny exploded. Eels were savages’ food, he said, and he expected something better as befitted a seigneur. They were witnessing Monsieur Trépagny’s transformation into a gentleman manifested by his new garments and his dislike for eels, which in the past he had always relished. He expressed his growing disdain for the Indians, calling them lazy and ignorant barbarians. He threw a coin on the table in front of Mari and told her that she must pack up and leave with her children the morrow—he was marrying a French lady in a fortnight. The coin would pay her passage east back to her people, where she might eat all the eels in the world. Mari sat quietly, saying nothing, and René supposed she was unfeeling and submissive.

It was midmorning when they left the house, Mari with her few possessions in a willow basket pack, the children each carrying a bundle. Renardette said to Mari in a low voice that she did not want to go to Wobik, that the people there treated her badly. Mari glanced at Chama, busy sharpening knives but listening attentively.

“Here bad stay you. Come you. Safe that mission.”

The little group went down the steps to where Monsieur Trépagny stood in the yard watching, legs spraddled like a colossus. Suddenly he turned to René.

“What are you gaping at? Go with them! And in Wobik arrange with Philippe Bosse to bring out my trunks on his cart. They are by now surely at the deputy’s house. Be back in five days’ time.”

René carried Theotiste across the river, Elphège stumbling behind. Mari, gripping Renardette’s reluctant hand, was the first across, moving as though on a firm path beneath the water, then striding eastward along the dim path to Wobik.

“Are your people in Wobik?” René asked her, although everything he had heard indicated otherwise.

“No. No Wobik.” She spoke in a low voice.

“Then—where?”

For a long time she said nothing. When they stopped at noon to make tea she said, “Sipekne’katik. River people we. All our life that river, other river. Mi’kma’ki our place. Good rivers. Good food. Eel, fish. Good medicine plant. Better. Here no good.” She handed corn cakes spread with cacamos to the children.

“How did you come to Monsieur Trépagny’s house?” he asked, but she did not answer and they walked in silence until they reached Wobik the next noon. Mari stopped at the edge of the settlement near the path to the mission church. “Here,” she said. “Confession, mass. Read, write, talk French by Père Perreault.” She gave him two corn cakes for his return journey.

“You read? You write?” said René, astonished and jealous. He had seen no evidence of these skills in Mari.

“Bientôt,” she said, “soon,” and with the silent children she took the path to the mission and the priest’s house. Only Elphège turned to look at him. René’s glance swept the ground and when he saw a Sabot de la Vierge he picked it and pinned it to his shirt with a willow sliver, enjoying the musky perfume.

He went on to the deputy’s house. A hundred yards away the river glittered and pranced in the sunlight. Two huge canoes were drawn up on the shore and under the spruce trees a group of men and a few Indian women were making camp—fur traders from the pays d’en haut heading for Tadoussac or Kébec. They were a rough-looking lot, great triangles of shoulders, chest, neck and arms balanced on bandy legs, bearded, dark-skinned from smoky fires, their tasseled red hats covering oily hair. One muscular fellow lurching under two heavy packs caught his eye; there was something about him René thought he knew. The man swiveled away and went into the shadow under the trees.

“Ah, Monsieur Sel.” Monsieur Bouchard, the deputy, was cordial and smiling, his yellow eyebrows raised in pleasure at seeing the young woodcutter from the forest. René explained that Monsieur Trépagny had renamed Léonardette Renardette because he thought the birthmark resembled a fox face, and he had sent Mari and the children away. He wanted to have his trunks brought out to his house.

“Ah, that is what fine fellows do when a moneyed lady with connections comes in sight. Yes, Philippe Bosse can bring his trunks out—for a consideration which I’m sure the elegant Monsieur Trépagny du Triomphe will be happy to pay, now that he is marrying the wealthy Mélissande du Mouton-Noir. I’ll see to it this afternoon so that he may continue to appear as a gentleman. Likely he wants them delivered to his big edifice he calls the ‘manor house’?”

“He said nothing of that.” As he looked around the room René saw Monsieur Bouchard had a shelf of books with gold letters on the spines. He discerned an R.

“Philippe can find him and ask. And you, are you clearing your own land now? Have you built your house? Have you also found someone to marry?”

“Monsieur Trépagny has not yet granted me land.” René had lost any sense of years.

“Indeed?” Monsieur Bouchard took down the big ledger and turned the pages. “Well, I believe it is well past the time. You have worked for him five years and four months. He will owe you wages. I will send him a note with Philippe. But have you found land to settle on?”

“I have seen several good places west of Monsieur Trépagny, one in an old Indian clearing about a mile from the river but near a small stream that runs all summer and autumn. Another is in the forest with a clear spring issuing from under a yellow birch. It has a fine mix of hardwoods.”

Monsieur Bouchard glanced at the wilted lady’s slipper fastened to René’s shirt. “Ah, a boutonniere. You know, a young doctor has recently come to Kébec who is much interested in the Indan pharmacognosy. Every day more men of talent arrive. And you shall certainly have your land.”

Monsieur Bouchard’s haul of long words made René uneasy, but he nodded as one intimate with the Indian pharmacognosy.

“Of course it is best to choose a wooded site and clear it—the more trees we cut down the sooner we’ll have fine farms and more settlers. Be sure not to cut down that yellow birch. If you do your spring will dry up. Use the clearing for pasture for your cows.” He sighed. “And of course Monsieur Trépagny will continue to be the seigneur of those lands. As they say, ‘No land without a lord.’ He has an extensive holding. When you raise grain you will bring it to his mill to be ground into the fine flour of New France.”

“I do not think he has a mill.”

“He will certainly build one. It is one of the duties of a seigneur to his habitants. Presumably he will persuade more people to come to his holding.” Monsieur Bouchard put the ledger away and smiled in dismissal.

“Sir,” said René. “I have a question.”

“Yes?” The deputy’s face grew serious.

“Mari the Mi’kmaq woman told me she was learning to read and write from the priest at the mission. Could that be true?”

“Père Perreault tries to teach the Indians their letters, to read a little and write. To what end except to read scripture I do not know, but that is the way of many of the French, especially fur traders, to be cordial to native people. Not all, of course. Most farmers and settlers dislike les sauvages.”

“Would he—?”

“What, teach you? You must ask him, but I am almost certain you would have to come to the mission. If you lived nearer Wobik you could easily learn those skills from him. Already almost twenty people are living here. Why not think about choosing land close to Wobik instead of a two-day journey away in the wilderness?” His yellow eyebrows went up and down in conspiratorial inquiry.

René said he would consider all of this. But the deputy knew he would not. He saw the stubborn face of a man with a mind like a stone, a man who preferred to live in the rough forest, the endless forest that amazed and frightened.

On the return trip there was much to think about: Mari, an Indian woman who could—perhaps—read and write; the possibility that he, too, could learn these arts; and the great news that the time for his land grant and freedom from Monsieur Trépagny was at hand. Despite the allure of living near the mission and the settlement, he had a feeling for the woods. As for Wobik, that muddy, tiny scrap of settlement was too much like France.

A little distance past the place where Monsieur Trépagny had killed the porcupine years earlier he began to sense something. He slowed his pace, set each foot with care as silently as he could and listened. Nothing. He went on, but the sense of a menacing entity nearby persisted. Five years of Monsieur Trépagny’s talk of supernatural horrors in the forest, the mnemic ethos of the region, had damaged his French rationality. He had come to believe in the witiku and its comrades as he believed in the devil and angels. He walked on, the back of his neck exposed and vulnerable, his senses quiveringly alert. The Iroquois were far to the south and west, though he had heard a few raiding parties sometimes slipped through the forests unseen and massacred settlers. He considered what animals might stalk a man: bears, cougars, wolves. Of these, bears had the greatest magical powers. It might be a bear snuffling along his trail, yet he doubted it. At this time of year bears were cramming their bodies with berries and greasy moths, eating, eating. As he paused, looking for blaze marks—for they were weathered and grey, difficult to see in the deepening light—he heard the distinct sound of a breaking twig in the sombrous forest.

From that moment the fleering faces of daemons appeared among the interstices of the branches, among the needles. The fear of Iroquois and their unspeakable tortures flooded his bowels. He might never get back to Monsieur Trépagny’s clearing, he might never claim his land.

Away from the trail he saw acres of young dog-hair larch. In there perhaps he could hide, for no one, not even an impassioned Iroquois, would plunge into trees so tightly packed. He burrowed into the larch thicket.

The impression of something alien not far away persisted, and as he rummaged in his pocket for a corn cake he smelled a faint drift of smoke. It was the fire of the Iroquois.

Not daring to light a fire himself, he curled up under the larches and spent a shivering night dozing and listening for their approach. He could make out a pale clump of corpse flowers and other luminous fungi in the gloom. Such sullen smolderings, invisible by day, were the signs of demonic passage.

When the paling east presaged dawn he was on the barely discernible trail, moving swiftly. The feeling of being pursued grew stronger and he half-ran, panting, sure he heard an Iroquois’s heaving breath. Then he stopped. Fleeing would not help him. He took up a station behind a spruce a few yards off the trail and waited. He would let the Iroquois appear. He would face their tortures and die as others had died. It was the red thread in the fabric of life in New France.

A short time passed and then he heard not only snapping twigs but a voice, two voices. The few sung words in French—“ … you’ll find many Iroquois bodies—plusieurs corps iroquois”—and then laughter. French! He saw motion through the trees and stepped onto the trail. But stood tense and ready for trouble. They saw him.

“Ah! He has waited for us!” They were short muscular men with black beards, top-heavy with huge shoulders and arms, thick black eyebrows and red lips—hommes du nord, voyageurs, men of the north. But he knew them by their large eyes, Monsieur Trépagny eyes, ebon black irises in flashing whites. They were dressed in the mode of voyageur–fur traders, one with a red tuque, the other with a neckerchief tied around his head, both with deerskin leggings and Indian-style breechclouts, oblivious to biting insects. Both wore brilliant sashes knotted around their waists, both wore woolen double shirts. They were drunk and carrying bottles of spirits, which they swigged as they walked. They were Monsieur Trépagny’s long-awaited brothers from the crowd of boatmen camped at Wobik.

They said their names: Toussaint, whose beard flowed down his breast, and Fernand, with a short bristle of whiskers. Oui, Tabernacle! Of course, by the Holy Tabernacle they were coming to attend Claude’s wedding, and yes, they had followed René, but also knew to look for the trail blazes. Some of their comrades would follow, for the chance of a wedding celebration would never be missed by anyone alive in this empty country. Another of their company knew the path, though he preferred not to join the revelry as he said he had a strong dislike of Claude Trépagny. He would stay in Wobik and guard their fur packs. They passed their bottles to René, and soon he was drunk and the brothers grew more boisterous, bragging of their wild and untrammeled lives, singing songs with endless verses. Toussaint said he knew more than forty songs; Fernand boasted that he had mastered more than fifty and that he would sing all of them this moment commencing with “Petit Rocher.” He began well but stopped after seven verses. He turned on René.

“You think this is all that we do, sing songs and walk through a forest? No! What they say, we live hard, love hard, sleep hard and eat moose nose!”

Toussaint pressed a dark chunk of food into René’s hand, saying it was not moose nose but pemmican. It had a burned, musty flavor and there were hairs in it and nodules of bright fat the color of a chicken’s foot. It was chewy stuff and the more he masticated it the more it swelled in his mouth. He took a gulp of whiskey and forced the pemmican down.