“Josime!” yelled Amboise. “You fool! Could of shot you.”
“If you had a firearm,” said Jinot, groping for the candle. Josime built up the fire outside, Amboise filled the kettle. They sat in front of the fire, brothers in stained shirts, spark-holed hats. In the first light their uncle-brother Josime saw the hackmatack knees.
“Is this man’s work?”
“No, we are now travelers and hunters. Go to that west forest, Pennsylvany, Ohio, we don’t know how far. Kuntaw said that forest goes to end of the world. We go there,” said Jinot. Amboise nodded. “That is our plan.”
Josime laughed. “That is not your plan. That is my plan. I care nothing for that woodland I was to share with Francis-Outger. He was happy to hear me say, ‘Brother, you can have it all.’ I think about you, my nephew-brothers. You better come with me, but I am going. Today. It is my plan.”
• • •
The decision began a welding of their lives and work as they angled north through the forest, leaving behind them a world of chopped and broken trees, woodland changed to cornfields and pasture. They yearned to go to a place where the trees still stood thick and wild. Josime said he had heard of a timber operation in the Gatineau country to the north.
“There is a man from Boston went there. He got three camps, sendin log rafts down to Montreal. I say go north.”
The important word for them was north. They were of the north and they would go north.
• • •
In ten days they walked to Three Rivers — Trois-Rivières — where they found some Omamiwinini downriver people preparing to go beyond Montreal up the Kichisìpi. These travelers, many women and children, in the care of a tall man with a dark and serious face, were happy to have three more strong men to help on the portages, to move along before the hard cold. Already there were morning frosts.
When they stopped for the first night a knot of girls enclosed Jinot. Some of them were exceptionally pretty. The Omamiwinini told Josime that some of them were Odaawa people on their way to Manitoulin Island, where other Odaawa people lived. Once, long ago, they had all lived on that big island, but whiteman’s diseases had come and the survivors set their villages afire; some moved to Trois-Rivières. Now they were returning home, for the diseases had disappeared. They would break their journey for a few days at First Meeting Place — Montréal. Josime, in another canoe, stared at one girl for a long time before he turned away and asked the men questions about the Gatineau. Yes, said the man with the serious face, it was true, whitemen cut pine up that river. They were making round logs to be flat on all sides. Very strange.
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.