Barkskins (26 page)

A
chille went into the disputed border region between Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick. He found Georges Fraude, a middle-aged Frenchman with a great bald dome to the apex of his head from which line of demarcation his hair flared back in thick silver waves.

“I got a woods crew two days south. Pay choppers good wages. I got some Indans—you all go together down to the camp. Right away.” He snorted and spat on the ground. “Got to be fast. Everywhere there's falls there's a sawmill nowdays. We'll cut pine all the winter.” He spat again and hitched at his drooping trousers. “I want men to work the rafts when the ice goes.” Achille signed up.

Men were chopping pine in hundreds of places. The big softwoods fell. New seedlings burst up on cutover ground, but now there was a break in the density of the woodland, and as new trees sprouted, the species succession shifted a little in each cutover tract. The forest began to alter in small ways. It still lived but it was not what it had been. Few noticed. The forest was a grand resource and it was both the enemy and wealth. Achille felt it was the same with the Mi'kmaq; the white settlers used them and took them down.

•  •  •

Four of them walked to the camp, all Mi'kmaq. There was a little snow on the ground. As they walked, the
kookoogwes
called and called—René's name for this little owl had been
chouette
—and the English bent it into
saw-whet.
The youngest of them, Perrine, was making his first attempt at a paid job. He was not more than eighteen winters, thought Achille. Watching over him was his uncle, Toosh, also from Cape Breton.

They reached Fraude's camp boss, Alois LaGrange, in late afternoon. The man was a block of muscle, with a knife-scarred face and whiskers like pinfeathers. He gave them a sour look, pointed in the direction of the camp.

They found a clearing full of stumps and two rough and windowless hovels built by the loggers; one had a stick chimney in the roof and a fire pit in the single room below. Achille put his head inside the door, but the insufferable whiteman stink made him reel.

“I rather sleep with wolves than whitemen,” said Toosh. They would build their own
wikuom
and keep to themselves.

In the greying daylight they quickly cut sapling poles and slabs of spruce bark, made a large but rough A-frame
wikuom
some distance from the reeking hovel of the whitemen. They weighted the slanting sides with poles. It was shelter. In a few weeks it would be half-covered with insulating snow.

When he saw the new lodging Alois LaGrange said, “
Bien!
Less trouble that way, keepin men separate.” He was thinking of the inevitable fights and lost days of work. “Got two other Indans, Passamaquoddy, in the crew, better they move in with you.” LaGrange said this would keep all the chickens in the same coop, so to speak. Achille nodded. At least the Passamaquoddy were Algonkian relatives of the Mi'kmaq.

There were three groups: Maine men, French-Canadas and Indians. The Maine men, crouched around their indoor fire pit, put their various fixings in one gigantic frying pan and, cursing and blowing on their burned fingers, ate directly out of the hot utensil. The French buried a cast-iron Dutch oven filled with beans in the hot ashes of the central fire pit to cook overnight. When they had pork they added it to the beans. These beans smelled very delicious and when the Maine men could stand it no longer they stole the cast-iron pot, carried it into the woods and ate the contents. The empty Dutch oven was found a mile from the camp, near where they were cutting, and there was a tremendous fight with ax handles, rocks, knives, one man dead and the iron pot recovered by the supperless French. Most of the Maine men left the camp the next day. When a new crew came in from Bangor, they brought a Dutch oven and a bushel of dried beans.

The Indians cooked meat outdoors on the coals on the lee side of their
wikuom,
protected from the wind. They had no iron kettle, but the Passamaquoddy shared two good bark baskets so they could heat water for spruce tea. The Passamaquoddy had a little bag of China tea but the Mi'kmaq preferred spruce tips and black birch bark. During the daylight hours while chopping Achille kept an eye open for game, or even put down his ax for an hour or two and hunted the ridges. When at last he found a bear's den under the snow they spent their free Sunday killing it. The frozen meat lasted a month, and the pelt went on the
wikuom
floor, the best place to sit. None of them had more than a few words of English, but Achille began to learn the tongue-twisting talk.

He had several axes, including an old one that had belonged to René. Hard use had worn away much of the cutting-edge metal and the thick remnant dulled quickly. He wanted an American falling ax with a heavy poll and, if he had enough money, a good goose-wing hewing ax. He planned to buy these when Fraude paid him for the winter's work. He thought of René and his inimitable chopping style. At this moment in among the big pines he missed him and wished they were cutting together again. Every chopper had his own way of doing the work, but René had been notable for quick light strokes with his very sharp ax; he could go on chopping for hours without tiring. As a boy Achille had found it difficult to chop in rhythm with him.

•  •  •

As spring began its slow crawl up from the south, Georges Fraude arrived on a heavily breathing horse one morning and said they had to get the logs into the river immediately. The ice was going, and with one more warm day the snowmelt freshets would pour into the heavier water. But they still had hundreds of logs to drag out of the woods.

“Forget them! Roll what we got in the water.” The man's haste seemed desperate and Achille remarked on it to the swamper.

Leon LaFlèche, one of the French choppers, said, “Did you not know that we are in the New England colonies and that we have cut their forbidden mast pines all the winter long?”

“Know nothing that. Thought we was in—what they call it?—Brunsick.”

Leon laughed. “That is why Fraude is in a hurry. The owner of this forest tract must be sendin his men to seize the logs and Fraude heard of it. The owners always know where we cuttin and let us do the work. Then they take the logs the last minute before we get them into the river.”

Getting the logs in the water was the trick. The river flowed north into New Brunswick, where they would be pulled out by Georges Fraude's sawmill men and metamorphosed from the English king's mast pines into New Brunswick planks. Fraude shouted and ran back and forth, urging the men to roll the logs faster. But before thirty timbers were in the drink a gang of woodsmen and Bangor toughs armed with ax handles and chains burst out of the forest and the fight was on. The militant ox teamster led Fraude's troops in joyous resistance; the Maine men enjoyed fights above all else. They were grossly outnumbered, for the landowner had rounded up scores of men from the saloons with the promise of pay and an exciting fight. Those of Fraude's men who could swim plunged in and made for the far shore.

The logs were captured by the landowner. Fraude paid no one. Most of the Mi'kmaq headed north, but Achille, who had meant to go back to Elphège and fetch Kuntaw and Auguste, could not return empty-handed. He drifted south looking for work.

E
lphège, now sixty-six winters, was half-blind but sat outside in fair weather. The smell of autumn, the tick of waxy leaves hitting one another on their descent to earth let him remember the fierce colors. The leaves fell, the first winter winds swept them into hollows, rain and new snow pressed them flat. Then the woods went silent.

Winters he huddled next to the fire, buried in thoughts of colors and fog, of hunts and journeys, of the terrible day six years earlier when scorching tears burned his cheeks as he knelt beside Theotiste's headless corpse. Despite his fifty-nine years Theotiste had become a warrior. In August 1749, when Cornwallis, ignoring Mi'kmaq territorial rights, declared Halifax an English settlement, Theotiste's band attacked some English tree-choppers. He escaped the avenging rangers, but fell the next week to an unknown assassin, his head a prize to a bounty hunter.

Elphège was now composing his death song. Noë's daughter Febe, after the death of her mother, had moved in to care for him. Sometimes they guessed at what might have befallen Achille, the youngest brother, who went to Maine to chop trees years before.

“Kuntaw,” said Febe. “Kuntaw will find him,” for Kuntaw, after much trouble with his wife, Malaan, left her and their boy, Tonny, and went south to search.

“If he lives,” said Elphège. “If he lives. Many evils could befall Kuntaw as he is headstrong.”

“Not so headstrong as Auguste.” Auguste spent much time with the English; he broke many English laws, drank whiskey, stole, he was imprisoned and beaten but remained defiant. The English called him a bad Indian and he took pleasure in the epithet.

“One day they will kill you,” warned Elphège.

“No. I kill them,” said Auguste. It was true that occasionally some villager was found drowned in the lake behind the town, or washed up on the shore, the white puckered body lacerated with knife wounds. Children had wandered into the forest and never emerged, their bones found years later with great crunched holes in the skulls. No one knew how these things had happened but Elphège had thoughts he did not wish to explore.

It was amusing to Elphège that with age he was presumed to be a wise man, even a
sagmaw.
Many people came to him to ask what they should do when an English housewife threw scalding water on a Mi'kmaw child begging food, or when another asked for magic help. It was a punishment to see his people half starved, skulking around the English and asking for employment or food. There were not many Mi'kmaw people left in the world, and each of them seemed plagued by sickness, hunger and sadness. They died easily, for they wished to die.

•  •  •

Years went by and Achille did not go north to his people. He kept to himself. He had the reputation of a skilled axman. The camp toughs stayed away from him. He fought with intensity and cold malice, and a man who had come up behind him in the woods and tried to club him at the base of the neck was spouting blood from the stump of his forearm—his severed hand hit the ground before he could strike. Another who crept up in the night with a firebrand to burn Achille's
wikuom
was himself roasted though no one knew quite how it had happened. The man's charred body was dumped in front of the shanty. Newcomers to the logging camp were warned to stay shy of the killer Indian, the reincarnation of the bloodthirsty savages who had massacred settlers in earlier times.

Kuntaw heard some of these stories as he made his way from camp to camp after leaving Malaan and Tonny in Mi'kma'ki. He hired on as a swamper for Duquet et Fils. It was becoming difficult to find good chances of pine on fair-size streams, so the swampers worked summers, constructing dams on the smallest rills. And the forest was dangerous; the fighting, ambushes and skirmishes continued. Men were in a killing mood.

There were more Indians in the Maine camps, and occasionally he heard some news of one named Sheely. He thought it might be Achille. This Sheely was a very good hunter, a good axman. All Kuntaw could find out was that Sheely was working in York state, cutting pine on the Raquette River. He made up his mind to go there in spring. It would take two weeks of walking, he thought. Maybe he would join Achille's crew. How surprised his father would be. Maybe they would go to Mi'kma'ki together after they drove the logs down to Montreal. He would have his wages and they could arrange passage in a trade canoe until the river forced them to walk.

The spring of 1758 came on uncommonly fast; one day the shrinking snow was frozen and he could make good time, the next it was mush and mud. The forest gurgled and slopped. It was slow going and when he reached the river Frenchmen rolling logs into the black water said Sheely had gone with the first logs.

“Hey, Indan, you look him Montreal,” they said. “Maybe Nouveau Brunswick. Maybe Terre-Neuve. Maybe
l'enfer.
” Suddenly the long chase seemed foolish. He turned back and headed for Maine. There was still time to hire on a spring drive. It wasn't meant for him to find Achille.

•  •  •

A month later he was on the west shore of Penobscot Bay in Catawamkeag, where crews were loading timber onto ships for export. There were several shipyards and a straggle of whiteman houses, one great log house and a tiny settlement of the few surviving Penobscots. He walked along the street fronting the bay following five or six other lumberjacks headed for the loggers' bar where most of the rivermen would drink, wake up the next day penniless and amnesiac.

Kuntaw felt very well. He was strong, his muscular body hard. He was relieved to have given up the search for Achille. Maybe someday they would find each other, but now he would enjoy being alive and vigorous. He strode along, his eyes flashing left and right as he took in the sights. After six months in the woods even the poor settlement of Catawamkeag looked like a city.

“You!” called a strident voice in English. “You there, you Indian!”

He turned and looked behind him. There was a young woman on a brown horse and she was pointing at him. He guessed correctly that she had only eighteen winters, a double-handful less than he.

“Come here.” Her voice was firm.

He hesitated, then shrugged and walked toward the horse. It was a valuable horse, nothing like the big scarred beasts that drew logs to the landings. He stood a few yards back from the horse and looked at the girl. She was elegant, wearing a black cloak edged in red. Something about her dark-ivory face said she was part Indian.

“You like to make some money?” she asked, moving close. She lifted her head and inhaled his odor of smoke, meat and pine pitch.