Free Barkskins by Annie Proulx Page B

lips curled in a dimpled smile. Monsieur Bouchard wondered why he did not wear a wig and tried to bring him into a discussion of books and ideas, to take his measure; was he a deep-dyed conservative, or a pioneer freethinker exploring novel cures? But Dr. Sarrazine, though polite, said his time was limited and he wished to see Mari as soon as possible. He carried a linen bag containing a notebook, cardboard stiffeners and a roll of drying papers. He had a packet of French needles for Mari. Monsieur Bouchard loaned him his only horse and, rather sadly, watched him ride west. Dr. Sarrazine returned in ten days, humming and smiling, his linen bag bulging with wild vegetable specimens, some of which he would send to the Jardin des Plantes. Bouchard, still longing for bookish conversation, watched the learned man board the ship to Kébec. The doctor turned, smiled his engaging smile and saluted. Bouchard returned the gesture and went back into his office.
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    The smoke-thickened years passed, and Crown corvée work gangs widened the west trail to a road. More settlers came into the forest. Every morning the sound of distant and near chopping annoyed woodpeckers who imagined rivals, then, feeling outnumbered, fled to wilder parts. The trees groaned and fell, men planted maize between the stumps. The deer and moose retreated, the wolves followed them north. In its own way the forest was swallowing René Sel, its destroyer. The forest was always in front of him. He was powerless to stop chipping at it, but the vigor of multiple sprouts from stumps and still-living roots grew in his face, the rise and fall of his ax almost a continuous circular motion. There seemed always more and more trees on the horizon. He suffered the knowledge that his countless ax blows were nothing against the endless extent of the earth’s spiky forest crown.
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    One spring Mari fell ill, complaining little but too confused to manage the household. She became thin, the round kind face giving way to the shape of the skull beneath; she saw visions and forgot everything said to her, forgot her children, forgot René, had to be tied in a chair to keep her from the river. For a year Renardette cared for her, but one bright May morning Mari answered her long-dead sisters, who called her as owls call.
    â€œThose sister say ‘come.’ ” In two hours she had joined them.
    René could not understand it. It was well known that Mi’kmaq lived long, long lives and remained strong until the last, and Mari was not old. It was the bitterest loss.
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    â€œIt is only fitting,” said Renardette to René when a week had passed, “that we should marry.” René shook his head, picked up the ax and walked out to the woodlot. Renardette, barely an adult, had become beer-swollen, imperious and hot-tempered, always smarting from imagined insults. She would not forget this one.
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    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