Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  The startled woodsmen stared, then, still gripping their tools, they ran on an oblique course toward the river, where they likely had bateaux. But one with a dirty bandage on his right thigh lagged behind.

  Duquet did not pause. He drew his tomahawk from his belt and hurled it, striking the runner’s left calf. The man fell, crying to his comrades for help in a high childish voice. One of the escaping men turned around and stared at Duquet, called something to the fallen one. The confrontation lasted for only a few seconds but left an unfading impression of a man swelling with hatred. Duquet did not forget the man’s mottled slab of face encircled by ginger hair and beard, the yellow animal eyes fixed on him, the sudden turning away and violent run for the river.

  “They come from the settlements along the coast,” said Forgeron as they ran forward.

  They bound their wounded prisoner, a boy not older than fourteen, and dragged him to a pine, tied him against it in a hollow between projecting tree roots.

  “You boy, garçon, talk up or I cut first your fingers. Then your balls. Who you are? What men you with? How you come here?”

  The boy folded his lips in a tight crease, in either pain or defiance. Duquet wrenched the boy’s arm and spread his left hand against one of the great humped roots. With a quick slash of his ax he took off a little finger and part of the next.

  “Talk or I cut more. You die no head.”

  Duquet’s bloody interrogation gave him the information that the Maine thieves were in the employ of a mill owner, a man named McBogle, an agent of Elisha Cooke. Duquet had heard of Cooke for years; all described him as a passionate opponent of Crown authority. But McBogle’s name was new. Although his heart was pounding with anger, Duquet thought Elisha Cooke and perhaps even McBogle sounded like useful men and he fixed their names in his memory. He would learn more from Dred-Peacock.

  “Why you come here steal pine?” he said.

  “We thought only to cut a few trees. Away from the surveyor’s men.”

  “Show your wounds.” When the boy held up his maimed hand Duquet said angrily, “No, not that. Only scratch. Leg wound.” He could smell the stink of infection from a distance. With his good hand the boy unwrapped his right leg and disclosed a deep and rotten gash in the thigh. It was a foul injury. A streak of red inflammation ran up toward the groin.

  “How happen?” he demanded.

  “Uncle Robert felled a big pine. Broke off a branch that gouged my leg.”

  It was an evil mess. In contrast, the cut in the boy’s calf inflicted by Duquet’s hawk was clean though it had nearly severed a tendon, and the chopped finger was a trifle. Nothing to be done. They carried the youth to the interlopers’ camp half a mile downstream, strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him near the still-smoldering fire.

  “We will stay here,” said Duquet to Forgeron, “as the thieves have prepared a camp for us.” He tried to speak calmly, but he was filled with a greater anger than he had ever experienced. After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done, crossing to the New World, escaping from Trépagny, learning the hard voyageur trade, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, learning to read and write and cipher, traveling to China, all the business connections he had made, these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

  Forgeron brought their canoe up to the campsite while Duquet searched until he found the trespassers’ pit sawmill. They had been there only a few days, but had the clear intention to saw. The stack of limbed and squared logs told him that. He wondered if they had planned to build a fort. It was said the English were plotting to build forts along all the rivers.

  “Let us put our mark on them,” said Duquet, and he and Forgeron took possession of the logs with two deep hatchet slashes on the butt ends. They talked of ways to move them. In the end it seemed a raft floated to the nearest sawmill might be the best way, getting what they could. While Duquet stayed to guard the timber in case the thieves returned, Forgeron went to Portsmouth to hire raftsmen.

  During the early evening the mildness went out of the weather. The sky filled with clouds the color of dark grapes, followed by an hour of rain; behind it the temperature dived into winter. Duquet woke at dawn, shivering. There was not a breath of wind but every twig and branch bristled with spiky hoarfrost. In the distance wolves howled messages to each other, their cries filleting the morning. They had likely scented the boy’s blood and infection and would linger out of sight hoping for a chance. Duquet got up and piled more wood on the fire. The wounded boy’s eyes were closed, his face feverish and swollen, cheeks wet with melting frost. Duquet thought he would be dead after one more cold night. Or he might not last until nightfall.

  With some urgency he prodded the boy awake and fired questions at him: his name, his village, his family’s house, how many people. But the boy only croaked for water, which Duquet did not give him, and then went silent. He still lived. Duquet spent the short day estimating the board feet in the felled pines.

  The light faded early as the growing storm invaded the sky, the wind and sleety snow rattling and hissing in the pines. While there was still enough light to see clearly, Duquet walked over to the prisoner. The boy lay on his back, the right leg bursting with infection, a yellow froth of pus oozing out from under the bandage, the leg a little splayed as though it were detaching itself. Nothing could be done with this burden except wait for him to die—one more cold night. The boy opened his eyes and stared at something across the river. Duquet followed his gaze, expecting to see Indians or perhaps one of the thieves returning. He saw only a wall of pines until a blink of yellow showed him where to look. A tall grey owl sat on a branch, seeing them. Its eyes were very small and set close together like twin gimlets.

  The boy spoke. “Help. Me,” he said in English. “Help. Me.”

  Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pinecone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. “No one helped me!” he shrieked. “I did everything myself! I endured! I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die! No one helped me!” The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm, closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. Duquet struck the hatchet into the loam to clean it.

  In the flying snow he dismantled the sawpit scaffolding and threw the boy into the pit hole, piled the scaffolding on top and set it alight. The gibbous moon rose. Hours later when the burning ceased he went to shovel in the half-frozen excavated soil, but before he hurled the first shovelful he glanced down and saw the black arm bones crooked up as if reaching for a helping hand.

  “Foutu! Done for!”

  He shoveled.

  Forgeron arrived four days later with six men who began constructing a raft of the cut pines. There was no sign of the wounded boy and although Forgeron opened his mouth as if to speak several times, he did not say anything except that the war was making it very difficult to find able-bodied labor.

  21

  shifting ground

  Again Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke & Sons and he was Charles Duke. Still he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

  “Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” asked Duke, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

  Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I hear much deleterious talk concerning his ways. Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, sawmills, surveyors, armies of tree choppers, potash and turpentine distillers and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

 
; “They think as I do,” said Duke, “so I cannot fault them. But although they love guns beyond telling, and protect themselves, the woods are dangerous with enemies, not only war foes, but the Crown Surveyor’s men. Yet they are only men.”

  “The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster in Ireland.”

  “Surely they are as other mortal men?”

  “No. They are different. They are damned strange, cruel men, clannish and proud to a fault, thirsty for vengeance over imagined slights, hard-drinking and inhumanly tough. The whoresons prefer to sleep outside in storms rather than in the comfort of a house. They know the country as the poxy Indians know it and to live free is their banner. The buggers are impervious to cold and heat and they bear pain as the Indians do, stoically and silently, even with relish. The ridges and watercourses are their highways, the forest their shelter. They choose to live in the most remote places. And they are bloody damned key fighters in the escalating antipathy between the French and the English.” He paused and took up his coffee cup, stared into Duke’s eyes.

  “Dud McBogle, his brothers and his sons are among these men.”

  Duke threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I have heard bugbear stories aplenty and I would class McBogle tales among them. No doubt he eats children as sweetmeats and wears a red fur cloak bespangled with their bones. What do you say when I tell you I consider taking this man on as a partner?”

  For once Dred-Peacock had nothing to say.

  • • •

  The ongoing war and marauding Indians forced Maine’s settlements to cluster along the tidewater margins; among them were several small shipyards. But Charles Duke discovered Penobscot Bay, where the great river discharged into the Atlantic and where he built a large house. He thought himself the first white man here, despising a few French-speaking métis, fruit of the fornicating priests who had lived earlier among the Indians. The land around the bay, called Norumbega by an unknown explorer, was fancied by credulous souls to be the site of a fabulous city crusted with gold and gems, as Kinkenadon or L’Isle Imaginaire. And here mustachioed Henry Hudson had cut the first mast pine in the New World. For that reason alone he liked the place.

  Duke’s log house was more like a fort than a dwelling. Half the ground floor was given over to his business room, with its enormous table fashioned from a single slab of pine four feet in width. And it was time to bring his sons, now young men, to the New World and set them to work, although little Outger was still too young to leave his mother.

  His Amsterdam sons, Jan and Nicolaus Duke, were fluent in Dutch, French and English with smatterings of German, Frisian and Portuguese. Jan was especially good with numbers and understood the finer points of bookkeeping. He was as forward-looking as a raftsman in a rocky river. Nicolaus, of imposing build, was physically strong and had a ruthless streak that Duke thought would make him feared at the bargaining table. He and Bernard were something of mariners, as both had several times sailed to China on the ships of Piet Roos. Jan and Nicolaus would deal with merchants, contracts and shipping. The French son, Bernard, was on his way from the Baltic, where he had studied the technical details of manufacturing pitch and tar, and where he had picked up a little of the Swedish language and enough Danish to be useful. He would be in charge of naval store production. And he, Charles Duke, the father, would continue to establish contacts, buy up paper townships and arrange for woodsmen and sawmills on the important rivers, to oversee the growing empire. It was time to gather his sons to him. And yet he was not interested in them in any way except an eagerness to recognize proofs of their success. They were the sons he needed. He wrote to Cornelia in English.

  Beste Deer Wif.

  I hope this liter find you and the childer in good helth I wishd to rite three Dayes pass but found ye Inkwel soe dry no Words in it and by some unhapy chance ye Cup Bord destit of Supply A qart come yester and todaye I take Quil in Hande to rite it is Time my Sons whose Care and Educasun you have fosterd begin Busines Life here with me in Boston and Mane cost New Franc I will rite them eache & mak ye Arangemt firm. I am covincd they will sucede in all our Procedings with ye help of your deer Fater and Unkul They are as capable as I hev ever wish I regret when I am far from and destite of frend hear and hop join you three mos. time I prey that you wil not want for hapy Compnee entil I return.

  Charles Duke, Penoscot Bay Cost of Mane

  Martch 3. 1717

  He lodged his sons in Boston, but they came to the Penobscot Bay house once a month to meet in the business room, to spread out their papers and books on the great pine table.

  He had not been wrong. Already, within a few months, the sons began to put forth their impressions and ideas. Jan, with his long bony face and hazel eyes slitted as though squinting into the future, was perhaps the most long-seeing, but they spoke among themselves before presenting him with new ideas.

  “Father,” said Jan. “We have noticed that more and more English and Scots shipwrights are settling along the New England coast. We think it would be a sensible move to get a foothold in the shipbuilding industry. It would reduce the necessity of transporting lumber, masts, bowsprits and yards to English or European ports. It is an opportunity.”

  “Yes,” said Duke. “I have often felt it would be good to move into shipbuilding, often and often, but I hesitated. You reassure me.”

  “Also,” said Bernard, who had confounded them all when he arrived from the Baltic countries with a great horsy wife, Birgit, “pitch and tar. We have pitch pine here, of course, but the superior trees are in the Carolinas. And slaves. I would suggest that we purchase and operate a pitch pine plantation in Carolina.”

  “It shall be done,” said the gratified father.

  22

  disappearance

  In Boston one day Dred-Peacock came to him at the Duke warehouse, a cavernous building near the docks, redolent of pine, oak, furs and roots.

  “I thought you might wish to know that the man you mentioned some time ago has been asking many people about you. How many sawmills you own, how disgustingly large your fortune may be, what ships you have, what tracts of timber and townships you possess. He himself operates five or six or more sawmills on the Penobscot tributaries and in New Hampshire. He begins to look like a serious rival.”

  “Who do you mean? Elisha Cooke?” said Duke.

  “His damned hard man, McBogle.”

  “Indeed,” said Duke. “I hear this sometimes. He asks questions but we never see him. What is your own perception of this situation?”

  “I think as you do, that he should be absorbed. He has the reputation of a dangerous man. I doubt we could buy him out but a partnership may be attractive. He has friendly relations not only with Elisha Cooke and the Wentworths, but with many judges and businessmen here and in New Hampshire. Yet he does not have our contacts across the Atlantic.” It was Dred-Peacock who had the invaluable English and European contacts.

  “We must talk with him and see what might be arranged. Where do we find him?”

  “That may be difficult. He has what they call a ‘thunderstorm sawmill’—because the only time it runs properly is when the water is high with rain—on the Moosegut and a house nearby. He keeps very much to himself in this remote place. If we go to him we must bring a few men with us for I hear he has a band of ruffians at his beck. I could accompany you a week today. But no sooner.”

  “Bien,” said Duke. “Good enough.”

  Then, within the hour, Forgeron, who had led a crew of woodsmen to cut one of Duke’s pine-heavy townships, arrived in Boston. His lean face was blotched with a red rash. He hesitated, as though he wished not to speak his news. When he did speak he threw his words down like playing cards.

  “We found the best trees taken. The stumps still oozed sap.”

  “Who?” said Duke.

  “Ne sais pas—don’t know. But there is talk that the man McBogle l
ast week shipped two great loads of masts to Spain. He will have made a fat profit. He is known for tree piracy.”

  “I plan to find this man in a week’s time and see what can be arranged. We will work with him.”

  “He is not known for compliance.”

  “Nor am I. Dred-Peacock will accompany us on the Monday. You must come as well.” Something had to be done about McBogle and they would do it. “It is necessary we go in a body as we do not know the strength of McBogle’s men.” But over the last year Duke’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate, dimness alternating with flashing light and tiny particles gliding through his field of vision like birds in the sky. He said nothing to Forgeron of this, only “what is wrong with your face that it shows so rough and crimson?” Forgeron shrugged.

  • • •

  The plan was ill-fated. Two days later a packet entered Boston harbor with great sacks of mail. Among Dred-Peacock’s mountain of letters was one informing him that his older brother and nephew had both perished in fire, and that he, Dred-Peacock, had succeeded to the title, the great house (now with a somewhat charred east wing) and the family’s two-thousand-acre estate, Dred Yew in Wiltshire. In seconds his talk of colonial liberty and rights evaporated, his self-definition as a man dedicated to New England self-rule shriveled.

  “I must go,” he said to Duke. “It is my responsibility to my family and to the estate—and the great yew tree now in my care. I cannot evade the title nor the responsibility. I leave at once.” In his voice Duke detected a long-suppressed tone of haughtiness. “I will write to you when I have settled my affairs. I believe we can continue our business ventures.”

  “Yes,” said Duke. “I quite see it.” Scratch some New England colonists, he thought, and you find Englishmen, as the bark of a tree hides inner rot. “But I cannot believe your chatter about a ‘yew tree.’ What man would leave a fair and rich land for the sake of a haughty tree?”

  “It is an immortal tree, centuries old. It has been on my family estate since a time before Christ, since the time when men worshiped yews and oaks. It is nothing you can understand.” What could Duke say to that? Nothing. What mattered was the continuance of their business dealings. And as if that were not enough, word came that Forgeron was ill with a fiery skin inflammation and the quinsy, a putrid sore throat that forced him into his bed. Duke said he would not delay. He would seek out McBogle alone.