Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  “You made it,” said Sapatisia. She was still in dirty jeans and the heavy grey sweater. “Sit down and have something. The coleslaw—where is it—” She half-rose.

  “I’ve got it,” said the man. His eyes looked bruised. He was older than the others, tall and thin, with a scar that torqued his mouth into a crooked slant. He stretched out a long arm and pushed the coleslaw bowl down the table. He looked at Jeanne and Felix.

  “That’s Tom Paulin,” said Sapatisia, and she made sketchy introductions: “Jeanne Sel, Felix Sel, Tom Paulin, Hugdis Sigurdsson and Charlene Lopez. Let’s eat now and then talk about the project.” Her knotty dark hair was held back in a ponytail that resembled a Percheron’s fly whisk; her eyes reflected the window light with a pale flash. Felix repeated “Tom Paulin” to himself, Tom Paulin the coleslaw passer. There was something about the man’s straight back and the way he moved that indicated tension.

  • • •

  They tossed the gnawed chicken bones into the stove; Jeanne smelled them scorching.

  Sapatisia said, “So then. Briefly, the Breitsprecher Tree Project does forest replanting. We have ties with as many as thirty conservation groups and we often work within their programs. The six of us make a work group. We like to have ten, but this time we have six. A few more might come later. We will be the only team working in Nova Scotia this season and there is a lot to do. We’ll plant trees and monitor several test plots outplanted three years ago. We keep detailed notes on how well they are doing for up to ten years. One particular plot was showing a lot of chlorosis last year. Dozens of variables. I have a pet site where we’re looking for the effects of mycorrhizal fungi on seedling growth. Burned soil is deficient in mycorrhizae and seedlings do not do well without them—their presence increases nutrient and mineral intake.”

  Sapatisia looked down the table at Jeanne and Felix scribbling notes, Charlene staring back at her, Tom Paulin in his private distance. She said, “Come back to us, Tom.” She spoke softly. She knew a little about him: that he had been through deadly experiences in Afghanistan years earlier, and that after he came home, somehow trees had saved him. He looked at her, cracked out a blink of a smile like someone working a mirror against the sun. She went on.

  “Whenever we can we’ll visit the province’s ecoregions, starting tomorrow with the highland plateau. It’s useful to have a grasp of small areas, to know what is special about each. Once you understand how to assess different geographies, soils and hydrologies, sizing up new places will become second nature.”

  Felix said, “You mentioned different countries—will we go to other places or just stay here?” Tom Paulin nodded, poured more tea into his personal cup marked with mù, the Chinese ideogram for tree.

  “For this three-month session you stay here. Next year you may work in a tropical rain forest.” Jeanne noticed that Sapatisia’s hands were dark, the nails broken. She looked at her own white, useless hands. The room was quiet and they could faintly hear the relentless cry of the harrier.

  “If you like a particular kind of work you might specialize—Tom knows about wildfires and deforestation. Charlene is our expert on planting techniques.” She nodded at the handsome hawk-nosed woman whose hair was twisted into an intricate knot at the back of her head. Jeanne wondered how she managed it in a tent.

  Sapatisia said, “So. Essential information for our newcomers. The Tree Project will supply you with room and board and pay for your travel and all equipment and tools. Sometimes you will be living in tents, sometimes in hotels or with a host family. This month it’s tents. The team will work together on the same plot. The work is hard and dirty. Next week Charlene will show Jeanne, Felix and Hugdis how we plant trees—we’ll be doing spruce, birch, fir, maples, hemlock on several cutover degraded plots—and the burned plots—all near enough so we can use this place for our camp. We’ll share the cooking, kitchen and cleanup chores.”

  “Then this project is not about medicinal plants?” asked Felix. He had noticed that Sapatisia often glanced at Charlene. What was that about?

  “It can be medicinal plants where they are natural constituents of an area. Don’t jump to the conclusion that medicinal plants only benefit humans—animals and other plants also use natural medicines. We often have to guess what understory plants belong in the mix because on badly degraded land we are not entirely sure what was there before the cut. You’ll see as we go along.” The male harrier flew from the tree and his shadow crossed the window.

  Sapatisia said, “Tomorrow we will be on the plateau to examine the mixed-wood forests.” From the red cupboard she took a stack of notebooks stamped BREITSPRECHER TREE PROJECT. “For field notes. Don’t forget to consult the project’s online library. A huge amount of information is available.” She took up a sheaf of papers.

  “Here are thumbnail descriptions of the geology and soils we’ll see tomorrow. Add your personal observations to these notes. And remember that where there are highlands, there must be lowlands with bogs and marshes—they are not discrete.”

  “And moose,” murmured Felix. He was here. He’d welcome anything he could learn.

  “Yes, and otters and beaver, muskrats and dragonflies, mosquitoes, beetles and worms, and how do they all fit into the forest’s life? Try to approach questions from the viewpoint of the forest.” She looked at Tom Paulin as she said this. Then, more briskly, “If you have questions about fires and soils, ask Tom. Always share your knowledge.”

  On the pages she passed out Felix saw a jumble of new words—glacial till, ferro-humic podzols, Proterozoic intrusives, gleysols, fibrisols. He was excited by the names of the soils. This was real knowledge.

  Jeanne had a question that had plagued her since she opened the envelope and saw the check fall out. “Why us?” she asked. “Why do you think Mi’kmaw people should do this?” Tom Paulin looked at Jeanne as if he were on a voyage of discovery and seeing a new land for the first time.

  “It is not just Mi’kmaw people working on the project. Some are Mi’kmaw, we are even related as I’m sure you know, but Hugdis comes from Iceland and Charlene from Mexico. Tom is from the American south. In Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Cambodia, Sumatra, Vietnam, United States West Coast, many of the people working to replant forests and resurrect damaged rivers are the children of indigenous forest residents. Dispossessed people who lived in forests for millennia until recently are the ones who step forward to do the repair work. They are the ones who best understand how to heal the forest.

  “It will take thousands of years for great ancient forests to return. None of us here will see the mature results of our work, but we must try, even if it is only one or two people with buckets of seedlings working to put forest pieces back together. It is terribly important to all of us humans—I can’t find the words to say how important—to help the earth regain its vital diversity of tree cover. And the forests will help us. They are old hands at restoring themselves.

  “Now I’m going out to Sobeys market. Let’s try for supper at five thirty?” She left and they heard the red pickup charge up the hill.

  • • •

  “When she mentioned forest people,” said Jeanne to Hugdis, “I was going to ask if that idea of idyllic tribes living in wild forestland isn’t a myth, like the myth of pristine primeval forest before the whitemen came. And actually isn’t it a favor to bring those people into modern life now?”

  “Jeanne!” cried Felix. “You don’t think it was a favor for the French and English to ‘bring’ the Mi’kmaq into their idea of modern life. I know you don’t.”

  Jeanne blushed and tensed in embarrassment. “That was different.”

  Hugdis changed the subject by telling the bizarre story of how the crazy Nazis tried to make the Bialowieza forest in Poland into the great primeval wilderness, about their efforts in back-breeding cattle to something they imagined was the extinct aurochs. And that started Tom on the sadness of Afghan people chopping down their last pitiful trees to sell for firewood; they talked un
til they heard the red truck come down the hill. One thing about this group, thought Felix, they really like talking about trees.

  • • •

  “Spaghetti tonight,” said Sapatisia, coming in with bags of food and bottles of wine. “If you don’t like the food you get to be the next cook.”

  Tom Paulin refilled the woodbox, stoked the stove, Charlene put a great pot of water on to boil, Jeanne and Hugdis chopped onions and green peppers, Felix sliced a large wrinkled pepperoni sausage into near-translucent disks and found bowls and forks. When Sapatisia mixed the sauce into the pasta she set the pot directly on the table.

  As they ate they talked of their lives and families, but everyone kept looking at Sapatisia. To Jeanne, who had become an instant disciple, she seemed to stand for all that was good.

  It was almost dark when they finished. Tom Paulin went outside while the rest of them cleared the table and Sapatisia rinsed out the teapot. Jeanne began to wash the dishes. Tom came back in and said, “The moon is coming up.” In the window they all saw the red moon, made ragged by sea fog, rising swiftly out of the ocean, paling as it climbed. It looked close enough to hit with a harpoon and seemed to draw farther away as it rose. Jeanne knew the moon’s apparent recession was only its rise above the distorting atmosphere, but suppose, she thought, that this time it kept going, becoming smaller and more distant like the waving hand of someone on a ferry.

  • • •

  The old stove radiated heat as they sat with their cups of tea and talked on, picking up on their earlier conversation about the tropics.

  “It seems,” said Sapatisia, “you are all more interested in tropical than boreal woodlands?”

  “They are more endangered, aren’t they? I keep reading that the forests of Sumatra will be gone in twenty years,” said Jeanne. “There is a sense of urgency.”

  “And you think boreal forests are less threatened? A misapprehension. You are attracted to the romance of the tropics. There has been a lot of media attention lately—Disney Company roasted for using wood pulp from poached tropical trees to make children’s books. Hardwood floor companies suddenly swearing that they only use ecologically sound plantation-grown trees.”

  She went on. “Charlene, you’ve spent time in Brazil and Colombia. How many trees and how many tree species would you say grow in Amazonia?”

  “My God, who knows! The diversity is so great and the different species so scattered—”

  Tom interrupted. “I read the Field Museum’s report last year that said sixteen thousand species and I don’t remember how many million trees.”

  Sapatisia nodded. “And they estimate around three hundred and ninety billion individual trees in the Amazon basin.”

  Tom looked at her. “How the hell can we understand those numbers? North America only has one thousand species. Sixteen thousand!”

  Sapatisia crooked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yes, how do we grasp these enormous diverse numbers? But the report also said that half the trees actually belong to a much smaller count of two hundred twenty-seven species—the predominants, including cacao, rubber, açai berries, Brazil nuts.”

  Charlene poured more tea. “Those are the trees humans have been growing for centuries. Aren’t there more of those species because human have nurtured them?”

  Sapatisia shrugged. “Possibly. We just don’t know. Some people are sure those hyperdominants were in the catbird seat because preconquest indigenous people grew them. On the other hand, some think they were always dominant and are in a naturally stable state. Quite a nice little puzzle.

  “And that’s the allure,” she went on. “The slippery composition of ecosystems in general. It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

  Tom Paulin leaned forward. Felix thought he had loosened up since dinner—maybe it was the wine. “I’m thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick—not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I’m thinking about ‘dark diversity.’ Like dark matter.”

  “Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this.

  “A little like absent presence—when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow—absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants—dark diversity.”

  “But if conditions change again will the absent plant return?” asked Jeanne. “Are you saying extinction is not forever?”

  “Sit next to me in the van tomorrow and we’ll figure out dark diversity and dark matter. Right now I need sleep.” He thought that she was not pretty but she had that soft beautiful skin color. And feelings. And a mind.

  • • •

  No one could sleep under such a moon. Its bitter white light destroyed repose. It was like acid poured over the landscape, seeping into every crevice.

  • • •

  Felix thought first of soil types, then of the unborn millions of tree cutters to come. And Sapatisia’s emphasis on how enormously important the work was, not just a job but a cause, a lifework. He had listened to Onehube—was this the big thing he, Felix, could do? A drowsy thought swam to the surface—he might now actually be doing it—forest work. Had he gotten around the barrier of college and even the university? Yes, he was at the edge of the forest. This was his start. They could not pull him back.

  • • •

  And Jeanne felt a stream of joy like a narrow sun ray breaking through heavy overcast, a sense that in this one day her life had become filled with leafy meaning. Because of Sapatisia Sel.

  • • •

  Tom Paulin in his travel-worn sleeping bag was remembering Afghanistan and lost comrades, men welded tightly by searing experiences that outsiders could never understand. There was dark diversity for you. He found civilian life unbearably lonely; he tasted the sour flavor of belonging nowhere but with the old broken group, forever stitched to each other like parts of a coat—the loneliness of a ripped-out sleeve, he thought. And then at Seeley Lake he had found the larches. Running from suicidal despair he had joined a work crew in an old-growth larch forest where lightning storms fried the summer skies. The Indians had burned underbrush to encourage grassy meadows for deer, but in the last century thickets of Doug fir crowded out larch sprouts. He touched one tree’s soft needles. A thought, unbidden, came—that one of his lost friends was inside that young tree. The burn of anxious grief for that fallen friend began to soften. The work crew had fired the built-up fuel load around the old larches, and the next year seedlings surged up in their thousands. He went on to different forests and in each of the young trees he saw the brothers he had lost. The more seedlings he planted, the more of them he resurrected.

  • • •

  Sapatisia tossed on her bed in the sleeping loft where once fishermen had stored their gear. It emitted a faint odor of stale bedding and old wool, of ancient seaboots and the wood handles of scaling knives. Every place in the world, she thought, had its own distinctive smell. The smell of old Mi’kma’ki must have been wet stones, sea wrack, pine and spruce, mellowing needle duff under the trees, a smell of salted wind and sassafras, of river fish and the people who lived in it, hair and limbs cleansed in the ever-flowing aromatic air. She rolled onto her side and looked down through a gap in the floorboards and saw moonlight shining on the teacups. She turned again and looked at the glowing sea.

  Her thoughts surged like the bubbles rising up the sides of a boiling pot. Nothing done. Everything still unsaid, nothing ready. She had not yet told them of the dangers, that forest restoration workers were attacked and killed, that any kind of interruption to the profitable destruction of forests invited reprisal. She had not mentioned the floods of propaganda and lies that would drown them. She had not told them about the devouring fires, the rich peat-bog carbon mass of the boreal Canadian forests that burned hotter than those of Euras
ia, the uncontrollable crown fires were changing the earth’s albedo. In the morning she had to tell them.

  New thoughts rushed in. Would they work as a group? Not everyone was suited to the life. She thought Felix would be good—he was hungry for the work. Tom Paulin was her rock, he would carry this group—if he stayed alive. Jeanne might be the finest kind once she found her way. Wait and see. Hugdis would leave in November. And there was Charlene, Charlene sulking again over some imagined wrong. And Mayara—no, she did not want to remember, she would not! But there was Mayara, rising in her memory, dark mestizo activist Mayara, sister, daughter, lover. Yes, and beautiful, too. And the treacherous memory would not stop there but leapt to Mayara on the day she had taken the foreign journalist to see a savagely destructive cut in a protected sanctuary, red mahogany logs lying on the ground, the butts still wet, when the cutters returned carrying guns instead of chain saws. As if they had known. Of course they had known. It was over in seconds, short bursts of gunfire. The photographs had shown Mayara cut in half, folded as though she were trying to kiss her own knees. Her knees! Her beautiful brown, rounded knees.

  There followed ten terrible days as Sapatisia and Alfred Onehube staggered through a minefield of pain, confessions of betrayal, grief like a heated knife, until their throats were raw, until they were both exhausted by the enormity of what they had lost. And crushing this was the knowledge of another loss so great it obliterated personal dissolution. For after the divorce she had gone to the ice.

  • • •

  On the Greenland glaciers with ice scientists she suffered a full-force shock of recognition—the coming disappearance of a world believed immutable. She had heard for years that the earth and its life-forms were sensitive to slight temperature changes, that species prospered and disappeared as weather and climate varied, but dismissed these alarms as environmental determinism. On the ice her thinking shifted as the moon shifts its position in the sky. Historical evidence and the intense scrutiny of contemporary changes sent signals like fiery arrows; the earth was exquisitely sensitive to solar flares, the shadow of volcanic ash, electromagnetic space storms, subterranean magma movement. All her life she had assumed polar ice was a permanent feature of earth. She had not understood. “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself. Great fissures thousands of feet deep opened by meltwater that eroded the hard blue ice, fissures that gaped open to receive the cataract’s plunge, down to the rock beneath the great frozen bed, forcing its under-ice way to the sea, lubricating the huge cap from below. Standing near the brink of one ghastly thundering abyss someone said, “We are looking at something never before seen.” That night, back at the camp, everyone admitted being shaken by the living evidence.