Excerpt from Barkskins by Annie Proulx, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She brought them a pot of unsalted stewed goose cooked with wild onions and herbs. The meat fell off the bone though Duquet could manage only a little of the broth. A small dish of coarse salt stood in front of Trépagny and he pinched it up with thumb and two fingers.

"Mari does not cook with sel, the Mi'kmaq say it spoils the food. So always carry your own sel, René Sel, unless you can put your thumb in the victuals and season them with your name—ha-ha." Then came a plate of hot corn cakes. Monsieur Trépagny poured an amber syrup on his cakes and René did the same. The syrup was sweet and smoky, better than honey, and he could not believe it came from a tree, as the master said. Duquet, exhausted by his ordeal, bent his head. Mari went to her cupboard and stirred something. She brought it to Duquet. Monsieur Trépagny said perhaps it was a potion made from green alder catkins, the very alders Duquet had cursed, so then the medicine would not work for him. Mari said, "willow leaf, willow bark good medicine Mali make," and Duquet swallowed it and slept that night.


Day after day the chopping continued and their hands swelled, blistered, hardened, the rhythm of chopping seized them despite the dull axes. Monsieur Trépagny watched René work.

"You've held an ax before; you have a woodsman's skill." René told him about the Morvan forest where he and Achille had cut trees. But already that life was unmoored and slipping sidewise out of memory.

"Ah," said Monsieur Trépagny. The next morning he took their wretched axes from them and went off, leaving them alone.


"So," said René to Duquet, "what is Monsieur Trépagny, is he a rich man? Or not?"

Duquet produced a hard laugh. "I thought that between you and Monsieur Trépagny all the knowledge of the world was conquered. Do you not know that he is the seigneur and we the censitaires?—what some call habitants. He is a seigneur but he wants to be a nobleman in this new country. He apportions us land and for three years we pay him with our labor and certain products such as radishes or turnips from the land he allows us to use."

"What land?"

"A fine question. Until now we have been working but there has been no mention of land. Monsieur Trépagny is full of malignant cunning. The king could take the seigneurie from him if he knew. Did you really not understand the paper you signed? It was clearly explained in France."

"I thought it concerned only a period of servitude. I did not understand about the land. Does that mean we are to be farmers? Landowners?"

"Ouais, plowmen and settlers, not landowners but land users, opening the forest, growing turnips. If people in France believed they could own land here outright they would rush in by the thousands. I for one do not wish to be a peasant. I don't know why you came here but I came to do something. The money is in the fur trade."

"I'm no farmer. I'm a woodsman. But I would like to have my own land very much."

"And I would like to know why he took my tooth. I saw him."

"And I, too, saw this."

"There is something evil there. This man has a dark vein in his heart."


Monsieur Trépagny returned a few hours later with iron axes for them, the familiar straight-hafted "La Tène" René had known all his life. They were new and the steel cutting edges were sharp. He had brought good whetstones as well. René felt the power in this ax, its greedy hunger to bite through all that stood in its way, sap spurting, firing out white chips like china shards. With a pointed stone he marked the haft with his initial, R. As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

Excerpted from Barskins: A Novel by Annie Proulx. Copyright © 2016 by Dead Line, Ltd. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.