Barkskins by Annie Proulx Read Free Book Online Page A

Trépagny. He would stay in Wobik and guard their fur packs. They passed their bottles to René, and soon he was drunk and the brothers grew more boisterous, bragging of their wild and untrammeled lives, singing songs with endless verses. Toussaint said he knew more than forty songs; Fernand boasted that he had mastered more than fifty and that he would sing all of them this moment commencing with “Petit Rocher.” He began well but stopped after seven verses. He turned on René.
    â€œYou think this is all that we do, sing songs and walk through a forest? No! What they say, we live hard, love hard, sleep hard and eat moose nose!”
    Toussaint pressed a dark chunk of food into René’s hand, saying it was not moose nose but pemmican. It had a burned, musty flavor and there were hairs in it and nodules of bright fat the color of a chicken’s foot. It was chewy stuff and the more he masticated it the more it swelled in his mouth. He took a gulp of whiskey and forced the pemmican down.
    René had been thinking of what they said of their companion who would stay in Wobik with the fur packs, thinking of the man he had seen disappear into the spruce shadow, and he knew with sudden surety who it was.
    â€œThis one who stays in Wobik, does he have bad teeth?”
    â€œBad teeth? No. Chalice! He has no teeth at all. He dines on mush and broth. He cannot eat pemmican and would be a liability did he not prepare his own repasts.”
    â€œIs his name perhaps Duquet? Or something else?”
    â€œDuquet. How do you know?”
    â€œHe was an engagé with me, on the same ship and hired to the same man—your brother Monsieur Claude Trépagny. He disappeared into the woods one day. Your brother believes he was caught and eaten by the loup-garou. ”
    â€œHah! He was not eaten, or if so, only a little around the edges. He is a man of affairs. He knows the important men in the fur trade—even the English. He says he will be a rich man one day.”
    René had his own idea of why Duquet did not wish to see Monsieur Trépagny.
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    The reunion of the brothers and their uncle Chama was noisy and sentimental. They all wept, embraced, cursed, swigged whiskey, slapped each other on the back, looked earnestly at one another, wept again and talked. The brothers disapproved of the clearing. Their own way of life left no scars on the land, they said, denuded no forests. They glided through the waterways and in seconds the wake of their passage vanished in the stream flow and the forests remained as they had been, silent and endless.
    â€œUncle, you must come back with us to the high country, what good times we’ll have again.”
    But Chama smiled sadly. He had a spine deformity that every year twisted him a little more sideways. He was no longer able to bear the hard voyageur life, a statement which motivated the pitiless brothers to describe tremendous paddling feats—twenty hours, thirty hours—without a pause. They named heroes of the water, wept for the memory of a friend who broke his leg so that the bone protruded from the bunched flesh. They had put him up to his neck in the icy water to die.
    â€œNot long enough to sing all of ‘J’ai trop grand peur des loups,’ which he asked us to sing. It was his favorite, that song—‘I have a great fear of wolves.’ And he sang the verses with us with chattering jaws until his heart slowed and he made the mortal change.”
    This started them off on stories of coureurs de bois who suffered untimely ends.
    â€œ. . . And Médard Baie, who suffered painful stomach cramps and died of the beaver disease?”
    â€œThat poison plant that beaver eat with great pleasure, and I have heard the Indians, too, eat of it, but it is death for a Frenchman.”
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    The wedding was four days away as the bride was traveling from Kébec