American black bear

The American black bear is not simply game in the novel: it belongs to a forest world understood through Mi’kmaq knowledge and relationships, even as people hunt it for food. In two scenes separated by generations, a bear becomes both a household provision and the occasion for Achille to teach Kuntaw and Auguste how to carry a heavy burden. Against the expanding trade in timber, those encounters give the animal a place in a landscape that cannot be reduced to commodity or property.

Food, protection, and knowledge

A bear enters the household when Cache Emil arrives carrying meat wrapped in bloodstained canvas. He says he had shot it while hunting with Achille weeks earlier, and brings his blankets and flintlock as well. He intends to sleep outside in the small wikuom shared by Theotiste and Elphège, explaining that he is there so no male person will bother them. The bear meat thus arrives alongside a protective act: the animal sustains a household whose safety Cache Emil has undertaken to help secure.

The hunt is part of a broader field of practical knowledge. Achille is described as an exceptional hunter who understands animals’ habits and can detect moose without dogs except in winter. Sosep compares his abilities to those of a megumoowesoo, a person honored by Kluskap with extraordinary gifts. This account places the bear hunt within skilled attention to animal life, rather than presenting hunting as a mere display of force.

Achille’s lesson in carrying the bear

On another hunt, food is scarce. Achille shares two small woodcock with Kuntaw and Auguste, and the party sets out to hunt farther east. Near a small lake, they encounter a very fat black bear emerging from spruce. Achille fires first; Kuntaw and Auguste shoot at the same time, and Achille fires once more. The bear falls, and Auguste immediately asks how they will get it back to camp because it is too large.

Achille answers not with an abstract explanation but with a demonstration. After gutting the bear and leaving its remains for wolves, he binds its hind feet to its front feet with sinew cords he always carries. He slips his arms into the loops formed by the bound paws, leans forward, and rises with the bear on his back. He carries it alone to camp, then calls attention to the deep impressions his feet have made. The tracks, he explains, show how a person’s steps change under a heavy burden; such a person may be carrying supplies, fur packs, or a bear. The lesson joins hunting, bodily effort, and interpretation of the marks left in the forest.

A world of relations, not simply resources

Achille’s treatment of the bear reflects the novel’s wider contrast between Mi’kmaq understandings of the living world and colonial assumptions about nature’s use. In Père Crème’s letter, trees are described as persons, and animals and plants as equals; the account also notes stories of people changing into bears. This worldview sits uneasily beside the instruction to regard trees as materials for houses and ships and to impose agricultural order on the days of people who live by hunting and seasonal abundance.

The bear is hunted and eaten, but the hunting scenes do not detach it from the surrounding world. Achille leaves remains for wolves, reads animal behavior, and turns his own tracks into knowledge for others. The animal’s place in this scene is therefore not limited to its value as meat: the encounter also reveals a system of attention in which human survival depends on understanding other lives and the conditions of the forest.

Contrast with commercial extraction

The novel sets this situated knowledge against an expanding trade that recasts forests as supplies for distant markets. Duquet dismisses beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as uncertain resources and settles on the forest as the supposedly everlasting commodity: timber could serve ships, houses, and fuel, with profits imagined as enduring. The later timber ventures in New Zealand make the costs of that outlook explicit. Camps and trading posts move on after stripping forests, leaving stumps and waste; felled trees are burned to clear land, along with birds, insects, fruit, and other forest life.

These commercial passages do not describe the bear as a direct victim of logging. Their relevance lies in the contrast they establish: the bear belongs to a forest encountered through particular hunts, seasons, skills, and needs, while timber commerce turns a complex living environment into a seemingly unlimited stock. Across the book, the animal helps make visible the difference between taking food within a web of relationships and treating the natural world as an inexhaustible resource.