Antiquity

Antiquity is presented as a time when natural places were understood to possess their own spirits and claims on human conduct. The novel makes this more than a remote historical idea: it sets that account against colonial habits of treating land and living things as resources, and traces related ways of knowing through Mi’kmaw practices, later ecological arguments, and efforts at forest renewal.

A world of particular spirits

The account of Antiquity describes every tree, spring, stream, and hill as having its own guardian spirit. These beings were accessible to people but unlike them, and the familiar figures of centaurs, fauns, and mermaids suggest their ambivalent character. Before cutting a tree, mining a mountain, or damming a brook, people were expected to placate the spirit governing that particular place and keep it placated. Nature, in this picture, was not a passive storehouse: human action took place in relation to powers and presences that could not simply be reduced to human use.

The book gives this account a pointed historical contrast. It presents the destruction of pagan animism by Christianity as making exploitation possible in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. The contrast is not simply between ancient belief and modern disbelief; it concerns the ethical consequence of whether the nonhuman world is understood to have its own standing. Later characters and episodes return to that question without claiming that the older worldview can be restored unchanged.

Mi’kmaw knowledge as practice

Mi’kmaw relationships with the natural world appear through practical knowledge rather than abstract doctrine alone. Mari teaches René Sel how to fish for eels: she makes three traps, supplies fish scraps for bait, and shows him where to set them. Her instruction locates people within the rhythms and resources of the river, and her remark that they are river people frames the practice as a relation of belonging, not merely a technique for taking food.

The account of Mi’kmaw life in a letter likewise challenges a settled, human-centered measure of order. It describes days organized around the abundance of animals, fruit, and fish and reports that trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears are regarded as equals. The speaker notes stories of human-animal transformations and everyday familiarity with toads and beetles, then admits that he may be learning from the people he is describing. His effort to persuade them to farm, grow grain, and regard trees as material for houses and ships meets resistance. The passage exposes the assumptions behind calling them lazy: it is the colonial observer’s own preferred schedule and land use, not a neutral standard, that defines what counts as productive.

That knowledge is transmitted through direct attention to the forest. Kuntaw recognizes that Beatrix needs him to help her recover an Indigenous identity she has been taught to set aside, and changes the direction of their learning. Instead of continuing with books, he takes her into the forest and teaches her to interpret animal tracks, seasonal signs in plants and trees, the odors associated with bears and approaching rain, frost-marked leaves, and changes in the water’s surface. He describes shore and forest as connected by countless fine strands. The scene makes knowledge relational and learned through observation: understanding a place means apprehending how its signs and living systems fit together.

The persistence of extraction

The remembered account of Antiquity illuminates later conflicts over forests, but the novel also shows how the extractive outlook becomes institutional and economic. When Lennart Vogel warns James Duke about the company’s holdings, New England and New York have few good stands left, and Ohio’s white pine has been burned or cut by settlers who turned the land into farms. The loss is not presented as an abstract decline: thousands of acres of valuable pine are gone, and the timber has been burned rather than used as lumber. The episode places the idea of inexhaustible forests against the speed and waste of settlement.

Dieter Breitsprecher sees the same pattern in federal logging laws intended to conserve forests. He objects that loopholes, especially the land-lieu clause, allow lumbermen to exchange logged-off land for untouched timber elsewhere. Much of the standing forest is burned or abandoned instead of becoming lumber, while lobbying sustains the system. His frustration is sharpened by his own complicity: he knows Lavinia Duke employs lobbyists and recognizes that he is implicated by association. The conflict therefore extends beyond a simple opposition between informed conservationists and careless exploiters; commercial power can absorb people who understand the damage.

The history of spruce budworm and DDT supplies a further example of intervention producing consequences beyond the intended target. Dr. Alfred Onehube explains that recurring infestations had once run their course as insects exhausted their food supply, dead trees fell, and fire made way for new growth. After the Second World War, the demand for pulp and paper and the availability of surplus aircraft and chemicals led the Forest Service to spray DDT against the budworm. The pesticide killed the small aquatic organisms that fed salmon, and the Miramichi River became a death river. Onehube’s warning about clear-cutting follows from this history: even when people believe they understand a forest, they may not know the effects of altering a fragile ecosystem on a large scale.

From belief to restoration

The novel’s later chapters turn the question of human responsibility toward practical restoration. Sapatisia describes the Breitsprecher Tree Project as a small field team working with conservation groups. Its work includes planting, monitoring test plots for as long as ten years, and investigating why seedlings fail. One plot had shown chlorosis; another examines the effects of mycorrhizal fungi, which support nutrient and mineral uptake and are lacking in burned soil. The account distinguishes restoration from simple replacement: planting trees is accompanied by attention to soil conditions, ecological relationships, and how plantings fare over time.

Across these periods, Antiquity functions as an ethical counterpoint rather than a lost golden age. The novel places the old idea of guardian spirits beside Mari’s river knowledge, Kuntaw’s forest teaching, warnings about industrial damage, and the patient work of monitoring and replanting. Their connection lies in refusing to treat nature as inert material. The terms change—from spirits to ecological interdependence and restoration—but each challenges the assumption that forests exist only for human use.