Atsuta

Ducks recur as part of the remembered abundance of Mi’kma’ki and as a concrete resource pursued through communal hunting. Their seasonal migration brings both food and a vivid contrast to the scarcity and changing conditions faced by the Sel family after its return.

Food in the remembered homeland

While waiting in wikuoms, Noë and Zoë ask Theotiste and Elphège to retell their mother’s stories about Mi’kma’ki. Those accounts gather berries, crayfish, beaver, eels, walrus, and ducks into a picture of a land where food could be found close to home. The children’s recollections of stepping outside the wikuom to find a turkey make the stories of abundance intimate and immediate, rather than abstract descriptions of the past.

That remembered plenty is set against the hardships the family encounters on returning. Elphège later wonders whether filling the children’s minds with stories of a summer world had prepared them poorly for the destination they actually reached. Ducks therefore belong both to family memory and to a landscape whose resources and conditions cannot simply be assumed to remain as remembered.

Migration and communal hunting

The annual bird migrations overwhelm Theotiste and Elphège with their scale. Sandpipers gather in vast numbers along the shore, wood pigeons darken the sky, and waterfowl become part of the seasonal food supply. Among them, ducks are hunted at night by a group working together: Theotiste and Elphège drift in canoes among sleeping flocks, while Cache Emil and Sosep raise birch torches. The startled ducks circle the lights, and younger men knock them down with poles.

The hunt yields five canoes full of fat ducks in a single night. Elphège contrasts this shared, rapid harvest with making a long, solitary journey for one tough moose, emphasizing the practical advantage of working together when the migrating birds arrive. The episode presents ducks not merely as food but as the occasion for collective skill and abundance.

Changing conditions

The migration also carries an uneasy historical echo. Sosep observes that Europeans may soon arrive in numbers comparable to the birds; the abundance of the season stands beside his anticipation of a transformed homeland. Later, as new white settlers arrive in Mi’kma’ki, Theotiste and Elphège make ax handles for money while Achille hunts. The family now needs purchased metal pots, tools, and other goods that were unfamiliar in earlier times.

Across these scenes, ducks mark a form of subsistence rooted in season, place, and cooperation. Their presence in stories told to children and in the communal hunt links cultural memory to practical knowledge, while the surrounding changes show that remembered abundance exists within a homeland increasingly altered by settlement.