Beavers

Beavers are among the book’s most consequential animals because they connect everyday life in the forest to the long history of colonial commerce. Their pelts carry extraordinary value in distant markets, but the trade that turns them into wealth also diminishes their numbers, disrupts Mi’kmaq practices, and helps motivate a search for supposedly more permanent resources. As the beaver becomes scarce, the forest itself is recast as an inexhaustible commodity—a confidence the novel repeatedly places in tension with ecological change.

A presence in daily life

Beavers first appear within the material world of the settlement around Monsieur Trépagny’s household. René Sel and Charles Duquet encounter a wikuom near the house, where Mari and her children retreat at night; when the newcomers arrive, Mari brings them beaver robes along with food and shelter. The pelts are useful and immediate: they warm the men, while the surrounding household practices make clear that life in the forest depends on knowledge and resources that the newcomers do not yet possess.

The animal also belongs to a landscape understood through Indigenous relationships and practical knowledge. Mari’s instruction to René about fishing and eel traps is part of a wider contrast between learning from the country and trying to possess or improve it. Her objection to burying fish entrails in a garden, and her insistence that the river people know how to catch eels, situate food practices within an understanding of the land’s existing abundance. Beavers later become a sharper example of what happens when a living presence is reorganized around trade.

Pelts, markets, and wealth

In the fur economy, beavers are valuable because their skins can be exchanged for European goods and money. The trade is not stable: Forgeron tells Duquet that it has become insecure, that intermediaries increasingly stand between traders and Indigenous trappers, and that beaver numbers are declining. Duquet comes to understand that working as a woods runner offers no reliable road to wealth. The changing location of beaver country makes the economic pressure visible: as animals disappear from heavily trapped areas, the trade moves farther north and west.

Duquet sees the same instability at a larger scale when pelts arrive in great quantities after a period of scarcity. Beaver shipments continue until French hatters and furriers can use no more and warehouses are filled. To him, this swing between surplus and shortage demonstrates the trade’s weakness: the animal may disappear through overtrapping or disease, or the market may simply turn against it. He stops treating reports of immense fur profits as a dependable foundation for lasting wealth and begins looking for a resource he believes can supply Europe indefinitely.

That search brings Duquet to timber. He rejects beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as potential foundations for a permanent fortune because living creatures can vanish and their markets fluctuate. Forests, by contrast, appear to him vast, renewable, and capable of supplying ship masts, houses, and fuel. His plan is to profit from furs for a few more years, prepare for the change, and then move into timber. The beaver’s vulnerability thus helps shape a commercial transition: rather than prompting Duquet to question extractive trade, scarcity directs his ambition toward a larger resource frontier.

Indigenous economies and dispossession

The decline of beavers has consequences beyond the fortunes of individual traders. When René Sel’s descendants return to Mi’kmaw country, Sosep describes a landscape altered by settlement and cultivation. Woodlands and fruitful edges that had supplied generations with berries and edible roots have been reduced as land is plowed for crops and salt marshes drained for livestock. Larger game animals have retreated, and beavers have been greatly reduced because their skins can be exchanged for guns and metal pots. A beaver pelt has become a form of white-man’s money, while the older practice of placing a skin on a grave has fallen away.

The passage sets this loss beside the possibility of exchange and coexistence. Theotiste imagines trading meat for maize and pumpkins and asks whether Acadians and Mi’kmaq might live alongside one another. Sosep’s response is constrained: they have little choice. For a moment, the seasonal abundance of birds and fish seems sufficient for all, but the account does not erase the prior changes in land use, wildlife, and custom. The beaver is both a traded animal and evidence of how colonial markets can alter the meanings attached to an animal, from a relation within community life to a commodity measured by its exchange value.

From wildlife to the forest frontier

The book repeatedly contrasts the depletion of particular animals with the belief that forests have no limit. René spends years cutting trees while forests seem to extend toward every horizon; even the visible growth of shoots from stumps does not undo the scale of his labor or the expansion of settlement. Duquet’s confidence in timber similarly follows his recognition that beaver numbers and fur prices are unreliable. The shift from animal pelts to timber does not end extraction; it changes its target and enlarges its scale.

Later episodes expose the consequences of treating resources as endlessly replaceable. In New Zealand, logging enterprises move from one productive shore forest to the next, leaving smoldering stumps and deep waste. The same extractive confidence reappears in the Michigan white-pine country, where Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes that Duke & Sons’ appetite could extend across a continent. He objects to clear-cutting, wasted wood, damaged soil, and erosion, while the choppers assume another forest will always be available. The earlier history of the beaver trade supplies a pattern for these later developments: commercial appetite follows a resource outward as local abundance gives way to depletion.

Narrative significance

Beavers are not simply a symbol for nature in the abstract. They appear in the practical details of shelter, food, trade, and Indigenous custom, and their changing numbers connect those details to political and economic transformations across generations. Their fur’s movement from trapper and trader to overseas markets makes visible the chain that converts an animal into wealth, while the consequences of overtrapping remain concentrated in the places and communities from which the animals are taken.

Their history also complicates the idea that forests offer a more durable solution to the fur trade’s instability. Duquet regards timber as permanent because trees seem to replace themselves and the forest appears limitless. The novel’s later landscapes—cleared, burned, or damaged by industrial logging—show the danger in that assumption. The beaver’s decline therefore does more than mark a lost source of pelts: it foreshadows the recurring gap between the apparent abundance of a resource and the limits imposed by extraction.