Blackflies

Blackflies are a recurring part of the forest’s hostile environment in the novel, first tormenting René Sel and the other engagés and later contributing to Charles Duquet’s exhaustion and blood loss. Their role links the newcomers’ early encounter with the woods to the escalating physical costs of Duquet’s solitary flight.

Encounter in the forest

As René Sel and the engagés travel through the deep forest with Monsieur Trépagny, blackflies appear among the insects assailing them. Monsieur Trépagny advises the men to smear mud over exposed skin, paying particular attention to the area behind the ears and the crown of the head, where insects can reach the scalp through the hair. He explains that Mi’kmaq people make a protective salve from spruce-needle oil and animal fat, though he has none available; mud must serve instead. The advice registers both the immediacy of the nuisance and the limits of the travelers’ preparations.

Part of the journey’s cumulative toll

The insect attack is one element in an already taxing passage. The engagés are weakened by their long ocean voyage, stumble over sprawling spruce roots, and struggle onward through the dim forest. Blackflies appear alongside mosquitoes and other biting insects, making the woods not simply a landscape to cross but an environment that continually acts upon the travelers’ bodies. The passage situates them within a natural world whose hazards are ordinary and persistent rather than isolated incidents.

During Charles Duquet’s flight

Later, as Charles Duquet makes his way through the wilderness after escaping Trépagny, blackflies add to the other pressures undermining him. In the third week of his journey he is exhausted, has open wounds, and is weakened by blood loss; the narration names blackflies and mosquitoes among its sources. He loses the river, crawls, and eventually finds it again by following a duckling toward water. The blackflies are not the sole cause of his collapse, but they belong to the accumulated privations that make his progress so precarious.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, blackflies connect the forest’s immense scale with its intimate physical demands. The same woods that dwarf the travelers also expose them to persistent insect attacks, against which local knowledge offers a practical defense that Monsieur Trépagny cannot provide. On Duquet’s later journey, the insects become part of a cumulative pressure rather than a discrete dramatic antagonist: their harm is folded into hunger, fatigue, exposure, and wounds. Their recurrence helps present the forest as an active environment, not merely a setting for human action.