Captain Bouchard

Captain Bouchard is an elderly Wobik intermediary whose river-passage business and ledger place him at the crossing point between newcomers, settlers, and Mi’kmaq families. Across the novel, he is more than a keeper of records: his authority over the ledger can preserve or erase claims, and his changing relationship with the Mi’kmaq makes him a measure of how colonial settlement turns land and memory into business.

Identity and Position

Bouchard has long handled the money paid for river travel and welcomed newcomers to Wobik. When Charles Duquet returns after many years, Bouchard is white-haired but still strong, and still occupies the same practical role. His ledger holds the marks of those who passed through his hands, including the elaborate signature of René Sel. The book is thus a record of movement as well as a potential witness to the histories of families and property.

His position gives him local influence without making him a neutral observer. He knows the circumstances surrounding Claude Trépagny’s death, René’s household, and the settlement’s expansion, and he can direct people seeking to buy or sell land. The authority of the ledger depends on what it contains—and, as later events show, on what remains in it.

Duquet’s Return and the Changed Settlement

When Duquet asks after René Sel, Bouchard tells him that René is alive, living comfortably with his wife and children in Trépagny’s former house. He also explains that Claude died while pursuing Duquet, intent on punishing him for running away. Some people, Bouchard says, believe Duquet arranged Claude’s death at the hands of the Iroquois; Duquet rejects the accusation and says that if they killed Claude, they had their own reasons.

Bouchard describes a landscape transformed by settlement. Wobik has expanded, farms have appeared near René’s home, and René cuts firewood and makes potash while keeping a few cows and sheep. Mari, meanwhile, laments the disappearance of woodland grottos and the medicinal plants that once grew there; her healing ability has made her locally important, even as she speaks increasingly against white settlers. Bouchard’s account makes the cleared landscape inseparable from the loss of places and knowledge that settlement has displaced.

He also supplies Duquet with the history of René’s household: Trépagny forced René and Mari to marry in order to keep his wealthy French wife from leaving, but ultimately lost her and everything else, including his life. Bouchard says he told Trépagny’s brothers about the arrangement at the time. Although they had a claim to Claude’s stone house, they declined it, preferring that it go to René, whom they regarded as content with the life of a woodcutter. The episode shows Bouchard as a bearer of private history, not merely a commercial clerk.

Land, the Ledger, and Dispossession

Later, Achille and Theotiste consult Bouchard about what to do with René’s property. Bouchard says it can be sold and identifies Jean Mague, a French farmer seeking cleared land and a house rather than spending years felling trees. Mague arrives with an extended family of adult relatives and their spouses, and Bouchard’s advice helps set a transaction in motion.

That proposed sale is overtaken by Renardette and Démon Meillard. Démon claims that René’s notarized title passed the property to his adopted daughter, Renardette, and denies that Achille, Theotiste, Elphège, Zoë, and Noë have a legitimate claim as René’s children. He proposes recording a sale to Mague in Bouchard’s ledger, presenting the transaction as legally binding while insisting that the Mi’kmaq claimants have no rights.

Theotiste recalls asking Bouchard about the entry showing that René owned the house and had married Mari under white law. According to her, Bouchard took the ledger into a back room, returned, and showed her that the record was absent; she had seen torn scraps of paper in the book’s cleft. The account implicates the ledger’s keeper in the disappearance of evidence, though the scene gives Theotiste’s observation rather than an explicit confession from Bouchard. Mague, Démon, and Renardette then conclude their arrangement, and Mague orders the family to leave, with his loaded gun ready. Bouchard’s earlier willingness to help find a buyer has become part of a process that strips the family of a home and land.

Change and Narrative Significance

Bouchard’s conduct is not presented as a simple, stable allegiance. At first his ledger and commercial role connect him to the settlement’s routine dealings; in the property dispute, the apparent removal of René’s record leaves Mi’kmaq descendants exposed to a transaction conducted in the language of white ownership. Yet the novel later indicates a change. After Achille returns from a long journey, he tells Elphège that Bouchard will betray no more Mi’kmaq people, explaining that the old man’s tongue has come loose and fallen to the ground. Elphège responds that this is good news. The account offers no further explanation of what happened to Bouchard, so the shift is registered through the family’s report rather than a narrated scene of confession or reform.

The repeated association of Bouchard with the ledger makes the book an image of the power—and fragility—of documentary proof. A family’s connection to a house may be remembered, discussed, and once recorded, yet a missing entry can help turn a lived inheritance into a claim declared false. His eventual refusal to betray Mi’kmaq people does not undo the consequences already shown, but it marks a break in the role he has played: the keeper of passage money and property records can also become a point at which that machinery of betrayal stops.