Charles Duquet’s escape from Trépagny

Charles Duquet’s escape from Trépagny is both a break from coercive service and the beginning of a new way of imagining wealth. Fleeing into the forest with little food and worsening health, Duquet survives a desperate journey only to be rescued by Indigenous traders and treated by an Indigenous woman. The episode also plants the ambition that will redirect his career: where the fur trade seems vulnerable to scarcity and fluctuating markets, he sees the forest as a lasting commodity. His flight thus joins an individual struggle for freedom to the expanding commercial history of timber.

Threats and the withheld promise of land

The danger surrounding Duquet’s departure grows out of life under Monsieur Trépagny’s authority. As spring advances, Trépagny extracts one of Duquet’s diseased teeth with a blacksmith’s pliers. When he declares that he will pull all of Duquet’s teeth, Duquet dodges him and refuses to submit. Trépagny pockets the tooth and threatens to have Duquet’s skull. Duquet’s silence and withdrawal make the confrontation a turning point: the threat is no longer merely the discomfort of service but the possibility of further violence at his master’s hands.

The dispute over land gives that immediate danger a wider cause. After Duquet has walked into the forest, René Sel asks Trépagny whether he is their seigneur and whether Duquet and René are to receive land to work. Trépagny says that land will come only after three years of service, completion of his domus, the arrival of his brothers, and clearance of a new maize plot. Land, he insists, comes at the end of service, not before it. The answer confirms that the promised reward is distant and conditional, while the labor demanded of Duquet is immediate.

When Duquet stays away for hours, Trépagny treats his absence with vindictive amusement, imagining him lost in the forest or killed by its dangers. His account ranges from drowning and wolves to moose and Mi’kmaw forest spirits. René thinks Trépagny has become too deeply immersed in what he calls the world of the savages, but the fear also reveals how the forest can serve as a weapon in Trépagny’s account: outside the household, Duquet is represented as exposed to forces beyond human protection.

Flight and survival in the forest

Duquet does not return when expected. The next day, a wavering call reaches the workers from the trees. Trépagny identifies the sound as a loup-garou, a wolf-shaped creature said to haunt forests, and orders René not to call back. René suspects that the voice belongs to Duquet. It seems to be calling for its mother, but Trépagny insists that this is a creature’s trick and ends the day’s work rather than risk drawing it closer. The episode leaves a deliberate uncertainty between supernatural explanation and human distress: the sound that Trépagny labels monstrous may be the fugitive asking for help. The men retreat to the house, while Duquet remains beyond their reach.

Duquet’s actual escape is a prolonged effort to keep moving. He follows a river west, keeping to higher ground because he fears Trépagny and René may pursue him. Before dawn the next day, he sets out again, eating fish pudding he had hidden in his jacket and drinking from the river. When hunger drives him back to the bank, he knots the neck and sleeves of his shirt into a makeshift fishing device and catches enough fish to continue. After eight days, he reaches another river running from the north and turns toward the beaver country and the traders who carry pelts downstream.

The journey then becomes more precarious. Duquet is weakened by infection, wounds, and blood loss; mosquitoes and blackflies further drain him. He loses the river and crawls through the forest, unable to stand reliably. Finding a duckling leads him back to water, and he eats small frogs and another duckling as he continues north. His purpose remains fixed even when he believes he may die: he means to reach the fur traders first. The movement from river to lost ground and back again makes survival depend not on mastery of the landscape but on recovering a route through it, one small source of food or water at a time.

Rescue and a change of direction

An Odaawa hunting party has watched the weakened man circling a small pond for two days. Traders hear of the sick Frenchman from Odaawa hunters, who joke about seeing him crawling around the pond. They find Duquet encased in dried mud and carry him to the river, where they soak away the hardened clay. His survival is uncertain, but an Indigenous woman takes responsibility for his treatment. She recognizes the infection in his mouth, uses a small wooden instrument with a leather loop to remove his rotting teeth, and gives him a mouthwash and an opiate. Her assurance that he will not die marks the end of the immediate crisis.

The voyageurs carry Duquet away in their worn canoe, bound for a distant Ojibwa village in the northwest. Rescue is therefore not a return to Trépagny or to the land withheld from him. It is a passage into a different network of travel and exchange, made possible by the people whose knowledge and labor sustain movement through the region. The episode establishes a contrast with Trépagny’s threats: the forest is perilous, but survival there is also made possible by Indigenous observation, medicine, and transport.

From the fur trade to timber

After the escape, Duquet prospers in the fur trade but recognizes its instability. Beaver pelts arrive in enormous quantities even as settlements face delayed supplies and fear of the Iroquois; eventually French hatters and furriers cannot use the surplus, and warehouses fill. Duquet sees that the trade can swing between abundance and scarcity. Beaver may disappear through overtrapping or disease, or for no discernible reason, and the market itself has limits. He wants wealth that can endure for generations and imagines a family name that might turn from a curse into an honor.

His answer is timber. Duquet rejects beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as resources vulnerable to depletion and changing demand. The forest, by contrast, seems to him an everlasting commodity that Europe lacks. He knows English colonists to the south cut pines for naval masts and reasons that New France might also sell timber for ships, houses, and fuel. He acknowledges problems of transport and markets, but imagines a business capable of expansion and lasting profit. The confidence that the forest will replace itself belongs to his commercial vision, not to a guarantee established by the narrative.

Duquet plans first to make money in furs, then to prepare for a move into timber. He briefly proposes the future partnership to the Trépagny brothers, who respond without enthusiasm. The proposed change does not happen at once, but the escape has already altered his horizon: the forest that threatened to swallow him becomes, in his calculations, the basis for an enduring enterprise. Later scenes of logging and overseas timber commerce expose the ecological costs hidden by that calculation, from waste left by New Zealand logging camps to the steady transformation of forest into marketable wood. The escape therefore initiates more than Duquet’s independence; it introduces the tension between a forest experienced as dangerous wilderness and one treated as a seemingly inexhaustible commodity.