Death of René Sel-An Action in Barkskins | Readify Wiki: A Better Way to Explore Books

René Sel’s death brings his lifelong work as a woodcutter to an abrupt end and exposes the violence surrounding the forest economy. Found dead at forty by his eleven-year-old son Achille, René remains beside the axe with which he had shaped his life; his killing and the removal of his scalp for a bounty connect his death to the colonial violence that reaches into his family’s history.

A Life Defined by Woodcutting

The narrative frames René through the labor of the défricheur and bûcheron: the person who clears land and fells trees. His working life consists of repeated, physically demanding tasks—cutting, topping, stripping, splitting, and stacking trees—and the practical maintenance of the tools and implements on which that work depends. The description makes woodcutting more than an occupation. It is the discipline that shapes René’s body and daily existence, until his hands have taken the enduring curl of an axe handle.

That lifelong relation between worker and tool governs the circumstances of his death. Achille finds his father on his knees in the forest, his hands clenched around the axe handle and its blade sunk into a cedar. The scene ends René’s life at the place of his labor, with the axe still in his grasp: the instrument of his trade also marks the final image through which the novel presents him.

Killing and Its Colonial Context

René’s death is not presented as an isolated accident of logging but as a killing tied to the colonial bounty system. After finding him, Achille discovers that René has been scalped; the removal of the scalp identifies the violence as an act carried out for payment. The scene therefore turns a family loss into evidence of a larger structure in which Mi’kmaq lives are exposed to state-backed violence and their deaths made redeemable as commodities.

The account places this violence against the ordinary dangers of the lumber trade. In the camps where Jinot later works, river driving is assigned to Indigenous laborers because employers regard them as expendable, and the riverbanks are marked by wooden crosses. René’s killing is distinct from those workplace deaths, but both expose a world in which the extraction of timber is sustained by risks unevenly imposed on Indigenous people. His death at the edge of the forest links the violence against his family to the labor regime that continues to draw Mi’kmaq workers into dangerous logging.

Inheritance and the Forest Economy

René’s death acquires a longer reach through the generations that follow him. The narrative says that he remained a skilled woodsman to the end, his life and body shaped by the axe, and that his sons and grandsons would follow the same work. What begins as an individual death thus becomes part of a family inheritance: forest labor passes on, while the violence that took René’s life gives that inheritance a cost beyond toil.

The novel later widens this history into a critique of the timber economy René’s descendants enter. In Michigan, Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes that Duke & Sons’ appetite for timber could become a drive to clear the continent, bringing soil erosion and the destruction of forest life in its wake. His unease contrasts with the company’s confidence that there will always be another forest. René’s death does not cause that later expansion, but it stands near the beginning of a multigenerational history in which people and forests are both drawn into extractive systems.

Other figures in that history imagine a different timescale. Dieter Breitsprecher argues for holding and managing cutover land, while later correspondence with George Perkins Marsh attends to what happens to soil and birds when trees and wetlands disappear. Dieter’s defense of planting seedlings rests on work whose results may not be seen by the planter. These later efforts make the contrast with René’s immediate, exhausting labor especially sharp: the forest is not simply a resource handed down intact, but a living inheritance that can be depleted or renewed.

Narrative Significance

The episode concentrates the novel’s concerns in a single image: a woodcutter found in the forest, still holding the tool that defined his working life. That image joins bodily labor, family succession, and colonial violence without treating them as separate histories. The forest is at once René’s workplace and the setting of his killing; the axe is both the means of his livelihood and the emblem of a trade carried forward by his descendants.

Read alongside later accounts of dangerous camps and large-scale clearing, René’s death also resists the idea that timber extraction is merely a story of enterprise and supply. The work depends on human bodies exposed to unequal risks, while the pursuit of timber can damage the ecological conditions on which future lives and livelihoods depend. His death therefore serves as an early, intimate measure of the costs that the novel’s broader history continues to reveal.