Friendship between Jinot Sel and Arana Palmer

Jinot Sel and Arana Palmer’s friendship gives Jinot a rare companionship in the New Zealand logging camp and brings together two Indigenous men whose lives connect Maine, Mi’kma’ki, and Māori country. It grows through work and conversation, and through shared practical knowledge of eels and forests. When Jinot’s injured leg fails while he is cutting a kauri, Arana helps him; after Jinot dies, Arana helps bury him. Their relationship makes friendship both a source of care in an extractive workplace and a meeting place for different Indigenous histories and ways of knowing.

Meeting and Recognition

Jinot meets Arana while working in kauri. Arana is young, strong, and of Māori and Maine family heritage: he tells Jinot that his father, Orion Palmer, came from Maine, and that he considers himself partly from there. Arana’s inherited Maine accent makes Jinot glad to hear a familiar way of speaking so far from home. Arana invites Jinot to meet his father, who welcomes the chance to talk about his early life in Maine, and the two younger men agree to work together and share a thatched tent.

The friendship is established through ordinary cooperation rather than a formal pledge. Arana shows Jinot how to make a mattress from bracken fern and suggests that a wool fleece would be more comfortable. Jinot looks forward to replacing the fern bedding, a small practical hope that belongs to their shared camp life. When Arana asks about Jinot’s leg, Jinot tells him about the Miramichi fire that nearly caught him and burned his brother Amboise. The conversation eases Jinot; he has not enjoyed the pleasure of friendship for a long time.

Work, Eels, and Shared Knowledge

Their relationship is sustained by work, but it is not confined to the logging operation. Arana has worked in kauri since boyhood, and Jinot brings long experience with the axe. They meet as skilled workers in a labor system that depends on enormous trees and the men who cut and haul them. Jinot is increasingly conscious, however, that his old injury limits what he can do: his scarred leg carries him in the morning but becomes painful by the end of the day. He feels too old for logging, a recognition that makes Arana’s companionship and attention more consequential.

Eel knowledge gives the friendship a further language. On a Sunday, Arana returns from his family home with eels wrapped in green flax leaves and roasted over coals. He explains that settlers have pulled up the manuka stakes used to guide eels into hinaki weirs. Jinot describes Mi’kmaw weirs built from river stones, which require attention as the river shifts them; Arana explains how brush and fern can strengthen a fence between stakes and emphasizes the importance of a well-made hinaki net. Their exchange is reciprocal: neither man merely receives instruction, and the conversation joins distinct local practices through a shared attention to the life and capture of eels.

The scenes at the camp also reveal a difference in the men’s circumstances. On Saturday nights Arana returns to his father’s home, changes out of his dirty work clothes, and joins his mother’s large family clan to eat his favorite dishes and be Māori again. Jinot remains at camp to wash and mend his single pair of canvas trousers. Arana’s visits make room for friendship within the camp, while his family life also shows that he moves between logging labor and a wider home community that Jinot lacks nearby.

Injury and Care

Jinot’s failing leg becomes decisive when he cuts his first large kauri. The work requires clearing debris and chopping a room into the tree so he can climb inside and swing his axe. He manages about an hour before the pain becomes severe. At noon, while trying to get down for tea, he feels his knee give way; his leg folds, and he falls against the mattock. Arana notices him, sees that he is bleeding, and promises to get him help. He cuts a forked sapling into a makeshift crutch and assists Jinot back to the bunkhouse.

Arana remains practically attentive after they return. He helps remove Jinot’s trousers, examines the cut, fetches water, and uses cloth from his extra shirt to clean the wound. With no doctor in the camp, Orion Palmer takes responsibility for treatment. The next day he sees that Jinot’s knee is badly damaged and the wound swollen, and he obtains patent medicines containing opium. While Palmer is away, Arana puts a hand on Jinot’s cheek and urges him to rest. The care cannot reverse the injury, but it makes Arana the person closest to Jinot during the days when his condition worsens.

Jinot spends a week in and out of drugged dreams as the wound becomes infected. Fever leaves him unable to recognize Arana, and he calls instead for Franceway. This loss of recognition marks a limit in their companionship: Arana is present, but Jinot’s illness carries him beyond the conversation and mutual understanding that had formed their friendship.

Death and Aftermath

Arana and Shuttercock bury Jinot near the river, at the edge of the hay field where they had cut rickers two years earlier. Rain begins before the grave is fully covered, then grows into a storm that carries mud and debris down the hills. The flood disinters Jinot’s body and sweeps it into the Pacific. Arana’s final act of care thus takes place within a landscape altered by logging and heavy rain; even burial does not secure a lasting resting place.

Later, when Etienne Sel and Joseph Dogg come searching for Jinot, Arana leads them to the kauri stump where Jinot had been working when his leg gave way. The stump’s old axe marks are the remaining evidence that Jinot had walked there. Arana explains that Jinot wanted to return to his family but had no money, and that he had been skilled with axes, even making a chair in a single Sunday. He also recalls that Jinot did not want to cut kauri, which he regarded as powerful trees, a belief Arana says his own people shared. In recounting Jinot’s loneliness, skill, reluctance, and wish to go home, Arana preserves the person behind the vanished body and the marks left in the tree.

Significance of the Friendship

The friendship brings together distinct Indigenous experiences without treating them as interchangeable. Arana’s Māori family and Jinot’s Mi’kmaw origins meet through conversation, work, and practical knowledge, particularly their detailed exchange about eel weirs. Their connection is also shaped by the pressures that brought both men into a timber camp: Jinot has crossed the ocean for work and remains unable to return, while Arana moves between logging and his family’s Māori community. The relationship offers Jinot fellowship far from home, but cannot protect him from injury, infection, or the demands of tree felling.

Arana’s later account turns friendship into an act of remembrance. He can identify the place where Jinot fell, recall what he said about the kauri, and describe the ordinary signs of his life in camp. The story gives those details weight against the industrial scale of the logging operation: a giant tree is reduced to a stump, Jinot’s grave is swept away, yet the exchange between the two men survives in Arana’s testimony. Their bond therefore preserves both personal memory and a meeting of knowledge traditions that the work of cutting the forest threatens to erase.