Gatineau is a forest-working region in the novel’s long history of logging, where the Sels’ experience connects Mi’kmaq labor to an expanding timber economy. It appears both as a place where Jinot Sel spent years chopping and as part of a larger story in which forest work, changing technology, and dependence on wages reshape lives and landscapes.

Forest and Commercial Ambition

The forest becomes a proposed alternative to the instability of the fur trade. Charles Duquet sees beaver as vulnerable to overtrapping, disease, and shifting markets, while imagining timber as a resource capable of sustaining wealth over generations. He considers the forest vast and renewable, and envisions supplying wood for ships, houses, and fuel. He plans to accumulate capital through fur trading before moving into timber, and briefly invites the Trépagny brothers to join that future venture. Their hesitant response contrasts his confidence with the uncertainty of those whose lives are already bound to the woods.

The novel later places Gatineau within the working geography of the Sel family. Jinot tells Albert Bone that he has spent twenty years chopping pine on both the Penobscot and Gatineau. His experience is practical knowledge earned through repeated labor: although he has never made an axe, he knows a poor one from having used many. When Bone tests him with a new axe, Jinot inspects its handle and edge and insists on trying it against a tree before judging it. The scene makes the forest a workplace whose expertise is acquired through use, not abstract instruction.

Camp Labor and River Work

Logging camps draw workers from varied backgrounds and regions. Their shared work creates what the narrative calls a brotherhood of the axe, formed through arduous routines and the pride attached to dangerous labor. Men rise before daylight, eat spare meals, walk to the cut with sharpened axes, and return near dark to crowded, makeshift quarters. After the spring drive, many spend their wages in nearby towns and wait for another logging contract. The work offers few alternatives and exposes men to serious danger.

River driving is especially hazardous, and the division of work reflects unequal assumptions about risk: a camp boss says that river work is given to Indigenous men because they drown as readily as white men. Logs must be moved through difficult water toward mills, making the river indispensable to the timber business even as it endangers the workers. A later camp boss defends the expense of bateau transport and provisions by pointing out that water moves the logs and powers the mills. Two Mi’kmaq men and a Montagnais worker are shown guiding logs, their labor treated as essential to the company’s supply chain.

Tools, Transport, and Forest Change

The working forest changes as equipment and transport change. Across generations, the Sels witness the poll axe give way to the double-bitted axe, then to crosscut saws and increasingly powerful mill saws. Oxen are replaced by horses, then by donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads reach timber stands beyond navigable rivers, trucks and roads displace the river drives. These shifts reorganize work and access: machinery enables logging farther from water and at a scale that levels the continent’s remaining ancient forests.

The novel sets these developments against an expanding appetite for timber. In Maine, the depletion of pine leads land agents and buyers to seek other woods, while mills and transport networks intensify cutting. Gatineau belongs to the broader forest economy whose methods and machinery travel across regions; its importance lies not only in the trees taken there, but in the labor and expertise gathered through repeated forest work.

Mi’kmaq Livelihood and Historical Significance

The Sels’ work reflects a narrowing of livelihood. Their people can no longer live without the goods and food of the white economy, and instead of relying solely on hunting and making what they need, they work for pay. Jinot and Amboise Sel move from a heavily cut Penobscot season to camps in New Brunswick, where they find other Mi’kmaq living as woodsmen. Their return to camp labor is thus both employment and an accommodation to a changing world, not evidence that the older ways remain intact.

Gatineau carries this tension between skill and dispossession. Jinot’s long experience makes him an authority on axes and trees, yet the larger logging system assigns Indigenous workers some of its most dangerous tasks and depends on their labor to move timber to market. The region’s place in the novel therefore joins intimate occupational knowledge to a much wider history: forests become commercial supplies, technology expands extraction, and the people who know and work the woods are drawn into wage labor as their traditional means of living recede.