Hugh Boss

Hugh Boss is a skilled hammerman and the father of Minnie Boss, whom Jinot Sel marries. As a smith, he teaches Jinot the judgment and precision required to temper an axe; as a friend and prospective father-in-law, he welcomes Jinot into the Boss household. The marriage makes their connection intimate, while a later cholera outbreak leaves both men bereaved and estranged before a shared act of mourning brings them together again.

Work and the logging world

Boss works at the forge, where making an axe requires more than strength. Jinot watches him heat a newly shaped blade and quench it, then return it to the forge to draw the temper. Boss points out how the metal changes color as he works it, stopping at brown rather than allowing it to reach blue. The sequence presents his craft as practical expertise joined to a trained eye: a blade must be shaped and tempered for use, not merely hammered into form.

That expertise sits within a dangerous, hierarchical labor system. In logging camps, men begin work before daylight, carry axes to the cut, and endure a routine organized around exhausting labor and scant rest. River driving is regarded as the most hazardous work; bosses assign it to Indigenous workers on the racist assumption that they are suited to dangerous water. In a later account of the industry, a camp boss defends the cost of river work to a company bookkeeper by insisting that water moves logs and powers mills, while Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers maneuver among the floating timber. Boss’s trade belongs to this wider production chain, where skill sustains the timber business but risk is distributed unequally.

Friendship with Jinot and the Boss household

Boss becomes Jinot’s friend, and Jinot spends Saturday evenings at the Boss family’s large cabin, about a mile from the factory, playing checkers. The household is busy and extensive: Mrs. Boss is often pregnant and tends the cooking range, while the children range from sixteen-year-old Minnie to Baby, barely a year old, with eight more between them. Jinot is drawn particularly to the children, and his growing familiarity with the family creates the setting for his relationship with Minnie.

Minnie has inherited her father’s scoliosis and undergoes regular stretching treatments. After these exhausting sessions, Jinot sometimes reads aloud to her while she rests on a kitchen daybed. His sympathy for her pain becomes a source of closeness; Minnie’s affection for him grows, and Boss notices the attachment. Although there is an age difference between them, he gradually accepts the possibility of their life together rather than opposing it.

When Minnie’s condition improves enough for her treatments to be spaced two months apart, the family celebrates. Boss gives her money for dress fabric, and she appears in a blue silk dress. He then takes Jinot aside in the cow barn, where he keeps his hard-cider jugs, and directly raises Minnie’s feelings. Jinot says that he likes her too. Boss treats their mutual affection as sufficient reason to proceed: a month later, Minnie and Jinot marry in the front room of the Boss house. As they marry, the men’s efforts to raise logs for the couple’s cabin can be heard outside, tying the new household to the family’s working life.

Marriage, loss, and reconciliation

Jinot and Minnie’s first children are twin boys, Amboise and Aaron. Their arrival gives Jinot a sense that he has entered ordinary family life, but that security is short-lived. When cholera spreads, Minnie and the twins die. Jinot goes to Boss’s house to tell him that the disease has taken them and that only he and Aaron remain. Boss responds in grief; he, too, is ill. Mrs. Boss is sick while pregnant, and the youngest children are also unwell. Boss survives, but Mrs. Boss and the three youngest children die on the same day.

After the funerals, Boss and Jinot hate one another for months. The account gives no further explanation for the estrangement, so it remains part of their grief rather than a stated dispute with a known cause. They meet again in the cemetery to erect seven fresh-cut stones for the dead. Working together on the memorials reconciles them. Each stone records only a name, a date, and the word cholera: a spare public marker for losses that have transformed both households.

Narrative significance

Boss connects two worlds that the novel repeatedly places in tension: the skilled manufacture that makes timber extraction possible and the dangerous labor that supplies its raw material. The forge scene shows knowledge being passed directly from a craftsman to Jinot, while the descriptions of camp work and river driving reveal the bodily risks and racialized allocation of labor behind the timber economy. The trade is not presented as a distant abstraction; it shapes the men’s work, friendships, and family lives.

His relationship with Jinot also develops through concrete acts of welcome: teaching him a craft, inviting him into the home, accepting his affection for Minnie, and arranging for the newlyweds’ cabin. The later epidemic tests that bond by destroying the family that had joined them. Their return to the cemetery, where they set up the stones together, does not undo the deaths; it gives grief a shared task and restores a connection that loss had broken.