Amboise and Jinot’s journey to Mi’kma’ki becomes a rescue when they find Elise bruised, grieving, and living beside an abusive husband. They bring her back to Penobscot Bay, where Beatrix welcomes her home; the return restores Elise to family safety, but the trip also exposes the hunger, disrepair, and cultural loss around the village and ends with Auguste refusing to come with them.

The journey and its purpose

Kuntaw sends his grandsons Amboise and Jinot up the coast by ship to Halifax, then on foot to the Mi’kmaw post. Their errands are personal: they are to see whether Elise is well and has children, and to find Auguste, the son of Kuntaw’s deceased aunt Noë. Kuntaw also warns them to keep away from the fighting between English and Americans if they hear gunfire. The trip is therefore both a family search and a passage through a landscape made dangerous by conflict.

The men arrive with the modest tenderness of relatives who have been separated too long. Amboise carries a small wooden turkey he carved years earlier, remembering that the toy amused Elise when she was young; if she has children, he hopes they might enjoy it. Jinot wishes he had brought something too, even a pinecone. Their gifts are small, but they make the search concrete: the question of whether Elise has children is accompanied by an object meant for them.

What they find in Mi’kma’ki

Kuntaw’s sister Aledonia receives the visitors and points them toward people bearing the Sel name. She confirms that Auguste is still alive, describing him with blunt affection as too bad to die. The news initially makes the family search seem successful, but the village they encounter gives the reunion a harsher setting.

The settlement is hungry and sad, a mixture of wikuoms and white settler cabins, in lands already cut over from what had once been Mi’kma’ki. The eel weirs lie in disrepair; the men rarely mend them, since agency bread and pork are easier to obtain than catching eels. Beside a wikuom whose torn bark covering needs repair, Elise’s husband, Luçon Brassua, lies drunk in the mud. Elise tells Amboise and Jinot that she has lost a baby girl, whom she named Bee after Beatrix. She had imagined marriage as resembling Beatrix and Kuntaw’s affectionate, laughing partnership, but her own experience has brought grief instead.

The conditions around Elise’s household are not presented as an isolated misfortune. Stories of Kuntaw’s father, Achille the Great Hunter, circulate through the chopped lands, and their account of an earlier world sharpens Amboise’s resentment: everything good seems to belong to yesterday. Seeing Elise’s situation and knowing Brassua is not good to her, Amboise urges her to leave with them. The rescue begins not with a planned confrontation but with an offer of refuge made against the visible contrast between remembered abundance and present hardship.

Auguste’s refusal

The search for Auguste reveals a second kind of damage. He has succumbed to drink and is found outside a granddaughter’s wikuom, bleary and nodding. When the visitors identify themselves as Kuntaw’s grandsons, he briefly rouses, says Kuntaw had been fortunate unlike himself, and then falls silent. He watches a dozen idle Mi’kmaw men lingering at the post, and tears run down his face.

Auguste names what has been lost by comparing the men’s idleness with his youth. He remembers being ready to hunt, catch eels, fish, hunt seals or sturgeon; making bows and arrows, crooked knives, canoes, and paddles; and taking part in war games, feasts, and dances. He points first to the idle men and then to himself as evidence of what they have become, reaching beneath his thigh for a flat bottle. The scene makes Kuntaw’s hope of bringing his cousin to the Penobscot house collide with Auguste’s despair and dependence.

When Elise is ready to leave, Amboise tells her to come away. She gathers her few possessions in a turnip sack and runs ahead toward the boat landing; Brassua is absent, drunk with his friends, and cannot hold her back. Amboise remembers that Kuntaw also wants Auguste brought home. The old man rises trembling at the invitation, looks around at the people near the post and a dog scratching itself, then sits down again with a sly smile. He refuses: the rescue can take Elise, but it cannot make him return.

Return to Penobscot Bay

Amboise spends the money Kuntaw gave them on passages from Halifax to Boston, then persuades the owner of a fishing boat bound for Georges Bank to detour and set them down at Penobscot Bay. Elise says little during the return. As the boat enters their home port, she draws a deep breath and lets it out, a small physical release after the journey away from safety.

Beatrix sees the travelers coming up from the wharf. She notices Elise’s fading bruises and tear-filled eyes and understands what has happened without needing an explanation. Opening her arms, she welcomes Elise back and tells her she is safe at home. Elise cries out to her mother; the two women embrace and sob, while Amboise and Jinot look at one another, surprised because they have never seen Beatrix cry. Amboise calls it a woman’s matter and suggests they go outside, though his eyes sting. Jinot would rather stay with Elise and Beatrix, but follows Amboise.

Significance of the rescue

The event turns a family visit into an escape from domestic abuse. Elise’s bruises and the loss of her baby make the danger legible, while her hurried departure—few possessions in a turnip sack, no husband present to stop her—marks the decisive shift from exposure to refuge. At Penobscot Bay, recognition happens in a glance: Beatrix reads the bruises and tears, and her open arms make home a practical shelter rather than merely a remembered one.

The journey’s outcome is deliberately uneven. Elise is brought back into the family, but Auguste, whom Kuntaw also hoped to reclaim, stays behind amid drink and social dislocation. His account of lost practices and present idleness connects individual decline to changes in livelihood and community life. The rescue offers a real return for Elise without pretending that one family’s reunion can reverse the broader losses visible in Mi’kma’ki.