Kejimkujik Provincial Park is the setting of a formative visit in which Jeanne and Felix encounter old-growth forest and learn that the land was once Mi’kmaw. The park brings the novel’s long history of logging and forest loss into sharp contrast with a woodland experienced for its living detail, and helps shape the cousins’ later interest in forestry and botany.

Setting and Mi’kmaw History

Mary May tells the children that the area was once Mi’kmaw land. The remark grounds their visit in a history older than the park’s present-day setting, connecting the landscape they explore to Indigenous presence rather than treating it as empty wilderness.

The Old-Growth Forest

After a long ride, Jeanne and Felix run beneath huge old-growth hemlocks. Felix notices the silver undersides of the branches and maidenhair fern growing in the deep shade; he engages with the hemlock as Tsuga canadensis. Jeanne admires the fern’s gleaming stems, then finds ebony spleenwort by the water and attends to the range of greens around her. Their observations make the forest legible through its particular species and relationships, not simply as a store of wood.

The Children’s Memory and Future Paths

Jeanne wishes that her mother could see the place. The children remember the day as fine and satisfying, and the visit becomes part of their developing relationship with the natural world. Later, Jeanne learns that botanists study stems and leaves, while Felix sets his sights on forestry school. They decide to pursue university through two years at community college, despite recognizing that their chances are uncertain. The park thus marks an encounter with an older forest that informs, without guaranteeing, the paths they hope to follow.

Ecological Contrast

Elsewhere in the novel, forests are treated as apparently inexhaustible commodities: merchants and companies pursue timber across colonial and international markets, while logging leaves burned and wasted landscapes behind. Kejimkujik offers a counterpoint to that extractive logic. Its old-growth hemlocks, ferns, and water-edge plants direct attention to a forest as a complex living place, and the children’s lasting memory gives that attention a personal and intergenerational dimension.