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Horses are working animals within the novel’s long history of forest extraction: they carry people into timber country and haul felled trees, linking remote forests to commercial operations. Their significance lies in this practical role and in the contrast between horse-powered work and the machinery and roads that later reorganize logging.

Travel and Access to the Forest

On the planned journey to the Coromandel Peninsula, horses are the means by which Lavinia and her party will travel from the coast into the forests to see kauri. Their host explains that horses were unknown in New Zealand half a century earlier, arrived with missionaries, and were adopted by Māori; he says that everyone rides. Lavinia has not ridden since she was a girl and did not bring riding clothes, so he proposes arranging a riding habit or, if necessary, men’s trousers. The conversation makes the horse both an ordinary means of access in the region and a practical consideration shaping Lavinia’s participation in the expedition.

The forest journey is described as a mounted party rather than an abstract business inspection. Lavinia rides a piebald mare, Dieter rides a gelding, and Ahorangi Oval sits on a bay mare that shifts nervously beneath her. Ahorangi’s brothers ride bareback ahead of them, while Mr. Oval follows on his Thoroughbred, Queenie; a servant and a packhorse carrying kete baskets bring up the rear. The varied mounts and riding arrangements show horses serving travel, status, and the carrying of supplies in the same expedition.

Horses in Logging Work

In the northeastern woods, horses belong to a labor system in which animals and equipment move timber from forest to landing. The novel describes steady oxen giving way to smart horses, and horses in turn being replaced by donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads extend logging farther from waterways, trucks and roads displace river drives. The sequence places horse power within a larger technological change: it increases the means of moving logs, but it does not end the expansion of extraction, which later machinery accelerates.

A smaller-scale alternative appears in Jackson Mius’s Maine operation. Jackson and his neighbor-partner Sonny Hull run an old-style, two-man horse-logging outfit: Jackson cuts trees, while Hull’s draft horses drag them to the landing. Their customers want quiet work that does not tear up the land, distinguishing this operation from more destructive methods. When a winter brings almost no snow, Hull leaves for Montana and work becomes scarce; Jackson then returns to school and studies forestry and wood management. The episode ties horse logging to both a comparatively restrained approach to the land and the economic vulnerability of small-scale work.

Labor, Risk, and Unequal Burdens

The novel’s accounts of forestry place animal-powered transport inside a dangerous, ethnically divided labor system. River driving is treated as the most hazardous work, and a camp boss explains that water is indispensable for moving logs to the sawmill: the company must accept the expense of the drive because there is no other way to deliver its timber. Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers are shown guiding logs through the river, while the broader history of the camps describes river work as labor assigned to Indigenous people. Horses are one part of this changing transport system, but their use does not erase the human risks borne by the workers who cut, haul, and drive the timber.

The older camp routine likewise establishes the hard conditions surrounding logging labor: men rise before daylight, carry sharpened axes to the cut, and return to crowded shanties after work. In later generations, technological change replaces animals and river transport with engines, locomotives, and trucks, while the work remains dangerous. Horses therefore mark an intermediate stage in the novel’s account of forest labor—not a timeless pastoral alternative, but a form of power incorporated into an expanding commercial system.

Trade and the Forest as Commodity

Horses appear alongside the novel’s wider account of how forests become commodities. Charles Duquet rejects beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as foundations for lasting wealth because living resources may disappear and markets fluctuate. He instead imagines the forest as an enduring source of timber for ships, houses, and fuel, and considers shifting from fur trading to timber. That vision depends not only on trees but on systems capable of reaching forests, moving wood, and connecting it with distant buyers.

The same pattern becomes visible in New Zealand, where coastal logging and trading stations combine camps, warehouses, sawmills, and small shipyards. They take valuable timber, move on to the next area, and leave extensive waste; felled trees are burned as a quick means of clearing land. In this larger landscape of commercial access, the mounted journey to the kauri forest is not separate from the timber enterprise it serves. Horses enable entry and movement, while the forest is increasingly treated as a supply of saleable wood.

Changing Uses

Across these episodes, the horse’s role is specific and transitional. It carries visitors and supplies into forests, and it hauls logs in a small-scale logging operation; elsewhere, it stands in a sequence of power sources overtaken by industrial machinery and road transport. The novel does not present horses as a solution to forest destruction. Rather, their practical usefulness connects travel and labor to the broader process by which forests are opened, harvested, and incorporated into trade.