The Maine woods stand at the center of the novel’s changing argument about forests: they appear as seemingly limitless wealth to timber entrepreneurs, as a living network of knowledge and relations to Mi’kmaq people, and as a place where extraction imposes immediate risks on workers and lasting costs on the land. The forest’s apparent abundance makes commercial expansion seem permanent; its depletion repeatedly exposes that confidence as an illusion.

Forest as Commodity and Frontier

Charles Duquet identifies timber as the resource that might secure a fortune beyond the unstable fur trade. Beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds can disappear or lose value, but he concludes that Europe lacks one commodity New France possesses in abundance: forest. Remembering that English colonists cut pine for naval masts, he imagines timber supplying ships, houses, and fuel, with profits that could endure. He plans to earn money in furs first, then shift into timber, and raises the prospect of that future with the Trépagny brothers, who respond cautiously.

Duquet’s confidence rests on a mistaken picture of permanence. The woods seem vast enough to replace what is taken, and that assumption turns a landscape into a business proposition. The novel later shows the same frontier logic operating across much broader markets: forest products are pursued wherever buyers and transport can be found, while the damage is left at the source.

Knowledge and Ways of Reading the Forest

The Maine woods are also a place of practical knowledge rather than merely a stock of raw material. Mari teaches René Sel to fish for eels, weaving three traps, supplying bait, and showing him where to set them. Her instruction is specific and repeatable: nearly every day afterward he brings her eels, and she explains that Mi’kmaq people know many methods, while the traps suit him best. The scene presents knowledge as something taught through practice and attention to place.

A letter written by Père Crème describes a different way of understanding the natural world. He observes that Mi’kmaq lives follow the seasonal abundance of animals, fruit, and fish, and that they regard trees, plants, fish, moose, and bears as equals. In the forest, he writes, they speak to toads and beetles as acquaintances; trees, in particular, are persons to them, not simply material for houses and ships. His account recognizes the distance between these relations and the French demand for agriculture and settled order, even as it reflects the colonial assumptions through which he interprets them.

Kuntaw later tries to teach Beatrix how to read the forest as an interconnected system. He leads her through animal tracks, seasonal signs in plants and trees, and other changes in the natural world, explaining that forest and shore are linked by countless fine connections. His teaching answers his earlier sense of failure to pass Mi’kmaw knowledge to his son Tonny: the forest becomes a classroom, and knowledge becomes a means of restoring a relationship with a world that books alone cannot convey.

Logging, Labor, and Risk

The woods are not only a destination for capital but also a workplace whose harsh routines shape the lives of loggers. In camp, men rise before daylight, eat salt pork and drink tea, and carry sharpened axes to the cut. They return near dark to poor food and crowded quarters, then sleep on the dirt floor beneath a shared blanket. Their work follows the seasons: chopping in winter, driving logs in spring, and, for some, sawing in summer. The novel describes this as a brotherhood made by dangerous work and the lack of other employment, not as evidence that the workers escape its costs.

River driving is especially hazardous. Wooden crosses along the banks mark the danger, while the allocation of river work to Indigenous workers reveals how risk is unevenly assigned. Injuries and deaths are familiar features of the labor. After Sash is killed in the river, the men recover his body and bury him; Franceway’s song gives voice to grief extending beyond the single death. The logging economy depends on workers who face immediate danger even as the business treats the forest as a resource to be moved and sold.

Depletion and the Wider Timber Trade

The Maine woods’ place in the timber economy becomes clearer when James Duke’s partner Lennart Vogel reports what he has seen in Ohio. The forest land James’s father acquired as a stand of white pine has been cut and burned by incoming settlers, who replace the trees with farms. Vogel’s account turns the loss of a distant forest into a warning about the assumptions behind the company’s holdings: land that once seemed to promise abundant timber can be transformed beyond recovery as a commercial supply.

The novel follows timber beyond North America as well. In New Zealand, logging camps, trading posts, warehouses, sawmills, and shipyards are established along the shore. After taking valuable timber, operators move on, leaving stumps and waste; felled trees are burned in a clearing process that also destroys the forest’s living variety. The phrase that the forest was there for the newcomers captures the extractive assumption that had earlier made Maine’s woods appear inexhaustible. Later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of pine to Sydney, and its lawyer hears a proposal for a New Zealand logging partnership. The expanding trade links distant forests to overseas buyers, while the environmental costs remain with the places being cut.