Moose

Moose are both animals and a thread connecting the novel’s changing relationships with the forest. They appear as food in moments of hardship and hospitality, as quarry whose tracks and habits require close knowledge, and as a source of livelihood and memory. Across generations, the scenes around Moose distinguish practical Mi’kmaw knowledge of a living landscape from the settler vision of forest as an inexhaustible supply of commodities.

Food, hospitality, and hardship

Early in René Sel and Charles Duquet’s life in the woods, Monsieur Trépagny shares Moose meat with them during a trek. The men are hungry and cold; René had hoped for bread, while Duquet can barely chew. The meal is presented as generosity, but the two young men also sense contempt beneath it. Moose meat thus enters the novel not as an abstract resource but as food received within an unequal relationship of dependence.

That connection between Moose and sustenance returns in the meal of maize that Mari brings to the workers. Monsieur Trépagny identifies the rich ingredient folded into it as Moose bone marrow. The detail makes the animal part of a food practice that draws on more than the meat itself: the bones, too, become nourishment. Later, during a period of extreme cold, Trépagny eats Moose marrow with bread while recalling the severity of a past winter. Moose food belongs to the practical means by which people endure the climate, as well as to the stories through which they remember it.

Food associated with Moose also marks domestic change. After René receives land from Trépagny, Mari prepares a supper for the newly established household that includes venison and sturgeon for the seigneur’s party, while René’s household eats hot eels. The contrast makes the allocation of food part of the novel’s account of property, labor, and changing household ties, rather than a sign that the forest’s resources are equally available to everyone.

Hunting knowledge and the forest

The novel presents the ability to find and understand Moose as learned expertise. Elphège explains how to read a Moose track, determining the animal’s age, sex, size, and condition. René is astonished by the boy’s knowledge. The scene challenges his assumption that Indigenous forest knowledge is mere trickery: Elphège’s skill rests on careful interpretation of signs and the behavior of animals.

Moose hunting also appears in the account of Kuntaw’s upbringing. After he and Auguste return from a hunt to discover devastation, Kuntaw insists that having killed his Moose makes him a man and argues for marrying Malaan despite Elphège’s objection. The episode connects the hunt to Kuntaw’s claim to adult standing, though the resulting early marriage and his later departure for logging camps lead to hardship for Malaan and their son Tonny. The animal is part of a consequential rite of self-understanding, not a simple emblem of triumph.

Much later, Kuntaw uses his knowledge of woods and waterways to guide white visitors who want to hunt and fish. He carries equipment, makes trails through young spruce, establishes camps, and prepares food; his customers turn the outings into stories of masculine adventure. For Kuntaw, the work exposes an imbalance: the visitors treat hunting as recreation, while the knowledge and labor that make their trips possible are his occupation. Moose hunting therefore sits at the junction of Indigenous expertise and a market that packages forest experience for outsiders.

Memory, livelihood, and loss

After Beatrix’s death, Kuntaw imagines returning north to a half-wild forest and recovering ways of knowing trees that he feels have been displaced by their conversion into materials for houses and ships. His memory of his father Achille carrying a dead bear recalls the physical demands of an older life in the woods; the preceding account of Kuntaw’s own Moose hunt supplies a more personal instance of his continuing ability to live by inherited knowledge. His planned return is also an act of grief: he prepares a camp for two and sets out food for the imagined One Who Would Come, while resolving to live among the trees.

The novel does not treat Moose as an inexhaustible feature of that landscape. Kuntaw can still find a few, but their continued presence depends on the knowledge of hunters who know where to look. Meanwhile, settler business repeatedly treats forest abundance as an opportunity for permanent wealth. The contrast is especially sharp in the history of timber exploitation: forests are cut for distant markets, and cleared lands are left with waste and burned remains. Moose belong to a woodland world increasingly altered by commercial extraction, even where the animal itself remains part of people’s memory, food, and livelihood.

Narrative significance

Across its appearances, Moose connect intimate scenes to long economic and cultural changes. A shared meal can expose unequal power; a child’s reading of tracks can overturn a settler’s assumptions; a hunt can ground a claim to adulthood; and paid guiding can reveal how Indigenous labor is recast as white recreation. These are not separate from the novel’s forest history. They show that woodland is not merely timber or scenery, but a lived environment whose animals and signs sustain forms of knowledge and relationship that commercial expansion threatens to marginalize.