Morvan is the wooded highland region in France where René Sel had worked as a tree-cutter before his arrival in New France. The remembered landscape establishes his practical knowledge of forests and labor, while the vast trees of his new home expose how limited that earlier experience was. Later, Morvan also marks the beginning of a longer history of forest work that the novel follows from manual cutting to industrial logging.

René Sel’s earlier life

Before leaving France, René had spent years chopping trees in Morvan alongside his older brother, Achille. When Monsieur Trépagny led René and Charles Duquet into the forests of New France, René feared he might be expected to serve inside the household; he had come with the experience of a woodsman, not a house servant. The new forest was so immense that he thought Achille would have stared in amazement at its trees. René wore his dead brother’s clothes and wooden shoes, carrying tangible reminders of the life and work he had left behind.

Morvan’s place in René’s memory was already receding soon after his arrival. When Monsieur Trépagny noticed René’s skill with an axe, René explained that he and Achille had cut trees in the Morvan forest. The old life, however, was becoming unmoored from memory even as that experience helped him make himself useful in his new surroundings. Morvan thus serves both as a real place of formative work and as a past that distance is beginning to loosen.

From woodland skill to a timber economy

The novel later sets the woodsman’s practical knowledge against the ambitions of Charles Duquet. After observing the instability of the fur trade, Duquet sought a commodity he believed could produce lasting wealth. He settled on the forest, imagining its timber as an abundant source of material for ships, houses, and fuel, and planned to shift from furs into the wood trade when he had prepared himself. Morvan belongs to the older world of hands-on tree-cutting; Duquet’s plan turns forests into a prospective commodity and a foundation for family wealth.

That commercial vision expands beyond New France. In New Zealand, logging stations, trading posts, warehouses, sawmills, and shipyards draw settlers toward timber. The camps move on after taking the most valuable trees, leaving waste behind; felled forest is burned to clear the ground. The belief that the forest exists for its takers sharply contrasts with René’s remembered experience of learning woodcutting in Morvan: in the later commercial system, forest becomes not a place of work alone but a resource to be extracted and traded across distance.

Logging work across generations

The narrative follows forest labor into the camps of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, where workers cut trees, build log roads, run sawmills, and drive timber down rivers. River work is particularly dangerous, yet companies depend on it to move logs to mills. A camp boss insists that water is essential to the whole production chain and that the expense of river driving must be accepted if the company wants its logs delivered. Indigenous workers are assigned this hazardous task, exposing how the industry distributes risk along racial lines.

Across three generations, the Sel family witnesses a succession of tools and transport systems: the poll axe gives way to the double-bit axe, then to the crosscut saw and increasingly powerful sawmills; oxen are replaced by horses, donkey engines, and Shay-geared locomotives. Roads and trucks eventually displace the river drives. These changes reorganize the work, but do not make it safe. The narrative links technological power to the rapid leveling of the continent’s remaining old-growth forests, making Morvan’s comparatively local tradition of tree-cutting the starting point for a much larger history of industrial extraction.