North American beaver

Beavers recur across the book as animals, food, trade goods, and symbols of a changing landscape. Their abundance once supported Mi’kmaw life and made their pelts valuable in European markets; overtrapping and expanding settlement then reduced their numbers and altered both local subsistence and the fur economy. From René Sel’s early encounters with Mi’kmaw fishing knowledge to later accounts of depleted hunting grounds, the beaver links practical ecological knowledge to the consequences of treating the forest’s inhabitants as inexhaustible commodities.

Food, Knowledge, and Exchange

Early in René Sel’s life in the forest, Mari shares practical knowledge of river foodways. She makes three eel traps, supplies bait, and shows him where to set them; the episode establishes a household economy based on learning from the river and using its resources directly. Later scenes broaden this knowledge to include beavers: when Auguste and Kuntaw hunt in new territory, Auguste shoots a swimming beaver and retrieves it, then Kuntaw takes a second. The two bring both animals ashore and eat well that night. Here beavers are not abstractions of wealth but part of a varied, attentive relationship with a landscape that also sustains lake trout, bears, owls, and the small creatures living in old logs.

That local relationship is repeatedly displaced by the commercial value assigned to pelts. The beaver skin can buy European goods: Sosep explains that beavers have been taken so heavily because their skins can be exchanged for guns and metal pots. The trade changes not only what people hunt but what the animal means within community life. A beaver pelt that once had a place in burial practice becomes a saleable object, while the meat remains important as food. The distinction between the animal’s many roles and the market’s single measure of value is central to the book’s account of ecological and cultural change.

Fur as Money, and the Instability of the Trade

For Charles Duquet, the fur trade’s apparent prosperity exposes its own fragility. Large shipments of pelts continue to arrive even while settlements fear shortages and violence, until French hatters and furriers can use no more and warehouses fill with fur. Duquet recognizes that the trade depends on alternating surplus and scarcity: beavers may disappear through overtrapping, disease, or causes people cannot identify, while demand and prices are equally changeable. He rejects the idea that pelts can secure wealth that will last for generations. His search for a more dependable commodity leads him toward timber, which he imagines as an effectively endless resource. The beaver thus helps initiate a shift in commercial ambition from wildlife to forests, without Duquet questioning the assumption that either can be exploited without limit.

The book also shows how this trade’s consequences persist beyond any one merchant’s calculations. By the time the Sel family reaches Mi’kmaw country, the beaver population has been severely reduced. The animal has become a kind of white-man’s money, and the older custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave has fallen away. Sosep describes a landscape increasingly converted to fields and livestock use: woodland edges that once supplied berries and roots have been altered, salt marshes drained, and larger game driven away. Beaver decline is one part of that larger transformation, but it is especially revealing because it joins ecological depletion to a specific loss of food, exchange, and ceremony.

Scarcity and the Costs of Settlement

Loze gives the decline a moral and cultural dimension. She recalls that earlier generations killed many beavers to trade with Europeans and says the animals left the country and brought illness in their wake. Her account connects the fur trade to disease and to the loss of a food source: after eel, beaver meat had been among the Mi’kmaq’s best foods, yet people destroyed that resource to trade its fur. The account is presented as Loze’s explanation and memory, not as an independently established cause of illness. Its force lies in the way it makes the consequences of exchange legible within a community’s own understanding of loss.

Settlement intensifies that loss. Acadian agriculture, livestock, boats, nets, and introduced plants press on the food sources and habitats that sustain Mi’kmaw life. Sosep describes the settlers as taking more and more, while the Mi’kmaq become fewer; his warning is not limited to beavers but places their decline among multiple pressures on land and food. He urges his community to keep Mi’kmaw ways alive in thought and practice, including a world in which plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. The beaver’s diminished presence therefore carries an argument about whose knowledge counts and whose understanding of the living world survives encroachment.

The Fur Trade’s Residue in Memory and Landscape

A burial scene makes the transformation of the beaver pelt concrete. After Mari’s bones are buried in a large wikuom built by Mi’kmaq helpers, Achille kills a beaver and places its skin at the burial place, restoring an older practice. Someone soon takes the skin to sell. The act is small but decisive: a gesture of remembrance and continuity is converted back into merchandise. The loss is not merely that fewer beavers remain; the market reaches into the very practices through which the community remembers the dead.

Elsewhere, the narrative sets this diminished animal against commercial landscapes organized around extraction. In New Zealand, logging operations take valuable trees, shift camps onward, and leave waste behind; the account of that timber frontier echoes the earlier assumption that resources will remain available wherever commerce looks next. Across these episodes, the beaver’s history anticipates the wider pattern of forest exploitation: a living system is reduced to goods, its depletion becomes visible only after use has altered the landscape, and the costs fall on communities whose relationship to the land exceeds its market price. The beaver remains a measure of that change—once food, wealth, and a meaningful part of Mi’kmaw life, increasingly scarce as the trade and settlement around it expand.