René Sel and Charles Duquet’s arrival in New France begins the novel’s long history of forest commerce by placing two vulnerable newcomers before the vast landscape that will shape their lives. They reach a remote settlement as servants of Claude Trépagny, but the forest makes a deeper first impression than the settlement itself: it appears at once formidable and, to Duquet, eventually inexhaustible. The scene plants the tension between human dependence on the woods and the belief that they exist to be exploited.

Arrival and first impressions

René and the other newcomers pass Tadoussac, Kébec, and Trois-Rivières before mooring near dawn at a remote riverbank settlement. Rain, mud, willows, and mosquitoes define the immediate surroundings; beyond them lies a dark forest that René perceives as an inimical wilderness. The settlers wait beneath a spruce while their names are entered in a ledger, a bureaucratic threshold between the voyage and their new lives.

René can make an R, learned from a priest who died before teaching him the rest of the alphabet. His partial literacy distinguishes him among the newcomers, but it does not change his dependent position. When Monsieur Bouchard notices the letter, he calls him a learned fellow; René is then summoned by his new master, Claude Trépagny.

The new household

Trépagny has also taken Charles Duquet, a frail young engagé from the Paris slums who had struggled through the voyage. René understands that both men are to serve the same master, though he can only guess at their prospects. Trépagny’s worn cloak gives little indication of wealth, and René does not know what work awaits him. After years of chopping trees in the Morvan highlands, he hopes not to be assigned to domestic service.

Trépagny leads the two servants away from the settlement and into dense hardwood forest broken by pine. René sees trees of a scale unfamiliar from the old country, including towering spruce and hemlock and stands of white birch. Trépagny says that Indigenous people use the birch bark to make houses and boats, a claim René initially doubts. The forest is therefore introduced not merely as scenery but as a material world already understood and used by its Indigenous inhabitants.

From forest encounter to commercial ambition

The arrival’s significance unfolds retrospectively in Duquet’s later response to the colonial economy. As large shipments of beaver pelts overwhelm the market, he recognizes the fur trade’s vulnerability to surplus, scarcity, overtrapping, disease, and changing demand. He wants wealth that will last beyond a fluctuating market and become a family inheritance, rather than a short-lived fortune tied to an animal resource.

Duquet identifies timber as the alternative. He reasons that the forest is vast, replenishing, and capable of supplying ships, houses, and fuel; English colonists already profit by cutting pines for naval masts. He plans to continue trading furs while accumulating capital and preparing to move into timber, and briefly invites the Trépagny brothers to join him. Their guarded response offers no enthusiastic confirmation of the plan. His confidence in permanent abundance, however, becomes an early expression of the extractive logic that will recur throughout the novel.

A landscape transformed into a commodity

The later history of logging exposes the consequences hidden inside Duquet’s assumption. In New Zealand, timber stations and related enterprises move from one productive stretch of shore forest to another, leaving waste and burned clearings behind. The same resource logic appears in the Michigan forests that James Duke celebrates as a supply large enough to occupy a thousand men. Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes the danger in that enthusiasm: he sees the company’s hunger to clear the continent and the destruction of soil and forest that follows when the supply is treated as endless.

The arrival also opens onto the labor history of the woods. Logging camps recruit men from many communities, but dangerous river driving is disproportionately assigned to Indigenous workers. Across generations, the Sel family witnesses axes, saws, oxen, horses, engines, locomotives, roads, and trucks successively reorganize the work; mechanization expands the capacity to fell forests even as workers continue to face severe risks. Against this long arc, the newcomers’ first passage from the riverbank into the forest is both a personal beginning and the opening of a history in which forests are repeatedly mistaken for permanent stores of wealth.