Beatrix’s death and the reading of her will end a life shaped by divided inheritance, late intimacy, and the attempt to pass knowledge between generations. As terminal stomach cancer brings her close to death, Dr. Mukhtar eases her pain and stays with her; after her death, her bequests reach her daughter Elise, her sons Francis-Outger and Josime, Kuntaw, and the younger men whose lives she had helped shape. The distribution of land, books, horses, and small personal mementos becomes more than a settlement of property: it exposes how differently each survivor carries her memory, and sends Kuntaw toward a solitary return to the forest.

Illness and final weeks

Dr. Mukhtar tells Beatrix that she has stomach cancer and a large accumulation of fluid, which he can relieve temporarily. He expects she may have a month or two, and offers to remain in the house because Elise needs rest and Beatrix will require continuing care. Beatrix says she wants to die and be done with pain and life, but that despair does not contain the whole of her remaining experience. Over the following six weeks she develops deep feelings for the doctor as they speak about books and ideas, places neither has seen, quiet, and horses. The pain medicine becomes less effective, and Mukhtar tries another treatment as her condition worsens.

In the final week, Beatrix experiences her illness through an image of being suspended in a vast bowl of water. At first the water seems as easy to breathe as air; as the pressure in her stomach bears on her lungs, it thickens, and episodes of pain become turbulent currents and storms. The image connects her bodily decline with the ordinary domestic bowl in which she once mixed bread dough, making the familiar household object a measure of how completely illness has altered her world.

The care around her is practical and intimate. Mukhtar works to make her last days more bearable, while Francis-Outger comes daily from his home a mile away with balsam boughs for the sickroom. He also brings juniper berries, which Mukhtar crushes. Their fragrance gives Beatrix a brief pleasure before she dies. The account places her death alongside the unexpectedness of her late love: after fifty-two years, she falls in love on her deathbed.

Kuntaw and the question of inheritance

Beatrix’s death deepens Kuntaw’s accumulated grief. He has already lost his son Tonny and daughter Malaan; now he tells himself that he has lost Beatrix and himself as well. He tries to protect himself by recasting their years together as wasted, describing her to himself as an overeducated white woman in an Indigenous body and deciding that life with her made him weak and powerless. Yet his rejection is not the same as indifference. His sense that he can recover strength follows directly from the loss and from his recognition that his life with Beatrix has not made him feel at home in the identity she hoped he would help her understand.

Kuntaw’s earlier estrangement from Tonny makes the question of transmission particularly painful. He had acknowledged that he failed to teach his son what he needed to know and had not stayed with Tonny and Malaan. He speaks of the old stories and ancestors, but cannot tell the story of his mother’s severed arm, Achille’s disappearance, or the years he spent searching for his father. These absences mark the limits of what he can pass on through speech. With Beatrix, however, he had come to understand that her request for his teaching was not simply a request for books: she needed him to help her learn the knowledge of the forest and the shore. He had led her through animal tracks, seasonal signs, and the connections among living things, and had set aside the books to teach her directly.

That shared learning does not resolve Kuntaw’s grief. After Beatrix dies, he turns toward the northern forest, where he believes half-wild land remains. He wants to know trees again as the old people knew them, rather than as material for houses or ships. His plan is specific: he will make a camp as if for two, with clothing and bed robes for a companion, but without a client or the metal cooking pots he associates with white life. He will set out food for the One Who Would Come, the companion he imagines gradually becoming visible like shadows of moving leaves. The vision transforms bereavement into a future-oriented ritual, but it also leaves Kuntaw alone, waiting for a person who has not appeared.

The will and its bequests

Beatrix is buried in a plot Francis-Outger has laid out behind the house. After the funeral, the judge reads her will while the family is present. She leaves the house, its furniture, and the rest of her property to Elise, both in gratitude for Elise’s care and in atonement for having sent her, as a girl, into a miserable marriage. The bequest acknowledges a particular injury in their history while providing Elise with the home and property that had belonged to her mother.

The remaining gifts distinguish different forms of attachment. Beatrix leaves all her books to Dr. Mukhtar, the man who has cared for her and with whom she shared conversations in her final weeks. Her secret forty-thousand-acre pine woodlot in northern Maine goes to Francis-Outger and Josime. The land makes the will consequential beyond the household: it passes a substantial forest property to her sons, while Kuntaw receives personal items rather than land.

To Kuntaw, Beatrix leaves two of their five horses, a red English wool blanket he had always liked, and a short letter. He laughs briefly after reading it, then falls silent; even in death she has managed both to amuse and puzzle him. The response preserves the complexity of their bond rather than resolving it into a simple declaration of grief. Her gift acknowledges his attachment to the blanket and horses, but it does not prevent him from deciding to leave for Canada.

Beatrix also leaves packages for Jinot and Amboise. Amboise receives a small watercolor she painted of Elise, Amboise, and Jinot sitting together on a bench beneath the apple tree, recalling a drawing session from years earlier, as well as a deerskin sock containing five gold pieces. Jinot receives a familiar four-inch stuffed toy horse that Beatrix made for him after Tonny brought the children to her home, along with a deerskin pouch of coins and a note in her unsteady handwriting asking him to remember her. The different gifts preserve distinct moments of family life: a shared portrait for Amboise, and for Jinot a toy linked to his arrival in the household.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The bequests do not produce a single, unified family response. Amboise carefully pockets his inheritance and says he will go to New Brunswick for the drive, which is just beginning. Jinot’s attention turns to work: Amboise urges him to collect his pay from Simon Marchand and come to the camp, recognizing that his difficulties are not limited to their mother’s death. Elise, meanwhile, is left with the house and must carry forward her own life after tending Beatrix. The will distributes not only resources but different obligations and routes away from the deathbed.

For Kuntaw, the aftermath is most consequential as a change in direction. He says he will go back to Canada, but his larger plan is to head north into the remaining forest and prepare a camp for an imagined companion. The One Who Would Come gives his grief a shape, while his resolve to live among trees expresses a desire to recover Mi’kmaw knowledge in a world where he sees trees treated as commodities. His planned return is neither a restoration of what was lost nor a settled reconciliation with Beatrix. It is an attempt to continue without her, carrying forward the forest teachings he had once shared with her and the hope that he might become a Mi’kmaw man again.

The episode brings the novel’s concerns with memory and inheritance into the intimate form of a funeral and a will. A pine woodlot can be transferred by legal document; knowledge of animal tracks, plant seasons, and the relations between forest and shore depends on teaching and lived attention. Beatrix’s possessions travel to different people, but her final gifts cannot make their histories identical. The stuffed horse, the watercolor, the books, the land, and Kuntaw’s imagined extra place at camp each preserve a separate strand of her legacy.