Tony takes his children to Kenton and dies at a logging camp

Tonny’s journey to Penobscot Bay is an effort to give his children the kinship and safety he cannot provide alone; his death at Wolf Falls then exposes the human cost of a logging economy that assigns Indigenous workers its most dangerous work. He arrives at his father Kuntaw Sel’s home with Elise, Amboise, and Jinot after their mother has been killed, entrusts them to Kuntaw and Beatrix Duquet, and goes on in search of wages. The children find a home; Tonny does not return.

A life shaped by displacement

Tonny grows up around a trading post, without the hunting skills or weapons that might have helped him sustain himself away from it. He is resourceful in the narrow terms the post permits: he begs, steals, runs errands for white men, and sleeps under overturned canoes or in makeshift shelters. His circumstances are not simply personal misfortune. The surrounding community has been disrupted, and the ways of life that once supported Mi’kmaw men have been eroded; Tonny has neither the resources to live by those traditions nor a secure place in the world of the post.

At fourteen, Tonny and Hanah begin a relationship, and they have three children, Elise, Amboise, and Jinot. Hanah later goes with white men and is beaten to death by the trader Henry Clefford. Her death leaves Tonny responsible for the children in a life already marked by instability. He is angry with his mother, Malaan, and tells her that he is leaving with the children because he is grown and a father. His declaration asserts responsibility, but the narrative makes clear how little support or preparation he has for carrying it out.

The journey to Kuntaw’s home

Tonny decides that the children should live among blood relatives rather than remain at the post. He knows only that his father lives at Penobscot Bay. He sets out without announcing his arrival, paddling a stolen canoe and then walking for weeks through mud and old snow. He often carries the youngest child, Jinot. The journey is a concrete act of care: despite his own poverty and estrangement, Tonny brings all three children to the one family connection he can identify.

At the house, Beatrix hears scratching at the door and admits the travel-worn visitors. Tonny names himself as Kuntaw Sel’s son and introduces the children, touching each one on the forehead as he gives their names. He explains that their mother is dead and asks Beatrix to help them, acknowledging that he considers himself unable to give them a good life. Beatrix responds by feeding them. She lifts Jinot onto a chair, and the children encounter the unfamiliar rooms and furnishings of the household.

When Kuntaw returns and understands who has arrived, he is overcome and asks them to stay, telling Beatrix that they should all live together. His welcome does not erase the distance between father and son. Tonny sees Kuntaw as dependent on Beatrix’s household, while the children’s mixed use of Mi’kmaw, French, and English reflects the changed circumstances of the family. Beatrix, who speaks Mi’kmaw better than Tonny or the children, shows them the large room that will serve as a schoolroom and says she will teach them to read and write. The family’s reunion thus offers immediate shelter as well as a practical plan for the children’s future.

Departure and the search for work

Kuntaw asks Tonny to stay, telling him that he still has a place there and that bringing the children was the right thing to do. Tonny nevertheless leaves in the rain and fog, saying that he will try New Brunswick for work and hoping to return for the children. His decision repeats, in a different form, Kuntaw’s earlier departure from his own people: Kuntaw recognizes that he, too, left a son behind. The parallel does not make the circumstances identical, but it gives their exchange a painful understanding of how one generation’s departure can become another’s inheritance.

The lumber camps seem to Tonny like the first available route into a new life. Work is scarce, and the camps are among the few employers willing to hire Indigenous men, treating them as disposable labor. Tonny considers whether he might move farther into the forest or seek a city, but he has no gun and does not know how to live by the animals. He chooses the camps, where he can at least find employment. The choice is constrained rather than freely made: the work that accepts him is also the work least protective of him.

Death on the river

Tonny spends the winter limbing felled pine. In spring, the boss orders him into a bateau for the river drive, assuming that his Indigenous identity means he is naturally skilled with a paddle. Tonny has known bateaux chiefly as shelter from rain, not as working craft, and he is no experienced riverman. Before he can collect his season’s pay, he drowns below Wolf Falls. His death closes the possibility that he will return for Elise, Amboise, and Jinot, while leaving the children in the household where he entrusted them.

The camp’s labor system explains why Tonny’s assignment is not an isolated misfortune. River work is recognized as the most dangerous part of logging, and Indigenous men are given it because employers regard them as suited to the water. A camp boss bluntly treats their deaths as no different from white men’s, even as the allocation of risk follows a racial line. The work moves logs to sawmills and sustains the commercial operation, but the danger falls on workers with little power over the terms of their employment. Tonny’s death before payday makes that imbalance especially stark: the labor has been extracted, but the promised wages never reach him.

Family legacy and the logging economy

Tonny’s arrival briefly interrupts a cycle of separation. He cannot recreate a secure life for the children, but he refuses to leave them at the post and carries them to relatives who can feed, house, and teach them. Kuntaw’s welcome gives that act a place within a wider family history, while Kuntaw’s grief after Tonny’s death turns the reunion into another measure of what colonial displacement has cost him. He believes he failed to make his son Mi’kmaw again and regrets leaving Mi’kma’ki, his people, and Tonny.

The episode also belongs to the novel’s account of forest extraction across generations. Logging offers Tonny employment precisely where other work is denied, yet it subjects him to a hazardous division of labor that can kill him before he receives his wages. Later accounts of the camps describe Indigenous workers being assigned river driving and trace changes from axes and saws to machinery, while the forests are cut at ever larger scales. Tonny’s story makes that economic history intimate: the logs travel onward, but the worker who was presumed fit to move them disappears from his children’s lives.