Trois-Rivières appears as a stopping place on a northbound journey, where Indigenous travelers and the Sel family encounter one another amid seasonal cold and expanding timber commerce. The town’s significance is less as a fixed destination than as a junction: routes through it connect families, homelands, labor, and markets that extend far beyond the settlement.

A stop on the northward route

After ten days of walking, the travelers reach Trois-Rivières, where a group of Omamiwinini from downriver is preparing to travel beyond Montréal and up the Kichisìpi. The group includes women and children and is led by a tall, serious-faced man. With frosts already beginning, the travelers welcome three strong men who can help carry loads over portages and keep the party moving before the severe cold sets in. Trois-Rivières thus serves as a practical meeting place: the Sels join a larger traveling community rather than making the journey alone.

Routes, return, and lost homelands

The travelers’ stories give the crossing a history that reaches beyond the immediate journey. Some of the girls traveling with the group are Odaawa people bound for Manitoulin Island. Their people had once lived there, but disease brought by white settlers devastated them; survivors burned their villages, and some moved to Trois-Rivières. Now that the diseases have disappeared, they are returning to the island. The town is therefore connected both to displacement and to a possible return: it is one point in a route shaped by epidemic loss, migration, and the continuing effort to reach home.

The river corridor and the timber frontier

At the same stop, Josime asks about the Gatineau. The travelers learn that white men are cutting pine along the river and turning round logs into squared timber, a practice the Indigenous narrator of the exchange regards as strange. This detail places Trois-Rivières within a wider transformation of waterways into corridors for commercial forestry. The northbound travelers move through a landscape where rivers carry people and sustain travel, while settlers and timber interests treat them as access to forest resources.

A junction in a larger trade network

The novel’s wider geography links Trois-Rivières to successive scales of exchange. Charles Duquet identifies New France’s forests as a resource he expects to be more enduring than animal commodities such as beaver, and later notices the possibility of a three-cornered route involving India, Europe, and timber markets. In New Zealand, the same commercial logic appears in shore stations that combine logging and trade, exhaust local forests, and move on. Much later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of prime pine to Sydney, Australia, and considers overseas timber partnerships. These episodes do not make Trois-Rivières the center of the timber trade, but they place it within the novel’s connected world of river routes, forest extraction, and distant markets.

Narrative significance

Trois-Rivières gathers contrasting meanings of movement into one brief scene. For the traveling Indigenous families, routes north and east make possible assistance, reunion, and return to ancestral land; for expanding timber commerce, waterways open forests to cutting and shipment. The town’s place in the narrative is therefore a hinge between journeys of survival and a developing economy that converts the surrounding forest into exportable wood.