New Brunswick is a recurring destination, workplace, and point of departure in the novel. For Mi’kmaq characters it offers a route toward wages and kin, but the work available to them is often dangerous and treated as disposable labor. Its forests and rivers also belong to a larger commercial system: trees become timber through cutting, river drives, and mills, while successive technologies extend the reach and pace of extraction.

Work, migration, and limited choices

When Tonny leaves Kuntaw’s home, he says he will try New Brunswick for work and hopes to return for Elise, Amboise, and Jinot. His choice is shaped by the scarcity of other employment: lumber camps are among the few places willing to hire Indians, and they regard those workers as expendable. Tonny first works through winter limbing felled pine, then is assigned to a spring river drive because his employer assumes an Indian is naturally skilled with a paddle. He has no such experience; bateaux had been shelter in his childhood, not working craft. Before he can collect his season’s pay, he drowns below Wolf Falls. His death makes the camp’s assumptions about Indigenous skill and the allocation of risk materially consequential.

New Brunswick is also part of the route Jinot takes while looking for his brother Amboise. In one deserted camp he finds a former logger peeling potatoes after a river accident left him badly injured and cost him half his teeth. The man recalls that Amboise left with an old Indigenous pack basket and planned to build a shack in the woods near the camp’s cut. Later, when the brothers meet, Jinot does not want to return to Marchand’s work or keep grubbing in a swamp for hackmatack knees. He asks Amboise to go west, where he has heard there are great forests. The movement through New Brunswick is therefore not simply employment or settlement: it is also a search for another way to live beyond the immediate demands of the camps.

The lumber camp and its labor system

The camps present themselves as rough, temporary communities, but their routines impose a strict rhythm. Workers rise before daylight, eat salt pork and tea, carry sharpened axes to the cut, and return near dark to pork and thin bean porridge. They sleep on a damp dirt floor under a shared, greasy blanket; rain can leave it wet for a week. The work binds men through shared hardship and pride in risk, while leaving them with little security. After the spring drive, many spend their wages in nearby bars and brothels and wait for another contractor to hire them. The description links the industry’s destructive work to the workers’ lack of alternatives: they have little to lose but their lives, yet the culture of the camp encourages them to behave as though they are safe if they are fast.

The danger is not distributed evenly. River work is acknowledged as the most hazardous task, and the narrative notes the many crosses along the banks. The boss assigns it to Indigenous workers; his blunt justification is that they drown just as readily as white men. That practice turns racial prejudice into a labor allocation system, placing Mi’kmaq workers and others in the water while the company’s logs depend on their work. The deaths and injuries of workers such as Tonny, and the other river-drive victims described in the novel, expose the human cost behind the movement of timber.

The work also depends on a chain of tasks and infrastructure. A camp boss argues that water moves the logs and powers the mills, so a company seeking to get logs to the sawmill must accept the expense of the drive. He points to Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers guiding logs through the river. This makes the waterway more than scenery: it is a transport system whose operation requires specialized labor, even as management’s accounting can reduce that labor to an expense.

Forests and the timber economy

New Brunswick belongs to a broader forest economy that Duquet imagines early in the novel. Having watched the fur trade swing between surplus and scarcity, he seeks a commodity he believes can provide enduring wealth. He concludes that the forest is an immense resource Europe lacks and considers the pine trade, timber for ships, houses, and fuel, and the possibility of building a business that could expand. He intends to accumulate money through furs before shifting to timber, and briefly proposes that Toussaint and Fernand Trépagny remain partners in his future venture. The brothers are not enthusiastic. The scene establishes the commercial promise of forests before the later narrative shows the consequences of treating them as inexhaustible.

The timber economy reaches beyond local camps. During a trading voyage, Duquet notices that a three-cornered route involving India could work for a lumber merchant. Much later, Duke & Breitsprecher ships its first load of best pine to Sydney, Australia, and a buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract while also expressing interest in New Zealand kauri and efficient logging camps there. These episodes connect forests in North America to distant markets. The forest becomes not only a local livelihood but a commodity moved through shipping and commercial networks.

That expansion carries ecological costs. The novel describes logging stations, camps, trading posts, warehouses, mills, and shipyards as a linked system that takes the most valuable trees and moves on, leaving waste and burnt stumps. In another account of North American forestry, Dieter Breitsprecher says that the companies he knows do not leave seed trees on vast cutover lands; rain or snow can carry soil downhill. His criticism contrasts short-term extraction with the possibility of maintaining forestland for future timber and paper. Together, these passages place New Brunswick’s logging world within a larger conflict between immediate commercial gain and the continued life of forests.

Generations, machines, and the changing woods

The Sel family’s connection to the woods extends across generations and across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Maine. Their work includes felling and spudding trees, building booms and corduroy roads, river driving, sawmilling, and cutting cordwood, pulp, and pit props. The account of this labor history follows changes in tools and transport: the poll axe gives way to the double-bitted axe, then the crosscut saw; mills progress from up-and-down gang saws to circular and band saws; oxen give way to horses, then to donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads reach forests beyond waterways, trucks and roads replace river drives.

These changes reorganize work rather than simply making it safer. Workers move from hand tools and animal power toward loud, fast machinery, while logging expands into increasingly remote forest. The text describes the profession as one in which a worker must remain watchful and lucky to survive for long. The machines make it possible to level the continent’s remaining ancient forests, and the family’s experience ties that environmental transformation to the ordinary labor of cutting, hauling, and milling.

New Brunswick thus holds several meanings at once: a place where characters seek relatives or wages, a setting for the dangerous labor assigned to Indigenous workers, and a part of the expanding timber economy. Its forests are presented as a source of wealth and work, but the repeated movement from camp to river to mill—and from one cutover tract toward the next—reveals the costs hidden by the promise of abundant timber. The province’s importance lies in this convergence of family history, unequal labor, industrial change, and forest loss.