Guillaume Dies in the Forest

Guillaume D’Anjou’s death in the forest is both a family bereavement and a return to the landscape that defined him. Found beside a deer he had shot, with his old hunting rifle fallen from his hands, he dies in circumstances that echo his father Égide’s death in the woods forty-four years earlier. For Loïc, Guillaume’s adopted son, the loss makes a recent walk with his father figure newly poignant: what had seemed an ordinary return to the forest becomes their farewell.

The Death in the Forest

One autumn day, Guillaume went alone for a walk near Sugarloaf Mountain Forest and did not return. The next day, his jeep was found at the edge of the woods; Guillaume lay farther inside, his old hunting rifle fallen from his hands. About twenty metres away lay a large male deer, shot in the chest. The forest was not simply a setting for the death: it was the terrain Guillaume knew with an intimacy formed over a lifetime.

The account attributes his death to a failure of his chronically weak heart. Guillaume had not brought the nitrate capsules he kept for a possible attack. Whether that omission was deliberate remains uncertain; the narration raises the possibility without resolving it. His death is described as quiet and hidden, a manner of dying suited to a man who knew the woods so well.

A Family Echo

Guillaume’s death recalls that of his father, Égide D’Anjou, who had died in the forest forty-four years earlier, almost to the day. The parallel gives the episode a powerful sense of recurrence: father and son both meet their ends among the trees, and Guillaume’s solitary walk seems to return him to a family history already written into that landscape. The text suggests an atavistic pull toward the woods, while leaving the exact meaning of the resemblance open.

The News Reaches Loïc

The news reached Loïc in Montréal, where he was completing his classical studies. In late October, after finding an urgent message beneath the door of his room in the Philosophy pavilion, he called his family in Touladi. Marie-Louise told him, in a broken voice, that Guillaume had been found in the forest with his rifle. She quickly insisted that his sick heart had failed, cutting off suspicion about the circumstances.

Grief and memories, along with regrets for things left undone or unsaid, overwhelmed Loïc for a time. He set out immediately for the Lower St. Lawrence, travelling overnight by express coach to Rivière-du-Loup and then onward by local bus to Touladi. He arrived beneath a heavy sky and returned to the family home and its familiar cherry orchard, stripped by autumn.

The Last Walk and Its Afterlife

Only two months earlier, Loïc had spent several days at home before beginning his final year of college. He had walked with Guillaume, his mother’s brother, who had adopted and loved him as a son. Loïc had not known that this excursion would be their last. After Guillaume’s death, it remained in his memory as a profound lesson in nature and in being: he had finally become old enough to recognize the depth of Guillaume’s knowledge.

Guillaume read the forest through broken branches, torn bark, displaced twigs, and openings between trees. Each sign belonged to a landscape he knew almost by heart, and his sure movement along its paths joined practical experience with a patient attentiveness. The death therefore changes the meaning of the walk in retrospect. What Loïc had witnessed as his adoptive father’s command of the woods becomes the final inheritance of that knowledge, carried forward in memory after Guillaume has disappeared into the place he understood so deeply.