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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Dead Line, Ltd
Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design by Jaya Miceli
Photograph © Anderson & Middleton Company
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007232000
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780007290147
Version: 2017-03-17
To the memory of my high school teacher
Elizabeth Ring,
Maine historian, scholar and educator,
who excited in me a lifelong interest in historical change
and shifting disparate views of past and present.
To the memories of my sister Joyce Proulx Kostyn,
brother-in-law John Roberts,
writers Ivan Doig, Dermot Healy, Aidan Higgins
and wildlife biologist Ronald Lockwood.
And for barkskins of all kinds—
loggers, ecologists, sawyers, sculptors, hotshots,
planters, students, scientists, leaf eaters, photographers,
practitioners of shinrin-yoku, land-sat interpreters,
climatologists, wood butchers, picnickers, foresters,
ring counters and the rest of us.
Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
George Santayana
In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
Lynn White, Jr.
Contents
I. forêt, hache, famille: 1693–1716
II. “… helplessly they stare at his tracks”: 1693–1727
10. all the world wishes to go to China
13. garden of delightful confusion
16. “a wicked messenger, fallen into evil …”
17. “unto a horse belongeth a whip”