Everyone has an opinion about these tractors and trucks. One thing’s for sure, you have to treat these things with respect. We talk about it all evening and go to sleep. The giants stand over us like silent guards.

At seven the next morning, the bus returns. This is when whites start work, no matter what the weather is like. I remember this from the residential school. Up at six in the morning, lunch at noon, dinner at five o’clock. Everything was on a schedule, and it was bad news for anyone who was late. The principal would go all red in the face and yell, “Punctuality! Punctuality! You will always be lazy in life if you do not learn how to be punctual. There is a time for everything!” All year they taught us to tell time using the big clock in the classroom. We had to memorize the days of the week, the months of the year, but it never sank in. Why did everyone in the world have to get up at the same time, eat at the same time?

Two men in white hardhats start giving orders to a bunch of others wearing yellow hats, and suddenly it’s like a bear has swiped open an ant hill. The men with the yellow hats scatter in all directions while we watch in amazement.

The tractors start to move. They spit thick black smoke out of their tall stovepipes. The more the engines roar, the thicker the smoke becomes, spewing up into the air. The caterpillars bite into the fresh earth. The bulldozers charge head first into the forest, the enormous gleaming blades of their shovels digging deep. The earth is split open, boulders heave up and roll over each other. The trees tremble as they are uprooted and stampeded into the ground. They bend, are flattened, crushed, swallowed up. The big bulldozers charge, back up and charge in again. They skin the earth alive, scrape it, clear huge flat spaces. The smell of overturned topsoil and sap emerges from the forest.

When the day draws to a close and the silence returns at last, we cautiously follow the tractor tracks between the new surveyors’ stakes. Our feet sink into the dark red soil, leaving deep prints.

• • •

Every day brings new surprises. We don’t even recognize the shores of our great lake anymore. Our campsites have disappeared, the hill has been flattened, the brook has changed its course. The smoke racks, the campfire, the old jackpine where we hung moose and bear hides have all been razed to the ground.

The endless grating noise of the caterpillars, the constant coming and going, the mind-boggling speed with which our land is destroyed…We can’t even think anymore. In the evenings, crude men wander between the tents and cabins. They gather on the dock or on the porch of the Hudson’s Bay post to harass the girls and even the women.