In the late 17th century, two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Dick, arrive in Canada, formerly known as New France. Forced to serve a feudal lord, they become woodcutters, men of the forest. Sel suffers greatly, oppressed by the forest he has been assigned to clear. He is forced to marry a woman from the Mi'kmaq tribe, and their descendants are trapped between two hostile cultures. Dick, resourceful and ruthless, escapes, becomes a fur trader, and then sets up a logging business. Annie Proulx narrates the global and harsh journey of their descendants over the next three hundred years, the revenge of competitors, accidents, illnesses, attacks by Native Americans, and cultural annihilation. Again and again, they seize as much as they can from a supposedly inexhaustible natural resource, leaving characters of the modern era facing a possible ecological collapse. The epic masterpiece of the great American writer, an exquisite blend of history and imagination, a dazzling, wonderfully dramatic novel about the destruction of the world's forests, with characters alive, full of greed, desire, revenge, or sympathy and hope.