It's already 4 a.m., a little late for breakfast. In a fiercely lit canteen, dozens of forestry workers in oilskin jackets and rubber boots are hunched over wooden tables, siphoning coffee, ingesting protein in the shape of eggs and ham. The room is white, but almost all the faces in it are black. They are recent immigrants, mostly from French-speaking African countries, who live in Montreal but come to cut brush in northern Quebec's boreal forest in the summer.

The local forestry-management company that runs the work camp does hire some Québécois, but today is Friday and they have all left to spend a long weekend with their families in nearby towns and villages. The African-born loggers do not take weekends off. They seldom take even a day off, in the hope of piling up as much cash as they can during the summer season. It would take almost seven hours to drive back to Montreal, ruling out weekend visits to wives, girlfriends and children left behind. And none of them owns a car anyway.

This camp — in the Banc de sable (Sand Bank) sector of a public forest 90 kilometres north of the town of Dolbeau-Mistassini (and about 200 km north of Quebec City) — is run by Aménagement MYR, which hired its first African employee, a man from Ivory Coast, in the late 1990s. Word soon spread in Montreal's African community that there was good money to be made in the bush. Now, 60 per cent of the camp's 90 employees are African-born, and the company is training two dozen more. Another local company, Foresterie DLM, is also staffed mainly by African immigrants.

The workers use special German-made brush cutters, power saws that look like oversized weed whackers but roar like motorcycles, to "thin" the forest — removing small deciduous trees, usually birch saplings, to allow commercially valuable spruce and fir trees to thrive. It is physically demanding work, similar to what traditional loggers did before they traded their chainsaws for massive harvesting machines, and unlike anything these men did in Africa.

Most of them speak a polished French that indicates urban middle-class backgrounds and university educations. But those qualifications often are not recognized in their new country, and so to pursue their Canadian dreams — or simply to survive — they take on the punishing forestry jobs that old-stock, white Quebeckers no longer want to do.

Raymond Bertrand, 28, worked for a French bank in Yaoundé after graduating from a Cameroon university. After landing in Montreal in 2006, however, he found that prospective employers didn't recognize the value of his African business-administration degree. So Mr. Bertrand enrolled at the University of Quebec at Montreal to start a second undergraduate degree from scratch. For him, brush cutting is a well-paying summer job, although he has had to leave his pregnant wife behind in Montreal.

"You do it for the money," he says in French. "It's very hard work. You cannot get used to it. It's like the winter."

Not all of his co-workers agree. Mamadou Diane, a debonair-looking musician from Ivory Coast whose stage name is Isaac Roots, says he loves this line of work. "I adore nature. It's my rasta side."

Some of the loggers are refugees whose stories testify to Africa's bloody politics. Prince Yakoub Dao, a 27-year-old merchant from northern Ivory Coast, obtained refugee status after his small shop in Abidjan was torched by pro-government thugs who accused him of being an opposition supporter.

Thomas Shase, 25, moved to Montreal after Muslim fundamentalists burned the family home in northern Nigeria. He started off working in telemarketing, and some people he phoned would tell him to "go back to Africa." Then he heard about the forestry job. "It's hard, my brother, but it's better than Montreal," he says. "The forest is peaceful. You get to think. But the best part is the money. If you can cut three hectares a week, you can make $1,500."

'You pay to learn'

Workers are paid hourly wages only during the initial phase of training, which can run up to a month. After that, Aménagement MYR (which works under contract for AbitibiBowater Inc., one of the largest pulp-and-paper companies in the world) will pay $500 per hectare thinned. Brush cutters start to make serious money only after several weeks; a talented worker with two months' experience can earn $2,000 a week.

Mario Richard, who owns Aménagement MYR, is a barrel-chested lumberjack's son with a foul tongue but an amiable nature who started picking fruit in Ontario at the age of 13 before going on to become a forest worker himself. His vice-grip handshake and flashy gold jewellery make it clear that he's the boss, yet Mr. Richard considers himself a team player (he still plays hockey at 41).

He believes it is important to encourage recruits to press on, because working conditions are excruciating. "It's not Las Vegas," Mr. Richard says. "When you can get out, you get out en hostie" — Quebec slang for, to put it mildly, "damn fast."

He also admits that in the early weeks, newcomers to the bush don't make a cent. "You pay to learn," he says. Workers must purchase their own equipment, which costs up to $2,000. The company fronts the money but demands repayment within several weeks.

Some locals, he says, have accused him of luring the Africans as cheap labour. "I pay everyone the same," he snaps. "Whether you're black or white, green or yellow makes no difference to me as long as you can do the job."

A young woman from Saguenay he hired can't match the men in physical strength, he points out, but her perfect technique makes up for it.

Mr. Richard says his African employees have stamina, noting that 80 per cent of them tough it out to the end of the summer when only 10 per cent of Quebec-born workers do. "We're more spoiled than they are," he says. Young Quebeckers no longer want to spend their summers in the bush. "If only brush cutters had a Nintendo control panel," he sighs.

If Africans are more likely than others to accept back-breaking work in the bush, it's perhaps because they cannot land lucrative jobs in Montreal. Quebec's 152,200 black people are as well educated as the rest of the population (14 per cent have a university degree), but they earn 28 per cent less and are twice as likely to be unemployed than other Quebeckers.

Bears, snakes and bugs

By 5 a.m., the workers pile into a Blue Bird school bus that bumps along potholed forest roads and log bridges. The loggers each have packed a minimum of three litres of water as well as a lunch bag stuffed with white-bread sandwiches (mock chicken, baloney, ham, egg salad or cretons, the popular Québécois pork spread) along with fresh fruit and prepackaged desserts.

The company insists that no uneaten food be thrown out for fear of attracting black bears. François Taosi, a Cameroonian brush cutter now in his mid-40s, says a bear once made off with a bag containing both his lunch and his tools.

What the loggers most fear are snakes. The land is covered in "slash," the unwanted branches, tops and stumps removed during clear-cutting operations more than a decade ago. The thick cover of mouldering trunks, vivacious boughs and iridescent moss sometimes clears to reveals patches of mud and hidden brooks. The company has told African workers that the garter snakes that live there are harmless, but it's a hard sell, culturally speaking.

The real issue, though, is the mosquitoes, especially on days like today when it rains on and off. The loggers douse themselves with a powerful insect repellent that is supposed to protect them for six hours, but they sweat it off in an hour. Africa has fewer bugs.

But Burundian Léonard Haninahazwa, his head tucked into his sweatshirt hood, tries to see the bright side: "At least these mosquitoes don't give you malaria."

The bus drops the loggers off. Individually or in pairs, they walk out to the plot of woodland that they have been allocated and within minutes brush cutters are whizzing and whirring.

These workers are in effect protecting the spruce trees that will be harvested in 30 to 40 years. If the brush wood were not cleared, it would take those trees twice as long to mature.

But it's hard to predict how much softwood will be required then. Lumber exports are already down because of the strong Canadian dollar and the slumping U.S. housing market. Quebec is especially hamstrung, according to the Quebec Forest Industry Council, mainly because its trees grow at a higher latitude than in provinces such as British Columbia and are therefore smaller in diameter.

Work winds down at 6, and the yellow school bus is back at the camp at half past. The visibly exhausted loggers, drenched in rain and sweat, fan out to their trailers. After a quick shower, they return to the canteen for an all-you-can-eat supper. Most nights, there is a choice of two dishes. Tonight, however, it's beef-and-vegetable stew served with heaps of rice, a West African version of a Quebec staple.

Village people

Some Africans have made their way up the Aménagement MYR company ladder. At the head office, Mr. Richard's right-hand man, Amadou Traoré, is from Mali (and a cousin of writer and former minister Aminata Traoré). At the camp, the main surveyor, Aboubacar Berté, is from Ivory Coast. When he first arrived in Dolbeau in 2002, he remembers that people at the local shopping mall would just walk up to him and chat.

"It felt like I was back in my village in Africa," he recalls. Mr. Berté is not especially fond of Montreal: "Your neighbour could die, and you'd never even know." He admits that some people in Dolbeau are still surprised to see immigrants around, but "they're getting used to it."

Is there not more racism in rural Quebec? "That's Montreal propaganda," responds Raphaël Gbadoe, an immigrant from Togo who first came to Dolbeau from Montreal to work as a brush cutter. Looking for an apartment here, he says, was much easier.

Mr. Gbadoe now works for Portes ouvertes sur le Lac, a non-profit that is trying to persuade African workers to move permanently to the region, mainly because the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean population of 273,000 has been falling for the past few years. Portes ouvertes sur le Lac has held meetings in Montreal to explain that life on the shores of Saint-Jean lake is low-stress, with a strong community spirit and little traffic.

On the down side, for some, there is no halal meat (approved for Muslim consumption). But there are financial benefits: By remaining in the region, forestry workers are entitled to extra weeks of unemployment insurance once they are laid off at the end of the summer.

Mr. Shanse, the former telemarketer, says he might be tempted to settle and raise children in Dolbeau with his "half-Inuit, half-Québécoise" girlfriend — because here, there are no street gangs.

Tired and homesick

By 9 p.m., late birds are firing off e-mail on the one available computer. There's a $2-a-minute satellite phone, but no one is touching that. Some workers look tired and downcast, especially those who have been here for only a few weeks.

Cameroonian Sylvain Bayemi used to play soccer with Canon, a famed Yaoundé team. He looks despondent and suggest that he was duped into taking the gruelling job.

Another Cameroonian, who declines to give his name, says he feels terribly homesick. "In Montreal, my wife massages me every morning," he says. "Here, I only get massaged by the mosquitoes."

But Mr. Taosi, the 40-something Cameroonian now in his fourth summer, has a different take. "I like the bush here," he confesses. "It gives me a lot of time to think." He is a trumpet player and Louis Armstrong admirer and says he composes while he works. He is saving money to open music schools in Montreal and Cameroon that he wants to name after his mother, Madeleine.

The discussion finally turns to a trick question: Which African country most resembles Canada? I venture that it is Cameroon, the only state on the continent to have both French and English as official languages. But Mr. Bertrand, the Cameroonian student, disagrees.

"It's Ivory Coast," he counters. "Because it has people from all over the world."

Michel Arseneault, a Canadian writer based in Paris, is the author of the forthcoming book Perdu en Afrique.