He smiles. “A very difficult question to answer,” he says.
I can see that he has the medicine in him. His lips curl at the edges in a slight smile and his eyes shine. When he is taking the morphine he forgets all about his British accent.
“Think of all the trees we passed canoeing to the town. Think of how many trees the fire ate. That many, maybe. ”
I sit and contemplate this for a long time.
The cold weather finally comes and the rain turns to snow. The mud of no man’s land turns hard, which makes movement easier, but when a shell lands close by, the earth thrown up is as sharp and deadly as needles. With the snow on the ground, Elijah and I find that night patrols are more difficult. We stand out in our dark uniforms against the white of snow, and so McCaan is issued white tunics that we throw over our coats.
The cold is exhilarating. Elijah and I watch through our sniper scopes for puffs of breath on the German line that rise up from the trenches like steam and give away positions. When our artillery knocks out chunks of Fritz’s line, we watch and wait for the poor soul who doesn’t know any better to appear in the opening just long enough to disappear in the red spray of Elijah’s bullet, or mine.
Breech lets us go hunting out of the trenches. Elijah has been on his best behaviour the last weeks as January has deepened. He and I work as a team again, me spotting and Elijah shooting. We move constantly and find new and better places to hide in the ruined earth and crushed brick of this place. At nighttime we come alive, constantly patrolling and planning large and elaborate raids on Fritz’s supposedly impenetrable trenches.
It’s as if the winter weather has inspired the Canadians dug in here. In this place that is a gigantic cemetery for the French, we raid Fritz at will, making him jittery and afraid. The officers like these big raids, and although Elijah tells me he prefers to work alone or with one or two others, he has no choice but to go out with so many other men to patrol and attack. He breaks off from the group when they are in no man’s land, never so far that if spotted by them he will be accidentally shot, but far away enough that he feels invisible.
On a night in late January, word goes out for volunteers to go on a mission to overrun a section of Fritz’s trench that has been pinpointed as a sector of accurate sniping. Elijah’s excited at the prospect of finding his own Mauser with a scope, and uses the medicine sparingly so that he has all of his faculties sharpened. Our artillery isolates a section of Fritz’s line, the booms of the guns sharp in the cold air.
I don’t volunteer for this one. I’m not sure why. A slight buzzing like a wasp in a burlap sack tells me not to go, and so I listen to it. I’ve talked even less than usual lately. I think of needing to get back behind the lines soon so that Elijah and I can build a matatosowin, a sweat lodge, so we can sit together for a while. I realize I miss home.
I sit back instead and watch as faces are blackened. Elijah carries his war club and the revolver that has been issued him as an acting corporal. They have carefully outlined their plan of attack, and the forty volunteers who will charge into the enemy trenches and go berserk upon Fritz before running back to their own lines again are as focused as any soldiers I’ve ever seen. I don’t know most of the others by name but recognize many of the faces, all of them Second Division who came over at the same time.
As I watch them prepare for the raid, I’m reminded of those Frenchmen back at Christmas. They put the chill in me. I think that they are windigos.
I watch the raiders slip from the trench and get eaten by the night. Back in my dugout, I listen for the box barrage that is to come. When it does, I light a cigarette and watch the smoke curl up, carrying its message. No sleeping the rest of the night. I wait for Elijah, troubled by our separation.
When maybe two hours pass, I hear a different shell attack, this one coming from the German line and landing a long way from us. Not long after that I hear a rustle outside the dugout. Elijah climbs in, his face blackened and his eyes standing out white. He lights a cigarette with hands covered in blood. He sees that I am awake and waiting for him.
“How did it go?” I ask in Cree.
“It went very well,” Elijah answers. He waits a few moments, sees that I am listening. He begins to tell me the story of his night.
The raiders crawl along their listening-post trench that juts out toward Fritz’s line, then slip over the top. It is a starless night, and Elijah can tell that by morning it will snow again. They spread out in a thin line and advance on their bellies across the frozen ground. Leaving by way of their listening post puts them close to Fritz’s wire without having to pick their way through their own. When star shells and Very lights pop up and drift down toward them, they lie still, their white tunics becoming a part of the snow-covered ground. This will be a good raid. He can feel it.
At Fritz’s wire he finds a place easy to slip through and this puts him ahead of the raiding party by a couple of minutes. He lies still and scans the sandbags of the parapet. The knowledge that yards from him there are sentries with guns pointed out at him and sensing he is close but not able to see him is exhilarating. The Canadian artillery is spot-on tonight. It lands with crunching thuds and blasts of fire and frozen ground one hundred yards on either side. This will cut off reinforcements from entering this section of trench that they plan on demolishing, and also keep the heads of the sentries down so that the raiders can slip in without notice and catch them by surprise. Still, the window to do this is small. The artillery can’t keep the fire up for long without giving them away.
As soon as Elijah knows that a good part of the raiding party is close by him, he crouches and moves toward the parapet, the others following. Vaulting over it, he feels as if he is flying, not knowing or caring what is below. But he does not fall long. His boots thud on a sheet of corrugated metal that collapses below him so that he crashes in the midst of three soldiers staring at him with wide eyes. It seems that he landed on the roof of their dugout and caved it in. They begin to scramble for their rifles as he tries to pull his legs from the crumple of metal and dirt. He is stuck in the old fallen roof up to his waist and can only move his torso.
He acts immediately, pointing his revolver into the face of the closest and pulling the trigger. With a flash of light the soldier’s forehead explodes. The gunpowder burns Elijah’s nose. As the soldier furthest from him grabs a rifle leaning on the wall, the other grabs Elijah’s revolver with both hands and begins twisting it away from him. With Elijah’s free hand he swings his war club hard and sinks the sharp nails deep into the soldier’s skull. The soldier stares in shock as Elijah struggles to pull the club out and hit him again, but it is stuck too deep and he lets the soldier fall with the club embedded in his head.
When Elijah turns, the third soldier stands calmly now with a look of anger on his face. The soldier’s rifle is levelled at Elijah’s chest. This moment freezes in Elijah’s head as men all around scramble and shout and the artillery explodes in the background and the German pulls the trigger and Elijah waits for the impact to throw him back. But the look of confusion on the soldier’s face lets him know that something has gone wrong. The soldier stares down at the useless rifle in his hands as Elijah raises his revolver and takes his turn aiming it at the other’s chest, pulling the trigger so that the gun jerks in his hand and his enemy falls backwards and lies still.
He feels a little ridiculous struggling to get free from the collapsed roof as the raiding party runs through this section of trench whooping and screaming, throwing bombs into dugouts and clubbing dazed Fritz with their knobkerries. Elijah’s worried there will be nothing left for him. Finally he is out and leans toward the first of the three soldiers. The face is gone and he is obviously dead. Elijah places his foot on the head of the second soldier and wrenches his club from it. The soldier mutters and speaks gibberish, his eyes making crazy circles. Elijah points his revolver at the soldier’s forehead as if he is a wounded dog and fires.
Elijah finds no thrill in this
part. This is simply what this place and these conditions have done to him. He makes his way to the third soldier. He is close to death and his chest makes a sucking sound with each laboured breath. His eyes are open and staring, and so Elijah covers them with one hand and with the other squeezes the soldier’s throat hard until he stops breathing. The soldier struggles a little and in the madness of the shouting and bombing, and rifle and revolver fire all around, this is an oddly peaceful moment.
Elijah stops this night’s story here. It is not until a long time later that he is able to share the rest with me. He does not think I will understand. He is right.
Elijah looks down at the soldier he has just dispatched and thinks of the earlier look of anger on the man’s face. He reminds himself that this just as easily could have been him lying there. He turns the dead man on his stomach and removes his sharpened skinning knife from its sheath and pulls the man’s hair back and removes his scalp with careful motions as simply as he would remove the skin from a pike. He places the hair in his kit bag, assuring himself that just as some other Indians consider it a sign of honour in battle, this counting coup and taking scalps, he will too.
The medicine pulsing in his veins slows and he knows it will not be long before it begins to thin and the headaches come and his body tires so that he will not be able to move. He begins to run with the others who continue to scream like wild things, throwing their bombs into the sleeping places of Fritz, the odd dazed soldier with bleeding ears crawling out only to have his hands tied as he is taken prisoner. The Canadians own this section of trench now and Elijah makes sure that no dugout has been left untouched, hurling his bombs into them so that his load for the trip back will be lightened. A look of animal victory spreads on the blackened faces of the Canadians around him as they pull souvenirs from bodies and peer into darkened holes. Their artillery has slowed down on either side of them, though, and Elijah knows it will not be long before Fritz pours reinforcements into this place.
He is surprised when the scream of artillery begins to come, shells landing close to this section of trench. Just as a shell lands near enough to send one of the Canadians’ legless body flying up and over the parapet ten yards away from him, Elijah realizes that Fritz has caught on that this section of trench is no longer his and is directing his own artillery into it, seeking revenge. The raiding officer’s whistle shrills and they all scramble over the walls of the trenches, dragging their prisoners and souvenirs with them, scurrying now not like majestic beasts but like rats, shell-hole by shell-hole down the hill, back to their line, not stopping any more when the eerie green or red light of flares pops up over them but running, running, the rat tat tat of Hun machine guns behind them knocking some of the Canadians headlong toward their own line, Fritz not caring any more if the bullets find the Canadians or their prisoners. Elijah is over his own parapet and back in the safety of the listening post as others crawl over as well. He can see that most of them have made it back tonight.
When he returns to our dugout to tell me most of this night’s adventure, the possession in his kit bag almost pulsates, he thinks. I watch as he lies down on his blanket and lets the night slow down enough for him to sleep. Just before he drifts off completely, he is startled awake and mutters to me that in the rush and clamour of the raid he forgot to find himself a German sniper rifle.
When we are moved behind Arras for a few days, Elijah finally admits to me that he sees that the medicine has caused him to lose too much weight while at the same time he’s not been able to relieve his bowels in any satisfying way for a long, long time. I’m not sure why he tells me all this. Maybe he feels guilty. Maybe it’s because he and I are two of the same in a place of strangers. Probably he sees that I am depressed and he gives me little bits of himself as an offering.
When he’s gone too long without the medicine, he tells me, he becomes fragile and headaches cause him so much pain that death seems a good alternative. When he does not take the morphine, he is afraid of the world, and that is not a good feeling. I tell him that he must stop using it, that his fear of being without it will leave him soon enough. I tell him that he can request a trip back to Blighty for a few weeks where he can recover.
But when the golden liquid is in his veins! Even at night the world is bathed in a soft light. He hears men talking and he understands what they are truly saying beneath their words. He can make himself float from his body at will and look down at the world below him—the world that man has created—and still see the beauty in it. He becomes the hunter at these times, the invincible hunter who can lie still for hours, for days, only moving to refuel his body with the medicine, using his osprey’s vision to spot the enemy.
KIMOTOWIN
Stealing
PAST MIDDAY I AM HUNGRY, and so I paddle Xavier and myself to shore. I make bannock with river water, wrap the dough about a stick and bake it by the fire, turning the stick every little bit when the dough begins to brown. Xavier still won’t eat anything. I grow a little frustrated with him, but keep it inside. When I look at him and see the pain cross his face I remind myself that he suffers in a way I can’t see. He will have to eat something if he is to live. This evening I will make a broth and force it down him if I must. For now, I will feed him another story.
I move closer to him, even though I can tell from his body that he wants to sit off alone. I take a long stick and poke it into the fire, stare out at the river moving by us, this river that carries us deeper into the bush. Again today I do not recognize much of this land. I try to push the thought away, the fear that we have entered a place we’ve never been before, but it continues to taunt me like a mean child throwing stones from the bush along the shoreline.
You are too young to know your grandmother, Nephew. She died long before you were born. Her illness came suddenly, and it consumed her. One month we were sitting on the bank of a river fishing together, the next she was a skeleton shivering in a blanket in her lodge. I tried all of the remedies and cures that I could think of, but nothing worked. The cruelty of living and dying can be astounding.
I buried her in the tradition of our family, placing her tightly wrapped body in the highest bough that I could find so that her ahcahk was free to travel up without hindrance to find her husband, my father. My mother had come from west of James Bay. She was born an Ojibwe, but had met my father on a trading expedition. The two tribes were not all that different, even shared much of the same language. But the Cree and Ojibwe did not always get along very well. My mother and father, in their own small way, tried to make that better.
It was summer, and I sat under my mother’s tree for days watching over her. I was wild as any animal by then, having left men and their churches a handful of summers earlier for the loneliness of the bush. Other women my age had children who would soon be ready to enter into adulthood. I had only myself. At that time, I could not imagine having my own children or going back to the people in that town.
I was left alone, and being alone, I found it easy to pity myself. The seasons came and went, sometimes so quickly that I lost track of my own age, sometimes so slowly that I felt I would go mad. My sister Rabbit, your mother, still lived, but the talk was that she was a drinker of wemistikoshiw rum and had abandoned her only son to be raised by the nuns in that residential school. The thought of my blood left in that place to fend for himself gave me no end of misery, but I had little choice in the matter.
The other awawatuk continued to ask favours of me sometimes, but besides that, my only conversations were with the sky and the forest animals. I dwelled on the Frenchman more than I wanted to, sometimes late at night believing I’d done wrong, but the loneliness I felt, even years later, of waking by myself every morning, served to remind me of what he’d done to me.
In the autumn after my mother’s death my recurring fits and their visions returned. They scared me. I was alone now, with no one to watch me. The fits were violent and painful. I worried about choking on my tongue or hitting my head on
a rock as I fell into the unwanted spasms. But they came, and more and more I would awake and find myself staring up at the sky, a cold sweat raising the goosebumps on my skin. From the dryness of my eyes, I guessed that they remained open while I was in that other world, but it was only fleeting images that I could usually bring back with me. The one thing I did know was that their return meant some change was coming. And at this point in my life, I had no reason to believe that the change would be good.
I continued on with my life best I could, following my traplines and hunting, collecting roots and herbs, always storing for the winter months. I moved with the game, my summer a little easier than winter, which was so frozen and still that certain days I was convinced I was the only living thing on this earth.
I would know a fit was coming by the change in light. The world would suddenly take on a sharper hue—the sky would go bluer, the water might turn a deeper black. And then the light would go soft, and my fingers and toes would tingle. The first pain was a lightning bolt through my temple, and it was always the one I dreaded most, the jolt of it dropping me to my knees while I was still conscious, an ice bullet through the head. Not until I entered this painful gate was I allowed to slip into unconsciousness and flashes of vision, faces I knew suddenly many years older, other faces I did not recognize. Sometimes I found myself in a circle of others around a council fire, other times I was alone. Once I came back from the other place with a vision of a metal wagon, moving of its own accord, black and shiny and noisy on a wide smooth path. Sometimes I saw the place where animals would be, other times I saw a great barren plain, the trees cut down and the water filthy with human waste. The visions were random, confusing, frightening or joyful. And when I returned, I had to scoop the fragments from the waters of my confusion and try to piece them into a story I could understand.