You finally spoke to me, Nephew, on the morning of the third day, when we were close to home.
“Why did you kill that man, Auntie?”
I had expected the question, but not so soon. After a long time, I said, “Sometimes one must be sacrificed if all are to survive.” You nodded as if you were a grown-up, even though you couldn’t fully understand. I had taught you all about the physical life of the bush, and it was time to teach you about the other life.
You and I continued where we had left off, and I was as happy as I’d ever been now that you were near me. You grew strong in the bush, your hair long and black by the time you were in your twelfth summer. You wore it braided and I wove into it a strip of rawhide and a thin red length of yarn so that you wore it the same way my father had. You seemed more than content to forget the wemistikoshiw ways, and it was rare that we spoke any English at all, or even talked of that place.
You asked about your mother, Rabbit, but I knew little. After my father died and we were forced to go to the town to survive, her will dried up. It is very easy in those circumstances to find comfort, to soak in wemistikoshiw drink, and this is what your mother did. I explained to you that I found my comfort in the sweat lodge, and many of the answers that I needed in the shaking tent. Over the years I taught you how to cleanse yourself, and, much more difficult, how to divine answers yourself. This last cannot be taught so much as nurtured, and many days I saw the spark of true talent in you. But you were much more interested in the hunt, spending longer and longer periods out alone in the bush.
One day you came to me and asked me something that took me by surprise. But it made sense to me. It was quite natural.
“I want a friend, Auntie,” you said that evening when you’d returned from your traplines with three fox and a marten. “I am lonely.”
I looked up from my sewing and saw that indeed you had grown up over the last winter. “Do you mean a girl?” I asked.
You turned red and blurted out, “No! I want a friend who is another boy who I can hunt with and play games with. I will wait for a girl until I am older.”
I laughed, but saw immediately that I had hurt your feelings. “I do not mean to laugh at you, Nephew,” I said. “It is just that you are very rational. You aren’t afraid to hide your feelings either, and that is a good thing.”
We sat for a long time. I helped you skin the animals. “Not too many people live around here,” I finally said. “Where will you find a friend, especially one your age?”
“We can move closer to the town,” you said.
I hadn’t been ready for this answer.
“If the wemistikoshiw were to find you, they would take you away and put you back in that school.”
“No wemistikoshiw can catch me, Auntie,” you said. “I do not want to live in town, just close enough that I can find my old friend who will come out into the bush with me to hunt.”
“We shall go when the weather allows it,” I said after a while.
You smiled.
Although I didn’t like to admit it, living back near other humans again felt good. That I did not see anyone didn’t matter. I was comforted a little by the fact that a half-day walk was all that separated me from other Cree. You were much happier too. I worried each time you’d make your way to the town, but you always returned, and within a few months you began to bring back a boy with you who was your age and who enjoyed to hunt as much as you. Your friend spent many days in the summers with us, and I worried that his parents would grow concerned at his long absences. One night, as politely as I could, I asked him about this.
“My mother is dead, so she doesn’t worry much about me,” he answered. “I was told my father traps for the Hudson’s Bay Company but I have never seen him. If I didn’t come out here to stay with you, those fat nuns would make me paddle them around while they scared away all the fish in the river.”
I laughed at his talk. It brought back memories of years before.
“I think that I would like to stay with you rather than go back to the residential school in autumn,” he added.
“I do not think that is possible,” I said. “They would surely come and look for you and throw us all in one of their prisons.”
“Well, we should think about it,” he answered.
He knew little of the bush, and I watched proudly as you taught him, Nephew. And how he liked to talk! For hours he could talk about anything, the stars, the rivers, the school, the people that he knew, places he didn’t know, far away across the ocean. Late each night I would fall asleep to his chatter. You lay beside him, Nephew, your eyes open wide as you listened to his stories.
Your friend began to return to our camp with a rifle and many bullets. I still had an old musket that had been my father’s, and had traded with other awawatuk for powder and balls of lead. But his was a fine rifle, a repeating Winchester that was almost as tall as you two boys. I wondered where he would get such a fine rifle, patiently waited for the story to come out. I did not have to wait long.
“I took this from one of the nuns,” he said to you one day while we sat around a fire outside, smoking fish for the approaching winter. “What does a nun need with a gun, anyway? I’ve seen her shoot it, too,” he added. “She is the worst shot I have ever seen.”
“I don’t know if it’s right to take something that isn’t yours,” you said to him.
“I am a warrior,” he answered. “I will use this gun far more and far better than her. It is small payment for her always wanting to bathe me.”
You both laughed at this, but the words echoed in my head for days afterwards.
All the rest of that summer you had shooting competitions with one another, and I watched how quickly both of you excelled. You shot at rocks you’d placed upon other rocks across the river, you shot leaves from trees, you shot the heads from grouse that roosted on the tops of tall pines. Neither of you missed very often. Your competition was friendly but serious.
“Nephew,” I called out one day after the two of you had repeatedly tried to shoot a small rock a great distance away, “the two of you are truly talented marksmen.” You smiled at me. Your friend took aim carefully at the rock, fired, but missed.
“Why does she call you Nephew and not your real name?” he asked.
“Nephew is my real name,” you answered. “I am her nephew.”
“Does she ever call you by your Christian name?” he asked.
You shook your head, looked at me nervously. “My name is Nephew.”
“Your name is Xavier,” your friend answered.
It was not said meanly. I could tell from his voice that the boy was simply trying to understand.
“Your Christian name is Xavier,” he said. “And mine is Elijah.”
TAPAKWEWIN
Snaring
AS NISKA MAKES CAMP for another night, I take a needleful of morphine, enough to send away the pain in my body, but not to kill me. I no longer have enough to stop my heart, only enough to get me through, at best, tomorrow. What will happen to me after that? I decide not to dwell on this now but instead to enjoy the warm river of it.
I must figure out what happened to Elijah. If Elijah can come back to me, he will help me. We will fight together again, fight against this medicine that consumes us. We will get better together. He will help me overcome the pain and I will help pull him from the war madness that swallowed him whole. Where is he?
I remember when he began to explore the places that aren’t safe to explore. I remember him learning to love killing rather than simply killing to survive. Even when he went so far into that other place that I worried for him constantly, he still loved to tell me stories. He never lost his ability to talk. I think it was this ability that fooled the others around us into believing he hadn’t gone mad. But I knew.
Elijah tells me a story. One night in late September he finds himself in a Hun trench. He’s not sure how he’s gotten here. More and more he finds himself losing pieces of his day. His face
is blackened by cork and he’s alone. He remembers patrolling one of the small, crushed villages with a number of others close by Hill 70. And now he’s here. He must have slipped off on his own and made his way through their wire. He’s here for a reason, he’s sure. If he could only remember what it is.
He looks in his hand and sees that he’s holding a spool of thin wire he’d found by an ammunition dump. Now he knows! Before he’s discovered, he forms a slip-knot with the wire and wraps each end to support beams on either side of the trench wall. It is a wonderful place for a rabbit run, the snare placed carefully by steps that lead down a few feet deeper. With luck, a man close to Elijah’s height will put his head right through and, as he jumps down, meet his end.
Elijah climbs out of the trench and finds a place to hide and watch. Amazingly, no one comes, and so he pulls a Mills bomb from his pack, is about to pull the pin, but thinks better of it. He places the bomb back and cups his hands by his mouth. Constricting his throat he makes the call of the goose, the honking sound as sweet and gruff as he’s ever remembered. A long time since he’s made that sound. It feels good. This will surely get men running. Still nothing. Another idea comes to him. He cups his hands around his mouth again and calls out, “Here Fritzy, Fritzy, Fritzy.”
Within a minute he hears the stamp of boots coming down the run. Four or five soldiers approach, slowing where the trench traverses. One and then another and another passes by the snare and jumps down unharmed. Has he made some miscalculation?
Then another soldier comes running and jumps down the steps, but stops abruptly, his feet kicking wildly a number of inches above the ground. He grasps at his neck, but the wire is buried now so tightly in his skin that all he can do is struggle himself to death. Within seconds he hangs there twitching. A couple of soldiers come up from behind him and, seeing their comrade apparently floating, stop dead and stare, not quite sure what is happening. One approaches and figures it out. He shouts for the others. Men come running, and as they are busy talking frantically and trying to release the body from the snare, Elijah slips back into the night. If he tells, who would believe it?
There are days behind the line when all he wants to do is stare up at the sky and look for aeroplanes. He’s asked about how one might get to fly. Nobody seems to know. The light of day hurts his eyes, he tells me. He eats very little. He does not shit. He drinks water and tea with lots of sugar and whiles away his time until we are sent back into the front line. That is his home.
He tells me that when he sleeps he dreams of being sent into a freshly dug mine shaft under the Hun line. He’s sent in carrying a great sack of explosives and travels deep into the shaft, the walls around him getting closer and closer. Without warning the tunnel ahead and the tunnel behind seal shut. His torch is extinguished. He’s left in a stifling black hole with enough explosives to tear out the bottom of the world.
One morning after stand-to we are given the order to change our socks for dry, clean ones. We’ve not been wearing our moccasins since Hill 70. Thick-soled boots are more sensible for walking over the shattered brick and sharp stones. Once his boots and old socks are removed, I see that the toes on Elijah’s left foot are a bit black. He rubs them and I can tell by his face that the pain shoots through his morning haze. He tries to cover them before someone notices, but McCaan is nearby.
“Look at that foot, Whiskeyjack!” he growls. “It stinks of rot. Report to the medic immediately.”
He limps down the line and finds Driscoll. The medic pushes his glasses back on his nose and takes Elijah’s foot in his lap, staring at it intently. “You’ve got the beginnings of a nasty case of trenchfoot, Corporal,” he says.
Driscoll pulls out a tin from his medical kit and opens it, scoops what looks like grease onto his fingers and rubs it onto Elijah’s foot. The pain makes Elijah feel faint.
“Whale oil,” Driscoll says. “I haven’t seen a case of trenchfoot in months. You mustn’t be taking very good care of yourself. Don’t let an officer see this or he’ll put you up on charges.” Elijah laughs, but he sees Driscoll is serious. “Change your socks twice a day,” Driscoll continues, “and use the whale oil liberally each time. If it gets worse, I’ll report you myself.”
“No need for that,” Elijah says as cheerily as he can. “Hardly hurts, hardly hurts.”
Driscoll hands him a small vial of tablets. “If it gets too much, pop one of these in your mouth and let it dissolve under your tongue. It’s morphine.” He winks at Elijah. “Just don’t take any before a patrol.”
Elijah begins to walk away.
“Corporal,” Driscoll calls out before he’s made it too far. Elijah turns back. “You’re looking rather anemic. Are you eating properly?”
“Just fine, sir.” Elijah walks away, limping and whistling.
WE ARE ORDERED TO GO over the top near a town called Lens. Our battalion crouches, backs to the mud wall, faces between knees. Shells scream and slam into the enemy trenches nearby and my body vibrates with the earth. I look over to Elijah beside me. He smiles.
Later, he tells me that he hums to himself a song that’s become popular with the soldiers. He can’t hear what he hums over the noise, just feels the vibration of the song in his chest. Everything shakes so badly he wonders how it is that the world keeps from falling apart. The soldiers around him squat too, wait for the barrage to end before they pour over the top. They keep their eyes squeezed shut, hands by their faces for protection. Elijah looks at those beside him, at me, at Graves, at Fat, at McCaan, at all the newer ones, wonders who he won’t see after today. The barrage reaches a crescendo. All that exists in the universe is noise, he thinks. The thought makes him begin to laugh.
And then all goes still. His ears hum an electric buzz and he can hear his own breathing deep inside him. There are places in the world, far off, where men are not about to do what Elijah and the others tense and wait to do. Elijah imagines men at this very moment still sleeping in their beds beside their wives. He imagines Indian hunters rising with the dawn to track through the forest. Although the silence only lasts for a few seconds, Elijah imagines it goes on for hours, his mind ticking like a pocket watch, the medicine in his veins illuminating the true meaning of all of this, moments before it will change so completely for so many.
A shrill whistle breaks the quiet. It sounds like the lone call of some crazed bird, makes Elijah’s stomach drop. Breech begins screaming, giving the order. Elijah’s waited all night for this, made sure to inject enough medicine into his bruised body to keep him calm without putting him to sleep. We’ve drunk our rum. Now we climb over the parapet screaming. Immediately the machine guns start rattling and men on both sides are falling. Fat struggles to climb over, and Elijah and I turn back and pull him up with as much strength as we can muster. Fat’s trip to Blighty wasn’t long enough. He lies there like an invalid, trying to catch his breath, and so Elijah and I turn to begin the advance. It rains metal, bullets ripping the ground and the sandbags right beside us.
When we begin the short run to the Boche line, Elijah and I find ourselves behind a thin row of soldiers who have taken the lead, but many of them kneel and lie, or are thrown down by the machine guns, and soon it is only Elijah and me, it seems, running headlong to the barbed wire. We hear the boom and feel the thunk of mortars crashing all around. Tossing ourselves in front of the German wire we wait for the sappers with their Bangalore torpedoes to come up from behind. Only one arrives and he slips in beside, slides the tube into the wire, lights the fuse, then orders us to roll away and cover our heads. We do as we’re told and the tube blows a nice wide swath through the wire. I roll first, Elijah follows, and we crawl fast as we can through the hole, a machine gun now trained on us and the bullets whistling just over our heads and exploding into the earth and creating showers of dirt.
Once through the wire both Elijah and I set our grenades and lob them into the area that holds the machine-gunner. Elijah carries an automatic rifle that McCaan gave him to use today. H
e carries his sniper rifle strapped snugly on his back, and he trains his machine gun on the smoke and dust in the place where it seems that most of the firing has come from. The gun is heavy and kicks hard in his hands as he sprays the nest. The nest goes quiet. We advance quick, bent over double, and jump into the advance trench, ready to begin shooting at close range.
The place is blasted. Two Boche lie slumped over the gun and others are scattered about in deformed poses, legs and arms bent at strange angles. One is still alive, moaning and cursing. Elijah walks over to him and empties the rest of the magazine into his chest. He reloads and drags what barbed wire he can into the trench, twenty yards on either side of us, while I keep watch. It will slow down any counterattacking Hun if they decide to retake this section.
I wonder where the rest of the enemy are, but then realize that this is just one small advance trench of many that surround the ruins of coal-mining villages that we’ve been ordered to overrun. We sit tight and wait for any of the others that might make it to us. Soon other soldiers begin trickling in, McCaan, Graves, Grey Eyes. I’m happy to see Corporal Thompson slide into the trench with us. He’s back from Blighty and looks thin and paler. Finally, Lieutenant Breech makes it in and immediately begins to bark out directions.
Heavy fighting continues in all the little trenches around us. Chaos. The trenches are like spiderwebs, shooting out in all directions, some leading nowhere, others leading into the heart of the villages thick with Boche infantry and snipers and bombers and machine-gunners. We must find our way in and take over these places. In doing this, we will control the place named Hill 70 and will, for once, be the ones staring down at the Hun, with a bird’s-eye view of the city called Lens. But first we must go foot by foot through these trenches that wind through the rubble of this village and kill every enemy we can find.