“You have your shot,” I say, and Elijah doesn’t hesitate.
His crosshairs are on the officer’s forehead. The officer stands there frowning. Elijah squeezes the trigger, but the kick of the rifle prevents him from getting a clear view of the outcome.
“He is dead,” I report, and Elijah begins to laugh. He is better off where Elijah’s sent him. I turn to gather our little gear and make a quick exit from our cover.
Already Elijah can see through his scope the startled looks of the soldiers, the veterans training their guns on our position. He reloads and finds another target, and although he knows better, he fires again, this time at a soldier whose head is higher than the others’. The soldier drops from the impact, but the muzzle flash of the rifle has given us away. The crack of rifle fire travels up the rise, bullets zinging close by us.
“Ashtum!” I call out, already five yards closer to the safety of our line. Elijah collects his gear and crawls out of his hole, stretches lazily up to the sky and smiles to the sun. Bullets rip the air all around him. “Put yourself in danger if you like, but not me!” I shout in anger as I turn to run.
Elijah turns too, and begins walking casually. “I’d only meant to add a little excitement to your morning, shake you out of this funk you’ve sunk into,” he shouts back.
I have rarely raised my voice at him. I can tell he is hurt.
The nights are getting cold again. Goose-hunting season back in Mushkegowuk. Word has trickled down that we are to be moved north, to a place called Passchendaele. The name is a pretty one. It makes me think of women. But then I am told it is near the place where Lisette lives and so my heart hurts all over again. When we are pulled off the line we are sent to a town far behind it. A pub that the company has adopted as its own sits in the middle of the village. I don’t like to go to it, but Elijah makes me anyway. “There are other Lisettes,” Elijah tells me. That makes me mad.
We will drink till we fall down tonight. I am not a good drinker and it won’t take me much, I think.
The pub is crowded and noisy and full of smoke. Men bang glasses and bottles on the long, scarred wooden tables. A feeling here Elijah says he doesn’t like. We buy drinks from the old woman behind the bar. Her nose is thin and crooked. She has long white hair that unravels from her braid. She reminds me of an old grandmother, a kokum. I look across the bar then and I see him. I’m shocked by his face here in this place. A face like mine. I’ve seen other brown men, a troop of brown men on horses, white cloth twisted high on their heads and long beards tied neatly so that they looked frightening and beautiful with their swords rattling at their sides. McCaan told me they were another type of Indian. “Indians from India,” he said. “Some of the King’s best.” But the one here in this pub is an Indian like Elijah and I are Indians. He’s Anishnabe. He looks Ojibwe.
I nudge Elijah and whisper to him to look to our left. At one of the tables the short brown man with black hair sits laughing with some others. It takes Elijah a moment, I see. He first thinks it might be an Indian from Moose Factory that he’s not quite remembering. But then he sees the stripes of a corporal.
“Is he the one they call Peggy?” Elijah asks me.
I shrug, take a long swig from my glass as if I don’t care.
He does not look at Elijah and me but we know that he knows we are here. Elijah buys a second bottle of wine from Kokum and goes to sit by him.
“Wachay, wachay,” Elijah says, handing him the bottle.
He smiles at Elijah. The smile is wary.
“Three Anishnabe in the same place,” the corporal says, nodding. He speaks in his tongue, but it is close enough to ours that we understand it. “Some things are beyond chance.”
“And how is your hunting?” Elijah asks. “I hope it’s as good as mine.”
I snort a laugh. It is good to laugh again. The white men around their table look at us oddly. They do not like that the Indians talk in words that they can’t understand.
“You must mistake me for someone else,” the corporal says. “There are more Anishnabe than you might guess who wander these battlefields. We all want to be warriors again.”
Elijah looks at me. I smile and then laugh again. It strikes me that I’m drunk.
“My guess is that you are Whiskeyjack, and this drunk fellow beside you is Bird,” the corporal says.
“I’m not drunk!” I slur the words. It is their turn to laugh.
“Your reputation walks ahead of you,” the corporal says, looking away from Elijah. “From what I hear, you are one of the good ones.”
Elijah stares straight ahead. His mouth is tight, but he can’t help but smile slightly.
“You know that the wemistikoshiw do not care to believe us when they hear about our kills in the field,” the corporal says. “We do the nasty work for them and if we return home we will be treated like pieces of shit once more. But while we are here we might as well do what we are good at.”
“Let’s not talk of dying tonight,” Elijah says, knowing right away that to kill him would prove nothing. “Let’s drink instead.”
By midnight they are drunk too. Everyone in this place is drunk. He is infantry like us, and his company, like the others, will be soon leaving to Passchendaele.
“You know,” Elijah says, leaning to him, “you and I are not so different.”
“From what I have heard, you’ve killed many. How many? Be honest.”
“One hundred ninety-four, to date,” Elijah answers. The corporal’s eyes open wide in astonishment. “It’s true!” Elijah shouts. “X, how many have I killed?” he asks in Cree.
“What?” I shout back.
Elijah shouts louder. “How many Fritz do you think I have killed?”
“Too many,” I answer. “More than one hundred sniper kills that I have observed. You are always sneaking off too. I do not know how many you have dispatched in the darkness of night. And don’t forget the hair you keep in your kit bag.”
“We shall not talk of that right now,” Elijah says, shaking his finger at me.
“There is another one, a Métis,” the corporal says. “His name is Norwest. He’s from Alberta and the rumour is he has killed more than you, even.”
“I’m sick of hearing about the feats of others,” Elijah says. “What do you really want from me?”
The corporal smiles. “Think of me as your conscience,” he says. “And you can be mine.”
Outside the air holds the cold of autumn. The smell of fire is on the breeze and Elijah and I are reminded of home. This corporal is too, I imagine. We walk down the main street of the village, back toward our respective camps. None of the three of us says anything. It gives me an odd feeling to be walking like we walk at home. An aeroplane drones in the distance. It is coming this way. Elijah says he hopes to catch a glimpse of its wings flash in the moonlight as it passes us.
The drone comes closer. The hair on the back of my neck rises. “This way,” I say, pulling Elijah’s sleeve and motioning with my other hand to the corporal. We slip into an alley as the plane passes over, low and fast. A bomb falling from under the plane screams in the cold air, then we hear the whomp of splintering roof as it pierces wood and the tiny breath of silence before the explosion. Flames shoot high. Men shout and scramble. Over the sound of burning wood Elijah says he can make out the drone of the plane coming back. It runs the length of the main road, its machine gun strafing the people who have come out to the road to investigate.
When the plane has left, we walk back onto the street. The pub where we’d been moments before is a smouldering bonfire. So are the buildings on either side. Bodies lie on the street, men attending to them.
Later, Elijah tells me that in this chaos the corporal leaned to him and whispered that he had twice Elijah’s kills in the field. Elijah says it would have been simple to slip his skinning knife into the corporal then, into the soft muscle between his ribs. He tells me he is happy he did not take advantage of the opportunity. He’s not sure why.
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MASINAHIKEWIN
Writing
XAVIER TELLS ME HIS MEDICINE will soon be gone and when this happens he will become very difficult, like the worst child I have ever seen. He says his heart will probably stop. He says he will struggle first, and the pain of his leg and his arm and the pain in his heart will kill him and he doesn’t want me to be sad when that time comes. He tells me all of this when the medicine he takes has him in its grip. He’s smiling as he talks, and I think that this medicine is far stronger even than the root I’ve heard that the Anishnabe far to the south take for visions.
I look down at him as he lies beside the small fire I’ve built on the beach. In the light his cheeks are hollow like an old man’s, but the smile is young. I’ve made a broth of moosemeat and roots. I move closer to him as the sun continues its descent, the sky still bright enough near midnight that I can clearly see the tree line across the river.
When he goes quiet I begin to hum an old song I’d hummed to him when he was small, and the smile remains on his lips. He keeps his eyes open, though. They are disquieting, glistening in the firelight. I wonder what they see. It is not this world here in front of me.
I begin to lift his head onto my lap and he lets me. I continue to hum the song, running my hand through his hair. He’s taken off his jacket and I look at his brown, scarred arms, at the hollow chest where his shirt is unbuttoned. I cry when I look at the empty pant leg. Even if he were to survive this paddle home, how will he survive in the bush? He is clumsy on his crutches. In a few winters I will be too old to continue hunting for him. What then?
I look at his arms again. They fascinate me. Scars all over them, white against his brown skin. I wonder where they came from. The wemistikoshiw at the trading post explained to me how the enemy used sharp wire to prevent men from crawling up and surprising them. They told me stories of how bombs blew apart into little needles that penetrated everything around. Xavier’s scars must be from this. As I look at these scars that crisscross his body I am angry at the ones who did this to him. My tears stop and I clench my teeth to stop myself from screaming out. I will not let him go easily.
The broth has cooled. I take a little in my mouth and bend to Nephew. His eyes are still open, but they do not see me. I place my mouth against his and in this way feed him so that he swallows in little gulps. At first he fights it, but I do not give in to his weak protest. I don’t feed him too much, afraid he will throw up what I’ve given him. He doesn’t.
After a time he begins to talk again. “Elijah,” he says. “Do you know how many he has killed?”
I look down at him. He’s still far away.
“I’ve killed many too. But Elijah, he is truly talented.”
“What has happened to Elijah?” I ask. The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them. Nephew continues staring, but his fingers fumble and wrestle with one another. He rolls away from me and moans long and low so that his voice travels across the river.
He tries to stand up, but without his crutches he falls back down hard. I offer him help but know he will not accept it. “Nephew,” I say. “Let me tell you a story. It will help pass this night.” He turns his back to me, but doesn’t try to stand again.
When the time at the end of summer came for your friend Elijah to go back to the residential school, he did not want to leave. I wasn’t surprised. You boys had grown close, more brothers than friends, and for a long time after Elijah was gone, you stayed quiet, knowing that it would be the rare times that you’d be able to see him during the school year. Elijah left the rifle. Do you remember, Nephew? After all, he could not bring it back to the school with him, and so you carried it everywhere. I did not like the way the gun had been obtained, but you were old enough to make decisions of your own, and to live with the consequences. You continued to shoot the rifle often, as if you hoped to impress Elijah with your ability when he returned. Elijah was one of those rare people who everyone always seemed to want to impress. I found it humorous that even I had found myself wondering what he thought of the food I cooked or the moccasins I sewed for him.
You were at the age that I needed to begin the next step of your learning. Late that autumn when the snow was in the air and we’d smoked enough geese to last us well into the winter, I built a hot fire and placed the shoulder blade of a moose upon it. I asked you to think about the animal, its habits, its scent, what it most enjoyed to eat. I told you to speak out loud about the animal, to talk about your last successful hunt. You watched carefully as you talked and I prayed. When I felt the good feeling of an old friend come to join us in the tent, I began to drip water onto the bone. It sizzled and popped, and finally a pattern that I could recognize began to emerge on the face of the bone.
I let the fire die down, then removed the still-hot shoulder blade. I studied the lines for a long time, talking as I did so that you might begin to understand the thinking. This animal had lived all its life in this country, and just like all of us it carried an internal map of its life, where it liked to eat, to rest, to mate. And where this moose had been, others surely would congregate. The job of the diviner was to coax this information from the animal.
“This crack,” I asked, running my finger along it, “does the way it forks into three remind you of any creek you might have been on?”
Immediately you answered, “There is the creek a half-day’s paddle down the river that looks much like that.”
“But there are many creeks that split into three,” I said.
You stared at the bone for a long time. “But the creek I think of runs from another creek that looks just like this one.” You pointed to another crack that ran into the one split into three.
I smiled. “Do you get a good feeling from it?” I asked. You looked at me quizzically. “When you picture walking up this creek, do you get the feeling that you will find a moose here, or do you feel nothing?”
You thought about this, your eyes closed, then finally answered, “I get a good feeling.”
“You will leave tomorrow before first light,” I said.
You were very happy early the next summer when Elijah returned. Both of you had grown and were young men now. Elijah made his announcement that evening as we ate.
“I am old enough now that I no longer have to return to the residential school. I am free to live with you.”
“You will go mad within a month,” I teased, “with no one but an old lady and a friend who would rather hunt than speak.”
“The town is not that far away,” Elijah answered. “Xavier and I can go there when we grow bored. No one will recognize Xavier any more. He looks like just another wild bush Indian with his long hair and his clothing.”
I looked at you, Nephew. Elijah was right. The only hint of your childhood was your ears that still stuck out a little from your head.
“You must grow your hair out now too,” you said, Nephew, looking at Elijah’s short residential cut.
“I like it this way,” he said. “It is easy to take care of.”
But over the months of summer I watched it grow longer as he became a wild thing of the forest once again.
The years passed quickly for me then, Xavier. My fits grew less frequent with age so that I began to believe they were gone forever. You and Elijah reached the age where you began to spend some of your time in town where there were young women. The two of you were happy, and I was glad for this. But then without warning the light began to change and the tingling returned. As surely as if the earth opened up beneath me and I was swallowed by it, I was taken to that other place, shown tormented visions of black horizons and constant thunder and more dead men than a woman can count or cry over. Soon I understood.
“A war has started in that place called Europe,” Elijah announced when you’d returned one day from a trip to town. “The Canadians have entered it.”
To me, Europe was that place to which the Hudson’s Bay Company sent furs from the bush. I knew little of that place except for its hunger fo
r pelts.
Just like little boys again, you and Elijah stayed up late into the evenings, talking. The focus of the conversation was obvious. I prayed to Gitchi Manitou that you not be taken away from me, but other plans were in the making that I could not yet see or understand.
Do you recall the morning you came to me, eyes cast down? I knew what was coming.
“Auntie,” you said, “Elijah and I have made a decision, but I want your approval.”
I continued to sew the shirt I’d been making for you and kept my eyes down too.
“We have decided to paddle to a town where we can join their army,” you said.
I was silent for a while. Finally I said, “Is there anything I might say that would change your mind?”
You shook your head.
“It will not be as you picture it,” I said. “Know that you go to a place that will change you forever.”
You nodded.
My next words were difficult to speak. “You must do what you must do.”
I watched over the weeks that you and Elijah prepared for the long paddle. Elijah seemed eager to get started.
“This war will not last long. We are going to miss it,” he began saying every day that he did not leave.
But you, Nephew, you seemed less anxious to go. Maybe you wanted to enjoy the quiet days of summer before being swallowed up by the wemistikoshiw and their ways. So much was still left for me to teach, but time had suddenly grown too short.
A little while before you set out, I once again heated the stones and built the matatosowin. I took you and Elijah into it and prayed round after round until all of us were so drained that we could not enter again. I prayed to the four directions, I prayed to the spirit animals, I prayed to Gitchi Manitou.
On the morning you were to travel, I tied a small medicine bundle around each of your necks. I see that you still have it. I’d chosen the ingredients carefully, pinches of all of the protective herbs I had, along with the tooth of the lynx that would offer you speed and invisibility and vision. I did not watch you leave, you know. Instead I took a long walk in the forest and cried. When I returned, I entered the shaking tent and summoned the lynx, begging it to follow and watch over you. The lynx did not answer.