The mist still hasn’t lifted much. McCaan tells us what a good thing that is. Sean Patrick and Fat are in front of me, and we crouch and move along a communication trench that leads us to the front trench. The whistle of shells keeps our heads down and when someone up the line slows down or stops, the ones behind bump into him. It is hard going. The bottom of the trench is covered in duckboards that keep our feet out of the mud and water that collects at the bottom. Normally, McCaan told us earlier, we’d come in at night, but the fog allows for us to move during the day. We were taught in training that everything happens at night. Digging and repairing, raids on enemy trenches, scouting and laying out of wire. “Darkness is your best friend,” McCaan says over and over. “Not to learn that lesson will kill you, boys.”
When stretcher-bearers come by, we squeeze to the side of the trench. I try not to look at the men being carried away, but occasionally I glance down at a face that is either contorted in pain or marked with a yellow M that means he has been given the medicine and is dreaming of the other place. It makes me think of Grey Eyes, and in thinking of that one I think of Elijah, too, who has become withdrawn and focused and serious since we came here. I see how Elijah’s eyes glow, how he is feeding off the fear and madness of this place. He makes a good soldier. McCaan is very happy with him, I think.
Finally we reach the front trench. At least this is what those in front whisper. This trench looks the same as the others we’ve been working our way through for hours. But the soldiers here sit in twos and threes in holes in the walls, their faces thin and dirty so that their eyes look too white and big. Other men hold tall metal boxes against the wall and peer into them, watching what the other side is doing. These are the periscopes we were shown how to use not long ago. McCaan stops us and goes out in search of an officer.
The one named Gilberto lights a smoke. His thick arms are covered in black hair as shiny as a bear’s. He’d scare me if his eyes didn’t crinkle kindly at the sides when he smiles.
Graves, the oldest of us, hisses at him, “Stomp that out, man. Fritz will see your smoke and lob a few right on top of us. Worse yet, an officer will come along and do far worse.”
Gilberto is big and wide-shouldered and grows fruit back home. I like him because his English is as poor as mine. He drops the cigarette immediately and two soldiers sitting in a dugout beside us laugh at us as they light up their own.
“The action left Saint-Eloi a while back,” one of them says, fitting the butt of his cigarette neatly into the place where his front tooth should be. “The dance is on the Somme now.”
McCaan returns with an officer who is tall and hunch-shouldered and looks like he wants to cry. He speaks so quietly that I notice McCaan must lean toward him to hear, and they look for a moment like two old grandmothers telling secrets. The officer holds a long club with a heavy end and bangs it on the toe of his boot. McCaan motions to us and we begin to walk, heads bent, through men sitting and sleeping or talking in low voices to one another. Once in a while we pass a few snipers who have their Ross rifles ready behind squares of iron. A little door in the iron slides open and the sniper fires his gun before closing the square again, and then I hear the ding of German bullets hitting the plate. It is like a game, I think, but one that you don’t want to lose.
We find the stretch of dirt and mud that is our new home and immediately start working to make it into something livable. Little shallow caves are dug into the sides as places to stretch out and sleep. We each claim what we can, and Fat begins complaining because there’s not one big enough for him to fit in, so I grab his shovel and help him to dig out something larger. When I’m done I find Elijah, and we agree silently to share a space.
The rest of the day is busy and the men are nervous. We listen for the different types of shells, and McCaan introduces us to a corporal named Thompson. He’s not much bigger than a big child, but his face is old. It’s impossible for me to tell what age he is.
Thompson does a lot of explaining, but me, I can tell he doesn’t like strangers much. “You hear the thunk of a mortar land close to you, know you can run away from it if you’re quick. It’s the only bomb you can do that with. The big shells you can hear coming from a long way off and just pray that they aren’t heading for you. Now listen careful, boys, it’s the smaller shells, the whiz-bangs, that are the most damaging, the ones that sound like a mosquito whining in the distance. You hear that coming and you dive flat into the earth and bury your nose deep as you can into the mud.”
We listen wide-eyed and careful, and as if to emphasize Thompson’s point, shells whine and roar and explode not so very far away. When one sings over us that is exceptionally clear, Thompson says, “Now that’s Fritz’s version of our eighteen-pounder. Blow a hole the size of a ditch into the earth.”
Another shell flies overhead, this one whistling like a teapot come to a boil, and then it’s gone. “That’s the whine you’ve got to learn to be fearful of. Shell’s only a four-incher but deadly accurate and efficient.”
He stops talking and puts his hands in his pockets. Then he turns from us and walks away whistling.
We look at each other. “Now that’s an odd one,” Fat says.
I know, though, to listen carefully to what Thompson teaches me.
In the late afternoon when we’ve reinforced our section of trench, Elijah and I lie on our backs and watch the aeroplanes above us soar and dive and fight one another. They are close enough that we soon learn to tell the shape of our own grey-and-black aeroplanes from those of the Germans. They swoop like ospreys and puff out little bits of black smoke. Once in a while a plane will falter, then spin down to earth and disappear over the hump of the trench.
“I wish I could fly like that,” Elijah says to me in Cree. “I wish I could fly like that, like a bird,” he repeats, staring up like a little boy. “Maybe a pilot will take me up sometime.”
“Me, I’m happy to stay on the ground on my belly in the dirt,” I answer. “Thinking about falling from up there makes me sick.”
Every night near sunset we are all ordered to stand-to, rifles at the ready, our heads just below the crest of the trench. We stand on what McCaan calls fire-steps, crouched, waiting for a German attack. This is ritual at dawn and at sunset, when both sides like to attack each other best.
This evening, McCaan squats beside me and smells of sweat and tobacco. He stares into a periscope over at the German lines and swears a lot because he has only the weak light the setting sun throws from behind us and can’t see much of anything. He’s jiggling around his periscope so much that he attracts a swarm of Hun bullets. I want to shout to McCaan to drop his head but the English words don’t come in time, just a stream of Cree, but it’s too late.
McCaan flies back onto the duckboards. The periscope is smashed beside him. I think that he has been shot in the head, because he doesn’t move, but then he gets up groggily as if he’s just woken up from a deep nap. One eye is so puffed that it is already shut closed, blackening by the second. He picks up the periscope and stares at it, muttering to himself. A bullet hole is punched neatly through the front, and the metal in back is ripped open. A medic rushes up, but McCaan pushes him away. A confusion flashes in his eyes that I’ve not seen before.
WE SPEND OUR FIRST MONTHS in and near Saint-Eloi. I like the nights best there. When evening falls the flares go up. Red and green, they illuminate the sky around us in the strangest hues of colour. These are the signal flares both sides use. It is as if I’m dreaming, staring up at this painted sky, shells whizzing above my head and once in a while crashing around me.
Corporal Thompson, the one who knows all the sounds, has taken over most of our training. He’s been in the trenches since almost the first day. Tonight he will take five of the new soldiers out to get them accustomed to working in no man’s land in the dark. As Elijah and Sean Patrick and Gilberto and McCaan and me sit waiting and smoking, Thompson appears as if from the wall of the trench, and I realize that it is the h
ole where he sleeps.
“Corporal Thompson,” McCaan says.
Thompson nods to him sharply, a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. He is short enough that he doesn’t need to hunch over in this trench. “Yes, Sergeant,” he answers.
“How do you feel about taking us up above to give us a little taste of no man’s land?”
“Very good, Sergeant,” Thompson answers, and disappears into his hole.
Thompson reappears with a small bag strapped by his side. I see that he doesn’t carry a rifle.
As if Thompson knows what I think, he says, “Not much good a rifle will do you up above when you’re working. It will only get in your way.” The others of us in the party unshoulder ours and lean them against the trench walls. “I want two of you to hold onto them, act as sentry while the rest of us work.”
McCaan and Gilberto are the first to pick theirs back up.
“This way, gentlemen,”Thompson says, and moves along the duck-boards with almost silent steps. He leads us to a ladder, then climbs it, peering over the top before disappearing onto the earth above. First Elijah goes, and I follow. The others are close behind. I wait for the zing of bullets to come any second, but see that Thompson has led us to a place of mounds and craters where we seem to be covered from direct fire.
A white flare goes up nearby and Thompson, on his belly, goes very still so that I have a hard time seeing him just yards away. I follow his lead, looking at the scarred landscape all around without moving my eyes. Under the bright glow of the flare it is strangely peaceful, rock-strewn and muddy and silent so that it isn’t difficult to forget I’m in the middle of a terrible place. In the dimming light I make out a grinning face next to me. It belongs to a soldier long dead, but I cannot tell from which side. His face is frozen in a perpetual smile, as if he is chuckling at what he knows.
When the light has died, my eyes have a hard time readjusting to the darkness. Thompson crawls up to me. I hear him rather than see him in the black that’s descended.
“Blind as a bat right now, ain’t ya?” he says close to my ear. “Next time keep one eye closed when a flare’s up. It’ll help your eyes adjust back faster.”
I hear him scuttle away. My night eyes are back in time to see him stop in an especially large crater. He motions for the rest of us to come close.
“They say a shell never falls twice in the same hole, but don’t believe them,” he whispers. “I’ve seen it happen. But in a pinch and there’s no other choice you are safest in a freshly blown crater.” He pauses, listening. I listen too, and a sound like scratching comes to my ears. I listen as carefully as I can and to me it sounds like mice chewing through something. Elijah listens as well, and we look to Thompson to explain.
“That’s our engineers below us digging,” he says. “They’re digging tunnels toward the Hun lines. They’ll fill those tunnels with explosives underneath Fritz. When the time comes—boom!” He spreads his fingers, lifts his hands.
Elijah and I look at each other in disbelief. Thompson seems to be a serious one, so I have no choice but to believe him. “From this point forward,” he says, “keep a close eye for Fritz. He’s been busy here again. Look at our barbed wire. Make sure that it hasn’t been cut. Note places that look like they’ve been mucked with. That’s where Fritz crawls through.”
We slip out of the crater one by one and make our way parallel with our own line, stopping often to listen. It is a quiet night. Even the constant shelling seems to have moved away from us. We make it to the stretch of barbed wire in front of our own position and Thompson examines it carefully. He motions and points to a place that has been cut through. We have no rolls of wire with us. Someone will have to come out later and fix it.
We turn and go back the way we’ve come. In another crater Thompson explains to us in a hushed whisper that he doesn’t want to go farther down the line tonight. Our group is close to the point where the new companies are dug in, and the sentries will be nervous and inexperienced enough to mistake us for Germans and shoot at us.
When we are within yards of where we first emerged, I feel relieved. The others slip back down into the safety of the trench and I am standing, about to follow Elijah down the ladder, when a flare pops up and hovers right over me. I’m frozen there in full view and turn my head and get my first look at the German line. It is much closer than I had assumed and I realize how exposed I am now that the flare is dropping right above me, illuminating the ground like it is morning.
But still I do not move. I stare at the enemy for the first time. No faces, just a line of mounds behind barbed wire. I hear the bullet whip past my temple before I even hear the crack of a rifle, and all around me the ground sends up splats of mud and dirt and I feel an impact on my hand and it goes numb as other bullets whiz by very close. I dive like an otter toward the trench and before I know it I’m sailing down the wall and land hard on my side on the duckboards at the others’ feet, the wind knocked out of me.
“You’d better lose that habit quick, Private,” Thompson says, staring down at me, then walking away casually as I struggle to find a breath.
McCaan bends down and sits me up. My chest relaxes a little and I gulp some air. I clutch my hand to my chest. McCaan takes my numb hand into his own and looks at it for a moment. “No Blighty for you on your first night out,” he says. “You’re just hit by a clump of mud knocked up from a bullet. It’ll be sore for a while is all. Teach you a good lesson.”
Back in our section of trench I lie in my little cave. My mind races with what’s just happened, the sneaking about in such a dangerous place, being shot at for the first time. It is real. All of this is suddenly very real. The other side wants to kill me, and I’ve never even seen their faces.
I won’t see it. It will just appear. The bullet so close to me tonight could have been a little more to one side. It is thrilling and horrifying at the same time. My hand begins to ache. I listen to Elijah carry on in English and laugh with Sean Patrick and Gilberto and Grey Eyes and Graves. Already Elijah is telling of his exploits. I hear him making this story bigger, more dangerous, though he wasn’t even the one shot at.
I watch the flashes of an artillery barrage far down the line. The night sky is on fire.
NOOHTAAWIY
My Father
XAVIER TWITCHES AND MOANS in his sleep. I arranged it so that he lies back in the canoe, his head on his pack. I found him this morning on the beach, shivering and half conscious. What happened over there has wrecked him. He thinks I don’t see him putting those needles in his arm. They are a part of what’s killing him. But something far worse is consuming Xavier from the inside. It’s this that I must figure out how to remove. I wish it were simply a matter of finding the right root in the bush. This is a sickness I’ve not had to face before. I must figure out the right cure or I will lose him, and he’s the last of my family.
The river water is black this early in the morning before the sun has a chance to warm it and the light to turn it the colour of tea. My father used to tease my mother and younger sister and me, telling us that we were the colour of the river water in high summer but that in winter we turned as pale as the Hudson Bay traders and he was afraid he’d one day lose us in the snow. My sister—your mother, Xavier—we called her Rabbit. We’d look at my mother’s brown face as her eyes narrowed in laughter and then look to my father smiling back. He was the last great talker in our clan. He told stories softly so that you had to lean close to him to hear, so close you could smell the smoke in the hide ribbon my mother weaved into his hair, the scent of his neck like the wind coming off the Great Salt Bay. I used to imagine that he weaved his stories all summer, his words forming invisible nets that he cast over us on the long winter nights, capturing us and pulling us in closer together so that we collected each other’s warmth. And sometimes his stories were all that we had to keep us alive.
I steer the canoe into the faster current and let us drift with it, using my paddle only as a rudder. T
he mist is disappearing now and I can see a long way down the bank, can keep an eye sharp for the movement of animals along the shore. Nephew cries out but then goes silent again. The sound of it, the animal fear at the very bottom of that cry, makes me think something I haven’t thought about in a long time. It is the story of my childhood. Now I tell it to you, Xavier, to keep you alive.
The snows were settled in so deeply that winter had become a part of us. This was long before you, Xavier, when I was still a child. Thirty Anishnabe lived on the traplines that season, half of us children. All the past winters we’d survived in much smaller numbers. This time we had no choice. Three families’ hunters had been taken away the autumn before, two by the North-West Mounted Police, one by Hudson’s Bay Company rum.
I was a young girl with waking dreams of all the trouble that was to come into my life, sharp pains like ice arrows through my temples that dropped me to my back and caused me to convulse. Except for Rabbit, the other children avoided me. Damaged is what I was to them, but they wouldn’t say this to my face. I was lean and bony with knotted black hair that I refused to let my mother comb. If they thought I was crazy, I let them. Laughed at them.
Autumn had been promising, many geese and ducks shot, four beaver families snared, and many grouse and sturgeon. But no moose, and the old women among us immediately began their chatter that no moose early in winter meant starvation later. Me, I think it was their idle complaints, their greedy talk as they chewed their hides and drank their tea, that put a curse on us. And in the harsh North Country near what the wemistikoshiw call Hudson Bay, shaking a curse once it settles upon you is like trying to shake a fat bloodsucker from your hand.