I see a hint of morning through the smoke. We are able to climb back in the canoe and, with heads bowed low, begin to paddle through the morning. On a long curve of river, we see a sand bar splitting the water. There is enough room for the two of us to curl up. The sand is warm from the fires that still burn up and down the river. We can get a little good air close to the ground.
“One of us should stay awake and keep watch,” I say to Elijah, but he’s already dozing lightly. Before I can fight it, I too am taken by sleep.
We lose all track of time in this soot-coloured place. All that’s left to us is to keep paddling, one stroke after the other. Find our way out.
Fires continue to rumble, but a little farther off now. The smoke lies so still and heavy above us that no sun is visible, and I no longer know what part of day it is.
A darker shade, possibly night, has approached when Elijah spots the hulk of it on the shoreline. We’d have missed it if not for the unmistakable scent of burnt hide and underneath that the smell of cooked meat that makes our hungry stomachs groan. We beach the canoe and see that it’s a bull moose, a big one, charred and blackened. Smoke rises from what is left of it. “That doesn’t smell so bad to me,” Elijah says, looking to me for my reaction.
I take my knife from its sheath and cut into the animal’s haunch. The rest of the meat will be poisoned by its fear. I cut past the blackened muscle to a large strip of warm, tender meat that’s under-cooked but not too bad. I taste it. “Good,” I say, cutting off more. Elijah takes his knife out as well. We work our way up and down the animal’s leg, choosing the best-cooked parts.
When I’ve had my fill, I skim ash away from a spot on the river’s surface and take a long drink of water. Elijah drinks too, and we sit together looking out at the haze of darkness approaching.
“Do you think we’d be safe to sleep here a few hours?” Elijah asks. We look around at the blackened stretch of stumps and smoking ground.
“There’s nothing left to burn,” I answer.
Elijah shivers. I realize how cold I am too. At least the ground’s warm. “Mind getting a little fire going?” he says.
I laugh.
The next couple of days remain the same. It is as if the river has taken the two of us down underground. The smoke refuses to lift and the lack of wind makes us feel as if we’re being suffocated. No birds sing. There are no trees for any wind to rustle through. The sounds of the river travel differently now, and it’s impossible to estimate distances, which only worsens the feeling of suffocation. Still, it’s the complete lack of animal sounds that makes me begin to feel more sad than I’ve ever been.
We both find it better not to talk at all if we don’t have to. The scrape of paddles on gunwales as they dip into the ashy water is the only sound. The earth, in all directions, is burnt black and continues to smoke angrily.
Elijah finally breaks the silence. “How far do you think the fire burned?”
I’ve been wondering. “Miles and miles,” I answer. “Hundreds of them at least.”
“I hope it doesn’t reach our home,” he says.
It strikes me suddenly that I might not hear any news from home until I return, if I return at all. Something very much like regret begins to rise in me.
I remind myself that I made the decision to do this. I will protect him. It is what I do, what I have always tried to do.
By afternoon there’s less smoke. The world unfolds a little of itself around us. As far as we can see, the ground is scorched black. What must have been bush too thick to walk through is now a great dead plain. Charcoal stumps stick up from the ground.
“I know this place,” I whisper to myself.
TO KEEP MY HEAD CLEAR, I ask Elijah to teach me more English.
“Good day, sir,” Elijah says. “Do you know the time?”
I repeat, my tongue feeling thick and stupid.
“You are the best shot in all of the world,” Elijah continues.
“You are the best shot in all of the world,” I repeat, looking for birds, for anything with colour, only half paying attention.
“Thank you,” Elijah answers. “You’re not a bad shot yourself. If you had a father, he would be a heathen like your Auntie.” We keep paddling. After a while he says, “The sky looks like rain.”
“Rain will kill the fire,” I answer in English.
“Good,” Elijah laughs. “Very good. You didn’t even sound much like a Frenchman. Now say,‘I am a Cree Indian from Moose Factory, and I have come to kill Germans.’ They will like that.”
“Will they really ask questions like that?” I ask in our own tongue.
“Maybe,” Elijah answers. “Better to let them know you’re an angry warrior than some fucking bush Indian.”
I think about this for a while.
I rely on Elijah to help me in their world. Since we were boys Elijah has always had a gift for wemistikoshiw language. Once the nuns taught him to speak English, they couldn’t stop him and soon learned to regret that they ever had. In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, just shake their heads hopelessly at the pretty little boy who could speak their tongue like one of their bishops.
“What if they mistake us for Plains Cree and give us horses to ride?” I ask.
“They’d better not.” After a pause, Elijah continues, “Maybe we’d learn and be good at it.”
“I can just see us climbing onto horses and falling off as soon as they start running. All the wemistikoshiw would stare. They would wonder just what kind of Indians we are.” We both laugh. After a long time of silence, I speak again. “Are they going to teach us to fight their way or will they just send us over there?”
“I don’t know,” Elijah says.
A SHRILL SCREAM close by jolts me from sleep. The night is at its deepest black and I feel blind reaching for my rifle.
“Another lynx,” Elijah whispers as we lie on our stomachs with our guns ready. “Very close, too. Take a shot if you get the chance.” Maybe the pelt will bring us some money in town.
It screams again, but from a different place. Something in its tone tells me it’s the same animal. It sounds hurt. Maybe a mother who’s lost her children.
The sound doesn’t come again. Eventually we relax once more, but I sleep restlessly, not sure any more what’s dream and what isn’t.
Before leaving the next morning, we scout out the lynx tracks in the black soot, following them once again on their circuitous route around the camp before they lead down to the water. Their size and shape are identical to those of the others. Once again they stop in a flat open plain of mud. “It’s the same lynx,” I say.
“Impossible,” Elijah answers. “And besides, there’s no mystery where its tracks went this time.” He points to the water. “A lynx could jump that distance.”
I do not believe him.
By mid-morning the blackened ground gives way to thick green bush. The change is not gradual but sudden. One can walk the jagged fire line of damage stretching west, the lush of high summer to the left, the black of fire on the right. I take a deep breath of the returned season.
We keep a close eye out for game all that day, and as dusk approaches put out our lines. No fish bite. I smell the scent of smoke in the early evening air, but it is the smell of town smoke, of people.
“It will be night soon,” I say. “I don’t wish to enter that place in the dark.”
Elijah nods. “We’ll camp and go into there in the morning.”
We find a good spot on a small island and soon have a fire going. The sun is sinking and we haven’t eaten since the morning. “My mother,” Elijah says, “she told me stories of her mother having to boil their moccasins in deep winter to make soup.”
I look at Elijah talking, his face blackened. His eyes stand out against his skin. He lost his mother at a young age and rarely talks of her. Both
of us are filthy. “We can’t go there looking like this,” I say. I walk to the river and wade in, remove my clothes and wring them out. The water isn’t as cold as I’d imagined. I scrub my scalp with sand. Elijah walks in too, does the same. I dive under the water, let the current carry me in its darkness like I am flying in my dream world.
After, we sit naked on a rock and braid each other’s hair, tying it tightly with strips of moosehide. The two of us still wear it in the old style. We are hunters, not homeguard Indians.
“Will they make us cut our hair short?” I ask, staring at the sun going down behind a stretch of spruce.
“I don’t know,” Elijah says. “Me, I think it would look good on me. But you, your ears would really stick out then. And your bald head would be so big it would make a nice target for the enemy.”
We roll our blankets about us, going to bed hungry once more. I try to find sleep, listen to the sounds of the town crossing to me in the night, men shouting and laughing, the tinkle of glass breaking on hard ground. Sleep is far away. Tomorrow I’ll go into a place from which there is no turning back.
“Do you think the Canadians will separate us, Elijah?” I ask. I try to sound relaxed, a little bored.
It takes Elijah a long time to answer, so long that I think he has fallen asleep.
He finally speaks in the darkness. “They’d better not.”
NTAWI NIPAHIWEWAK
Raiding Party
I JOLT FROM A LIGHT SLEEP. Feet pounding by on duckboards. Who is running around at such an hour? The night’s very dark, that time just before dawn. I peer out from my hole and see another form pass by. I can tell by his breathing that Elijah is awake beside me. A shout down the trench and the boom of a rifle firing, followed by the pop pop of a pistol. Elijah rolls out of our cave and crouches, me following. With our rifles we bend and run toward the noise. Sergeant McCaan appears with his red hair sticking up and follows as well.
More shouts and the boom of a grenade going off close by, just ahead at the traverse where the trench cuts at an angle to the right. A shower of earth falls on our heads. We stop and wait. Elijah signals for McCaan to give covering fire, then peers around the corner, waving for me to come ahead. Half a soldier lies on the ground. His eyes are open and looking around in a panic. From the waist down there is nothing left of him, just ropes of red gut and intestine where his hips should be. McCaan shouts for a medic and other soldiers appear, looking about dazed and uncomprehending. I figure it out quick enough, though. It seems to dawn on Elijah at the same time.
“Trench raid,” Elijah says. “Those were Hun running by us.”
I nod in understanding. “They might still be around,” I answer in Cree. “We should look.”
McCaan barks out and details are formed. A search goes on until dawn. The Germans are long gone, appearing then disappearing like phantoms. One soldier complains after stand-to that his helmet and rifle are missing. Another claims all his rations are gone. The soldier blown in half is carried away by the medics and his guts and blood covered by a few shovelfuls of dirt.
There are rumours about that Gerald, a young one in our company, was found sleeping at his sentry position last night. Some say that he has been taken a few hundred yards behind the lines and shot already. I don’t know if this is true. All I know is that no one has seen him in the last few hours. After breakfast we clean our rifles and uniforms as best we can and speculate out loud. When McCaan appears he is ashen faced. No one dares ask him anything.
Over the next days a quiet falls on the lines, although it seems that no one is sleeping well at night. Talk starts of retaliatory raids and the talk builds until it is a given that one of these nights, tonight maybe, the Canadians will raid the German side.
Elijah pals around with Corporal Thompson as much as he can. Thompson tells Elijah many helpful things, one of which is how to kill rats. It is simple but effective. Tie a little cheese or bread to the barrel of a rifle and the braver rats appear within minutes for their treat. Then, just a matter of squeezing the trigger. The crack crack of rifle fire is common during the day and the victim more often than not is a rat rather than a German. They are as bold as pet dogs but will run over your face while you sleep to get at your rations, even bite your nose or other exposed flesh if they are hungry enough. Elijah and I have taken to sleeping with our heads under our blankets.
We find that the rumours about young Gerald are true. He was court-martialled a week after the raid and taken behind the lines. Six soldiers were ordered to go with him, a dummy round put in only one rifle so nobody is quite sure if he is the one who did the actual killing. Rumour is that they were all poor shots and Gerald did not die immediately. The officer had to stumble through the mud and take out his revolver and shoot him in the head as if Gerald were no more than a mule. According to someone who talked to someone in the firing squad, Gerald cried and begged the whole walk to the place where he was to be executed. He tried to run and screamed so much that they had to gag him and tie him up. He was shot in the rain, crying like a child.
When our time in the front trench is done, we are sent back to the support trench. I soon learn that the biggest worry here is not enemy rifle fire but shells that occasionally scream in and explode close by. Harassing fire, Thompson calls it. Our days are spent filling sandbags and repairing sections of trench, working up and down the communication trenches that lead to the front line, fortifying them. The work would be monotonous if not for the constant worry of a German shell taking us by surprise.
Rumours are more rampant than truth, I discover. Now that the spring fighting along and around Saint-Eloi has died down, the men talk of being shipped to another place where a great summer battle is building. The other talk is of the Hun’s newest weapon, shells filled with poison gas that fall like a plague from the heavens. There must be some truth in it. We are all issued strange-looking hoods with goggles for eyeholes and a tube that sticks out for breathing.
We are told that if the scream of “Gas!” ever reaches our ears, we are to place these hoods immediately over our heads and tuck them into our tunics. McCaan makes us practise this, Lieutenant Breech nearby and watching with a smirk on his face. The hoods are hot, and difficult to breathe in. I feel like I might smother in mine, but Breech demands that we keep them over our heads for hours, that we go about our work wearing the hoods so that we may become used to them. The chemical that coats them and neutralizes the gas gives me bad headaches. They are ill-fitting as well, slipping about so that I can’t see through the eyeholes. I can hear my own breath echo in my ears, and feel like I am suffocating. It’s easy to hate Bastard Breech even more on these days.
Finally we are sent back to reserve where we can rest without too much worry or work. My first round in the line seems to have faded to a distant memory already. Corporal Thompson says that the last few weeks since he’s met me and the others are the quietest that he can remember in a year. Only seven casualties in the company, four to shrapnel wounds and three killed, including the private blown up by the trench raider’s potato masher. I wonder if young Gerald is counted among the casualties, but I keep the question to myself.
Back of the lines we fill up on hot food and clean ourselves as best we can. We keep occupied by playing soccer in a fallow field near the farmhouse where we’ve been billeted. I don’t like the game. It’s pointless and tiring. Instead I spend my time watching. Grey Eyes, the one who is a liar, he is a prisoner of the medicine they call morphine. I’ve seen him take it with a needle, and the way he goes slack and calm after. The idea of it scares me. So much easier, too, to find medicine here than I ever imagined. The medics carry plenty and are not always careful keeping an eye on their kits. Many men even carry it in their packs in case they are wounded and there is no help close by.
Elijah is fascinated by Grey Eyes’ use of it. He even goes so far as to watch Grey Eyes when he is in that other place. I tell Elijah to let Grey Eyes get caught by an officer and taken away. He’s a bad o
ne and his actions will lead us all into trouble. But Elijah says no. This is all like a game to him. Elijah can out-talk even the officers with his nun’s English and his quick thinking. The others in our section are drawn to him and his endless stories. I am forced by my poor English to sit back and watch it all happen, to see how he wins them over, while I become more invisible. A brown ghost.
When it is time to go back to the front trenches, the men are sombre once more. Instead of heading back to where we first were, we march a couple of miles south, and those in the know mutter that we are marching directly to Saint-Eloi craters, the ugliest place on the earth. Corporal Thompson explains to us that seven huge craters and countless smaller ones dot this area. On any given night they might be in different hands. We come up to the craters through what once was the town of Saint-Eloi, now just laneways of rubble and burnt timbers. We file along the communication trenches when night falls, going still when flares go up as we near the front lines. Only a few shells whistle by on their way to somewhere else.
Elijah and I are given sentry duty that first night, and are amazed at the condition of these trenches. They aren’t really trenches at all but shallow ditches where even Thompson must keep bent at the waist. All attempts at drainage have failed, and water up to our knees soaks through our boots, making them too heavy. It would be better and more comfortable to wear the moccasins that I made for Elijah and myself, but I don’t want to ruin them. As we pass by the troops we listen to the low mutters of discomfort. There is nowhere dry to sit and sleep, never mind lie down.