I saw the bush once more, summertime or maybe autumn, with the sun high. A beaver dam that had not been abandoned, a new lodge of freshly woven branches. I sat in a canoe with a young man paddling ahead of me. I did not recognize him. His hair had been short like mine but was already growing out. On a bend in the river, a large moose, a bull, stood on the shore. The same excitement that always comes with spotting one, especially one so large, swelled in me. But we did not take it. We drifted silently by with the current.
Sitting alone in the room, I realized that I was not going to be able to escape it. The window was too high, and the door that locked me in was solid. My hair had grown to a soft down, and still I did not regret my actions. I waited and dreamed and plotted.
One night I awoke to a soft scratching at the window. I looked up and saw a shadow hovering by it. Before the panic even had a chance to grip me, the window crackled with a tinkling of glass. I crouched behind the bed and watched as the rest of the window was smashed out. With a flourish of long hair, my mother stuck her head in, and in the language I had not heard in weeks she told me to throw her my bedsheet. I stood and did as she told me, all the sleep quickly gone. She twisted the sheet and threw one end down and told me to grab it. She then hoisted me up and pulled me through the window, where I smelled the first fresh air in a long time. Spring had come while I sat in that room.
“Ashtum,”
she said. “They have probably heard us. We must go now.”
I wondered where we were going, but that soon became apparent when she led me to our two dogs, both tied to travois with all of our
possessions bundled on top. “Did you see Rabbit?” my mother asked. “Will she come with us?”
“She is called Anne now,” I said, and watched the understanding cross my mother’s face.
We led the dogs out of Moose Factory at that part of night when it was darkest, and I did not look again upon that place for another two years. My mother and I walked out of there and back into the time of our ancestors, living on what the land would give and slowly becoming wild like the animals around us.
KAKWAPASKINAATOWIN
Competition
L
ATE IN JUNE
our battalion is moved near a place called White Horse Cellars where the remnants of the town run between the two lines. The mud is less of a problem as we have been stationed almost on top of the Ypres Road that leads into here. No man’s land is strewn with rubble and the carcasses of rotting farm animals. It is ground rich for hunting Fritz, Elijah says.
I like the name of this place. When I sleep a little, the dreams are good, of the big white horses running free across open green fields, of cool dry cellars filled with food.
More and more Elijah and I are given permission to go out on our own, me spotting and Elijah shooting, because we come back with kills. There is plenty to hide in around here, old brick piles, blasted wagons, the fallen walls of houses. This part of the line is confusing and temporary. In some stretches, the Hun line is only one hundred yards away. The area has claimed many lives on both sides.
Thompson has been out and watches us work. He says he is amazed by how long we can lie still despite the lice and without falling asleep, how we can spot movement that he is not able to see. Elijah explains to him that it is hunting, and hunting is what we have done all our lives. I do not correct Elijah. There is no point in telling Thompson that I am the only one of the two of us really from the bush, the only one who has truly hunted for a lifetime. I have no reason to say it.
Over the early summer that Thompson calls the quiet season and the calm before the killing, Elijah’s numbers grow. Three, five, ten. I have become very good at spotting movement, at seeing the men in the jumble of brick and mud. My job is to find the unfortunate ones who for just a moment forget the danger. But it is Elijah’s job to dispatch them.
I am learning to come to terms with what he does. And that I am his accomplice.
Now when Elijah and I come back in to the trenches after a day or two out, the others look at us differently. We are becoming the talk of the battalion, Thompson says. We’re also beginning to draw attention from the German big guns. When we hunt in one area for more than a couple of days, the shells begin to pour in. This in turn makes us unwanted by our own, and so we spend longer and longer periods of time out of the trenches and sniping from our different nests. The really good nests we keep as long as we can, moving between them as randomly as possible. I like it better out here away from the trenches anyway. There’s no boredom, no officers to answer to, no stand-to.
One night when Elijah and I slip back into our line for a hot meal and a little rest, I overhear Sean Patrick and Grey Eyes talking about us. I hear my nickname mentioned, then Elijah’s, and realize that they don’t know I’m right beside them. I’m becoming a ghost.
“What do they do out there?” Sean Patrick asks.
“They sneak around and kill Fritz,” Grey Eyes answers.
“Don’t they see?” Sean Patrick says. “The more they shoot, the more shelling we get in our sector? I’d rather they do their dirty work somewhere else.”The two of them are silent for a time.
“It’s Elijah that’s the killer,” Grey Eyes says suddenly. “X just spots for him. Elijah told me how X threw up the first time he saw Elijah get a kill.”
“How many do they have now?”
“Elijah’s got dozens, I imagine, if you include the crater raid they did a couple of months ago.”
I leave without a sound so that they do not know I have been there, my ears hot.
A
HORRIBLE OFFENSIVE BURNS
like a giant fire south of us. The continuous rumble of the big sixty-pounders hammering the Germans doesn’t let off, beats for days like the biggest drums, the earth below me shivering, shuddering even though the bombing is many miles away.
Elijah and I lie in our nest at night or volunteer to sit in listening posts in no man’s land. “Those are our guns,” Elijah whispers to me tonight. His eyes reflect the little light and he has the smile of the mysterious on his lips. Lately, I notice he sleeps less and talks all the time about hunting. He says he can see things over the horizon. Glimpses. We sit in a listening post, a small crater twenty yards out from our own line. We spend this night listening for what Fritz is up to, but all we hear is a German soldier moaning and mumbling, wounded badly but still alive and in the middle of no man’s land.
“Sergeant McCaan says a big attack’s coming,” I whisper, “and that the British are preparing a big offensive.” The night’s at its quietest, with the sun only an hour away but still buried somewhere deep below. The wounded soldier continues to moan and mumble. He is talking some sort of secret language now, I think, speaking with the spirit who will take him on the three-day road.
“Fritz is dug in too well in France,” Elijah says. “Tommy will fail.” The wounded soldier suddenly laughs, as if to agree with what Elijah says. Maybe they see the same thing.
Elijah has killed more men already than I can count on both hands. It doesn’t seem to bother him. Me, I’ve killed no one that I could see yet, but I’ve helped Elijah. I don’t think it bothers me, but I won’t let myself think of it, just push it away whenever it appears.
Elijah smiles and stares out into the black. The guns in the south cause the sky there to glow and pulse. They are the North Lights, in the wrong place, reminding me of home. The line across from us is still. The only noise over the booming in the distance is the muttering and cries of the wounded soldier.
“I’ll be back,” Elijah whispers to me and crawls out of our listening post quick and silent. I know it’s useless to try and stop him. I also see that Elijah has left his rifle behind.
Staying still, I listen and try to fight off the anger that comes to me when Elijah does these stupid things. It isn’t fair. I’m left here like a worried wife, wondering if Elijah’s going to make it back this time or if he will be spotted and shot. I hear the wounded soldier suddenly cry out what sounds like
“Nine, nine, nine …”
and then in a lower voice, he begins to speak as if carrying on a conversation with someone. Finally, he stops talking. I sit and listen for a long time, the emptiness of the night striking me now that the wounded voice is silent.
When the sun begins to threaten and I am sick with the worry that Elijah will not get back in time or at all and I will be forced to squat in this hole all day until night comes again and I can make it back to the line, Elijah slithers into the crater and leans back on it, breathing shallow and a little hard.
“Where were you?” I ask in Cree, trying not to sound upset, the tone slipping out anyway.
“I helped that soldier find his way to the spirit world,” Elijah whispers.
“We must get back before the sun comes up,” I say.
“I was good to him,” Elijah continues, staring up into the sky. “He’d suffered enough and I didn’t want him to leave violently, so I covered his mouth and nose with my own hand and whispered good things to him till he went.”
“Enough,” I say sharper than I want to, and crawl out of the crater and toward our line.
T
HE OTHERS IN THE BATTALION
have begun to treat Elijah like he is something more than them. I walk beside him or behind him along the trenches between stretches out hunting, and very few seem to notice me at all. When we are given our daily rum ration, Elijah likes nothing better than to sit and talk about his latest exploits to anyone who will listen. And there are many. How soon they seem to forget who is the better shot. None of them know that I am the one who taught Elijah what he knows about hunting. My English isn’t good enough to correct what I see happening, but even if it was I would only sound like a bitter old woman to them. After all, I have not pulled the trigger on a man yet. That is Elijah’s job.
When I am able, I find a place away from their talking and slip into a light sleep that creeps across me like smoke. I drift back to the training place we were sent to after our time in Toronto, in the cool of autumn, back to where we first learned exhaustion. This memory, this pretty little stone, I examine it with my eyes closed tight. Turn it over in my fingers.
Our days of training in these farm fields in Ontario are all the same, the company sleeping lightly and in shifts, working at digging trenches and then filling them back in again, learning about sap lines, fire-steps, parapets, parados, stand-to morning and evening, learning a little of what we will do once we get to France.
Some officers have arrived from over the sea to train the men. The men around me whisper that these officers have seen a lot of action. They have a certain look about them, a certain hollow stare. One of them is older, British. The other two are Canadians. One of the Canadians is missing his left arm to the shoulder. The British one always looks like he’s crying. The other Canadian, him, he looks like he’s fine to me. Those three sit long hours at night by a fire and talk with Lieutenant Breech and sometimes Sergeant McCaan.
Nighttime is when we learn how to string barbed wire without tearing our hands, how to lie still when flares pop up over us so that
we melt into the ground. Nighttime is when we learn to patrol quietly and sneak up on one another. This is what Elijah and I like best, and what we are best at.
McCaan has taken notice of how good we are at this and it makes me feel a little important. During these games at night the men are sent out into the darkness of forest or meadow and told to find the other group that has been sent out or are simply told to make it back to the camp first. The others can’t keep up with Elijah and me, though. In the darkness I feel that Elijah and I are owls or wolves. We have done many night hunts over the years. McCaan reports our talent to Lieutenant Breech. Elijah tells me Breech says that it is our Indian blood, that our blood is closer to that of an animal than that of a man.
While the men are out on night training I know that the visiting officers sit by the fire and talk with Breech. They talk about France, about places with strange names. Popperinghe. Flanders. Festubert. Loos. They talk of the Hun using a gas that when breathed turns the lungs to fiery liquid so that a man drowns in the flames of his own insides. The crying officer was at the place where this gas was first used on the Canadians. He saved himself by pissing into a handkerchief and breathing through that with his face buried in the mud. But the gas got his eyes a little bit anyways.
One or two places over in France will decide the war next summer, these officers say as they sit by the fire. And it’s the soldiers here around them that will help decide it. I find out all of this through Elijah. Elijah comes back late at night to the tent where we sleep, shaking me awake and whispering to me in Cree all the things that he has overheard them say as he lay in the dark spying on them. Elijah sneaks up and stays silent in the shadows for hours while they talk, mimics their voices, their postures, their stares. He cannot wait to get over there. He tells me he’s afraid the war will end before we arrive.
Elijah, he has a talent, him. He has become as good as me at sneaking, and maybe has more patience. Elijah’s like a shadow when he wants to be, lying flat and breathing silent so that he becomes the ground. I know that I am a good hider, a good worker, a good shot. We will both be very good over there. But Elijah, all he wants is that place. This war will make him into something.
One night Elijah and I lie in our tent and talk. The quiet evening with nothing to do is rare. Autumn has come to stay. The air is sharper. The trees glow in the sunlight as part of them dies.
Talk’s started up of the battalion moving again, maybe this time to the ships that will take us overseas to the war. Elijah tells me this in our language as we sit in the tent near the warmth of the wood stove.
“Just a matter of time before this came,” Elijah says. I sit up to hear better. “Before they separated us.”
“What is this?” I ask. “Who says?”
“It is the talk.”