My head is light and today has turned into a good day for me. The Highlander raises his rifle and aims a long time. I hold my breath. The rifle fires and the match quivers, then falls over. Men shout once again and rush on the field. I am surrounded by arms reaching out to me and men talking into my face. The ones in my section, Gilberto and Graves and Grey Eyes and Sean Patrick and Elijah, grab me and lift me above their heads. I look down at the sea of men around me and notice the officers pointing to me and talking.
McCaan approaches, beaming, and shouts up to me. “From now on you will no longer be called Xavier. You have a new name now. Your new name is simply X, and when men ask you why, you tell them, X marks the spot on any target you wish to hit!” The others laugh and cheer, shout out to me, “X marks his spot!”
It strikes me then. None of these who are here today can call me a useless bush Indian ever again. They might not say it out loud, but they know now that I have something special.
ONAHAASHIWEW
Sniper
T
HE SHORELINE THAT WE PASS
is still new growth, green and wild, nothing grown taller than a man. I watch it for some time after I awake, listening to the gentle dip of Niska’s paddle. In places blackened tree stumps jut up like burnt fingers. They look like the dead trees of Ypres, make me wonder if the battlefields have begun to grow over yet with red flowers.
“Maybe Elijah is still over there, Auntie. Maybe the army has kept him there longer,” I say out loud, not meaning to. I turn to her and she smiles down at me, passes me a cup of water that she’s dipped into the river to cool my scratched throat.
“Maybe,” she answers. I watch her lips. “When is the last time you saw him, Xavier?” she asks. She is not used to asking questions. I can tell she is afraid to voice this one.
I look at the shore. “Near here is the place where the fire caught up to us,” I tell her, pointing to the bank. “We had made camp and fallen asleep with the wind blowing the fire away from us. But sometime in the night the wind shifted and the fire snuck up.” I lay my head back on my pack, too tired to speak more. I want to be able to tell Niska this story but cannot find the energy inside me that I need to do it.
Sean Patrick’s at his sniping post, Grey Eyes working the steel plate, swinging it up when Sean Patrick calls for it, shutting it as soon
as the shot is fired. I noticed them earlier in the day and am surprised to see them still shooting in the afternoon. I want to warn them not to use the same position too long or they’ll give it away, but figure they know as much. I don’t want to offend them. I also see that Grey Eyes has the glassy look of the medicine in his veins and he is not paying close enough attention, but McCaan has given me a shovel and told me to fill sandbags.
“Don’t want you snipers thinking you’re above all this,” he says.
I notice Elijah isn’t given a shovel.
An aeroplane drones overhead and I look up from my work to see if it is one of ours, or Fritz come to strafe us. I bend back down to fill sandbags when I hear Gilberto shouting for help. When I look over, I see ten yards from me Sean Patrick on the ground writhing like a snake and grabbing his neck, blood spurting out in impossible amounts, his eyes wide with terror of what is coming. I run to him. We all run to him, McCaan and Elijah, Graves and Fat who’ve become closer and closer over the last months like a skinny father and his heavy son. We stand over Sean Patrick dumbly, none of us really knowing what to do, in shock at the sight of bright red blood pumping from between his fingers clenched so hard that he appears to be choking himself, McCaan kneeling and fumbling to help.
“Shot through the neck,” Graves mumbles as if to no one.
Immediately I think of the snipers rumoured to be around here, of one especially, the one they say stalks our lines and has impossible numbers. Elijah claims that the man doesn’t really exist.
McCaan pulls gauze from a pack near him and tries to move Sean Patrick’s hands. “Help me,” he shouts, and the tone in his voice sets us all into action.
Elijah and I pry Sean Patrick’s hands away and hold them above his head while Graves and a stunned-looking Grey Eyes clamp onto his long skinny legs. McCaan applies the gauze to his neck, but we all know it is futile. I stare into Sean Patrick’s eyes near to my own. He
stares back at me in pure fear. I smile to try and reassure him that soon he will be on the long road and he won’t be scared or in pain or cold or wet any more. I can see the fear die a little at the same time that the bright light drains from his eyes. They turn glassy as those of Grey Eyes. McCaan quits working. I let go of Sean Patrick’s arms and watch the muscles relax into the slow release of the dead.
Grey Eyes stands back from us. “I told him to take a break,” he mumbles to no one. “I told him that he’s too tall to be sniping here.”
Sean Patrick’s height has nothing to do with what has happened.
That evening McCaan gives me and Elijah and a couple of others permission to carry Sean Patrick back behind the lines near one of our nests for burial. We dig silent and steady, the body beside us wrapped tightly in his blanket. When the hole is deep enough, we put him into it. I prefer the old way of placing the body high in a tree so that the soul can leave it without hindrance, but no trees stand for miles around here. I say my own prayers to
Gitchi Manitou,
and Graves and Fat touch their fingers to forehead and chest and shoulders. It surprises me that Elijah whispers his own prayers in Cree as well. We burn a little sprig of sweetgrass that I’ve carried with the leftover moosehide in my pack from Canada and whisper more prayers to drift up with it. We cover Sean Patrick’s body with shovelfuls of dirt and then sit, watching the flash of the big guns and feeling the rumble beneath as the real darkness begins to settle in.
“Hun sniper,” Elijah says. I nod to him. “He’s a good shot,” Elijah continues. “To be able to hit a man through the neck with such a short window of opportunity.”
I want to tell Elijah that Grey Eyes is at least partially to blame for operating the slot so slowly, but then I realize that I am to blame too for not saying anything to them when I noticed the mistakes they were making.
Sean Patrick is not the only one to be killed by their snipers. All up and down the line the Germans are taking a toll. Although the
shells kill far more, the snipers eat away at morale like a fast disease. Thompson says that Fritz are using this area as a training ground. McCaan orders Thompson, Elijah and me to do whatever we can to impede them, to get a little revenge for Sean Patrick.
For the next days we stay out of the trenches as much as possible, finding places to hide and scout for snipers. I am glad not to be in the trenches. McCaan is angry that Sean Patrick died so needlessly, and keeps a closer eye on Grey Eyes. He is not as good as he thinks he is at hiding what he puts into himself. I must remember what he has done to Sean Patrick next time Grey Eyes asks for something.
E
LIJAH GOES INTO ANOTHER PLACE
when he is hunting. He forgets his British accent and his bragging, is patient. And he becomes more watchful. He moves with no wasted movement, like a wolf on some smaller animal’s trail.
Sometimes late at night when we are in a listening post or in one of our nests, Elijah will comment on what Fritz is doing in his own line, on what his actions will be in the next few days. It is as if Elijah is lifted from his body and carried to the other side where he can float around at will. His eyes stare as if he can see very far. Some elders talk of this experience, but more often a man takes the form of an animal when he leaves his body—a bird or a fox or even a bear. Sometimes I wonder if Elijah is taking Grey Eyes’ medicine, but I know that he isn’t. He wouldn’t be able to hide it from me. This
wemistikoshiw
medicine, sometimes I am tempted to try it, late at night, lying out here and listening. Plenty of it around. Many of the soldiers carry it in tablet form in their packs. They put it under their tongue if they are wounded. Some even carry a needle full with them at all times, the same type of needle that the medics carry. Most are deathly afraid of pain, of prolonged suffering, even more than they are scared of death.
I begin to adopt Elijah’s ways. I try to think like the Hun, particularly the very good one who killed Sean Patrick. The sniper
has been operating in this area for a while now. Many shots through the neck. His numbers continue to grow. Proof that it is the same man is that he uses a rare type of round in his rifle, one that does not flatten and expand on impact like most of the cheap rounds but is hard and copper and cuts through nearly anything like a tiny, deadly knife.
We spend more and more days out in our different positions, watching for hints of the others who are no doubt in turn looking for us. Elijah and Thompson and I go into our own line only once in a while for small supplies of food and water. Lieutenant Breech lets us come and go as we need to, on the promise that we deliver results. The summer remains quiet on this part of the line, hot like I have rarely known heat. I am always thirsty. We hear the constant rumble of the big battle going on down the line. It is not going well for Tommy. Graves keeps us informed when we come in. There’s a new urgency to find the snipers operating across from us. Word is out that very soon the Second Division, my company included, will be sent down to take part in that fight.
“We bombed ’em straight for days on end,” Graves says. “Literally tons of shells we dropped on ’em thinking we were going to soften ’em to mush before the assault.” Graves talks more now that he has a listener in Fat. “We figured it would be a Sunday stroll across no man’s land after the bruising we gave ’em. But little did we know they’ve got some very deep trenches to hide in. Soon as we stopped the bombing and the whistle blows for us to go over the top, here comes Fritz crawling from their deep holes and setting up their machine guns. From what I heard, a man couldn’t advance for all the dead Tommies lying like cordwood on the field in front of him.”
McCaan tells Graves to pipe down and stop stirring trouble.
“If we’d had those same machine guns in the Boer War,” Graves continues, muttering now, “I tell you it’d have been a different outcome.”
Here where the Ypres Road bisects the front line, where the piles of brick and wood and debris add to the chaos, nothing stands out and everything stands out, it seems. I peer through my riflescope for hours at a time. I’ve taken to spotting through my rifle now in the chance that I, too, might get a shot. I want to see if I can do what Elijah does. But all I am able to spot are rare glimpses of a helmet or shovel. Easier for me to picture soldiers with antlers on their heads, I tell Elijah. It will make it all the easier when the time comes to shoot one. Elijah laughs at this. Even though I make light, I spend my hours wondering what I will do when it is my turn to pull a trigger on a man.
“Antlers,” Elijah says. “Do you remember the time you had antlers?”
I wonder for a moment what he is talking about, force myself back to Mushkegowuk, a place I try not to think about for fear it will make me homesick. “When we were caribou hunting?” I ask. He nods. I smile. “We were young then, weren’t we,” I say.
We were only sixteen winters, had wandered as far from Auntie as we ever had before, far up the coast, near where the
Ayashkimew,
the raw flesh eaters, lived. I’d promised Auntie we’d return with enough caribou meat to feed a village. Now it was deep winter and we’d still found none. But tracks were everywhere, and so we pushed on.
On a bright morning that was so cold we were forced to keep moving, we crossed onto a plain surrounded by black spruce. At the far edge of the plain, we spotted a herd. We were downwind of them, but I knew if they sensed us and ran, we could never catch them. Elijah wanted to shoot at them, but I knew the distance was still too far.
“I have a better idea,” I said, remembering what you’d once told me, Auntie. “Conceal yourself here,” I told Elijah.
We sat and watched the herd from a place that was a natural funnel if I could force them this way. I dug through the snow until I
reached dry, yellow grass and collected as much as I could. Using my knife, I struck my flint above the grass I’d collected until part of it glowed red embers and sent a thin trail of smoke into the frozen air. I picked up the smoking grass, breathing on it every little while to keep it alive.
“They will soon come,” I whispered. “Wait until they are close before you begin shooting.”
I crept along the way we’d just been, the smoking grass in my hand, and cut into the tree line. Careful as I could, I made my way along the edge of it back toward the herd. Wherever the trees opened up onto the plain, I stopped and placed some of the grass into the crook of a tree, blowing onto it until it smoked. I continued in this way for a long time until I made my way behind the herd. You’d told me, Auntie, that caribou were afraid of the smell of smoke and would move away from it.
When I’d reached the far side of the herd, I found a thicker branch and picked it up. Holding it above my head, I bent at the waist and walked out of the tree line, crouched and swaying, directly toward the nervous herd, bending the branch in a curve so that it looked like antlers. The animals swung their heads and looked at me, not sure what they saw. I continued walking toward them, cutting off their escape route to the north and east. The animals let me get so close that their musk tickled my nose.
And then they ran. I straightened and ran after them, watched as they approached the places I’d left the burning grass before they veered away and toward the spot where Elijah waited. I began to shout when I saw that they could not escape, my voice leaving my mouth in great puffs of air, the cold stinging my lungs. I whooped and ran, and didn’t stop even when Elijah’s gun began to bark out and the animals fell as they tried to pass him.
“We ran out of bullets that day,” I whisper to Elijah as we stare out at the Ypres Road. “How many did we kill? A dozen?”