The thought of the thick sweet smoke makes Elijah’s stomach churn. “I have other medicine,” Grey Eyes says. “I’ll help you below.”
They make their way along the heaving deck and inside. Elijah only realizes how cold he is now that the heat and stink of all the crowded men rolls over him. He and Grey Eyes make their way along the aisles defined by swinging hammocks, voices grumbling and moaning in the shadows. They descend further into the ship, down below to where there are no longer any men, just the thick smell of horses.
The animals are nervous as the dull thud of waves hitting the ship echoes somewhere above them. Elijah reaches his hand out to one but it pulls back.
In a corner near the stable, Grey Eyes falls to his knees and digs behind an old crate, pulls something from the burlap. Elijah shivers violently. A good thing that Grey Eyes found Elijah, Elijah thinks. He might have frozen to death up there. His fingers are numb so that he can’t feel them or the tiny bottle Grey Eyes passes to him. It glitters in the little light. Grey Eyes’ brows arch when he sees how Elijah stares.
Grey Eyes sits beside Elijah on the soft burlap and fondles another one. “I have all this medicine, but no way to take it,” he says, laughing. “Cut my arm,” he says.
Elijah looks at him.
“Cut me,” he says again. “Deep.” Elijah pulls out his skinning knife. His head’s dizzy. He runs the thin blade hard across the bone of Grey Eyes’ forearm. Elijah watches in fascination at the skin separating, red blossoming out against the silver of his blade.
Grey Eyes takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wraps the wound. “I’ll be back shortly,” he says, as Elijah wipes the blade on his pants. Grey Eyes disappears into the shadows of the ship.
Lying there with a sick stomach, Elijah listens to the
thump thump
of the ship’s engines, the pound of waves, the nervous shuffle and stamp of horses’ hooves.
Maybe a couple of hours pass. He tries to find the energy to stand up and get back to his nest under the lifeboat on deck. It’s better on the deck in the open air, he realizes, than in this place below the water in the groaning ship. Elijah hears Grey Eyes before he sees him. He has a way of walking heavy on his heels. He’d be no good as a hunter. White-faced out of the shadows, the dark under his eyes making him look sick, he smiles. He sits beside Elijah and pulls up his sleeve, exposing a bandage. He pulls the bandage back, and Elijah
sees a neat row of black stitches puckering Grey Eyes’ skin where Elijah had run the knife.
With his other hand Grey Eyes pulls a small sharp object from his pocket. “Take off your jacket and roll up your shirt sleeve,” he says. “Give me one of those ampoules.” Taking the bloody handkerchief from his pocket, Grey Eyes loops it around Elijah’s biceps and pulls tight so that his arm and hand throb dully.
Grey Eyes snaps off the top of the glass ampoule and inserts the needle of the syringe into it. “I nicked it up in the infirmary,” he says, focused on the needle. He then carefully draws back on the plunger, and Elijah watches a little golden liquid flood the glass tube. It’s the same colour as the ring on each side of the syringe where Grey Eyes places his fingers for grip. “I don’t know how strong this is,” he says, taking Elijah’s arm in his lap, “so I won’t give you much.” Grey Eyes flicks his thumbnail against the tube and pushes the plunger so that a bead of golden liquid appears at the needle’s tip. “Hold still,” he says, placing the sharp needle along the vein of Elijah’s arm and pushing it in slow so that Elijah feels a tug and burn under the skin. Carefully, Grey Eyes presses the plunger down, and Elijah feels like his arm’s being filled with warm air.
Grey Eyes takes the needle from Elijah’s vein and unties the handkerchief. Elijah looks down at his arm, wondering if this is all, when suddenly his breath hitches in his throat and light floods all around. His head floats from the pain of his body, hovers there, watches Grey Eyes remove his jacket, roll up his sleeve, tie the handkerchief around his arm, dip the needle into the ampoule, tap it with his thumb, and slide it into the bump of his vein. Grey Eyes lies down on the burlap away from Elijah and shivers. Elijah stares up into the dark, smells the horses, floats just above the ground on warm golden water, listens to it hit the ship, the beckon of snuffling and snorting animals like whispers from thirty paces.
He tries hard to keep his floating head tethered. It hovers above him, tugging gently, wanting to float, to drift and see what there is to see. When he thinks of releasing it, just letting it go to explore, a panic swells up, so big it forces air from his lungs so that a low groan escapes his mouth.
“Don’t fight, Whiskeyjack,” Grey Eyes whispers. “Just let it go.”
“No,” Elijah whispers, “it won’t come back, my head won’t come back.”
Grey Eyes laughs softly. Elijah fights the fear by himself, and then just decides to let his head float away.
Elijah remembers seeing the horses’ stalls from above, and in one of them he sees me with a horse, feeding it by hand. Elijah floats further, peering into dark corners, reading the names on wooden cargo boxes. A
MMUNITION
.F
OOD
.C
LOTHING
. Everything we will need over there. He floats to the next level. Waterline. Men in hammocks sleeping. Some tossing. Others sick. Rows and rows of meat, they look like meat wrapped in wool blankets. A couple of men talk, talk about girlfriends left at home. Children that they might not see again. Elijah lets himself float up the stairs and up out onto the lowest deck. Black night. No stars. The water below blacker, deeper than the sky. Cold. Two night watchmen stroll, cigarette tips glowing. Will they check the cargo hold? Watch. Don’t panic. Breathe. The upper deck and officers’ quarters. More sleeping men. Two are not sleeping. They touch tender fingers to mouths. Taste one another. Bite.
The whisper and laughter of many voices up the final stairs. Elijah can hear them coming from the little glow of the wheelhouse. A party? The voices are excited. Not a party. Something. Crackle. Static. Anger. Women’s voices speaking Cree. Elijah is pulled back to his body. He disappears into himself on his burlap sacks that itch his back.
“That was the one and only time I experienced the morphine,” Elijah says to me, the pounding of artillery rumbling low in the
distance. “It allowed me to leave my body and see what was around me. I see how it might be a very powerful tool for me in such a place as this.”
“You will not take it any more,” I tell him.
He nods and smiles.
We lie on our stomachs and scan the ground hundreds of yards in front, the sun reaching its peak and then beginning its descent toward the earth behind us. Its warmth causes me to grow sleepy, and I find myself nodding onto my rifle, head sinking. A bird behind me sings a shrill song, and I realize that I’ve not heard this in many days.
Elijah’s voice startles me awake. “I’m going to check the accuracy of my rifle.”
My eyes dart open. The sun has moved some since I fell asleep.
“Is that wise?” I ask. “What if the smoke gives away our position?”
“We’ve got the sun pretty much behind us now,” he says. “No sniper can stare into it and see anything but sunspots.” He preps his gun. “I’m beginning to think that their sniper is a phantom.”
“What are you going to shoot at?” I whisper.
“The bloated belly of that horse,” he says.
I focus into my scope and fill it with the body of the horse. “That will be a very bad mess you cause.”
“It should explode in an interesting way,” he says. “Watch carefully.”
I watch, tense for the explosion in my ear. As soon as it comes, the horse’s belly disintegrates in a red and brown cloud of spray, the animal’s head jerking as if it is still alive. I continue staring through the scope, scanning the ground all around, tracing the ribbons of intestine and brown hide littering the mud around the animal.
That is when he captures my eye. Not fifteen feet away a corpse moves slightly and a puff of smoke comes out from it. Almost simultaneously wood splinters and dirt clods explode between Elijah’s head and my own and Elijah yelps in pain, the sound of his trying desperately to reload his Ross setting me into action.
“That body just shot at us,” I blurt as I train my sights on it and can suddenly see the barrel of a rifle pointing out at us from under the corpse.
“I can’t see,” Elijah says. “My eyes.”
I know that the sniper is reloading and it is a matter of seconds before he will fire at us again. My rifle is steady on a place just above the rifle poking out from under the corpse and without any more thinking I pull the trigger. There is the explosion and the kick. As the smoke clears, I see that the rifle I aimed above is now lying on the ground at an angle. The knowledge slowly sinks in. As I peer through my scope for movement, I know that there won’t be any.
“Fire one more time,” Elijah says. “Put one more round in the same place.” His voice is tense. He is in pain.
I reload smoothly, draw a bead once again at the space just below the corpse, then fire.
We drop down into the cover of the nest. “Give me a canteen,” Elijah says.
I reach between us and pass it to him. He lies on his back now and pours water into his eyes.
“Can you see?” I ask.
“Yes, but things are fuzzy,” he says. “You got him, didn’t you?” he asks.
I don’t answer.
“That was their phantom sniper,” Elijah says with awe. “The one who killed Sean Patrick. He was hunting us too.” I see that Elijah can’t speak with his British accent when he speaks in Cree. “Can you imagine?” Elijah asks, beginning to laugh. “The intensity of such a man? He could lie there for hours among the dead and the rotting. He lay there in that stink of death like death itself. But we got him.”
I ponder this for a while.
“We will go out there tonight and learn his tricks,” Elijah says. “We will get you a souvenir of your first great kill.”
SHAKOCIHEW
Seducing
I
N THE EVENING
I find a good spot for camp. This first day has been a strange one for me. Twice I came around a bend in the river, expecting to recognize land I’d passed not so long ago as I travelled up this burnt stretch to the town. Twice I was surprised to feel lost, like I’d somehow never been on this river before. I’m feeling unsettled, like Nephew and I are on a very different journey from the one we began.
I try to feed Xavier, but still he doesn’t eat. He is disappearing in front of my eyes, sitting across the fire with a blanket over his shoulders, the smoke causing him to shimmer. I feed him with my story instead. He’s listening, I think, his eyes staring at the water.
We weren’t always alone out in the bush, Xavier. Although my mother never let another man very close to her after my father, she sometimes liked their company, their quiet talk and easy ways. Like us, there were roving bands of hunters who lived in the old way as much as possible, sending in hunters to trade furs for bullets and flour once in a while when that was possible. The Indian name for us was
awawatuk,
and we had the unfair reputation of being thieves and murderers, all because we rejected the
wemistikoshiw
. Rarely did the
awawatuk
travel in groups bigger than five or six, but in the summer, just as in the old days, we came together in bigger numbers when the land would support us.
In the years I grew into a young woman, my mother taught me all that she could about the shaking tent and the
matatosowin,
the sweat lodge. She taught me about the healing and killing power of roots and herbs that grew around us, what parts of the skunk would cure snowblindness and what parts of the owl gave night vision. She saw my occasional fits the same way I did, as an unwanted gift, but one to be nurtured regardless.
The
awawatuk
accepted that I was the natural extension of my father, the new limb through which my family’s power travelled. By the time I was living my seventeenth winter, men would come to me not for what men usually seek women out for, but to ask questions and advice. Most often, they wanted to know where to find game, and so I divined for them, placing the shoulder blade of the animal on coals and dripping water onto it as I had watched my father do. The rare hunter came to me wanting to understand the symbol of a dream and sometimes to learn his future. If I had not experienced a fit in some time, I constructed a shaking tent and crawled into it, summoned the spirits of the forest animals to come inside and join me, so many of them sometimes that the walls of my tent puffed out and drew in with their breath, becoming a living thing all its own. Most often, though, it was the spirit of the lynx that came to me first and stayed through the night, showing through its sharp eyes the secrets of the forest.
When I was left free with my time, I travelled through the bush, hunting and stalking. My hair grew long and tangled and wild. I stayed out for more and more days on my own, worrying my mother who was growing older now. But I was restless. The void inside me was aching, needing to be filled.
That is when I came across him.
He began to run a trapline farther out than the other
wemistikoshiw
and was apparently not afraid of the bush and its dangers. I knew he was a
wemistikoshiw
trapper by the way he systematically placed his
traps and by the way he baited them. At first his insolence angered me, and I would follow his line and spring all of the metal jaws before they could take any animals. But still he persisted. So I played tricks on him, taking the leg of a fox or a marten, placing it in one of his traps, and leaving him to wonder whether the animal had escaped by chewing off its own leg. I covered my own tracks by sweeping the snow with a spruce bough, or else I’d strap carefully whittled branches to my mukluks so that they resembled great clawed feet and leave prints where I knew he’d see them and be left frightened and wondering. That’s when the idea came to me.
At first it was less an idea than an image that came late at night while I sat alone by my fire in my little
askihkan,
the thought of me catching him and keeping him like a pet. This kept me warm, and even for brief moments stilled the ache in me as I imagined stroking him, feeding him berries with stained fingers, licking the juice from his lips. When the winter was at its deepest and the hunger had set itself in the pit of my stomach so that the world was more a dream than a real thing, I acted in desperation, frustration.