Elijah stops this night’s story here. It is not until a long time later that he is able to share the rest with me. He does not think I will understand. He is right.
Elijah looks down at the soldier he has just dispatched and thinks of the earlier look of anger on the man’s face. He reminds himself that this just as easily could have been him lying there. He turns the dead man on his stomach and removes his sharpened skinning knife from its sheath and pulls the man’s hair back and removes his scalp with careful motions as simply as he would remove the skin from a pike. He places the hair in his kit bag, assuring himself that just as some other Indians consider it a sign of honour in battle, this counting coup and taking scalps, he will too.
The medicine pulsing in his veins slows and he knows it will not be long before it begins to thin and the headaches come and his body tires so that he will not be able to move. He begins to run with the others who continue to scream like wild things, throwing their bombs into the sleeping places of Fritz, the odd dazed soldier with bleeding ears crawling out only to have his hands tied as he is taken prisoner. The Canadians own this section of trench now and Elijah makes sure that no dugout has been left untouched, hurling his bombs into them so that his load for the trip back will be lightened. A look of animal victory spreads on the blackened faces of the
Canadians around him as they pull souvenirs from bodies and peer into darkened holes. Their artillery has slowed down on either side of them, though, and Elijah knows it will not be long before Fritz pours reinforcements into this place.
He is surprised when the scream of artillery begins to come, shells landing close to this section of trench. Just as a shell lands near enough to send one of the Canadians’ legless body flying up and over the parapet ten yards away from him, Elijah realizes that Fritz has caught on that this section of trench is no longer his and is directing his own artillery into it, seeking revenge. The raiding officer’s whistle shrills and they all scramble over the walls of the trenches, dragging their prisoners and souvenirs with them, scurrying now not like majestic beasts but like rats, shell-hole by shell-hole down the hill, back to their line, not stopping any more when the eerie green or red light of flares pops up over them but running, running, the
rat tat tat
of Hun machine guns behind them knocking some of the Canadians headlong toward their own line, Fritz not caring any more if the bullets find the Canadians or their prisoners. Elijah is over his own parapet and back in the safety of the listening post as others crawl over as well. He can see that most of them have made it back tonight.
When he returns to our dugout to tell me most of this night’s adventure, the possession in his kit bag almost pulsates, he thinks. I watch as he lies down on his blanket and lets the night slow down enough for him to sleep. Just before he drifts off completely, he is startled awake and mutters to me that in the rush and clamour of the raid he forgot to find himself a German sniper rifle.
When we are moved behind Arras for a few days, Elijah finally admits to me that he sees that the medicine has caused him to lose too much weight while at the same time he’s not been able to relieve his bowels in any satisfying way for a long, long time. I’m not sure why he tells me all this. Maybe he feels guilty. Maybe it’s because he
and I are two of the same in a place of strangers. Probably he sees that I am depressed and he gives me little bits of himself as an offering.
When he’s gone too long without the medicine, he tells me, he becomes fragile and headaches cause him so much pain that death seems a good alternative. When he does not take the morphine, he is afraid of the world, and that is not a good feeling. I tell him that he must stop using it, that his fear of being without it will leave him soon enough. I tell him that he can request a trip back to Blighty for a few weeks where he can recover.
But when the golden liquid is in his veins! Even at night the world is bathed in a soft light. He hears men talking and he understands what they are truly saying beneath their words. He can make himself float from his body at will and look down at the world below him—the world that man has created—and still see the beauty in it. He becomes the hunter at these times, the invincible hunter who can lie still for hours, for days, only moving to refuel his body with the medicine, using his osprey’s vision to spot the enemy.
KIMOTOWIN
Stealing
P
AST MIDDAY I AM HUNGRY
, and so I paddle Xavier and myself to shore. I make bannock with river water, wrap the dough about a stick and bake it by the fire, turning the stick every little bit when the dough begins to brown. Xavier still won’t eat anything. I grow a little frustrated with him, but keep it inside. When I look at him and see the pain cross his face I remind myself that he suffers in a way I can’t see. He will have to eat something if he is to live. This evening I will make a broth and force it down him if I must. For now, I will feed him another story.
I move closer to him, even though I can tell from his body that he wants to sit off alone. I take a long stick and poke it into the fire, stare out at the river moving by us, this river that carries us deeper into the bush. Again today I do not recognize much of this land. I try to push the thought away, the fear that we have entered a place we’ve never been before, but it continues to taunt me like a mean child throwing stones from the bush along the shoreline.
You are too young to know your grandmother, Nephew. She died long before you were born. Her illness came suddenly, and it consumed her. One month we were sitting on the bank of a river fishing together, the next she was a skeleton shivering in a blanket in her lodge. I tried all of the remedies and cures that I could think of, but nothing worked. The cruelty of living and dying can be astounding.
I buried her in the tradition of our family, placing her tightly wrapped body in the highest bough that I could find so that her
ahcahk
was free to travel up without hindrance to find her husband, my father. My mother had come from west of James Bay. She was born an Ojibwe, but had met my father on a trading expedition. The two tribes were not all that different, even shared much of the same language. But the Cree and Ojibwe did not always get along very well. My mother and father, in their own small way, tried to make that better.
It was summer, and I sat under my mother’s tree for days watching over her. I was wild as any animal by then, having left men and their churches a handful of summers earlier for the loneliness of the bush. Other women my age had children who would soon be ready to enter into adulthood. I had only myself. At that time, I could not imagine having my own children or going back to the people in that town.
I was left alone, and being alone, I found it easy to pity myself. The seasons came and went, sometimes so quickly that I lost track of my own age, sometimes so slowly that I felt I would go mad. My sister Rabbit, your mother, still lived, but the talk was that she was a drinker of
wemistikoshiw
rum and had abandoned her only son to be raised by the nuns in that residential school. The thought of my blood left in that place to fend for himself gave me no end of misery, but I had little choice in the matter.
The other
awawatuk
continued to ask favours of me sometimes, but besides that, my only conversations were with the sky and the forest animals. I dwelled on the Frenchman more than I wanted to, sometimes late at night believing I’d done wrong, but the loneliness I felt, even years later, of waking by myself every morning, served to remind me of what he’d done to me.
In the autumn after my mother’s death my recurring fits and their visions returned. They scared me. I was alone now, with no one to
watch me. The fits were violent and painful. I worried about choking on my tongue or hitting my head on a rock as I fell into the unwanted spasms. But they came, and more and more I would awake and find myself staring up at the sky, a cold sweat raising the goosebumps on my skin. From the dryness of my eyes, I guessed that they remained open while I was in that other world, but it was only fleeting images that I could usually bring back with me. The one thing I did know was that their return meant some change was coming. And at this point in my life, I had no reason to believe that the change would be good.
I continued on with my life best I could, following my traplines and hunting, collecting roots and herbs, always storing for the winter months. I moved with the game, my summer a little easier than winter, which was so frozen and still that certain days I was convinced I was the only living thing on this earth.
I would know a fit was coming by the change in light. The world would suddenly take on a sharper hue—the sky would go bluer, the water might turn a deeper black. And then the light would go soft, and my fingers and toes would tingle. The first pain was a lightning bolt through my temple, and it was always the one I dreaded most, the jolt of it dropping me to my knees while I was still conscious, an ice bullet through the head. Not until I entered this painful gate was I allowed to slip into unconsciousness and flashes of vision, faces I knew suddenly many years older, other faces I did not recognize. Sometimes I found myself in a circle of others around a council fire, other times I was alone. Once I came back from the other place with a vision of a metal wagon, moving of its own accord, black and shiny and noisy on a wide smooth path. Sometimes I saw the place where animals would be, other times I saw a great barren plain, the trees cut down and the water filthy with human waste. The visions were random, confusing, frightening or joyful. And when I returned, I had to scoop the fragments from the waters of my confusion and try to piece them into a story I could understand.
My loneliness combined with my fear in the year after my mother’s death so that a plan began to form in my mind. During one of my fits the face of a boy came to me. There was no doubting that he was my relation. His nose was mine, his eyes carried the same sharpness. His ears stuck out from his head. I realized I was seeing you, Nephew, that you needed me as much as I needed you. In the long, quiet hours of the bush, the thought of you kept me company.
From what I knew, you were only four or five winters. The nuns could not have damaged you too much already. You needed to be out of that place as much as I had needed it when my mother took me. It would be a relatively simple thing to sneak you from there. They would not concern themselves too much with one little boy. Children ran away from there all the time. And even if they decided to search, no
wemistikoshiw
lived who could find me.
That winter was especially long and cold, and in the nights that seemed to stretch on forever, I convinced myself of what I needed to do. Many problems presented themselves to solve, the biggest one being that I didn’t know what my own nephew looked like or even his name. Surely they would have given him one of their names, and I had to find it out. A greater problem still was whether I’d even be able to force myself to go back to that place again.
I struck out by canoe just after the blackflies died off. Now that mid-summer had arrived the rivers would allow me a silent and untraceable route of escape once I found you. Not only this, but I knew from my brief stay in the residential school that most of the children were allowed to return to their parents for a short while in this season, and I hoped this would make finding you much easier. If what I’d heard was true, my sister was in no condition to keep you, and you’d be lonely and likely willing to leave if I invited. And that is how I finally decided. I would not take you by force. I would ask my nephew if he wanted to come with me. If you said no, I would respect it. If you said yes, I would bring you with me to be raised in the old ways.
I travelled for three days, paddling from first to last light. As I had remembered, the smell of the town came to me long before I could see it. A copse of pine stood near the school, a place in which I could hide and watch. I had to rely on the vision of you I’d brought back from the other place. It felt fresh in my memory. I just needed to look for the boy with eyes like mine and ears that stuck out. How hard could it be?
I entered the town at night, fighting off the fear of coming face to face with the Frenchman again, even though I knew full well he was dead. It wasn’t his physical body that frightened me. Just as I remembered, the pines near the school offered protection, facing the blank wall full of windows, the top floor the place where all the children slept. I took steps to make sure I would not be discovered, carefully hiding my canoe and covering my tracks, building a shelter of pine boughs far away from the trail that ran through this place. A cooking fire was out of the question, and so I’d brought enough smoked fish and meat to last me a number of days. I settled in and waited, my body full of jittery anxiety for what I would find.
As I had expected, only a few children remained in the summer. They came outside to play at the same time every morning, as carefully watched over by one of the nuns as goslings by a mother goose. Six boys of similar age played with one another. I watched them from a distance. By the second day I’d made my guess which one was my blood.
In the afternoons, an old nun, the one I was sure went by the name Magdalene and who had taken such a dislike to me, went out in a canoe with the little boy, and while he paddled her up and down a stretch of the river, she fished from the front. He was a small boy, and her weight was great enough that the canoe did not lie level on the water, but he tried hard as he could to take her to the places she pointed at. It didn’t take long before he tired against the current and her weight, and when he rested she would turn around and smack
him hard on the head with her paddle. She was a horrible fisher, banging about in the canoe and demanding he paddle her to places where no fish would want to feed. But he was patient, and did not give up or complain. I had no doubt it was you.