Two days later I watched while the children played. They kicked a hide ball back and forth to one another, and I moved close to the edge of the trees. You were one of the children and you were closest to me, and I waited patiently until the ball was over-kicked and you were the one to pursue it. When you were within earshot, I made the sound of a grouse, just loud enough that you could hear. Your ears perked as I knew they would. After kicking the ball back to the others, you crept into the trees. I made the sound of the grouse again, and you came closer.
“Nephew,” I whispered. You stopped short, tensed to run. “Do not be afraid. You are the son of the one they call Anne. ” I spoke in Cree, for my English was not good enough. But you understood. You nodded. “I am Niska. I am your Auntie. ” You followed my voice, and I watched as you saw me for the first time. Your eyes widened. I realized then what I must look like, my hair long and black and wild, my body covered in hides.
“What do you want of me, Auntie?” you asked. You spoke Cree with a
wemistikoshiw
accent. You were bold.
“I came to ask if you would prefer leaving here and going into the forest to live with me. ”
You did not hesitate. “Yes, Auntie. ”
I smiled, and as I did I realized it was my first smile in many months. My eyes watered.
“Meet me here tomorrow. ” You smiled too, then turned back and joined the others, chasing the ball.
When you came the next day, I explained that we’d leave in the afternoon, that I would paddle up to the canoe while you fished with the nun.
“But why can’t we leave now, Auntie?” you asked.
“There is something I have waited many summers to do,” I said. “And I would be honoured that you would be a part of it along with me. ”
Later that day I waited in my own canoe underneath a thick overhang of willow. As I knew would happen, you appeared on the river, Nephew, paddling the fat nun Magdalene. When you were across the river from me, I called out the sound of the whiskeyjack. You turned toward it. There was no question whose blood you were.
I listened as the nun shouted out directions. You steered the canoe closer to me. I waited, and, not wanting to miss the moment when she was no more than two arms’ length away from me, I let out a great wail, the wail of years of hurting, so that the old nun stood, then stumbled and rolled out of the boat and into the water. I slipped out of the willows in my canoe, and in the English I remembered said to her, “
You
paddle home. ” I took my paddle and clipped her sharply on the head for emphasis. She stared up at me from the water, terrified, her black robe billowing around her, her thin grey hair plastered to her forehead. I motioned for you, and you jumped in my canoe. Do you remember, Nephew? We left that place slow and smiling.
The months that followed were the happiest in my life. We spent our days wandering and trapping and hunting in the bush. Amazingly, you had very little knowledge of any of it, and so I taught you everything I could. You learned quickly and naturally, and your ability to walk invisibly and to shoot was obvious.
One afternoon in late autumn, when the frost in the morning was heavy on the ground and the last of the geese were flying south high on the currents of air, the familiar tingling in my toes and fingers came to me. We followed a river that promised moose, and I wanted to warn you of what was to come, but was too late. The piercing pain shot through my temple and I collapsed to the ground. As I drifted off to the other world I could hear you calling out to me and crying.
I do not know how long I was gone, but as I gradually returned from that place, you remained hovering over me with a tear-stained face.
“Were you dead, Auntie?” you asked me. I smiled and shook my head. “Your eyes were open, but they did not see. You said words I did not understand. ”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “When you are old enough I will explain. ”
That winter and the following summer and the winter and summer after that were plentiful and very happy. You adjusted to the ways of the bush better than I had hoped and became a talented hunter and reader of signs. I taught you all I knew about the bush, the best way to snare rabbits and how to use their fur for protection against the cold brutality of winter, how to weave and walk in snowshoes through the deep snow, how to approach a moose downwind and even how to snare one, how to make your own clothing and moccasins, what plants and herbs were edible and which had healing properties.
But as always happens, the good times bled into harder times and our third winter together proved long and difficult and very cold. Some days were so difficult for us that you cried with hunger and I was reminded of my own childhood, of that winter long ago when my father still lived. Once or twice late at night as you slept fitfully by the fire, I even found myself questioning if I had made the right decision in taking you from that school. At least there you had a full stomach and warm bed. My fits began to come back to me more often, and they were something you could not understand, but at least became used to, for you realized I always came back from that other place. What I didn’t tell you, Nephew, was that I brought back with me the knowledge that soon a visitor would come to us, a visitor with a request I could not ignore.
ONATOPANIWIW
Fighter
T
HE STORY AUNTIE TELLS
me brings a smile to my lips. I remember that nun who liked to switch me. I can still see the look on her face when Auntie scared her into the water and struck her with the paddle. I smile at Auntie and this makes her eyes bright. Niska is a good woman. She is a good and crazy woman.
The sun is warm on the river, and I no longer feel guilty that I do not help paddle. She has the current and we are in no rush. I lie back and run my hand over the rough wool of my pants, feel the nub of my leg through it. The skin covering it is still a burnt red and puckered and so ugly that I can’t look at it. When I first realized I’d lost my leg, I stared at the wound for days, watched as blood seeped through the white bandage, life leaking out of me in a trickle. Maybe it was then that I decided to die. I know that was when I discovered why Elijah loved the morphine, and the nurses were generous with it.
I struggle to stay awake for a while, the canoe rocking me on a fast part of the river so that I’m reminded of the trains Elijah and I rode to join the army, the trains moving further and further south until we came to that frightening place called Toronto. I remember how we lined up in rows of soldiers in new uniforms, how we ate and marched together. The barracks were just like the ones in the school of my childhood. We children had lined up just like soldiers to be
inspected every morning and evening. Elijah and I were always together in my short time at the school. He protected me and I protected him.
We schemed after our switching in front of the other children. We lay in our beds beside one another, whispering late into the night, going silent when we heard the nun making her rounds with her candle.
“We will run away from this place,” I would say to Elijah in our tongue. “We will take a bit of food from the pantry each day, just enough that it won’t be noticed. We will find a place to store it, and when we have enough, we will leave late at night and be so deep in the bush by morning that no one will ever be able to find us.” This was before I knew you existed, Auntie.
“We will need more than just food,” Elijah would whisper back. “We will need an axe and some matches. We will need extra clothes and shoes for summer and boots for winter.”
I was surprised Elijah needed so much. “Where will we keep it all?” I asked. “The nuns can smell too good. They will find it. They find everything.”
“We will hide what we take near the river, and we will steal the canoe that always sits by it,” Elijah answered matter-of-factly.
“But the animals will eat our food,” I said, and this kept Elijah quiet for a long time.
A rumour floated from ear to ear amongst the children that two boys had once run away from here and were never found. The other rumour was that the next year, little bones, too small to be an adult’s, were found in the barn by the school.
“We will hide only the things that can’t be eaten by the river, and we will hide the food somewhere here in the school,” Elijah said finally.
I doubted this plan would work. The nuns found everything we tried to hide. But I said nothing. I wanted the plan to come to life.
“One of the nuns keeps a rifle,” Elijah said as I was falling asleep. “She keeps a good rifle and lots of bullets. I have seen it in her room.”
This information made me open my eyes. “Really?” I asked. He nodded. That settled it. I was kept awake wondering if Elijah had really been in her sleeping place. We were all strictly forbidden to go anywhere near it. Elijah was not good enough at sneaking that he wouldn’t be caught trying to get in. It wasn’t until a long time later that I found out he’d really been in her room. And though Elijah and I were forever planning our running away, it remained just whispers in the dark before sleep.
Niska hums a song to herself as she paddles. The sun on my face makes me sleepy, and the tide of memory pulls at me again, this time taking me to France. I struggle against the pull. I do not want to go there right now. Instead, I try to figure out what day today is in the English way of keeping time. It is high summer, but what day, what month? I slip into a light sleep, remembering that in the way that they keep time, it has been a year now that Elijah and I have been here. I am a different man. I am thinner than when I left Canada, and harder in so many ways.
The late winter and early spring brings cold rain that turns to snow but does not stay. The engineers constantly work, and Elijah has explained to me that I must decide to be either a carrier of bags full of wet mud or a hunter. All winter I have suffered this miserable thing called depression. To make it all worse, I cannot forget that girl, Lisette. For weeks after I left her I was a mud carrier. My mind could not focus in the field, and that is dangerous when what you hunt hunts you as well. But now I am sick of mud. The idea has grown in my head all winter, so that now I cannot shake it. If I can see her again, my depression will go away. I think of ways to accomplish this, to see her again. But she lives far away from Vimy Ridge. Lisette was my first woman. When I see her again, I want to be able to tell her stories of adventure. And that is why I am again Elijah’s spotter in the field.
We’ve found what promises to be a good nest in a pile of brick just behind the front trench. In the event of trouble, a communication trench lies just to our right and leads to the support trenches. When the sun is out, for most of the day we stay still and choose potential targets, the sun in our eyes so that we must be careful not to let it glint on our field glasses. But the sun is rarely a problem. The wind blows from the west constantly, carrying with it heavy, low clouds that spit upon us. Elijah is friends with the officers who have authority to call artillery in to specific areas, and he uses this friendship, asks them to blow holes in the Hun parapets. The odd Fritz wanders by and Elijah has made a game of keeping a running tally of the hits and misses we each make.
“We’ll use your Mauser as the prize,” he says. “After two weeks we tally our scores and the winner takes the prize.”
I just smile at his proposition. This is a fine rifle, one that I will take home and hunt many moose with.
I ask Elijah where I can find rounds for the Fritz rifle. Elijah’d promised me more a while ago, and only a handful is left now. I think he is holding out. Elijah covets this gun, but I am responsible for taking down the Hun sniper who loved the dead. The night of the day I killed my first human was the first time I felt like an ancestor, an
awawatuk
raider and warrior. I prayed to
Gitchi Manitou
for many hours on that day and the following day, thanking him that it was I who still breathed and not my enemy. Since that time I am able to shoot at other men and understand that what I do is for survival, as long as I pray to
Gitchi Manitou
. He understands. My enemy might not understand this when I send him on the three-day road, but maybe he will on the day that I finally meet him again.
From our position we watch the hill that Fritz has dug into and from which Fritz watches the Canadians. Our engineers work at night, digging like moles into the ground, and Elijah and I debate whether they are digging another tunnel under the German line to
fill it with explosives or whether the digging is for another reason. I think that what they are doing will surprise everyone, but Elijah says that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We do agree that something big is coming, though. When the ground thaws, I imagine. More and more troops huddle in the cold behind the lines when Elijah and I are sent back to rest. I see, too, that the supply dumps grow in size and horses pull up the big guns while the earth is still frozen enough to keep them from sinking.
On a night that we have come up from the support trench to take our position at the front again, an idea comes to me that I cannot shake from my head. Through my fine German scope I see that a group of three dead Fritz are not too far away, strung on the wire. A listening post juts out within an easy shot from where they are tangled up and turning black, and I think that they must have bullets for a Mauser with them. I consider mentioning this growing idea to Elijah in the hopes that he will join me in the adventure, but then decide I want to do this alone. It’s dangerous, I know, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I can almost hear Elijah saying this in his funny-sounding
wemistikoshiw
tongue. I fear being caught by my own and the trouble that will come from it as much as being caught by Fritz.
On the night that I choose to do my raid, everything feels wrong. A lot of troop movement bustles through my part of the line. Fritz has picked up his shelling and focused it on the Canadian wire, and I am not left alone long enough to blacken my face with burnt cork and sneak over the top without being noticed. When the middle of the night has come and passed and I still sit in my dugout, frozen by indecision and trying to find a good time to make my move, I finally and bitterly tell myself to call it off. I lie back on my blanket, the dark of the night sinking into me. Elijah would have just gone, I tell myself. Elijah would not have worried about anyone else or anything else but focusing on those dead Fritz and what was in their pockets and he would not have let any excuses, any fear, stop him. He would
have just gone. I do not sleep all night, this defeat that I’ve suffered biting at me like scurrying, passing rats.