I nod to him. I don’t want to be around him right now.
“If you desired, we could go see the medic together. We could explain to him that you cannot hear properly any more. They can do tests. The medic will see that it’s the truth and they will send you home as a hero.”
He talks as if he is the Elijah I once knew. I feel drawn toward his concern, comforted in this place of loneliness. I struggle not to fall for it.
“I’m not crazy,” Elijah says. I continue to stare at the horses. “You must listen to me, X. This is war. This is not home. What’s mad is them putting us in trenches to begin with. The madness is to tell us to kill and to award those of us who do it well. I only wish to survive.”
“You’ve gone beyond that,” I say.
Elijah kicks at the ground. “Listen to me, X,” he says. “I should never have gotten in that aeroplane. Before that I believed nothing could hurt me over here. But I lost something up there is what it feels like. I need to get it back.” Elijah reaches his hand out to a horse. It shies away. “I can see that I went too far into a dangerous place for a while. But I see that.” He stops talking, then starts again. “Does that mean something?”
I’m not sure if he wants me to answer. I’m not sure of anything any more.
The sun is behind Elijah now, and his face is in shadow, light shining brightly about his head. “Do you know what I think?” I say softly. “I think that you did more than just kill that young soldier yesterday.” I look at Elijah as I say this to see his eyes, but he remains a shadow.
“Why do you say that?” he says. He speaks loudly so that I can hear him.
When I do not answer, he seems about to walk away, but then looks in my eyes, makes sure that I can see his lips, see what he is
saying. “I came to talk to you to offer you help. We have a great future after this war. We will return home as heroes. I will become a great chief. I won’t let you or anyone else take that away.” He turns and walks away before I can answer, hands in his pockets.
My stomach cramps again and makes me cry out. I lie on my side in the sand, staring out at the river and the late afternoon sun sparkling on it. Niska, what am I to do?
ONIIMOWI PINESHISH
Little Bird Dancer
I
DRAG WHAT I NEED
out of the bush. Willow branches the width of my fingers, hardwood for a hot fire, roots of secret plants, bark from a tamarack. I don’t see Nephew immediately, and so I go to collecting the stones that speak to me. None of them are very large, but all of them have a character of their own, call out to me as I pass them.
Niska, choose me. I will give off heat without cracking. I will spark in the darkness and tell you of your grandfathers. I am older than the others
. I make a pile of them and build a fire nearby, use the hardwood I have gathered so that it burns hot and bright.
Only then do I begin to wonder about Nephew. I look around, see his odd tracks in the sand and mud, the solid, single boot print, heavy on the heel, the two deep holes off on either side of it made by his crutches. His step is unsteady, and I can see clearly that he has fallen while trying to walk and dragged himself toward the river. I panic for a second, imagining him pulling himself into the river and drowning in the current, but then see that he has crawled into the canoe. I walk to him.
He lies in it, sweats and shakes without control. He crawled into the canoe for protection. I bend to him but he looks at me with eyes that don’t seem to recognize me. He is close to leaving me for good and all I want to do is hold him, but he weakly pushes me away. I let him lie in the canoe and I sit on a rock beside it, my fingers worrying
themselves. He looks like he is caught in a bad dream. He calls out English words I do not know, covers his face as if shielding it from danger. He dreams of his war, and this causes the fever inside him to burn.
I leave him and build up the fire again. Carefully, I place the rocks into the centre where they will heat. The coals glow white and red. Heating the rocks properly will still take hours. It is only late afternoon, and the sky will stay bright long into the evening.
I construct a willow frame carefully, weaving the thin branches into a suitable length, then digging the butts into the earth so that in the end I have built what looks like the skeleton of a small wigwam. In the centre I dig out a pit for the rocks, fill my bucket with river water and put it beside the pit. I take the canvas from the canoe and place it over the frame, pile more rocks around the edges so that no heat will escape and no light will come in. In the end the lodge is just big enough for Nephew and me to crawl into and sit comfortably.
I check the rocks heating in the coals of the fire, then I leave to search out some spruce boughs and to fill my medicine bag with twists of sweetgrass.
When Nephew is more conscious and is calm enough, I pick him up out of the canoe and lay him down on a blanket by the fire. His weight is that of a child. He can’t eat, and the tremors continue to shake his body.
The dusk of high summer approaches. I have thought hard for the last hours. I have tried to figure out what Nephew needs, what will help to staunch his wounds before it is too late. I know of roots and stalks for headache, for stomach sickness, for infection. I know to use the skunk’s glands to cure snowblindness. But what Nephew suffers from has been inflicted in a place I do not understand. What he has gone through I will never fully understand. For much of my life, during many of my fits, I have seen flashes of the killing and of the earth exploding in fountains of mud, but that is a small taste of the
reality, even though the images haunted me for days. A fever is eating him alive.
I remember when I was a child and came to my father scared or hurt. I remember what he would do to help me. He made stories for me. About me. About how he imagined me before I was ever even born. I have no medicine that will help Nephew, but in these memories I find something.
Nephew continues to shiver in his blanket by the fire. Sometimes he calls out names and words. His dreams are bad. Maybe he won’t last through the night. I cannot let him go without telling him his story. I lie down with him and gently place my arm over his thin frame. Our relationship has never been one of physical closeness, and it feels strange to mother him in this way. I put my mouth close to his ear so that he can hear me whisper. His skin burns. He doesn’t respond, but I don’t let that worry me. If I choose my words right, and speak from that place inside that tells no lies, he will hear.
Nephew, before I ever knew you, I had dreams of you. I dreamed that I used to take you out hunting before you could walk. I would bundle you tight in your
tikonoggan
and carry you on my back through the bush. You were very good. You watched everything. And when we came close to game, you knew to stay quiet. Even then in my dreams I knew you would one day become a great
hookimaw
.
He stirs a little, tries to push me away, but I hold onto him and keep whispering in his ear. His sweat begins to soak through my shirt too.
I dreamed that when you were old enough to walk, we would go out into the bush for days. We’d take only what we could carry in our
mewutikans
. In winter we would strap snowshoes to our mukluks and your body grew strong from this weight on your shoulders and legs. When I dreamed, I saw from the first time you pulled a bow or fired a rifle that you had something more than others, a calmness of breath, an eye that saw for great distances, steadiness.
He moans out loud and begins to shake. I cling tighter to him and hold back my tears. I am afraid of losing him. I don’t want to lose him.
Listen to me, Nephew, when you were no more than five winters I came and took you away from their school, from them. I didn’t have to live in visions any more. And this story that I tell you is the story of you.
I stop for a moment and listen to his breathing. It is panicked and shallow.
Your first winter with me we followed bull moose tracks through deep snow. We followed them for miles. You held me up with your short steps, even though I cut a good path through the powder in front of you. Slowly, I got further and further ahead until I disappeared from your sight. You were left alone for the first time in your life. Your sobs echoed in the frozen air. But you kept walking.
I cry as I tell him this, but I keep my voice firm and slow.
You crossed a long, open plain and my tracks led you to a place of thick undergrowth, so thick that you must have wondered how even my small body could make it through the tangled branches that reached down and grabbed at you like bony fingers. You kept walking through trees that grew so close they sucked the sun’s light into their black bodies. You had to strain to see my tracks below you. You crouched and listened for the sound of me ahead. But you only heard your own breathing. You had no choice but to push on.
I can feel his heartbeat through our thin frames.
The bush began to open up and you saw in the better light that you were not following my tracks at all. You were following the long ragged drag of the bull moose as he fought his way through the snow. A fear you had not known before must have bloomed low in your stomach then. It must have rushed up until it flooded your mouth like the taste of bad meat.
You squatted and held onto your knees so as not to fall down. When the dizziness left you, you stood up again. I’d warned you
before of panic’s danger. It comes quick like an accident does, out of nowhere. Even then you knew not to let it take you. You stood there for a while and you must have thought of the stories I had told you around the fire, of men deep in winter being eaten alive by their own fear, men who tried to run away from it and grew hot from their running so that they tore their clothing off to cool down and help them run faster, men who were found half naked in the dead of winter by hunters, their faces stiff in a grimace at the sight of their fear catching them.
You stood then and picked up the bow I’d made you. You thought then that I would find you. And if I did not, you would track this moose alone and shoot it full of arrows and clean it and bury it in the snow. Then you’d find your way home. You would go then and find me, Nephew, and you would lead me to sustenance.
He cries out a name I don’t recognize. McCaan. It sounds like the names of Hudson’s Bay Company men. I think of all the other young men who fought in that war alongside Nephew. There must be so many that have come home damaged like this. He continues to moan and shiver, calls out other names in his sleep, names I don’t know.
Gilberto. Sean Patrick. Grey Eyes. Graves. Breech
. So many names, but not that of his childhood friend.
After a time his eyes open. He stares vacantly at the fire, his body still quaking. I once again heat moosemeat over the flame. If he doesn’t eat soon, he will die. I chew a choice bit in my mouth to soften it, and when his eyes are closed, I slip the meat from my mouth into his. He tries to spit it out, but I hold his mouth closed until he swallows. I repeat this again, and then again. He keeps most of it down.
The sun is low now, and still warm. I fall into a light sleep but am awakened by his voice.
“Look at my leg, Auntie,” he whispers. There is anger in his tone. “Look at what is left of it.” He has pulled up the material of his pants
and a red nub pokes out above where his knee should be. The stub is inflamed and makes my stomach turn a little. His eyes are wild with the fever. He mustn’t waste his little energy.
“Hush,” I say. “You must rest.”
“What am I to do with this?” He pounds on the stump weakly.
“You will learn to walk on crutches almost as well as you walked on two legs,” I say to him. “When you put your mind to it.”
He swears and tries to spit into the fire but it dribbles down his chin. He is not fully in this world right now. A part of him has died already and tugs at what is left to follow.
Not knowing what else I can do, I pick up the story again.
When you found that you were following the tracks of a bull moose and not the snowshoes of your Auntie, you made up your mind not to be afraid. This was a brave thing for a boy who’d only seen six winters. But as you followed the tracks you saw that they cut back into the deep bush, and when the branches scraped at your face once more, you could feel the bravery slowly draining from you.
But you kept going because there was no other choice. A half day of following the tracks brought you to the edge of a lake. The snow was deep. You followed the moose’s belly drag onto the lake. Halfway across, you stopped to catch your breath, and there the moose was, by the other shore. The sun shone on its massive antlers. You knew from what I had told you that we were now in the month of the coldest moon and this meant that soon the moose would drop the antlers from his head to travel through the dense bush and deep snow easier. New antlers would sprout and begin growing, so fast that by summer they would be massive again, to be used against other bull moose when it was time to mate.
Remember how the wind was in your favour and the moose did not know of your presence? I’d also told you that the animal’s only real defence was his sense of smell.
Mooso
is as nearsighted as an old
grandfather. Your fear all but disappeared as you stood as still as you could and thought of ways to sneak up closer.
When you looked down at your arrows, they seemed tiny against the bull’s mass. You figured, though, that if you walked very quietly, the moose wouldn’t notice you. He was too busy eating. Do you remember slowly pulling the mitten off your hand with your teeth? How you reached to your quiver of arrows at your side and pulled out your straightest and sharpest? It must have felt like forever and already your hand was aching from the cold, but you managed to nock the arrow without being heard.
Nephew cries out, but calms down once more. I continue whispering in his ear.
Your first steps in your awkward snowshoes were deliberate and quiet. It was then that you thought to yourself, He cannot escape me. And suddenly, as if you had shouted this thought out loud, the moose jerked his head and looked right at you. He blew a white fog of breath from his nostrils as if a fire burned inside him. He shook his antlered head in disgust, then turned and walked into the underbrush, snapping branches as he went.