We turn and go back the way we’ve come. In another crater Thompson explains to us in a hushed whisper that he doesn’t want to go farther down the line tonight. Our group is close to the point where the new companies are dug in, and the sentries will be nervous and inexperienced enough to mistake us for Germans and shoot at us.
When we are within yards of where we first emerged, I feel relieved. The others slip back down into the safety of the trench and I am standing, about to follow Elijah down the ladder, when a flare pops up and hovers right over me. I’m frozen there in full view and turn my head and get my first look at the German line. It is much closer than I had assumed and I realize how exposed I am now that the flare is dropping right above me, illuminating the ground like it is morning.
But still I do not move. I stare at the enemy for the first time. No faces, just a line of mounds behind barbed wire. I hear the bullet whip past my temple before I even hear the
crack
of a rifle, and all around me the ground sends up splats of mud and dirt and I feel an impact on my hand and it goes numb as other bullets whiz by very close. I dive like an otter toward the trench and before I know it I’m sailing down the wall and land hard on my side on the duckboards at the others’ feet, the wind knocked out of me.
“You’d better lose that habit quick, Private,” Thompson says, staring down at me, then walking away casually as I struggle to find a breath.
McCaan bends down and sits me up. My chest relaxes a little and I gulp some air. I clutch my hand to my chest. McCaan takes my
numb hand into his own and looks at it for a moment. “No Blighty for you on your first night out,” he says. “You’re just hit by a clump of mud knocked up from a bullet. It’ll be sore for a while is all. Teach you a good lesson.”
Back in our section of trench I lie in my little cave. My mind races with what’s just happened, the sneaking about in such a dangerous place, being shot at for the first time. It is real. All of this is suddenly very real. The other side wants to kill me, and I’ve never even seen their faces.
I won’t see it. It will just appear. The bullet so close to me tonight could have been a little more to one side. It is thrilling and horrifying at the same time. My hand begins to ache. I listen to Elijah carry on in English and laugh with Sean Patrick and Gilberto and Grey Eyes and Graves. Already Elijah is telling of his exploits. I hear him making this story bigger, more dangerous, though he wasn’t even the one shot at.
I watch the flashes of an artillery barrage far down the line. The night sky is on fire.
NOOHTAAWIY
My Father
X
AVIER TWITCHES AND MOANS
in his sleep. I arranged it so that he lies back in the canoe, his head on his pack. I found him this morning on the beach, shivering and half conscious. What happened over there has wrecked him. He thinks I don’t see him putting those needles in his arm. They are a part of what’s killing him. But something far worse is consuming Xavier from the inside. It’s this that I must figure out how to remove. I wish it were simply a matter of finding the right root in the bush. This is a sickness I’ve not had to face before. I must figure out the right cure or I will lose him, and he’s the last of my family.
The river water is black this early in the morning before the sun has a chance to warm it and the light to turn it the colour of tea. My father used to tease my mother and younger sister and me, telling us that we were the colour of the river water in high summer but that in winter we turned as pale as the Hudson Bay traders and he was afraid he’d one day lose us in the snow. My sister—your mother, Xavier—we called her Rabbit. We’d look at my mother’s brown face as her eyes narrowed in laughter and then look to my father smiling back. He was the last great talker in our clan. He told stories softly so that you had to lean close to him to hear, so close you could smell the smoke in the hide ribbon my mother weaved into his hair, the scent of his neck like the wind coming off the Great Salt Bay. I used
to imagine that he weaved his stories all summer, his words forming invisible nets that he cast over us on the long winter nights, capturing us and pulling us in closer together so that we collected each other’s warmth. And sometimes his stories were all that we had to keep us alive.
I steer the canoe into the faster current and let us drift with it, using my paddle only as a rudder. The mist is disappearing now and I can see a long way down the bank, can keep an eye sharp for the movement of animals along the shore. Nephew cries out but then goes silent again. The sound of it, the animal fear at the very bottom of that cry, makes me think something I haven’t thought about in a long time. It is the story of my childhood. Now I tell it to you, Xavier, to keep you alive.
The snows were settled in so deeply that winter had become a part of us. This was long before you, Xavier, when I was still a child. Thirty Anishnabe lived on the traplines that season, half of us children. All the past winters we’d survived in much smaller numbers. This time we had no choice. Three families’ hunters had been taken away the autumn before, two by the North-West Mounted Police, one by Hudson’s Bay Company rum.
I was a young girl with waking dreams of all the trouble that was to come into my life, sharp pains like ice arrows through my temples that dropped me to my back and caused me to convulse. Except for Rabbit, the other children avoided me. Damaged is what I was to them, but they wouldn’t say this to my face. I was lean and bony with knotted black hair that I refused to let my mother comb. If they thought I was crazy, I let them. Laughed at them.
Autumn had been promising, many geese and ducks shot, four beaver families snared, and many grouse and sturgeon. But no moose, and the old women among us immediately began their chatter that no moose early in winter meant starvation later. Me, I think it was their idle complaints, their greedy talk as they chewed
their hides and drank their tea, that put a curse on us. And in the harsh North Country near what the
wemistikoshiw
call Hudson Bay, shaking a curse once it settles upon you is like trying to shake a fat bloodsucker from your hand.
Early winter, the time of the blowing moon, sat upon us. Our hunters came back wide-eyed and frozen, reporting to my father the absence of animals, even of tracks. They worried by my family’s fire. I know all this because I watched them from the corner of our
askihkan,
hidden under my father’s moose robe, quiet and observant like a hungry lynx.
By the end of that month, all of us scrounged for food. The women peeled tamarack bark for tea, dug through the deep snow in hopes of finding a few dried fiddleheads. The men continued to go out on the traplines and to hunt, returning silent, their blank stares scaring us children.
I was nearing the time of my strawberry ceremony, when the women closest to me would keep me in our
askihkan
all day, talking to me, praying, telling me stories, preparing me for my first blood of womanhood. Until the spring came, I was allowed to wander. But I wanted nothing of that. I wanted to stay close to my father, to watch over him.
When talk began that soon we would be forced to boil our moccasins, a group of hunters returned with a small black bear slung on a pole between them. Some of the old ones among us were bear clan and muttered bitterly. Who would dare disturb a brother’s winter sleep? They brought the bear directly to my father. I hid in my usual place and watched as he spoke with them about where they’d come across the den, how they had recognized it in the deep snow.
Marius, the oldest hunter, spoke first. “We followed its tracks.” My father looked puzzled, but he remained silent. Marius continued. “At first I thought I was mistaken, but there they were for all of us to see. We followed them.” My father and the four hunters sat silent for
a long time, staring at the crackling fire. “The tracks ended near a cliff by the river,” Marius said after a while.
My father waited.
“They just stopped,” one of the younger hunters blurted. “We walked with them, and in the middle of an open field they just stopped.”The others stared at him.
“We’d been led to a den,” Marius went on, as if the young one hadn’t spoken at all. “We could see its indent on the side of the cliff. But the tracks stopped short of it at least the length of a tall man. Clearly the den had not been disturbed since autumn. We dug and we roused the bear and took it quickly. We wouldn’t have disturbed it, but we were hungry.” My father nodded and again they all stared at the fire.
I looked over at the bear hanging from the pole, tied by its hind paws so that its nose pointed to the ground and its tongue lolled out. Normally they would have skinned and quartered the animal where they took it, but this time was different. The bear was thawing now near the fire. I smelled the musky smell of piss. I could see from where I lay that it was only a little taller than me.
The young hunter spoke again. “All of this is not good!” His name was Micah. He had a pretty wife who’d had her first child the summer before. I thought he was handsome, and I blushed whenever he was around.
“Do we continue to starve or do we eat the animal that has been delivered to us?” my father asked. “If no other game is found in the next day, the choice will be apparent.”
I listened to this as the wind threw itself against our
askihkan
. An early storm wind, young and strong. Even I knew that. There would be no hunting for the next day at least.
The following afternoon my mother and father prepared the bear for us. Normally we did our butchering outside, but the bear was our brother, and so he was invited in. Nothing was rushed. Nothing was
to be wasted for fear of angering him. The knife used couldn’t touch anything else. Any of the hair that the bear shed was carefully collected from the floor and clothing, and burned in the fire, whispered prayers drifting up with the stinking smoke. My parents carefully laid the animal on his back on freshly cut spruce boughs, talking to him, whispering prayers for what seemed like hours. They rocked back and forth on their haunches, my father sprinkling bits of powder into the flames that brought into the room a sweet smell I recognized as cedar. I was alarmed when at one point my father began to cry. I’d never seen this before and was frightened, but I remained beneath his heavy moose robe.
When the prayers were finally done, the bear was pulled up on the pole by his hind paws once again and a large cooking pot placed below him. My father took his knife and ran it along the bear’s stomach. With a ripping sound the
askihkan
filled with the powerful smell of insides. The guts filled the pot. Then he and my mother cut along the inside of the bear’s legs and gently peeled the fur from his body, cutting carefully where they had to separate flesh from fur, until the animal hung there naked. He looked like a small, thin man dangling from his feet, blood dripping from his head. For the first time I realized why we were told the bear was our brother.
For many nights after, I was jolted from sleep by dreams of this bear-man waking from his death slumber, bending up to untie his feet and then jumping onto the floor, eyes bulging from his fleshy skull, pacing on two legs between the bodies of my sleeping family, sinew of white muscle glistening in the moonlight as he searched for his fur.
With the skinning and cleaning done, the hunters who’d killed him were invited in to prepare the meat for roasting. He was a winter bear, grown thin in his sleep, and although young, was tough already. But we were hungry, and all thirty of us crowded in and ate until every part of the animal was gone—his meat, brain, heart, kidneys,
liver; his bones cracked open for their marrow and carefully collected to be boiled down later. We ate until our stomachs grew taut as drums, until beads of sweat dotted our foreheads and our cheeks flushed red. My father warned all of us that not a scrap should be wasted. Even the smallest piece of gristle that no one wanted was collected in a bowl and added to the bones or burned in the fire over prayers. We were always careful not to waste for fear of insulting an animal, but this time stood out to me. I did not understand my father’s concern, his eyes following everything, anxious. Later I would come to understand.
The young hunter Micah took his new baby girl from his wife’s lap, then chose a bit of flesh and put it in the baby’s mouth. “Your first taste of meat,” he said to the child, who hesitantly, then hungrily began to chew. We all smiled at the expression on her face, but then she turned red and began to gasp. Micah shook her upside down to try and dislodge the meat. Like lightning my mother grabbed the child, sticking a finger in her throat so that she gagged and threw the meat up. I saw the meat drop to the floor. I glanced at Rabbit, but she did not pick it up and place it in her bowl. No one else seemed to have noticed.
We didn’t taste fresh game again for a very long time. It got so that I would remember the tough bits of gristle that I had not wanted at the feast and my stomach would grumble moodily.
The real cold settled in with the moon of the exploding trees. This was the time of the year that we depended on the hare to help us live. Its hides were sewn together and worn fur-side-in from our feet to our heads. Its meat was tender. We ate the stomachs that were filled with bitter greens to stave off the coughing disease and the yellow disease. But like everything else this particular winter, even the hares began to abandon us. The hunters continued to return with very little or nothing at all. Marten partially eaten by wolves, the odd grouse, a skinny and starved beaver. Some of the men began to
complain about what we already knew, that there were too many of us for this part of the bush to sustain. They were going to head off with their families in hopes of surviving. In the end only the head-strong young Micah and his wife and baby walked into the bush alone.
The next day broke bright and cold as any I’d ever felt. The children who had energy played a game where they let spit drool from their mouths and measured how fast it froze once it hit the air. Micah pulled a toboggan with their few possessions, his wife with her child slung in her
tikonoggan
walking behind in the track that he cut. Although his wife did not speak a goodbye or look back to us, we all knew that she did not want to go, that it was Micah alone who had made the decision.