We were only sixteen winters, had wandered as far from Auntie as we ever had before, far up the coast, near where the Ayashkimew,the raw flesh eaters, lived. I’d promised Auntie we’d return with enough caribou meat to feed a village. Now it was deep winter and we’d still found none. But tracks were everywhere, and so we pushed on.
On a bright morning that was so cold we were forced to keep moving, we crossed onto a plain surrounded by black spruce. At the far edge of the plain, we spotted a herd. We were downwind of them, but I knew if they sensed us and ran, we could never catch them. Elijah wanted to shoot at them, but I knew the distance was still too far.
“I have a better idea,” I said, remembering what you’d once told me, Auntie. “Conceal yourself here,” I told Elijah.
We sat and watched the herd from a place that was a natural funnel if I could force them this way. I dug through the snow until I reached dry, yellow grass and collected as much as I could. Using my knife, I struck my flint above the grass I’d collected until part of it glowed red embers and sent a thin trail of smoke into the frozen air. I picked up the smoking grass, breathing on it every little while to keep it alive.
“They will soon come,” I whispered. “Wait until they are close before you begin shooting.”
I crept along the way we’d just been, the smoking grass in my hand, and cut into the tree line. Careful as I could, I made my way along the edge of it back toward the herd. Wherever the trees opened up onto the plain, I stopped and placed some of the grass into the crook of a tree, blowing onto it until it smoked. I continued in this way for a long time until I made my way behind the herd. You’d told me, Auntie, that caribou were afraid of the smell of smoke and would move away from it.
When I’d reached the far side of the herd, I found a thicker branch and picked it up. Holding it above my head, I bent at the waist and walked out of the tree line, crouched and swaying, directly toward the nervous herd, bending the branch in a curve so that it looked like antlers. The animals swung their heads and looked at me, not sure what they saw. I continued walking toward them, cutting off their escape route to the north and east. The animals let me get so close that their musk tickled my nose.
And then they ran. I straightened and ran after them, watched as they approached the places I’d left the burning grass before they veered away and toward the spot where Elijah waited. I began to shout when I saw that they could not escape, my voice leaving my mouth in great puffs of air, the cold stinging my lungs. I whooped and ran, and didn’t stop even when Elijah’s gun began to bark out and the animals fell as they tried to pass him.
“We ran out of bullets that day,” I whisper to Elijah as we stare out at the Ypres Road. “How many did we kill? A dozen?”
“Yes,” Elijah says. “It was a good day. And the day of butchering that followed.”
FRITZ HAS A SIMILAR SNIPING SYSTEM to ours. He hides in his nest and moves frequently, uses the steel-plate method in his line too. Elijah and I now know the location of four plates. The one on the far left of their territory appears to be the most used. We doubt that the talented sniper is using any of those, though. The true snipers like to work alone or in pairs. They don’t like to work in the trenches, but outside of them. They’re more exposed then, but they are exposed to more targets too.
It’s an obsession now for Elijah to take out a sniper behind one of the plates, a message to Sean Patrick’s killer. While I scan for possible positions behind their lines, methodically Elijah searches for some pattern in how they are working the plates. So far the killer has been very careful, very random. He does not take any shots unless they will be sure. He doesn’t give away his position. But Elijah and I also feel the pressure increase every day that we don’t make a kill. Lieutenant Breech will call us back into the line with all the others where we will be forced to live like rats once again. Breech has already done this to Thompson, ordered him back in to train new virgins.
One afternoon when I think that Elijah is sleeping, he suddenly says calmly that he has figured out a pattern. I lie and listen, resting my eyes. “I see it at sunrise,” Elijah says, as if talking to more people than just me. “I hear a succession of shots on the mornings when there is no cloud and the sun rises over their line. Their chances are good of hitting a soldier’s head at stand-to. They use the light to spot us and know that all we can see of them is covered in shadow.”
I think about this for a while. “How will we be able to see their position to shoot at them, then?” I ask.
“We’ll make sure to train our rifles on two plates in a little while, then leave it be till morning.”
“But how will we know the precise time to fire?” I ask.
“The last two days they have fired exactly when the sun comes up behind them. We will lie facing them, and soon as you see the first light that shines bright enough to blind you, we will both fire.” Elijah breathes in deep, then releases his breath. “They have grown comfortable thinking that they cannot be seen at this time of morning. They know that we are at stand-to on our line and there are plenty of targets for them. They’ve taken to leaving the plates up long enough to take two shots. You will hear their first one, and then we will immediately answer it.”
We carefully train our rifles on two plates, the rifles anchored by sandbags so that they won’t move accidentally. Elijah goes back into his head then, and for the next hours I lie and listen to the evening sounds.
The night is relatively calm and the air is clear. Stars litter the sky above me. I fall into a light and troubled sleep, then jerk awake when I dream I’ve accidentally nudged my rifle out of position.
When dawn approaches, we lie facing it, and I breathe my deep breaths in preparation. The sky above us is the black-blue of early morning, and clear. The sun lets me know it’s coming by the slow brightening of the sky to purple. When the first ray shoots out and over me, I whisper, “Be ready,” in Cree to Elijah. My hands loosely grip the rifle so as not to move it even a fraction.
Sighting through the scope is useless. It reveals nothing. Seconds later the sun breaks over the other line. The thin crack of a Hun rifle rings out and Elijah answers it before its echo has died in my ears. The sudden concussion makes me jump a little, even though I am ready for it, the familiar whine rising inside my head. I fire as well, but am worried I waited too long. “Do you think you got yours?” I whisper to Elijah. He nods, and in the silence that falls back over us I know as surely as I know anything that Elijah has done it.
I wonder about myself, though.
NAATAMAASOWIN
Revenge
THE FREQUENCY OF GERMAN FIRE from behind their steel plates drops off almost completely in the next days, and this is proof enough to McCaan and Lieutenant Breech that Elijah and I are accomplishing what we need to. We come in for a little food and rest and the others ask if it is Sean Patrick’s killer we have gotten. We shake our heads and explain that he does not work from the trenches but is somewhere behind, where he has a better view of the Canadians. Elijah warns everyone to keep their heads down.
“Remember, chaps,” he says, “Xavier is sniping behind your line too now and might mistake one of you for bloody Fritz!” Everyone laughs and Elijah laughs and talks with them.
I do not laugh as loud.
Elijah’s reputation is growing, I know, and Elijah’s vanity being fed makes him content and happy. But the real job still lies ahead of us, and if Elijah can get the Hun whose reputation grows like a legend in this place, bigger than Elijah’s even, then Elijah’s reputation will be secured, and mine will be too, and we will be given a higher rank, and we will make more money and have more freedom. Thompson tells us all of this. While I lie still at night, though, I begin to wonder about this Hun sniper.
When it comes time for us to go back for a few days of rest behind the lines, I’m surprised that I don’t want to go. A short while earlier, the promise of rest in a safe place was the only thing left to keep me going, but now I’ve become as obsesse
d as Elijah. I’m tempted to ask permission to stay in the line and continue hunting the sniper, and tell Elijah as much.
“It will be good for us to take a few days’ rest,” Elijah says. “We will gain a new perspective on things. We’ll come back with steadier nerves and fresh eyes.”
We march the five miles on the Ypres Road with the others. Socializing now isn’t as easy. Sean Patrick, I realize, was a kind of bridge between me and Graves and Fat and the others. He was always the first to say hello or invite me to sit with them for a meal or to offer a cigarette. It isn’t my imagination that now when Elijah and I walk by a group of soldiers, the soldiers stare at us and wait until we are out of earshot before they begin talking again.
Still, I see that Elijah and Grey Eyes fall back into their old ways when they are once again together. They sit together and eat together and disappear for long stretches together when they know no officers will be about. I realize one night as I sit alone along a creek that runs by the farm, listening to the talk of the others by their campfires, that I am angry with Elijah. Elijah isn’t really even friends with this man who is directly responsible for Sean Patrick’s death. I know that Elijah spends time with Grey Eyes because he likes the pull of the medicine. He likes to test himself, to see how well he can fight trying it. Is there not enough stress for him here in this place? I am tempted to go and find McCaan and tell him what I know about Grey Eyes.
Me, I try to ignore all of the bad feelings that well up inside of me. Enough bad feelings around here for a thousand lifetimes. I enjoy this little bit of time off, and sleep and eat well and stay mostly to myself and don’t think about my work on the lines at all and maybe that is why I’m jolted out of the deepest sleep I’ve had in months with a knowledge as sure as anything I know. It’s so clear to me suddenly that I think nothing of immediately getting up from my blanket in a corner of the barn with a little bit of straw for a bed to search out Elijah.
Elijah and Grey Eyes have taken to staying in a little well-hidden tent that Elijah constructed out near the creek. It reminds me of the old tents that the elders build back in Moose Factory and into which they bring heated stones and pray and sweat and wait for visions or for knowledge. Elijah has built this one in the old way, with sturdy saplings that form the round structure that he covers with canvas, a small flap for a door. When inside the tent, the dark’s like what a womb must feel like, the air close and hot and the universe feeling endless even when you stretch up your hand and touch the roof.
I make my way to the creek and squat outside the tent, listening to hear if Elijah’s awake. I hear nothing and crawl inside, where the black is so complete that my eyes won’t adjust. I feel around, hoping Elijah’s the one I find first and not Grey Eyes. I know my friend well enough to be sure that he constructed this tent not so much to seek visions as to protect himself from the prying eyes of officers. It would be easy for him to claim that he is conducting mysterious Indian ceremonies in his tent. This would be enough to keep most of them away.
“Elijah, wake up,” I say, shaking the form in front of me. He sleeps hard tonight. “Wake up. It is important.” Elijah takes a long time to find consciousness.
“What is it?” he asks in Cree. “An officer?” His voice is disjointed in this darkness, hollow and childlike.
“No. I’ve made an important realization.”
“Can it not wait until tomorrow?” he says.
“It is about the German sniper,” I say.
Elijah’s blanket rustles. The little light from the moon outside is a welcome thing as we crawl out.
Elijah lies on the ground and stares up at the stars. His eyes glitter wetly in the moon’s light. “Tell me,” he says.
“Think of the bullet that killed Sean Patrick,” I say. He nods. “Its angle was not right.” Elijah looks puzzled. “Sean Patrick was not shot by someone level with him or even from above him like we assumed. The bullet entered his neck from below him.”
“Then why did you not say anything at the time?” he asks.
“It’s not a great angle,” I answer. “At the time, I just believed it had ricocheted on his spine and that was why the exit was higher than the entry. You saw it too.”
“There was too much blood to see anything.”
“There was a lot of blood,” I answer. “But it was obvious where the bullet opened up his neck. Just below his Adam’s apple. And then when we turned him over after he was dead it was obvious as well that the bullet had passed clean through, but near the base of his skull.”
“How do we know it wasn’t just a ricochet?”
“You know as well as I do that the Hun sniper uses copper bullets. The chances of one ricocheting on something softer than it is slight.”
We sit silent for a while. The air is almost chilly at this time of night out on the wet grass.
“That can only mean one thing, then,” Elijah says after a while. “He’s hiding somewhere where he is looking up at our trenches, not down at them like we assumed.”
“And the only place that he can do that from is no man’s land,” I answer for him.
We look at each other. Elijah no longer seems sleepy.
WE LET MCCAAN KNOW that we are on the verge of something important, and he gives us permission to go back out to where we keep our nests hidden. Three days pass and we continue to wait, searching no man’s land for any sign. I peer through the scope of my rifle at the magnified images, the craters whose bottoms are filled with water, the splinters of black trees, a blasted wagon, a bloated horse, the belly expanding with gas each day so that it has become grotesque in its size as it bakes in the sun. Old rifles are scattered about, old Hun helmets, the wool coats of soldiers disintegrating into the mud just as their bodies do below the coats. Newer corpses lie out there too. A number of times I’m startled to see a man sprawled out and grimacing at me with big teeth, his lips and gums pulling back, and for a second I think the man is alive and is aiming his rifle at me. But they are dead, all of them. Everything out there is dead.
When we are bored, we whisper back and forth to one another. We are well hidden. We never talk of home. It is too far away.
Today in one of our nests, I comment on the dead horse whose belly has grown impossibly bigger. It reminds me of other horses. In the big ship on the way across the ocean I watched over horses in the ship’s hold. I haven’t thought about those horses, haven’t thought about anything from the past in a long time. To focus only on what is around me now is enough—if the shell that screams overhead will fall close to me, if I have chosen a careful enough concealment, if any of the metal of my rifle glints in the sunlight, if I can find the sniper.
It is the long part of the afternoon. Elijah laughs. “Do you remember the bull moose that came back to life?” he asks.
I nod slightly, smiling. “You thought it was dead,” I whisper. “And as you straddled it to pull its head up by its antlers it stood up with you on its back.”
“My first and only horse ride,” Elijah answers.
We stare out at no man’s land. Elijah breaks our silence with his whisper. “Why did you care so much for those horses on the ship?” No answer comes to me.
After a time, he speaks when he sees that I won’t. “Did you know that I tried the medicine, the morphine, on that ship to England?” he asks.
I stare at him in disbelief.
“Grey Eyes is to blame for that,” he says, and I know he will tell me the story. Elijah, he can’t keep anything from me. He never has been able to. It is easy, hearing his voice, for me to be in Elijah’s stories so that I live them myself, and this is why, even before I hear the story of Grey Eyes and the medicine, I dislike the man more.
It was when we had set sail from Canada on the falling tide, and as soon as we cleared the breakwater, the sky dulled and hung low and the waves built up so that the rocking of the ship felt comfortable at first like a mother. But not an hour on the rolling swells of the ocean and Elijah said he was cold to the touch a
nd when he felt his forehead he was sweating as well. His stomach churned and its contents rose so that he stumbled best he could to the railing and expelled them into the black sea below. He retched until nothing was left and continued retching until his stomach hurt like it had been punched hard. He lay on his side on the metal deck and slipped into broken dreams of horses on fire on the river we’d travelled.
He remembers a hand shaking him. He turns and sees that the sky is dark now. The ship pitches horribly. The hand belongs to Henry Grey Eyes.
“You’re sick,” Grey Eyes says. “And you’re freezing out here.” Elijah stares up at him. “You need medicine.” Grey Eyes smiles. “Smoke one of my cigarettes with me. It will calm your stomach.”
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.