Nature, War, and Survival Theme Analysis

Elijah swings again, and again the marten squeals. My stomach feels sick. I pick up a heavier piece of wood, step up, and give it a sharp blow to its head. The hide noose snaps and the marten drops to the ground. It doesn’t move. I club its head once.

Elijah stares at me.

“We had to do it,” I say.

Where is he? We spent the whole war together only to lose each other in the last days. A shell landed too close to me. It threw me into the air so that suddenly I was a bird. When I came down I no longer had my left leg. I've always known men aren't meant to fly

I'd much rather be outside on the cool grass, me, but the officers won't allow it. We've been over here in this place that some call Flanders and others call Belgium for three weeks now. I felt stupid and small when Elijah had to explain that Belgium is a country, like Canada, and Flanders is just one small part of it, like Mushkegowuk. I'm still uncomfortable with the language of the wemistikoshiw. It is spoken through the nose and hurts my mouth to try and mimic the silly sound of it. I opt to stay quiet most of the time, listening carefully to decipher the words, always listening for the joke or insult made against me. These others think that I'm something less than them, but just give me the chance to show them what I'm made of when it is time to kill.

McCaan whispers out to all of us to regain our wits, that this is our first true test as soldiers and that for all we know we may be in enemy territory and that from this moment on our lives hang in the balance. "You are acting like rabbits," he says. "It is time to act like wolves,” and these are the perfect words. I can almost hear the backs of the men around me stiffen and the hairs on their necks bristle and it is exactly this, to be the hunter and not the hunted, that will keep me alive. This law is the same law as in the bush. Turn fear and panic into the sharp blade of survival.

Smithy shakes his head and looks away. He is small and skinny. He's going bald. He looks like a Hudson's Bay Company man I know back in Moose Factory who teaches Sunday school to the children who live on the reserve and not in the bush, the homeguard children. "That ain't true atall," Smithy mumbles. "There's another Indian feller goes by the name Peggy. Ojibwe, I think." He looks over at me. ''He's got close to a hundred kills but no officer wants to give him credit since he likes working alone." Smithy suddenly stops talking and looks embarrassed that he's said so much. "Peggy's salt of the earth," he adds as an afterthought. "Every Canadian enlisted man knows he ain't no liar."

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.

The world is a different place in this new century, Nephew. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. In my early visions, numbers of men, higher than any of us could count, were cut down. They lived in the mud like rats and lived only to think of new ways to kill one another. No one is safe in such times, not even the Cree of Mushkegowuk. War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.

The next morning after stand-to, Thompson approaches Elijah and me. He talks to both of us, but his words are for Elijah. "What do you think of the last days, Whiskeyjack?" he asks, lighting a cigarette, exhaling and looking at the sky.

I can see that Elijah knows exactly what Thompson's asking. Thompson is asking if Elijah likes killing. Elijah considers it for a moment. "It's in my blood," he finally says.

Thompson smiles, then walks off. He didn't ask me the same question. Does he sense something? How am I different? A strange sensation, one I do not recognize, surges up my spine.

The awawatuk accepted that I was the natural extension of my father, the new limb through which my family's power travelled. By the time I was living my seventeenth winter, men would come to me not for what men usually seek women out for, but to ask questions and advice. Most often, they wanted to know where to find game, and so I divined for them, placing the shoulder blade of the animal on coals and dripping water onto it as I had watched my father do. The rare hunter came to me wanting to understand the symbol of a dream and sometimes to learn his future. If I had not experienced a fit in some time, I constructed a shaking tent and crawled into it, summoned the spirits of the forest animals to come inside and join me, so many of them sometimes that the walls of my tent puffed out and drew in with their breath, becoming a living thing all its own. Most often, though, it was the spirit of the lynx that came to me first and stayed through the night, showing through its sharp eyes the secrets of the forest.

"Whiskeyjacks should fly better," he says.

Elijah looks at him. "How do you know my name?"

"I don't," the man says. "I was dreaming. There was a flock of whiskeyjacks." He looks confused. "They were pecking at something dead."

Elijah stands and walks back to me.

"What did the old man say to you?" I ask.

"He knew my name. Claims he was dreaming of whiskeyjacks."

"It's a sign,” I say.

"Everything's a sign to you." Elijah looks out the window. "Hey, there’s a sign," he says, pointing outside. "It says Abitibi River. But you wouldn't know that, considering you're a heathen."

I lie deep in the trench when the day is calm and think about how the world of the soldier consists of staring up at the sky, crawling upon the earth at night and living beneath it during the day. In the dark of night I think that my life has been divided into three for me by these wemistikoshiw. There was my life before them and their army, there is my life in their army, and, if I live, there will be my life after I have left it and returned home. They must have some magic in their number of three. I know that you, Niska, taught me that we will all someday walk the three-day road, and now I'm left wondering what connection there might be between their world and mine. I need to find out if we share something, some magic. Maybe it will help me get through all this.

I made Xavier smile with my story of smacking the nun with my paddle, and this gives me hope. Steering the canoe slow through the afternoon I watch him drift into sleep. It is a restless time for him, and his face looks like a scared child's when he cries out. To try and ease him a little, I start talking again. The story is not a happy one, but something in me has to tell it. There is truth in this story that Xavier needs to hear, and maybe it is best that he hears it in sleep so that the medicine in the tale can slip into him unnoticed.

I remember when he began to explore the places that aren't safe to explore. I remember him learning to love killing rather than simply killing to survive. Even when he went so far into that other place that I worried for him constantly, he still loved to tell me stories. He never lost his ability to talk. I think it was this ability that fooled the others around us into believing he hadn't gone mad. But I knew.

Elijah kicks at the ground. "Listen to me, X," he says. "l 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?"

"Show us how the grouse danced," Old Francis said, and drunk from the attention, you stood, and made everyone else stand around the fire too. You imitated the big grouse, and everyone lifted their arms and moved around the circle. Do you remember? You called out and we moved around the circle, and then you raised your arms and called out again and we all touched our fingertips above our heads and moved the other way, you rustling your arms like feathered wings and everyone laughing. And that is when I said, "From now on we call you Little Bird Dancer," and everyone laughed and agreed it was a good name for you.

Tonight I do not worry about making camp. I just pull our blankets from the canoe and we curl up in them and watch the fire. In a little while I will have to add more wood to keep the chill away. Nephew breathes calmly. I listen to the sounds of the night animals not so far away. I hear the fox and the marten chasing mice. I hear the whoosh of great wings as an Arctic owl sweeps close by, and after that the almost silent step of a bigger animal, a lynx perhaps, keeping watch with her yellow eyes. I lie here and look at the sky, then at the river, the black line of it heading north. By tomorrow we'll be home.