Summary
The six-person raiding party leaves for the German lines, quickly falling under heavy enemy fire. Thompson sends Xavier and Elijah to “finish the job”—killing the German work party that is firing upon them and setting fuses for bombs in the German machine gun nest. At first Elijah rushes to the nest but, feeling sick and suffering from a pounding headache, he eventually turns and runs. Xavier throws grenades into the machine gun nest, then finds Elijah on the ground and lays over him in order to protect him. Xavier sets the fuses, then drags Elijah with him to a crater where they can hide from the explosions and gunfire. When he manages to get Elijah back to the trench safely, the medic says that Elijah has a few scrapes and a possible broken arm, and administers morphine.
The men are sent back to the reserve to rest, having spent their required time on the front. Xavier learns that the young new soldier died during the raid, and that Thompson was sent to a hospital where he is close to death from shrapnel and bullet injuries. Gilberto had carried Thompson back to the trench, saving his life. While at the reserve, Xavier notices that Elijah doesn’t take advantage of the available supply of morphine, and believes that he wants to wait and use it when he really needs it to give him peace of mind and clarity on the battlefield. Elijah decides to forgive Grey Eyes for his greed with the tobacco. Xavier reminisces on the short time he spent in the residential school as a child. He doesn’t remember his mother, Rabbit, who gave him up to the wemistikoshiw nuns when he was a young. Elijah sat next to Xavier in the school, trying to help him when he struggled with English. After Elijah wrote a dirty word on a piece of paper, the two boys were beaten with a switch by Sister Magdalene, one of the tyrannical nuns.
While at the reserve, the other soldiers ask Xavier and Elijah about their Cree names; Elijah’s is Weesageechak, meaning trickster. They make frequent trips to the “estaminet,” a pub where alcohol and prostitutes are readily available. Xavier grows sad when he sees Elijah flirting with the owner of the estaminet’s daughter, but cheers up when Elijah says he doesn’t want to pursue her. On the last night before the men are to return from the front, Xavier drinks enough to give him confidence, and he approaches the young woman. He helps her carry some heavy boxes, and then she walks with him down a path away from the lines. Xavier discovers that her name is Lisette, and that when Elijah was talking to her, he was not flirting but putting in a good word for Xavier. They hold hands and kiss as they walk back to the estaminet. Lisette tells him to meet at the same place after supper the next day.
The next morning, Xavier cleans himself up by bathing and running a flame along his uniform to kill lice. He returns to the place where he is to meet Lisette in the early afternoon, and waits until nightfall for her to return. Lisette leads Xavier to a small pond, where they lie on the grass and have sex. Soon after, Lisette has to return to the estaminet, separately from Xavier so that no one suspects what they have done. Xavier lies alone by the pond and wonders when he will see her again.
Two days later, the men are sent away from Saint-Eloi, to the trenches at the Somme. The men are given new clothing, winter coats, and new rifles—although Xavier and Elijah keep their superior guns. They stay at a grimy, dilapidated campsite called The Brickfields. As Xavier and Elijah lie on their backs, watching birds fly, Elijah talks about the first time the two rode on a train, when they were sent to the back cart to be separated from the white passengers. In the back cart, Elijah pretends to fly. When he trips and falls against a man, the man says “whiskeyjacks should fly better,” but claims that he was dreaming about a flock of whiskeyjack birds when Elijah asks the man how he knows his name. Xavier thinks this is a sign. He notes that Elijah is sad to leave his country behind.
The next section returns to Niska’s point of view. While Xavier sleeps by the campfire, she continues the story of the Frenchman that frequently visited her tepee. Niska says that they met so often throughout the winter that she came to think of the Frenchman as her mate. One winter, though, when they are drinking tea in her shelter, a hunter from the awawatuk Cree comes to ask Niska to divine where he should hunt. Niska tells the Frenchman he must leave, which angers him; he doesn’t return to Niska again. The next summer, she decides to return to Moose Factory to find the Frenchman. She walks through the Indian part of the town, but the Cree who live there view her as an outsider. Finally, an old woman invites Niska inside her cabin. She gives Niska stew and warns her that some Indians who have converted to Christianity will be angry if they see her in the town. The woman also says that the Frenchman has several illegitimate children in town, and that rumors of his relationship with Niska has spread. She tells Niska that she is not destined for happiness because of her role as a hookimaw, a mystical diviner of the future. Finally, she gives Niska some wemistikoshiw clothes to fit in.
The next day, Niska cleans herself, dresses nicely, and walks through the town, spotting the Frenchman eating in a pub. She joins him inside. The Frenchman tells Niska that he missed her and buys them both liquor, while Niska struggles with mixed feelings of anger and attraction. As darkness falls, Niska grows sad, and then abruptly leaves to walk to the residential school. She desperately calls out Rabbit’s name, but soon the Frenchman is grabbing her shoulders. He leads her to the town’s church, where the two have sex. Afterwards, he taunts her, saying that the act has taken Niska’s spirit away. In shock, Niska stumbles away, throws up outside of the church, and then runs to the river. She strips the wemistikoshiw clothes from her body and quickly paddles away from the town. After returning to her home in the bush, she builds a lodge and steams rocks inside, praying for purity. She discovers that she still has the power to summon spirit animals, especially the lynx. Niska asks the lynx spirit to extinguish the source of her pain, and feels peaceful again. Later, Niska’s mother tells her that the Frenchman in Moose Factory went mad and committed suicide.
The narrative switches back to Xavier. In the canoe with Niska, he takes morphine in direct view of his aunt. He drifts back into memories of the war, back when McCaan tells Elijah that he will be acting corporal until Thompson returns. Xavier resents the fact that Elijah receives more attention than he does even though they act as a team. Their battalion moves to a village called Albert, where Elijah and Xavier see a huge statue of the Virgin Mary protruding from the rubble of a burned church. The men are sent to the front lines near the German-controlled town of Courcelette. The fighting takes place at “Candy Trench,” so called because a candy factory once stood in the area. Xavier and Elijah scout the area, finding a perfect spot to snipe from in battle the next day. They report their discovery of the spot to Breech, who takes a long time to approve of it, much to Xavier’s annoyance.
Xavier and Elijah gather enough supplies to last several days of battle, then travel to their sniping spot. As they wait through the night for the fighting to begin, Elijah asks Xavier to tell him a story to pass the time. Xavier talks about their boat ride over to England, when they were trapped in a raging storm. Xavier liked to stay below deck to calm the horses who were kept there. Once, when he was sleeping, two horses panicked and broke their legs. Xavier woke Elijah up in a panic, and Elijah left to tell the officers what had happened. Once in the officers’ cabin, Elijah had to wait until they were done discussing his and Xavier’s hunting skills, as objectively as if they were animals. When the officers finally descend below deck to shoot the animals, they find that Xavier has already used a knife to slit the horses’ throats. Xavier explained that he had no choice. Breech wants to arrest Xavier, but another officer steps in and says he should commend Xavier for his fast judgment and willingness to carry out unpleasant tasks. Breech hisses to Xavier that he will never be an officer, and makes the men clean all of the horses’ stalls.
The next morning, Elijah and Xavier take stock of their position. Elijah injects a small amount of morphine, which he has used continuously since being wounded in the raid. They watch as the Canadian troops advance on the Germans and the fighting begins. As the battle thickens, they begin to methodically snipe the German machine gun operators. When the Canadians push the Germans back from Candy Trench to the one behind it, called Sugar Trench, Xavier and Elijah move to a higher sniping position.
Eventually, the Canadians overrun Courcelette, and Xavier and Elijah make their way back to the Canadian trenches. Elijah reports to Breech that he shot three German machine gun operators in the neck from 800 yards away, but Breech just mocks him. Xavier and Elijah spend the next two weeks scouting the Germans. Eleven days after the last battle, more fighting begins, and for the first time Xavier sees a tank rolling across the battlefield. After this battle, where the Canadians gain some ground, the men are sent back to the town of Albert. While there, Elijah tells Xavier that one night he climbed on top of the virgin statue’s crown and fired a single bullet at a faraway battle.
The men return to the trenches, where cold, wet conditions make life miserable. Elijah and Xavier, however, fare better than the rest of the men—they are used to enduring constant rain while hunting back home, and they wear their fast-drying moccasins. Elijah starts volunteering for burial duty, and takes to opening the corpses’ eyes and staring into them before they are buried.
Analysis
These sections delve deeply into the pain and joy of the main characters' relationships with wemistikoshiw. For Xavier, his tryst with Lisette provides a welcome, happy respite from war. His attempts to clean himself and his willingness to wait hours for Lisette show that he quickly becomes dedicated to her. In contrast, Niska’s relationship with a white, French hunter degenerates from one marked by closeness and mutual, unspoken understanding to a fraught enmity characterized by hostility and viciousness. In the end, Niska actually brings about the Frenchman’s demise, as it’s implied that her powers drive his spirit to insanity. The end of their relationship marks Niska’s dramatic split with not only the wemistikoshiw community, but also the Cree who choose to adapt a more urban lifestyle. The act of removing the wemistikoshiw clothes from her body symbolizes Niska stripping herself of all vestiges of the white-dominated and industrialized life in the wemistikoshiw town.
Elijah’s attitude toward battle and war shifts in this section as well. Xavier’s pre-war recollection of his friend as more carefree—humorously pretending to be a bird in public—contrasts with his morphine- and fatigue-induced weakness in the middle of horrific battle. However, his enthusiasm for battle and for war itself is not dampened, as he still dreams of flying—in a military airplane rather than as a bird. Despite the physical challenges that war poses, Xavier notes that Elijah is “still daring, still talkative.” This resilience is not necessarily a good thing, though; it hardens Elijah to the destruction and loss of life that war engenders, which is only beneficial to some extent. This section plants the seeds for Elijah’s continual pushing against the line that divides a necessary wartime detachment from an indiscriminate relish for killing.
These sections also explore opposing views of death: as a necessary means to an end—euthanizing wounded horses, winning a war—or an end to itself. Elijah seems to take the latter view, as his growing fascination with the power of killing manifests itself in the way he wants to make sure that he is the last thing a dead man sees before his final burial. In contrast, Xavier takes the former view. He kills the horses because he has no other choice, and he does so with shocking efficiency. These different views play out on the battlefield as well. Elijah’s determination to climb the statue of the Virgin Mary transforms into obsession, as he holds the conviction that it would make a perfect sniper’s spot even as there is no battle close enough to fight against.
Lieutenant Breech continues to serve as an example of the inherent, institutionalized racism in the army. Elijah attempts to use his unusual willingness to engage in battle and his exceptional skills as a marksman to win the respect of officers such as Breech. In return, he is mocked, doubted, and belittled. Breech’s comment about the “canoe lengths” that separated Elijah from the soldiers he shot demonstrates that, because of their status as First Nations people, Elijah and Xavier stand on an unfair playing field in comparison to white soldiers. In line with the treatment of the legendary sniper Peggy that Xavier heard earlier in the war, as Ojibwe Indians Elijah and Xavier must deal with Breech’s frustrating skepticism and ethnic taunts. Breech’s angry statement that Xavier will never be an officer hints at jealousy lurking under the surface. A plausible explanation for Breech’s dismissal of Elijah’s accomplishment is the underlying fear that Elijah is a better soldier than he is, and one more deserving of an officer position.
