Summary
Elijah and Xavier are back in the trenches, awakened by the sound of gunfire that means the Germans have infiltrated the Canadians’ trenches for a raid. Some rations and supplies have been stolen, and one soldier has been killed. Xavier learns that Gerald, the sentry who fell asleep at his position and thus allowed the raid, has been court-martialed and shot by a Canadian firing squad. The company is sent back from the front trench to the support trench, where they work on maintaining the trenches while under the constant threat of deadly shells. Lieutenant Breech makes the soldiers wear uncomfortable gas masks for hours at a time, to prepare them in case of a poisonous gas attack. Finally, the company is sent back to reserve where they can rest. Xavier notes that Grey Eyes has become addicted to morphine, and that Elijah easily charms the other soldiers while Xavier is overlooked.
The company returns to the front trenches in the Saint-Eloi craters, an area of land marred by seven huge craters and many other smaller ones. One night, Thompson wakes Xavier, Elijah, Sean Patrick, McCaan, and an old soldier called Graves for a dangerous scouting mission that will determine whether the Germans are in one of the big craters. They find three Canadian soldiers in the crater, two of them dead; McCaan and Sean Patrick leave to take the living soldier back to the trench. After they leave, the Germans begin bombing the remaining soldiers. They take shelter in a crater filled with the bodies of dead soldiers, and Xavier feels certain that he will not be killed that night. When morning comes, they move to another, larger crater, where they stay for the day. Xavier smokes a cigarette to pass the time, noting that he started to smoke just to fit in but now enjoys it. Thompson and Xavier talk about Elijah, and Xavier says that Elijah had to stayed in the residential school for a long time because he was an orphan. Thompson says that Elijah and Xavier are true hunters. As they leave the crater that night, they hear Germans, and Thompson instructs the men to throw bombs into the crater before firing into it himself with a machine gun. It’s the first time that Xavier has killed someone. The next morning, Thompson asks Elijah if he likes killing, and Elijah tells him that it’s in his blood.
In the next section, "Kiskinohanaasowin: Learning," Xavier is back in the canoe with Niska. He’s in pain, coughing and gasping, and when he recovers he speaks harshly to Niska, telling her about the carnage of the war. He falls back asleep and is plunged again into the world of the trenches after his return from the large crater. Elijah begins speaking in an English accent and bragging that he killed men during the crater raid; the other soldiers view him as a hero. Xavier notes that Lieutenant Breech doesn’t like him because he asked to sleep outside during training in Canada, using offensive English that Elijah told him to say and that he didn’t understand. Xavier considers taking morphine, but decides not to because he doesn’t want to lose his memory of Niska. Grey Eyes tries to get Elijah to take morphine, but Elijah refuses. The men shoot on the German troops, and Xavier notes that Sean Patrick is a good shot; he talks to Sean Patrick and discovers that he grew up in Ahmic Harbour, around Ojibwe Indians who taught him how to hunt and shoot.
Finally, the company is relieved from the front and sent back to reserve. As Xavier watches naked soldiers stand around talking while waiting for their clothes to be washed, he thinks about the horrors of war and the irreverent way that soldiers treat death. After a few days of rest, the soldiers return to the front lines. Thompson begins training Xavier and Elijah to be snipers. When Xavier uses a scope to locate a German soldier fixing a section of the trench, he tells Elijah where to fire. Elijah kills the soldier, and smiles to himself as Xavier throws up in reaction to seeing the soldier’s head being shot.
Niska talks to a sleeping Xavier as she paddles them downriver. Her story picks up where it left off: her father has been killed, and her people are directionless without him. Niska and her family are forced to move into a city, Moose Factory, because overhunting of animals for furs has made survival in the bush impossible. Her sister, Xavier’s mother, begins attending the residential school; then Niska herself is physically forced to attend the school by a soldier, under the command of a priest who considers Niska uncivilized. Once inside the school, Niska is kept under close watch by the nuns. If she speaks in Cree rather than English, the nuns starve her. They also beat children with switches and make them eat off the floor. After a nun cuts off Niska’s long hair, she retaliates by stealing a razor and completely shaving her head. As punishment, she is put in solitary confinement for a week. Niska begins to have convulsions again for the first time since her father died. Niska’s mother breaks into the room in which Niska is held and rescues her. The two leave Moose Factory that night, leaving behind Rabbit, who has adopted white customs and now goes by Anne.
In "Kakwapaskinaatowin: Competition," the narrative switches back to Xavier’s point of view during the war. His battalion has been moved to a place called White Horse Cellars. He and Elijah have been getting more and more kills while working as a sniper team in which Xavier locates the soldiers and Elijah fires. Elijah tells Thompson that he and Xavier are skilled because they grew up hunting; Xavier privately disagrees, knowing that he is the only one that truly grew up in the bush and hunted for a lifetime. One night, when Elijah and Xavier can hear a wounded German soldier moaning and mumbling in the no land’s man between the trenches, Elijah slips out into the no-man’s land and suffocates the soldier, believing his act to be one of kindness.
The other soldiers in the battalion quickly grow to view Elijah as a hero, while ignoring Xavier. Xavier resents this, knowing that he is the better shot and that he taught Elijah how to hunt in the first place. Elijah overhears officers talking about how the battalion will move to more crucial fighting grounds elsewhere in France, and he is excited to go there because he believes the war will help him make a name for himself. Elijah tells Xavier that they may be separated when the battalion moves, and says it will be good for Xavier to gain some independence.
The day after this conversation, Xavier’s battalion combines with another for a shooting competition. Elijah laughs loudly at the officer giving instructions, who continuously cries because his eyes were injured in a gas attack, but before he can be reprimanded the other battalion begins cheering loudly, sparing him. Elijah and Xavier, along with another marksman from the other battalion, make it to the final round of the competition. Elijah suggests to the officers that the final test consist of trying to light a match with a bullet from twenty paces away. As the task is set up, Xavier thinks back to the winter after Elijah left the residential school and went back to the bush. Xavier was teaching Elijah how to hunt, and he grew angry at Elijah for disturbing a fox he was about to shoot. He later finds that Elijah has stayed up all night, practicing walking on twigs silently so he won’t make the same mistake again. Xavier wins the final round of the shooting competition, and McCaan gives him the nickname “X” for “X marks the spot,” meaning Xavier can shoot any target he wants to hit. Xavier thinks that the soldiers won’t call him a useless bush Indian again.
Analysis
This section introduces the idea of killing spreading from enemy-versus-enemy to within-troop killing. After failing to perform sentry duty, Gerald is shot by a firing squad comprised of his fellow Canadians; the clear-cut lines of Canadian versus German war blends into a terrifying landscape where your fellow soldiers can turn on you if you let them down. This theme is advanced later in the book as Elijah’s increasing lust for killing turns him against his own company. It reinforces the message that war is senseless; chaos and fear reign on both sides of the battlefield.
The character of Grey Eyes introduces the theme of morphine as a path to escape the horrors of war. On the canoe with Niska, Xavier uses morphine to escape not only the pain in his leg but also the emotional pain that comes in the aftermath of war. His obsessive, chronological path through war memories is a form of catharsis, working alongside the morphine to process these memories as the drug helps to dull their pain. The use of morphine is a common thread throughout the book, as Elijah also takes advantage of the drug to give himself a battlefield advantage. Grey Eyes represents part of the link between Elijah’s sanity and madness; his entreaties to Elijah to try morphine accelerate his descent into amorality.
Thompson’s conversation with Xavier and Elijah in the trench deals with issues of race and respect. As First Nations men, Xavier and Elijah are seen as inherently inferior to the white soldiers; the officers and soldiers around them continually doubt and mistrust them, reinforcing the systemic racism that makes it difficult for the two—especially the less outgoing Xavier—to feel connected to the army. Xavier thinks that Thompson’s reserved manner, and his expectation that the men will learn through watching and listening, makes him “like an Indian.” Thompson treats Xavier and Elijah much more kindly that most of the other men do: recognizing their talents in shooting, praising them for it, and giving them time to practice sniping. However, Thompson also illustrates the fact that Xavier and Elijah must essentially work twice as hard as white soldiers to get the same level of recognition: only through their incredible abilities are they recognized as equal in the eyes of the other soldiers.
The difference in attitudes toward killing between Xavier and Elijah is further explored in this section. While Xavier is a better shot, Elijah is less hesitant to use his abilities to kill. Elijah not only seems to recognize that his path to military success is through relentless shooting, but also seems to be less bothered by the physical act of killing than Xavier is. Elijah seems to have more readily adapted the soldier’s abstract view of death that Xavier muses about when watching the naked soldiers.
Niska’s experience in Moose Factory and the residential school point to a larger theme in the book about the exploitation and oppression of First Nations people by white Canadians. Under the guise of religion, the nuns in the residential school terrorize Niska and her sisters. They seem to both fear and resent the differences between their culture and the Cree culture, punishing Niska whenever she speaks her native language. Niska’s act of shaving her head represents a bold rebellion against the nuns, and a rejection of the racist and toxic wemistikoshiw culture. This rejection manifests itself in her final escape: Niska’s life will play out largely in the bush rather than the town, exemplifying a return to the traditional Cree lifestyle. Niska’s difficulties in Moose Factory both as a child and as an adult prove the difficulty of pursuing this traditional life in the face of invading white influence and industrialization.
Xavier’s narrative expands upon the differences between him and Elijah. Elijah’s claim that he and Xavier are good hunters because they grew up together annoys Xavier because it plays directly into the officers’ view of Cree as valuable only for their marksman talents—talents which are themselves are bound up in white notions of Cree identity. Xavier knows that he is the one who grew up in the forest, not Elijah, and he resents his friend’s encroachment on his own identity and past. Elijah’s mercy killing widens the growing distance between the two friends; while his act might have been kind in the sense that it ended the wounded soldier’s suffering, Xavier feels unsettled at the ease with which Elijah carried out the murder. He can see that war is changing his friend, drawing him further from the just rules of bush survival that have been ingrained in Xavier.
The jealousy that taints their relationship appears again later in the section, as Xavier and Elijah are thrown into direct competition with each other. Still, even the envy that Xavier sometimes feels is balanced by respect for his friend—his memory of Elijah’s determination to improve as a hunter reminds him of Elijah’s good qualities. Xavier resents the fact that Elijah is seen as a war hero and adapted easily into the fold of white soldiers; but by the end of the section, Elijah’s overconfidence costs him the shooting match, as he suggests a task he cannot succeed in completing. Xavier’s victory puts the two friends on even ground again in terms of respect. Respect in the army is complicated by racial identity, as Xavier feels the need to prove himself just to be put on equal standing with the white soldiers. He and Elijah need to exhibit incredible skill to gain admiration from their officers; but at the same time, any success that they do have in battle is attributed to being “in their blood” rather than due to their own bravery or skill. After Xavier wins the shooting contest, he thinks with vindication that his fellow soldiers will not think of him as “a useless bush Indian.” This racist conception of white superiority demonstrates the second battle that Xavier and Elijah fight throughout the war, a battle within their own side for the respect and recognition that they deserve.
