the windigos (symbol)
When Niska is a child, she watches her father kill a woman and her child after the woman, driven mad by starvation and isolation, turned into a cannibal (a windigo). Xavier, in turn, watches Niska kill a windigo when he is a child. In the end, after Xavier kills a bloodthirsty and delusional Elijah, he notes that he has become a windigo killer like generations before him. The windigos symbolize evils spirits and corruption in the face of unimaginable hardship. They represent the intense fear that the Cree feel when nature threatens to topple their way of life and plunge their loved ones into madness. In the battlefield, this fear translates into Xavier’s anxiety that Elijah will become completely absorbed by his compulsive need to kill. Elijah’s transformation into a windigo puts everyone around him in danger, friend and foe alike. Both Xavier and Niska feel guilty after their murders, but they view the act as necessary to contain the evil spirts that inhabit windigos.
the Mauser rifle (symbol)
Xavier kills a prolific German sniper who has been responsible for the deaths of many Canadian soldiers. After he goes to canvass the body, he discovers a Mauser rifle in excellent condition—one of the best possible guns that a sniper could hope to have. Since it was retrieved from the sniper “who loved death,” the gun serves a symbol of the fascination and addiction to death that grows in Elijah, who always wants to use the Mauser. After Xavier kills Elijah, he lays the rifle across his friend’s body as a form of burial. Leaving the rifle behind, he symbolically turns away for the destruction and violence that had consumed Elijah.
the lynx (symbol)
After Xavier and Elijah narrowly survive a dangerous forest fire, they see a lynx’s tracks that seem to disappear into thin air. When Niska has visions, she seems most able to communicate with the lynx’s spirit. The lynx symbolizes protection: its presence as the boys almost die indicate the mystical, spiritual guidance that Niska is able to tap into. In some Indigenous cultures, the lynx is seen as symbolic of hunting prowess, characteristically both dangerous and powerful. In this sense, he is an apt symbol of Xavier and Elijah, whose incredible hunting skills could bring them food and the title of hookimaw in the bush, but bring them great hardship in the war—even as they ensure their military recognition.
the number three (motif)
Xavier notes that the army seems to be “obsessed” with the number three, creating divisions between three lines of battle (front, support, and reserve), work parties (one sentry, two workers), and the army itself (infantry, artillery, cavalry) in which each section is put through three repeated rituals (training, combat, recovery). When the soldiers rest in reserve, they follow three steps: food, rest, women; when they pray, they invoke three entities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Even dying appears to be a three-part process: a soldier is a man when the bullet strikes, an animal as he struggles to hold onto life, and a corpse after he has stopped breathing. Xavier sees his own life as divided into three parts: before the war, during it, and after. The repetition of the three parts represents the highly organized and divided aspects of military life. These organized, sequential divisions contrast with the Cree concept of circularity. The importance of the number three to the novel partly explains its title, which is based off of the Cree legend that a journey to the afterlife takes three days, as well as the fact that Xavier and Niska’s journey home is a three-day trip.
addiction (motif)
The “sunlit river” of morphine flows throughout the book. Both Xavier and Elijah use the drug to escape harsh reality. In particular, Elijah uses morphine to increase his battlefield prowess. This leads to a dangerous cycle in which Elijah is separated from reality, and his continued recognition by the officers depends on his continued use of the drug to get an edge on the battlefield. In contrast, Xavier becomes addicted to morphine after he kills Elijah. Not only is he beaten down by the physical pain of his leg, but the emotional weight of all that happened to him and Elijah during the war combines with the guilt he feels over his murder of Elijah, making reality completely unbearable. His struggle to overcome his addiction and survive the physical effects of withdrawal is a source of dramatic tension at the book’s end. In addition, Rabbit's descent into alcoholism poses another example of the destructive effects of addiction.
