Joseph Boyden · 2005 · survival

Joseph Boyden's 2005 debut. Two young Cree men from the James Bay lowlands enlist and become snipers on the Western Front, and one of them comes home. The frame is a three-day canoe journey up the river, an aunt paddling her nephew home while he tells her what happened and she tells him what happened before he was born.

1. 1
   Mushkegowuk

   The James Bay lowlands, where Niska has lived alone in the bush since walking out of a residential school, and where she taught Xavier and Elijah to hunt - which is their whole qualification for what comes next.

2. 2
   Toronto

   They enlist and are trained and shipped, two boys whose skill with a rifle is the only thing about them the army wants - and Xavier learns the English and pretends not to, answering officers in Cree.

3. 3
   Ypres

   The salient, and the first gas. Their marksmanship gets them out of the line and into an elite sniper section, which is a promotion of a kind - and Elijah discovers he has a talent for it that goes past skill.

4. 4
   The Somme

   Elijah starts taking morphine and taking scalps, and is decorated for the first and not caught at the second - and Xavier watches the friend he taught to shoot become something the war is pleased with.

5. 5
   Vimy Ridge

   April 1917, the Canadian Corps taking the ridge that had defeated everyone else - and by now Elijah is a celebrity in the battalion and Xavier is the quiet one nobody credits with any of it.

6. 6
   Passchendaele

   Mud that swallows men and horses, and the point at which Xavier understands what has to be done about Elijah - and does it, and then carries the consequence for the rest of the book without saying so.

7. 7
   Amiens

   August 1918 and the shell that takes his leg, and the hospital and the morphine - and a soldier discharged into a country that has no particular use for him, coming home on a train to a river.

8. 8
   Mushkegowuk

   Niska paddles five days against the current to fetch him and three days back with him dying in the bow - and takes the morphine away, and builds a sweat lodge, and gives him his name back.