Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Page A

identify. “Looks to be one of ours,” Thompson says. “You can see by the outline of the wings. Observation plane. Stay still. Ifit spots us it might take us for one of them and call a bombardment in on us.”
    I listen, basking in the warmth.
    “Did you send Elijah off for some rest?” Thompson asks. I nod. “You’re a quiet one,” Thompson says. “I’d have said that’s an Indian trait, till I met Elijah.”
    We laugh.
    “Why’s his English so good?” he asks after a time.
    “Him, he stayed in residential school a long time,” I say. “Him, he had no parents, so the nuns kept him.”
    Thompson leans back and stares up at the sky. “Your English is getting better,” he says. I smile. “I watch the way you two walk about,” Thompson says. “I figure I know true hunters when I meet them.”
    Another plane drones somewhere we can’t see.
    “A cup of coffee and something to eat sure would be nice right now,”Thompson says. “I’m going to rest awhile and dream about it. You take the trench, but don’t let your curiosity get you and go down too far. Fifty or sixty feet is plenty. If Fritz does decide to come along, you can get back here and warn us.”
    We both get up and Thompson rouses Graves. I head down the trench. Nothing’s in it but the mud walls. I find a place to sit where I can get a view down the laneway but can’t be seen. I don’t mind sitting here, waiting for the darkness that is still many hours away. My head floats up above this cut in the earth and into the blue swatch of sky above me. I listen to the rhythm of bombing in the distance.
    The afternoon is waning when I make my way back to the crater. The sun has begun its slide down behind the Canadian lines. Graves sits by the side of the crater, his machine gun pointed at the trench I emerge from. Graves nods to me as I walk out. We wake Elijah and Thompson.
    When it is dark enough, Thompson gathers us and we make our way out of the crater. As I crawl out, I see an old German helmet. Itis the rarer kind, made of leather and cloth with a spike on top. Elijah grabs it. He straps the helmet to his pack.
    Instead of leading us back to our own trenches, Thompson has us wait by the lip of the crater. He hands each of us two Mills bombs. “I’ve got a feeling they’ll be coming this way soon enough to look around,” he says. “If you hear them scrounging about below, pull the pins and throw these in. Then we’ll make our way back quick.”
    When twenty or thirty minutes pass and I begin to think that Thompson is mad, I make out the sound of men sneaking about below. I can hear them whispering, can hear the step of boots all around where I’d slept this morning. Thompson gives the nod and we set and throw the bombs in at the same time. They explode in a series of concussions. Men scream. Thompson takes Graves’s machine gun and crouches at the lip, sprays into the crater until all of the rounds are spent. I’m amazed at the little man’s actions. He kills with such ease.
    “Let’s go, boys,”Thompson says.
    We move from crater to crater, the ground a little more familiar now, and finally drop into the safety of our own lines.
    I replay it over and over in my head so that I don’t sleep all night, pulling the pin on my Mills bomb, throwing it and watching it arc until it disappears into the crater, the concussion and screams. I have killed someone now.
    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