Three Day Road: Tapakwewin: Snaring Summary & Analysis

Niska makes camp, and Xavier injects enough morphine to kill the pain, but not enough to kill him. He no longer has enough to commit suicide, and when it is gone, Xavier does not know what he will do. “I must figure out what happened to Elijah,” Xavier says to himself. Elijah will help Xavier—help him to “overcome the pain”—and Xavier will help Elijah overcome the “war madness that swallowed him whole.” Xavier thinks of Elijah’s stories. “He never lost his ability to talk,” and that is why no one noticed he had gone mad. “But I knew,” Xavier thinks.

Elijah slips through a “Hun trench” in late September. He can’t remember how he got there. “More and more” Elijah is “losing pieces of his day.” He is in a wrecked village, near Hill 70, and he has a thin piece of wire in his hands. Now he remembers. The snare. The village is a wonderful place for a rabbit run. He sets the wire. If a man as tall as Elijah runs through, he will surely be caught. “Here Fritzy, Fritzy, Fritzy,” Elijah calls. A German soldier runs through and catches in the wire, kicking and screaming, hanging by his neck. Elijah sneaks back through the trenches and back to his own line. He doesn’t tell anyone where he has been. “Who would believe it?” Elijah wonders.

One day, after morning “stand-to,” Elijah removes his sock, revealing a blackened foot. “Loot at that foot, Whiskeyjack!” McCaan yells and orders him to Driscoll. The medic gives Elijah whale oil to rub on his fit and tells him to change his socks twice a day. Driscoll hands Elijah a small bottle of pills and instructs him not to take them before patrol. “You’re looking rather anemic,” Driscoll says. “Are you eating properly?” “Just fine, sir,” Elijah says and “limps” away “whistling.”

Elijah and Xavier’s unit are ordered “over the top” near a town known as Lens. Elijah stands next to Xavier, smiling. Elijah “hums to himself a song that’s become popular with the soldiers” as he gets ready. He can feel the vibration of his hum in his chest “and then all goes still.” A “shrill whistle” breaks the silence, like the “call of some crazed bird,” and Elijah feels his “stomach drop.” The unit begins to run toward the German line, and Elijah and Xavier throw bombs into the machine-gun nests.

The town is “blasted.” The soldiers keep advancing, including McCaan, Graves, Grey Eyes, and Thompson, who has just returned from the hospital. Breech orders Thompson to scout ahead with Elijah and Xavier and report back to him in thirty minutes. They find two snipers shooting up head; one from the ground and one from the steeple of a church. “Well, shoot them,” Elijah says to Xavier. Xavier drops them both quickly. Elijah moves toward the church. He tells Xavier to go back and update Breech and says he will hold their position with Thompson.  

Alone for a moment, Elijah injects himself with more morphine. “The world shrinks back a little” and the pain in his bowels (“that have not been emptied for years, it seems”) subsides. The Germans appear to have retreated, and Xavier arrives with Breech and the rest of the unit. Suddenly, a German soldier wearing a rag around his face appears with a hose and a tank strapped to his back. “Lie down, Graves!” Elijah yells in Cree and flames explode from the end of the hose and “engulf Graves’s body.” A Canadian soldier shoots the German’s tank, and the man explodes.

By the end of the day, the Canadians have taken Hill 70 and are set to enter Lens. Elijah “dreams of Graves” and of Sean Patrick and Gilberto, too. In Elijah’s dream, Gilberto speaks to him with brains dripping out of his mouth. “Do what you can,” the dead Gilberto says. “There is nothing sacred anymore in a place such as this. Don’t fight it. Do what you can.”

Elijah learns “to take pleasure in killing.” Xavier wants only to go home to Canada, but Elijah tries to convince him that “the freedom of this place will not present itself again.” Xavier knows Elijah speaks of the “freedom to kill,” but Xavier does not care to have that freedom. Their unit arrives in place called Passchendaele, and Elijah drags Xavier to a pub. “There are other Lisettes,” Elijah says. In the pub, Elijah and Xavier see another Indian. He’s Anishnabe, an Ojibwe, from the looks of it.

“Wachay, wachay,” Elijah says to the Indian. The Indian, a corporal, looks at them. “Three Anishnabe in the same place,” he says. “Some things are beyond chance.” Elijah assumes the man is Peggy and says as much. “You mistake me for someone else,” he says. “There are more Anishnabe than you might guess who wander these battlefields. We all want to be warriors again.”

“My guess is that you are Whiskeyjack,” the Indian says, “and this drunk fellow beside you is Bird. […] Your reputation walks ahead of you,” the man says to Xavier. “From what I hear, you are one of the good ones.” The Indian asks Elijah how many kills he has. “One hundred ninety-four to date,” Elijah says proudly. “There is another one, a Métis,” the Indian says. “He’s from Alberta and the rumor is he has killed more than you, even.” Elijah is “sick of hearing about the feats” of other Indians. “What do you really want from me?” Elijah asks the Indian. “Think of me as your conscience,” the Indian says and smiles. “And you can be mine.”