![]() ![]() ![]() In doing so their friendship was tested to the limits. As their reputations grew, the two young men, with their handsewn mocassins and extraordinary marksmanship, became both the pride and fear of their regiment as the stalked the ripe killing fields of Ypres and the Somme. In turn, Xavier relates the horrifying years of war in Europe: how he and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, prowled the battlefields of France and Belgium as snipers of remarkable skill. As Niska paddles him the three days home, she realises that all she can offer in her attempt to keep him alive is her words: the stories of her life. It was the story of a White man and his Aboriginal family, of family ties, hard work, happiness, betrayal, racial prejudice and ultimately, from Daryls point of view, tragic dispossession. Xavier Bird, her only living relative, gravely wounded and addicted to the army's morphine, hovers somewhere between the worlds of the living and the dead. She leaves her home in the snowy southern wilderness and paddles her canoe upriver to retrieve him, only to discover that the one she expected is the other. ![]() It is 1919, and Niska, the last Canadian Indian medicine woman to live off the land, has received word that one of her two boys she grudgingly saw off to the Great War has returned. ![]()
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