Hence Xavier’s remark about reckoning with what one does to the enemy.īut that’s not where Three Day Road starts, for better or worse. They became skilled hunters, and at the front, they conduct the ultimate hunt - or Elijah does, anyway. Elijah, whom he met there, came to live with them later, and Xavier taught him all the backwoods knowledge he has. Xavier grew up in the backwoods, but after his mother’s death when he was very young, attended a repressive religious school until his aunt, Niska, rescued him. Or separate them, rather, to Elijah’s frequent gratification and Xavier’s constant pain. Likewise, the prejudice the two friends face in the ranks of the Southern Ontario Rifles runs deep, embodied in their insecure, less-than-capable immediate superior, Lieutenant Breech, who views them as alien to begin with, though with gradations that fit his convenience. Neither name actually belongs to them, for they are Cree, a Native people of Canada, and white people have bestowed those handles on them. So says Xavier Bird, thinking of his boyhood friend and brother in arms, Elijah Whiskeyjack. Toward the end of this harrowing novel about the First World War, a soldier narrator remarks, “We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy.” In part inspired by the legend of Francis Pegahmagabow, the great Indian sniper of World War I, Three-Day Road is an impeccably researched and beautifully written story that offers a searing reminder about the cost of war. Intertwined with this account is the story of Niska, who herself has borne witness to a lifetime of death-the death of her people.

Eventually the harrowing and bloody truth of war takes its toll on the two friends in different, profound ways.

But while Xavier struggles to understand the purpose of the war and to come to terms with his conscience for the many lives he has ended, Elijah becomes obsessed with killing, taking great risks to become the most accomplished sniper in the army. Both become snipers renowned for their uncanny accuracy.

Shipped off to Europe when they are nineteen, the boys are marginalized from the Canadian soldiers not only by their native appearance but also by the fine marksmanship that years of hunting in the bush has taught them. At the urging of his friend Elijah, a Cree boy raised in reserve schools, Xavier joins the war effort. Set in Canada and the battlefields of France and Belgium, Three-Day Road is a mesmerizing novel told through the eyes of Niska-a Canadian Oji-Cree woman living off the land who is the last of a line of healers and diviners-and her nephew Xavier.

3 day road joseph boyden