by Muriel Gray
“You’re saying they will kill again?”
The rabble-rouser was now a frightened boy.
“We do not know that they have killed at all.”
Muir was silent but Strachan raised his voice from the long bench.
“Aye. An’ we dinnae know if the sun’ll come up in the mornin’!”
James Henderson kneaded his brow and tried to calm himself. He must regain his authority here and he raised his head to do so. “I must remind you that Angus McEwan is still in there waiting for us to give him a decent burial.” He decided to take the lead. “And if none of you are man enough to deal with it, I will do it on my own.”
He looked around and then moved off toward the door. Duncan Muir put a hand out to his thin arm, and shook his head. “Naw, Reverend Henderson. Leave him. We must do it.”
Henderson nodded, and as if prompted a group of men at the back put their hats on and opened the door. He watched their slumped shoulders and shuffling gait and pitied them their grisly task. He had not even been able to fully enter the cabin, the sight of the blackened blood on the floor being more than he could bear. These men were of stronger stuff, and he felt guilt and a nugget of shame that he had manipulated them. The cold air seeped in with the opening of the door, and the ever-present wall of falling snow was there to greet them. As they filed out, the men at the front stopped.
“Look! There, by God!”
Henderson came to the door and peered over their shoulders to see what it was. Through the opaque sheet of snow, a figure was approaching. A white man. A tall white man in a long black coat walking toward them from a thicket of trees as though he were expected. He raised a hand in greeting and the men looked at one another.
“Hallo!”
Muir pushed through and stared at the figure. He found his tongue to answer by the time the man reached the crowd of staring faces and stood before them with his hands on his hips.
“Are you a ghost, sir?” Muir was only half in jest.
The stranger laughed, his pale blue eyes taking in the assembled company and resting on Henderson’s face with a smile. “No, indeed. A trapper foiled by the snow, gentlemen. And a damned hungry one.”
A Canadian accent, but hard to place. The men stood uselessly in a bunch, staring at him miserably until Muir took the initiative again.
“You’ll forgive us our surprise, sir. We’ve had a… we’re in the midst of tragedy today and we expected no one until the trains can get through.”
He looked concerned and nodded. “Tragedy follows us like our own shadows out in this wilderness. I’m no stranger to it.”
Henderson was as surprised as the rest of them by this man’s appearance, but he was not comforted by his easy manner. In fact, he was made distinctly uneasy by those smiling eyes. But he could tell that Muir was pleased they had a guest.
“There’s no hot food. Our cook is indisposed at present. But there’s a loaf and some cold ham if you care to have that.” Muir looked around and then back at the man. “I must say it’s a relief to see a new white face.”
“It’s a pleasure to see a face at all for me. I can go for half the year and not see a Christian soul.”
The words were forced, Henderson thought. An easy manner, yes, but words that were almost being read from a book. As if he was learning them, very fast, from some unidentified source. He put it down to the fact the man was a trapper, and must indeed, true to his word, be alone for much of his life. No doubt he was just picking up the rudiments of social intercourse as he went. But it was odd, and the minister did not care for it.
Henderson stood aside for the man as he was led into the canteen to be fed, and the men outside burst once more into heated conversation. They looked as though they wished to change their minds and delay the grim chore for the more heartening pursuit of watching this new man eat, when Henderson turned to them and put up a hand.
“It must be done. He should not be left like a dog.”
They made no gesture, but one by one they lowered their heads and moved away through the snow to McEwan’s defiled cabin. Henderson went back inside the long, warm wooden building. The trapper was already at table, being brought a piece of ham by Sinclair, a short and dour man from Inverness. A flash of irrational rage shot through James Henderson as he watched this man being waited on, but he fought it back. The man was hungry and just new from the isolation of the wilderness. He had a right to their hospitality. He stepped closer to the throng that was around him to hear his words. The trapper was answering Muir’s question with a smile.
“Strange to say, I have almost forgotten my real name. Best call me by my Indian name given to me many seasons ago when I was trading with the Kinchuinicks, I believe on account of my hair. They have peculiar notions, these savages. But it serves me well and I have used it for so long I have become it. They call me Snowchild Sitconski.”
He grinned to the men. They did not grin back.
He turned the wooden cross over in his hands as if looking for its secret. The Henderson man had carved it well. One piece, and where the bars crossed, a rough and tiny figure of a man with his arms out. It was nothing like the beautiful bone-and-wood one that Walks Alone had held and hoped to keep in the cabin, but it was good and he liked it.
Henderson had seen him hold it when he came back a few hours ago, but Walks Alone had no time for smiling or thanking him with his hands. He had brought terrible news. Walks Alone had sat on his blanket next to the wall of the tepee listening to the tall man try to tell his story. His mother, and his father, who had woken and was well, had listened carefully to Henderson’s tale of the things that were happening in the white man’s village. Then his mother had looked at his father in a strange way when she heard of the death of the man McEwan.
They were all gone now. He was alone in the tepee, tending the fire and touching his cross, trying to discover its magic, which he could not comprehend. But there was much he could not comprehend. He had been astonished to hear his sister’s name spoken again in the tepee today. They never spoke of her in front of him. At least not when they thought he was listening. But he had heard his mother crying sometimes at night when she thought he slept, and heard her call her name. And today, her name had been on all their lips but his. Walks Alone looked into the fire. They thought he could not bear to hear it. They were wrong. He said it every day inside his head, and he relived her death in minute detail just as often. The spirits had taken his voice with that death, but he would not forget. He could not. Not even if he wished to.
“Take her, Walks Alone.”
His father’s tone had been brusque that hot summer evening. The camp was only hours old and they had much to do before nightfall. Singing Tree had gone with the women to the river, and the men were in the camp with a few scattered children who were too tired after the long journey to accompany their mothers.
She had put her chubby little arms out to her father and was crying that he would not hold her. He had been busy with his medicine, herbs and roots that he was pounding to give to an elder to whom the journey had not been kind.
“Why must I take her, Father?”
“I must have quiet. Fetch wood and take her with you.”
Walks Alone had looked sulkily at his father, whose authority was unshakable. He picked up the one-and-a-half-year-old girl and waddled away under her weight toward the edge of the camp.
It was a new summer grazing site, and he was excited that he would be able to explore where he had never been. Narrow-leaf cottonwood and aspens fronted a forest of pine, and he headed for its dense bulk to search for deadfall. She weighed so much and was making his burden more difficult as she gurgled and kicked in delight to be lifted in her brother’s arms. Behind him, the sounds of camp were comforting: dogs barking, horses snorting and the shout of one man to another. He had grunted into the woods with his sister, elated at the thought of the summer that lay ahead.
The edge of the forest with its elderberry and honeysuckle was not i
nteresting to him, and he hitched his bundle up in his arms as he headed deeper into the tall trees. It was beautiful. The scent of sweet pine resin rising from the hot forest floor and the sunlight filtering through the high canopy of branches was magical. The undergrowth was full of deadfall as he’d hoped, and the pick of firewood was endless. Then he had remembered that he had not brought the willow basket that he wore on his back. How was he to fetch the wood home with his sister to carry? He sighed and put her down. She fell heavily on her bottom, picked up a twig and put it to her mouth, took it out again and talked to it in that secret language that only she and her mother seemed to comprehend. What to do?
Walks Alone had decided he could run back to camp quickly enough and bring the basket without his sister even noticing. She was happy on her seat of twigs, chuckling and grabbing anything that came to hand. He had broken the sharp branches off a long, thick piece of pine and given it to her. She’d closed her fingers carefully on the rough bark and looked at it, then back at him as if he’d handed her a valuable prize.
“Gaaah! Baaa!”
He’d nodded at her and it had seemed to satisfy her. She’d returned to her piece of wood, fascinated.
Walks Alone had turned and run quickly through the forest, surprised it was so far. He had not noticed how deeply into the woods they had come. No matter. He was fast. He’d gained camp and run around the back of the tepee to avoid his father’s gaze, had found the basket from the jumbled pile of belongings in the sled and sped off toward the wood again.
He had been lost for a moment, then her childish sounds had drawn him to the spot. He’d seen her through the trees, crawling expertly on all fours along and over the undergrowth and fallen branches. He’d slowed his run and walked toward her, slinging the basket off his back, making ready to collect the wood.
How could he have seen it? It was hidden. Of course it was. That was its point.
The gin trap was for a bear. A black fearful thing that would hold a four-hundred-pound grizzly. Its circumference was only slightly smaller than his sister’s length, and when her weight triggered the spring, it had folded her in two, the back of her head touching her own heels as it had snapped her spine in half and severed her head from her shoulders, her feet from her legs. Such a fast, fluid movement, with no sound other than the snapping of bone and the rustle of leaves as the whole trap jumped in the air with its new prey.
The body had not been recognizable as human. How could a human body bend backward from the waist so the calves were against the back? And without a head, or feet. Just a ragged red circle of neck, pumping blood as though the heart wanted the little life to continue, and the stumps of legs that oozed their contents onto the forest floor.
He’d opened his mouth and no sound had come from it. No scream, no shout. Nothing. He had stood over the thing that had been his sister for an age, then turned and walked slowly out of the wood toward the camp.
By the time they had understood that the boy could no longer speak, and had gone without him into the wood to search where he pointed, a wolverine had got to her.
His father had found her and for a moment had not understood what he was seeing as the animal tore another piece from the carcass, then, seeing it had human company, picked up the head by sinking its teeth deep into a plump cheek and ran off into the forest.
He remembered it every day. Why should he not? And when Henderson had spoken her name in the tepee they had all remembered her. Strange that it was a trapper who would have her name. No matter. It pleased his heart to hear it again, and he rubbed his cross with a thumb as he tried and failed to say it for himself.
Snowchild. Darling little Snowchild.
42
Outside, everything was quiet at number nine Oriole Drive. The snow fell silently on itself, making a slab on the roof, which needed new tiles. The light wind that occasionally sent the solemn flakes into a swirling frenzy shook the branches of the tall pines in the yard and made the snow sculptures on their boughs fall to the ground with a barely audible whoosh. Far away in the distance, a train sounded its horn as it pulled its coal through the night.
But inside the house three people were still awake. Katie lay looking at the dim outline of her robe hanging on the back of the door.
Physically she was warm, but far from comfortable, hugging herself beneath the covers, legs curled up to her belly, arms circling her knees. Her thighs were still wet from their sex and she lay completely still, a mile away in the bed from her husband, making no attempt to move and barely breathing.
Katie was sore. Between her legs was a dull ache that was matched only by the one in her heart, the one that was compressing her chest like a vise, making her breathing a chore. She had initiated their sex with a feathery touch and a caress as soon as they climbed into bed a few hours ago. Sam had seemed so small and lost, so weary from his confessions and broken by his circumstances, that she wanted to hold him, to have him inside her and soothe him with the anesthetic of pleasure.
And it had been pleasurable. To begin with. Sam had returned her touch and she’d burned for him, and if she were honest, a little of her passion was that she was holding a man who had become a stranger to her. It was the same hard body, the same embrace, although she noticed as he moved above her that he had removed the amulet from around his neck for the first time in their married life. But the warm skin contained a man she loved but didn’t really know. The thrill had been short-lived. Even now, lying silently thinking in the dark, Katie was not sure at what point she had stopped trusting the large man who had been inside and all over her body. Thoughts had come to her as he stroked her back, she knew that much. Dark thoughts. Thoughts of her son and his distress, of Sam’s behavior, of all the things that were wrong with this picture of a happy, normal family. And the darkness of it all had pulled her back from that temporary loss of sentience that sex affords, and made her struggle to move away from him. Had he misinterpreted her squirming? Surely he had. Perhaps he thought she wanted to play rougher; it wasn’t unknown in their repertoire. All she could think of now in the dark was the ugly burning violence of the act, of his penis that was normally a part of them both becoming nothing more than a hard, intrusive piece of meat that she was desperate, violently desperate, to expel from her body. It made her feel that the center of all rage was between her legs, that a touch there was a deliberate and scheming affront from someone who would hurt her. Hurt them all.
Billy. God. Please, never Billy.
She had fought with him, clawing at his back and rolling her head, screaming at him inside her head to let her go, but he held her tighter, punching himself into that pit of her wrath until she could bear it no more and bit him savagely on the shoulder.
Sam had come inside her at the same time she drew blood from him and arched back in a mixture of pleasure and pain.
Then there had been silence. No talk. No holding and laughing and kissing. He had put his hand to his bleeding shoulder and turned away like a wounded dog, leaving her gasping through clenched teeth, staring up into the darkness.
The abused always becomes the abuser.
She had cried softly, too softly for him to hear, and the movement from his shoulders suggesting that he was already asleep made her hate him for an instant.
Jesus, she was falling apart. He had told her his life, and now she was hating him for the truth of who he was.
What did she think his childhood had been like? She had harbored a Hollywood fantasy that Sam had ridden about on a horse on some grassy prairie, had lived a life outdoors and grown up tall and straight and handsome with the simplicity of a humble but decent Native life. The middle-class fool in her thought that he had left it behind because it wasn’t good enough, not ambitious enough for a man like Sam. But Sam was not ambitious. Sam was always happy with whatever they had. A tiny room, a big house, a crap job, no job, it made no difference. As long as he was surrounded by his family, and they were well and fed. Not ambitious at all. She had just made it up
to satisfy herself and get on with her own little selfish life.
She made herself think the unthinkable. This crazy stuff had all just happened. Abused children were abused for years. Slowly. Gradually. Agonizingly. Billy had only reacted to his father like he was the Devil since yesterday. It was nothing.
Was one incident nothing? What if this was just the beginning?
But why? Why would a man like Sam Hunt hurt one of the things he loved most? You mean like just there, like how he just hurt you, her dark side thought. She pushed the darkness away.
Maybe he wouldn’t. But maybe Sam Hunting Wolf would. The blackouts. And the murders. Her father-in-law was a murderer. Sam had said so. Like father like son.
Dear God, no. That was going too far. She heard his breathing, steady and rhythmic. No. It was all wrong and wicked to even think it. Billy would be fine. The police would catch and incarcerate the psycho and Sam would be better soon. She loved him and she trusted him. Her eyes moistened afresh. Trusted him enough to want to kill him when he penetrated her? She screwed her eyes shut and groaned, concentrating on shutting it all out. But before she could stop herself, the dark machine that was running the program marked the end of everything started to run through every detail, every betrayal and sniff of duplicity all over again.
The second person still awake was Billy.
His mom had come and made him stop playing, and he had gone to bed without a fuss. But he was making himself stay awake. Billy was afraid. Sometimes the wolf took him places when he didn’t ask to go, and he didn’t want to go anywhere tonight. As long as he stayed awake he’d be fine. And there was plenty keeping him awake.
His dad was hurt that he was avoiding him. Billy knew it, and it was confusing him. Did that mean his dad didn’t know the bad thing was in him? He wanted so much to rush into his arms, to kiss him and let those arms sweep him up and hold him. Keep him safe. But he was still afraid. He had never been so afraid in his whole life as he was that night. In fact, he had wet the bed after his mom had come in and put him back in. She still didn’t know. He knew where the sheets were in the big closet at the top of the stairs and he’d stripped the stained one off, stuffed it in his toy chest and put a new one inexpertly on the bed. He didn’t want that kind of fright again. And so he wasn’t going to go to sleep. He only wished that Bart could be in with him, but Mom had put him in the kitchen and she wouldn’t let him upstairs. He could always go next door and get in with Jess, but she would only get excited and start yelling or doing that big loud laugh she did that was more like a scream. So he just lay there and stared into the black night, trying to keep his eyes open and praying that the dark thing wouldn’t find him and take him away.