by Lisa Smedman
“Superintendent Steele wants to form a special division within the force,” the Commissioner said, in a tone of voice that was carefully non-committal. “It would be a hand-picked troop made up of constables drawn from our existing divisions, and special constables recruited from the civilian population. Each man must fulfill the peculiar qualifications that Steele has set out — qualifications that he believes you possess.”
This left me completely at a loss. “Sir, I … I don’t….”
The Commissioner held up a hand and I fell silent. His eyes bored into me as if I were a man charged with a crime and he the judge who would decide my fate. Then he glanced down at the paper on the table in front of him. “Your report of the incident suggests that you weren’t surprised by the death of Sergeant Wilde. In it, you state that you had a premonition of his death.”
“It was just a dream, sir,” I sputtered.
It was a lie, of course. The dreams that contain premonitions of the future are always especially vivid for me, and every detail remains etched in my memory for years thereafter. Yet was I to recite these details now? If I did, they would think me some kind of fanciful lunatic.
“It was wrong of me to make mention of my dream in the report,” I said. “It wasn’t very professional. I—”
“You never did fully explain the circumstances of the Sergeant’s death,” the Commissioner continued.
The blood ran cold in my veins. For a brief moment, I thought the Commissioner might harbour a suspicion that I was somehow responsible. For all I knew, I might be. I had no ready explanation as to why the Sergeant had died and I had lived.
Except for the dream….
“I want you to tell us every detail of what happened that day,” Steele said in a steadying voice. “The things you didn’t put in your official report. And put your mind at ease, Corporal: you aren’t the first man I’ve heard a fantastic story from. There have been many incidents, of late, that defy explanation. There’s something strange afoot on the prairie — something that’s been growing this past year. That’s why I’m forming Q Division.”
“Q Division?” I echoed.
“Q — for query,” said the Commissioner. Then he glanced sidelong at Steele. “The request has not been approved yet. Nor will the new division be given official approval until I’m convinced of its necessity.”
I stared from one officer to the other, a growing sense of relief dawning upon me. They hadn’t found out my secret, after all. I’d been called to Regina on an entirely different matter. Yet if I told them my tale, I was likely to wind up in a lunatic asylum. I chewed my lip, uncertain how to proceed.
“Go on, man,” Steele prompted me. “Tell us the whole story, from the very beginning.”
I’d been sleeping heavily on the night that I had the strange dream. I’d been on picquet duty the previous three nights, and had been at the point of exhaustion when my last round of duty finally ended. With heartfelt relief, I’d crawled into my bed at three o’clock in the morning, too tired to remove my undergarments, which, after three days of near-continuous wear, could have used a wash.
The dream had started ordinarily enough, but soon developed the clarity and minutiae of detail that were the hallmarks of a premonitory dream. In it, I’d been standing outside a cave, from the interior of which came the insistent barking of a dog. It growled at me in the voice of the Sergeant, ordering me to crawl inside the cave.
I did so, and felt something round beneath my hand, as cold and slimy as a rain-slick cobblestone. I looked down only to discover, to my horror, that I was crawling across human bones, some of which still had wet, greyish chunks of flesh attached.
I realized then, in that peculiar clarity that comes upon one sometimes in dreams, that the dog was ordering me to my doom. I tried to back away but couldn’t — the bones moved under my hands and knees like shifting sand, and I only managed to turn myself about in a circle.
My wild scrambles somehow brought me closer to the rear of the cave, to the spot where the dog stood. It was a massive hound, larger than any I’d ever seen. I’d been wrong about it being alive — it was dead. The eyes were glazed and its fur matted, and fleas leaped away from the cooling corpse.
Fear filled me then. I was trapped in a cave filled with dead things and I no longer knew in what direction the exit lay. I only knew one thing: if I didn’t get out, I would die. Heart pounding, I scrambled about on all fours, trying and failing to find an escape.
Then my right hand slipped on one of the skulls, momentarily covering its empty eye sockets. In that instant, everything went dark, as if it were my own eyes that had been covered. At first I was as terrified as a babe in the night, but then I had a childish thought: if I can’t see the skulls and the dog, they can’t see me….
That was when Sergeant Wilde threw a splash of cold water on me. I awoke with a start to see him glaring down at me, my blanket tangled about me.
“On your feet, Corporal,” he growled, waving a piece of paper above my blinking eyes. “The Indians are causing trouble again. We’ve got orders to roust those copper-skinned heathens.”
I wiped away the water that was dribbling down my cheek and sat up, disengaging the blankets. My flannel undershirt was sopping wet, and I was annoyed at having been awakened so soon from my first opportunity to sleep. By the faint light coming in through the cracks in the barracks wall, I could see that dawn was breaking.
“Why me?” I grumbled, looking around at the occupants of the four other bunks, all of them blissfully snoring. “Why not one of the others?”
“Corporal Grayburn!” he barked. “I’ll have none of your guff. Another remark like that and you’ll be up on charges.”
I quickly buttoned my lip. Discipline is strict in the North-West Mounted Police; a single angry remark to a superior bears a five-dollar fine. I didn’t want to risk a whole week’s pay, especially on Wilde, who wouldn’t recognize a proper insult when he heard one.
Wilde was a fierce, hot-tempered man. He stood more than six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick black moustache. When he sat, he had a lazy air about him, like a dog taking the sun, but he could bark out orders like no other sergeant. More than one of our men had taken “French leave,” deserting the force rather than face any more of Wilde’s insults.
Wilde marched, rather than walked, everywhere he went; it was a wonder his thudding footsteps hadn’t awakened everyone in the barracks. He looked down at me, hands on hips, a slight smirk twitching his moustache. I realized that he’d chosen me because I’d gotten so little sleep in the past few days. He’d enjoy seeing me yawn and droop in the saddle.
It was no secret that Wilde didn’t like me. He was a bad card player and a sore loser, while I, in contrast, was a natural at poker. I win not because I have the stoic countenance of the Indian, or because I am particularly adept at the game, but because I’m lucky. The very cards I’m seeking for my hand come to me, as if by magic.
The other men were good-natured about losing their wages to me, although they refused to let me play with them again. Wilde, however, was convinced that I was a cheater, and took an intense dislike to me.
“We ride at six o’clock,” he told me. “I expect you to be ready.” Then he turned and strode out of the barracks.
A blanket-covered form on one of the nearby beds stirred, and a sleepy voice called out. “What is it, Marmaduke? Reveille?”
“It’s nothing,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
I fumbled for the pocket watch I keep beside my bed and consulted it. Assuming the time on it was correct — every watch I touch runs either too fast or too slow, which was one of the reasons why I hadn’t become a watch maker like my father — I had less than twenty minutes to prepare. I rose from my bed, pulled on breeches, jacket, socks and boots, then stumbled over to the stove and stoked it with kindling. Then I hurried outside to the creek for a pail of water to boil for tea.
I looked up from the gurgling stream at the sun, whi
ch was just rising over the hills. It hung huge over the horizon, mottled with a peculiar reddish hue. The Indians call this rare phenomenon a “painted sun” and say it is an omen of ill fortune. I shivered as I thought of this, although at the time I attributed my tremors to the fact that my hands were immersed in cold water. Then I rose with the dripping bucket and hurried back to the bunkhouse, turning my back on the celestial warning.
Breakfast was the same as it always was at Maple Creek: a biscuit hard as rock, hot black tea to soak it in, and a few slivers of dried apple, as withered as the face of a crone. There was no time to fry up bacon; I had barely time to pack my saddlebags with spare stockings, shirt, horse brush, currycomb, and mess kit. I buckled on my spurs and strapped on my cartridge belt and revolver, all the while chewing on the granite-like bread and slurping mouthfuls of hot tea.
I ran a hand over my lips, wiping away the crumbs. Thankfully I didn’t need a shave. I ran a comb through my hair, put on the pillbox hat that the sergeant always demanded we wear on duty, despite the fact that he himself wore a Stetson, and adjusted it to the regulation angle of two fingers’ width above the right eye. Then I packed the comb away with a razor, shaving brush, sponge, and soap in my holdall and stuffed it into my saddlebags. The Sergeant had neglected to inform me where we were riding to or how long we’d be away, and I’d been too somnambulate to inquire. For all I knew, we’d be on the trail for days. I added a change of undergarments to the bag, then carefully packed my pipe in its velvet-lined leather case. The pipe was a fine bulldog briar with a twisted stem of English amber and a cool-smoking rubber mouthpiece. Here in the North-West Territories, it was difficult to find the fine tobacco that I had developed a taste for during my three years of working in the tobacconist’s shop in Ottawa. The best I could do was a tin of Hudson’s Bay Imperial Mixture, which I added to the rest of my kit.
I rushed out to the stables and saddled up Buck, the bronco I’d been assigned upon my posting to the Maple Creek detachment two months prior. He was a good steady horse, bred on the prairie and accustomed to its extremes. He wasn’t much to look at: just a solid dun colour throughout, and not overly swift. But he was a solid trooper, nonetheless, and devoted to his duties as an NWMP mount. He’d been stolen shortly after my arrival by Indian braves, but he’d returned to the stables all on his own two days later, with an Indian’s handprint in ochre paint on his rump as a souvenir of his adventures. I could only assume that he’d bucked the thief right off his back, then ventured home again.
That was when I’d changed his name to Buck, a colloquial term for an Indian warrior — and a damn fine pun, as far as I was concerned.
Buck didn’t look any happier at our early departure than I did. He puffed out his stomach as I cinched the saddle tight, but a knee to the stomach put paid to that trick. I slid my Winchester into the saddle’s carry case, fastened my saddlebags in place, and mounted up.
As I trotted out of the stable, Wilde cast a baleful eye on me and snapped the face of his pocket watch shut. He didn’t say a word to me, but instead just turned his horse, a high-tempered black, toward the trail that led to the west. He whistled for his dogs — a pair of fierce hounds that followed him everywhere — but they refused to follow him. Instead they hunkered down with their bellies to the ground, growling their refusal.
Wilde addressed the dogs in a disgusted tone: “What, afraid of the wild Indians are you? Damn cowards.” He wheeled his horse around and spurred it forward. I had to spur my own horse to catch up with him. Buck snorted his displeasure, but picked up his pace. Still a little shaken by my dream, I was glad we’d left the dogs behind. They reminded me of the dead hound in my dream.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“To the head of the railway line,” Wilde said. “Chief Piapot and his band have placed their tepees in the way of the construction crews. We’re to give him official notice to move on.”
We hadn’t far to go, then: no more than a morning’s ride. We trotted through the thickly forested hills, following the railway tracks. The freshly laid steel reflected the rays of the morning sun, twin slashes of red across the ground.
As we rode, I mused upon what was to be done. The band of Cree that Piapot commanded had been assigned a reservation, but insisted, instead, on continuing to wander about the prairie. What an irony that, out of all this trackless wilderness, they had chosen a campsite directly in the way of the CPR line!
As if hearing my thoughts, the Sergeant interrupted the silence.
“They chose that camping spot deliberately, you know,” he said. “We’ve been having no end of trouble with those savages. First it was tomahawks, wedged in the spaces where the rails met, and then it was a tree trunk across the line. It’s only by the grace of God there hasn’t been a derailment, and lives lost. It’s time we put an end to Piapot’s mischief.”
I nodded because the Sergeant seemed to expect it, but kept my own counsel. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Wilde: the acts of vandalism he’d listed were against the law and demanded a response. It was just that I wanted to see the right men punished for the crime. All sorts of Indians passed through the Cypress Hills: Cree, Assinaboine, Blood, Blackfoot, and Peigan. It could have been braves from any one of these bands that had committed the mischief. The North-West Mounted Police weren’t like the American cavalry to the south, pouncing upon any red man who happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. We were a police force, and we relied upon investigation, rather than brute force, to help us find and punish the right culprit.
I glanced sidelong at the Sergeant as we rode, and revised that last thought. Some of us believed in conducting an investigation more thoroughly than others.
The sun was warm on our backs by the time we reached the end of the line. I knew we were getting close when I saw a train engine and four flatbed cars, piled high with steel rails, just ahead on the track. The engine was powered by one of the new magnetic perpetual motion devices: in the place where a coal car would normally be was a flatcar on which was mounted an upright beam of wood like a ship’s mast. A gigantic magnet, suspended from the mast on a wire, swung slowly back and forth, causing a curved steel beam below it to rock, and thus to power pistons below it. When engaged by gears, the pistons drove the wheels. The steady metallic ticking noise the device produced was a far cry from the steam trains of my youth, with their billowing clouds of smoke and chuffing engines. It had the added advantage over a steam train of not emitting burning embers that set the dry prairie grass on fire.
I expected to hear the pounding of sledgehammers and the rasp of saws cutting wood as we drew closer, but the work site was still. Instead of the sounds of men going industriously about their labour we heard the beating of an Indian drum.
The railway navvies — a crew of blond, burly Swedes — stood in a huddled group, drawing on pipes and talking in nervous voices while their foreman cast dark glances at a circle of a dozen tepees that had been erected on the railway’s right of way. The edge of one of the tepees — a rude shelter of buffalo hide painted with crimson figures that seemed half man and half beast — was only a few inches away from where the unfinished tracks stopped, blocking the line completely. The drumming came from inside it.
The Sergeant and I reined our horses to a halt and stared at the wild scene before us. Piapot’s braves — several dozen of them — were all mounted on their ponies, rifles in hand. Many had daubed their faces with paint, and several were wearing their eagle-feather bonnets and painted war shirts. They rode back and forth across the prairie, every now and again swooping toward the halted train. Each time they did, the navvies stepped back a pace or two as the Indians got uncomfortably close.
Upon spotting our red coats, one of the warriors let out a whoop. Several fired their rifles in the air, and the smell of gunpowder drifted toward us. I winced slightly, but kept my composure. The Indians loathe a coward.
I didn’t see any women or children in the Cree camp. I could only assume they were ins
ide their tepees.
The foreman of the railway gang was a short, wiry Englishman who wore a red flannel shirt with sleeves rolled up and a cloth cap pushed back to expose his high forehead. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and shouted at us over the din of whoops and rifle shots.
“We’ve been having a bit of trouble with the Indians these past two days,” he said with typical English understatement as a bullet from one of the brave’s rifles zinged off the steel side of the train engine. Inside it, the engineer and mechanic ducked.
The navvies fell back into the dubious shelter of the railway cars, and the foreman glanced back over his shoulder, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “I’m hoping you can settle the Indians down and get them to move on.”
“We’ll settle things, sure enough,” Sergeant Wilde grumbled, looking over the head of the foreman at the paint-daubed warriors. Then he leaned over to open his saddlebag, and pulled a piece of paper from it — the same one he’d waved at me that morning. He straightened in his saddle, and held the paper out in front of him.
“Chief Piapot!” he shouted. “I have here a written order for you and your band to quit this location. You are to take the northward trail to your reserve at once.”
The Indians had halted their whooping to listen to the Sergeant, but it was difficult to ascertain whether they understood him. As he lowered the paper, a group of them charged us, waving their rifles in the air. The foreman scuttled away, and I tightened my grip on Buck’s reins. I glanced at the Sergeant, wondering if I should draw my Winchester. He gave a slight shake of the head.