Apparition Trail, The

by Lisa Smedman

  Superintendent Cotton drummed his fingers on the table at which he sat. They were short and blunt, their squared tips matching the set of his shoulders.

  “I’ve heard that Steele was setting up a new division — supposedly some crackerjack force of hand-picked men.” Cotton’s eyes lingered on my dirt-grimed jacket, and the torn, bloody hole in my riding breeches. “Judging by the wild tale that you’ve just told me, it sounds more like a crackpot division.”

  I sat bolt upright in my chair, my face hot with anger. “But you’ve seen the evidence yourself!” I cried. “When the first Fort Macleod was washed away by that sudden deluge, and seven men died.”

  “A flash flood. Nothing more.”

  I glared at Cotton, seeing now that nothing I could say would convince him. He reminded me of my father: unwilling to believe in anything that didn’t fit his notion of the way the world was ordered. I ground my teeth. Cotton had obviously spent too many years in the militia; it had forced him to see only in neat little parade-square rows.

  I could see that I was on the verge of angering the Superintendent, when what I needed was his assistance. To get it, I had to present him with something that he could set his sights upon.

  “There is still the matter of Wandering Spirit’s assault on me,” I said in a steadier voice, gesturing at my bandaged thigh. “And the disappearance of Mr. Chambers. I would request, sir, permission to set out with a patrol at first light, to arrest Wandering Spirit and to search for our special constable.”

  The Superintendent’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need to be told my job, Corporal. A crime has been committed, and an arrest shall be made. A patrol will be sent out — but one of our own men will lead it. We’re quite capable of bringing our Indians to justice without the aid of Q Division.”

  “But sir!” I protested. “You don’t realize what you’re—”

  “Corporal Grayburn!” Cotton shouted. “That’s enough!”

  I sat on the edge of my seat, fists balled in my lap in frustration. How could anyone possibly arrest a man who was impervious to bullets, and who could kill with the touch of a coup stick? I considered myself quite adept at dealing with Indians, and yet I’d only escaped death by a hair’s breadth. I shuddered at the thought of what might befall a less experienced policeman. Yet I could see by the flinty look in Cotton’s eye that further protests would do more harm than good. I sat in silence for a moment, listening to the faint clatter-clack-clacking of the perpetual motion wheels that generated power for the electric bulbs illuminating the office, and trying to ignore the ache in my stomach.

  A thought occurred to me: perhaps if Steele intervened….

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “What is it now, Corporal?”

  Cotton’s patience had almost reached the end of its tether. I chose my words carefully. “I would also request that I be allowed to use one of the fort’s aerographs to relay a message to Regina. My Superintendent will be wondering why I didn’t respond to his telegram this morning.” I glanced outside the window of Cotton’s office. It had been dusk by the time the constable and I had ridden the six miles back to the fort on his horse, and now it was fully dark. The moon was round and full; a perfect night for sending an aerograph.

  Cotton’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Very well. I’ll get Constable Browne to show you to the aerograph operator. When you’re done, you can bunk down in the men’s barracks. I believe there’s a spare bed; see the quartermaster for a blanket.”

  I stood and saluted while the Superintendent called the constable to his office.

  Constable Browne led me out of the building that housed the Superintendent’s office and past the recreation room, where I heard the clacking of billiard balls. I glanced in and saw men drinking cold cider and smoking their pipes, and heard the buzz of male voices raised in companionable conversation. While Browne collected the civilian who operated the fort’s aerographs, I bought tobacco at the bar and sat down with my pipe to write my report to Steele. I wrote slowly, composing my message with care. The aerograph was a much more secure way of sending messages than the telegraph, but sometimes aerographs went astray. Just in case this one did, I couched my report in language that only Steele would understand. I didn’t want a lost report to be the basis for alarm.

  As I wrote the message and enjoyed my first decent smoke in weeks — the bar sold Capstan Full Flavoured by the tin — a wagon pulled up outside. A teamster with a mailbag over his shoulder strode into the room, and there followed the usual hubbub and excitement that follows the arrival of the mail.

  After a few minutes, Browne returned with the aerograph operator, a young fellow by the name of Bertrand whose portly girth and thick-lensed spectacles would have rendered him medically unfit for service as a policeman. I decided that he must be a civilian employee of the force.

  I nodded hello. “I’ve just about finished my report. Won’t be a minute.”

  Bertrand gave me the kind of look an officer gives a recruit who is late for picquet duty. “You interrupted my reading,” he said in a petulant voice. Then he glanced down at my report and added: “I’ve better things to do than wait for constables who spell buffalo with an e on the end of the word.”

  I felt an angry flush spring to my cheeks, but didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response. Instead, I crooked an arm around the paper I was writing on and finished my report to Steele. Bertrand, meanwhile, looked around the room with an air of smug superiority, all the while uttering several loud complaints about being made to stand and wait.

  I folded the paper in two and rose to my feet. “Done.”

  Bertrand reached out to take it, but I jerked the paper back. “Sorry,” I said. “This report is for the eyes of my Superintendent only. I’ll have to place it inside the aerograph myself, Bertrand, so you’d best show me to it.”

  He pursed his lips angrily, but led me out of the recreation room and across the parade square. We walked to the northeast corner of the fort, where a bastion stood. After ordering me to knock out my pipe, Bertrand climbed the stairs, wheezing all the way up. I followed him, taking the stairs easily and shaking my head at the poor physical specimens they were letting into the force these days.

  At the top of the bastion were two of the wonders of the modern military age: a Gatling gun, its perpetual motion mechanism softly humming; and an aerograph.

  The latter looked like a miniature version of the air bicycle I’d ridden to Regina, but with hollow brass tubes in which a message could be placed, instead of seats for riders. Its hydrogen-filled balloon was about a foot long, and was affixed to a railing by means of a wire. It floated in the night sky, propellers whirring, straining at its tether like a dog on a lead.

  “Where’s the message going?” Bertrand asked.

  “To headquarters.”

  Bertrand stared at me if I’d just said something stupid. “All the way to Regina?” He shook his head. “Medicine Hat has a telegraph. Your message can be relayed from there.”

  “No! I can’t run the risk that the Metis will cut the line again. This report is urgent; it must go directly to Steele at once. Calibrate the aerograph for Regina.”

  Bertrand met my stare for a moment, then turned his back on me and winched the aerograph down to the bastion. “Cotton’s going to hear about this,” he muttered. “He’ll see to it that your division pays the extra cost.”

  Bertrand pulled a slim leather case of what looked like watchmaker’s tools from his pocket and began tinkering with the aerograph, carefully adjusting the mechanism that drove its miniature wings and propellers. He’d pushed his glasses up his face so that they rested on his forehead; I realized that he was working entirely by feel. He paused to wet a finger and hold it up to test the wind, then continued with his work.

  Despite the man’s odious nature, I was intrigued. The moon was bright enough that I could peer over his shoulder and watch as he set the angle of the tiny gyroscopes inside. The gimballed wheels within wheels — each
a perpetual motion device — spun gently as his thick fingers brushed against them.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Adjusting the sensors.” His nasal voice was edged with a touch of irritation, and I wondered if my presence had set the machine off-kilter. Yet he couldn’t resist the urge to boast. “Not just anyone can be an aerograph operator. It takes a special touch and a keen mind to align the navigational mechanisms. Each has to be precisely aligned with both the Earth’s and the Moon’s magnetic fields, and calibrated to take into account large sources of iron, which can throw the device off course. If it’s done incorrectly, the aerograph could miss its target by dozens or even hundreds of miles. Fortunately, I have a photographic memory and have studied all of the known sources of magnetic deviance in the North-West Territories. There’s a direct current of magnetic force between Fort Macleod and Medicine Hat — that’s why our detachment was selected as an aerograph post — and from there the device can follow the rails to Regina.”

  I wanted to challenge him on his preposterous claim to a photographic memory that extended to cover all of the North-West Territories, but kept silent, not wanting to interrupt his delicate work. I retreated to the other side of the bastion and leaned against the Gatling gun, waiting for him to finish. After a moment or two, he seemed satisfied with his adjustments. He nodded his head so that his spectacles fell back onto the bridge of his nose, pushed them into place over his eyes, then held out a pudgy hand. “Give me your message.”

  I did so, and watched as he rolled it up, then opened the tube at the heart of the aerograph and slipped the report inside it. Bertrand screwed the end on the tube, then unhooked the aerograph from its tether. He closed his eyes, aimed the aerograph toward the west, and let it go. It flew straight and true, and I let out a sigh of relief, thankful that my strange effect on mechanical devices had not impeded its course. As the aerograph disappeared into the night, Bertrand turned and walked heavily down the stairs to the ground, ignoring me as if I had ceased to exist.

  I waited atop the bastion until the sound of miniature wings flapping and propellers turning faded away. Anxious though I was to know what Steele’s orders would be, I knew I had a long wait ahead of me. The aerograph would take several hours to wing its way over the four hundred miles between Fort Macleod and Regina. Even if Steele was awake and read the report directly, it would be hours more before his return missive winged its way back, via aerograph, to Fort Macleod. It would be mid-afternoon of the next day, at best, before Steele’s reply reached me.

  Still dry from the long day’s march across the prairie, I decided to find something cold to drink. I returned to the recreation room, purchased a large bottle of cold tea, which had jokingly been labelled “Fine Old Rye,” and settled into an armchair. I listened idly to the buzz of conversation around me. The topics were the usual ones: the men groused about their officers, about the lack of women, and about the heat. I perked up when I thought I overheard the word “ghost” and saw the fellow who had uttered it holding up a newspaper. The other constables all laughed, as if he’d just told them a joke. I was just about to get up from my chair when the fellow took his leave of the others and crossed the room to sit at a table near my armchair.

  He was a constable, although his jacket was so faded and dusty that the chevron nearly didn’t show. His sunburned face and casual manner marked him as a long-time member of the force. He lay a crisp-looking copy of the Battleford Post Journal that must have come in tonight’s mail on the table, then opened up a tin of peaches and began eating them. On a whim, I stared at the newspaper, silently imploring him to offer it to me.

  My attempt at thought transference must have worked. The fellow looked up and stuck out his hand.

  “I’m Daniel Davis,” he announced. Then he realized that he was still holding the spoon in his hand and grinned. He touched it to his forehead in a mock salute. “Otherwise known as ‘Peach.’” He winked, and lifted the can. “They cost a fortune to ship up from Fort Benton, but I love them.”

  “I’m Grayburn. My first name is Marmaduke — and you shorten it to ‘Duke’ at your peril. If you’re done with your newspaper, could I borrow it?”

  Constable Davis gave me the strangest look when I introduced myself, but he handed the newspaper over to me readily enough. As I began to read, I could feel his eyes boring into me. I lifted the newspaper, setting it between us like a screen.

  The newspaper was typeset in the typical fashion, with long columns of text punctuated here and there with block-letter headlines in the same size of type. For this reason, the item that was of import to me did not catch my eye for some time. I only noticed it after I glanced at an illustration on the page, which showed a clean-shaven Mountie in a pillbox hat and military jacket. The illustration was so poorly drawn it might have been any beardless member of the force. Then I noticed the headline beside it: North-West Mounted Police corporal missing.

  Wondering if another member of my former detachment had disappeared, I quickly scanned the article. My pipe nearly fell from my mouth when I saw my own name and realized that the illustration was meant to be me. According to the article, which was as vague as it was inaccurate, “Special Constable C.” and I had been spirited away to the underworld by the ghost of an Indian woman named either Abigail or Emily McDougall, in revenge for being unable to save her dying daughter. The writer concluded that the spate of disappearances that had been occurring across the prairie were the work of malevolent Indian ghosts who yanked unsuspecting settlers into the hereafter.

  I shook my head in disbelief. How was it possible that the newspaper had come across the story of my disappearance from Victoria Mission so quickly? Someone must have found the letter I’d left for Steele at the mouth of the cave, read its contents, and reiterated them to a journalist: that much was clear. Yet that had been just this morning. Even if the story had been relayed by telegraph this very day, how could the newspaper containing the story be in my hands when it took four days for the mails to travel by wagon from the Medicine Hat train depot to Fort Macleod, the most western of North-West Territories detachments?

  Feeling eyes on me, I lowered the paper and saw that Constable Davis was still staring at me. “The man who went missing: that’s you, isn’t it?”

  I nodded mutely. Then I looked down at the newspaper, and at the date at the top of the page: August 11 — two full weeks later than I thought it was.

  “What is today’s date?” I asked sharply.

  “Why, it’s the sixteenth,” Davis replied.

  Today was August 16? That meant that nearly three weeks had elapsed; yet every sense told me that no more than a day had passed. I felt my face go pale.

  Davis leaned forward and placed a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right, Grayburn?”

  “Yes. Fine.” I answered automatically, folding the newspaper. My mind was elsewhere. I was fearful that my days among Q Division were numbered. I’d let an account of my investigation fall into the hands of the general public, and now the newspaper was stirring things up. If I weren’t careful, every settler in the North-West would be looking over his shoulder for fear of ghosts. Steele would not be impressed.

  There was a chance, however, that my discoveries thus far might outweigh this error. If what I had seen today was real, and not some grand illusion, the missing settlers were being turned into buffalo, which then were slaughtered and eaten by the Indians. I wondered if the McDougalls were among the buffalo I saw being butchered at the bottom of the cliff. The shaggy bull whose heart the Indians had cut out may have been the missionary himself.

  I shivered. The poor souls might as well have been dragged by ghosts into the netherworld that Sergeant Wilde and I had ridden to; it would almost have been a kinder fate.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Davis asked.

  “You can’t believe everything they print in the newspapers,” I told him, mindful of Steele’s instruction to discuss my assignment only with officers. �
�The Journal obviously was in error on this story — as you can plainly see, I am not missing at all. I just lost count of the days it took to make the journey here from Victoria Mission. I must have suffered sunstroke.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy him. He nodded as I rose from my seat, but then added something that stopped me in my tracks: “The Indians certainly do believe in ghosts. I’ve seen them go without food rather than pass by the spot where a ‘ghost’ has been spotted.”

  I sat back down. “When was this?”

  Davis quickly warmed to his tale, obviously enjoying the telling of it. “A year ago, I was escorting an Assinaboine band north to their reserve at Battleford. We were just about to ford the Saskatchewan River when the entire band stopped dead in its tracks. More than a thousand men, women and children squatted on the sand and refused to cross because they thought they saw a ghost on the other side.”

  Davis shook his head. “I crossed the river myself, and ordered the carts that held the government provisions across as well, but the Indians refused to budge, even when I broke open the stores and brewed up tea. For an entire day the Indians just sat there, even after I threatened to dump their food in the river. The next morning everything was all right again. The ‘ghost’ was gone, and the Indians crossed the river.”

  I leaned forward, intrigued. I wondered if Davis, like me, had blundered into the after world. “Did you see the ghost yourself?”

  Davis laughed. “It wasn’t a ghost. It was an animal: a buffalo calf with the lightest hair I’ve ever seen, almost milk-white. Just a wobbly-legged little wretch that had been separated from the herd, judging by the lost look in its eye. It seemed to be looking for its mother, and was bleating piteously. The Indians saw its white coat, and mistook it for a ghost.”

  A feeling of restlessness settled over me. There was a connection here; I could sense it. When I’d emerged from the tunnel near the buffalo jump, I’d also seen a flash of something white. It had been smaller than the buffalo that had thundered past me, about the size of a calf. The painful blister its hoof had left on my foot assured me that it was very real — not a ghost at all.