by Lisa Smedman
“Did you find any hoof prints on the shore where you saw the white calf?”
Davis gave me a strange look, as if I’d asked a very odd question.
“Not a one — but that doesn’t prove that it was a ghost.”
I suspected otherwise, but I kept my own counsel.
“What month was this?” I asked.
Davis replied at once. “I remember the date well: May, 24 — the Queen’s birthday. I was wishing I could have been celebrating it with the others at the mess, instead of being stuck out on the prairie, herding a bunch of superstitious savages.”
I thought back to what Steele had told me. The woman in the report he had collected had to have been Emily; the facts all fit. A Peigan woman gives birth in May of 1883 to a child with pale hair and skin. The child is stillborn, its soul presumably flown to the Big Sands that is the Indian equivalent of Purgatory. On a sandy riverbank, Indians see the ghost of a white-haired buffalo: Iniskim’s astral body, which for some reason took the form of a buffalo. A day later, a medicine woman uses magic to bring the stillborn infant to life, and the ghost on the river is gone.
Just over a year later, the child is seriously ill. Emily carries Iniskim into the cave near Victoria Mission, and Chambers and I follow. When I emerge from the other side of the tunnel, I see a flash of white, something I now realize must have been an albino buffalo calf: Iniskim, now transformed into a buffalo, body and soul.
Intuitively, I knew what must have happened. Iniskim, it seemed, had been about to die a second time in her short and unhappy life, this time of a fever. In desperation her mother had carried her into the cavern, and the girl had been transformed into a buffalo calf. Somehow, this had saved her. Was that what Emily had been talking about, when she said there was “medicine” at Victoria Mission? Why had she chosen this drastic course of action when I’d provided her with another alternative? I’d given her twenty dollars — why hadn’t she used the money to buy medicine from the traders?
“You said the Assinaboine saw this ghost on the banks of the South Saskatchewan,” I prompted. “Where were you, exactly?”
“I don’t recall,” Davis answered. “It wasn’t a ford that we usually took — it was a crossing suggested by one of our scouts: a sand bar in the river, somewhere between the South Saskatchewan’s confluence with the Red Deer River and the ferry crossing at Saskatchewan Landing. It was the only time I ever went that way; I’d be hard pressed to find the spot again. Why do you ask?”
I gave what I hoped was a nonchalant shrug, trying to hide the pang of disappointment that I felt. I’d been just at the edge of something important; I could sense it.
“Just idle curiosity. I like a good ghost story as much as the next man. What’s the name of the scout who led you to the ford?”
Davis frowned. “I think his name was Many something-or-other.”
“Which detachment is he attached to today?”
Davis shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I sat back to think about what I’d just heard. Steele had said that a Peigan woman — whom I now knew to be Emily — had given birth to her albino daughter at Fort Qu’appelle, more than one hundred and fifty miles east of the South Saskatchewan. Why had the buffalo-shaped ghost of the stillborn Iniskim appeared on a river hundreds of miles away?
I asked Davis more questions, but it soon became clear that he could add nothing more to his strange tale. The rattle of billiard balls, the drone of voices, and Davis’s cheerful smile were starting to bear down upon me. I needed to be alone, to think. I had too many unanswered questions, too many leads. Everything seemed to be connected: the disappearance of the McDougalls, Wandering Spirit’s attack on Dickens, Emily and her daughter, Wandering Spirit and Big Bear, the buffalo … but how, and why? Which should I investigate first?
I decided to let geography decide for me. Whatever clues remained at the ford where the white buffalo calf had appeared two years ago, the confluence of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers lay more than two hundred miles northeast of my present location. Even by air bicycle — which Fort Macleod did not have — it would take an entire day to reach, and then still more time to follow the more than one hundred miles of river that lay between that point and the ferry crossing at Saskatchewan Landing. It would take me days or even weeks to find the crossing that Davis had mentioned — assuming I could find it. And even then, what could I reasonably expect to discover after such a length of time?
Closer at hand were Big Bear and Wandering Spirit, but I wouldn’t be able to leave until morning for the buffalo jump — which I learned had the rather gruesome name of Head Smashed In. I could join the patrol that would be sent out from the fort, but even if Wandering Spirit and Big Bear had not decamped by then, how was I to force any answers out of a man who had nothing to fear from bullets, and how was I to locate a man capable of becoming invisible? Tracking Big Bear down would be like trying to catch the wind.
There was also the matter of Chambers to deal with. After being transformed into a buffalo he had pleaded with me for help. I was the only man in the whole of the North-West Territories who would know him for the man he was, and not just some “dumb beast,” fit only for shooting. I had no idea where Chambers was now, but at least I had a starting point: the spot where he had scratched out the word help beside the riverbank. Yet how was I going to convince Fort Macleod’s scouts that tracking down a buffalo was important, especially when Superintendent Cotton already thought I was a crackpot? What would they do when I started talking to the shaggy beast?
As I pondered, my stomach began to ache again. If this was typho-malaria that was cramping my intestines, it was taking the devil’s own time to run its course.
It was time for some painkiller. I handed the newspaper back to Davis and rose from my chair.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I think I’ll turn in.”
Davis waved goodbye with his spoon. “Pleasant dreams.”
My dreams that night were anything but pleasant. I dreamed that I stood at the bottom of a rocky bluff, knee-deep in animal bones. From somewhere up above came the sound of a flute and the tramp of tiny feet. I recognized it at once: the music of the Pied Piper, a bedtime tale that had always filled me with terror when I was a child. Whenever my father read me that story of little children marching to their doom, I’d stuff my ears with cotton and hide under the bed for the rest of the night.
I clapped my hands over my ears, trying to blot out the sound, as dust rained down on my head.
A stone fell from up above and bounced, with a sharp crack, off a buffalo skull at my feet. I recognized it as the oddly shaped stone I’d found in the woods near the McDougall home. It chirped as it flew through the air, bounced again, and vanished.
Up above, the pit-pat of rat feet became the thunder of hooves. The sound reached the lip of the bluff, and then buffalo began to spill over the edge above. As the animals fell, they became human — women and children screamed and men cried out in terror as they rained down upon me. I threw up my arms to protect my head, certain that a heavy body would land upon me at any moment.
Suddenly, all was silent. Lowering my arms, I looked around. I still stood on a jumbled heap of bones, but this time, they were human. Skulls peered up at me, chunks of greying flesh still clinging to the bone. As I watched, horrified, a crow settled on one of the skulls and began to peck out what remained of one of its eyes.
I saw other animals skulking through the bones, stopping now and again to worry the bits of flesh that clung to them. A lynx sank its teeth into an arm and dragged it to one side; a bear picked up a thick thighbone with its paws and bent it until it cracked, releasing an ooze of marrow that it slurped like honey with its tongue. Foxes, gophers, and mice scurried in and over the bones, and even a deer paused to nibble at the withered flesh on a skull as it if were lichen on a rock. I backed away in horror from this unnatural feast, trying not to draw their attention, but my foot trod upon a dry bone that snapped with a loud crack.<
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All of the animals looked up. Their eyes held a keen intelligence that was greater than any animal’s, and something more: a hunger. I realized then that the grisly repast they had just enjoyed was not enough. They wanted more. They wanted my flesh.
Nervously, I backed away. With each step I took, the animals crept forward, coming ever closer until they formed a half-circle around me, eyes gleaming and mouths chanting. The bear held the spiral-shaped stone to his mouth with one gigantic paw, and was playing it like a flute, leading the other animals forward. As I stumbled backward, I heard someone calling from up above.
“Take it! Throw it up to me!”
The bear and I looked up at the same time. Standing at the top of the cliff, silhouetted by a bloody sun, was a buffalo with yellow-brown hair. The animal had the usual shaggy beard, but its cheeks were bare, as if they had been neatly shaved, and a growth of hair on its upper lip resembled a moustache. Although I had not been looking at the buffalo when it spoke, I knew its mouth had not moved. Its words had come to me via thought transference.
Before the bear could react, I plucked the stone from its paw and hurled it up to the buffalo. Chambers caught it in his hand. He stood, a naked man silhouetted by the sun, and raised the stone in his fist in a triumphant salute.
I laughed in delight, but my joy was short-lived. Even as I watched, the stone that Chambers held above his head grew. In the space of a heartbeat it was as large as his fist, then as large as his head. His arm sagged under the weight of it — and then the stone suddenly became as big as a buffalo. Chambers had only enough time to give one short gasp of surprise before he vanished beneath its crushing weight.
On top of the stone now stood a buffalo calf, its legs still wobbly, and its eyes large and pink. The calf’s hair was a pure white, wet with the juices of the womb and streaked with the blood of its birth. Behind it, framing its snorting head like a halo, was the full moon.
I realized that I had something tucked under my arm: a newspaper. I unfolded it and tried to read the front page, but the headlines wouldn’t hold still. I could only make out a single word that kept changing every time I looked at it: MISSING, VANISHED, DISAPPEARED, GONE.
Then the text below the headline began moving. The neat columns of letters broke apart and re-formed into crude stick figures like the ones the Indians paint on their tepees. Around the outside of the page, forming an enclosing circle, were stick men with lines radiating from their heads like the feathers of Indian war bonnets. Inside the circle they formed were other stick figures, these ones without feathers. They seemed to be arranged in a spiral, and about half way along the spiral the figures of humans were replaced by squarish animal figures with four stick legs, curved horns protruding from their heads, and short tails: buffalo. The spiral ended at the centre of the page, where a large black blot of blood had fallen upon the paper. I realized that my nose, which Four Finger Pete had broken, was dripping ink.
I stared at the page, knowing that I should be able to read it, but frustrated that I could not. Somehow I knew that it held a message of great import. Yet the stick figures meant nothing to me. I was an uneducated child who had not yet learned his letters.
I searched the unfamiliar page for anything I could understand. I at last found in an upper corner the only words that remained intelligible: a date. Even as it disappeared, I committed it to memory: September 15, 1884.
Memory echoed in my ears then, in the form of a woman’s voice. I heard again the words that Emily had spoken as we stood next to the body of her husband on the deck of the riverboat. She had warned me of the “Day of Changes,” and at last I could guess at the meaning of her words. In less than one month’s time, when the moon became full again, each and every settler in the North-West Territories — more than seven thousand souls — would be turned into a buffalo. Only Indians would be spared.
I dropped the newspaper and looked around me. The animals had changed into white crows. These sprang into the air and began flying toward the top of the cliff, their wings flapping in unison.
As I watched, I felt something moving in my hands and instinctively released it. An aerograph rose into the sky with the creak and flap of mechanical wings, following the crows. Just as it reached the top of the cliff, the aerograph suddenly swerved. Its air bag caught on one of the white buffalo’s curved horns and tore wide open. Now the aerograph was falling. Flail as its mechanical wings might, it was doomed.
I was doomed.
I had become the aerograph — and I had no wings. I fell toward the stone on which the white buffalo stood, drawn toward it by the invisible force of gravity, flailing my useless arms and screaming as I tumbled headlong through the air. The stone drew me to it like a magnet. I crashed into it with tremendous force, feeling my metal bones bend and break, my airbag clothes tatter as they were torn apart.
Now I lay between the buffalo calf’s hooves, staring helplessly up at it. One hoof lifted, then paused just above my stomach as the animal considered my fate. Above it, winging their way in a tight spiral toward the moon, the white crows screamed for blood. I could feel fever-heat radiating from the hoof above me as it settled onto my stomach, pressing down with painful force, and I mumbled a protest through bloodied lips.
“No,” I croaked. “Please. I tried to help you. No—”
I woke up to a hand shaking my shoulder. Sitting up, I found myself in an unfamiliar barracks. I nearly doubled over as pain punched through my stomach like a fist. Clutching the spot above my scar with one hand, I grabbed the hand that was offered me and gripped it tightly until the worst of the pain had stopped.
I looked up into the worried eyes of Constable Davis. Like me, he was dressed only in his undergarments. The barracks were dark, and I heard snores and the deep breathing of men in slumber coming from the bunks all around me. An empty bed, its blankets thrown back, was next to mine. Moonlight slanted in through the windows, illuminating the room with a pale white glow. Outside the window, a full moon hung in the sky; the sight of it set my heart to pounding. I felt dizzy, disoriented.
“What day is it?” I gasped.
My question took Davis aback. “Why, it’s the sixteenth,” he said. Then he glanced out the window. “Or rather, the seventeenth, since it’s now past midnight.”
I sighed with relief. The Day of Changes was not yet upon us.
“Are you all right, Grayburn?” he asked. “I heard you groaning in your sleep, and then you called out for help. Are you ill?”
Realizing that I was still gripping my stomach, I moved my hand away. Wincing at the pain that gnawed at my guts, I gestured at my haversack. Davis handed it to me.
“Just a bout of typho-malaria,” I said as I fished the bottle of patent medicine from the pack. “Several of the men at my detachment have it; the water at Moose Jaw is miasmic. I’ve just got a mild dose — nothing a little painkiller won’t manage. No sense in incurring a hospital stoppage if I can still perform my duties.”
I took several good swallows of the Pinkham’s, and after a moment felt a warm glow begin to replace the ache in my stomach. The young constable nodded, yawned, then crawled back into bed. I heard the crackle of the straw in his mattress.
“I don’t know what the bastards in Ottawa are thinking,” he muttered. “Docking a man’s pay just because he’s sick just doesn’t seem fair to me.”
“Nor to me,” I said, taking another swallow of painkiller. “So please, keep my infirmity to yourself, would you?”
“I will,” he said.
I lay in the dark for some time after that, listening to the other constables breathing. I was jealous of these men who slept so soundly; every time I tried to drift back to sleep I was awakened by the pain in my stomach, and imagined I heard Chambers’s voice calling to me. Was he somewhere out on the wide prairie even now, confused and befuddled by his buffalo form, praying I would come to his aid? My dream seemed to be urging me to cure him — but warning that any cure I effected might prove fatal.
<
br /> At last, giving up on sleep, I rose from bed and pulled on my breeches. I stepped outside the barracks and tamped some Capstan into my pipe, then struck a match and drew until the tobacco was cherry red. Leaning against the rough wooden wall of the barracks, I looked across the parade square that was bathed in moonlight. I tried to imagine the prairie in ten or twenty year’s time. Two decades earlier, there had been nothing on this spot but windswept prairie and a few tepees. Now there was a bustling police detachment. A hundred miles to the north lay Calgary, the current terminus of the CPR line. The town had only been surveyed last December, but already it had a population of 500. The Calgary Herald, a newspaper whose printing press had arrived by train only last month, was already boosting the town — claiming it would have a population of more than 1,000 before the year was out, and was further predicting a population of 5,000 in a decade’s time.
I glanced up at the moon, its “dark side” now bathed in light. If my dream were truly a prophetic one — and I had no reason to believe it was not — then in one month’s time the moon would be beaming down on a very different world. I tried to picture Fort Macleod, Calgary, and all of the other outposts and towns of the North-West Territories, large and small, with buildings vacant and silent. Nothing but ghost towns would dot the prairie then: ghost towns, and tepees, and the skulls of buffalo that had once been men, women, and children.
“Heya, napikwan. Gotta smoke?”
I started and dropped my pipe, which landed with a shower of sparks on the wooden boardwalk at my feet. Beside me, a stoop-shouldered man bent down to pick it up. When he handed it back to me, I recognized him at once by his short stature and the drooping moustache that matched the slouch of his shoulders: Jerry Potts, the most famous — and notorious — scout in the whole of the North-West Territories. At forty-seven years old he was nearly twice my age, but I say with no shame that he was easily twice the man I’d ever be.