Apparition Trail, The

by Lisa Smedman

Chafing at the delay, Steele did what he could to mobilize his forces. He telegraphed Maple Creek, ordering that detachment to limber up its nine-pound muzzle-loader and stand by. The limber was one of those powered by a perpetual motion device, and could travel swiftly over open prairie. If the Manitou Stone did turn out to be at the place where the spiral crossed the South Saskatchewan River, it would be a simple matter of sending a rider back to Maple Creek to alert the artillery crew, and the gun could be driven to the spot within twenty-four hours.

  Just in case the Manitou Stone had wound up elsewhere on the ley line, Steele sent telegrams to every detachment that was close to a spot where a disappearance had taken place, requesting the commanding officers to search the area for large or unusual boulders, and to use their field guns to blow these stones to pieces.

  As might be expected, the commanding officers responded with a barrage of questions. Why were they being given such strange orders? What was this new division — which they had barely heard of — up to, and under whose authority was the Superintendent acting? Steele had to come up with a plausible reason for his orders, and wound up weaving together fact and fiction. He explained that the stones were of religious significance to the Indians, and that they were to be smashed in order to demoralize the Indians and to make them think twice about supporting the much-anticipated Metis uprising. When Commissioner Irvine himself backed up Steele’s orders, the commanders at last agreed.

  Never one to sit idle myself, I used the time to send a telegram to the detachment at Fort Qu’appelle. I addressed it to Acting Hospital Steward Holmes, the fellow who had delivered the stillborn Iniskim and seen her alive several months later. I hoped that he could shed some light on the medicine woman’s identity, and urged him in my telegram to find out everything he could about her.

  I told Steele we needed to find and question the medicine woman about the Day of Changes and Iniskim’s role in it. Secretly, however, I hoped to persuade her to cure the cramps that had wracked my gut for the past six weeks. Although I was able to carry out my duties, the lingering of this bout of typho-malaria was starting to worry me. I wondered if I would ever be free of it.

  The return telegram from Holmes was a disappointment, however. It simply reiterated what he’d said in his report to Steele.

  Convinced that there had to be something more, I asked Steele if I could again see the report on the birth and resurrection, and read through it carefully. I found one detail that Steele had neglected to mention: according to Holmes, the birth had been a difficult one. I knew that already; Emily had told me as much herself. Holmes’s report added something more, however. Emily had lost a great deal of blood while giving birth, and at one point Holmes was convinced that he’d lost her. Yet even though he’d been about to give her up for dead, along with her child, she’d lived.

  I thought my efforts to find the medicine woman had come to an end, but then I heard that a scout by the name of Many Eagle Feathers had been ordered to report to Medicine Hat for questioning. I didn’t pay him much attention at first: he had been hired by North-West Mounted Police just six months ago, and turned out not to be the scout who had guided Constable Davis and the Assinaboine. He wasn’t the man we were looking for.

  He was half Blood Indian, though — the same tribe that the medicine woman who healed Iniskim was from — and he’d briefly spent time in a Blood camp, after his father had died. I decided to ask if he knew of the medicine woman, even though the odds were against it.

  I caught up to Many Eagle Feathers as he was getting ready to ride back to his detachment. He stood outside the blacksmith’s shop, watching the farrier shoe his horse. That surprised me — I thought that all half-breeds rode unshod ponies, as Indians did. This fellow, however, looked more white than Indian. He had close-cropped hair and wore trousers and a jacket. His only Indian accoutrements were his moccasins and a string of trade beads around his neck. Suspended from them was a silver crucifix, and beside it an amulet bearing the image of one of the Catholic saints. When I hailed him, and he greeted me in flawless English, I started to doubt that he’d have any information for me at all. Still, it was worth a try.

  I motioned him away from the ringing clangs of the farrier’s hammer. “Many Eagle Feathers, can I have a word with you?”

  “My name is Peter,” he said.

  He must have changed his name in the six months since he signed on as a police scout. I supposed he had adopted the Christian faith only recently. “Peter, then — can we talk?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m looking for a woman from the Blood tribe. I’m wondering if you know her.”

  “Maybe. What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But she’s a powerful medicine woman — so powerful that she can cure any illness — even bring people back from the dead.”

  The scout merely nodded, as if I hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, and fingered the cross that hung around his neck. “Only Christ can raise the dead. God’s is the only true power; medicine men are false prophets.”

  “This was a medicine woman,” I reminded him. I had no desire to get into a religious debate; I knew from observing my parents that it only led to anger and tears. “She was in Fort Qu’appelle last summer.”

  “I’ve never been to Fort Qu’appelle.”

  He’d replied a little too quickly, the way a guilty man will when questioned about a crime.

  “There was a girl born in Qu’appelle in May of last year — a stillborn. This woman brought her back to life.”

  Peter merely shrugged, but his silence and his refusal to meet my eye were speaking volumes. He knew something and didn’t want to tell me. I could see that I needed to be more persuasive — but how? Then I noticed a puckered scar on the inside of his forearm, just peeping out from the bottom of his sleeve. I thought about how much the wound must have hurt, and that gave me an idea.

  I pointed to my stomach and doubled over, as if wracked with pain. It didn’t require much acting; my eyes had already begun to water as a wave of nausea gripped me. “I’m ill,” I told Peter in a lowered voice as I straightened up. “I need to find the medicine woman so she can cure me.”

  It took Peter a moment to meet my eye. When he did, his expression was guarded. He pressed his lips together in thought. My hopes lifted — I was certain he was going to tell me what I needed to know — but then he shook his head.

  “You should pray,” he advised. “Perhaps God will hear you, and send a saint to heal you. They are very powerful.”

  I could see that even my impassioned plea wasn’t enough. Peter wasn’t going to help me find the medicine woman. Why was he so reluctant to talk about her? I could guess by his carefully neutral expression that he knew the woman. I stared at him, and after a moment I realized that he had crossed his arms in such a way as to conceal his scar.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “The farrier is finished with my horse.”

  He was right. The ringing of the hammer had stopped.

  “Wait.” I grabbed Peter’s wrist and yanked up his sleeve. His scar ran all the way up to his elbow on the inside of the forearm, and looked as though it had been made by a knife. It had probably been a bloody wound — very nearly fatal. Yet there were no stitch marks.

  “This medicine woman healed you, didn’t she?” I guessed. I glanced at his crucifix. “And the priests told you that it was the work of the Devil.”

  Peter jerked his hand away and gave me a frightened look. “She is the Devil.”

  “So you do know her!” I cried. “Well I don’t care if she is, or if she has horns and a pitch fork. I want to be healed by her.”

  Peter thought about this for a long moment. “I know the woman,” he said slowly. “Her name is Strikes Back.”

  Relief washed through me like a dose of Pinkham’s. “Where is she now?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Which of the Blood bands is she with?”

  “None of them. S
trikes Back is a half-sister to Chief Red Crow; she used to travel with his band, but she had a fight with him many years ago and has gone her own way since.”

  It was all I could do to contain my excitement. Of the chiefs that had been present in the shaking tepee, Mountain had described Iniskim as his granddaughter, and now Red Crow turned out to be related to the medicine woman who had used her magic to restore life to Iniskim. Was Strikes Back part of the plan to effect the Day of Changes — or, given her animosity toward Red Crow, was she working to prevent it?

  “What was the fight about?” I persisted.

  Peter’s earlier hesitation was gone. Now that the stopper of fear had been removed, he proved to be a font of information.

  “About ten years ago, Strikes Back learned that Red Crow had kept some of the horses that should have been given to her husband when she married. She became angry and shot them.”

  “She shot the chief’s horses?” I asked. It was an incredible act of defiance among a people who valued horses above all else — even more so for a woman. I’d already seen one demonstration of an Indian woman’s mettle when Emily shot her husband, but that had been a desperate act to save her child. I still imagined women to be the weaker sex, not prone to such acts of violence.

  Peter chuckled. “If you met Strikes Back, you’d understand. She’s a woman with a man’s heart. She rides and hunts buffalo as well as any man, and is as tough as a man. I heard that she was once found in a snowdrift, frozen to death. They carried her back to her tepee, thawed her out beside the fire, and she came back to life.”

  “Where did she go after leaving Red Crow’s band?”

  “She married a white man — a trader. She lived with him in the trading post at Fort Macleod for many years. That was when I met her — and she healed me.”

  Fort Macleod! I’d been there only a few short days ago.

  “Is she there still?”

  Peter shook his head. “She quarrelled with her husband more than a year ago and walked away, leaving him and their four children. That was the last anyone saw of her.”

  “What was the trader’s name?”

  “Davis.”

  That took me aback. “Any relation to Constable Davis? The one they call ‘Peaches’?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you have to pay Strikes Back to heal your arm?”

  The scout gave me a strange look, but before I could interpret it, the farrier walked Peter’s horse over to us. Peter paid him for the shoeing, then swung up into his saddle. “I’m still paying her,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross upon his breast. Then he kicked his horse into a trot.

  “With what?” I asked, running after him. “Money? Furs? Trade goods? What did she want?”

  His horse increased its pace and galloped away in a cloud of dust. I thought for a moment about chasing after him, but realized that it would do no good. If he’d wanted to tell me more, he would have.

  I walked back to the blacksmith shop, kicking the dusty ground in my frustration. Then I noticed that the horseshoes of Peter’s horse had left a peculiar pattern. I called the farrier over, and pointed it out to him.

  “He was a strange one, all right,” he said. He scratched his beard with the clawed end of his hammer, then shrugged. “Not your typical Indian scout, at all. He must be a really religious fellow. He wanted to re-shoe his horse, even though the shoes were brand new. He wanted me to use nails with cross-shaped heads. He says they’re for good luck. Maybe he thinks they’re gonna help his horse to walk on water.”

  Laughing at his own joke, the farrier walked away. Peter had already ridden out of sight to the north, on his way back to the Battleford detachment. I wondered if the cross-studded horseshoes really did bring protection — if there really was something to Peter’s newly adopted Catholic faith. Raised by a sceptical father, I’d been brought up to believe that religion was just so much superstition. It was balderdash — just like premonitory dreams, and magic. Except now I knew that magic was real.

  Peter was gone, but he’d given me a starting point for finding the “manly hearted” Strikes Back: Fort Macleod. Another possible source of information was coming from that very detachment, even now. I just had to wait for him to arrive.

  That night, I had a strange dream. I was standing in a graveyard, much like the one at Victoria Mission. All around me were mounds of freshly turned earth, each of them a grave. All were marked with rough wooden crosses, except for one, which had a tombstone. Curious as to whose grave it might be, I walked over to read the inscription.

  There was none: the tombstone was a solid black slab of stone, with nary a word upon it.

  A burning curiosity filled me — whose grave was it? With the sudden insight that comes upon one sometimes in dreams, I realized that the tombstone was weighing down the person who had been buried here. I had only to lift it and she would rise to the surface, revealing her face to me.

  I bent down and grasped the stone, then gave a mighty tug. Despite its weight, it came up easily in my arms, revealing a hole in the earth. I saw movement below, and realized that the occupant of the grave had suddenly become animated. Suddenly terrified, my thoughts filled with wild imaginings at the horrific form this morbid creature might take. I ran from that spot, still holding the tombstone in my arms. The corpse hauled itself out of the grave and followed me, running low and swift to the ground like a beast. Its feet had become hooves, and they were striking the ground with a tick-tick-tick-tick noise that was counting off the seconds to my death.

  I staggered onward, then realized that I was running in a circle. The empty grave lay directly in my path. Unable to stop myself, I plunged headlong into it. As I fell, the tombstone rolled back into place, sealing the grave shut — but not before I caught a glimpse of a buffalo, haloed by the moon, staring down at me with a smile on its lips as my doom descended upon me….

  I woke up in a cold sweat, my legs flailing. Something was indeed ticking in the darkness, and for a wild moment I fancied that it was part of my dream. I slammed a hand down upon it — and the ticking stopped. I realized belatedly that it was only my watch — that it had inexplicably started working again.

  I rolled over and pulled the blanket up closer to my chin. Then slumber found me once more.

  The next morning, Bertrand at last straggled in to the Medicine Hat detachment on one of the few horses from his detachment that had not been struck down by illness. He was surprised by the warm greeting I gave him. As he climbed down from his horse, complaining loudly about chafed calves and saddle sores, I invited him into the mess and bought him a glass of cider. As soon as he was settled I asked him if he knew of a white trader named Davis who had married a Blood woman. I hoped he could tell me more of the history of Strikes Back.

  Bertrand was quite curt and gave me a suspicious look, but he did know the full name of the fellow — D. W. Davis, an American out of Montana. Bertrand also added one key fact: Strikes Back had deserted her husband in May of 1883. He even remembered the date: Victoria Day.

  On that day, the trading post had just received a shipment of tinned goods that would be used to enliven the annual celebration of the Queen’s birthday. Bertrand had gone to the trading post to pick them up, and found the jilted husband of Strikes Back smashing bottles of cider against a wall.

  As I put the two stories together, something gave me pause: the dates. How could Strikes Back have been in Fort Macleod and in Fort Qu’appelle on the same day? The two settlements were four hundred and fifty miles apart. It simply was not possible — unless magic was involved.

  I knew from personal experience of one way a person could travel a great distance by magic: by passing through a tunnel like the one I’d entered at Victoria Mission. I wondered if Strikes Back had walked into a cave at Fort Macleod and exited it later that same day at Fort Qu’appelle. Time flowed at a different rate in the tunnel than it did above ground. In my case, nearly three weeks had sped by while I walked through the t
unnel. Strikes Back, an accomplished medicine woman, had been able to produce the opposite effect: only a few hours had elapsed while she’d made a journey of several hundred miles.

  It seemed logical to conclude that Strikes Back had used the tunnels to reach Fort Qu’appelle, but one thing puzzled me. Upon entering the tunnel, why had she not been transformed into a buffalo?

  Just like me, Strikes Back must have been able to pass through the tunnels without being transformed. And so had Emily, since I didn’t find any shreds of her clothing next to those of Chambers. I sat and thought about that, as Bertrand drank his cider. What commonalty did Strikes Back, Emily, and I share?

  As pain clenched my stomach, I suddenly knew the answer: all three of us had nearly died at one point in our lives. My heart had faltered on the operating table, Emily had nearly died of blood loss while giving birth to Iniskim, and Strikes Back had been frozen in a snowdrift. For one brief moment, each of us had a foot inside death’s door. Perhaps because we had already been “reborn” once, the magic that turned humans into adult buffalo with the light-coloured coats of newborn calves no longer worked on us.

  That would explain why I could handle the buffalo stone, and why it had not transformed the dead buffalo back into human beings again. Its transformative magic only worked on living creatures. People like myself, who had “died” at one point in our lives, were counted among the dead.

  One question remained, however. I’d seen Big Bear carefully pick up the buffalo stone in my tobacco pouch. He’d obviously feared its magic — which must work on white and Indian alike. Why then, when the Day of Changes came, were the Indians so confident that only whites would be turned into buffalo?

  What protection did the Indians have that white people did not?

  As I was pondering the question, my eyes fell on a pair of antlers that had been mounted as a trophy on the wall. They reminded me of the deer form that Chief Mountain had taken, when Poundmaker’s magic sent those gathered inside the shaking tepee into the spirit world.

  Suddenly, I realized why the Indians would not be affected by the Day of Changes. Every Indian had a guardian spirit — a protector in animal form. The magic of these animal spirits might not be able to prevent the transformation wrought by actually touching a buffalo stone, but it was a shield against the less direct magic of the Day of Changes.