Apparition Trail, The

by Lisa Smedman

  Leveillee crossed himself, then stared into the fire. I should have realized that the scout, like all good Frenchmen, was a member of the Catholic faith. It made me think of the half-breed scout Peter, who had so utterly rejected his people’s beliefs. Would half-breeds, too, be transformed by the Day of Changes?

  I turned back to the young recruit and, in an attempt to bolster his courage, said, “The Indians have magic, it’s true, but Q Division will know how to deal with it. Special Constable Chambers is an expert in the field of magical energies and ethereal forces, and I have no little experience myself. You’re safer here with us than you’d be if you were back in your bed at the detachment.”

  I gave Chambers a pointed look. “Indeed so, Constable,” he agreed, winking at me behind Moody’s back. “The corporal and I are quite capable of handing any magical calamity, large or small.”

  “But what are we doing here?” Moody said. “And what happened to the other patrol? It looked as though their clothing had been torn apart. It must have been a horrible way to—”

  “They didn’t die,” I said quickly. “At least, we think not.”

  “They were changed into buffalo, weren’t they?” Moody said.

  That shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I realized that Moody had either overheard Steele and me, or like Leveillee, had drawn the correct conclusion from what he had seen.

  “Will the Indians do that to us, too?” Moody asked.

  Chambers answered the question before I could. “The other patrol ran afoul of magic, but the Indians who wrought that magic are long gone from here. Be thankful you remained here, with us. Steele and the others are much more likely to run into them than we are.”

  I hoped Chambers was right about the Indians not being anywhere nearby. I might be immune to their transformative magic, but they certainly had other conjurations that could affect me.

  “We can’t tell you any more than you’ve already guessed,” I said to Moody, making sure I caught Leveillee’s eye as well. “The details are for the ears of Q Division only. All you need to know is that, if the Indians try anything, I have the means to counter their magic.”

  “But—”

  “No further questions, Constable,” I said. “That’s an order.”

  I thought I saw Leveillee’s eyes flick to the pocket I’d placed my tobacco pouch in, but couldn’t be certain. He touched a hand to his chest, and nodded sagely. I wondered if he carried some sort of Indian amulet there, like Jerry Potts and his protective cat skin.

  We finished our tea in silence, and then spread out our blankets. Chambers had somehow contrived to pack a pair of stylish silk pyjamas in his saddlebags, and was pulling them on over his long underwear. The young constable guffawed out loud, but Chambers ignored him. He went through what must be his evening routine, brushing his hair and moustache until the smell of Brilliantine filled the air, then neatly folding his clothes and lining his boots up next to them. Leveillee was more polite, bidding Chambers a pleasant good night while hiding his smile behind a hand. Like me, both Moody and Leveillee were going to sleep fully clothed, with boots on — or moccasins, in the case of Leveillee. I was glad not to have to disrobe; I didn’t want anyone to see the scar left by my surgery.

  The constable fell asleep instantly; already I could hear him snoring. It didn’t surprise me; even for someone as young and healthy as he, it had been a long day’s ride. In the distance, I could hear coyotes yipping. I hoped they wouldn’t trouble our horses in the night.

  “Shall I put out the fire, Corporal?” Leveillee asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’d like to read a bit first.”

  I pulled the hymnbook out of my pocket and pretended to read it by the dim red glow of the fire, intending to wait until the others were asleep. The tea hadn’t done anything to soothe my stomach; I needed a dose of the Pinkham’s that was hidden in my saddlebag. I didn’t want Leveillee to see me drinking it, however.

  Leveillee nodded and whispered something to himself, then rolled over. Chambers, however, remained propped up on one arm, regarding me. “A hymnal?” he asked with an amused twinkle in his eye. “I didn’t think you were a religious man. You told me you gave up church when you were a boy, because it angered your father.”

  I murmured in a noncommittal fashion, puffing on my pipe and turning the pages. I considered drinking the Pinkham’s then and there — Chambers already knew I carried some with me, after all — but Leveillee was probably still awake. If the scout had as good a nose for spirits as Jerry Potts did, he’d smell the Pinkham’s in an instant. I’d already insulted him once by not offering tobacco; I didn’t want to compound that seeming slight by denying him “liquor” as well.

  Something fluttered out of the hymnbook, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Chambers catch it before it landed in the fire. It must have been another of the shinplasters I’d tried to give to Emily. I’d thought the wind had blown them all away.

  “What’s this?” Chambers asked.

  “A bookmark.”

  “Rather an odd thing to use.”

  I’d yet to tell Chambers about giving my poker winnings to Emily — there just hadn’t been time. I didn’t want to launch into the story just then.

  “It was the only thing I had at the time,” I said.

  “A feather?”

  That made me look up.

  Chambers did indeed hold a feather in his hand. It was about five inches in length and rather bedraggled. It looked like a wing feather from a crow, except that it was pure white.

  “It must be Emily’s,” I said, leaning forward and closing the hymnbook. “This hymnal was the one I gave to her on the North West, and the feather looks just like the one she wore in her hair. Now we know how she opened the tunnel at this end. The tunnel would have closed behind her once she emerged — she must have planned to use the feather to re-open the tunnel once she found Iniskim. Either she decided not to use it or….”

  I wanted to believe that Emily had simply abandoned the hymnal, but now I wasn’t so sure. That feather was her key to the tunnels. I didn’t think that Emily would have left it behind willingly.

  Chambers’s dark eyes bored into mine. “You know what this means,” he whispered.

  I glanced at Leveillee and saw that his breathing had deepened — he was asleep. I turned back to Chambers. “Steele said we’d open a tunnel only as a last resort, if we couldn’t find the Manitou Stone any other way.”

  Chambers dismissed that idea with a flick of the feather. “That’s not what I meant,” he hissed. “This feather belonged to Emily. We can use it to contact her ghost.”

  I opened my mouth to protest that Emily wasn’t dead, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure. My imagination was starting to form a picture of what might have happened. Emily had carried a similar white feather with her to Victoria Mission, and used it to open the cave there. She’d left it in place, not expecting to need it again, but then wasn’t transformed into a buffalo in the tunnel, after all. She’d tried to follow her daughter, but had lost her. She’d used this second, bedraggled feather — the one from her hair — to open a tunnel here at the ford, and had climbed up to the buffalo-shaped rock to look around. She hadn’t cared that the tunnel had closed behind her — she knew she could re-open it again — but something had prevented her from doing so. Hoping to use the feather later, she’d hidden it inside the hymnal — but why?

  I already knew the answer: a white man’s hymnal was the last place another Indian would look for it.

  Big Bear and his cohorts must have been here at the ford. They had probably come to search for Iniskim, just as we had. They’d spotted the other patrol, and used the ley line’s magic to transform them into buffalo. Then they left, using magic to cause their footprints to vanish — just as I’d seen Big Bear himself vanish on the day he’d prevented Wandering Spirit from killing me at Head Smashed In. Emily’s footprints had been erased as well. The only evidence of her that had been left behind was the hym
nal.

  Only two questions remained: had Emily gone with the other Indians willingly — and was she still alive?

  There was one way to find out. I looked at Chambers, who was still waiting for me to respond. “Do it,” I whispered back. “Contact Emily.”

  Chambers held out the feather. In the ruddy light of the buffalo-chip fire, it took on a lurid red glow. “We’ll do it together,” he said. “As a sensitive — and as someone who has developed an affection for the woman — you stand the best chance of reaching her. I’ll tell you what to do.”

  I set my pipe aside and pinched the feather between thumb and forefinger, taking care not to crush it, while Chambers continued to hold its shaft. Below my hand, I could feel the warmth of our tiny fire.

  “What do I do next?” I asked.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I did.

  “Now concentrate. Picture Emily in your mind, and call to her.”

  “Is that all?” I asked. I didn’t know much about séances, but what little I’d heard seemed to indicate that they required tambourines and trumpets — and tables upon which the spirits could rap out messages.

  “Just call her,” Chambers said. “You can speak her name silently, just as you would when trying to attract someone’s attention via thought transference — or you can say her name aloud, if that helps you to concentrate. Sometimes speaking aloud is easier, since both your physical and your astral bodies will be saying the name at the same moment. If your plea is impassioned enough, you’ll contact her.”

  I was determined to contact Emily — although I had yet to tell Chambers the true reason why. I was confident that the aerograph would lead Steele straight to the Manitou Stone — that we no longer needed Iniskim to lead us to it. If we did succeed in contacting Emily, I would still ask where her daughter was — but what I really wanted to ask her was how to find Strikes Back.

  I concentrated on Emily’s name, but nothing happened. I heard no reply — only the faint snores of Constable Moody, the distant yipping of coyotes … and the soft hoot of an owl.

  Whooo?

  “Emily,” I whispered.

  Whooo?

  “Emily.”

  Even as I spoke the word, I realized what was wrong. This was the name that Four Finger Pete had given his wife. She had no reason to respond to it any longer.

  Whooo?

  A name floated into my mind, as gently as a feather. I tried to grab it, but it slipped through my hand like smoke. I tried again, this time imagining that my hand was an owl’s foot. My claws brushed against the feather, then caught in its weave and closed….

  “Stone Keeper,” I said.

  I felt a drop of liquid splash upon my hand. I opened my eyes and looked up.

  The night seemed brighter than it had before. The thin wisps of smoke given off by the burning buffalo chips were curling back upon themselves to form a leg, a hand, an oval face. I recognized the face at once by the pockmarks that overlaid its beauty, by its sad eyes and the two long braids that framed it. Emily — Stone Keeper — was crying. A tear trickled down her cheek and landed on the coals with a faint hissing noise.

  The sound caused Chambers to open his eyes in surprise. He had the presence of mind neither to speak nor to let go of the feather we both still held. By the way he was looking around, I guessed that he couldn’t see the woman in the smoke — but when she moved, causing her skirt to rustle slightly, his breath caught. He tipped his head, as if listening.

  “Stone Keeper,” I said, using her proper name. I vowed that I would never again call her by the name Four Finger Pete had given her. “Why are you crying?”

  “My daughter is dying.”

  I expected her to answer in the broken English I’d heard her use when I’d first met her on the North West. Instead, she was speaking in another language — probably Peigan. It didn’t matter; just as I had understood the chiefs in the shaking tepee, so I understood her now.

  It seemed that Chambers could hear Stone Keeper, as well. “Where is Iniskim?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Stone Keeper said. She did not glance in his direction but instead stared straight at me with her sad, dark eyes. “Iniskim is lost. You must help her, Thomas. She must reach the Manitou Stone.”

  “Why?” Chambers interrupted in a strained voice. “So your people can work their terrible magic? You must know where Iniskim is. Tell us. Now!” The feather I was holding shuddered, and I realized that Chambers’s hand was shaking.

  I was about to rebuke Chambers for trying to bully Stone Keeper into telling us something she clearly didn’t know. After the way she had been treated by Four Finger Pete, it was an unkind approach to take. Then I realized what Stone Keeper had just done. She’d called me by my true name: Thomas.

  Chambers hadn’t noticed. I glanced at Leveillee and Corporal Moody. Both were still wrapped in their blankets, fast asleep, as senseless as if a spell had been cast upon them.

  “Why must Iniskim reach the Manitou Stone?” I asked Stone Keeper.

  “If she doesn’t, she will die.”

  “Didn’t taking Iniskim into the tunnel cure her fever?” I asked. “I thought that, by being transformed into a buffalo—”

  “Taking the shape of a buffalo gave my daughter the strength to run, but in order for her to live, the spirit inside her must reach the spirit world.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She was not meant to walk this earth so soon. She must return to the spirit world, if my daughter is to survive.”

  I was confused. Who was the “she” Stone Keeper was talking about?

  Chambers grasped the answer more quickly than I, even though he could only hear Stone Keeper’s words, not see her. “Your daughter Iniskim,” he said, looking through the smoke rather than at it. “There’s a spirit inside her body, isn’t there — a spirit forced to enter the physical plane and share her flesh.”

  Stone Keeper nodded.

  “For what purpose?” Chambers asked. “To enact the Day of Changes?”

  “Yes, Albert,” she whispered. “That is the reason.”

  Stone Keeper looked quickly down at the coals then, as if suddenly realizing that she was talking to two white men. The smoke from the fire began to resume its natural course, no longer eddying into the whorls that formed Stone Keeper’s body. Her face started to fade. I saw that the buffalo chips had nearly burned out; there was very little red among the ashes.

  “Stone Keeper, wait!” I said. “If we promise to help Iniskim, will you tell us more?”

  The smoke paused.

  I touched my stomach with my free hand. In the excitement of having contacted Stone Keeper, I’d been able to ignore the constant pain that filled it, but now the twisting nausea had returned. Leveillee and Constable Moody both seemed to be fast asleep, but just in case they were secretly listening, I chose my words carefully.

  “You already know one truth about me, and I suspect you know others,” I told Stone Keeper. “Look into my heart and judge whether what I say is true. I want to help your daughter, but I am duty-bound to do everything in my power to prevent the Day of Changes. Is there a way that I can do both?”

  A breeze blew across the buffalo chips, fanning them back to a rosy glow. The smoke from the fire thickened into lazy curls.

  “Help Iniskim to reach the Manitou Stone so that the one who shares her body can return to the spirit world,” Stone Keeper said.

  “Will that stop the Day of Changes from coming?” I asked.

  Stone Keeper seemed reluctant to answer.

  Chambers broke the silence. “It won’t stop it,” he guessed. “It will only delay it from coming for another nine months, until the spirit can be reborn. Isn’t that right, Emily?”

  Stone Keeper’s downcast eyes confirmed this.

  “It takes months for a child to be born,” I said. “At least that’s something. That should give us plenty of time to destroy the stones that shape the ley line.”

  “No one can
stop the Day of Changes,” Stone Keeper murmured. Her eyes rose to meet my own. “Not even you. The medicine men have dreamed it for many hungry winters now: when White Buffalo Woman returns, so will the buffalo.”

  “Tell us more,” Chambers said. The antagonism he’d displayed earlier was completely gone; now his voice was filled with curiosity, instead. “If Constable Grayburn is to help your daughter, he has to know the nature of the spirit that shares her body.”

  “The spirit inside my daughter is White Buffalo Woman. She once walked this earth in human form, in the days when the buffalo were so many that the prairie was black with them. We have not seen her for many, many winters, yet she watches the herds still — sometimes as a white buffalo calf, and sometimes as a white crow. She has seen the herds dwindle, hunted until there were too few buffalo left to feed our people. She has heard our prayers — and she has prepared for her return.

  “It was said that when White Buffalo Woman returned to this earth in human form the buffalo would also return. That time was to come in spring, when the Moon of Eggs was full.”

  I made a quick calculation. The Indians count moons, rather than months: thirteen moons make up their year. The Moon of Eggs — so named because it is the time when wildfowl build their nests and lay eggs in them — fell in late spring.

  Chambers glanced up at the sliver of moon overhead. “The Day of Changes wasn’t supposed to take place until after April, when the moon’s dark side had completed its rotation toward the Earth, was it?”

  “Why then are the chiefs trying to transform the white settlers into buffalo so soon? Why didn’t they just wait for the Moon of Eggs?”

  “For many winters now, our people have gone hungry,” Stone Keeper said. “Many have died, and some even turned wendigo and feasted upon human flesh in their desperation to survive. The chiefs needed to find a way to make the Day of Changes come before winter, so that our people would not face starvation again.

  “Chief Poundmaker knew that his buffalo-calling stone had the power to change humans into buffalo, and that other buffalo stones also had this power. Chief Little Pine remembered that the Manitou Stone had once marked a medicine line of great power — power that could spread the buffalo-calling stones’ magic across the prairie. But the Cree could not use this magic until White Buffalo Woman was summoned to this earth — for that, they needed the help of my people.