Apparition Trail, The

by Lisa Smedman

  Reaching into my kit box, I pulled out my pipe and filled it with a pinch of Old Chum. I puffed on it gently, filling my tent with aromatic clouds of smoke. As I placed my tobacco pouch back inside my kit box, my eye fell on a small square bundle, wrapped in a black silk handkerchief: Chambers’s cards. So strong had been my compulsion to possess them that I’d stolen the cards from his personal effects when they were being wrapped up for delivery back to his brother in England. Filled with guilt at my petty theft, I hadn’t even looked at them these past few weeks, but now I slowly unwrapped the handkerchief that held them.

  The cards still looked the same as when Chambers had used them to test my psychic abilities, that day on the North West. A host of priests, fakirs and shamans stared up at me from the face cards, their eyes imploring me to test my powers once more. I shuffled the deck and held the cards in a neat stack, then turned them over one by one, guessing what each might be. No matter how hard I tried, however, I couldn’t guess a single one. My powers had deserted me.

  Uttering an oath, I cast the cards to the floor. They fell in a scatter around my stocking feet, mostly face down. One of the face cards, however, landed face-up. The character printed on it — a magician in an elegant black suit and top hat, holding what looked like a shell in his hand — caught my eye. I picked it up.

  When I gave the card a closer scrutiny, my hand began to shake. I saw something I’d never noticed before. The fellow depicted on the card was the spitting image of Chambers, right down to his dark curling hair, moustache, and the beard worn below the chin, with cheeks shaved. The object in his hand wasn’t a shell — it was a spiral-shaped buffalo stone.

  I swore out loud and nearly dropped the card when the character on it started to speak. I heard a tisk-tisk noise, and then Chambers waved a finger at me.

  Hello, Grayburn, he said. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time, but it’s damnably hard to catch your ear. You must have been a busy man, this past month.

  “How—?” I gasped. “Where—?”

  I turned the card over and looked at it, like a child searching for a person behind a mirror. The back was the same solid black it had always been. I turned the card face-upright again. Chambers was still staring at me.

  I’m in the astral plane, of course. And do you know, it’s quite a fascinating place. It seems to conform to my notions of what Heaven might be like, although it changes whenever someone new ventures along. I’ve developed a theory to explain that — I call it Belief Convergence. When two astral beings with different notions of what the afterlife should look like meet, the scenery shifts through a riot of surrealistic imagery. It’s very much like the stuff of dreams, and so I’ve concluded that—

  “You’re dead,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

  Of course I am, Chambers said with an exasperated sigh.

  “But how can I talk to you? When I used the song to cure my cancer, my psychic powers vanished. I shouldn’t have been able to contact you at all.”

  Chambers put his hands on his hips and frowned at me. The gesture reminded me of a schoolmaster I’d once had. Strikes Back lied.

  It took a moment for his utterance to penetrate my brain. When it did, my eyes widened. “You mean that I can still have precognitive dreams and contact the dead?” I asked wonderingly.

  Chambers laughed. You’re doing it at this moment, are you not?

  I could only nod.

  You have a great gift, Grayburn. You’re a true sensitive, in every aspect of the word. You’ve a talent for communicating with the dead. It’s no wonder the owl spirit chose you as its own — the messenger of death could find no more appropriate person to serve as a bridge between the dead and the living. That was why the owl came to you at the moment of your death, in the operating theatre, and sent you back to the land of the living.

  Chambers looked around, as if trying to see beyond the edges of the card. Have you a pen and ink — and paper?

  “I think so,” I replied.

  Good. Then take them in hand, and get ready to write.

  He waited while I reached for pen and ink. When I was ready, he gave me a twinkling grin. I’ll wager this will be the most renowned pamphlet the Society for Psychical Research has ever seen. Just make sure you get the title right — “Observations From the Other Side” — and spell my name correctly.

  I had to smile. “Have no fear, Albert. I will.”

  Chambers dictated the first lines of text to me, and I began to write.

  We spent no more than an hour or two on the text that first evening, but in the weeks that followed I used the card to speak to Chambers on several more occasions and, eventually, the manuscript was completed.

  By that time, I was back in Medicine Hat, waiting for Steele to assign my next case. Q Division was out in the open now — since the Day of Changes, there was no profit in concealing our existence. Indeed, the reverse was true. Knowing that a special division of policemen had been formed, each man of which was handpicked for his psychic powers or magical abilities, was a comfort to the settlers of the North-West.

  Much later, I set pen to paper a second time. This time, the words were not Chambers’s, but my own.

  I awoke with a start, my heart pounding, certain that I’d heard someone shout my name, I wrote. Yet all was silent in the darkened barracks….

  Afterword

  Marmaduke Grayburn was the first North-West Mounted Police constable killed in the line of duty. He was shot in the back on November 17, 1879, near the NWMP horse camp at Fort Walsh after he rode back up a trail to retrieve an axe. While an Indian named Star Child was arrested for the murder, he was later acquitted. The identity of Grayburn’s killer remains unknown.

  While most of the characters and some of the events in The Apparition Trail are drawn from history, the story as a whole is fictional. The Apparition Trail is alternative history: an attempt to answer the question of what might have happened had magic awakened in the world — enabling Native rituals to produce concrete effects and European attempts to create perpetual motion devices. With magic, the history of the Canadian west would have been greatly changed.

  In 1884, the year in which The Apparition Trail is set, the Indians who ranged over the North-West Territories (the current provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan) were in desperate straits. The buffalo on which they relied for food, shelter and clothing — herds that had numbered several million animals just a few short years before — were on the edge of extinction. The preceding few winters had been the coldest and most difficult in living memory, and all game animals were scarce. After consuming their horses and dogs, the Indians were reduced to eating gophers and grass in an attempt to survive. Several thousand people starved to death. Adding to this tragedy were the ravages of smallpox and other European diseases, which killed thousands more.

  In 1876, the Cree signed Treaty Six, which (at the Indians’ insistence) included the provision of food in times of famine. Rather than living up to this promise, the Canadian government issued the Indians rations that were inadequate (the per-person ration for Indians was only half that issued to a North-West Mounted Policeman). The government further stipulated that food would only be given to those Indians who worked in exchange for it — this at a time when some were too weak from hunger to hunt. Indian agents like Tom Quinn took a hard-line approach: the Cree nicknamed Quinn “the bully,” and the “man who always says no.”

  Some bands made an attempt to switch to farming, but the equipment the government provided was inadequate, and many of the farming instructors who were sent to teach the Indians had no knowledge of Prairie farming requirements. Crops failed, and again the Indians went hungry.

  Some Indians did fight back, staging acts of political protest. In 1880, Chief Beardy erected a toll-gate across the Carlton Trail. In 1883, Chief Piapot set up camp in the path of the Canadian Pacific Railway in an attempt to stop construction of Canada’s first coast-to-coast railway line. It was Chief Big Bear, however, who worked t
he hardest to advance the Indian cause by way of his attempts to unite the scattered tribes of the North-West Territories and to present a unified voice to the Canadian government.

  Sadly, Big Bear is recorded in the history books as a traitor and instigator of murder, rather than as the spokesman he tried to be. On April 2, 1885, warriors from his band, led by Wandering Spirit, shot and killed nine settlers at Frog Lake — including two priests. The shooting started when Quinn refused Wandering Spirit’s order to join settlers that the Indians had taken hostage. After two warnings, Wandering Spirit shot him; Quinn had said no for the last time. The Indians looted the settlement, then fled, taking their hostages with them.

  Wandering Spirit led the band to Fort Pitt, a NWMP fort commanded by Francis Dickens, son of the famous novelist. There, a gunfight with three NWMP scouts who blundered into the Indian camp left one Mountie dead, and another wounded. Dickens decided to abandon the indefensible fort; the Indians let the police retreat, but took more settlers hostage.

  The Frog Lake murders and the forced surrender of Fort Pitt came at a time when the Metis (settlers who were half Indian, half French) were staging an uprising. Just a few days earlier, the Metis had traded shots with the North-West Mounted Police at Duck Lake, killing three Mounties. The actions of Big Bear’s band were seen as part of a general uprising and the Canadian government responded proportionally.

  As chief of his band, Big Bear, who had tried to stop the killing at Frog Lake, was held personally responsible for the murders there. A column of several hundred militia and NWMP pursued the band relentlessly for the next two months, attacking them twice. The “spring of blood” that Big Bear had seen in a prophetic dream several years earlier had come to pass.

  Around the same time, Chief Poundmaker traveled north to Battleford to profess his loyalty to the Queen and the Canadian government. He found the town empty, the settlers having fled to the safety of the nearby NWMP fort in the belief that the Indians were coming to attack. Poundmaker’s band looted the town, carrying away food and other supplies and burning a church and a judge’s house.

  Poundmaker’s band was also pursued by a column of militia and NWMP, which attacked the Indians at their camp near Cutknife Creek. The Indians were outnumbered nearly two to one and were low on ammunition, but they held a strategically superior position on a hill overlooking a ravine. They also had advance warning of attack, through a man named Kohsakahtigant who was warned in a dream by a sacred manitouassini, Old Man Stone, that danger was approaching. After a tense battle which saw eight militia and NWMP killed and fourteen wounded — and six Indians killed and three wounded — the NWMP and militia were forced to retreat.

  Big Bear and Poundmaker ultimately surrendered to the NWMP and received jail sentences. Both died shortly after their release from prison.

  Wandering Spirit, and seven other Indians who had killed white settlers, were sentenced to death, and were hung en masse in Battleford in front of local Indians who were forced to watch this example of Canadian frontier justice. Some of the condemned men urged their people to capitulate to the settlers; others urged them to fight on and sang their death songs proudly.

  It is reported that, in the days while Big Bear’s band was fleeing with its hostages, Wandering Spirit’s hair turned completely grey. Before his hanging, he unsuccessfully tried to take his own life by stabbing himself in the chest with a knife while being held captive in a prison cell.

  While the majority of The Apparition Trail is fictional, one event is drawn from history: the story of the Manitou Stone. This large boulder, situated on a hill near the Battle River, was held sacred by the Indians. According to an ancient prophesy, if ever the stone were moved, war, disease, and famine would follow.

  In 1868, Methodist Missionary John McDougall stole the Manitou Stone, removing it by wagon to his church at Victoria Mission. According to McDougall, this “raised the ire of their (Indian) conjurers.” The stone was ultimately shipped to a Methodist church in eastern Canada.

  McDougall and his family did not disappear, as they do in The Apparition Trail. McDougall lived until 1917, and during the Metis rebellion of 1885 served as a scout and translator for the Canadian militia.

  The majority of the NWMP officers and men described in The Apparition Trail are drawn from history. Sam Steele was an exceptional officer who joined the NWMP at its inception in 1873, and he commanded “Steele’s Scouts” during the Metis rebellion of 1885. He later went on to serve in the Klondike during the gold rush, and in the Boer War in South Africa.

  The larger-than-life character of scout Jerry Potts is also drawn from life. It would be difficult to create a more fascinating character than this hard-bitten frontiersman: Potts really did wear the skin of a black cat as his personal protective charm, and he was as tough a fighter and skilled scout as they come.

  Sergeant Brock Wilde is also a historic figure — although he met his death as a result of a bullet, rather than through Indian magic. He died in 1896 after being shot by Charcoal, an Indian accused of murder whom Wilde had been pursuing. According to NWMP lore, Wilde’s body was guarded by one of his faithful hounds, which police were forced to shoot after it refused to back down from its vigil.

  The American gambler Four Finger Pete is described in the memoirs of NWMP Inspector Francis Dickens, who discovered Four Finger Pete’s body after the gambler had been shot by his Peigan wife. Dickens sympathized with the woman, whose name is not recorded; he had seen the results of the beatings that Four Finger Pete gave her. Dickens covered up the death, reporting to his superiors that Four Finger Pete had simply disappeared.

  Arthur Chambers is entirely fictional, although the Society for Psychical Research is an actual organization, founded in 1882. The theories of magic and the ethereal plane have their root in the beliefs of Theosophy, a mystical philosophical system that arose in 1875.

  Details

  The Apparition Trail

  Copyright © 2004 by Lisa Smedman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  Edge Science Fiction

  and Fantasy Publishing

  An Imprint of

  HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  P.O. Box 1714,

  Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,

  Canada

  Cover design by James Beveridge

  e Book ISBN: 978-1-894817-70-7

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  Contents

  The Apparition Trail

  Notice

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Afterword

  Details

  Table of Contents

  The Apparition Trail

  Notice

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

>   Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Afterword

  Details