Kanata

by Don Gillmor

  There was one last hurdle.

  “In order for him to hang,” Macdonald noted, “he must be found sane.”

  “That may prove difficult,” McIlvoy said. “He believes he is the Messiah.”

  “I have had the same thought of myself on occasion,” Macdonald said. “Am I mad?”

  McIlvoy looked at Sir John, his hair dry as straw and cut by his wife to resemble a recently harvested field, his face lined, his mouth, in unguarded moments, hanging in autumnal gape. He had created an ungovernable country, then tried to govern it. Who but a madman would do that?

  “I have the honour to answer that I am not guilty,” Louis Riel said to the Regina courtroom. It was July and the prairie heat descended on the proceedings like a shroud. Beneath their black suits, the men sweated heavily.

  Riel’s lawyers intended to plead that he was indeed insane. The evidence supported the claim, and recent events helped. Will Jackson, a Protestant who had sided with Riel and acted as his secretary, was declared mad after a thirty-minute trial. Like Riel, Jackson had made no plea for insanity, but the six Protestant jurors concluded that for a Protestant to follow a Catholic lunatic was itself a form of madness.

  But Riel wanted no part of insanity. On this, he and Sir John were allied. His mind wasn’t fevered now. And he realized that if he were declared a madman, his cause would be deemed a foolish one. In order to give the rebellion legitimacy, he must be found to be sane. And he was. In the peace of his cell, he didn’t feel the demons, their agitating heat and spiked trail through his consciousness. He was the founder of Manitoba.

  The next afternoon, Riel addressed the court. “There are those who brand me a madman. And to them I ask, ‘Who is mad; the person who rises against an injustice or the person who perpetrates it?’ If you believe the plea of the Crown, that I am sane and responsible for my acts, acquit me. I have acted reasonably and in self-defence, while the government, being irresponsible and consequently insane, cannot have acted wrongly, and if high treason there is, it must be on its side and not on mine.”

  Riel was found guilty, though the jury pleaded for mercy on his behalf. When asked if he had anything to say to the court, Riel stood. “When I came into the North West in July of 1884, I found the Indians suffering, I found the half-breeds eating the rotten pork of the Hudson’s Bay Company. No one can say the North West has not suffered. I am no more than you are. I am simply one of the flock, equal to the rest. I say my heart will never abandon the idea of having a new island in the North West, inviting the Irish; a New Poland in the North West, a New Bavaria, a New Italy. The Belgians will be happy here and the Scandinavians and the Jews who have been looking for a country for eighteen hundred years will perhaps hear my voice one day on the other side of the mountains. It is my plan, it is one of the illusions of my insanity. My thoughts are for peace. This is what I have to say.”

  The judge stared at Riel and coldly announced, “You will be hanged by the neck till you are dead and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  Nine days before Riel’s scheduled execution, Donald Smith, who looked like Methuselah and was as rich as the devil, hammered in the ceremonial final spike of Macdonald’s railway at Eagle Pass in the Rocky Mountains. Smith distrusted Macdonald and was in turn hated by the man, and this animus filled his swing as he hammered the spike in. The transatlantic wonder. In little more than a week the country had an enduring symbol of unity in the railroad and an equally potent symbol of division in Riel’s execution. A foundation for the uneasy tension that nations crave.

  It was clear and cold on November 16 as Riel stood on the gallows. He said a short prayer for Macdonald. “I pray that God will bless Sir John and give him grace and wisdom to manage the affairs of Canada well.” The hangman’s hand rested heavily on the lever as Riel stared upward and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tu

  7

  CATHERINE MOUNTAIN HORSE, MONTANA, 1881

  Catherine Mountain Horse lay in the tall grass with her silent father, Jamieson. David Thompson begat the illegitimate Tristan who begat Jamieson who begat Catherine, an eleven-year-old girl as thin as a sapling, her black hair tied around an owl skull, wearing a long red skirt made from a blanket. The September sun was behind them, and she could feel it warm her back. The Sharps .45-calibre rifle was almost as long as she was. Her father was sighting along its octagonal barrel, resting on a tripod fashioned of sticks and pointed at two buffalo that walked warily in the valley below. The two buffalo in the Judith Basin were a remnant of the last great herd in North America. To the south, General Sheridan had encouraged its slaughter as a military tactic, to starve the Indians into submission. Buffalo hunters killed thousands in a single day. The Sioux burned swaths of land along the border, destroying the grazing land in an attempt to keep the buffalo from moving north. British and German sportsmen shot thousands of buffalo from trains and left them lying on the prairie. Coyotes and carrion birds gorged on carcasses spread over miles. Bleached bones were shipped east in boxcars to be made into fertilizer.

  The breeze moved her hair slightly as she lay on her stomach with her arms folded, her head resting on them, one elbow reassuringly touching her father. One of the conditions of this outing was silence. If she wanted to spend the day with her father, hunting the last buffalo on the continent, she had to remain silent. No girlish laughter, no foolish questions, no idle observations could escape her lips. No movement that could send this last, perilous food supply stampeding through the valley into the waiting guns of Big Bear or the Sioux. Catherine had taken this oath, the price of being near him. As they lay motionless, she conducted a conversation between them in her head.

  “What is the colour you love above all others, my Flower?”

  “Blue.”

  “Do you know where the snow goes?”

  “No.”

  “It vanishes in the night, travelling to the north, running from the summer sun. It hides in the mountains and then comes back when the leaves turn, it creeps along the ground in the night and when you wake up, it is there.”

  “Why does the coyote sing to the moon?”

  “Coyote first sang to the sun, because he loved its warmth in the morning. But the sun heard Coyote’s singing, and it turned its back to that terrible noise. Coyote was hurt. He thought his singing was the most beautiful on the plains. From that day on, he only sang for the moon.”

  “What else?”

  “What is the colour you love above all others?”

  “You asked me that.”

  For an hour they lay still, watching the bull, which was seven hundred yards away. Jamieson thought the bull would wander toward him, the wind at its back, and that the cow would follow. The west wind was coming off the mountains and scoured the valley in twisting gusts. When the bull was a hundred yards away, he aimed high and slightly into the wind and squeezed the trigger. The explosion made Catherine jump slightly, and Jamieson was jarred by the recoil. There was a brief delay, then the muffled thud of the bullet hitting the buffalo. It walked two more steps, then sat down, as if confused, the huge head the last thing to hit the ground. The cow started toward it, unsure of where the sound of the rifle had come from as it echoed off the hills. Jamieson fired into the cow and it fell.

  Catherine watched her father skin the male buffalo, his knife moving in a deliberate sawing motion then twisting and cutting, an intricate dance. They walked back to the Blackfoot camp as the sun rose high in the sky. From the hill Catherine saw their tents spread along the lower slopes. Once they had been the most feared nation on the northern plains, her father had told her. Now they huddled in fear, of hunger, disease, and, when the whisky traders came, fear of themselves.

  Men and women both went to where the buffalo had fallen and hauled them back. The animals were cooked, every scrap of meat roasted, the fat used for pemmican, the bones broken open for the marrow, the hides tanned into robes. Catheri
ne sat by the fire with her father, the hunter, who was at a place of honour beside Crowfoot, their chief, a lean, tall man with a nose as thin as a knife. The fire was lulling and Catherine ate until she was full, something she hadn’t done for a week. She fell asleep and her father carried her to the tent.

  When winter arrived, Catherine saw fewer buffalo. She walked with her father in the deep snow and most of the time they came back to the camp without anything. She noticed the faces becoming thinner, the lines deeper. Perhaps her own face was doing the same. There were nights when she crawled under the buffalo robe and was cold and knew she would be colder. Her mother had died when she was an infant, and when she thought of her, she thought of warmth, a warm mother who would come into their tent and banish the cold.

  There was an outbreak of measles during the winter and families died. They burned the grey cloth tents and blankets and possessions of the dead families. Sometimes they burned the families. In the spring the whisky traders found them again. Warriors traded buffalo robes and horses and women and reeled on the plain under the stars. The whisky took what starvation and disease hadn’t. Most of the horses were gone. Many of the children dead. The old and the weak were culled. Brothers killed one another in drunken brawls, warriors humbled by whisky made with potatoes, tea, and molasses.

  In the heat of summer, Crowfoot came to talk to Catherine’s father.

  “There are no more buffalo,” he said. “The whisky traders have taken what little we had left. We cannot last the winter. We must walk north and hope for the protection of the Great Mother.”

  Her father nodded.

  The Blackfoot set out on a warm, dry morning in the middle of summer, fewer than half of the seventeen hundred who had come to Montana. Catherine walked behind her father. They made almost twelve miles that first day, walking until the sun set. There were some who were sick and many who were weak with hunger, or shaking from the absence of whisky, men who sweated and screamed for spirits that had vanished, who suddenly fell to the earth, flopping like fish taken from a stream.

  At first it was the weak and sick that held them back, and the whisky-headed warriors who collapsed onto the grass in their own peculiar pain. Then it was the dead. They stopped to place withered bodies in trees, lashing them to branches.

  On the fourth day, Crowfoot came and talked to Catherine’s father and the two of them disappeared, walking back along the trail they had just walked. She found out later that her father had shot one of the horses that a whisky trader was riding. A warning.

  Catherine could see her father getting thinner, slowly disappearing. Perhaps that was what happened to her mother; she was less and less and then she was nothing. They walked for more than one full moon and she woke one morning to find frost on the grass. When the first spot appeared on her father’s face, she felt a cold wind inside her.

  “It is nothing,” he told her.

  But then there were more. He was already as thin as he could be. There didn’t seem to be many places to put spots, and maybe that would help. That night he talked as she lay beneath the robe. He told her how the stars got into the heavens, and pointed out which one was her mother. In the night Catherine woke and touched her father’s face. It was cold and Catherine shook him and whispered into his ear but he didn’t wake up. She told him a story about how the bear came into the world, a story he had told her when she was a child, then she laid against him and wept until morning. When the sun rose, three men took him away. They placed him in an aspen tree and Catherine sat beneath him until they carried her away. She walked north behind Crowfoot, and her father joined the line of blackened bodies rotting in trees that stretched into Montana.

  Catherine walked as if in a dream, imagining her father’s voice, his touch, those things she needed to preserve. She was empty with hunger, and her head ached and she felt, as she saw Grey Eyes hoisted reverently into a tree, as she watched Fierce Owl foaming on the ground, his skeletal body seized into a sinewy fist, as she saw her people shuffling northward, bent, that she was already in the spirit world, that she would find her father standing, smiling, at the end of this. His arms would be open and she would walk into them and stay there. For a week she uttered not a word, hoping that if she didn’t engage the real world, she wouldn’t be part of it. When her father was alive, she felt the protection he offered. Now, there was no protection. The nation couldn’t protect itself. She hungered for the spirit world.

  They trudged across the buffalo grass, through rivers, along alkaline coulees, past juniper and dusty bushes. A creek valley had turned to powder and it rose as they crossed it, a fine mist that caught the wind and coated them, making them appear as ghosts. Catherine saw a large shape on the ground ahead of them and smaller shapes around it. When she got closer she could see that the large shape was a buffalo. The other shapes were wolves that had been skinned, their still shiny carcasses wet under the sun. They were twisted into strange shapes, their teeth bared, turned in upon themselves. The wolfers had been here. They shot the buffalo and slit it open and laced the meat with poison and waited for the wolves. After eating the meat the wolves began to writhe, trying to rid themselves of the poison. Catherine had come upon them once with her father, howling madly, twisting like wild horses, leaping, briefly standing on their hind legs in a grotesque dance, as if they were in the throes of becoming human, then flopping onto the ground. The Blackfoot were starving but if they ate this meat they would dance like the wolves.

  It took six weeks to walk to the Cypress Hills. A government man gave Catherine some bread and a bowl of soup and she sat and ate them both as quickly as she could.

  There was another migration. Fifty miles west of the Blackfoot, heading north out of Montana, were thirty cowboys driving 6,800 head of polled Black Angus and Shorthorns to the Cochrane Ranche, the first large-scale cattle-ranching operation in the West. Senator Matthew Cochrane had 360,000 acres of grazing land. The cowboys drove the cattle hard, making eighteen miles a day. Calves were lost, cows with broken legs abandoned. By the time they arrived, they had lost a thousand head. They went back to Montana and got a second herd, driving them north through winter, getting caught in heavy snow and waiting for chinooks that didn’t come. The cattle instinctively tried to move southeast, to find something to graze, but the cowboys had orders from Montreal to drive them north, damn the consequences. They lost half the herd, and in the spring the carcasses filled the coulees where the cattle had become bogged in deep snow. There were stretches where you could walk on the bodies for a mile without touching the ground. The meat was tainted but the hides could be salvaged. The foreman went to the Blackfoot camp and asked for skinners; they were paying twenty-five cents a hide.

  It was another walk, this time without the red dress, dressed as a boy, twelve years old but grown. There were sixty of them, and Catherine could smell the job before she saw it, a thick taste of death. She had helped her father skin buffalo and she surveyed the expanse of spoiled meat beginning to bloat in the spring sun, and then set to work amid the men of her tribe, steering the large knife around the distending flesh, finding the lines that defined it and pulling the hide away and dragging it to dry in the sun. Ravens hopped nearby, picking at the faces. Magpies pulled at soft red threads and danced away. The smell infected the air, and the western breeze couldn’t carry away the rot. The sound of flies changed in pitch, subtle notes that inflected upward as they moved, a screaming feast that covered the exposed meat like black blankets. A million beetles invaded from below. Sixty Blackfoot covered in blood, skinning the casualties of Senator Matthew Cochrane’s eastern management. Catherine laboured until dark, her arm finally too tired to cut the stinking hide. She washed in the stream that ran through the hills, careful not to drink from it in case there were dead cattle upstream. She cleaned her knife, sharpened it on a stone, and then fell asleep by the fire.

  8

  DEXTER FLEMING, 1882

  The crossing wasn’t pleasant, a slurry of gin and vomit, the ship pitch
ing in the waves, the aristocracy as miserable as the cattle. Four deaths followed by burials at sea, the last one—an infant with the misfortune of being born on the ship—poorly attended due to violent weather. Dexter Fleming was tall, with dark hair, a weak mouth, and a voice that sounded as if he was judging you, even if he was only asking for milk in his tea. He was coming from London, heading for the North West on the slurred advice of Bertie Beckton. Beckton’s grandfather had made a fortune in textiles (and been Lord Mayor of Manchester, an ambitious man in all things) and left that fortune to his three grandsons: Bertie, William, and Ernest. Their plan, divined one evening after several bottles of port, was to go to the Canadian North West. They had read of an aristocratic farming community started by Captain Edward Pierce, who was recreating a utopian version of England on the endless prairie that he named Cannington Manor.

  The Becktons had already gone there and built a twenty-six-room mansion out of limestone and blue rolling stone. They christened it Didsbury, a reminder of Manchester. Inside were hand-carved mantels, Turkish carpets, and oil paintings sent from their grandfather’s country place. The bunkhouse had room for eighteen men and the kennels were filled with foxhounds imported from the Isle of Wight. They had poached a jockey and the head groom from the Lincolnshire stables of Lord Yarborough, and the stalls for the racehorses were lined with mahogany, the horses’ names engraved on brass plaques. All of this situated on 2,600 acres.

  Pierce was recruiting the English aristocracy and those who aspired to it with ads in British papers. “With a few hundreds a year, a gentleman can lead and enjoy an English squire’s existence of a century ago!” At Cannington, Pierce had established a trading company, general store, dairy, cheese factory, flour mill, a land titles office, and an agricultural college to teach these young gentlemen how to farm.