A Place Called Winter

by Patrick Gale

  ‘What my father called me. I don’t expect you to get your tongue around the Cree. In English it’s Little Bear. I’m told Ursula means the same.’

  ‘It does.’

  Little Bear flicked the reins and the ponies raised their heads from the grass and shambled into motion. ‘The track from here to Hinton is pretty rough,’ Little Bear said, ‘so we’ll have to go slowly. Which is fortunate, as these two don’t know how to do anything else.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Harry told him. ‘I’ve no urgent business.’

  They set off beneath the trees and were soon on a muddy, heavily pitted track beside the river, which Harry imagined must become impassable in flood weather or deep snow.

  Although he was now speaking out more than he did as Ursula, Little Bear was no more chatty. Harry decided to be honest with him.

  ‘Gideon is very pleased you’re talking to me,’ he said.

  Little Bear met this with thoughtful silence but at last said, ‘Of course he is. He mistakes my silence for sadness. He thinks if I talk, I won’t try to kill myself again. He believes talking cures everything.’

  ‘So your silence is shyness?’

  ‘I think it’s anger. He forgets English was forced on me when they tore me from my parents.’

  ‘You speak it very well.’

  ‘I was a star pupil.’

  ‘As a boy.’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘Was it so cruel?’

  ‘Cruel schooling is the norm with the English,’ Little Bear reminded him. ‘So you might not have found it so. But we Cree love our children. We keep them close. Taking us away from our tribes and parents and forbidding us to speak or even think in Cree was only the beginning. You have to understand, as a two-souls I had a special position. I was being taught mysteries, things ordinary boys would never learn.’

  ‘A two-souls like . . . the people in Gideon’s reading the other night?’

  ‘The very same. I was special and my father was proud of me. But to the missionaries, I was an evil influence. I was fourteen, nearly fully grown, but to them I was an evil child. They cut my hair short and the evil they saw in me was beaten out day after day.’

  ‘Did you fight?’

  Little Bear shrugged. ‘No. I was always quiet and good and a swift learner. And their Jesus was so kind, kinder than some of our spirits. He reached out to me and still hasn’t let me go. For a meek, mild dead man, he has a tenacious grip!’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘My shaman had taught me better and earlier than the priest did, and I suffered . . . I suffered – what is it Gideon calls it? – a paralysing inner conflict.’

  Harry chuckled at this precise rendering of the good doctor’s way of speaking.

  ‘Is he helping you?’

  ‘He lets me be myself. But only in limited ways. He bought me my two dresses.’

  ‘They’re pretty.’

  ‘They’re as much a disguise as any boarding school suit. And this jacket and hat he got me are no more than fancy dress.’

  ‘So why can’t you go back to . . . to your people?’

  ‘Even if I could find them, they wouldn’t know me now. That’s one of Gideon’s wiser sayings, that most outcasts banish themselves.’

  ‘Do you think of yourself as an outcast?’

  ‘Don’t you, Harry? In any case, Jesus wouldn’t let me go so easily.’

  ‘You know . . . Jesus was a good deal more revolutionary than the men who teach in his name. He never married. He was a friend to outcasts and non-believers. Nowhere in the Bible does he speak out against . . . living as you do.’

  ‘I know. I read all the Jesus bits. Which makes him all the harder to shake off.’

  ‘What about the others? Does Gideon help them?’

  ‘Well, most are more residents than patients, I think. Their cure is to be able to take refuge from the world’s disgust and punishments. Mabel tried to kill her husband.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She didn’t succeed, but her lawyer had her sent to an asylum rather than face trial. And here, she and Bruno can have their . . . There’s a name for it.’ Little Bear thought a moment or two, then clicked his fingers. ‘Bostonian marriage.’

  He drove them on in silence and Harry chose to respect his privacy rather than grill him further. He admired the scenery, enjoyed watching the way Little Bear handled the lazy ponies.

  When they arrived in Hinton, Little Bear stopped a discreet distance from the stores. ‘The quickest thing is for you to go inside with the list,’ he said, ‘while I wait out here with the cart. If I do it, I have to wait at the back door and they take too long to serve me.’

  ‘They don’t like that you’re an Indian?’

  Little Bear laughed at him. ‘Oh you’re so very English! No. They don’t like giving white man’s food to Indians to handle. And then they really don’t like that I speak like an Anglican priest. If him talk like this, him no thought uppity. But I can’t play that game. You take the list and I’ll do the carrying. Gideon has an account; just give the address as Bethel Ranch.’

  Harry took the drily vegetarian list into the small stores while Little Bear waited outside. He added a small box of matches to the shopping list because it felt odd having none rattling in his breast pocket and he hadn’t liked to take the ones from his cabin. Knowing what small country communities were like, he prepared himself for the mention of Gideon and his ranch of peculiar people to earn him a comment or a sidelong glance, but there was nothing. Either the shopkeeper was waiting to gossip once he had left, or Bethel had succeeded in keeping the nature of sanctuary it provided a secret from its innocent neighbours.

  As they called in at the post office to drop off and collect Bethel’s mail, he fancied he and Little Bear received looks, not for where they were from but for the fact that they were an Englishman letting himself be driven about the place by a fancily dressed Cree who should, by rights, have been riding on the cart’s rear with the groceries. The postmaster muttered something as he handed over the letters.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘I said,’ the postmaster told him, ‘you have mighty queer taste in friends.’

  The remark left Harry shocked and angry, but he stumbled out in silence, cheeks burning, unable to muster a suitable retort. He said nothing of the exchange to his companion.

  ‘You’re having bad dreams still,’ Little Bear remarked a while after they had started back for home.

  ‘Not especially,’ Harry said.

  Little Bear laughed. ‘You don’t have to lie to me. No. You are. You shout in your sleep.’

  ‘Really? I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. So English! It doesn’t bother me. I don’t sleep much anyway. I like the night-time for walking about the place, which is how I hear you. Are you holding things back from Gideon?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Little Bear raised an eyebrow. He had a satirical, suggestive edge to his humour that Ursula lacked. ‘But?’

  Harry smiled. ‘Now, now. Is that in the Bethel spirit of community openness and harmony?’

  Little Bear shrugged. He flicked the ponies’ reins smartly, setting all the tassels on his buckskin jacket in motion.

  ‘I begin to feel he only wants to hear the things that will confirm his theories,’ Harry admitted.

  ‘At least you feel he still hears you. Sometimes I talk and think he is completely deaf.’

  Little Bear pulled the ponies to a halt so they could watch a buzzard performing its mesmerising wheels high above the treetops. ‘Did you fight in the war, Harry?’

  ‘No,’ Harry admitted. ‘I was a bit old and I thought I was more use as a farmer.’

  ‘So the man y
ou killed was here in Canada?’

  Harry looked at him sharply, but Little Bear’s expression as he nudged the ponies back into motion was as unreadable as ever.

  ‘I’m so psychic, sometimes I frighten myself,’ Little Bear told him kindly.

  Harry tried to focus on the scenery they were travelling through, the track, the bushes, the ponies’ flicking ears, but saw again the broad shoulders and distinctive head. ‘He wanted to destroy everything. Everything I loved,’ he muttered.

  ‘Just tell me, was he an evil man?’

  Harry thought a while. ‘Evil like in a fairy tale,’ he said. ‘But fascinating too.’

  ‘Huh.’ Little Bear looked briefly at him and smiled faintly as if reading something in his face. ‘Bad men you want to kiss are the worst; he had only to use the right tone of voice and you offered your throat to the knife.’

  ‘That sort of thing, yes,’ Harry said, and cleared his throat, unnerved at the accuracy with which the young man beside him seemed able to read his darkest instincts.

  WINTER

  They were young and were certain they would make good in God’s open spaces, where a man is a man.

  Jennie Johnston, A Glance Back

  Chapter Nineteen

  While working for Jørgensen, in an area that wasn’t exactly hilly, Harry had often heard people joking that the western prairies were so dull and flat that a man driving a cart there had to fight sleep because of the extreme monotony of the landscape, but could at least rest secure in the knowledge that if he did nod off, his horse would be equally bored and feel no temptation to leave the dead-straight track while its master slumbered.

  Between Moose Jaw and Saskatoon, Harry had certainly seen stretches that seemed to bear out the jibe, but as he left the Battlefords behind and drove the laden cart along the almost deserted dirt road towards Cut Knife, he was pleased to see mature stands of trees and then even a hill or two. It wasn’t exactly Derbyshire, he told himself, but neither was it Norfolk.

  Compared to the area around the Jørgensens, however, it was astonishingly empty of people. He passed no more than four other carts on the road all day. Much of the land had not yet been cultivated, and he seemed to see more Indians – Cree, as he had just learnt these were – than Europeans on his way. He was worried his new horses would become overly tired, having no idea how fit they were. He found a stream where they could have a long drink and a rest while he ate some lunch and drank a rashly celebratory bottle of warm beer. Safe from any man’s satirical gaze, he spent some time talking to them and rubbing their faces and wondering what he should call them.

  There was so little sign of life at Cut Knife, and he was so tired by then, that he nearly drove straight through it without noticing. At least Winter had a station. Cut Knife was no more than a few homesteads as yet, and certainly had no inn. The farmer he was sent to was chatty enough once he had got over his surprise at an unexpected visitor. He showed Harry where he could water his horses and secure them for the night, and suggested Harry sleep under his cart on the straw in his barn, saying there were thieving Indians about and that a fully laden cart was too much provocation for men with little to their name.

  Cut Knife had only been settled four years before, he said, but they hoped to persuade the Grand Trunk Pacific to throw out a branch line to them from the Battlefords, if only to make shipping of grain and delivery of supplies less arduous. ‘And we have a hill nearby!’ he laughed. ‘A regular hill.’ He described how it was where the Indians had murderously routed a revenge attack during the rebellion of the 1880s, defending their women and children from far greater government forces. White men were killed, he said, and added suggestively that one had been mutilated. Harry could tell from the detail of his narrative that he had enjoyed few opportunities to tell anyone the story since finding it out for himself on arrival.

  The barn was bone dry, being almost brand new, and the straw fairly fresh. Harry furled himself in both his new blankets and bedded down, as suggested, beneath his cart, mounding up some straw beneath him as a kind of pillow. He had enjoyed softer beds, and warmer nights, but the smell of the straw seemed to act like a mild narcotic, and it felt somehow tremendously safe to have the big, warm, sighing bulk of his new horses close at hand.

  He was up at dawn to feed and harness them. The farmer offered him a cup of tea and a slice of bread, as well as the use of his privy (of which he was proud, as it was as new a feature as the barn), then solemnly talked him through the actually very simple route to Winter before seeing him off the property.

  The scene at Winter’s tiny station when he finally reached it was like that at so many of the settler stations he had passed through on the way to the Battlefords. A little cluster of humanity – all men, of course – waiting to catch the next train or to do business with men getting off it. Troels strode out from their midst to greet him. He had spent another night with his German woman and was keen to share every lip-smacking detail.

  As they turned north up what was evidently intended for Winter’s chief street one day, humanity fell away again except for the evidence of an occasional shack, tent or soddy, or a distant glimpse of a farmer at work. Between Moose Jaw and Jørgensen’s place the land had seemed entirely under cultivation already, whether for crops or as pasture. Here, as on much of the land Harry had driven the cart through that morning, the white man’s incursion was still a fragile, piecemeal thing. Moose Jaw was a city by comparison, with hotels, a library, a choice of churches, a proud governmental hall, most of it built of brick. Even Battleford had enough brick buildings to lend it a convincing air of permanence. The few buildings they passed in Winter were wooden, built with whatever men could carry by cart from the train, presumably, and while many were in better repair than the pitiful structure where Varcoe was living with his woman, they were rarely much larger. Jørgensen’s house was only built of lumber but seemed palatial by comparison; it had two verandas, a second storey, an attic and a cellar. But when Harry commented on this, Troels pointed out that since settlement in Winter was comparatively fresh, these were mainly places where men lived alone, batching it in minimal space and comfort until such time as they could attract wives and acquire, like Jørgensen, the trappings of domesticity.

  The land rose steadily towards a distant ridge when all at once Troels was jumping down from the cart. Using Harry’s new scythe, he stamped and sliced his way through thick grasses and dazzling spring weeds to find a surveyor’s post, off which he read a number.

  ‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘I thought so. This is your new home! The bastard lied about the fencing.’

  Wire fence heading off from a single post into the thick prairie grass was what had alerted Troels to search for the surveyor’s marker. But there was no equivalent fence along the facing side of the property.

  Having driven the cart a little way off the track, Harry tied the horses to a tree beside a small slough so they could have water. Troels and he then set about clearing ground for the tent, one with the scythe, one with the shovel. It was slow work. The grass was tough stuff, its closest English equivalent the sharp-edged marram found on seaside dunes. Everywhere there were sturdy clumps of weeds or small saplings that must have taken root since Varcoe performed what little clearance he had managed during his stay.

  As they worked, they came upon the sad wreck of Varcoe’s attempt at a shelter: a tangle of mismatched lumber and canvas that must have given way under the weight of snow in the winter just past. Tugging the canvas aside and making a heap of the lumber for firewood, Harry found a stash of perfectly good if slightly rusting tools including, most usefully, a post-hole auger; a small reparation for Varcoe’s fraudulence over his fencing performance.

  To his shame, Harry had never erected a tent before, not even in school, so was happy that Troels knew what he was about and took charge as they unrolled and set to pegging the baffling thing, telling Ha
rry where to bang in pegs or secure poles. As they pulled the tent upright and he stepped inside, he felt a brief, boyish glee, which was swiftly followed by a species of panic at the realisation that this frail structure and this alone was now his home.

  As though sensing the faltering of his spirits, Troels insisted they get on with heaving the little stove into place and securing its tin flue through the opening in the tent roof, pulling tight the cunning corset of leather straps and canvas that closed the gap around it to hold out the worst of the weather. They shared a bottle of beer to slake their thirst after their labours and christen the new home, then Troels left Harry to pull his trunk and bags inside and begin unpacking, while he went off to discover the full extent of Varcoe’s perfidy over the fencing.

  Having assembled and made up his camp bed in one corner and arranged blankets for Troels and gathered a good heap of fairly dry wood for the stove, Harry left the tent – where the gloom and the strong smell of newly unrolled mackintosh was threatening to overpower him – and took his brand-new water bottle and whistling kettle in search of a stream where he could draw water fit to drink. He discovered one a little way up the slope, and tasted it gingerly at first, then eagerly when he found it sweet. (Jørgensen had told him horror stories of men settling on land that proved to have only alkali water on it.)

  There were birds singing, more than he ever heard at Moose Jaw. He made out the cool, deliberate notes he had already learnt belonged to a chickadee. And there was an abundance of flowers. He made a note to send away for a botany book when he was next at a bookseller. That idea in turn brought home the realisation that he had not seen what he thought of as a proper bookseller since leaving Moose Jaw, and that it might be months, years even, before he saw one again. Perhaps he could write to the one he used in London. He stood from filling his bottle and kettle and looked around him at prairie grass and saplings, at trees he would have to fell and boulders he would have to lever on to a stone-boat for the horses to pull out of the way – once, that was, he had a lever and a stone-boat.