Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Horses in a New World
Acknowledgements
Also by Troon Harrison
For my husband, Trevor.
Every morning I awake with thankfulness
into a world made rich and joyful by your love.
Chapter 1
I was alone in the canoe when the great creature swam out of the fog.
I heard the gusts of its heavy breathing before I could see the creature itself. Chills of fear slithered up my neck. Around the canoe’s fragile hull of birchbark, the muddy Hayes River swirled down to meet the salty waters of Hudson Bay. The current was running fast; although the tide was slack, the river was filled with eddies and long ropes of water like the muscles in a hunter’s arms.
I had been warned, for most of my fourteen winters, about the dangers of the river. Only last year a man from the trading fort had drowned here, stranded on a sandbar as the tide rushed in. What had possessed me to come out alone in a canoe taken from the beach?
It was the arrival of the supply ship that had caused my foolishness. It had sailed over the horizon that morning from England, a tiny island far away across a wide ocean. Only once a year it arrived in the months of July or August, and dropped anchor at a place they called Five Fathom Hole, on the edge of the great bay. Then the men of the fort went out in light boats and schooners to bring ashore the precious supplies that the Hudson’s Bay Company sent to its employees. There would be Dutch cheese, and British beef to cook with, and fresh supplies of oatmeal for porridge and of flour for bannock. Women would have fresh lengths of calico cloth to sew with, and strings of bright glass beads. Letters would arrive from loved kin, and newspapers filled with pictures and stories about things that happened in that other place, the place that the white men called home.
For the two weeks that the supply ship lay offshore, the fort at York Factory would be filled with bustle and laughter despite the hard work of unloading the cargo and carrying it up the wooden landing stage to the warehouses. There would be wild games of football, the winning team celebrating with extra rations of rum, the laughter and shouting turning into fist fights. Men would play their fiddles while my mother’s people came into the fort from their lodges, and danced their Swampy Cree dances, the Rabbit dance, the Kissing dance. And maybe some girl with coppery skin would catch the eye of a trader, newly off the ship, and she would marry him. The way that my mother had, twice.
My father, a man named Simon Mackenzie, had left when I was still a baby swaddled on a cradle-board, peeing into moss. He had gone with a canoe brigade, paddling west along hundreds of miles of water to a fort in a place called the Red River valley. Before departing he had promised my mother that he would return and that they would always be together but, instead, he had abandoned us. His broken promise had lain in my mother’s eyes, hard and still, like stones lying under shallow water at the margin of a lake. She had waited many years for him to return, clinging stubbornly to his promise while she lived amongst the Homeguard Cree, the bands that lived near the fur-trading fort. She refused even to marry a young chief though he sent bolts of fine cloth to her tent door, and piles of trade blankets. Finally, though, she did remarry; my second father, Ronald McTavish, was the fort’s baker, his heavy arms and cheeks always pale with flour and even his sandy hair dusty-looking. With this second husband, my mother had Charlotte Bright Eyes, her second daughter and the person dearest to my heart.
When Charlotte was five winters old, my mother died of a white man’s illness called the measles, her soul gone along the wolf road that shone overhead on clear nights, a ribbon of stars. For one more year, Charlotte and I lived inside the fort’s tall palisade of logs with the only father we knew, but when the supply ship came again, Ronald McTavish called us to the bakery to tell us that he was leaving on the westerly wind.
‘Ah, lassies, I’m sorry to go without you,’ he told us, his voice as soft and heavy as his bread rolls. Charlotte was seated on his wide lap but I stood stiffly in the doorway of the bakery, numb with disbelief.
‘But you know how I hate the cold winters,’ he continued, ‘and how the gout aches in my joints. Oh, girls, I long for green fields. Now that your mother has passed on, I haven’t the heart for this wild land any more. You will be fine; your mother’s people will take you in and care for you.’
He had been right; my mother’s people did take us to live in their lodges of poles and deerskin, to sleep on boughs of spruce around smoking fires. But all had not been fine, for in the final moons of winter many of our kin died of starvation, including my grandfather. My grandmother had died many years before; I scarcely remembered her. And so, when the supply ship had dropped anchor this morning, I had climbed into a canoe and paddled along the shoreline, hoping for a glimpse of her three tall masts and of the other boats scuttling across the water like beetles to meet her. I had hoped to slip away from my melancholy, my deep sadness. At the fort, they called my sadness the Blue Devil. I had hoped to paddle away from it, like a moose being hunted and doubling back, shaking off its hunter and vanishing into its own solitary life again. I had hoped to forget about all the spirits.
The fog had fallen upon me like a blanket after I had already paddled a good distance east along the shore from the fort. Now, instead of being able to glimpse the ship being unloaded, I was in danger of being swept out to sea and drowned. After the fog had fallen, a great dead spruce had sailed out of the yellow murk. It must have been standing on the riverbank, and the water had eaten away the clay beneath it until one day it toppled over with a wild splash, and was sucked away. Though I had strained over my birchwood paddle with the strength of both arms and my whole back, the current swept the canoe sideways, and the roots of the tree, reaching out for me like dark arms, had pierced the birchbark sides of the canoe above the waterline. The canoe was held fast in a tangle of roots, and the tree, the canoe and I were being swept out to sea.
Faintly, I could hear the cries of the water birds along the mudflats or flying overhead: the brown geese, the white geese, the beautiful pale swans, the eider ducks. Water gurgled against the tree roots, pulling away chunks of bark from the trunk.
Once, the ghostly shape of a fishing stage flew towards me out of the mist. Here, some Cree man had built a willow weir beneath the water, and a platform five feet above the water, so that he might catch porpoise as they leaped and splashed upriver, eighteen miles inland to the great waterfalls. For a moment, I thought that my spruce tree would lodge up against the legs of the stage, and that I could cling to it and climb out. I leaned from the canoe, stretching my arms towards the stage’s looming posts. I was a leg’s length away from the closest post, then an arm’s length, then closer … my muscles quivered with the strain of my stretching. I would be saved when the fog lifted, when fishermen saw me on the stage. All would be well!
Then a whirling eddy of dark green water caught my tree, and it revolved away from the stage, its whole waterlogged length spinning in the current. I sank back into the canoe, my heart hammering.
A little while later a tiny bird decoy, fashioned from bent willow, bobbed past me and was swallowed by the fog. Some hunter had made it to lure the ducks down close to his hiding spot on the mudflats, so that he could shoot them. I shouted, hoping a hunter might hear me, but the fog ate my voice whole.
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I will die out here, I thought. Then who will look after Charlotte Bright Eyes, my little half-sister with her face shaped like a heart? Who will finish making her coat, cut from a trading blanket with stripes of green, red and yellow? Who will sew the beads on to her leggings, and smoke the moose hide to make her a fine new robe?
Out here, in the fog, the misipisiwak or underwater panthers might come for me, sensing how alone I was and how defenceless. They would rise out of the depths of the underwater world, the world where powerful spirits dwelled, with their horns and their bodies like lynx, and would devour me.
I broke into a cold sweat, although tiny chips of ice bobbed against my canoe with a gentle scraping sound.
This is happening because I failed in my vision quest, I thought. No spirit wanted to be my pawakan, my spirit guide. Now I was going to die alone in the salty mist, trapped in the roots of the black spruce, without a spirit guardian to save me with its power. All I had was a song, the song I’d been given in my vision dream, which neither I, nor the elder healing woman Betty Goose Wing, could understand. Was the song directed to an animal, or to a wind spirit? And which wind was I calling to? Sawanis, spirit of the south wind, would be a gentle force to call upon but if I sang to Kiwitin, the malevolent being of the north, then harm would surely befall me. All dangerous animals came from the north – the wolverine, the snake, the underwater panther – as well as the terrible Witiko monster with its heart of ice, which gnawed its own lips with its sharp, blue teeth, and which stalked people and ate them. The words of my song might bring me power or might be treacherous, might be a trick played upon me in my dream.
Nonetheless, these words were all that I had brought back to the lodges after my vision quest’s three days of fasting, and so I began to sing them now in my canoe, in the fog. My voice was thin with terror. I drummed the palms of my hands on the canoe’s thwart as I sang the words over and over, imploring my missing pawakan to come to my aid and save me. ‘Far Runner, Wind Runner, Water Runner, come to me, carry me onwards.’
I paused for breath, gulping air, tasting on my tongue the wet mist, the salt, the muddy banks, the ice, the rotting roots of the tree that held me fast. Then I heard it, the breathing of the great creature. Was it a water panther? I peered into the mist, my heart plugged in my throat like the wooden stopper in the neck of a powder horn.
The creature’s long head parted the fog.
It was larger than the head of a caribou, as large as the head of a moose but more tapered, and with bones that were lighter and more slender. Both caribou and moose were animals that I knew well, and this creature was neither one of them, and neither did it have any antlers or horns. Around its head was fastened something like a harness, made of strips of hide, and a rope trailed from this harness and sank down into the water. The creature’s fur was red like the fur of a summer fox, and it had pricked ears, longer than the ears of a sled dog but shorter than the ears of a rabbit. Between its ears hung down long red hair, and its nostrils were wide and fluttering with its heavy breath. Its back was beneath the water but I glimpsed its length, and saw how the long red hair of its neck and tail floated on the surface of the water. Around it, the current swirled in circles so that I knew it had great legs, churning the depths as it swam towards me. Its large rounded eyes rolled white as it glimpsed the shadowy tangle of the spruce tree and my pierced canoe. Air snorted from its nostrils. Was it a manitou, a great spirit, summoned by my song? I clutched the canoe’s cedar gunwales and stared at the creature as it came closer, closer.
Twice a year, the spirit chiefs of the caribou commanded the herds to journey: northwards in summer along the edges of the long days, then southwards in winter, fleeing the darkness. On their journeys, the deer swam across lakes and rivers; they could find the far shore even in darkness, even in fog. They could smell the land; its scents of moss and muskeg swamp, black mud and pale clay, spruce needles, water lilies and cranberries, the green leaves of poplar. Perhaps this red creature too could draw smells deep into its lungs; perhaps it was not lost, as I was, in this world of fog and water, but was swimming strongly towards the invisible shore.
There had been fog in the dreams of my vision quest too. The previous fall, in the moon when ducks begin to moult, Betty Goose Wing – who was an aunt of my mother’s – had helped me to prepare. Dressed in a new, clean robe of white caribou skin, stitched with porcupine quills and blue beads, I had walked alone into the bush and come to a small lake. Here the men had built me a platform, a bird’s nest, in the trees by placing long poles between four tall black spruce trees. Other poles, laid horizontally, created the platform on which the men had heaped boughs, their resinous scent strong in the falling sun. For three days, I had sat on there, my eyes filled with the light of the lake by day and the path of the stars by night, my palms drumming a skin drum, my mind seeking its pawakan guide. For three days and nights, I had fasted, only sipping water occasionally from a birchbark container sealed with pitch.
‘Kicimanitow, Great Spirit,’ I had implored, ‘take pity upon me, Amelia Otterchild Mackenzie, for I am an orphan.’ Yet nothing came into my dreams. Perhaps nothing wants me, I had thought, and I had prayed harder, in desperation, reminding the Creator how I needed help to care for my little sister.
And then, at last, the pawakan came in human form, walking over the platform and into my dreams, the fog swirling around the pillar of its body like smoke. Its face was lean and long, and its hair was not black like the hair of my people but red, hanging down on each side of its face and with a single long lock hanging down the front, over its nose. It was dressed in a robe of red fur that I thought might be fox. Its moccasins made a strange, hollow sound on the platform poles as though they were hard – like the white man’s boots – instead of soft like the moccasins of the tribes. It peered at me through the swirling fog.
‘Do you know me?’ it asked. ‘Have you seen me before?’ And it gave a long laugh; a long, peculiar, gusting laugh.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t know you,’ and this was wrong, for in my vision I should have been able to recognise my own pawakan. Three times it asked me if I knew it and each time I answered ‘No.’ At last, it began to shape-shift, flashing between its human form and its true shape, but still I didn’t know what my pawakan was, for in the swirling fog I glimpsed only flashes of vision, like the flashes of vision you get in the bush at night in the middle of a lightning storm. In those moments I saw thin, red legs running, and red hair flying. The drumming of the moccasins on the poles grew louder, it filled my ears and pounded inside my head; my heart drummed with it, leaping and rushing high in my chest. One final time I saw my pawakan in human form. ‘Here is the song to summon me,’ it said, and then, in a thin high voice, it chanted, ‘Far Runner, Wind Runner, Water Runner, come to me, carry me onwards.’
For days after returning to the lodges, I struggled to understand my vision quest dream. Without a pawakan I would never prosper in life; I would have no skills at healing or paddling, at hunting or trapping, at kinship or marriage. I would be taunted and jeered at by my mother’s people, and would die young. Days passed but understanding failed me and a great fear, like the fear of a hare in the path of a wolverine, turned my bones to softness. Finally, I sought out Betty Goose Wing where she was hanging split whitefish to dry on poles.
‘I know that one does not speak to others of one’s pawakan,’ I said. ‘But I need your wisdom.’
Though she listened intently, drawing deep breaths on her clay pipe and ignoring the dogs nosing around her feet, Betty Goose Wing was not able to help me. ‘You must pay close attention to all your dreams each night,’ she said at last. ‘Perhaps your spirit guide will come to you again and you will recognise it.’ But her eyes were flat and closed, and I knew that she was afraid for me, for if a dreamer could not recognise their pawakan during their vision quest, fasting with face painted black, seated near a lake or river, then what hope was there?
Some of my mother’s peop
le were coasters, people who lived all year near to the fur-trading fort of York Factory, hunting or fishing or gathering wood for the white men. Others of my kin were inlanders, and when the day length began to wane and the cold stalked southwards like a great white bear, these kin journeyed away from the Hayes River to hunt the moose and the bears in their dens.
‘You should go into the bush,’ Betty Goose Wing advised me, ‘and perhaps there, where it is clean and where you are away from the white man’s ways, your pawakan will come to you again.’
So Charlotte and I travelled into the north-west with the sled dogs, with the women carrying the lodge skins on their backs, with the hunters striding along smoking their pipes, the long barrels of their guns laid upon their shoulders and beads shining in their greased hair. At first, the winter was kind to our hunting band and the men called a grandfather, a black bear, from its den and shot it and laid tobacco in its mouth as an offering. They came back to camp quietly, without boasting. The women danced at night, asking the spirit chief of the martens to bring the martens to the trap lines, and the martens came and gave themselves to us. Their bodies were limp in the traps under their shining pelts, but their souls had gone to find new bodies and run in the bush again. We ate well, and sat around our fires talking and laughing as we repaired mittens lined with fur and hats of fox hair, and as we cured the marten skins to sell to the traders at the fort in the spring, in the grey goose moon.
Later in the winter, the bush fell silent and a great cold breathed on the land so that the tree trunks split apart, making a sound as loud and sharp as a gun being fired. The north wind blew away the snow so that the moose and the deer could run swiftly from the hunters and couldn’t be killed. Day after day I set snares for the white hares but my snares lay empty and the snow was unbroken by any tracks. At night now I dreamed of nothing at all but I could feel the Witiko monster stalking our camp, moving in through the dark forest, gnawing its lips, uttering its strange, gruesome sounds, for it had no speech. At night, it sat watching our lodges, trying to catch the sparks that flew up from our fires, for each spark that it caught would be a soul that it devoured.
Red River Stallion Page 1