Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  The cold deepened. The land seemed to die around us.

  We boiled strips of willow bark in melted snow and drank the broth; we gnawed on caribou hide that filled our bellies with nothing but the memory of meat. We drummed and sang songs, hoping to entertain the animals, but they didn’t come to us. The men sacrificed a white sled dog, and laid tobacco in the clefts of rocks, but still the animals stayed away, hiding, as though we had offended the spirit masters that controlled the number and movements of all the animals. What had we done to cause offence? We had hung the head of moose and bear in the trees, and decorated them with ribbons and with ochre paste. We had laid other bones upon platforms where the dirty dogs couldn’t gnaw them. The dead animals had been brought to our lodges with respect, laid upon their backs, lifted inside without striking against the door posts, and given the seat of honour. We had covered their bloodstains to keep the snow clean, and had sung them songs of gratitude for the gifts of their bodies.

  Yet we had somehow given offence, or a sorcerer was using his power against us, driving away the animals. We starved. A young mother died first, then two children, then a hunter with an injured leg, then my grandfather. In the lodges we lay on the spruce boughs under a pall of choking smoke, and tried to turn our thoughts away from Witiko, who would drive us crazy, and make us eat our own kin before he killed us. We were too weak now to drum or sing, too weak to make new moccasins, or to weave netting for the snowshoes that let us fly along on top of the snow’s crust.

  Still, the north wind blew. Sometimes, I heard the running of hard feet in my dreams or saw a flash of long red hair, but my pawakan didn’t come to me; perhaps nothing in the spirit world felt any pity for my plight. Charlotte’s heart-shaped face grew pinched and pale, her bones poking through like the wings of fledgling birds. I held her against me under a covering of Hudson’s Bay Company blankets and bearskin, and waited for the moment when our hearts would grow too weak to beat in our chests, and our feet would climb the wolf road, running after our mother.

  But neither Charlotte Bright Eyes nor I died in that starving moon, and when the cold lessened, the people from the fort came looking for those who were still alive: only nine of us out of a band of thirty-three. They carried us back, wrapped in blankets and laid upon sledges made of moose hide and birch-wood. The sleigh bells rang clear and bright on the dogs’ harnesses. For weeks, we lay in the room at the fort that had once been slept in by Ronald McTavish, the baker, and waited for strength to return to us. I sold my marten pelts to the trading store to buy rations, and cooked for Charlotte in the labourers’ cookhouse: stews of corn and pemmican, or caribou and potatoes, fried whitefish, porridge of oatmeal, tarts of cranberries and gooseberries. The plumpness returned to her cheeks and arms, and the brightness to her dark brown eyes. I braided beads into her black plaits, and began planning to make her a robe of tanned moose hide with fringes and patterns of porcupine quills.

  All summer, I plucked geese before the men salted them in barrels to eat next winter. I stitched clothing for the white men at the fort: duffel socks, shirts, mittens, trousers. I washed their laundry along the shores of the Hayes River, my hands numb in the water, the tide licking in and filling the air with salt. All summer, the Blue Devil of sadness held my heart in its hand, a heavy thing, drained of joy. The white man’s Blue Devil was like the Witiko monster: it turned one’s heart to ice; it was a thing that was always starving. All summer, I was starving for laughter, for warmth, for all my inlander kin who had died of their hunger. When the supply ship dropped anchor at Five Fathom Hole at last, I thought that maybe Ronald McTavish would return to us on it, or that he might at least have sent us a letter and a package of tartan cloth, and some gifts from his homeland: a brooch for me, a piece of pretty lace for Charlotte.

  And so this was the true reason that I borrowed a canoe and began to paddle along the shoreline, becoming lost in the fog and tangled in a dead tree. So it was that I was expecting to drown, when the great red creature came alongside the canoe.

  When it was very close, I saw the fringes of red hair inside its tapered ears. I saw the water beaded in the long whiskery hairs over its eyes. I saw how its dark eyes looked at me as though it were saying something to me, asking me a question. I was skilled in listening to animals, in understanding their natures and their spirits. The souls of animals are stronger than the souls of people, for when you kill an animal, its soul remains in this world, finding new bones to live in. I could listen to all the animals in the bush: the marten, the lynx, the beaver, the muskrat and the otter, the fox and the wolf, the grandfather bear, who has no chief over him.

  Never before had I spoken to the red creature swimming alongside my canoe in the fog – yet I heard its question. I had only an instant to answer, for already the current was swirling the creature and I apart. Already the strip of churning water was growing wider, cold and dangerous, between us.

  ‘I know who you are,’ I said, and the creature swivelled its ears towards the sound of my voice. Then I kicked aside my useless paddle with a clatter, and rose without hesitation to climb out of the canoe.

  Chapter 2

  Aaiiiyeeee! I was falling into fire!

  Its dark mouth swallowed me whole. Pain filled my body; for an instant, fire licked over the top of my scalp. My feet thrashed me to the surface of the icy, burning water and my outflung arm splashed across the ripples. I grabbed a long strand of the creature’s red hair, and wrapped it quickly around my hand twice. The creature did not pause in its strong swimming. Its head was outstretched, its redrimmed nostrils sucked air, perhaps filling with the smells of the invisible shoreline.

  With a strong pawakan, one could survive almost anything: a drowning, the vengeance of a sorcerer, or the attack of a white bear. I could feel the strength of my pawakan now; it was indeed a water runner, as my song had foretold. The muscles sliding and straining in its shoulders bumped against me as I was towed alongside. Beneath the water’s turbulence, I felt the stir and thrust of the creature’s long legs and once a bone banged against my own dangling legs. I pulled them up, trying to make them float behind me, but they were weighted down by my soaked leggings and robe of deerskin. I stared at where the creature’s back surged just beneath the water. Tightening my grip on the strands of hair, I let myself drift back from the neck, and then I stretched out my right foot in its sodden moccasin. With a lunge, I slid that leg over the top of the creature. Then I felt the true power of my pawakan, for its back was broad and solid, easily lifting me out of the water. Ripples creamed from the creature’s neck, broke over my leggings, and fanned out into the turbulence of the Hayes’ currents.

  We journeyed in a silence broken only by the creature’s snorting breath and, once, by the haunting laughter of a loon, a great diving bird. For a long time, we travelled through the bowl of fog with the muddy water continually sucking us downstream to the icy bay. The creature worked its way across the current at an angle. I could no longer feel my legs; even the cold burning had turned into numbness. My jaw rattled with chills. I began to wonder if we would ever reach shore, or if the fog would ever lift. Perhaps I was no longer on the Hayes River but was being carried away into some other world where the spirits lived: perhaps the world beneath the waves where Underwater Woman dwelled, or perhaps the upper air where the Thunderbirds soared, or perhaps even the world below ground where the Hairy People lived.

  Suddenly, there was a sharp grating sound beneath me. The creature’s back lurched. Its feet struck against small stones. From out of the fog loomed the pale sweep of a willow tree. The creature was no longer afloat now and its great body, no longer buoyant, lunged heavily from the water and on to a narrow strip of shoreline beneath a clay bank. The creature lowered its head and breathed so hard that I felt the surge of air in and out of its lungs. I glanced down. The toes of my moccasins were high above the shingle and for the first time I could see the true size of my pawakan. It was a massive beast; greater than a bull moose, as powerful as a bear,
as elegant as a running deer. Water streamed from its sides and down the hard lengths of its slender legs, the front legs and the back legs of different shape from each other. I lay along its neck, shuddering with cold, and felt the moment when it too began to shudder, long spasms running through its shoulders.

  We would die if we didn’t find warmth. Although it had released us, the burning fire of that cold river might still kill us.

  I slid from the creature’s back and staggered, my legs buckling beneath me. When I grasped the rope trailing from the creature’s harness, it began to follow me along the shoreline, heading upriver towards the lodges of the Homeguard Cree. Its hooves were not cleft in two like the hooves of a deer, or like the hooves of the white men’s oxen at the fort, but were one solid piece. Those hard black hooves struck forcefully against stones, making a sound as loud as the hooves that had drummed in my vision quest, before I had seen the true form of my pawakan. When we crossed patches of pale sand or clay, the animal left strange marks, circular in shape but with an indented V. I had never seen this track on our land before, although I could name the tracks of many creatures in snow or mud. The white men read stories in books and newspapers sent on the ships, and I too could read, for the York postmaster had given the children lessons by candlelight. But with my mother’s people I had learned another kind of reading: to understand the tracks of animals as if they were stories, the tales that the animals told about themselves.

  We struggled on, shivering in our shawls of chill mist. I could feel the creature’s fatigue, read it in the slump of its neck, see it in the occasional stumble over a piece of driftwood. I wondered how far it had swum to find me, to save me. Finally, a point of land that I recognised loomed up, and I turned inland and found a faint trail. We climbed it away from the shoreline, brushing through low-growing poplars. Blueberries left a dark stain on my moccasins as I strode through them. The boughs of a lone tamarack pierced the fog. I swung further inland on to a clay path worn by the feet of the Homeguard Cree as they went to and from the fort, working for the white men, bringing them fish for their sled dogs, wood for their iron stoves, wildfowl and baskets of cranberries to cure the terrible scurvy. Without help, the white men would never have survived in this world that they called Rupert’s Land, named after a nephew of one of their chiefs far away in England. It was a strange thing that they could name the land, for not even the Great Creator had done so. And it was also a strange thing that this chief Rupert had never once set foot on the land that was named after him.

  My pawakan walked steadily behind me, its warm breath gusting on the back of my neck, its hooves thumping the ground, its amazing tail swishing when it got caught in twiggy bushes. I had never seen such a tail. It was not fluffy like the tail of a fox or a skunk; it was not flat like a beaver’s tail, nor long and sinuous like the tail of an otter. The tail of this red creature was like the smooth shining hair of a beautiful woman; it was so long that it brushed against the creature’s ankles as it walked.

  It was the dogs that first heard us coming and rushed to meet us. They swarmed around the creature and ripped up the air with their frenzied barking. The creature stopped and watched the dogs, then stretched its neck towards them. I saw that it was neither amazed by the dogs nor afraid of them, and after a moment we walked on and the dogs ran ahead into camp. I circled around the edge until I reached the pale, conical tipi where Betty Goose Wing lived. Over her fire, hung from a tripod, was a black pot containing caribou brains. When they had boiled, Betty and I would use them to tan a moose hide; the hide that she had promised to give to me for Charlotte’s new robe.

  I began to lead the red creature in circles around the fire, letting its heat wash and lick at both of us.

  ‘A-aunt-auntie!’ I called in Cree, my jaw seized tight with cold, my teeth chattering. She emerged from the dark triangle of the lodge doorway, a figure as round and thick as a tree stump, her face weathered like cedar bark. Her dark eyes watched us circling the fire, shaking with cold and still dripping salty water. I turned and began to circle the fire in the other direction so that we would be warmed on the other sides of our bodies.

  ‘What have you been doing, Otterchild?’ the old woman asked, tamping tobacco into her pipe with the ball of her thumb. Then she clenched the pipe’s clay stem in her teeth, settling it into the groove worn there through her many winters.

  ‘I was caught in a black spruce, drifting out to the bay in the fog,’ I confessed. ‘But my pawakan came to me in its true form and rescued me; it brought me to shore on its back. This is the creature that visited me on the platform in my vision quest. Only, Auntie, I don’t know its name.’

  Betty Goose Wing nodded, and the long strings of beads in her ears swung and glistened in the damp light. ‘It’s a horse,’ she said. ‘There was a horse at York Factory when you were a baby of two winters, too small to remember. It was brought on the supply ship and the men used it to ride on. It pulled sledges of firewood, and rocks from the garden. But one winter, the wolves killed it. And last summer too the white men brought a horse on the supply ship. Perhaps you didn’t see it. It was when we were feasting and dancing the Round dance for your mother’s spirit.’

  I stared down at the toes of my moccasins, trampling in the dirt around Betty’s glowing fire. Last summer had been the time to celebrate my mother’s life and death so that her spirit would be free to travel to the happy lands of the west. And also, last summer, Ronald McTavish had abandoned us, sailing away on the westerly wind before ice sealed the bay shut. All I had felt was the pain in Charlotte’s gentle dark eyes. So I had paid little attention to the contents of last summer’s supply ship, with its bales and boxes, its kegs and livestock. Its horse, which must have been sent on to some other fort.

  ‘So, your pawakan is the spirit of horses,’ Betty said, her tongue thinking about the meaning of those words. ‘I have not heard of this happening before. The horse is not an animal of our people, like the bear or the wolf. It is a creature of the white man’s world. Perhaps the horse spirit is a pawakan that only a half-blood like you could possess. I heard that the white men don’t have pawakans at all, only some man they call Jesus. They all have the same man’s spirit.’

  She scowled at such an inexplicable strangeness, and drew hard on her pipe. ‘This red horse must have come on the supply ship … then fallen into the river when the men were unloading. You must lead it to the fort, find out who owns it.’

  ‘Who owns it?’ A chill shook through me, but not from cold. Someone, a white man, owned my red creature, my spirit guide who had saved me from drowning! Some white man, perhaps the chief factor, perhaps the chief trader, had sent for this creature from far away and it had been brought to him across the world, so that he could ride it, and make it work for him. I was going to lose my horse, although out there in the fog we had belonged only to each other.

  I was losing one more precious thing.

  Pain gripped my stomach and wrung it, like a hand wringing a wet hide before it is tanned, squeezing the moisture from it. I bent over, choking on loss, grief blocking my throat. The horse came to a standstill and bent its muzzle down to nudge my head. The warmth of its breath filled my wet hair, and I felt the soft short fur around its nostrils brush my cheek. I leaned back into its shoulder and willed myself not to cry, for grief or anger were private things amongst the Cree. I would not show tears here before the children that were gathering with excited shouts, or the adults who were drifting in closer through the fog.

  I felt a hand on my back. ‘I will hold the horse,’ Betty Goose Wing said. ‘Go into my lodge and put on dry clothing before the cold eats you up. Bring out a blanket for the animal.’

  I stumbled away from the staring faces and into the smoky dimness of the tipi with its familiar smells of tobacco and sweet grass, the musk of furs. Jerkily, I pulled off my robe and leggings, and pulled on some of Betty’s; they were much too large for me and hung in folds from my body. Although I had recovered from the starving moo
n when my kin had died, I was of only medium height, stocky and strong but not plump. Still shaking with cold, I pulled a capote, a woollen blanket coat with fringes, over Betty’s robe. Then I snatched up a blanket and carried it outside, where I spotted a young mother that I knew, standing amongst the circle of people exclaiming over my pawakan. Only they thought that it was simply some possession of a white man’s.

  ‘Jane!’ I called to the young mother. ‘Please, can you let me have some moss?’

  She looked surprised as she turned away but when she returned she carried a large bundle of the pale grey moss. It grew all over the land beneath the tamarack and spruce trees, and the deer ate it, and the Cree packed it into babies’ swaddlings.

  ‘Thank you, Jane.’ I took two large handfuls of moss and began to rub them over the horse, around and around in circles, absorbing the water from its short coat. I rubbed along its neck, across its sloping shoulders, between its front legs. The moss in my hands became limp with moisture and I turned to Jane and asked for more. ‘I will gather some tomorrow for your baby,’ I promised.

  I rubbed the new, dry moss along the horse’s spine to the base of its tail, down its back legs, under the curve of its belly.

  ‘A fine young stallion,’ Betty Goose Wing observed, watching beside me.

  ‘Finer even than Rebecca Stonechild’s new hunter!’ joked someone in the crowd and there was a gust of delighted laughter amongst the women.

  I ignored them and kept rubbing moss all over the horse. As his coat dried, its colour became lighter, changing from dark red to a fiery brightness. And then I saw that there were white hairs too, mingled with the red in some places like different colours of grass mingled along the shore of a pond. Down one side of his neck, across the top of his back, and spreading down towards his back legs, the horse’s fire coat was silvered with white. He was like a coloured autumn leaf, touched with the lightest of first frost. I had never seen an animal with such a strange, fine pelt. Did a horse change colour with the seasons? Like the hare and fox that were brown or red in summer but white in winter, did this horse change? By the time of the snow goose moon, when the sun left us, would he be white all over? Did he know snow and darkness in his island home far away? I stared at him in wonder and ran my palms over the patches of white and red hairs. There was no white in the long hair of his tail or in the hair that grew along his neck and hung down his face. All the long hair was pure red.