Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  Once the moss was dampened, I threw Betty’s blanket over the horse and continued trampling around the fire. The people of the band drifted away into the fog, to tend their own fires and cook their evening meals. The children and the dogs ran off and finally only Betty remained, seated impassively in her lodge doorway, like a boulder, and smoking her pipe.

  ‘You take this horse to the fort,’ she said. ‘Someone there will be waiting for him.’

  I circled the fire in stubborn silence. This creature is mine! I wanted to say, but I knew that Betty was right.

  ‘It is the spirit of horse that is your pawakan,’ Betty said. ‘That spirit is yours for life now, as long as you do what it tells you to do, when it speaks in your dreams. Your pawakan will not leave you just because this one horse returns to its owner. Go now, before dark.’

  I slid my hand beneath the woollen blanket draped across the stallion’s back. His coat steamed with warmth. ‘I will wash your blanket and return it,’ I told Betty and she nodded and rose, stiff but strong, to tend to her fire. Then the red stallion followed me along the beaten clay trail, as the fog began to grow thicker and darker, like a good meat broth. Somewhere in the murk, across the wide, flat land, the sun was sinking into the west. A wolf howled once and was answered by another. The stallion flung up his head, neck tensed, ears straining towards the sound. I tugged on the rope and after a moment he continued to follow me, snorting. Perhaps, I thought, there were no wolves in the land from which he had come.

  My feet dragged as I approached the trading fort. In my stomach was a pain, a heaviness. I thought this was the way that the trout felt, caught on one of the white men’s fancy feathered lures in Ten Shilling Creek. Every step that I took closer to the white man’s world was a step closer to the moment that I would have to let go of the rope, and watch as someone else led away my red stallion.

  I approached the fort’s stockade from the rear, the side furthest from the river, and entered by a small gate in the tall wall of logs. Inside it, pasture drifted off into the mist and I heard the steady ripping noise of cows and oxen grazing the sparse forage. Away to my left, hogs grunted in their muddy wallow. The stallion followed me without faltering and, although his ears swivelled to take in these sounds, there was no tension in his muscles. Perhaps, I thought, he knew these animals at home, for these were white men’s creatures too, brought on the supply ship each summer. Faintly, I heard the ringing of a bell to signal the evening meal.

  Ahead of us loomed the pale wall of the cow byre, sided with planks that the sawyers had made from logs. The horse did not hesitate when I led him inside to a stall. The harness on his head was made of heavy leather, with a hard sheen on it; I wondered what kind of an animal it had been made from. It was secured with large buckles of bright metal. I unfastened one and slid the straps from the horse’s head, then fetched him a tin bucket of water and watched as he sucked long draughts. Water dribbled from his lips and he returned my stare as if he were thinking about me. In his eye, the centre was not round like the iris of a human eye, but rectangular, and on each of his legs was a small, hard piece without hair, as rough as rock. I wondered if there was anyone at the fort who could answer all the questions that I had about this creature. Beneath the blanket, his coat was warm and dry so I slid the heavy wool from him before securing the stable door and running through the fog. Charlotte would be looking for me, and I must find someone to talk to about the horse.

  I skirted the garden behind its wooden fence, and heard the sound of someone digging, throwing aside the wet, heavy soil to land with a solid thud.

  ‘Mr Murdoch?’ I called in English, and the sound ceased.

  ‘Mr Murdoch, it’s Amelia Mackenzie. Can I talk to you?’

  There was a pause as I waited for the fort’s postmaster to approach, moving slowly in the gloom. Although his job was to spend many hours each day writing long lists of supplies ordered, of furs shipped, of items traded, of letters received and letters sent, Mr Murdoch’s joy came from the garden. He laboured on it all summer, late into the evenings when his day’s work was completed and the sun lingered. He dug trenches to drain it. He hauled cow manure to it, and created raised beds on top of layers of willow wands so the air could dry the clay soil. He bent his back over the straggling rows of early turnips, potatoes, cabbages. Every year plants died from frost and of mould, but still Mr Murdoch kept trying; he said that he was an optimist. He was also kind, giving Charlotte and me hard sweets called humbugs. I’d asked if they were made from maple tree sap but he’d only laughed and said that people in England did not harvest tree sap.

  Now his freckled face peered at me in the gloom, his sandy hair falling over his sweating forehead. He swiped away black flies and mosquitoes, smudging his face with dirt. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  He listened carefully while I recounted my story about being adrift in the river, about being saved by a red horse. A puzzled look crept into his eyes.

  ‘Well, it must have come off the ship, no doubt about that,’ he said at last. ‘But no one here ordered a horse this year, Amelia. If they had, I would have known about it. Aye, indeed. I know who ordered soap and tooth powder, who ordered a lamb’s wool cravat, how many strings of beads to expect on this ship, how many hundreds of bales of fur the fort is sending back to England when the ship leaves. But there was no horse on any of my lists. Maybe some Company laddie in London decided to send us one. But it’s no good here for horses; the wolves get them, they cannot get about in the deep snow, and the hay is scarce. You know how hard it is to find hay even for the oxen, and how we slaughter most of them to eat ourselves each winter. No, no, this is not a country for horses.’

  ‘So no one here owns the horse?’ I asked, a note of hopefulness creeping into my voice.

  Mr Murdoch gave me a keen glance; he knew how animals fascinated me, how I had spent hours caring for an injured owl one summer, how the cats and the little dogs living in the governor’s house pressed against my legs, and followed when I walked along the shore.

  ‘Don’t go getting any ideas,’ he warned. ‘White men’s creatures always belong to someone.’

  I nudged at a stone with my moccasin. ‘I must go and find Charlotte. Please will you talk to the cowman and ask him to take care of the horse? He needs something to eat but I didn’t know what to give him.’

  ‘Hay and grass, same as the cows,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘Unless it’s some fine, fancy animal that eats oats and corn. Off you go then, and find your sister. I’ll make sure the horse gets taken care of.’

  I turned as he began digging again, and ran through the misty maze of buildings: the warehouses, the tradesmen’s shops – the tinsmith’s, the cooper’s, the blacksmith’s – past the distillery, where the rum was made, past the ice house, kept cold all summer with last year’s river ice. Now I was passing the storage rooms filled to the ceilings with stack upon stack of furs. All those animals had died for the white man’s trade and been brought here from hundreds of miles of trap lines and rivers, inside canoes and boats, and paid for with knives, guns, kettles, blankets and beads. The buildings all looked the same as I ran past, all boarded in planks painted white and pale yellow, already peeling in the salty summer fogs and freezing winters of this land.

  It was late by the time that I found Charlotte, and boiled us some caribou stew in the cookhouse, and fully dark when we went to bed at last in the room that was only ours for another day or two. An officer had told us that this room would be needed by one of the men arriving on the supply ship. Then we would have to return to the lodges and live with Betty Goose Wing.

  In the morning it was still foggy, and men hung around the fort cursing the weather, yearning for news of home, for the excitement of unloading the ship. I ran to the lodges with moss for Jane’s baby, then spent most of the day in the cow byre, just watching the red horse eat with a steady grinding of his jaws, or sleep standing on his feet, or flick flies away with that long, long tail. I cut a piece of old deerhide into s
trips and braided them together, and stitched them in a circle, then used this to rub the horse all over. He seemed to like the soft tickle; he sighed in satisfaction and turned his head to nudge me with his soft muzzle. I began to dream a waking dream; to believe that he might belong to no one at all, to be mine because we had found each other in the water, and walked to the fort together. He had been sent by my pawakan, spirit master of all horses.

  On the second day after the ship anchored at Five Fathom Hole, the sun broke through the fog. It dazzled the eye now to look out over the blue river, to see the tiny insect of the ship out there, its three masts fine as mosquito legs. Schooners and light boats and York boats were sent out to the ship to ferry the supplies ashore. Almost everyone in the fort came out to watch, seated in the short grass along the bluff above the landing stage. Boatload after boatload came alongside. Pipers marched up the planks of the stage, the skirl and shriek of their bagpipes like the cries of shore birds. Next came what everyone was waiting for: the bales and boxes, barrels and chests, all sent from England, all filled with food, with trade goods, with books and clothing and letters from home, with seeds to grow in next summer’s garden.

  ‘I’m trying runner beans next year,’ said Mr Murdoch, sitting beside Charlotte and me on the grass as the labourers hauled and heaved the supplies up the wooden ramps of the landing stage. I didn’t ask what runner beans were; I was watching two goats being led onshore; their strange eyes, like glass beads, were wide with fright. And then my own eyes widened, for in the next boat being rowed alongside the jetty was a sight so strange, so improbable, that I could only stare in shock.

  ‘Aha! Here she is then,’ said Mr Murdoch. ‘The owner of your stallion, Amelia. They say in the fort that she’s married a trader and has come now to live with him, bringing the horse as a wedding gift. The news arrived last night, along with a packet of letters brought by a fur brigade from Oxford House. I hadn’t the chance to tell you about it until now.’

  I couldn’t answer. A white woman! A woman who owned my horse!

  She was helped on to the landing stage and now she was walking up it, small and short, her spine very straight, her face in shadow beneath the wide brim of a pale-coloured hat. Ribbons and feathers flew out from this hat in the stiff breeze, which sent the pleated folds of her long, blue gown snapping like a sail. Now she was being greeted by Mr Robert Miles, the governor of York Factory, dressed in a frock coat and a silk cravat instead of his usual working-day garments. Curiosity itched across my skin, demanding attention.

  ‘Come,’ I said to Charlotte and took her small, warm palm in mine; we crossed the grass where cloud shadows ran like schools of porpoise, then edged forward until we were in front of the traders watching the unloading, and watching the white woman. There were no other white women in this land, for the men of the Hudson’s Bay Company came alone on their ships to trade for furs, and brought no mothers or wives or daughters with them. Instead, they married the Cree women and fathered half-blood children, like Charlotte and me. And then, when they pleased, they left us.

  So there she stood, that lone white woman, in an empty space on the crowded landing stage. She was a sight as foreign, as unfamiliar, and as inexplicable, as the sight of a horse in this land. Her hands, encased in long, pale blue gloves, clenched and unclenched in the swirling folds of her gown as four boatmen, from a lighter tied up below, approached her.

  ‘These are the men who were responsible for bringing your horse ashore,’ Governor Miles told her. The men stopped at a wary distance, their red stocking caps flaring brightly in the light and the red sashes at their waists flying in the wind. Beneath the angry stare of the woman’s eyes – blue as chips of spring ice – the men cleared their throats and shuffled their feet.

  ‘Pray tell me,’ she said suddenly, ‘how you have lost an animal as valuable as Foxfire, a stallion of the line of Original Shales and Flying Childers. Do you dolts know what you have lost? A Norfolk Trotter, that’s what, a stallion of the finest lineage, brought safely over thousands of miles of ocean in the belly of a ship. He was worth more money than you will ever earn in your entire miserable lives!’

  Her voice was clear and hard despite her small size; it rose in volume as she spoke until she was almost shrieking. Everything paused on the landing stage; men set barrels down, leaned on chests, clustered along the gunwales of boats. Everyone wanted to know what would happen next. Charlotte’s hand squirmed in mine and I softened my tight grip.

  Beneath her hat brim, strands of the woman’s hair were coming undone and blowing across her face; they were pale and bright golden, and filled with curls.

  ‘Well, answer me!’ she cried. ‘How did you fools lose him?’

  ‘Ma’am, we got him off the ship fine, in the slings, before the fog fell,’ one man replied. ‘You saw this with your own eyes. Then the fog came down when we was drawing closer to shore, and then the horse took fright and plunged overboard. Wasn’t nothing we could do to hold him. He knocked Thomas here off his feet. Took a nasty blow to the kidneys. Then the animal was gone, into the fog. That’s all, ma’am.’

  ‘I do not give a fig about the kidneys of this Thomas!’ cried the woman. ‘Why did he not have a good grip on the lead rope?’

  The men only shrugged and muttered.

  ‘I will dock their rations,’ interrupted Governor Miles smoothly, ‘and have them all flogged.’

  ‘That will not bring back my horse which is drowned and lying at the bottom of Hudson Bay,’ said the woman. ‘What will my husband say when I arrive in Red River without the horse he’s expecting?’

  Red River! I shook my head as though a bull fly was lodged in my ears. Red River was the place to which my father had once journeyed and from which he’d never returned. And now this tiny, furious white woman and the stallion that she called Foxfire were travelling to the same place? I gave my head another incredulous shake, and wondered what my spirit guide required of me.

  When I took three steps forward, all gazes swivelled on to me. Closer, I saw with a start that this white woman was very young; her face was as smooth, pale and softly rounded as the face of a porcelain doll that had once come on the ship for someone’s half-blood daughter. Closer still, and I saw the smudges of blue beneath the young woman’s eyes, felt the thousands of miles that she had fretted and worried about the horse’s safety and well-being in the belly of the ship. I knew how the ground, at that very moment, swayed beneath her, and how the great land stretching flat to the sky made her feel tiny and helpless.

  ‘Your horse is safe here in the byre,’ I said. ‘He and I swam to shore.’

  And with those words I gave him away, one more precious thing that would now leave my life, running the long wild rivers into the heart of the land without me.

  Chapter 3

  ‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ the white woman exclaimed. She did not gasp or swoon, the way that white heroines did in the novels that I borrowed from the fort’s library collection. Instead, her blue eyes pierced me like a needle going into deerskin. ‘Is this true?’ she demanded. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Amelia Mackenzie. I was being swept out to sea when your stallion swam past my canoe. I thought he was –’ I gulped and paused. I should not talk about my pawakan, my spirit guide, and especially not to this strange white woman. ‘I thought he was swimming to shore,’ I amended. ‘So I swam with him, and brought him to the fort.’

  ‘Extraordinary!’ she repeated. ‘I am Orchid Sapphira Spencer, and I am for ever in your debt.’ Her gloved fingers brushed across my hand in a brief, impulsive gesture before she turned to the governor. ‘Please make sure that this Indian girl is rewarded,’ she told him; I noticed how her lips fumbled with the word ‘Indian’ and how her clear glance flicked over me, puzzled and curious. I supposed she was surprised by my green eyes, my skin the colour of a dried cedar frond, the brown highlights in my hair like the highlights in the pelt of an otter. She didn’t realise that I was half like her, half white; that
in my veins ran the blood of men called Highlanders, from a part of that island far away that was called Scotland.

  Governor Miles inclined his head but he wasn’t looking at me; he frowned briefly at the four men from the lighter and shooed them away so that they turned with hasty relief, almost bumping one another off the landing stage in their rush to escape from that threat of a flogging. Men bent to their loads again, hoisting up the wooden chests of trade goods, and continued toiling with them to shore. The thunder of their feet shook the stage, and Governor Miles cupped Orchid’s elbow as he steered her out of the way and guided her to continue climbing to shore.

  Just as her feet, in their tightly laced shoes of thin leather with hard dainty heels, touched the bluff, she turned to glance back at me. I saw the bright flicker of her blue eyes beneath her hat’s brim of woven grasses. She smiled then, brushing a strand of curly blonde hair from her face, and for an instant she didn’t look much older than I was. Then she walked on beside the governor towards the fort’s octagonal facade of painted planks. The wind whipped her blue dress against her short, plump body, and a feather flew out from her hat to be caught, twenty feet away, by a boatman who stuck it into his red stocking cap with a gleeful grin. He winked at me, his earring twinkling. Then he hoisted a bale of goods on to his back and adjusted the leather tumpline, the strap that went across his forehead and held the weight of the bale.