‘I’m hungry,’ Charlotte said softly, and I squeezed her hand.
‘I still have credit at the Company store,’ I reminded her. ‘Now that the ship has come in, we can buy fresh rations.’
‘Maybe we can get some humbugs!’ Charlotte said and her soft, dark eyes lit up.
‘Maybe. Let’s go now and cook something.’
She skipped beside me, her hand nestled in mine, and I felt a spasm of pity and love for her; my gentle little sister who had become an orphan even younger than I had. ‘After eating, I’ll take you to visit the horse,’ I promised her, for the thought of the stallion pulled at me constantly; half of my mind was always with him in the cow byre.
Charlotte, however, was more interested in playing along the shore with some other girls and so I was alone as I crossed the pasture and opened the byre’s creaking door. The horse turned his head and a gusty whicker of sound fluttered his nostrils in greeting. I approached him with slow steps, and laid my palm flat against the warm gloss of his hard shoulder. I had brought him a gift, freshly unpacked from a chest off the supply ship and given to me in the cookhouse by Samuel Beaver, who’d been given it by a Cree boy who had stolen it when no one was looking. The fruit was larger than any berry I’d ever picked, and called an apple; Mr Murdoch had told me that horses loved this fruit which grew in fields in England.
The apple was a slightly wrinkled, reddish, rounded thing in the palm of my hand. The stallion inclined his long face and I glimpsed his large teeth, square like the teeth of a beaver, as he bit into the fruit. I saw that the flesh of the apple was white. Juice oozed from the stallion’s lips and his deep eyes considered me. When the fruit was all gone, he nosed at my arm, then began eating hay again. I pulled the oval of braided leather from where I’d tucked it between two beams, and began to rub the horse all over.
‘Foxfire,’ I murmured, remembering how the pawakan, entering my vision quest in human form, had worn a robe that looked like fox fur. Betty Goose Wing had said that white people didn’t have pawakans to guide them and protect them. Perhaps in their land they didn’t face the dangers that my mother’s people did: the violent blizzards screaming in to bury the land; the glittering crusts of snow that broke underfoot, warning the wildlife of your approach so that they fled away over the tundra; the cramping pains of hunger eating the belly. Betty had said that the white people all shared the same spirit with the name Jesus, the spirit that sometimes a Company chaplain talked about when he climbed off the supply ship, before he journeyed inland to the other trading forts.
If this horse wasn’t the white woman’s pawakan though, then why was he so important to her? Why had she been so crushed with fear and anger, standing there on the landing stage and berating the boatmen for his loss? She had said that he was worth a fortune in money, but what good was that here, where beaver skins were the most valuable item that a person could possess? Next to skins, a person might wish to own a good gun, or new traps, or a buffalo robe, but money was almost useless.
The barn door creaked, and sunlight sliced across the stallion’s red back. I turned, a smile on my lips, for I thought that Charlotte had come to find me. Orchid stood still in the doorway, the sun burning like a flame in her uncovered hair, and a cloud of mosquitoes hovering around her face. Her cheeks were already blotchy and inflamed with bites, and needed camomile lotion. She had changed out of the blue gown and now wore a gown with wide shoulders, a scooped neckline, and puffy pale yellow sleeves. I recognised the style from copies of the Lady’s Magazine that had arrived on last year’s ship for other men’s half-blood daughters. The fabric of Orchid’s gown was a thin chintz that drifted around her in gauzy folds and looked useless for life at York Factory. The gown would have torn on the smallest of twigs, and could not have been worn to pick berries or when stretching beaver skins on frames.
Despite the circling mosquitoes, a smile tugged at the corners of Orchid’s lips. A sigh of satisfaction stirred the air between us, and she stepped forward and touched the stallion’s forehead with her soft hand, as white as the flesh of the apple.
‘You cannot believe how happy I am to see you here,’ she said to Foxfire, and then she turned to me. ‘You must know how to care for horses.’
‘This is the first horse I have ever touched.’
Her gaze lingered on me searchingly. ‘Remarkable,’ she said briefly. ‘In the governor’s house, they tell me that you have a way with animals, that the pets follow you around.’
I inclined my head.
‘I myself grew up around horses,’ she explained. ‘My father owned a fine stable with many mares, and one or two stallions. When I was your age, horses and flowers were all that my father talked of; horses and hounds and hunting, hothouses and growing rare species of orchids.’
Sadness hovered in her eyes, and I felt a weight press upon her shoulders. ‘Now Foxfire is all that is left …’ She trailed off, her fingers twining in the long red hair that fell from the horse’s neck. Perhaps, after all, she had a horse pawakan, I thought, but then I recalled what Mr Murdoch had said about a bride gift.
‘You are taking this horse to your new husband?’ I asked, and Orchid nodded.
‘My mother died four years ago,’ she said. ‘My father fell into deep grief; he gambled away his fortune and lost our home and lands and then he died of an excess of drinking. I was forced to become a governess, looking after other people’s children, the daughters of a relation. It was a terrible blow to me.’
I watched her, puzzled. In the Cree lodges, it was an honour to take care of one’s kin, and orphans were never turned away from a lodge door, from the warmth of a fire, from a pot of caribou stew or a freshly caught methy. Only a bad-hearted person would not care for their own kin yet I didn’t feel darkness in this small young woman, only grief. I didn’t understand what had been so terrible about being a governess but I did understand the grief of being an orphan, how one stood beneath the wolf trail of stars and felt its mournful light dance in one’s eyes.
‘Then one night,’ Orchid said, ‘there was a party in the family’s London home, and I was allowed to attend once the children were in the nursery for the night. I was playing cards with a man, and he told me that he was a factor with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and was home on furlough from trading furs in Rupert’s Land. We were laughing and drinking Madeira, and I asked him what he wanted most in the world. Do you know what he replied?’
Orchid’s gaze flew to my face but I remained silent, caught in her story like a rabbit in a snare.
‘He said what he wanted most was a large horse,’ Orchid continued. ‘He said that the Indian ponies in the Red River valley were all very well for running buffalo, but much too small and inferior for any other purpose. And then –’
‘Ponies?’ I asked.
‘Small horses, mustangs and cayuses, Mr Spencer calls them; the Indians use them to hunt the buffalo.’
‘What happened after he said he wanted a large horse?’
‘I made a daring leap, like a horse jumping a great hedge that it cannot see over the top of,’ Orchid explained. ‘I asked this factor whether he would marry me and take me away from life as a governess, and make a home for me in the Red River valley, if I could grant his wish for a large horse. And he said that he would; for a moment, maybe, he thought I was joking but then he saw that I was serious. And by then, he had already agreed and couldn’t, being a gentleman, go back on his word. I had a secret that he didn’t know yet: when my father died and the creditors took our possessions, I was allowed to keep something that I owned personally, that my father had given to me. It was this stallion, Foxfire. I hadn’t sold him, although I needed the money. I couldn’t bear to part with him, for he was all that remained of my previous life, the life where I was a spoiled and indulged only child.’
The stallion shifted in the byre, his hooves rustling the bedding of wood shavings from the joiner’s shop, where the chests for guns and the kegs for rum were made.
‘Then what happened?’ I asked Orchid.
‘The man, whose name is Robert Spencer, married me, and then when his furlough ended five weeks later, he returned to Rupert’s Land on the supply ship. This was last summer. I couldn’t come with him because one of the children in my care was very ill and I couldn’t be spared at such short notice; I felt obliged to stay. But now, this summer, I have come to join Mr Spencer, bringing with me my large horse, the thing that he said he most wanted. We are going to travel by York boat to the Red River valley, Foxfire and I, to join Robert. I hope that he will be pleased with my bride gift. We had only such a short time together, and have now been apart an entire year. I hope that he that he will not regret our agreement.’
A flicker of doubt ran over her face. I saw how she gathered her courage and resolve, how she turned her thoughts resolutely towards the vast continent that lay before her, filled with spirits that she didn’t even know existed.
‘What man would not be pleased with this gift?’ I asked, and again, her eyes lingered on me.
She gave a short, sharp sigh, and became suddenly brisk. ‘What very good English you speak.’
‘I have been around white men all my life.’ It was true that it was easy for me to speak the English tongue, for I had grown up hearing it, but Cree remained the language of dreams, of thoughts, and of lullabies.
‘You must have questions about this animal you have not handled before,’ she said. ‘I will have his grooming kit brought here for you to use, his brushes and combs. You must approach a horse here, at the shoulder, on his left side. You must clean out his feet every day, using a hoof pick.’
She bent, running her hand down the stallion’s front leg, and he lifted his foot from the floor and held it up for her to grasp. When she tipped it, I saw how the bottom was pale and smooth like a stone but with a spongy V-shaped piece. ‘This is the frog,’ she said, pointing to it.
I wrinkled my forehead in puzzlement, wondering what frogs had to do with a horse’s foot; in Orchid’s land, did horses live in the swamps? Or had frogs and horses made some agreement together, back in the days when the atiokan stories had taken place? These were the oldest stories, telling of the time when all the animals talked to one another and lived in lodges, before the trickster, Wishahkicahk, changed the world. ‘Why do you clean out the feet?’ I asked, for no one cleaned the hooves of deer and yet they ran fleetly over the tundra.
‘Why, otherwise disease can get in, and stones can cause bruises,’ Orchid replied. ‘This horse, you will observe, will willingly pick up three feet. But the fourth, his off-hind foot, he is very reluctant to give to you. It was hurt once when he trod on a thorn, which had to be extracted painfully. He has been careful about the handling of this foot ever since.
‘And also, every day, one must wipe around the horse’s eyes with a damp sponge and clean out the nostrils. When I was a child, we had stablemen and grooms but my father made sure that I learned how to care –’
We both turned as the door creaked again, its sagging bottom board scraping against the dirt floor because the frost had heaved the old building.
‘Mr Murdoch,’ I said with a smile. He began to grin, the freckles standing out on his pale cheeks, but then he saw Orchid and his features rearranged themselves into formal, polite lines.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ he said, holding himself stiff in his everyday working clothes of coarse trousers and loose shirt, and fumbling with his ink-stained fingers at a letter that he held.
‘Begging pardon for the interruption,’ he continued, ‘but I was looking for Amelia Otterchild.’
‘Pray proceed, you are not interrupting,’ Orchid said in a gracious manner, and Mr Murdoch’s face lit up again with a startling enthusiasm. It was the same triumphant look that he wore when he was able to harvest anything at all from the garden; once he had grown peas and had stood amongst the struggling vines, his face glowing as he picked the tiny pods.
‘Amelia,’ he said now, ‘you know that the old octagon is going to be rebuilt? There has been talk of it for several years, and of rebuilding some of the other fort buildings too. The post office is to be rebuilt first as the work that I do there is so vital to the smooth running of the Company. So I have been ordered to clear the office out, and organise everything well, prior to the building being replaced. A boy, a new apprentice off the ship, has been given to me to help me. And we found this, Amelia, this letter!’
He flourished the paper, folded over and written upon with faded ink, his voice cracking with excitement.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘A letter to your mother. Sent many years ago but never delivered. It was lost all this time, for thirteen years, Amelia, lost and lying behind a loose board in the wall of the office. But now, here, I am giving it to you!’
The paper slipped into my outstretched hand, as cool and light as the touch of a leaf. A tremor ran through me as I turned it over, and stared at the elegant sloping letters of my mother’s name: Mary Mackenzie.
‘Can she read?’ I heard Orchid ask in surprise, and heard too Mr Murdoch’s answer: ‘Certainly she can read. I taught the evening classes myself, with free candles and paper and tea for everyone who came, be they labourers or children. It is the wish of the Company that the traders’ children have a basic education. Amelia has read many of the books in the library here, ma’am.’
I ignored them both. I turned the letter over again, as though tracking an animal’s hoof prints, as though walking slowly through a dream and looking for guidance. Then with infinite care, fearing the letter might fly from my grasp like a moth, I opened the paper and spread it out upon the stallion’s warm, smooth back, and began to read it to myself.
18 October 1817.
My dear Mary, I trust that you and the baby are in good health as am I. Our boat brigade reached the Red River without any undue difficulty and found a fertile place. Both free traders and Métis half-bloods (who call themselves the Bois-Brûlés) have begun to settle along the river, and have both crops and cattle. The furs being brought in from the western regions are of superior quality, and the factor at York will be most pleased with them. This is a fair place and one in which I am engaged to remain as the factor wishes me to hunt for the fort’s provisions. I wish you to join me here in the spring when the brigade comes west again from York Factory. I believe we can look forward to good prospects here for ourselves and our infant daughter as well as for any other children that we might be blessed with. You remain always in my thoughts. Simon Mackenzie.
The stallion shifted his weight, and the letter shifted too. I smoothed it again with the palm of my hand, smoothed those letters that my father had penned one autumn evening when I was an infant in my cradleboard, the one with the heart that my father had painted on it before leaving.
‘Is something wrong? Is it bad news?’ Orchid asked, but her voice came from very far away, and I didn’t reply, simply went on staring at those words. Engaged to remain … I wish you to join me here … our infant daughter. ‘Lost all this time,’ Mr Murdoch had said. Lost like the light from my mother’s eyes, lost like my mother whose spirit had slipped from her body in the fort at York Factory that she had never left. ‘Your father went west with a boat brigade; he was a tripman, who rowed boats for the Company. He was a crack shot with a gun,’ she had told me when I asked about him, but nothing more would she ever say. It was from Betty Goose Wing that I had learned of my father’s broken promise and the cause of the bitterness in my mother’s lips even after she had been wooed by a young chief, even after she had married another trader. Only Charlotte Bright Eyes ever brought sweetness to my mother’s stern face.
I turned and brushed past Mr Murdoch and Orchid, and ran across the pasture to the small gate in the stockade wall. Faster and faster, I ran through the low bushes and the shrubby aspen poplars. On my right, the great river stretched out, swirling and sparkling. On my left side, the tundra was an enormous animal, lying down flat, splotched with shades of b
rown and tawny. Beneath the immense bowl of sky I fled, disturbing a ptarmigan that had been feeding on berries, so that the bird flew up in an agitated flurry of feathers.
Father! Father! my thoughts cried.
My moccasins pounded the clay trail, echoing the pounding of my blood behind my eyes. I ran with the letter clasped to my chest with one hand while the other hand paddled the air as though I were swimming against a hard current instead of cool summer wind. Pale smoke drifted from the encampment of the Homeguard Cree and the dogs ran out to meet me but I brushed through their jostling pack. Betty Goose Wing was outside her lodge, stitching lines of porcupine quills, dyed red with berry juice, on to a deerskin tobacco pouch. She straightened as I rushed to her, gasping, my heart pouring words into my mouth so fast that my lips couldn’t speak them. ‘Auntie, Auntie!’
‘Breathe,’ she told me calmly. ‘What is chasing you?’
I doubled over and waited for air to suck all those words out of my mouth, while my hand holding the letter flapped in front of my knees.
‘From my father – lost for thirteen winters – asking my mother to join him in the Red River valley.’ I straightened. ‘Why was it never delivered?’ I wailed. ‘Who would have lost it?’
‘Hmph,’ said Betty. ‘It is the past chasing you.’ She began to look like a woman picking medicines from the tundra grasses, like a woman setting traps, for her face was intense and still with focus. ‘Thirteen winters ago,’ she said at last, ‘the postmaster was a half-blood named Alexander. His mother married twice. Her second husband was a chief and, later, his son became a young chief who wooed your mother.’
‘It wasn’t an accident?’ I asked. ‘The young chief wanted my mother … he asked his half-brother to keep this letter from her. They wanted her to think my father had abandoned her. Us.’
Red River Stallion Page 4