Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  ‘Did I say any of this?’ Betty asked, her gaze on me as unblinking as the dark gaze of a turtle sunning on a log. ‘It is all in the past now, Amelia. You cannot mourn it any longer.’ And she bent back over her stitching.

  ‘But he might be there still, in the Red River valley! I might have kin there!’

  ‘You still have some kin here,’ Betty reminded me. ‘We did not all starve.’

  ‘The horse is going west on a York boat,’ I muttered. ‘The white woman is taking him to the Red River valley. Maybe this is why my pawakan is the horse spirit. Maybe I should travel west with the horse, Foxfire, and search for my father. Maybe there, in that valley, my father would welcome his daughter, and my sister, Charlotte Bright Eyes.’

  Betty Goose Wing drew on her pipe, rubbing its clay bowl thoughtfully with one broad, callused thumb. ‘There is a shaking lodge ceremony tomorrow at sunset,’ she said at last, smoke drifting from her mouth. ‘The inlander hunters want to ask the spirits where to travel to in the next moon, when they go into the bush to hunt. They hope to avoid another starving winter. You could come to the shaking lodge too, and ask the spirits for guidance in your choices.

  ‘You are like your mother, Otterchild. She had one foot on the path of our people, and then she set the other foot inside the fort, into the white man’s world. And now you do not know where to put your feet, either one of them. So you should come and talk to the spirits. Sunset, tomorrow,’ she repeated and then rose, brushing a few stray strands of tobacco from her leggings, and stooped inside her lodge.

  I wandered over the tundra, picking late-ripening blueberries and searching for grey moss for Jane’s baby. Perhaps it was foolish to think that my father would welcome us, I thought, as I stooped to pick a mushroom to add to tonight’s supper of fish soup. Perhaps Simon Mackenzie had forgotten us long ago, after my mother failed to join him, failed to respond to that letter. He would never have known that it was not delivered to her. It was common for the Company to move its men around, to assign them different jobs. If my father was a crack shot with a gun, as my mother said, it was not surprising that the fort in the west kept him to hunt for its provisions. The only surprise must have been that my mother failed to join him there. Now he was just another white man, another stranger. Or perhaps he might have travelled further still and become lost in the distances, lost in the great mountains. Perhaps he had even travelled to the shores of the shining Pacific ocean that Mr Murdoch had shown to us in evening class, using the terrestrial globe belonging to the governor.

  Then what would become of Charlotte Bright Eyes and me, far away from our remaining kin, in a valley of free traders, and unfamiliar tribes: the Assiniboine and Salteaux bands, the Cree who ran after the buffalo on little horses? I pondered that for a moment as I tore up a handful of dry moss. Where had the tribes out west got horses from, and what kind of horses were they? Were they all red in colour, and with frogs on their feet? And how did the tribes use these horses to hunt the buffalo?

  There was the big horse to consider too, the magnificent Foxfire who drew me to his burning presence like a cold person to a campfire. Perhaps he would need me on his long journey; perhaps it was for this purpose that he had saved me from the muddy Hayes River. And was it even possible, I wondered as I carried a bundle of moss towards camp, for a horse to travel in a York boat? From York Factory to the Red River valley was a journey of six hundred miles. Foxfire had already lunged overboard in the Hayes River, and the men hadn’t been able to hold him, so how did Orchid expect him to travel along the wild rushing rivers, filled with rocks and waterfalls, into the heart of Rupert’s Land? There was no other way to make this journey; no trail or track through the wilderness. Only in winter, the horse might have been able to walk on top of the ice. Was this creature able to withstand the cold? In his own land, did Foxfire’s kind migrate south as day length waned or did their sleek coats thicken and soften with an underpelt that allowed them to endure as the moose did?

  There was so much that I wanted to learn about Foxfire, and about the nature of horses. Could I risk the happiness of Charlotte for this desire? What would the spirits advise me tomorrow in the shaking lodge, when the shaman went down on his knees and sang to them, until they entered like birds and spoke to us all in different languages, Cree and English, French, Ojibwa, and Chipewyan?

  Where would I place my two feet then?

  Chapter 4

  When I slipped into the cow byre the next morning, gulls were crying over the river where the tide rushed in to cover the muddy shoreline. Weak sunshine falling through a window illuminated the stallion’s fiery back and the pale head of Orchid, his mistress. She held a tin pail that Foxfire was eating from with a steady grinding of teeth, and glanced over her shoulder as I entered.

  ‘He is having his oats,’ she said, ‘and then I will turn him out into the pasture. It will do his legs good to stretch, for he was sorely cramped for ten weeks in the hold of the supply ship.’

  ‘Oats?’ I asked in surprise, thinking of porridge with caribou meat in it, and a crumbly topping for a dessert of wild gooseberries – for these were the uses we had for oats at York Factory. ‘This is all that horses eat – grass and grains and fruits?’

  ‘Carrots too and sometimes a root called a mangold, like a turnip. Haven’t you read anything about horses in the library here?’

  I shrugged, thinking. ‘There were no horses in Robinson Crusoe. Also, I’ve read a detective novel and a romance called The Road to Tralee … and a book about sailing to India and trading for tea.’

  There had been passing mention of carriages in some of these books – things called landaus and phaetons and mail coaches – and perhaps I had vaguely comprehended that these were drawn by horses. However, I didn’t know what any of these carriages looked like and neither had I ever given thought to the animals pulling them. The truth was I did not read as well as Mr Murdoch liked to imagine that I did; it was slow, hard work finding my way through a page of words, like wading through a muskeg swamp with mud sucking at my knees. None of the words I had waded through had given me any idea of the power and beauty and nature of a real horse.

  ‘Does Foxfire pull a carriage?’ I asked now, and Orchid shook her head and set the empty pail on the floor. ‘He is trained for riding on; I have brought his tack with me, his saddle and bridle, in a chest. Men ride with legs astride their horses’ backs, but ladies ride sidesaddle with both legs on one side of their horses.’

  ‘Ride, on top of? It must be hard to balance.’

  ‘It is exceedingly difficult to learn to ride this way,’ Orchid conceded, ‘but I have been riding since I was a small child on a fat pony with a bad temper. Despite having one’s legs both to one side of the saddle, one must keep a straight spine and direct one’s gaze forward. Women even hunt this way, following the hounds over rough country, through fen and bog, over fences and hedges. Hunting is the most popular pastime in Norfolk, where my father owned his lands and stables. It is a flat, wet country beside the sea; you would like it, Amelia, for it is similar in ways to your own land here, only not as bitterly cold in winter.

  ‘Oh, it was wonderful to gallop across the fields with the sea shining along the horizon like a finger of light, with the horses fresh and eager, and the hounds giving voice like a choir! The freedom was marvellous!’

  ‘But what were you hunting?’ I asked.

  ‘Foxes.’

  ‘We hunt foxes too! Do you trade the pelts?’

  Orchid stared at me with a mesh of puzzled lines wrinkling her forehead. ‘Pelts? Oh, Amelia! We do not hunt foxes for trade but for sport, for pleasure, for the thrill of the chase. We do not skin them, nor trade the pelts, although we do cut off the brush, the tail, to keep. We leave trade to the factors of the Company here in Rupert’s Land. In England we use money and not trade goods. Pelts! That is a diverting idea!’ And she let out a peal of laughter, clear and sharp, so that the stallion flung up his head and watched her, the sun lustrous in his eyes
.

  I flushed and bit my lip, seeing myself as Orchid must have, an ignorant girl with little learning, and little experience of the world. But then, what did she know, this white woman, about sewing a moose hide into a tent, and suspending it over a smoking fire until it had changed to a golden colour that would look wonderful decorated with blue glass beads, and stitched with coloured threads in patterns of flowers? Could she gut a speckled trout, washing it in cold water so that the innards sluiced away downstream? Could she set traps for muskrat in the springtime, using a raft of dry logs with the trap dangling beneath from a pole baited with musk?

  I stepped to the open door of the byre and stared out, my back stiff, and behind me Orchid’s laughter died into a silence broken only by the scrape of Foxfire’s hooves as he pawed impatiently through the bedding to the ground beneath.

  ‘Our ways are strange to one another,’ Orchid said at last, when the silence had stretched taut as a rope between us. ‘Do not be offended by me. Come, I will show you how to halter this horse, and you can lead him into the pasture and keep an eye on him whilst I go for breakfast in the governor’s house.’

  I turned back and Orchid handed me the harness that the stallion had been wearing on his head when I swam with him in the river. ‘Hold it thus,’ she said, ‘and now reach beneath his neck and guide his head into the noseband.’

  Foxfire dropped his head as I slipped the halter on to him and fastened the metal buckle that lay along his cheek. He was not like a wild thing, I noted, that would hate straps made by man. Instead, he had been trained to accept the halter, even to welcome it. Orchid snapped the lead line into the ring beneath the horse’s jaw, and handed it to me.

  ‘Hold the line in both hands,’ she said, ‘with one hand near the horse. Never wrap the line around your hand or arm lest the horse bolt and drag you; you could be killed in this manner.’

  Killed! I felt the power of the stallion as I led him outside; felt how puny and small I was standing at his shoulder while he flung up his great head and stretched out his neck, the breeze off the bay lifting the ends of his long hair so that it flickered around him in the light. His nostrils stretched wide, sucking at the smells of the pasture: rank pigs, oxen, young calves’ sweet breath, cows’ milky udders, and perhaps the smells that travelled from futher away too, of salt and mud, ice and fresh water. Presently, he dropped his head and began to rip up the sparse grass with his teeth, moving steadily along, his hooves piercing the ground and leaving semicircular marks.

  ‘Listen, I will tell you the names of his parts,’ Orchid said, and I tried to commit them to memory as she talked: the poll behind his ears, the hock where his hind legs bent like elbows, the fetlock, where the lowest joint of each leg flexed as he moved, the croup above his tail, the shoulder sloping towards the front legs, the withers, where his long hair (his mane) ended and his smooth, long back began.

  ‘A good horse has correct proportions,’ Orchid explained. ‘You must imagine a triangle here, between the seat bone, the stifle and the hip. The sides of the triangle should be equal to one another in length. And here, the length from the fetlock to the elbow should equal the length from the elbow to the wither.

  ‘You can see that this stallion’s conformation is admirable. His lineage is impeccable, for he is a Norfolk Trotter from a long line of splendid trotters tracing back to a stallion named Flying Childers, grandson of the famous Darley Arabian himself.’

  I pondered all this information. In the Cree bands, one could name one’s ancestors but it was a new idea to me that one could also name the ancestors of an animal. Indeed, was not each animal only itself, over and over, being reborn into a new body after each death? Perhaps this horse before me was not merely Foxfire but was the spirit of the famous horse, the Darley Arabian, that Orchid spoke of with such reverence, reborn into the body of this red stallion.

  And, had I understood Orchid correctly that there were different kinds of horses? ‘Not all horses in your land are Norfolk Trotters?’ I asked.

  ‘Good gracious, certainly they are not,’ Orchid exclaimed, beginning to smile but then repressing the expression as, perhaps, she remembered our previous misunderstanding. She hurried on. ‘There are heavy horses that pull wagons and ploughs like the Shire and the Suffolk Punch. And there are small horses that have lived wild on the wasteland, the moors, for centuries and are called ponies. Of them there are numerous kinds: the Dartmoor, Exmoor, Fell and Welsh. There are horses bred especially for the fox hunt, and flat racing horses called Thoroughbreds and many more besides.’

  After Orchid left for breakfast I walked around the pasture with Foxfire for a long time, until the bell rang for the white men’s noon meal. It was a thrill to feel how he would follow me after only a slight tug on the lead rope, and a thrill to lay my hands against his warm hide. I smoothed my hands all over him, saying out loud, ‘Stifle, pastern, girth, neck, quarters, chestnut,’ as I touched each place. My hands began to learn the shape of that horse, every fold, every plane, every wrinkle of skin: his flat knee, the soft hair on his breast between his front legs, the mottling of silver like frost upon his redness. ‘Roan,’ Orchid had said this colour was called, red roan.

  Suddenly, he leaped. He whirled! My hand slipped on the lead rope so that it burned across my palm. Through my line of vision he soared, a flash of muscle and white rolling eye. I spun, I jumped, I gripped on to the lead rope with my teeth clenched. His head came around towards me and he became still again, snorting. He had pulled me a yard across the slippery grass, and behind us the patterns of his hooves had dug in deeper than before. My heart pounded. I saw the quiver of his shoulder, heard the whistle of his snort. He danced sideways, as though to an invisible drumbeat, the great barrel of his body shining as the sun slid across his muscles.

  I glanced around, still clinging to his lead rope, and saw that it was a kite that had frightened him, a yellow flapping kite being snatched by the wind rising up the bluff from the river as children played along the shore. The kite soared higher, and ceased its struggle with the wind to become a thing of grace and speed, climbing until it was another speck amongst the white specks of seagulls. Foxfire dropped his head and began to graze again in nervous snatches, still breathing hard and with sweat darkening his chest.

  Now I had learned something about the nature of horses, I thought. He was an animal whose nature was to run; he was like the deer that lived on grass and moss, and that had no defence against wolves and lynx but their own reflexes, swift as the lick of lightning strikes. The flying blur of their slender legs raced them away from the threat of the predator. Again I wondered how this creature, this horse, would be able to travel for six hundred miles in the cramped confines of a York boat, when his nature was to flee from any threat. Who could hold him when his muscles bunched, when his legs sliced through the air, when he stretched out his neck and flew into the wind, sucking it into wide nostrils?

  I ran my hands over him, soothing him as I had soothed Charlotte after our mother died; stroking her Cree hair, black as a raven’s wing, stroking the backs of her small dark hands with their chubby knuckles, singing her lullabies. And sound was important to the horse too; his ears still swivelled constantly, alert for sound from any direction. I began to sing to him. I sang him a lullaby without words – ‘wa wi wa way’ – and then a Cree love song, and then a song about the geese flying south in winter. Then I switched to the white men’s songs that they played on their pipes and fiddles at celebrations; songs about laddies and lassies, misty mornings and unrequited love. Foxfire’s breathing slowed, and the muscles in his neck and shoulders slackened as the tension left them. Soon, he began to graze steadily again, and the sweat dried on his chest. Even when the kite swooped closer, flapping again like a shot and injured bird, Foxfire merely raised his head for a moment to watch before dropping it to continue grazing.

  Perhaps, I thought, something in particular had startled him in the Hayes River; perhaps he had not simply leaped overboard as the boat
man had said but had been propelled into action by something frightening. If I could find out what this thing had been, I might be able to help him in his journey to the Red River valley. If, that is, I went with him … If I went searching for my father, who had written a letter but had never come back to find out why my mother hadn’t replied, had never written again to enquire after the health and whereabouts of his infant daughter. Surely, if he had loved us, he would have come searching for us many years ago instead of waiting for us to join him in the west? What kind of a man would be so careless with what he professed to love? I yearned to hear the explanation from his own lips, to learn what the answer to the mystery was. I had thought of myself as an orphan for two winters now and it was strange to consider that perhaps I wasn’t one, not quite, after all.

  Would Simon Mackenzie remember calling me Otterchild, smoothing my hair with its brown highlights over the soft dome of my infant head? He had done this despite the fact that my mother, to please him, had given me a white child’s name – Amelia. How Betty Goose Wing had smiled when she told me about this: each of my parents naming me for the other one’s pleasure. Could a love like this have simply sputtered out, like a candle in a strong draught? Didn’t he ever wonder what had become of me, whether I had survived the starving moons, the burning autumns, the fragile springs and tempestuous summers at York Factory – didn’t he think about his white blood running in my veins?

  I sighed, and focused my eyes back on the stallion’s hard black hooves moving slowly past my moccasins. When the sun had climbed high into the sky and the kite had sunk over the bluff on to the beach, I led the stallion back into the cow byre, checked that his water bucket had been filled, slipped the halter from his head, and went to find the boatmen. It took me some time but eventually I found one of them in the boatbuilding yard where the York boats were constructed from trees dragged in by teams of lowing oxen.