Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  ‘When the horse went overboard,’ I asked, ‘what truly happened? What frightened him?’

  ‘Why, ’twas the white whales,’ the boatman answered, scratching his hair under his cap and adjusting his spectacles on his weather-beaten nose. ‘We heard the whales blowing in the fog, and then one surfaced to the side of us, his white back all sleek and ghostly in the fog. And then he blew, whoosh! And the wet and fishy air swallowed us up, and in the midst of that the horse was gone, plunged right over the side.’

  ‘Thank you for your story,’ I said, and he nodded and turned back to planing a plank so that curls of wood dropped from it as thin as sheets of paper. I paced around the perimeter of the boatshed, thinking hard. The smells of fresh cut wood – cedar and birch, spruce and poplar – tickled my nose as the breeze ebbed and flowed, swirling through the buildings of York Factory like a tide, licking at the buildings with its salty currents. Sawdust clung to my moccasins. York boats in various stages of completion or repair loomed over me, the lines of their thick hulls as swooping and graceful as the wings of shorebirds, their thick overlapping planks built to withstand the grind and bite of river rocks.

  I clambered into one of the boats, tilted on its side with three broken ribs, and sat in it with the sun lying on me like a warm hand. Almost everything was carried in these boats now, although when I was younger, birchbark canoes had carried the furs and the trade goods along the vast network of rivers running through Rupert’s Land like the veins in a body. Now it was the York boats that carried the chests of guns, ammunition, and sharp axes, the strings of beads and bundles of blankets, the kegs of rum for easing trade agreements. They also carried all the provisions: barrels of dried peas, oatmeal and cornmeal, sacks of pemmican made from dried buffalo meat and saskatoon berries, salted geese, salted pork, biscuits, loaves of sugar, and chests of tea.

  I had seen settlers travel by York boat, after crossing the ocean because of promises made to them by a white man named Lord Selkirk, a man who had bought a piece of Rupert’s Land and renamed it Assiniboia. He had convinced the Company to bring white families to live there in that land, where the Red River lazed between low hills. Company chaplains travelled by York boat at times, and so did goats: I had once seen a dog depart for the west in one, and even crates of clucking hens, but I had never seen a horse inside one. The boats were rowed by eight men wielding oars so long and heavy that they were hard to lift, and at every rapid the boat had to be unloaded and all the goods inside it had to be portaged around the rapids along narrow trails cut through the bush. The boat itself was run onshore and dragged along on rollers laid on the ground. The horse would have to climb out too, and be led through the bush – but who could induce him to climb aboard again, and would he lie in the boat or travel standing up for six hundred miles?

  Whales, I thought, as the men working at the saws burst into song; their voices – rough then smooth, single then united – drifted over me and soared away into the wind like kites. The white whales swam in the bay, and into the mouth of the Hayes River, in small bands, and were hunted for blubber to feed to sled dogs. Their bodies rose from the depths like drifts of snow; silent, sleek, their bulbous snouts glimmered beneath the surface as they rose, mysterious and beautiful. But when they surfaced, they blew foul, fishy air through their holes with a gusting whoosh of sound, as the boatman had said; it was easy to see that this would have sent the stallion plunging overboard. But what if I had been there to sing to him – would this have helped? Or what if he couldn’t have seen the whales … if perhaps, he’d had something fastened to his halter to partially cover his eyes?

  I would find Orchid and ask her about this, I thought, but first I would go to the fort’s library and try to find books about horses. I clambered out of the damaged boat and brushed sawdust from my gown. The fort, as I walked through it, bustled with harried clerks and nervous apprentices, all helping to sort the items that were being unloaded from the three-masted ship at Five Fathom Hole. The goods had to be unpacked, sorted and repacked; some of the supplies would remain at York Factory but much of it would be sent on to other forts by York boat. Everything had to be packed in chests or bundles weighing ninety pounds, for this was the weight that the boatmen would carry on their backs as they staggered, almost running, along the rough portage trails. Huge quantities of furs, which had been arriving all summer in canoe brigades from places far to the west, had to be packed for sending to England.

  Passing a fur warehouse, I glanced in and saw men packing the pelts into bales after they’d been flattened by a screw press. I thought of the marten pelts I had cured last winter and how they were going to travel further than I had ever been, somewhere in the hold of the ship, going to the fur auction in a city called London.

  ‘Watch out!’

  Turning from the door, I had almost collided with a group of half-blood girls of my own age, their arms filled with lengths of brilliant, patterned cloth from the Company store.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled but one of the girls stepped forward; I didn’t know her very well, although I had seen her around the fort and in the Cree camp. Her name, I remembered, was Eva.

  ‘Amelia.’ Her smooth face creased into a smooth, placid smile between her black braids and the flaps of her blue, beautifully embroidered cap with a beaded fringe. Beneath her chin, her merino gown was decorated with a row of square trade brooches, while silver thimbles and coins imprinted with a chief’s head dangled from her ears. I had noticed before that she was a girl who always liked to look as fine as she could, to outshine her friends. She liked to widen her eyes at young men: boat captains in top hats with ostrich plumes, or hunters with their guns resting on their shoulders. I was surprised that her father hadn’t married her to one of them yet.

  ‘You’re the one who saved Mrs Spencer’s horse,’ she said. ‘How brave you are! I would be terrified of the creature!’

  I shrugged. ‘He is not so hard to manage.’

  ‘I hope this is true. I am travelling west with him. With Mrs Spencer. Her new husband and my father traded together on the Athabasca River a few years ago. They are still friends. My father has asked Mrs Spencer to take me with her. I am going to the new school for girls, the boarding school, in Red River.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ A wave of something welled up in me; was it envy? Would Eva learn to slip a halter on to the stallion’s bent head, would she listen to Orchid’s stories of fox-hunting and rare flowers? And in the settlement of Red River, where the Company had offered the half-blood Métis people land to farm on, would Eva ever cross paths with my father unwittingly; one more white man working in a warehouse perhaps, or rowing a boat down the river as Eva walked on the shore?

  ‘… know what to take with me,’ Eva was saying, ‘but Mrs Spencer will help me.’

  She smiled again, smoothing the folds of the fine wool shawl that was draped around her shoulders, but her eyes were dark and unreadable, fixed intently upon my face. I remembered that she was the niece of a chief, and stretched my own stiff lips in reply but Eva was already turning away to her friends. The porcelain beads and dentalia shells in her hair shone in the sun, and her leggings were deeply fringed and crusted with red beading. The girls’ laughter drifted back over their shoulders as they moved around the corner of the fur warehouse.

  I hurried on to the library. It was a plank-floored room with wooden shelves lining the walls, and an eclectic collection of books that the traders had sent for over the years, and magazines and newspapers. I searched for a long time but didn’t find any book specifically about horses; I would have to rely on my own observations, and on Orchid’s knowledge, to satisfy my curiosity. However, I did find a drawing in a magazine of horses pulling a carriage with high wheels; I bent over it, studying the web of strapping that covered the horses and fastened them to the carriage. It was impossible for me to guess the purpose of it all. I wondered if the white women made the strapping, weaving it all together the way that Cree women wove the netting for sno
wshoes.

  Each horse, I saw, wore flat pieces of harness that covered its eyes – this was just what I had imagined for Foxfire! Wearing something like this, he would not be able to see the river water rushing along on either side of the York boat. I would suggest this to Orchid and maybe she could have something made before she left. Maybe I could persuade her to sing to the stallion in her sharp, clear voice … but I didn’t think it the right kind of voice for soothing the horse’s panic. It was not a low, husky voice like my own, a voice that seemed to hold the vibration of a drum skin within it.

  With a start, I realised that the sunlight had dimmed on the knotted plank floor. I laid the magazine away, for soon it would be sunset and time for the shaking lodge ceremony in the Cree encampment. I must find Charlotte and take her with me, for it was her future, as well as my own, that I was trying to decide upon, and who knew what price we might both pay if I chose to pursue the mystery of my father, and the lure of the horse, into the wilderness?

  Chapter 5

  I hurried to the room that Charlotte and I had spent the summer recovering in. It was sparsely furnished with only a wooden bed that we shared, a stool, our snowshoes leaning against one wall, a fishing pole I had made from a sapling and a piece of string, my traps for catching marten, and a plain wooden chest that Ronald McTavish had left behind. In it, I kept our meagre possessions: our flannel undergarments for winter, a coat of white hare fur I’d made for Charlotte, my sewing kit with bright silks and different sizes of needles, Charlotte’s baby moccasins threaded with her dried umbilical cord, and a spelling primer that I used to teach Charlotte her letters. On top lay my blanket shawl of blue and green tartan cloth threaded with bright yellow lines like the lines that connect together everything that exists, and that point to the four directions from which the animals came into the world. Charlotte had said once that my shawl matched my green eyes.

  I undid the single braid that had hung all day down my back and brushed my hair, dragging at tangles in my haste. My fingers flew as I parted my hair across the centre of my head, and as I plaited it into two braids, one beside each ear. Then I coiled each braid up over an ear, and fastened it in place with a decorative covering of deerhide stitched in a zigzag pattern of yellow and white beads. I had made these hair coverings the previous winter, in the Cree lodges while the fire smoked and the cold fell. Once my hair was in place, I pulled my tartan shawl around my shoulders. In the bottom of the chest was a small bark container that I had made and carved with pictures of animals: a family of otters, a moose, a porcupine. The seams were bound together with peeled spruce roots. Inside the container lay a package wrapped in scraps of deerhide. I held it for a moment in one palm, feeling its lightness, or perhaps its heaviness.

  Then, slowly, I unfolded the hide to stare at my most precious possession.

  The brooch was of pure silver. Its two hearts were intertwined, decorated with diagonal score marks and round stipple marks; atop the hearts was a crown with shining points. A luckenbooth this brooch was called, designed in Scotland. Such brooches were popular in the fur trade, and copies of the Scottish ones were made in Montreal, in Lower Canada. The luckenbooth lying in my palm was from Scotland though, and was larger and thicker, of better quality, than the trade brooches. My father had given it to my mother before he paddled away into the west. When a Cree died, her possessions were buried with her; my mother had been buried with her jewellery and her traps, her axe and her cooking pots. This one thing I had kept, although guilt weighed upon my chest for many nights as I lay beneath a blanket and held tightly to Charlotte. This one thing I could not part with, not even for my mother in her grave.

  Now I turned it over to trace with my fingertip the familiar inscription engraved deeply into the silver and tarnished by the salty air. True heart is true riches. Simon and Mary.

  But if my father’s heart had been so true, entwined with my mother’s heart like the entwined silver hearts of this brooch, then why had he left her? Left us? Why had he brought this brooch all the way from Scotland, and pinned it on to her shawl – his hands callused from wooden paddles and the rope around bales of trade goods – and then disappeared?

  I pressed my lips against the brooch’s coolness and used it to pin my own shawl together before slipping outside to find Charlotte.

  The sun was dipping into the west as we hurried, hand in hand, along the familiar path over the tundra towards the lazy smoke of the Cree fires. Here and there, beside the path, the leaves on blueberry bushes were already turning red as autumn approached; before long, the entire tundra would flare up, bright as fire, until quenched by snow. The last boat brigades, including the one for the Red River valley, would depart as soon as the supplies had been repacked and loaded. After that, the only travel would be over the ice of the frozen rivers.

  The people were gathering around the outside of the dome-shaped tent when we arrived, and Betty Goose Wing gestured for us to join her on the women’s side. Charlotte and I sat on the ground beside her, and folded our legs under us. I stared at the shaking tent and my heart fluttered twice in my chest like a bird in a snare net. Soon, as darkness fell, the spirits would enter it; soon they might talk to me. The tent was formed of deerskins wrapped around evergreen saplings, and had only been made that afternoon under the shaman’s watchful eye. The dogs had been kept away from it, for if any of them peed on the materials, the tent would be too dirty for the spirits to enter through the hole in the top.

  ‘Are you ready to speak?’ Betty asked, wisps of smoke trickling from between her weathered lips. I bent my head into my hands, blocking out the laughter and conversation taking place all around me, feeling the smooth beads of my ear coverings beneath my fingertips. Did I have my question ready to speak to the spirits? But what was it that I needed most to know … where my father was? Or whether I should travel with the horse? Were these the same thing?

  A hush fell upon the Cree and I lifted my head in time to see the dark form of the shaman slip into the tent, his greased hair thick with beads and feathers, and his face painted red with ochre. Cold air poured down the back of my neck and in the silence I felt the great sky lie down heavily upon the spindly trees and the flat land, flat as a rawhide stretched upon a frame and ready to be scraped. A baby gave a fretful cry in its cradleboard but was crooned into sleepy silence. A duck flew over, high and fast, its wings whistling. Betty rocked to and fro, and the smell of sweet grass and tobacco tickled my nostrils as a slender clay pipe was passed from hand to hand until it reached me. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs and felt the land and the silence and the cold air flow into me like a tide. In the shadows, the animals were gathering; I felt their presences. My skin prickled.

  Charlotte pressed against my side and I laid my cheek briefly against hers; it was as plump and smooth as an egg in a warm nest.

  Inside the tent, a drum began to throb, its skin vibrating inside my ribs. The shaman’s voice rang inside my head as he called upon the spirits and entreated them to come and help us, to talk with us. The sound seemed to go on all night, all autumn. My legs fused to the ground beneath me, the cool living body of our mother earth, formed after the great flood when the muskrats brought the ball of mud up from beneath the waters. With that mud, Wishahkicahk had remade the world, and then had told the animals, saved on his raft, to multiply and be good, not to hide too much when their brothers needed to eat. Pine needles pressed into my leggings, engraved their patterns upon my skin like the words that a man had once engraved into the reverse side of a silver heart brooch.

  The first star climbed into the sky of my eyes.

  ‘They are coming,’ Betty hissed beside us, and I saw a quiver run through the tent’s sides; it was like the quiver on the skin of a deer when the flies touch it. I strained my eyes in the gloom but the tent was still again, and all around me people held their breath and even the dogs, tied to logs on the other side of the camp, were silent. Then another quiver ran through the tent; it was as though wind had blown
over a patch of grass, or a ripple had run over a pool of water. ‘They are here,’ Betty said, leaning forward with a grunt of satisfaction. At that moment, the harsh caw of a crow tore apart the silence inside the tent, and its tip began to swing in an arc as the other spirits entered to join Crow.

  Lynx hissed and the sound ran over my skin like the rasp of a tongue. Moose bellowed as though in rut, a noise so loud that it seemed to push us backwards, further away from the tent. But then we leaned in again as Loon called to us, laughing.

  A hunter stood up in the crowd on the men’s side. ‘My brothers, we need to know about the winter,’ he called respectfully. ‘We need to know where we should journey to find the deer. Can you help us?’

  ‘He’s just being nice because he wants roast meat,’ a Hairy Heart sneered inside the tent; its voice was as hard and thin as new ice and I felt my bones grow brittle, ready to snap in the teeth of that cold-hearted monster. The Hairy Hearts were almost as frightening as the Witiko; they roamed the forests and the tundra in rags, gnawing on the flesh of their prey.

  ‘Why should he have meat to roast when we are hungry?’ the Hairy Heart complained. ‘He should go hungry too, unless he wants to make us an offering. Maybe he’d like to make us an offering of much roasted meat.’

  Beside me, Betty Goose Wing spat into the darkness; everyone knew that the Hairy Hearts were insatiably greedy, that they always wanted burnt offerings made to them. The hunter who had first spoken ignored the Hairy Heart and called out again, still respectfully, ‘My brother the deer, if you are here with us, please speak to us.’

  ‘Deer is not here!’ shouted Flying Squirrel, who always spoke the opposite of the truth and so we knew that Deer had entered the shaking lodge.

  ‘My brother, I do not know where the deer will run this winter,’ said the Deer spirit suddenly, speaking in Cree, and a stifled moan arose from the people, for we all remembered the cramping pain of hunger in our bellies.