Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  The gurgling underwater voice of Northern Pike spoke in the French tongue. ‘Perhaps the men will have to catch fish instead,’ translated Betty Goose Wing beside me. Another stifled moan of consternation ran through the men’s side. Fishing was women’s work and only in starving moons would the hunters consent to abandon the trails of big game animals and venture on to the hard sheets of river ice to chop holes and let nets down into the blackness where the currents spoke in their gurgling tongues.

  ‘Perhaps the people have taken too much from the deer and not treated them with respect.’ This thin, cruel voice from inside the tent ran over me like a flensing knife; it separated my brain from my body and my blood ran cold. It was Macimanitow who spoke, that evil being who wishes us ill, and as his words died into silence, Pakahk the skeleton rattled his bones together with a terrible dry hard rhythm like the clattering of frozen sticks.

  ‘Hunger,’ he chattered. ‘Hunger is coming to the people and soon their bones will be pale and shining in the dark.’

  Charlotte whimpered and pressed against me and I pulled her closer with one arm.

  ‘I will not shine on those bones,’ protested Moon in the English language.

  ‘I do not believe the people have disrespected their brothers the deer,’ interjected the voice of Wishahkicahk, the trickster hero of the ancient stories from when the world was young, for he was a man who showed kindness to our people. ‘I have heard the people singing to the deer to entertain them.’

  ‘No, no!’ cried Flying Squirrel. ‘They have done no such thing.’

  ‘They have killed so many deer that the carcasses went adrift on the tide and went down Underwater,’ Macimanitow said, and hunters cowered low as the cruel touch of that voice ran over their heads and whistled away into the sky’s silence. ‘They have wasted their brothers’ gifts.’

  The tent became still. Outside it we sat as still as wooden carvings for we knew that it was true; the Homeguard Cree had killed many deer as they migrated across the Hayes River, killed them for their hearts and their tongues, and let the bodies slip away on the fast current. Betty Goose Wing had complained about it, I remembered; she had said that in the bush, no animal’s body was ever treated with such disrespect but that the Homeguard Cree had become dirty with the white man’s wasteful ways.

  Suddenly, the tent began to shake violently; the tips of the sapling poles thrashed in the air as some mighty thing entered. A cacophony of sound rose from inside as the new spirit was welcomed by a babble of languages, snorts and hoots and hisses, the crackle of ice. All fell into silence as a great growl tore apart the darkness; that growl vibrated the ground beneath me and Charlotte clapped her hands over her ears. ‘It is Crooked Tail, it is Nimosom, our grandfather,’ whispered the women around me, for even to name the bear – with its ability to stand on its hind legs and stretch as tall as a man, and its claws that could rip open a man’s ribcage – was disrespectful.

  ‘Grandson,’ said the bear with a chuckle, speaking to the shaman down on his knees as the spirits roamed around his head, ‘Grandson, we will fight. If you can throw me flat, I’ll be pleased. If you can’t throw me, you people won’t be able to get any game this winter. Get up, Grandson, and we will wrestle. Come.’

  Outside, people leaned forward, willing the shaman to wrestle that great bear to the ground, willing his pawakan guardian to be so strong that he might pin that hairy bear flat on to his back.

  ‘He’s winning!’ shrieked Flying Squirrel in Cree.

  ‘Push harder, grab him!’ gurgled Pike in French.

  ‘He is too weak!’ cried Macimantow, and a groan escaped from Wishahkicahk.

  ‘Again!’ roared Bear. ‘I will give you two more chances. We will fight three times!’

  Once more, the Cree leaned forward in the dark as the tent’s poles shook and the tip spun in the darkness, a pale blur as the bear and the shaman fought inside while the spirits cried and shrieked, and showers of stars littered the sky and the trees shook in the stillness of the air as though wind tore them apart. My fingernails scored marks in my palms. Sweat beaded my freezing forehead.

  ‘Again!’ roared the bear. ‘Fight me again! I will give you one more chance to win.’

  Sweat touched my tongue. Heavy shapes thrashed past me in the darkness; I felt the ground heave. Trees fell far out on the tundra; black spruce crashed to the ground, crushing the blueberries. The shaman heaved and struggled, his hands slipping on empty air, the bear’s weight pressing a groan from his throat as he fell beneath those raking claws.

  ‘Grandson, your pawakan is not strong enough,’ growled Bear. ‘You have lost three times, and in the moons of winter you will not sing me from my den.’

  A woman wailed nearby for if the people could not lure the bears from their dens, nor catch the deer, they would starve again in the moon when the old man spreads the brush.

  ‘Maybe the people can catch rabbits,’ hissed Lynx.

  ‘You can starve to death on rabbits,’ quipped Turtle, known for his sense of humour. But it was true you could starve on rabbits for when Wishahkicahk threw all the animals, one by one, into the fatty river, he pulled rabbit out almost right away, and so rabbit has little fat on him. Bear was allowed to stay in the fat-filled river the longest, and so has the most fat on him for people to warm hearts and bellies with in the bitter cold.

  Now the spirits began to argue inside the tent in tongues that no one could understand, and once Wolf howled and once Wolverine snarled.

  ‘Ask your question,’ muttered Betty Goose Wing beside me, but my tongue lay in my dry mouth like a frozen stone.

  ‘You can do it,’ whispered Charlotte, squeezing my fingers, her grave eyes fixed trustingly upon my face. I gulped and nodded but at that moment, even for Charlotte, I could not speak.

  Somewhere in the crowd a woman asked the whereabouts of a missing relative and the spirits talked to her for some time; Turtle gave an impersonation of a drunk and people chuckled in response, for it was well known that this missing relative was too fond of brandy and often became lost close to home. Once, this person had spent all night staggering in circles around a grove of trees within shouting distance of camp, and had arrived home in the morning to say he had been on a far journey over the tundra.

  ‘Maybe he thinks he is paddling across the ocean, arriving in England,’ joked Turtle now. ‘But maybe he is really arriving in the camp at Ten Shilling Creek!’

  People laughed again, but there was a heaviness about their laughter; a heaviness on our chests and in our bellies. Yes, we could starve to death on rabbits.

  ‘Ask,’ whispered Charlotte.

  My voice quivered, a poplar leaf in the wind. ‘Please, tell me if I should travel west with the red stallion.’

  The tent hung still and silent while the spirits considered my question; I saw them flitting around inside like tiny points of light. I shook my head and the tent was a dark cone in the deeper darkness again. Someone shuffled their moccasins in the dirt. Betty inhaled on her pipe.

  ‘She wants to go west and get civilised,’ said Moose with a snort.

  ‘She didn’t get baked long enough,’ sneered a Hairy Heart. ‘She’s only half done.’

  I flushed in the darkness; it was true that my skin was paler than the skin of full-blooded Cree. I knew the story, how the Creator had modelled people from dough and put them into the oven to bake; how he took the white people out too soon, and left the black people in too long. Only the people of our land had been baked just right, their skin a pleasing and beautiful brown.

  ‘She needs to find her father,’ said Wishahkicahk gently.

  ‘Ah, he is wandering,’ said Turtle. ‘He has wandered so long that he cannot remember the way home even with a clear head. Perhaps he needs a drink!’

  ‘Her heart is turning to ice,’ said a Hairy Heart. ‘If she stays here and freezes, she could follow her mother along the wolf road instead of travelling west to find her father.’

  ‘She wants to b
e with the horse,’ said the Moon, speaking English again. ‘The horse can see in the dark; maybe his spirit can find her missing father.’

  ‘White men do not get lost,’ said Dog suddenly with a sharp barking sound. ‘They have instruments to guide them.’

  ‘They have big noses to follow,’ said Turtle and all the spirits laughed.

  ‘Horses know how to find home,’ growled Bear. ‘Horses have strong spirits.’

  Suddenly, the tent began to bend and shake violently again, and I felt the spirits streaming out of it, soaring away into the still, cold air, the huge sky, the flat land filled with power and living things: trees and rivers, stones and muskegs, ice and winds, Thunderbirds, stars. The world tilted crazily, the stars swinging, the trees tossing, the water crashing on the shores of the Hayes River, the ice creaking in its sheets far to the north. Then stillness settled itself over us. People sighed and shifted, got to their feet in silence. The shaman crawled from the tent and was helped to his feet and led away into the darkness, his face gouged with fatigue.

  ‘Sleep in my lodge, it is late,’ said Betty, and she hefted a sleeping Charlotte on to one hip and brushed past me. I stumbled after them and lay down on spruce boughs by the embers of a fire, pulling a covering of marten fur over me and tucking it around Charlotte’s heart-shaped face.

  ‘What did Moose mean when he said I wanted to be civilised?’ I whispered. Betty’s craggy profile bent over her embers and she blew on them until tiny licks of flame appeared.

  ‘You know the Company agreed to the Red River colony,’ she said. ‘The Company wants the half-blood people to go and live there. After the Company merged with its enemy, the North West Company, many men lost their jobs. That was 1821. Those men were offered land in the west. And the Company decided its retired men and their Cree wives should be given land by the Red River to live on.

  ‘The Company wants all these people to become just like white men. They think the Cree will forget their own stories, lose their own language. They think the Cree will forget the names of the stars, how to read the stories written by the animals across the land. They tell us to forget the names of the spirits, forget our own ancestors. The white man thinks we will no longer know how to talk with a drum.

  ‘I tell you, the white men will gnaw on the Cree people like dogs gnawing on bones. This is what they mean by civilise.’

  I lay on my back, shocked, as the fire sank into embers again. To call a person a dog was the worst of insults, and to allow dogs to gnaw on the bones of animal prey was the worst disrespect. The bones of deer and moose, beaver and marten and bear were usually hung in trees, or placed upon wooden platforms out of reach of the dogs.

  Was my white father like a dog? The longing to know him stirred in me like a fish swimming up out of a dark pool. I remembered my envy when Eva had said she was travelling with Orchid and Foxfire: was it the journey itself that I wanted, with its rivers and rapids, its changing skies? Was it only adventure I craved? Or was it the touch of the stallion’s hot shoulder – his mystery – or the sharp, bright laughter of the white woman? If I stayed here, would Charlotte and I starve because the shaman had been too weak to fight with Bear, because the people had taken the deer tongues and left the carcasses to go to waste?

  ‘Betty?’

  ‘Umph.’

  ‘Whose band does Eva belong to?’

  ‘Eva’s mother is sister to Chief Joseph Many Guns. When he was younger, he sent blankets to your mother’s door. She was a fool to refuse him.’

  ‘And Eva’s father?’

  ‘A white man, a trader. He had been here for a few winters, after working on the Athabasca River.’

  Eva, niece of the chief, I thought; niece of the chief who had persuaded the apprentice postmaster to slide a letter down behind a loose board in the office at York Factory so that it might lie there hidden for many years, my mother’s face turning to winter while she waited for a word from my father. I wondered what stories Eva carried under her tongue, stories about a proud woman who refused a young chief, about a lost letter, about a white man named Simon Mackenzie. If I went west, would she share those stories?

  ‘Do you think it is true? That the people will starve because they didn’t respect the deer?’ I asked.

  Betty’s reply held her scowl. ‘The beaver used to be a great people,’ she said. ‘They used to be so wise and clever that the Transformer had to intervene. He sent the beaver to live in the water, and he took away their speech. We people have always treated the beaver with great respect. But the white man changed that. The traders wanted beaver pelts, more and more of them. We started killing the beaver, wiping out all the beavers in one lodge, not leaving any to keep the beaver families going. We took the beaver so we could have rum and guns. Now there are no more in this land around the fort, and no deer. Not even enough hare to make Charlotte another coat. That’s what happens when you don’t respect the beaver.’

  ‘What do you think the spirits want me to do?’ I asked after a pause, but Betty had fallen asleep; her snoring rose and fell in waves. Bear had said that horses knew how to find their way home. I already had a home here: in the deerskin lodges, inside the fort’s log palisade, out on the tundra with the ducks and geese honking overhead and the tamaracks stirring in the salty wind. It would be painful to leave all this behind – and yet the people here were starving. Betty Goose Wing said we were all ehpishhot here now, out of balance and harmony with nature, for the coming of the white men had changed the ways that the elders had taught us. If we left all this behind us, what place would we call home if we didn’t find my father? Where would we sleep at night? I needed close kin, and some kind of life for Charlotte and myself, and maybe my father could provide that. But to be civilised … Was this the price we would pay – a loss so great that there would be nothing left of us? That everything clean and beautiful in us would have been gnawed without respect?

  I flung off the rumpled fur, then stooped to tuck it back around Charlotte. My hands ached with love, smoothing her black hair. I lifted the flap of hide over the doorway and walked out of camp and into the fort beneath the moon’s grin. I found the latch on the door of the cow byre by touch alone, lifted it with a click and stepped into the sweetness of cattle. My foot nudged a pail and its handle fell with a clang; the stallion stamped a back hoof and the moon hung in his eyes. I stepped up to his left shoulder, the nearside, as Orchid called it, and his spirit encircled me like arms; a kindness, a calm pool. I pressed my forehead against his own while his breath ran over my hands.

  The horse pawakan was a strong spirit; strong enough, I hoped, to guide me through all adversity, perhaps even through a starving moon, or perhaps through the white man’s rules. It was hard to know which of these dangers to choose to walk into. I was an animal, trying to choose between two traps – which would hurt me the most, and which might I hope to escape from?

  Chapter 6

  I hoped that I had made the right choice.

  Standing on top of the bluff, facing the Hayes River, I watched the first fingers of sunlight touch a tamarack tree; already its needles were turning golden and soon they would drop off. The moon of falling leaves was beginning. Skeins of geese flew high above, heading south to escape the cruelty of winter. Already, this morning, frost lay on the grass. The cries of the boat crews rang across the river as the sun warmed it to blueness. Men’s feet thundered on the landing stage, and the York boats lay in the water below, each one packed with forty hundredweight of goods, and ready to depart for its long journey inland – each one trying, like the geese, to leave before it was too late.

  Here came the men of the Portage La Loche brigade, nicknamed the Poisson blanc or Whitefish. They streamed down to their boats, the puffy sleeves of their striped shirts rumpled, their long hair dishevelled; many of them had barely fallen into bed an hour ago, after last night’s ball in the carpenter’s shop. Now they carried their fiddles silent beneath their arms, and buttoned their blue vests against the cold. T
he woven sashes knotted at their waists were bright red as cranberries. Here came their champion, Paul, massive and hairy as a bear, and nursing a black eye from a fight outside the fort’s old octagon yesterday afternoon.

  I closed my eyes, ignoring the bustle below as the boats filled with rowers, as oars tickled the water’s surface, as the canvas sheets – oiled with whale fat – were pulled snug over the trade goods to keep them dry. I stretched my arms high to the first light and chanted a song of thanks, as Betty Goose Wing had taught me to do at sunrise. I thanked the Creator for tools, for the strength of my horse pawakan, for my good health, for the new morning, and for my little sister, Charlotte Bright Eyes. And here she came now, running over the white ground, dodging between men carrying long oars over their shoulders, and casks of rum slung on poles by leather strapping. Her robe of soft, fringed deerskin flapped against her legs, and the green beads on the fringes sparkled. Her moccasins left scuffed trails in the frost, like the trail left by ptarmigan feathers when the bird lands in snow.

  I smiled down as she pressed against my side. ‘Are you ready?’ I asked, and she nodded solemnly, cradling her doll of carved wood and deerskin in her arms.

  ‘Good. Now it is time to fetch the stallion.’

  As we approached Foxfire, tied to the tamarack tree to which I had brought him at dawn, I whistled to him, a long sweet note. He strained on his lead rope, snorting, ears pricked as the boat crews laughed and cursed, and as oars clattered along gunwales. I reached into my fire bag, slung over my shoulder, and which contained dry moss and the flint I used for starting fires. Today it held something else. I pulled out the two rectangles of stiff leather that I had been stitching for several nights. Quickly, I threaded rawhide strips through the holes I’d pierced in the rectangles with a sharp awl, and then lashed the strips securely around Foxfire’s halter. Now the leather rectangles – Orchid called them blinkers – partially covered the stallion’s eyes so that he could see directly ahead but not all around.