‘Oh, Amelia! And Charlotte! Oh, praise God you are safe!’ she cried, and strode forward to stroke Foxfire’s neck, and fondly pat Charlotte’s dangling leg encased in soaked leggings.
‘All my sketches have been water damaged, as you see.’ She gestured and I realised that the white rectangles strewn upon the rock were her paintings, some reduced to mere puddles of colour on paper that was tearing apart with wetness. A few still retained a semblance of their original brushstrokes and pencil lines, although the paper was badly wrinkled.
‘And your wooden chest has been brought ashore too,’ Orchid said, pointing. ‘Samuel laid it there, near the pile of paddles.’
My heart beat faster; I tied Foxfire to a tree and left him to graze while Charlotte helped Orchid smooth out her paintings. I hurried down to where the York boat’s long paddles lay in a haphazard pile on the strip of gravel shoreline. My wooden chest with its rope handles, and the initials HBC stamped upon it in black, was battered and cracked along one corner. I lifted the lid and took out Betty’s gift of a moose hide to spread it, soaking with water, upon a rock; hopefully, it had protected the other contents of the chest. When I plunged my hands down through our damp clothing, my father’s letter was the first of my two most precious objects that I found. It was soggy and soft. Carefully, I extracted it, and peeled apart its folded layers; the ink was spreading through the wet paper, pooling into blotches. My eyes flitted over the familiar lines, finding recognisable words: This is a fair place … look forward to good prospects. With infinite care I spread the letter on a rock to dry, uncertain whether it would ever be legible again. Then I plunged my hand back into my trunk to find the luckenbooth in its wrapping of deerskin. Here was the skin, a small scrap, worn soft as goose down by age and use. My fingers fumbled with it.
It was empty.
I pulled everything from the trunk, looking for the brooch, piling spare leggings and fishing line and winter robes and my sewing kit all upon the shoreline until I was standing in a jumble of belongings. The chest was empty, its wooden bottom stained with water. My hands tore again through the clothing at my feet, shaking, unfolding, sorting. No brooch, no glint of brightness, no sharp bright sound as it fell on to the stones.
Numbly, I sorted through everything more slowly, more carefully, willing the brooch to appear magically; to be caught in a fold of tartan fabric, to be lying in the toe of a moccasin, to be trapped inside the red Morocco leather covers of my sewing kit. But it was in none of these places. I stood for a long time, oblivious to the tripmen shouting commands, rigging up rope harnesses for themselves so they could pull our wrecked boat to shore and begin repairing the broken planking. I stood in silence, trembling with the weight of such a loss. If I found my father, how would I prove to him now that I was indeed his daughter? How would I remind him of his broken promise to my mother, to me?
‘Amelia!’ I turned at last, focusing on Eva’s smooth face as she peered at me, her arms filled with the wet, bedraggled mass of a white hare coat. ‘Is something wrong?’
I stared mutely at the coins and beads swinging at her throat, at the shell discs hanging from her ears. ‘I have lost something,’ I said slowly at last, the words wedging themselves in my throat. ‘And Eva, the Witiko man from your boat – listen, we must feed him bear’s grease!’
Eva listened intently while I told her what had happened in the bush, her forehead wrinkling with concern. ‘I will ask my boat’s cook,’ she promised. ‘But you must be careful, Amelia. This is the second time that the man – his name is Angus – has followed you into the bush.’
Her eyes seemed stretched wide with concern but after a moment I realised that she was looking over my shoulder at a young Canadian, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat and river water; he was Pierre, the steersman from our boat. I was relieved to see that he had survived his plunge into the rapids, although one side of his face was swollen with a rock abrasion and he had chipped a front tooth; his grin now was jauntier and wilder than before.
‘It was Pierre who brought your box ashore,’ Eva explained.
‘I’ve lost a brooch – a heart-shaped silver brooch,’ I told him. ‘Have you seen it?’
He shrugged and waved one hand expressively. ‘Mais non, non. Everything was everywhere in our boat,’ he said. ‘I collected it all, then Eva sorted through the belongings and restored them to their owners. C’est vrai. If your brooch is missing, what can I say? It is at the bottom of the river, non?’
He winked one lazy dark eye at Eva as he swung away, whistling.
For two days, we camped on the narrow strip of shore while the men hauled logs from the bush, and cut planking, planing the long timbers, then sawing the planks to length. Our boat, resting on log rollers, was propped almost on one gunwale to fully expose her ripped belly. The new planks were hammered into place, then caulked with oakum and sealed with pitch. At last, the boat was refloated, loaded with the salvaged cargo – everything torn, battered, and still slightly damp – and we began once more to ascend the long rivers and the scattered lakes.
Rain began to fall, a steady, soft, monotonous deluge that freckled the surface of abandoned beaver ponds, and drummed upon the oiled cloths in which we wrapped ourselves. Leaves along the shoreline, turning colour now, glowed dull gold and red like slow fires, in the grey air; and the tripmens’ voices as they sang fell flat and small upon the dark, roiling rivers. Orchid’s face was pale and pinched; the tip of her nose was red and she blew it often into a white lawn handkerchief, coughing and gasping for breath. Her gowns were stained with clay, smoke, and leaf juice; rips and broken stitching marred the fabric along the hem. Still, when she noticed me watching her, she smiled brightly and straightened her shoulders, slumped beneath a damp, smoky blanket. A long red scratch on one cheek marked where a branch had swung back into her face as she followed a trip-man over a rough portage.
Foxfire was quiet in the rain, staring at the shoreline passing by or following me docilely along trails at portages. His three remaining shoes had been removed – two coming off easily and one requiring a fight – and I had kept a nail as an amulet which I carried in a bag around my neck. Now his feet made a dull thudding sound against rocks instead of a metallic ringing. The gash on his shoulder was healing; I sponged it every evening using a baling sponge from our boat, and hot water from a kettle slung over the fire. Orchid fretted that he was losing weight on the strange diet of dying grass, leaves, and damp oats; that he was losing muscle tone from the many weeks of travelling.
Watching him as he swayed in the boat, the rain dribbling in rivulets down his legs beneath the edge of his blanket, I wondered if he felt as lost and homesick as I did; as though this great land had swallowed us in, a pike swallowing a smaller fish, so that we would never find ourselves again. Did he yearn to be with his own kind, as I yearned for the face of Betty Goose Wing, wreathed in pipe smoke, wrinkled and kind? Did he long for the drift of salt on the wind, as I did? Perhaps he pined for the wide open spaces of his marshes along the Norfolk Broads as I pined for the sweep of Hudson Bay, the metallic light shimmering on heaving waves beneath the vast sky. Here, above the rivers, the sky seemed shrunken, ringed by the raking spires of conifers; the walls of trees on each shoreline hemmed us in so that sometimes I felt as though I couldn’t breathe but was suffocating for lack of wind and space and a cold, northern light.
One night, sitting by a smouldering fire of wet wood, I asked Eva casually if she knew that her uncle had once wooed my mother, but she said that she had not heard anything about this. Then I asked whether she thought that my father might ever have sent my mother a message but she said she didn’t know; it had all happened so long ago anyway so what did it matter now? Her perfect profile bent towards the fire as she spoke, her full lips curling in a smile, but when she turned her head to glance at me, her eyes were veiled and unreadable.
It was still raining, colder now, when we approached Robinson Portage, the longest stretch of trail on our trip. It was
said that this portage was haunted by the ghosts of all the men who had died there of broken legs and heart attacks, as they struggled for seven days to haul the great boats overland along rollers of poplar logs, as they stumbled, half trotting, beneath the packs of goods on their backs. Songs fell into silence as we approached the long set of waterfalls, a dim white barrier glimpsed far ahead. Then the boats were run on to shore and the tripmen, with grim faces, began unloading them. For seven days, they would work beneath the threat of imminent death, kept company by the crosses leaning amongst the poplar trees.
A camp was set up, and Orchid spent hours in her tent, coughing with a deepening rattle in her lungs. Eva slipped in and out of the tent, asking Orchid for stories of her life in England, learning about balls, calling cards and town houses; about etiquette and taking the waters at the baths; about fashions in gowns and hats, and how many servants were required to run a grand house. Eva wanted to become as white as she could, I thought, she wanted to wash herself in that river of English memories until it washed the brown colour from her skin. As she murmured softly to Orchid, and as Orchid replied in her hoarse voice, Eva was learning how to change colour, like the leaves changing along the riverbanks. She confided to me one evening that she planned to find and marry a white trader while she went to school in Red River.
‘Not just any white man will do,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He must be a clerk with good prospects and connections, who will rise through the Company ranks to become a chief trader or factor.’
I darted her a surprised glance for she was always flirting with Pierre, who anyone could see was wild, smoking his Brazilian hard twist tobacco while light sparked on his earrings. He would never settle into civilised life or exchange his fringed buckskin jacket for a frock coat. And Eva’s father would never form an alliance with him.
‘What about you?’ Eva asked. ‘Isn’t there a hunter you’ve had your eyes on?’
I shrugged. ‘I had no one to arrange it for me, no father after Ronald McTavish left,’ I said. Then I turned my face away, for there had been a hunter I liked but he had died in the starving moon, disappearing into the bitter smoke of a blizzard and never returning. Perhaps he had left moose blood lying uncovered on the snow, and had brought the blizzard upon himself.
‘Ah, it is the same on both sides of the Atlantic,’ said Orchid, overhearing us. ‘Fathers negotiate whom their daughters will marry, for trade purposes or wealth or bonds between families. My dear departed parent would be horrified to know I am traipsing halfway around the world with no dowry but a horse.’
After a moment’s reflection she added pensively, ‘Yet, he is a very fine horse. And I daresay my husband’s wealth is not so very great, not the thousands of pounds per annum that my father would have liked for me.’
Then she laughed, hard and clear. I was learning that this laughter was something she could hide behind like a blind, when she was hunting down her own fear.
By day, I led Foxfire to and fro through the poplars, listening to the distant shouts of the tripmen, and watching the horse’s mobile lips as he foraged; it was marvellous how sensitive his lips were and how he could strip leaves from the finest of twigs and leave it upon the tree. Hour after hour I wandered with him, rain pattering on his oiled blanket, as I thought about the feel of his great back beneath me in the river. I wondered if Orchid would allow me to ride him. At last, I asked her and she had the men locate and unpack her chest containing the stallion’s tack. I ran my hands over the bridle with its buckles and straps, and the smooth, cold shine of the metal bit that Orchid explained lay in a space that all horses have between their front and back teeth.
‘With this, you have control over the horse’s head,’ she explained. ‘There are many different kinds of bits but this one is a pelham with two rings. The straps attached to the rings are called reins, and there are two on each side so they are called double reins. The top rein pulls straight back from the top bit ring, but the lower rein exerts a lever-like action with the bottom bit ring, and so pulls up over the poll behind the horse’s ears. This encourages the horse to drop his head and to collect his body beneath you with his spine rounded. Then his energy and his balance are under your control.’
Then she showed me the saddle; a large, heavy leather object with a shining stirrup in which to place one’s foot, and with two protrusions around which a lady, who must never ride astride, might place her legs and try to balance. We tied Foxfire to a tree, and Orchid showed me how to place his saddle blanket, made from the pelt of a young sheep, on to his withers and then slide it slightly backwards in the direction of his hair growth. The saddle was placed on top, and Orchid showed me how to reach beneath the horse’s belly for the girth straps of leather, and how to tighten them until the saddle was secure. ‘Always check the girth again before you mount,’ she said. ‘You do not want to end up dangling beneath his belly if the saddle slips.’
Then she showed me how to bridle him, laying one arm along the crest of his neck and guiding the head straps over his ears while my other hand slipped the bit between his teeth.
‘Mount here, on the nearside,’ Orchid said.
My heart beat hard. I slipped the toe of my moccasin into the stirrup iron, and swung my weight up and over. The stallion pranced sideways, trees swayed, clouds scattered fast across the sky, and the cold wind whipped my cheeks. Joy ran through me for a moment, like the solemn joy that I felt when men played their fiddles and I danced with the other girls and women, stamping our feet to the lilting laments of their Scottish homeland. But this riding was even better than dancing; better than running through grass with the wind roaring at your back, as I used to do on the tundra when I was a small child.
From then on, I rode at least twice daily while Orchid stood patiently in the drizzle, coughing, calling commands, teaching me how to keep my hands gentle and yet strong, my body upright and yet pliant, my legs loose and yet ready to tighten so that I wouldn’t fall off. Riding, I thought, was like being a weed in a river current or a tree in a strong wind – everything about horse and rider was moving, flowing, bending, and yet tenacious and powerfully alive. When the stallion trotted, he covered the ground in swinging strides, and soon I was able to bend him amongst the trees and around stones even at a trot, his whole body supple. Orchid began to teach me about leads; about which leg the stallion should lead with as he rounded rocks, and how I could feel this through the rhythm of his body. It was possible to ask the horse to change which leg he was leading with. My braids flew back over my shoulders as I rode, and my face stretched wide in a smile of delight.
On our final day at the Robinson Portage, the rain stopped and Orchid decided she wanted to go for a walk and start painting again. We left Charlotte and Eva in Orchid’s tent, stringing beads, and left the horse tied to a tree, one hind leg cocked as he dozed. Orchid and I wandered off, watching squirrels scamper along logs, chipmunks stretch their faces wide with seeds, wild raspberry bushes toss in the wind, and the pale yellow tongues of willow leaves slip loose and fall to carpet the ground. Storms of yellow poplar leaves whirled around us.
A chill ran over my skin like a breath.
I could hear a great silence behind the wind and the rustling leaves; my skin prickled with the awareness of a mighty power close by. Standing stock-still, I waited, my eyes scanning every detail: a stump, a gooseberry bush, the place where a skunk had dug in the soil for roots, the place where a lynx had clawed long pale gouges into the trunk of a white spruce. Still the silence gripped me, pressed upon me.
The spirit and the power came closer.
The bear’s head rose slowly from behind a screen of willows, rose until it was higher than my own head. I saw the pale brown snout, a pair of small sharp eyes, an open mouth revealing teeth sharper than thorns and as long as my hand. The bear’s head swung, questing for our scent on the wind. When a gust whirled around, the bear tasted it with his open mouth and his twitching nose; he caught our smell and grunted in curiosity.
> ‘Orchid,’ I called softly. ‘Stay very still. Crooked Tail is here.’ Amongst my mother’s people, one did not speak the bear’s name aloud, but called him Crooked Tail or Galloping Along out of respect.
But Orchid did not reply and neither could I see her, somewhere to my left, meandering amongst the trees.
The bear lumbered forward, closer to me, cocking his head with questions: Who is there? What do you want? He rose to his hind feet, and his fore paws dangled. His tall body was as upright as a man’s and rolling with thick fur, fat and mighty slabs of muscle. This was an animal that could take my whole head into his mouth and crush it like a nut, or tear my neck wide open with one swipe.
I shook with dread and awe.
Raising my arms very slowly above my chest, I took two steps backwards. I did not look into the bear’s eyes, for that would have been a challenge. ‘Forgive us, Grandfather,’ I said softly. ‘We did not mean to disturb your peace. We will leave now and let you rest.’
One more step back.
A twig snapped to my left, and the pale green of Orchid’s gown flashed in the corner of my eye. The bear’s head swung around, fast and heavy and blunt; I heard the woof of surprise rush between his teeth.
‘Amel— oh!’
‘Step away slowly, do not run,’ I warned her softly and watched as she obeyed, clutching her paper to her chest, her scratched and wind-reddened face suddenly as pale as it had been on the day she walked up the landing stage at York Factory. A sneeze tore through the silence, then another. Papers flew from Orchid’s hands to scatter on the ground. The bear dropped on to all fours and swung his head from side to side, growling and grinding his jaw with his rounded ears laid back. Weakness ran through my knees.
Red River Stallion Page 11