‘Do not run,’ I begged Orchid with a quiver in my voice. ‘Talk soft –’
As she sneezed again, the bear hurtled forward, a dark blur of bone and speed like a rock crashing down a riverbank in a spring thaw, like an eagle falling from the sky upon a hare. Orchid flung herself backwards against a tree trunk. The bear covered the space between himself and her in four bounds; the light shattered on his teeth and claws into a thousand splinters that pierced us with arrowheads of terror.
I leaped forward, yelling, waving my arms, and the bear skidded to a halt, swinging around, looking for the source of this commotion. With a roar he plunged towards me; a whirling wind, a gun bullet, the darkness of death. Something crashed away through the trees behind me. A squeal of fear rode the wind. The bear halted again – he was so close to me that I could smell the sickly sweetness of dead meat on his breath – and rose back on to his hind legs. His great belly filled my vision with its luxuriant folds of fur. I stopped breathing. More crashing echoed through the trees, branches snapped, leaves whipped a large body.
‘Foxfire!’ Orchid cried in anguish and I glimpsed a flash of red hair. The bear dropped to all fours again and set off through the trees, chasing the fleeing horse at a flat run that ate up the ground, propelling him over the yellow fallen leaves and out of sight in a few seconds.
‘Come!’ I gasped. ‘Come!’
I strode into the bush, my breath and my heart hurrying and churning, my eyes slow and steady, scanning every sign, every word of the story that horse and bear had left behind themselves in their flight: a hoof mark in wet soil, a claw scratch on rock, a flattened blueberry bush, a snapped willow twig, a log broken open by impact and spilling grubs on to the ground. And also: the harsh alarm call of a crow, disturbed, far ahead of us. It lifted from the canopy of trees and struggled into the wind.
I whistled until my lips felt like wrinkled berries but the horse did not neigh in return.
Behind me, Orchid slipped and stumbled, cursing beneath her breath, holding up her gown with one hand, her ankles twisting inside the tight lacing of her stiff leather boots. I was almost running now. My mind filled with visions of the bear bringing the horse down, the great wounds he would leave on Foxfire’s frosted red quarters, how those claws would separate the horse’s flesh from his ribs like a flensing knife, how the stallion would scream in agony as he died.
Still my eyes were careful, steady, slow, reading the land.
‘Do not walk in the tracks,’ I warned Orchid over my shoulder. ‘And do not step across them.’
We hurried downhill between tamaracks that shed their thin yellow needles all over our shoulders and into our hair, and emerged on to the gravel banks of a small tributary creek running down into Robinson Lake. I lurched to a halt and Orchid barged into my back, panting, muttering. I laid my hand on her shaking arm.
‘Quiet! Look!’
Five hundred yards ahead, the bear sat on his rump and short tail beside a carcass. Ribs protruded like the ribs of a York boat, curved and pale. Red tatters of flesh hung from them. The neck lay limp and twisted, the head bent beneath it. Long legs sprawled in the stones as though, even in death, the animal still tried to outrun the ferocity of the great bear’s furious onslaught. Orchid stifled a sob.
‘It’s not Foxfire,’ I said. ‘It’s an elk. Watch.’
The five wolves that had been scavenging from the bear’s kill in his absence drifted along the perimeter of the trees like windblown flecks of campfire ash. Trotting in closer, from different directions, they snapped and snarled at the bear, distracting him, lunging and feinting. The long bushes of their dark tails swung in the wind, and their eyes glowed golden in the harsh light.
‘When he sits, they cannot creep up from behind,’ I whispered. ‘Watch.’
The bear swung his great body around and from side to side, his paws whistling through the air, swatting at the wolves as though they were flies buzzing in his ears. One wolf, rashly coming in too close to snatch at a ribbon of elk flesh, was lifted half off the ground and flung sideways with a high yelp of pain; it circled away, limping on a broken foreleg. The other wolves continued baiting the bear for a few minutes but eventually trotted off and were swallowed by the forest. The bear rose to his feet, padded over to the carcass, and shoved his heavy nose inside the ribcage.
I drew Orchid back under the tamaracks. ‘I am going to keep tracking,’ I said. She nodded, gripping her nose to hold in another sneeze, her eyes watering with cold and fear. We made a wide detour around the bear, and waded through the frigid stream downwind of him where his keen sense of smell would not detect us. Then we worked our way back along the shoreline until I picked up the trail of the horse again and began to follow it as he plunged and zigzagged through the bush in terror.
Dusk was falling. My body was quiet now; all over me, my skin was listening; waiting to hear the wolves crying to the rising moon, or the stamp of a horse, or the padding approach of the grandfather bear who has no chief over him. I lost the trail in the gloom, circled back, picked it up, lost it again. Now it was almost completely dark beneath the pale foliage, and Orchid’s rasping breath warned me that she was exhausted.
‘We will have to go back,’ I admitted at last, although the horse’s name was crying in my mind like a lament, and my eyes bulged with the hot burn of unshed tears.
‘How are we going to find our way in the dark?’ Orchid cried.
‘There are signs everywhere. Look here, see this aspen tree? See how its bark is thicker and whiter on one side? That side is south.’
For three miles, perhaps four, we retraced our steps while the stars climbed high, while branches slapped our faces and dead logs gave way under our feet and an owl cried somewhere to the north, like a spirit searching for us with a message. A stone pierced the bottom of my worn moccasin and bruised my foot.
Oh, Foxfire, Foxfire.
How could it be that he had journeyed so far, so many thousands of miles over sea and land and river and lake, into the midst of this vastness, and had died here without ever reaching his new stable waiting for him in the Red River valley? Was his spirit galloping now over our heads, joyous and free, along the wolf road? Or was it being reborn somewhere, in the form of a bright red colt with spindly legs and eyes like pools of water? Grief swelled in my chest, bigger and bigger, until I could barely stagger along carrying its weight.
A slanting rain began to fall, carrying a granular coldness like sleet in the core of each drop. It stung my face and eyes. My hair was plastered to my numb scalp. My wet feet slithered in the undergrowth.
There was silence behind me as Orchid stopped walking. I turned to locate the pale blur of her face. ‘It is unbearable!’ she cried suddenly, her high voice hard and sharp. ‘I hate this country. Everything is so – so – hostile! The bugs, the mud, the weather, the thick trees, the – the rude uncouth men we travel with, the dark. I hate this wilderness! I am so weary of it! I cannot go on!’
Sobs racked her. I went back and put my arms around her shoulders and felt the grief and bewilderment and homesickness that poured through her like a current between the grinding power of rocks. For a long time, I held her until her outburst subsided. I wiped her eyes with a corner of her sopping shawl, as though she were a child as young as Charlotte. ‘Come,’ I said. ‘We must get back to camp.’
We saw the bright flicker of fires at last, like stars fallen amongst the trees, and emerged on to the shoreline to stumble towards them. There was a cooking pot suspended over flames and sending out inviting smells of muskrat stew … there were the dark piles of goods from the boats, the kegs of rum and salt pork, the boxes of tea and soap and candles … there were the men, sprawled by the fires and wrapped in oil cloths, smoking pipes while they waited for their evening meal … and here was Eva, hand in hand with Charlotte and hurrying to meet us, her smooth face flushed with relief and her dark eyes glowing.
‘We had just noticed you were not back yet!’ she cried, as Charlotte buried h
er face against my robe and clung to me. ‘When the horse came back without you, we didn’t know what had happened.’
‘Back?’ I asked blankly.
‘He strayed off; his rope must have come untied. After some hours he returned covered in sweat and scratches and limping on one front leg. Look, there he is.’
I followed the line of her pointing arm, the wink of her brass rings and bracelets, and saw the gleaming flank turned sideways to a fire, the fall of red mane, the elegant drooping head. Foxfire turned his face towards me as I gave a weak whistle, and a greeting fluttered his nostrils in return. I crossed to where he stood tied to a sapling poplar. Flames danced in his eyes as he lowered his face against my chest and leaned there, breathing slow and deep in peacefulness at last. Weakness poured through me, and my hands shook, smoothing his forelock hair. I inhaled the sweet familiar smell of his coat, then gave a silent prayer of thanks to the Great Spirit as I went to the river to scoop water in a tin cup. With this, I sponged the horse’s nostrils clean, and washed the ragged scratches across his shoulders. I felt the heat in the tendons of his lame leg, and poulticed it with the shredded bark of a red willow.
As I worked on the leg, wrapping strips of linen around it to hold the poultice in place, I wondered about the man called Angus, who might be turning Witiko, or who might be a sorcerer. I pondered the possibility that he was wrestling with my spirit guardian, the Horse, and that he was trying to harm Foxfire. I tied the linen strips in place and went to fetch the stallion some oats and to fill his water bucket, peering along the shoreline for a glimpse of the half-blood with a bronze face and hair like drying grasses.
The next morning, before dawn, the tripmen whooped with delight, wading out to the loaded York boats and climbing onboard, hefting their paddles again, turning their faces towards the west and their backs towards Robinson Portage. Charlotte and I settled ourselves on our hard bench beside Orchid but she would not speak to me as we travelled. She stared far away, as though searching for something along the rocky shoreline with its dense walls of trees. She stared at the surface of the river as though reading a book. She bent over her sketch paper with intense concentration, as though she were praying to her Creator, asking for help from her pawakan, that spirit called Jesus.
Once, suddenly, as though we had been in the middle of a conversation, she said in a clipped tone, ‘I don’t see how you could have been so careless as to let Foxfire’s rope be incorrectly tied. I thought better of your sense of responsibility, Amelia. I’m very disappointed in you.’ Then she glared away over the water again, wiping at her red nose and coughing.
I did tie the rope correctly, I wanted to protest. I was sure that I did. And yet … how had Foxfire come untied if I had made the right knot? How had he come to be wandering in the trees alone, following us perhaps by smell and hearing, by glimpsing us with his keen eyesight? And so I didn’t reply to Orchid but sat silent, gnawed by guilt and doubts, her angry accusation lying heavy on me. I huddled in my blanket, cold and as silent as she was, falling deep down into that black place that I had tumbled into when my mother died, and which it had taken me many moons to begin leaving. But now, here I was again, back in a pit of despondency, gripped by the Blue Devil of sadness. My brooch was gone, swept away by the rapids, and my father’s letter was almost illegible with blots and water stains and ragged rips. And the land was so much huger than I had ever imagined, and I was so much smaller. It seemed foolish to have dreamed that I might find my father or any place for Charlotte and me to call home.
Chapter 9
The weather was wild and unpredictable as the brigades toiled onwards. Boiling white clouds threw dazzling reflections upon the water. Gusts of cold wind shook the leaves from the trees in squalls of gold. Then darkness would fall across the land as though a hand had brushed it with soot, and racing clouds obliterated the sun. Snowflakes swept over us in flurries, burning cold on our cheeks and eyelids, then dissolved as they fell on to ground or water.
I bent over the pair of new moccasins that I was making, embroidering each toe with purple thistles, that flower the Scotsmen loved. Carefully, I strung the porcupine quills and the little glass beads, along my needle even while the wind whipped against me, and Foxfire’s tail streamed between his legs.
Orchid maintained her silence; her plump cheeks seemed to grow thinner, and her skin whiter, with every hour. As she breathed, I could hear the deep rasp in her lungs and I knew that she was growing sicker in her anger and loneliness, but my own tongue lay heavy in my mouth. I had done no wrong and yet she had accused me; it was hard now to break the grip of our silence, or to meet the sharpness of her blue eyes. I kept my own eyes downcast over my sewing, over Charlotte’s braids as I plaited their three strands together, over our lunches of cold bannock and smoked buffalo tongue.
Misery gripped my heart so that it beat slowly and weakly, like a dying fish in the bottom of a canoe.
Although I continued to take care of Foxfire, I did not ask Orchid to have his saddle unpacked again. Instead, as the river glinted in dawn or sunset light, pearly as the inside of a shell, I found a stump or a rock to clamber on. Then I simply slid one leg over the stallion’s back and sat comfortably with legs astride and dangling, feeling the horse’s warmth and muscles, learning to anticipate his every move as he wandered the shoreline. He grazed contentedly while the cries of whippoorwills echoed in the stillness, and mist smoked from the water’s surface.
Since our boat’s load had been lightened by the loss of goods in the wreck, Eva decided to transfer into it. She and Orchid moved to sit one bench ahead of Charlotte and me, and a small part of me felt glad. Now I didn’t have to pretend to ignore Orchid any more, for when I raised my eyes from my needlework all I saw was Orchid’s short back wrapped in a woollen shawl, and her stiff bonnet of grey muslin. Eva leaned against Orchid’s shoulder, and they talked in monotones about England. Orchid even gave Eva some sheets of paper, and she began to learn how to use Orchid’s watercolour paints, but Orchid herself did not paint or sketch; simply stared straight ahead as though nothing mattered to her now except reaching the Red River colony and clambering for ever out of this boat.
‘Here I am after all,’ Eva turned around to say to me once. ‘I lost my place in this boat when you brought the horse onboard at York. But here I am now. And now I don’t have to worry about that tripman in the other boat – you know, Angus.’
Had it offended her after all, moving to another boat to make way for me? I searched her face for a clue but she was already turning away, tossing her head so that her long braid, decorated with white ermine fur and blue beads, swung against her back. Pierre gave a whistle behind me at the steering oar but Eva pretended not to hear. Then he began to sing and the other men took up the refrain, their voices ringing clear and melodious across the river, echoing from the trees and rocks:
‘Why should we yet our sail unfurl?
There is not a breath the blue waves to curl;
But, when the wind blows off the shore,
Oh! Sweetly we’ll rest our weary oar.
Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past!’
I knew that the men were looking forward to reaching the trading fort of Norway House and then the great expanse of Lake Winnipeg, which would grant them a rest from toiling up the river rapids. On the lake they might raise the boat sails and lie dozing on the benches while the wind carried us southwards with the pelicans and gulls.
‘Tomorrow we will reach Painted Rock Portage,’ Samuel Beaver said that evening as he helped me to cut grass for Foxfire. ‘Do you know about this place?’
I shook my head, stripping leaves from a poplar to add to the grass.
‘It’s a sacred place for our people,’ Sam said. ‘The ancestors have painted it with pictures. And people go there to make offerings to the grandfather rock, and to pray and lie on it for healing.’
He straightened with the sickle in one hand,
and gave me a steady look. ‘You might find help there.’
I stared back at him, wondering if the whole boat knew that Orchid and I weren’t speaking, that she was sick, and that my heart was heavy and blue.
‘Don’t you get homesick?’ I asked Samuel. ‘Don’t you miss the bay?’
He smiled and his dark skin gleamed above the red cloth knotted at his throat. ‘The rivers are my home now. I want to follow them far to the north, to the frozen sea, and far to the west where the great mountains lie, and I want to go over the mountains and down to the shores of the Pacific! The rivers run everywhere and look – I have the hands of a tripman now!’
He held them out for my inspection and I saw that the paler skin on his palms was hard and thick from the oars, and no longer blistered or weeping.
I smiled, and turned back to the poplar tree, wondering if I too might learn to feel that the rivers were my home. But a river was not a home for a horse, although Foxfire seemed to enjoy swimming. I wondered if all horses were such strong swimmers as he was, and enjoyed wading in the shallows, snorting playfully into the water and splashing with a foreleg. If only Orchid and I were friends still, I could have asked her.
In the morning, I decided once again to try leaving the blinkers off Foxfire’s halter; surely, he had been travelling by boat long enough now that he would remain calm. This time, he followed me into the boat without trouble and watched the shoreline surging past with calm attention.
‘What are those?’ I heard Orchid ask late in the day, and I glanced up from my needlework.
‘They are manitohkan,’ Eva replied. ‘They are carvings of people’s dream guardians.’
Along the shoreline, a group of trees had been cut down to leave three feet of stump, and into these had been carved the faces and sometimes the torsos of dream guardians. There was a magnificent Thunderbird from the upper air, gazing sternly across the water, and there was a moose, and there was a great northern pike with its hooked jaw. We were nearing the sacred place. I laid down my needlework to watch the shoreline and presently I saw the skull of a deer placed high in the limbs of a white cedar tree, its antlers positioned to face the rising sun, and tied with long, bright ribbons. Then I saw a package of rolled birchbark nailed to a skinny jack pine and I knew that it contained the paws of a bear, hung there to ensure good hunting in future, and after this we passed the skull of a bear, wedged into a crook in the limbs of a birch, and with its jaw decorated with loops of beads.
Red River Stallion Page 12