‘It is so He that owns the chin will be respected and will give himself to the hunters again,’ I muttered to Charlotte as she gazed from the boat, her wide eyes taking in every detail. Who else would help her to learn the ways of our people, if I did not pass on my knowledge? I was too young to be a wise elder, and yet my sister had no one else.
Now ahead of us lay the flat sheets of the Painted Rock, which the trade goods must be portaged around. The tripmen ran the York boats onshore beside six birchbark canoes, light and graceful as duck feathers. Their Cree owners were gathered further down the shore; the smoke from their fires and their pipes streamed sideways in the capricious wind and the fringes of their deerskin robes flapped against their legs as they danced to the slow beat of a drum. Their chanting carried to me in snatches on the wind and I knew that they had come to this sacred place to worship the Great Spirit.
While the tripmen unloaded the boats, I let Foxfire graze amongst the huckleberry bushes. Then I tied him up, and made a fresh poultice of red willow for his tender foreleg while Charlotte helped me by brushing him. She had to stand on a stone to reach his high back.
‘He is always quieter for you,’ I told Charlotte. ‘He moves more slowly, placing his hooves carefully to avoid treading on your little feet. He understands that you are only a few moons in age.’
‘I am not a baby!’ Charlotte protested but I saw that she was pleased, and slid her hand lovingly along Foxfire’s neck when he bent his head towards her.
I wondered if Foxfire had ever spent time in the pasture with the foals he had fathered, far away in England; if he remembered running with his mares while the foals gambled alongside. But perhaps, like human fathers, he did not cast his thoughts backwards when he journeyed away.
It was while I was gathering firewood that I noticed the dome-shaped sweat lodge, screened by trees and huddled against the base of the sacred rock, its cracks stuffed with offerings of tobacco, tea, dried meat and even a hunting knife with a bone handle. I stared at the lodge for a long minute; it was small, and made with willow saplings covered in birchbark. A flap of deerskin hung over the low doorway. The ashes in the fire pit outside the lodge were still warm, and the grandfather and grandmother rocks placed in the centre of the pit still exuded a comforting heat.
I knew then what I must do to help Orchid’s cold, and her loneliness and anger, as well as my own Blue Devil. Though I was not a wise elder, I knew some things: that warmth would speed healing, that a sweat lodge might restore harmony to troubled minds. I knew that I must bring peace to our friendship again.
Hurrying now, I dodged between the trees to the Cree fire, but the people had left, slipping away in their canoes, and so I couldn’t ask permission to use their lodge. But perhaps it was here for anyone who came seeking help from the spirit world. I ran back, dodging the pale trunks of poplars in the dusk, feeling the bite of snow against my cheeks. Pulling my strike-a-light and a wad of bulrush fluff from my bag, I bent over the fire pit and struck a spark. Scraps of birchbark coaxed flames into life. With the small hatchet I kept in my belt, I chopped enough wood to get the fire roaring, creating a blaze that would send heat deep into the stones lying in its midst.
Orchid was seated outside her tent, and eating listlessly from a tin bowl of rubaboo stew made of pemmican mixed with flour. Her harsh coughing punctuated the laughter and conversation amongst the tripmen gathered at their fires. Charlotte was nearby, playing a game of whist with Samuel Beaver, Eva and Pierre in his tall steersman’s hat with red ostrich plumes.
‘Orchid,’ I said softly, although I couldn’t meet her stony glance with my own miserable one. ‘I am worried about your health. There is a way amongst my people for healing illnesses of the heart and the body. Will you let me help you?’
For a long moment, she didn’t answer but finally she nodded, stirring her spoon aimlessly around in her supper. ‘I cannot take one more bite of this mess,’ she muttered. ‘What do you wish me to do?’
‘I have some things to get ready, then I will come for you.’
It was fully dark by the time that I had gathered the items I needed, and Orchid and Charlotte followed me through the stinging air and the ghostly poplars; the peppery tang of fallen leaves tingled my nostrils. The fire I had lit was dying down. From my small leather medicine pouch, I pulled a little Brazilian hard twist tobacco and some chunks of dried caribou meat and sprinkled them on to the fire.
‘What are you doing?’ Orchid wheezed.
‘It is an offering for the spirits,’ I said, ‘so they might look on us with compassion and grant our requests.’
‘As in the Old Testament,’ Orchid said. ‘Burnt offerings for the Almighty.’
I inclined my head but didn’t answer. Mr Murdoch, the postmaster who taught evening class at York Factory, had once read us a passage from the white man’s sacred book, in which people brought oxen and birds called doves, and burned them with fire for their white man’s Creator. Now I rolled the hot stones from my fire with a stick, and dragged them inside the lodge on a piece of deerhide, tipping them into the hole dug in the centre of the floor. ‘Strip all your clothing off,’ I told Orchid.
‘This is madness,’ she protested fiercely. ‘I am ill, and it is almost freezing out here.’
‘I will give you a blanket, but you won’t need it soon, inside the lodge.’
‘Madness,’ she muttered again, breathing hard but fumbling to undo the rows of jet buttons on her gown. It seemed to take her for ever to strip; what vast quantities of strange garments the white women wore, with boning and buttons and ribbons, with lace trim and flounces! At last we stooped and entered the lodge on our knees, wrapped in blankets.
‘I cannot see anything in here,’ Orchid said, her voice tinged with panic.
‘You don’t need to see with your eyes, only with your spirit.’
The braid of sweet grass that I had lit at the fire and brought inside, glowed in the darkness. I wafted it around our bodies, letting the fragrant smoke wash us clean and prepare us for talking to the spirits.
My blanket slipped from my shoulders as I settled myself on the beaten ground strewn with white cedar fronds. When I inhaled, their sharp resinous aroma settled deep in my lungs and my mind filled with the peace and greenness of the forest, with its singing silence.
‘Kicimanitow, Great Spirit,’ I prayed, ‘I am Amelia Otterchild Mackenzie. I come for healing for my sadness. I come for guidance to find a new home. I need your help to find it. May my pawakan be strong. And Mary Mackenzie, my mother, may your spirit hear me. Send strength to help me travel on without you.’
‘Great Kicimanitow,’ came Charlotte’s voice, soft as the touch of a spring leaf against my ear. ‘I am Charlotte Bright Eyes McTavish. Help me to make this great journey with my sister.’
I sprinkled cedar fronds on the fire and they spat and curled, crackling to draw the attention of the spirits to our requests. A gust of wind ran up the walls of the lodge. I heard the patter of leaves falling upon it and sliding down to the forest floor. When I touched Orchid’s arm lightly, I felt her flinch in the darkness. ‘You must state your name and your need,’ I prompted.
‘Almighty Father,’ prayed Orchid, ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I your most humble servant beseech your mercy in this hour of need –’ She broke off with a racking cough, bending over from the waist.
I lifted the birchbark pail of river water and poured it on to the hot rocks so that steam billowed around us.
Orchid stifled a shriek, but her coughing subsided.
‘Wake up, grandfather stones,’ I pleaded. ‘Wake up, grandmother stones. Send our messages to the Creator.’ Then Charlotte and I began to chant while the heat and the steam from the stones pushed its fingers deeper and deeper into us, through our skin, through our organs, into our bones. It filled our heads, it pumped through our hearts. There was nothing but heat and steam and a darkness so thick it was as though the night had pressed its hand across our eyes and sealed them s
hut.
Our chanting voices seemed to be joined by other voices; the words of our chant rolled and sluiced around inside the lodge like stones in a bucket of water; they roared and poured against us, blocking all other sounds. Inside my head, all English words were lost, then even the words of my mother’s tongue. Thoughts were obliterated. Sweat filled my mouth, poured from my chest.
Now pictures filled my mind.
I was running over the tundra of the bay, running with the wind at my back and the sparse trees bending before the blast, and the lichen a grey blur amongst the snowberry bushes. When I glanced down, I saw that my legs were not the sturdy brown legs of a girl with chubby knees but were the long, fine, red legs of a horse, slender and tough with tendons, and ending in round black hooves.
Then I was in a river’s boiling rapids, fighting for breath. My lungs burned. My heart was bursting. The smother of the river went over my head but suddenly I burst skywards, in the talons of a soaring Thunderbird. But when I looked upwards, the bird had the long, elegant red face of a horse.
And one more picture: I was crawling through a dark forest, rain beating upon me, my hands covered in mud. I was lost. The forest pressed around me, leaning closer, watching me like a lynx watching a hare before it leaps upon it and kills it with one bite to the throat. Closer and lower over me that dark forest leaned, all its trees listening to my heaving breath, my feeble heartbeat. And then, beneath my hands, in the soggy dark ground, I saw the tracks of the horse: those rounded hoof prints with the indented ‘V’ and I knew that I was saved, and rose to my feet and began to run alongside those tracks, the trees leaning away to let sky light pour over me.
The heat was waning in the sweat lodge. The words of the chant sank low, became simply the voices of myself and Charlotte, soft girl voices. Orchid coughed.
‘Mighty Kicimanitow, we thank you for all your gifts,’ I said simply, and then I lifted the flap of the door and let a curl of night air lick inside the lodge. Starlight shone on the poplars. ‘Wait,’ I said to Orchid as she crawled towards the door. I uncapped a small glass jar that I had bought at the Company store in York Factory, and dipped my finger into the soft grease inside.
‘What is it?’ Orchid asked as I rubbed it over her throat and upper chest, and on the straight bridge of her nose.
‘It’s an ointment I made last spring. I boiled the buds of the balsam poplar in bear’s grease. It is good for colds and coughs. It is from the land that you call hostile. But the land gives us everything we need for food, for clothing, for making our boats and lodges, for our medicines.’
The smell of the sticky balsam buds filled the lodge; a smell containing spring sunshine on waves, the wild song of the geese returning north, and playful breezes rippling new grass. A smile hovered at the corners of my lips.
‘I have brought you some other clothes,’ I told Orchid as she crawled from the lodge behind me. ‘Your white woman’s clothes are not suited to this land.’ Fumblingly, she pulled on the deerskin leggings that I had been keeping in my wooden chest, and over the top a flannel petticoat and then a flannel-lined gown falling only to her knees.
‘I feel half naked,’ she muttered anxiously. ‘I have never revealed my limbs thus in public.’
After I had handed her a Hudson’s Bay blanket to wrap around her shoulders, she slipped her feet into the moccasins that I had been beading for myself; I had noticed that our feet were almost the same size. The soles of Orchid’s leather boots had been wet, then dried at a fire, so often that they had cracked wide open.
‘I have been beastly,’ she blurted suddenly into the darkness. ‘Will you please forgive me?’
When we hugged, our grip around each other’s shoulders was like the grip of women being pulled from water when they cannot swim.
‘We are almost halfway to the Red River colony,’ I said. ‘You and your horse will soon be safely at your new home. Now please will you take Charlotte back to the camp? And also, take this Labrador Tea, and brew yourself a mug. It is for healing colds.’
‘But where are you going?’ she asked as I handed her the small pouch of dried leaves that I had been carrying in my fire bag, and that I had picked and dried on the tundra.
‘I want to lie on the rock and look at the stars,’ I replied. ‘I will be back soon.’
I saw Charlotte slip her small, dark hand trustingly into Orchid’s plump, pale one, and watched their dim figures slip into the hands of the trees before I turned and climbed the flat sheet of the rock. I lay on its hard surface and felt its old spirit press against me, filled with a strength that endured all weather, all seasons. Around me on the rock were the paintings that the ancestors had made: little figures of men and animals so that their spirits too surrounded me like a great company of travellers and wanderers, hunters and all those who came in need of healing.
Orchid would grow stronger now, I thought, but what about me? Was I still going to lie in the grip of my sadness about the past? And the grip of my worry about the future?
The sky began to curl like the petals of a flower.
The light grew stronger: pale pink and deep rose against the blackness. Great waves and ribbons of light swirled across the northern sky, folding, lashing, shimmering. The stars paled in comparison. Awe stroked a light finger across my skin, and my face stretched into a smile of joy. My mother’s ghost was dancing with all the other spirits. Still the sky kept changing, the colours waxing and waning, swirling and crackling with the lights that the white men called the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights. My mother, I thought, was not lost but always with me; her good heart, filled with stern fairness, kindness and loyalty, was not gone. It was not a thing like a silver brooch that could be swept downstream but was something that could survive even death. And all her teachings were alive in me: how to snare a rabbit, how to bait a fish hook, how to cure a marten pelt, how to be a daughter with a good heart of my own.
And the Bear, I suddenly realised, the Bear had come to remind me of his promise. In the shaking tent ceremony in the Cree camp at York, the Bear spirit had said that horses knew how to find home. And so the stallion had done when he was chased away from camp by the bear and I went tracking after him. The stallion had circled around after the bear stopped to eat the elk carcass, and had found his way safely back to the tripmen’s camp on the shores of Robinson Lake. It was to remind me of his promise that Bear had sent Foxfire running into the bush. ‘Horses can find their way home.’ I savoured the words, sweet as raspberries on my tongue, while the spirits danced overhead.
My horse pawakan was strong, I thought, for already I had survived starvation and adversity; already it had saved me from drowning. I must keep following the roar of the rivers, and the tracks of the horse, towards my new home in the west, the home that my father, Simon Mackenzie, would provide for Charlotte and me. The home that my mother would want me to have.
The sky began to fade and the wind rose, keening in the jack pines. The last of my sadness blew away in tatters, and I stood up, feeling the hot rush of my blood, and scrambled towards the camp, where I hoped Orchid was lying peacefully with her head on the pillow I had stuffed with down picked from bulrushes.
By the time we reached Norway House two days later, Orchid’s nose had stopped running, and her cough had subsided into an occasional short bark. She had filled a whole piece of paper with a painting of the goldeye fish that Samuel Beaver had given us for supper. Around the fish, she had painted water lilies, goose grass, and muskrat reeds, while I began beading another pair of moccasins. The tripmen hurled the boats across the waters of Playgreen Lake towards where the fort lay hidden behind a swell of land. The red Hudson’s Bay Company flag flapped atop its high pole, and the shoreline was strewn with canoes and other York boats, for this post was an important one where brigades converged from different river systems. From here, tripmen would travel far to the north and west along the Saskatchewan, the Red Deer, and the Bow rivers to take in the trade goods and bring out the furs.
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br /> Orchid was met by the chief factor, and escorted off to his house of whitewashed planks for an evening meal, but Charlotte and I tied Foxfire in a small barn and gave him hay to eat, and then went to use the woodstove in the labourers’ kitchen. It was strange to be back inside a white man’s palisade after so many weeks with nothing to look at but rocks and trees; strange to see the neat rows of tilled earth in the garden, and to hear the deep lowing of oxen in the pasture.
The tripmen’s champions fought that night in the midst of a roaring mob, and then the men played their fiddles and danced their reels and jigs, growing wild on rum. Charlotte and I slept, at Orchid’s insistence, in the small pantry room in one of the married officer’s houses; the officer even had a small wooden bed placed there for us. Unused to sleeping in its narrow confines, I stirred early and, leaving Charlotte still sleeping with her dark lashes fluttering, crept outside. It was a morning of sharp sun and glittering frost; the sky like a washed stone. The fort’s buildings were bright white boxes in the hard light, and the flanks of grazing oxen steamed in the warmth.
And there! There! What were they, drifting along by the far wall of the palisade, behind the cattle byres?
I narrowed my eyes in disbelief, shading them with one hand.
Yes! I gave a little jump for joy, as if I were in the middle of a dance and the drum was lifting me up. Then I hurried as fast as I could walk, my old moccasins skimming along the ground without a sound, until I was closer, closer, closer … now they were only yards away, now only feet. They raised their heads from the grass and the sun shone in the long hair of their dark forelocks. I stood before them in my green tartan blanket and feasted my eyes.
Red River Stallion Page 13