Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  I watched Gabriel while he talked; heard how passion fired his voice so that it soared and sang. Delight gleamed in the dark planes of his face. Even then, behind that passion and delight, I felt his stillness; the thing that attracted me to him, the place in him that contained the sure strength of the land, the trees, the sky and snow and rocks and grass. The animals.

  ‘Your father breeds horses?’

  ‘He freights for the Company, running brigades of carts far north every summer, taking supplies from Red River up to Fort Carlton on the prairie trails. And my brothers go with him, trading along the way with the Assiniboine and Cree, even sometimes with the Blackfoot. My father has many horses, and many oxen.’

  ‘Are you a trader too?’

  ‘No, I’m a scout. I ride sometimes to Carlton, other times on the buffalo hunts in the south, in the land of the Sioux nation. The Sioux are great horse breeders. They raid our camps, stealing horses even when they are hobbled and guarded. We call it the war road, the trail leading south from the Red River colony into the land of the Sioux nation. When I’m scouting on a buffalo hunt, I ride my horse to and fro at a gallop as a signal I’ve found a buffalo herd. But if I have sighted a Sioux camp, or one of their raiding parties, I throw handfuls of dust into the air as a sign to those following behind.’

  ‘What do you scout for here, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg?’ I asked.

  ‘For Cree and Salteaux camps so that the Métis traders I am with can trade for beaver and muskrat pelts. And when we are not close to the lake shore, I search for water for our oxen and horses, and also for buffalo. Both these horses of mine are buffalo runners, trained to the hunt. When they sight a herd, they will run after it and into it at a flat gallop. They will twist and turn amongst the cows by the touch of my knees alone. This leaves my hands free for loading my gun with powder. I carry the lead shot in my mouth, and spit the balls down the muzzle to reload.’

  As he talked, I could feel a great door opening up. It was as though I had been living inside a smoky lodge and then a hand lifted the wide skin flap away from the entrance and outside I glimpsed a new world, a place filled with wonders and about which I knew nothing.

  ‘I don’t even know what these flowers are called!’ I blurted out, staring at the beaded patterns on Gabriel’s buckskin coat.

  A cloud of puzzlement crossed his eyes, then he laughed. ‘Flowers! I thought we were talking about buffalo running.’

  ‘There is so much I know nothing about,’ I mumbled in embarrassment, my cheeks flushing.

  ‘These yellow ones are buffalo beans,’ Gabriel said, his strong, callused fingers tracing the lines of flowers that edged the border of the beadwork. ‘These pink flowers are wild roses. These other yellow ones, on my fire pouch, are sunflowers.’

  My gaze skittered over his pouch as he held it up and I nodded mutely, still feeling foolish. But when my gaze flickered to his face, his eyes held no trace of laughter.

  ‘What you have done is as brave as the deed of a warrior,’ he said. ‘You are far from home, from the lodges of your people. Are any of your kin with you?’

  Suddenly, words began to jostle and tumble over each other in their eagerness to share with Gabriel the stories of all my moons: the birth of Charlotte Bright Eyes whom I loved like my own life, the white fathers who deserted us, the ghost of my mother walking the starry wolf road, the blizzards of the starving winter, the red stallion whom I also loved and must soon be parted from when Orchid gave him to his true owner, a white stranger in the Company’s stone fort on the Red River.

  ‘He is –’ I stopped. I had almost said that the red stallion was my pawakan. Then I remembered not to speak this secret to this young man who was also a stranger, even though his eyes soaked in my words like dry ground soaking up water.

  ‘Foxfire is dear to me,’ I amended. ‘I have – horses are – I have a special connection to them.’

  ‘Amongst the Plains Cree, youth may dream of horses on their vision quests,’ Gabriel said. He was a person who could hear buffalo far out on the plains in the silence of a gopher hole, and the silence of an enemy in the pause between two notes of a bird’s song, and now he had heard the words that I had not spoken.

  ‘Amongst the Métis, horses are precious. They are a man’s wealth, and his status. Without them, how could we run the buffalo? We sell the buffalo meat and the pemmican to the Company to feed its clerks, traders, and tripmen. Without horses, how could we travel the land, trading with the tribes? Horses are as good as money; you can always sell or trade them. Chiefs can get two horses for one daughter in marriage. Amongst my people on the White Horse Plain, west of the Red River, a good horse is the best gift that you can give to another person. The very best gift.

  ‘Listen, for one good buffalo-running mare, my father will trade over twenty yards of cloth, several shirts, a few pounds of tea and tobacco, some shot and gunpowder, a few good knives, and he’ll even throw in some thread and some gunflints. He knows she will repay it all with buffalo skins and fine foals.’

  ‘Why aren’t you training and trading horses instead of being a scout?’ I asked.

  ‘For scouting, I am well paid in furs or trade goods. I am saving up. Soon, the white men plan to begin building a new fort to the west in the valley of the Qu’Appelle River. One of my uncles is a Company horsekeeper. He’s going to ask the Company to hire me for this new fort in the Qu’Appelle valley, and there I will be a horsekeeper too, breaking and training the Company’s herd. One day, I will use my money to buy land, and will have my own herds of horses and cattle.’

  I thought about this for a few minutes. Gabriel’s skin and eyes were as dark as any Swampy Cree’s, and his black hair was worn like Cree hair, its long braids filled with shells and brass pipes. But he talked like a white man; the people of the land knew that no one could own the land, or buy and sell it. The land was our mother, and we were part of it. Only white men thought you could treat the land like a trade good, to purchase or pass on. Perhaps, I thought, all the half-blood Métis were like me, they were looking for where to put each one of their two feet. Perhaps Gabriel Gunner and I had this in common.

  The mustangs had drifted away as we talked, and were ripping at the dead yellow stems of the fine grass while the gusty wind flattened their tails between their hind legs or streamed the black hair out sideways.

  ‘Two days ago we found a small herd of buffalo,’ Gabriel said. ‘We killed plenty. The women in the traders’ camp are drying and cooking all the meat and we will not move on yet. The men from the York boats will sit all day around our fires, waiting for the wind to drop. Would you like to ride Smoke Eyes?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Gabriel whistled piercing and sweet, and a boy of about eight suddenly jumped down from where he’d been sitting in the forks of an oak tree, hidden by the thick foliage of coppery leaves.

  ‘Hey,’ said Gabriel, ‘let’s fetch the horse gear!’ and the boy shot off like a flushed hare, a grin lighting his face.

  ‘But the stallion –’

  ‘He will be fine where we left him, tied to a cart. I’ll tell my brother to guard him and bring him water,’ Gabriel replied before striding after the young boy in the direction of the camp.

  When they returned, they were carrying two objects of leather and beadwork, and the trailing thongs of bridles and reins. Gabriel had a gun in one hand.

  ‘You will have to ride with a man’s saddle,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Métis women do not ride astride, but side-saddle like white women?’

  He gave me a baffled look. ‘Of course women ride astride. But their saddles have frames of wood or buffalo bone, and this forms a horn at the front and a cantle at the back. They can hang their babies’ cradleboards from these frames and ride with them.’

  As he talked, he spread a hide over the back of Smoke Eyes. ‘This is buffalo,’ he said, smoothing the hide so that it lay unwrinkled with its mass of dark brown, curly hair uppermost. On top of this he hefted one of t
he leather objects.

  ‘This is a saddle?’ I examined it in surprise, for it was nothing like the stiff heavy side-saddle that Orchid owned for Foxfire, nor like the saddle that the Jesuit priest had owned for his black Canadian gelding. This Métis saddle was of soft rawhide that lay flat upon the buffalo skin blanket. An embroidered roll formed the front and the back of the saddle.

  ‘Stuffed with buffalo hair,’ explained Gabriel. ‘These flowers embroidered here? These are fireweed.’ He flashed me a grin.

  ‘Who embroiders all these flowers for you?’ I asked, and lowered my eyes to hide my twinge of uncertainty.

  ‘I have a home filled with sisters. Some of the tribes call us Métis the Beaded Flower People because of the needle skills of our women.’

  Again, I felt that door flap lifting on my smoky lodge; outside it I glimpsed the flowers of the great grasslands waving and blooming around the legs of the running mustangs, the thundering buffalo. I too had good skills with a needle, and the men at York Factory had often asked me to embroider their moccasins with hearts and thistles, those patterns dear to their memories. But now, I could learn to name the flowers of the grasslands, and to sew them into my beadwork; already, I could see pink roses blooming on the smoked moose hide that Betty Goose Wing had given me for Charlotte’s new robe. And even – yes! – I would embroider little red and yellow horses running amongst the flowers.

  ‘But why is this a man’s saddle?’ I asked, as Gabriel slid the rawhide girth strap through a bone ring and pulled it tight.

  ‘On her saddle, a women must be able to carry babies. But a man must be able to fight from horseback with a gun, and so he uses a flat saddle without a frame. In this, he can bend over low and flat against his horse’s shoulders and neck as it gallops. He can fire his gun beneath the horse’s neck, or from along the neck. It’s a good skill to have when you ride south on the war road to find the Sioux nation.’

  He stooped and picked up a bridle from the grass, and slipped it over the mare’s head. It too was lavishly decorated with a beaded pattern of fireweed and silver lines; the beadwork ran up the cheek pieces lying flat on each side of the mare’s face, and across the brow band. Tassels of orange ribbons hung from the brow band, and were threaded through tin cones that chimed slightly as the mare shook her head. For a bit, Gabriel used a rope of buffalo hair, and he knotted it around the mare’s lower jaw.

  Then he handed me the reins, and suddenly I stopped worrying about all the things of which I was ignorant, and remembered instead that I was a girl who knew how to ride a horse. I nudged the toe of my moccasin into the bent wooden stirrup hanging on its rawhide strip, and swung up into the saddle. The mare’s ears flickered ahead of me, tipped with black, flushed with gold. The wind roared overhead, and the mare jumped sideways, a step like a dance step, as though the drumming heartbeat of mother earth was tickling the bottoms of her feet. Gabriel bent against the gelding, tightening his girth. In a moment he too was mounted, the fringes on Hard Twist’s bridle streaming around the gelding’s head in the wind.

  ‘Goodbye!’ Gabriel shouted, but his little brother had already vanished into the trees, heading back to camp.

  Gabriel nudged his moccasins into the gelding’s sides and the horse leaped away into the trees with the mare hard upon his heels. Her wiry strength gathered under me. We dodged and wove through the roaring forest, crossing small clearings of withered grass, while oak and maple and elm leaves flew around us, plastering themselves momentarily against our chests or faces before being carried on in the blast. Wind filled my mouth, rushed down into my chest, hot and then cold. It stung my watering eyes. It sang in my ears, and my heart thumped.

  The horses were wild with the wind. Tightening their jaws around the buffalo rope, they leaped over fallen limbs, feinted around tree trunks. Their eyes rolled white. They dodged as though bullets were pelting them, as though underground spirits were reaching up to catch their legs, as though they were turning into Thunderbirds and growing wings. The wiry muscles of that mare became mine; my body twisted and turned and bent and grasped. The hard pounding of her hooves on the ground, baked by the passing summer, drummed inside me. Prairie chickens flew up from under the horses’ noses, battering at the air with their brown wings in an explosion of noise, and the mustangs jinked and shied, then flew forward even faster, dashing along a straight stretch of the track we were following. It was more the trace of a track than an actual track; it was like one skein of silk thread laid down through the trees and the clearings where purple asters flowered knee-high on swaying stems. The horses followed that track as though they had created it, and knew every bend and dip in its ghostly length.

  At last, we pulled them up beside a swamp where they blew hard, their chests wet with sweat.

  Gabriel ran his hand over Hard Twist’s neck, and spoke to him in the language I couldn’t understand, and with laughter in his voice.

  ‘What do you say?’ I asked.

  ‘I told him in Michif that he is as fast as the chief of the antelope. Michif is what we speak at home; it is the tongue of the Métis. It is part Plains Cree, part French. But I will try to remember to speak only English to you.’

  A ‘V’ of geese passed overhead, their calls shredded by the wind, and a flock of some other birds that I didn’t recognise rose flapping into the turbulent air.

  ‘At home by the bay, I knew the names for every kind of bird,’ I said. ‘But now I know how the white woman feels, in a land where nothing has a name for her, and she doesn’t know any of the stories.’

  ‘You will learn it all. Our fathers and grandfathers came from another land, and yet now this land here belongs to us.’

  ‘Your father is a white man?’

  ‘My father’s father was white, and married a Salteaux woman after the custom of the country. So my father is Métis. My mother is also Métis, she is half Plains Cree and half French. We Métis are of this land; we know its names and its stories. Since 1816 we have been a nation with our own flag.’

  ‘You – we – have?’

  Again, I mulled over Gabriel’s words. It was a strange new idea to believe that I belonged to a nation, that a half-blood like me could have her own place to stand her two feet in.

  Gabriel nudged Hard Twist forward and we skirted the swamp at a walk, and came upon the faint wheel tracks made by the traders’ carts. The horses broke into a trot, heading north along the wheel lines between the tossing trees.

  They were there suddenly, as suddenly as images appear in dreams.

  In one heartbeat I saw their shaggy dark shoulders, humped like the backs of old women, and the ragged beards hanging from their chins. The stormy yellow light lay along their curved horns. Once, in York Factory, a tripman had said that the buffalo was an animal that looked like a great ox wearing a rug on its back.

  For that one heartbeat, the mustangs seemed to hang suspended in air, all four of their hard hooves off the ground in the manner that Orchid believed horses capable of. We were downwind, but it didn’t matter now, for we had been seen. The largest of the buffalo turned to face us in the middle of the wheel tracks, and lowered his head to bellow, a roaring vibration that rattled my rib bones and hummed in my ears, and split the wind in two. Behind him, the other animals – there were about a dozen – turned to flee with their tawny calves amongst them.

  ‘Turn around! Turn the mare around! Go back!’ Gabriel yelled, wrestling Hard Twist’s head sideways, and drawing his gun from its embroidered sheath that hung against his thigh. In that instant, a branch snapped from an elm tree with a sharp crack and plummeted towards the ground in the periphery of my vision. Smoke Eyes shied violently as the branch fell and I knew, even as she shied, that I had lost any control over her. When she straightened out again, she was already in a gallop and pounding down the track towards the buffalo. I heard Gabriel wheel the gelding back around to follow us.

  The bull roared again, pawing the ground so that small stones and sticks flew around him. I gripped
the mare with my knees, and wrapped my hands in her mane, since I didn’t think there was any way, right then, for me to reach my knife. And what good would it do me against a creature that was as high as a horse at its massive shoulder, and as wide as a very old tree, and as fierce as a wolverine? An animal whose nature I knew nothing about. Even without this knowledge, I could feel the bull’s obdurate rage. Nothing but death would sever him from his cows and calves.

  The mustangs were running neck and neck now and Gabriel had dropped his reins to load powder into the gun from the powder horn in his brightly woven Assomption sash. At the last moment, the bull already swivelling on his cloven hooves, the horses split away from one another to go thundering past on either side of him, and I heard the sharp crack of the gun as Gabriel fired. Then I was amongst the scattering cows with Smoke Eyes dodging between them.

  The cows hurtled on. On either side of me, their shaggy darkness fled, thundered, pounded along. The mare cut a way between them, leaping past a calf, cutting under the nose of an old cow, swinging in alongside a younger cow and holding her position at the cow’s shoulder. She was waiting for me to fire upon the cow, I realised, but I had no gun. We hurtled towards a bend in the track. The buffalo crowded into the bend, bunching up. Panic swelled against my lungs, pressed high in my throat.

  Hold on, I told myself, just hold on.

  One of my knees pressed momentarily into shaggy wool as the buffalo pushed us off the bend of the track. Smoke Eyes shot wide to escape, ran into the trees, dropped into a sliding halt on her bent hocks to avoid a boulder. I flew over her shoulder and hit the ground hard. Smoke Eyes charged on, running buffalo.

  I lay very still on my stomach and waited for the golden and brown world to stop spinning. I tasted my lips; no blood. I breathed in once, then out. I listened to my heartbeat. Then I climbed to my feet slowly, unfolding my joints, checking the strength and length of my bones. Nothing broken. I breathed in and out again, and began to walk back up the track towards Gabriel and Hard Twist.