Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  When I came around the bend, the bull lay in the flattened grass, a mountain of muscle, horn, hoof and fat. His strange purple blood oozed into the dust like the juice of a flower.

  ‘Gabriel?’ I called uncertainly, and at that moment the dead bull surged into the air. He did not rise as horses do, first the front legs straightening, then the back unfolding afterwards. That bull rose straight up, unbending all four legs in one convulsive spasm that flung his great mass of flesh skywards. His tail spasmed in the wind. He swung his head, fixed his rage upon me, and began to run.

  I turned to sprint. Something smoky blurred in my vision as it surged past me from behind. A horse? The force of its passing spun me around, wrenching my shoulder, before I fell. Dust filled my eyes and mouth.

  ‘Lie still!’ Gabriel shouted in a smother of hoof beats. I heard the crack of a gun again, and felt the vibrations in the ground. In my blurred vision, legs flashed past. The ground rocked. I felt the great bulk of the buffalo surge beside me, tower over me. If it fell, I would be crushed as flat as a skipping stone, my bones mashed into the dirt like berries being mashed into pemmican. Our carcasses would be inseparable. On the heels of the buffalo, I felt the swift curve of the mustang’s belly flash by.

  The gun rang out a third time, the sound reverberating in my ears. Trees and wind flounced around me; the whole world seemed to tremble and swing with dizzy uncertainty. For the second time, I pulled myself off the ground and looked around. The bull was lying still again. Gabriel rode around him in a circle, controlling Hard Twist with his knees, and shot the bull once more through the shoulder, a heart shot. I saw Gabriel press the gun’s hot barrel to his mouth and spit a lead ball down into it to reload. I saw the mustang spin around the bull like a dancer, obeying Gabriel even when Smoke Eyes burst through the trees, wild-eyed, smothered in foam, and trailing her reins, to join them.

  Gabriel snatched up his own reins one-handed and, carrying the gun in the other hand, rode to where I waited, numb with shock. He swung off the sweating horse and gripped my shoulders. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  I buried my face in his long braided hair, and felt the wind buffet us closer together. He kissed the parting line on my scalp, then the curve of my cheek. The two horses breathed gustily beside us. Thunder rumbled off to the west.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked at last, my voice shaking.

  ‘You came off and the mare ran on. I didn’t know this at first so I rode on past, believing the bull was dead on the track behind us. Then I saw Smoke Eyes riderless, and turned back to find you. And there you were, standing in the track with the bull getting ready to charge. Hard Twist knocked you down as we galloped past. A bull won’t gore you on the ground, only if you fall off your horse on to its horns.’

  ‘But it might have trampled me?’

  ‘Buffalo don’t step on things unless they have no choice. Same with horses.’

  Thunder rumbled again. When I opened my eyes and looked over Gabriel’s shoulder, the first flash of lightning split the dark sky open.

  ‘So now you know how horses run buffalo,’ he said. ‘And now you have a story about this land.’

  I smiled a little.

  ‘Come on. I’m going to cut out the bull’s tongue for our supper tonight.’

  Unsheathing his knife, he let out a sudden whoop of laughter. ‘I’ll unwrap my fiddle!’ he said, bending over the bull’s head. ‘We’ll have a dance tonight, your first dance on the shore of Lake Winnipeg!’

  Chapter 12

  In the firelight, the horses and oxen corralled amongst the Red River carts threw bulky shadows. I followed Gabriel to a cart and waited by one of its huge wheels while he reached inside it to search through a pile of blankets.

  ‘What is wrapped around the cartwheels?’ I asked.

  ‘Shaganappi, strips of buffalo rawhide. These carts are made of nothing but wood and shaganappi; there are no nails from the white men holding them together, and no grease on the axles. We can repair them any place we’re travelling.’

  As he spoke, he lifted a bundle of buffalo robe from the cart, and unwrapped a fiddle from it, checking to make sure that none of its strings were broken.

  ‘I made this one myself from maple wood,’ he said with a smile of satisfaction. ‘It’s a copy of a fine old one I have at home. The story was that it once belonged to a Scotsman who murdered a trader from the North West Company. But it plays a beautiful jig.’

  ‘What was the murder over?’

  ‘Something to do with a horse, a buffalo runner which got rustled.’

  ‘Does that happen often?’ I glanced anxiously across to where Foxfire stood, his eyes glowing in the firelight, and tied to a cartwheel.

  ‘Horses are a man’s wealth,’ Gabriel said, tuning up his fiddle strings. ‘Amongst the tribes, horse stealing is a glorious pleasure. Even the young men of the Métis have been known to make a horse or two disappear!’

  ‘But how did you get the murderer’s fiddle?’

  ‘I won it at a horse race as payment for a wager. Some men will gamble everything they have on the outcome of horse races: their household goods, their tipis, even their own horses.’

  ‘And the murderer’s horse that was rustled?’

  ‘No idea what happened to it. Long gone over the southern prairie.’ Gabriel grinned, tucking the fiddle tenderly beneath his chin and running the bow lightly over the strings. ‘Come on.’

  We walked through the camp, past the racks of wood where strips of buffalo meat were hung to dry, past the cauldrons of bubbling buffalo meat swinging from iron tripods over the fires. Firelight washed up the sides of the pale, conical tipis. Dogs skulked in the shadows, and women chatted softly in tipi doorways. When Gabriel began to play his fiddle, the Métis and the tripmen from the York boats drifted closer, and two other men with fiddles stepped forward to join him. Presently, a tripman pulled a harmonica from a pocket, and a Cree paddler fetched a skin drum to beat out the rhythm.

  My toes began to itch as that music tugged at them. Gabriel’s fiddle sang with a bounce and a lilt; even the flames in the campfires seemed to flutter in rhythm. People began to dance, their moccasins pounding the grass and flat dusty ground, their shadows leaping across the tipis, their eyes as bright as the sparks that occasionally burst upwards in flurries from the burning wood.

  ‘This is the Duck dance,’ said a woman beside me, bouncing her baby in her arms. ‘Do you know it?’

  I shook my head, watching the dancers, wishing I could join in.

  The woman handed her baby to a child standing nearby. ‘Come,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘You will learn it as you dance.’

  My shadow merged with the other whirling shadows, separated, merged again. The pure sweet notes of the fiddles rocked me and swung me, and filled me with a wild and solemn joy. My eyes filled with the surge and flow of the dancers. Bright flashes of colour flared and then were swallowed by shadows: the fringe of a red sash, the yellow embroidery on a legging, the long strings of glass beads around Eva’s neck. Pierre swung past, his hat at a rakish angle with its orange plumes of dyed ostrich feathers swaying. Charlotte danced with some other children; when I glimpsed her heart-shaped face creased with laughter, my heart bounded in my chest, over my belly filled with a stew of sturgeon fish and the root they called askipwawa. Orchid stood on the edge of the dancers, watching, until the fiddlers played a waltz, and then she danced it with the captain from our boat, her short plumpness bending gracefully and her feet, in the moccasins I had given her, keeping perfect time to the three-beat throb of the drum.

  Then the fiddlers played a jig; ‘The Red River jig’ someone murmured in my ear, and Gabriel laid down his fiddle and began to dance too. I stood beside Orchid and watched as the dancers’ feet flew, faster and faster, their legs a blur of motion, while the fiddles poured their song into the night. Then the fiddle notes changed, became higher. The dancers began to lift their feet in fancy steps, pirouetting, sidestepping. Knees kicked,
heels thumped the ground. The spectators whistled and whooped. My eyes were fastened on Gabriel, on the flapping fringes of his jacket, the glitter of its beadwork. His long hair flew around his head. His eyes flashed and his teeth shone. Firelight ran over the hard planes of his face, over his feet that seemed to be everywhere at once, flying in one direction and then another.

  At last, the fiddlers paused for a rest, and the dancers sat down to eat bowls of cornmeal pudding sweetened with wild plums. I felt shy suddenly, when Gabriel came to sit beside me, tamping wild tobacco into the stone bowl of his pipe.

  Thunder rumbled far off along the western horizon, although the wind had died and the trees hung thick and clotted with stillness around the perimeter of the camp.

  ‘Where does your father keep his horses?’ I asked.

  ‘He has a farm on the White Horse Plain, west of the Forks where the Assiniboine River runs into the Red River. It is about thirty miles from where you will be, in the new stone fort that the Company is building.’

  Smoke trickled from his mouth and rose straight up, mingling with the smoke from the fires. ‘Maybe you will come and visit my family,’ he said softly. ‘My mother would welcome you. If you cannot find your father, my family would help you.’

  ‘Marci,’ I said shyly, which was the first word of Métis that I’d learned that evening and which meant ‘thank you’.

  Gabriel smiled. ‘You will soon be a true Métis.’

  For a moment, our gazes locked and I felt again the stillness in his spirit, the stillness of vast skies and prairie wind, and of the long waves of the endless land.

  One of the fiddlers began to tune his instrument again, and the drummer began a slow pulsing rhythm. Gabriel knocked ash from his pipe bowl and tucked it into his sash before joining the musicians. The dancers swirled around the clearing like a school of brilliant fish in a river’s whirlpool, and I felt myself sucked in and swirled around with them. We danced reels and square dances, and a dance called Drops of Brandy. We jigged, we leaped, we spun. Eva whirled past, laughing with her head tipped back, her eyes stretched wide and her lashes fluttering at a tripman with hawk feathers standing upright in his hair. Samuel Beaver’s black face gleamed like polished wood as he stomped past. Pierre whirled a Métis girl in circles, and then swung her in close against his chest, winking at me when he caught my glance. He and the girl sashayed together, the hem of her bright print dress draped over his leggings while tripmen yelled and whistled, and tipped flasks of rum to their mouths.

  Through the sea of dancers, I searched for Gabriel. He was dancing on the spot, bending and swaying over his fiddle, his arm sawing with the bow, his toes tapping. I heard the pure notes fly from beneath his fingers, and soar above the other notes. I caught the smile he sent me, a flash in the darkness. He laid down his fiddle in mid-tune and leaped into the dancers to catch me by one hand and swing me around, laughter shining over his skin. The fiddle notes ran through our bodies, through our joined hand, and stirred the leaves on the poplar trees so that they trembled in the smoky air. The taste of wild plums lingered on my tongue. Dancing with Gabriel was like galloping on a sure-footed horse, like swimming in the rapids of a roaring river, like running over the tundra with the wind howling in my hair.

  Night and music flowed over us, poured over us, like white water over hard rocks.

  Very late, when the clouds began to drift apart and reveal a sprinkle of stars, the tripmen wandered off to the York boats to sleep beneath oiled canvas. They yawned as they went, some staggering from too much rum. The Métis walked with tired legs to their tipis. The women of our brigade – Orchid, Eva, Charlotte and I – had been offered beds to sleep on inside one of the tipis. I glanced around for Gabriel but he had disappeared.

  ‘I am going to check on Foxfire,’ I told Orchid, for I remembered the time he had strayed away when his rope came undone, and how the bear had chased him, and how my friendship with Orchid had suffered as a result. I passed Charlotte’s small, limp hand into Orchid’s grasp, and watched for a moment as my little sister tottered away beside her.

  Then I wended my way through the smouldering fires and the sleeping dogs to where the stallion stood tied to a cartwheel so that he couldn’t get near the Métis mares. He had been hobbled and grazing all afternoon, in the watchful care of Gabriel’s younger brother. Now he was passive, dozing with one hind foot cocked, and his head drooping. He breathed heavily in contentment as I laid my hand upon his shoulder. My head pressed against his neck and for a moment we stood, sleepy and still. Tomorrow, I thought, we will reach the Company’s new stone fort in the Red River valley, and our great journey together will be over. Then we will be parted, and maybe I will never ride this horse again, or run my hands over his red coat as it grows thick in readiness for winter. Who knew what Orchid’s husband, an unknown white man, would be like; whether he would allow me to care for his horse? An ache of sadness filled my throat.

  ‘Foxfire,’ I whispered, my breath stirring the coarse red hairs of his bright mane. I ran my hand down his face, and smoothed it over the softness of his muzzle. I remembered how he had swum to me out of the fog when I was being swept into the salty bay with ice chips bobbing against my canoe. My guardian spirit, my horse pawakan with his hard flying hooves, his noble face, his streaming red tail.

  I became aware gradually of their voices, low but bulging with anger, and coming from the nearest stand of trees. The stallion’s ears swivelled, taking in the sound.

  ‘You didn’t have to dance with her so many times!’ Eva hissed. ‘Who is she anyway? Just some wandering trader’s poor daughter, that’s who! She wasn’t even pretty!’

  ‘I can dance with whoever I want to. Comprends?’ I recognised Pierre’s voice, a low growl with no hint of its usual mocking laughter.

  ‘So do that! You just do that! But don’t come crawling back to me afterwards!’

  ‘Crawling? Ha, that’s a new one. I do not ever crawl to you or anyone else on this trip. I’m a steersman; I make important decisions about the boat, and I earn a good income.’

  ‘So spend it on some poor trader’s daughter then! Buy her some trinkets!’

  ‘Oui,’ said Pierre on a long cool note. ‘I will spend my money on anyone I please. But not on you, you bad-tempered witch.’

  I heard the sharp snap of a twig as Eva flounced off, and dimly I saw her storm through the trees and away into the camp with the beads around her neck swinging. After he spat, Pierre was quieter, moving through the underbrush; I heard only the grate of shingle on the shore as it slipped beneath his feet. Then there was silence. A wolf began to sing to the west, and soon its cry was echoed back by its brothers as they called to the drifting clouds and the brilliant stars. I shivered, for frost was forming on the wooden spokes of the cartwheels.

  As I threaded my way back towards the tipi where I was to sleep, I felt sad as well as cold. This wonderful day, filled with excitement, was over and soon dawn would flush the eastern horizon, and my last day with Foxfire would begin. And I had not even been able to say goodbye to Gabriel Gunner.

  He materialised at my shoulder, a swing of deerskin fringes, a flutter of sash. In the glow of a dying fire, he stood and looked at me.

  ‘In the morning I am leaving early with another scout to seek the Cree,’ he said. ‘But I would like to see you again. When I come back from this trading trip, I would like to visit you in the stone fort. Before the first snow.’

  ‘Yes. I would like to see you.’

  ‘When the Métis give a gift, they lay it in the hands of the receiver. Hold out your hands. One of my cousins made this.’

  He laid the bridle’s straps across my palms; they were decorated with blue beads and with tassels of orange wool threaded through tin cones. ‘This is so you know you will always have a horse to ride,’ he said. ‘Perhaps, if I don’t see you at the fort, we will meet at a trotting race or a cart race in the valley. I will look for you.’

  ‘Marci,’ I repeated, and then shyness swallow
ed me and I ducked away into the entrance of the tipi where Orchid and Charlotte, and even Eva, already breathed deeply in sleep. The smells of spruce boughs and smoke and sage bit my nostrils.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said softly, and I heard Gabriel move away into the night. Stillness fell as I pulled a buffalo robe over myself, shifting closer to Charlotte’s warmth.

  In the morning, I awoke with every muscle aching; there were bruises on my ribs and knees from being flung over the shoulders of the mare when she was running with the buffalo. When I rose from the bed of spruce boughs, my legs were stiff and sore from the hours of dancing. ‘Wake up, Charlotte, wake.’ I shook her shoulder gently and her breathing hitched, then resumed its slow rhythm. I shook her again, then knuckled my own eyes and yawned before ducking out into the cool wash of morning air. Women nearby were stirring dried buffalo meat into hot grease and dried berries to make pemmican.

  Closer to the tipi, Orchid was arguing with our boat captain. ‘But we cannot leave yet! I must make myself presentable for our arrival at the fort! One of your men must help me to find my belongings. I cannot possibly arrive dressed like this!’

  At my approach, she turned with a determined lift of her chin. ‘One of the women is going to show us where we can bathe,’ she said. ‘It will be cool, but we must prepare ourselves and make a decent toilette. I refuse to arrive looking like a heathen.’

  ‘You mean dressed like a Cree woman?’

  ‘That is exactly what I mean. It is all very well for the women of this country; they lead rough lives. But I have standards to maintain, and my husband will expect no less. Do not give me that affronted look, Amelia.’

  The boat captain shrugged his shoulders helplessly. ‘One hour, not a minute more. The men are anxious to reach the fort and unload the boats.’