Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  ‘Thank you,’ Orchid said. ‘Please send a man to find my belongings.’

  Charlotte’s small hand slipped into mine and I bent to kiss the tip of her nose. We followed Orchid’s bustling, resolute form down the shingle beach and waited while a tripman unearthed a chest from beneath the canvas-covered piles of goods. While Orchid rummaged through the chest, muttering to herself, I slid Gabriel’s bridle into my own chest, and smoothed its straps flat. I will always have a horse to ride, I reminded myself. Even if it’s not Foxfire. I am protected by the spirit of horses, and I will not be without horses in my new life here on the prairie.

  I needed to believe this so badly that I bit my tongue in anxiety. My mouth filled with a taste like tears.

  When the Métis woman arrived, we followed her around a small point of land covered with shrubby willow bushes to a rocky shoreline. While she kept watch from amongst the willows, braiding her hair, we stripped and waded into the cold shock of the water. It was clear today, still in the sunshine, lapping with a gentle wash upon the shore. Orchid’s neck and face were browner than the pale folds of her body and the whiteness of her legs. She bent over, plunging her head in, her loose hair flowing around her like golden weed. She rubbed it and herself vigorously with the Métis soap of buffalo fat and wood ashes, and then handed the slimy soap to me. I rubbed myself all over, and then soaped Charlotte whose teeth were already chattering. We washed our hair, and then lay on the rocks and waited for the early sun to dry us. Gulls wheeled overhead, crying, while Orchid dressed slowly in the many layers of a white woman’s costume with its lace undergarments, its petticoats, its flounces and ruffles. At last, over the top, she donned a dark green dress of a soft velvet fabric, with large puffed sleeves and a draped skirt. She pinned her masses of curly hair up into a large bun on the top of her head, and skewered it with pins, before scrutinising herself in a mirror.

  ‘This will have to do,’ she said at last, and I saw the anxiety clouding her clear blue glance.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ I offered but she gnawed her lower lip nervously.

  ‘It is not the sort of toilette one would make at home,’ she fretted. ‘I do so hope it will be acceptable here. It’s the best that I can manage under the circumstances. I do hope that Mr Spencer will be tolerant of this fact. I am so very brown from the sun.’

  ‘What is wrong with sun?’ Charlotte asked.

  ‘It is not lady-like to be brown,’ Orchid replied severely. ‘Only women who work outdoors have brown, weathered skin.’

  ‘Like my Cree aunties,’ Charlotte agreed innocently, but I was wondering what a woman would do all day long if she didn’t work outside, and what kind of work she might be doing instead. In the Cree camps, the women were always working: tanning hides, drying berries, sewing moccasins, netting snowshoes, stuffing pillows with goose down. As they worked, they laughed and talked, sharing their stories, being given advice from their elders, and nursing their babies. ‘Those Cree women work harder than most men of my acquaintance,’ a Company clerk had said once in my hearing. I stared at my own brown skin, my sturdy legs, the muscles in my arms that had already done so much work. I remembered the story about the Creator, taking the people of the land from the oven at just the right time, when they were perfectly baked a lovely brown. I smiled then, bending my face over the ripples and seeing it hang there like an autumn moon.

  Orchid lifted a large hat on to her head and pinned it in place, and then sat on a bleached log, and pushed her feet into a pair of delicate shoes of pale green leather with heels and pointed toes. With difficulty, she picked her way through the willows, and back along the beach to where the tripmen were already running out their oars and pushing the boats into deeper water. I ran to fetch Foxfire and lead him up the familiar planks of tamarack into his stall. This will be the last time, I thought, and when I sat beside Orchid on our bench, my throat was aching. I braided Charlotte’s damp hair, and then my own, into two tight braids that hung down on either side of my face. Charlotte began stringing rosehips together with a needle and a thin sinew, making herself a necklace. Behind me, Pierre leaned on his steering oar and the boat swung southwards, pointing straight to the place where the Red River ran out into the shallow vastness of Lake Winnipeg.

  Orchid fidgeted beside me, pushing strands of hair back under her hat. Her jaw was set in a line of rigid tension.

  ‘Where is Eva?’ she asked suddenly.

  I pointed to the boat ahead of us, where Eva’s dress was a speck of brilliant purple above her leggings. ‘There,’ I said in a low tone. ‘She isn’t speaking to Pierre today so she has moved to another boat.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ Orchid said irritably. ‘I hope she will behave with decorum when we arrive. She will need to lodge in Mr Spencer’s house for a day or two until she begins school.’

  Orchid gnawed her lower lip again. ‘The stallion is looking a little thin,’ she said. ‘I hope Mr Spencer will understand the rigours of our long journey.’

  ‘He has made this journey himself,’ I reminded her, but I too looked anxiously at the horse. Rising from my bench, I rummaged around for his grooming kit, then entered his stall and began to smooth the brush all over him. His winter coat was roan, just like his summer one, and he still reminded me of an autumn leaf silvered with frost. I knew every swirl of his coat, every pattern. I traced a line of silver with my fingertips and wondered again whether Orchid’s husband would ever allow me to ride him. I brushed his mane and tail, and with my fingers untangled every snarl created by the wind, until the hair hung smooth and straight.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Orchid, sounding calmer, when I rejoined her on the bench. ‘You have done a splendid job of caring for Foxfire. I am most grateful, Amelia. I hope you will find your father but in the meantime you must treat Mr Spencer’s home as your own. I am sure he will not turn you away until you have found your father. I believe him to be a kind-hearted man.’

  I nodded, my stomach clenching. How long would it take me to find Simon Mackenzie? And what would I do if I couldn’t find him; where would Charlotte and I go then? I hoped that Orchid was right, and that her new husband was indeed kindhearted and would allow us to stay in his home.

  The shores of the lake, which had lain along our eastern and western horizons for so many days, began to draw together like the strings of a pouch. Charlotte slipped her rosehip necklace over her head, and the York boats entered a waving expanse of reeds and bulrushes.

  ‘See that?’ asked a tripman, jutting his chin towards plants I didn’t recognise. ‘That’s wild rice. The Salteaux women harvest it and very good it is too. There’s plenty of sustenance in this land: fish and wild fowl, rice, and sugar from the maple trees. Plenty of game and wild berries.’

  ‘Without the Salteaux, the settlers would never have survived their first years in the colony,’ another man commented. ‘They had a hard time of it, sure enough. All those droughts and floods, and the grasshopper plagues in 1818. ’Twas like something from the Bible, like the plagues of Egypt.’

  ‘True enough,’ agreed the first man.

  ‘And then the North West Company stirring up trouble,’ added a third man. ‘And the Métis getting restive.’

  ‘What happened?’ Orchid asked, her tone sharp again.

  ‘’Twas in 1816 when the Métis got all riled up by the men of the North West Company and killed twenty-one settlers of Lord Selkirk’s, him as was so keen to get the valley carved up into farms. The Seven Oaks Massacre they called the killings.’

  ‘And in that same year, the Métis all got together in the Qu’Appelle Valley and called themselves a nation and made their own flag.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Orchid asked.

  ‘Why to protect their free-roaming way of life and their buffalo land from all the white settlers coming to farm the place.’

  ‘But they were all riled up by the other trading company, the North Westers. Now that company’s been merged with the HBC, we’ll have no more of their plots.’
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  ‘And no more floods either, ’tis to be hoped.’

  ‘Was it very bad?’ Orchid asked, staring overboard at the water’s placid surface as though she expected it to begin rising before her eyes.

  ‘Aye, it was bad sure enough. The old fort, Fort Garry that was, had to be abandoned afterwards. Houses and horses all got swept away downstream. Cows, chickens – they all went sailing away. The odd person too, no doubt. It’s why the Company is building the new fort of stone, Lower Fort Garry they’re calling it.’

  The men lapsed into silence, pulling hard on the oars. Orchid kept pushing back strands of hair and adjusting the tilt of her hat with its nodding feathers and bunches of crumpled fabric flowers. Her hands shook as she smoothed the folds of her long gown. As I watched her, a tremor of anxiety shook me too, like wind stirring a tree, and I pressed my knees together to still their quaking.

  I had begun to see that there were many ways my father might have died in this place.

  Chapter 13

  Now the bows of the York boats were free of the wild rice and bulrushes, and entered the waters of the Red River.

  ‘The Red River!’ I whispered to myself. Excitement and anxiety gripped the back of my neck. The Red River, to which my father had journeyed so many years ago, and where he had waited and waited for an answer from Mary Mackenzie, the Swampy Cree woman he loved, and who was far away on the shores of the great bay. I stared about, soaking in every detail of this place: the low shores with a fringe of oak and maple trees, the vastness of the prairie beyond with its waving grasses and wild flowers. The Red River’s steady current eddied past, purling against the wooden hull of the York boat. My father had dipped his paddle here. My father had looked at these shores, and watched hawks and ravens ride the clouds of the sweeping sky.

  Here and there, log cabins stood set back from the river’s edge, and settlers in faded shirts bent over in their gardens of cabbages, carrots, potatoes and turnips. Narrow fields of barley and wheat stubble stretched away from the river, golden and rough. A man on a horse trotted along a trail running parallel to the river. Foxfire stretched out his neck, nostrils flared as he sucked in the scent of that stranger. His neigh rang in my ears, and he banged his hooves against the boards that hemmed him in.

  ‘Fancies the local mares!’ a tripman joked.

  ‘Let us be thankful for that, since it is the reason that I brought him here,’ said Orchid tartly, and the men laughed and burst into song, labouring over the oars in their haste to arrive.

  ‘Lower Fort Garry!’ shouted the captain in mid-afternoon, and the men raised their voices in shouts of satisfaction, for they had survived the cold rivers, the back-breaking portages, the rocks and dark forests, the approaching cold bringing its white storms. A Cree paddler began to thank the Creator for a safe arrival, and I closed my eyes and listened to his words, clutching Charlotte’s hand and feeling my gratitude like a current, fighting with the currents of fear and doubt that swirled inside me.

  When I opened my eyes, the boats were sweeping in beneath a bluff to where a wooden landing stage was crowded with Company men in striped shirts and their best vests beneath capotes with brass buttons. Briefly I remembered the moment when Orchid had stepped ashore at York Factory; it seemed so long ago, and now it was me who was stepping ashore in a strange place, my body tremulous with countless miles of wind and water.

  My heart beat hard and fast, and I tried to gather up my courage.

  Now we were manoeuvring alongside the stage, our gunwale at the same height as the stage’s planking. Orchid rose to her feet, brushing her hands down her gown, lifting her chin. Charlotte’s hand clutched my fingers so tightly that they tingled.

  ‘I have to untie Foxfire,’ I said, but Orchid shook her head.

  ‘Leave him, Mr Spencer will have arranged for his care.’ She wasn’t looking at me though for her gaze was focused upon the group of men on the stage. For a moment, her teeth worried at her lower lip, then suddenly she smiled brilliantly. With head high and spine straight, she stepped from the York boat, her gloved hand brushing the outstretched hand of a man in a black frock coat and with a silk cravat tied beneath his sandy beard.

  ‘My dear Mrs Spencer,’ he said formally, and bent his balding head and his middle-aged face with thick cheeks, over her hand as he kissed it. ‘Welcome to Fort Garry, such as it is in its current state. We have great hopes for its future though. I trust that you will be most happy here.’

  His pale blue eyes flickered over me and then his gaze sharpened. ‘Splendid!’ he exclaimed. ‘My dear wife, this is a most splendid animal that you have brought all this way. We must have him unloaded at once! I have had a stall prepared in the stable.’

  Orchid’s cheeks flushed with pleasure and relief while her husband called for a man waiting nearby with a rope.

  ‘Bring the horse out immediately, before the unloading begins,’ he ordered, and he patted Orchid’s arm as she slipped it through one of his own.

  ‘You must speak to the horse softly and –’ I started to tell the man with the rope.

  ‘He will know how to handle a horse,’ Orchid interrupted.

  ‘And pray, who is this young woman?’ Mr Spencer asked.

  ‘Amelia Mackenzie, and my sister Charlotte.’

  ‘They have journeyed with me from York Factory,’ Orchid explained. ‘Amelia has made herself invaluable in caring for the Norfolk stallion. I could never have survived the trip without her assistance.’

  ‘I am most grateful to you,’ Mr Spencer said, but his eyes remained fixed upon the York boat where the other man was untying Foxfire.

  ‘Amelia and Charlotte have come to the colony seeking their father,’ Orchid explained in a breathless rush, sounding unsure of herself. ‘They might need to lodge with us temporarily until they find him.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Mr Spencer seemed momentarily disconcerted, and looked directly at me for the first time.

  ‘And here is Eva, of whom I wrote to you. You did receive my letter?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he replied, as Eva stepped forward. Her smooth smile belied the tired, sullen droop of her eyes.

  ‘You wrote that Eva is to attend the boarding school here. She will learn to leave behind the savage ways of the Métis, to become civilised. Might I ask whether the Misses Amelia and Charlotte will do the same?’

  Heat flooded my face but Orchid flashed me a warning look from beneath the upswept brim of her hat, and I swallowed my words back down. ‘I do not know yet; I must find my father first,’ I said.

  ‘What a veritable bevy of young women you have brought with you,’ remarked Mr Spencer, patting Orchid’s gloved arm again and sounding not completely pleased. ‘Yes, a veritable bevy. My modest home will be bursting at its seams. But ah – here comes the horse!’

  He released Orchid’s arm to hurry down the landing stage to where Foxfire was lifting first one black hoof and then another over the gunwale of the York boat and on to the hollow thump of the planking.

  ‘Splendid! Remarkable! This fine fellow will no doubt be the talk of the colony!’ Mr Spencer exclaimed, beaming and nodding so that the sun shone on his balding head and threw the creases of his face into sharper relief. I thought that he must be twenty years older than Orchid; perhaps, like the Cree, the white men sometimes married much younger women. This was good, I thought in relief, for he would have amassed enough trade wealth to be able to take care of her.

  ‘This fellow will sire fine foals that will put the scrawny cayuses of our copper-skinned brethren to shame,’ Mr Spencer continued.

  An unfamiliar anger rose in me, swelling like the tide in the mouth of the Hayes River. ‘The mustangs of the Cree and Métis are not scrawny –’

  Orchid stepped in front of me. ‘My dear Mr Spencer,’ she said, ‘we are in perfect accord about this stallion’s abilities. I am most delighted!’

  Eva stared at me, ponderingly. ‘I needn’t have bothered,’ she muttered. ‘You will spoil everything for yourself anywa
y.’

  ‘Bothered with –? What do you mean?’

  ‘You will have to hold your tongue and your temper if you want to marry a white trader.’

  ‘I never said that I did!’

  ‘Perhaps a Métis scout would suit you better, then you can wander around cutting up great lumps of buffalo and dragging it away in carts. I don’t plan on doing any such thing. I am going to have a fine house here one day, you wait and see.’

  ‘I don’t mind what kind of house you have. You’re just grouchy because Pierre – oh look, we are being left behind,’ I noticed, for Mr Spencer and Orchid were climbing from the stage and ascending the track to the fort, with the stallion following on his lead rope. It seemed as though we had been forgotten, but as I took Charlotte’s hand to follow, Orchid paused and glanced back over her shoulder to send me an encouraging smile.

  ‘Welcome to the Red River!’ she cried, but Mr Spencer did not turn, nor even pause in his assertive stride.

  When we reached the level ground above the bluff, Mr Spencer stopped to give orders to the man leading Foxfire and presently the man walked the stallion away towards a collection of log buildings where cattle grazed. I guessed the buildings were the stables and byres for the oxen; beyond them stood a large house surrounded by a veranda, and another huge building of limestone rock.

  ‘Our new fur loft,’ Mr Spencer said proudly, waving a hand at it. ‘And the Big House is the quarters for our governor, Mr Simpson, when he visits. He too has brought a white bride to this territory, my love. I am desirous that you shall soon meet her. She is a young thing herself, from London, and I fancy that the two of you will have much in common. So you shall not be starved for feminine company of the better kind.’

  He patted Orchid’s arm as he spoke, and gazed at her eagerly. He wants more than her stallion, I thought. He wants the two of them to begin their new life happily together in this colony, although they barely know each other. He is a kind man in his own way, even though he does not think that I am company of the better sort.