Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  I hurried to catch up, realising that Mr Spencer and Orchid were moving along the cart track again. Labourers swarmed around the wooden framework of another new building, and high-wheeled carts passed us, laden with limestone and pulled by placid oxen while the whips of the bullwhackers cracked over them. Wheel tracks marred the prairie in every direction, and men shouted orders. Other oxen were chained to the trunks of oak trees which they dragged along, and in the distance I could hear the rasp of saws and the ring of hammers.

  ‘– only room there for unmarried officers,’ Mr Spencer was saying as Charlotte and I caught up to him. ‘So I have arranged for us to dwell in a small cabin just to the south. Once I retire, at the end of my current contract, we shall move upstream to our own land, and I shall have us a fine house built near the Forks. Already, some grand homes are being built there.’

  The small cabin to which Mr Spencer led us had been plastered in buffalo hair and lime, and its walls shone a fresh, bright white. Its small glass windows reflected the waters of the river running in the shallow valley below, and a swell of prairie folded around it, thick with berry bushes and wolf willow.

  ‘Why, it is quite charming!’ Orchid cried in delight, and a sigh of relief escaped from my lips. I had wondered, sometimes, what she expected to find at the end of her incredible journey across thousands of miles of rolling ocean, and up the wild rivers, and southwards over three hundred miles of shallow lake.

  Inside, the cabin was floored with wooden planking and furnished with pieces imported from England: tall wardrobes painted green and yellow, cabinets holding china cups sprigged with delicate flowers, a bed with a walnut headboard. Paintings of ships decorated the walls, ships with three masts and billowing sails like the supply ships of the Company that dropped anchor at Five Fathom Hole. Portraits of stern white chiefs, with sashes and medals across their chests, stared out from their frames.

  ‘It does lack a certain feminine touch that I am confident you can supply,’ said Mr Spencer. ‘Your luggage will be brought here once it has been unloaded. In the meantime, I must repair to the Big House for a meeting with the junior clerks, and will leave you ladies, you many ladies, to refresh yourselves after your journey. There is a cold smoked ham in the larder, and my servant will make you some tea.’

  He ran a bemused glance over us all clustered in the doorway of the parlour, and then departed with his firm stride.

  We ate the ham with coarse bread, seated at the shining table with its six matching chairs, and then sipped tea from china cups as the servant, a young Cree girl, poured it. When Orchid’s chests and boxes of luggage arrived on a cart, its ungreased axles squealing, we helped her to unpack her treasured possessions: silverware with her family crest on the handles, cut crystal miraculously unbroken, a bright Kidderminster carpet that we unrolled upon the drawing-room floor, dresses that she hung in the painted wardrobe. Her face shone with delight as she lifted each thing from the chest where she had packed it so many months before.

  There was only one bedroom in the cabin, in addition to a kitchen, and two small rooms that Orchid called the drawing room and the parlour. She sent the Cree servant girl to the Company store, located in the fur loft, for some ticking fabric. All afternoon the five of us sewed the striped fabric into rectangles, our needles flashing along the straight seams as we sat in the thin sunlight on the bluff above the Red River. We stuffed the mattresses with dried grass and laid them on the floor of the parlour and that was where we slept that night. In the morning, Charlotte and I went walking along the shore, watching Métis children wading in the shallows, catching frogs and collecting shells. A camp of Plains Cree stood against the skyline, its tipis pale in the sunlight, its spotted horses tied to a picket line. Dogs ran past, fighting over sticks. Men drove along in carts pulled by oxen, or flashed by at a trot on sturdy mustangs.

  Disturbed by canoes filled with Salteaux paddlers, two great brown birds rose from the reeds, trailing their skinny legs. Charlotte giggled. ‘They are sandhill cranes,’ she said. ‘The same as at home, Amelia! When Wishahkicahk caught hold of a crane’s legs and flew to the moon, he stretched its legs out as long as sticks!’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, laughing at the memory of being told this story in the camp outside York Factory when I was a child myself. Perhaps the Plains Cree also told this story … perhaps I did already know some of the stories of this land.

  We approached a Cree boy fishing for goldeye and I tried to ask him how far it was to the White Horse Plain. The tongue of the Cree here was not exactly the same as the tongue spoken by my mother’s people, and at first the boy didn’t understand. Finally, he waved an arm southwards, and said the word ‘thirty’. I stared into the far distance, where the land turned from golden to blue and was swallowed by sky, and thought about Gabriel’s sisters, stitching sunflowers and roses on to deerskin.

  When we returned to the cabin, a cart waited at the door and Mr Spencer stood beside the horse harnessed to it; a rangy black horse with one blue eye. I smoothed its forelock tenderly.

  ‘How is Foxfire?’ I asked.

  ‘Very well to be sure, settling into his new home.’

  ‘May I visit him in his stable? May I ride him? He needs to be exercised.’

  Mr Spencer pondered my question for moment, removing his cap and running his hand through his thin, sandy hair. Sunshine shone in his pale eyelashes.

  ‘Visit him, yes, by all means. But as to riding him, I hardly think it suitable for a young lady to ride around by herself. Not suitable at all. I shall take care of his exercise myself. I had a saddle shipped over for this very purpose.’

  ‘But I need to look for my father and also to visit a family on the White Horse –’

  Mr Spencer’s glance flicked away from me as Orchid and Eva came outside. When I followed his gaze, my disappointment over the topic of riding vanished temporarily and was replaced by astonishment.

  ‘Splendid!’ cried Mr Spencer. ‘My dear wife, you have worked a small miracle of transformation!’

  Eva gave him her smooth, slow smile, framed now by black curls, for she had cut off her long braids, and her ringlets brushed the shoulders of her dark blue dress. It was a white woman’s dress, pinned at the lace collar by an oval brooch decorated with the face of a woman shown in profile, and fastened down the front with a row of tiny pearl buttons. Her earrings of coins and thimbles had been replaced by pearl drops, and beneath the hem of the long dress her toes peeked out in pointed leather shoes. Under the dress, I knew, she would be wearing woollen stockings instead of beaded leggings.

  ‘I am ready to go to school now,’ Eva said, and Mr Spencer handed her up into the cart where a Hudson’s Bay blanket had been spread upon the bench; she settled herself upon it with a flounce and waited while her small trunk was loaded and Mr Spencer climbed in and took up the reins.

  ‘Goodbye, Charlotte and Amelia,’ she said. ‘I hope you will be happy here with the Métis,’ and she flashed me a mocking smile. Then she faced forward as the cart drove away.

  ‘You will have more room for sleeping in the parlour now,’ Orchid said. ‘I have asked Mr Spencer to make enquiries about your father’s whereabouts but you must be patient. He says the colony stretches for fifty miles along the shores of the Red River, and for another thirty to the west, along the banks of the Assiniboine. If your father has retired from the Company, he could be farming anywhere along the shorelines. Or he might even be employed in the south, around Pembina.’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, but it was very hard to be patient as days, then weeks, slipped past. The ground hardened with frost, and the last leaves fell so that the trees rattled bare arms over the river’s surly currents. Grey skies hung low over the new fort, where the men worked long hours trying to complete the buildings before snow fell. For hours, Charlotte and I walked along the shoreline, and wandered around the fort, waiting, watching. A slow, deep fear dragged me down into its blue depths. I scanned face after face; all those white faces with blue
or green or grey eyes, all those yellow or brown beards, all those wind-reddened cheeks. Would I know my father if I looked at him, if our gazes crossed beneath the pale walls of the fur loft or the veranda of the Big House? Would some spark of recognition fly between us, or would our glances slip on by, like lures slipping past fish that didn’t care to bite?

  Every morning I visited Foxfire who greeted me with a gusty whicker. I leaned my face against his forehead, finding comfort. Sometimes, leaning there, I thought with longing about Gabriel Gunner dancing the jig with his long hair flying and sparks rising behind him, and sometimes I thought about Smoke Eyes with her coat of ashes and wild honey. I longed to ride her again even though I had been thrown over her shoulder; I longed to feel her bunched muscles surging through the crackling grasses. Gabriel had said he would visit me before the first snow fell but day after day dragged past, with a cold wind keening over the dull dead grass, and dark clouds scudding overhead from the west. Loneliness ached in my bones. I thought of Betty Goose Wing, seated in the doorway of her lodge, squat and heavy as a boulder, wise and enduring. I wished I could sit beside her in the camp of my kinsfolk, and listen to their stories.

  I began to work for the Company, alongside the Cree women, netting snowshoes with babiche, the long strips of hide from deer and buffalo. When I worked, I lulled my fears, my hands flying with a rhythm as I wove the strips over and under, as I pulled them tight and knotted them. I began to learn the dialect of the Plains Cree people, and twice I visited their camp and borrowed a pony, which I rode along the river path, stopping at cabins to ask about my father. I would have gone more often, but I needed the work making snowshoes, and I had also unpacked my traps and was setting them for muskrat, and curing the hides to sell to the Company.

  At night, as I lay on the grass-filled matress in the parlour of Mr Spencer’s house, with nothing to listen to but the ticking of a tall, polished clock, my fears crowded in close like a gathering of ghosts, whispering and questioning. Where was Simon Mackenzie? Was he dead or alive? When I found him – if I found him – would he take us in? How much longer could we stay here, sleeping in the parlour, our presence growing heavy on Mr Spencer’s kind heart? Had Gabriel forgotten me, had I been only an evening’s entertainment? Where was he now, skimming along on Hard Twist with fiddle tunes playing in his ears?

  One evening, when my fears were pinching the edges of my sleep, I rose silently and wrapped my tartan blanket around my shoulders. On cold toes, I crept into the kitchen and dipped a tin mug into the pail of water by the enamel sink. Standing there in the darkness, sipping the water that was so cold my teeth ached, I could hear Orchid and Mr Spencer talking in the drawing room. In the evenings, she liked to sit there stitching cushion covers in something she called cross stitch, and he liked to read the newspapers that our York brigade had brought from the English supply ship. I should have covered my ears with my hands when I heard their words; I should have crept back to bed, but something held my numb toes tight against the floorboards, and prickles ran over my neck.

  ‘– not seemly,’ Mr Spencer declared in a firm tone.

  I heard a log shift in the wood stove.

  ‘She is only trying to earn some credit at the Company store so that she can provide necessities for herself and her sister,’ Orchid said in a soothing tone.

  ‘It is not suitable for her to spend her days trapping muskrat and making snowshoes with the Cree women!’ Mr Spencer said. ‘It is manual labour. She has a white father and if she were educated might make a good marriage to a junior clerk in the Company, and make something of her life.’

  ‘But she doesn’t want to attend school until she has found her father,’ Orchid explained.

  I hugged the blanket closer around my shoulders and licked my dry lips.

  ‘I understand this, but nevertheless, it seems she is able to net snowshoes whilst awaiting him. How will she ever become civilised by pursuing this occupation? You know that it is the express wish of the Company that the Métis people be welcomed in the Red River colony as long as they forgo their savage ways and forsake their wandering lifestyle. It is of utmost importance that they become educated and Christian.’

  I waited for Orchid to defend me; Orchid who had worn the moccasins I had beaded, who had sat naked with me in a sweat lodge, and waltzed in the Métis camp to the beat of a drum. But she said nothing and I understood, in the long moment of silence, that her loyalties had shifted, and that she must consider her words when talking to the white man who had provided her with a home.

  ‘Have you heard nothing of the whereabouts of Simon Mackenzie?’ Orchid asked at last.

  ‘No one to whom I have spoken has a recollection of him. But it is thirteen years since he might have been here, and many tripmen have come and departed again in that period. Perhaps he was never here but stationed at Pembina, or perhaps he journeyed further west. But, my dear wife, you really must stop Amelia from roaming around the settlement asking questions about Simon Mackenzie. She has been wandering further and further afield, when she is not working with the babiche. She has been seen knocking at farm doors and making enquiries.’

  ‘She is anxious to find him.’

  ‘It is very unseemly, knocking at the doors of strangers! Does she mean to visit every farm between here and the Forks? And wandering around the fort, accosting men as they go about their work, and asking them questions! Talking even to the Cree and Métis men she meets! It is wholly indecent. If she is to live here under my roof, I must insist that this stop. I wish you to be included in the society of the wives of the Company’s officers. Otherwise, you will find this place a lonely wasteland. And if you are to be included, you must not be too friendly with a girl of such disreputable habits. I have only your best interests at heart, my love. Amelia must attend school.’

  ‘Please allow her to remain with us until Christmas,’ Orchid murmured. ‘It is only another few weeks. After that, if she has heard nothing, we will send her to school.’

  ‘As you wish,’ Mr Spencer replied grudgingly. ‘But after that, I will take Charlotte to the school myself; I will make sure that she, a young innocent, is educated. Amelia can do as she pleases.’

  I moved so fast that my foot knocked against an empty bucket which fell with a clang, rolling away as I rushed out of the kitchen and into the drawing room.

  ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘No, you cannot separate Charlotte and me! She is an orphan and she will stay with me. And I do not want to go to your white man’s school and be shut up inside its walls, reading books. I can already read the stories of the land, and that is all I want!’

  Orchid sat as though frozen, her needle poised in mid-air and motionless over her stitching. A dark flush ran over Mr Spencer’s face, and even the top of his balding head glowed as though rubbed with berry juice.

  He half rose to his feet. ‘This is insolence!’ he said, his words tight and clipped as though cut off with a knife. ‘You are nothing but an ungrateful half-breed who –’

  Orchid shot to her feet in a rustle of gown, her lips quivering. ‘Robert, be quiet,’ she snapped, her eyes flashing. ‘Amelia is nothing of the sort. Without her help, you would never have received your precious stallion. It was Amelia who kept him in good condition. How dare you speak to her like this?’

  Orchid’s chin lifted, and her eyes blazed like chips of spring ice. The newspaper rustled in the tension of Mr Spencer’s grip. My teeth chattered with shame. I was causing difficulties here, in this home where I had been sheltered, and causing distress in Orchid’s new marriage; because of me, her loyalties were being stretched out fine as a tendon in two different directions. If those tendons tore apart, we would all feel the pain.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I muttered, speaking softly, although blood thundered in my ears and my pulse raced. I stared down at my toes which seemed very far away.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ Orchid said. I heard the rustle of her gown as she seated herself, and the whisper of the newspaper like dead leaves. My legs
seemed to belong to someone else as they carried me back to the parlour. I lay down beside Charlotte, and let my tears stream over my cheeks in silence to be absorbed by my grass bed. I gripped one of Charlotte’s braids as though I were afraid we’d be torn apart in our sleep.

  In the morning Orchid said nothing of what had happened but asked me to stay at home and help her to finish embroidering a set of cushion covers. I jabbed my needle in and out of the coarse canvas, threaded with a dull green shade of wool. I stitched inside a pattern that Orchid had drawn on the canvas with pencil, a pattern of leaves and strange flowers whose names I didn’t know, and didn’t ask for. A light as cold as pewter lay on our laps, and the cold crept across the floor, although the wood crackled in the stove. Below the bluff, the river had frozen into a sheet of steely ice, and the cold wind whistled over the cabin roof and away across the dark land. Still, it didn’t snow.

  Sometimes I laid my stitching aside and went to stand at the window, gazing out as though the force of my longing could make a strange white man stride to the front door, calling my name, or as though I could pull Gabriel Gunner and his mustangs over the empty horizon. But the only person who arrived was Mr Spencer, his nose running with the cold and his eyes bright with alarm.

  ‘The horse is gone! Rustled!’ he shouted, slamming in the front door with the wind flowing past his trousers and flapping the edges of Orchid’s embroidery.

  The wind whipped his words against me and I leaped in shock. ‘What horse?’ I cried, but even before he answered I knew what his reply would be.

  ‘His stable door is locked every night, but they picked the lock and stole him away. Those filthy Cree or thieving Métis are behind this! Fetch me my gun, Orchid!’

  ‘Foxfire?’ she asked, her face pale as bleached wood.

  ‘Of course, the Norfolk stallion! But I have hired a tracker from the Salteaux, and we are setting out now with dogs and a few men to find the horse and bring him back. Fetch my gun, if you please.’