The cushion cover fell from her lap as she rose and went without a word to bring it to him; its smooth barrels and polished stock were dull in the dark light. Briefly, he kissed her and then turned back to the door. ‘Don’t wait for me at dinner, I might be late. But we will find the horse – this tracker I have hired can find anything!’
I stood in the door and watched him depart, mounted on one of the mustangs that the Company kept in a herd near the fort. Its black hooves hammered on the ground, which was frozen hard as rock; ground that held no hoof prints, nothing to tell the story of a horse’s disappearance.
I was plummeting, plunging, falling. I was in the bottom of a deep pit. My heart was turning to ice like the heart of a wild Witiko, dying of hunger, howling alone.
Chapter 14
For three days Mr Spencer and his tracker and dogs searched for a trace of Foxfire but found nothing. I myself persuaded Samuel Beaver to ask for time away from his tasks at the fort, and we too searched, beating through bushes and looking for even a strand of red hair blowing in the cold wind, or for a white crescent scraped upon a rock by a passing hoof. We walked gingerly along on the river ice, sliding our moccasins over its dull sheen and searching for the V-shaped indentation of a foot pressed into the frost. But there were no signs anywhere to tell us where the horse had gone. It was as though the Thunderbirds had descended and carried him into the air.
‘Otterchild, I am sorry about your horse,’ Samuel said on the evening of the second day as the light drained from the sky and the prairie turned its back on us like an animal hunkering down into hibernation. ‘I cannot help you search any longer. The Company is sending me up to Norway House tomorrow. But have you heard that there is a big wedding feast planned by the Métis on the White Horse Plain?’
I shook my head as the wind gusted at the edges of my blanket. I pulled it more snugly around my shoulders, and turned away from the wind. Samuel’s bent face was almost completely black in the fading light.
‘The men have been talking about it as we work. A free trader is marrying a Cree chief’s daughter in the week before Christmas; they say there will be horse racing and dancing and feasting for days. Perhaps you might ask there about your horse.’
‘Perhaps,’ I muttered. ‘Thank you, Samuel. And – goodbye.’
He hugged me briefly. ‘Goodbye, Otterchild. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’
Then he was gone with his callused hands and his shining face, a bulkiness in the rising dark, the memory of shared apples, bannock, miles of river. Soon, there was only the sound of receding footsteps on the hard ground. It was like listening to my past walk away, all those days at York Factory when my mother had still been alive, when Charlotte had been a gurgling baby in a cradleboard painted with Scottish hearts. I stifled a sob as I trudged back to Mr Spencer’s cabin.
For a few more days, I continued searching on my own, although I knew that by now the horse was probably many miles away. I searched along the shoreline, whistling and waiting for a neigh in reply. I looked for holes broken through the ice by hooves as I set my muskrat traps. I searched around the stable, fingering the cold flatness of the picked lock that dangled uselessly from its bolt. I stood for long moments, lost in sorrow, in Foxfire’s empty stall, remembering how beneath his red forelock the hair swirled in a pattern like a river current, and how the white hairs lay over his flanks like frost. Tears blurred the pale rectangle of the open stable door, and the silence was a burden on my back.
At home in the evenings, in Orchid’s parlour, I laid out the moose hide that Betty had given me, and cut the pieces for Charlotte’s winter coat. From birchbark, I cut templates of roses and horses. The strings of seed beads, brought all the distance from York Factory in my chest, lay shining in my lap like droplets of water as I worked, threading them upon my needle, laying them flat upon the moose hide. Tick, tock, tick, tock. The tall polished clock seemed loud in the silence for the wind had died. Beyond the window, the land brooded, vast and cold and empty, waiting for the snow that was so late in falling.
I was quiet at suppers, not speaking unless spoken to, making sure that Charlotte and I both had hands and faces scrubbed clean and hair neatly braided so that Mr Spencer could find nothing to object to. I was glad to see that, although the horse was missing, Mr Spencer still spoke kindly to Orchid and called her ‘my love’, his face grave and tender in the flickering light from the lantern on the wall. He treated us all with courtesy, and no more was spoken about school.
Yet I knew that he had not forgotten about his plan or changed his mind; I could see this in the set of his mouth and the cool paleness of his forehead with its straight, sandy eyebrows. He was not a man who changed his mind easily about anything. And the feast of Christmas was coming closer, closer, with every swing of the clock’s round pendulum inside its walnut case. Christmas … and no Simon Mackenzie, no Gabriel Gunner, no rumour of a red horse. And after this, school for Charlotte and even for me, school with walls that shut out the vast sky, the touch of wind, the taste of snow or rain, the smell of animals crossing the horizon. School with its clocks that cut time up into smaller and smaller pieces – hours, minutes, seconds – like a knife chopping meat finer and finer. This was not time as I knew it, time measured by shadows stretching, by the moon waning, by water rising and ebbing, by birds flying north or south and rending the sky with their music.
Bent over my beadwork, I felt the white man’s trap closing slowly. The beads quivered in my fingers and blood sprang from the accidental jab of the needle. I knew then what I must do – but not whether to tell Orchid. Yet how could I leave her without saying goodbye, after the hours we had spent seated in the York boat, our eyes running along the stallion’s red back, the slope of his croup, the bend of his neck? Those hours had tied us together like a tie of kinship. I decided that I would have to risk saying goodbye, for I was almost grown and she couldn’t stop me from carrying out my plan.
I waited until the last morning and then I rose in the dawn greyness and went into the kitchen where Orchid was struggling to rouse the fire in the belly of the black stove. As I entered, she wiped her hand across her cold face, smudging it with soot. I bent to blow on the embers, adding small twigs and a curl of birchbark until the flames leaped up.
‘I am leaving,’ I said.
Her blue eyes widened. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I am going to the White Horse Plain with a Métis family. They are giving Charlotte and me a ride in their schooner. I am going to a wedding feast to listen for rumours of Foxfire. I might spend the winter there.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Orchid cried, pushing back strands of hair and rubbing her chilled hands together before holding them to the flames. ‘Mr Spencer has not been able to find any clues about the stallion. You cannot go off on a wild goose chase, a girl travelling without a chaperone! It is not suitable and Mr Spencer would not condone it!’
‘He is not my husband or my chief,’ I said evenly. ‘And this is not my lodge, although you have made me welcome here.’
‘But – surely, you will return? Amelia, what has possessed you?’
‘I am not a child. I have travelled six hundred miles to this place, and now I am travelling on and you cannot stop me, Orchid.’
She looked at me for a long drawn-out moment, and those six hundred miles sat between us, a truth as round and solid as a grandfather stone. The weight of that stone was like the weight of loyalty to kin, and Orchid surely felt it lying between us. Her gaze softened and she pulled me against the flannel nightrobe that she had not yet changed out of. Her hands gripped my back
‘Oh, Amelia,’ she said brokenly, and nothing more for a long time. Behind us the fire crackled, taking hold of the maple wood, and I felt the stove’s heat against my legs.
‘We must eat and then leave,’ I said gently at last, and Orchid sighed and stepped away, wiping her eyes before becoming brisk again.
‘Have you got everything packed? Look, you
must take this cold venison from the pantry, and this salt pork. And here is the bannock you baked last night; I will wrap it in a cloth. And have some oat porridge now, before you leave.’
She pulled her robe tighter and bustled around, placing things in my open trunk that I had dragged to the door while Charlotte, yawning sleepily, crouched by the stove to get warm.
‘I hope you won’t get into trouble on account of this,’ I muttered.
‘Perhaps, but I will take care of it,’ Orchid replied with her customary determination, her chin lifted. We smiled then, and hugged for the final time as the schooner creaked to a halt at the door, and the faces of the Métis children peered out from beneath the wagon’s canvas awning. The wife lifted Charlotte onboard, and her husband swung my chest up before he climbed on to his seat and sent his whip cracking out over the oxen’s red backs. I scrambled up, the wheels already beginning to turn, and waved to Orchid as she stood in the doorway of her cabin, a woman who knew even fewer stories of this land than I did myself. The swell of the prairie folded her in. I felt the tug of our parting, and then I turned my face towards the south. It was hard to keep saying goodbye to people I had journeyed with.
For a day, we followed the river trail past the settlements of Lord Selkirk’s people, and the homes of retired Hudson’s Bay Company men, and the cabins of the Swiss and German farmers. The ribbon of river lay beside us, a cold sheen, until we reached the Forks where the Assiniboine flowed in from the west. Here there were grander homes, some of stone and others of board upon stone foundations, and a general store and a blacksmith’s shop. We turned west and began our second day’s journey along the banks of the Assiniboine, the trail winding amongst willow and cranberry bushes all bare of leaves.
The family we travelled with were in high spirits, anticipating the festivities. Around me, they sang and laughed, but I hunched in my blanket and thought about the family of Gabriel Gunner. Should I try to find them? It was humiliating, I decided, to stand knocking at their cabin door, an orphan with no kinship claim upon them, a girl who had only danced for one evening with one of their sons. I set my jaw and pushed my wounded pride down into one of those places inside me that were like birchbark rogans, sealed with pitch. Things could be stored in those containers for a very long time. Even liquid things. Even tears.
We approached the settlement of St François Xavier that evening, on the White Horse Plain.
‘Are there white horses here?’ Charlotte asked Louise, the Métis woman, as the schooner bumped along on the uneven ridges of the frozen track.
‘Tell us the story of the blanco diablo,’ one of the Métis children cried immediately. The other children crowded against their mother, who was nursing a baby. Even Charlotte snuggled closer. Curiosity got the better of me and I let my blanket slip from my ears so that I too could listen to Louise’s words.
‘This is a story that my mother heard from her mother, and she had heard it from her own mother. About one hundred and forty years ago, as the white man reckons them, only the people of the tribes wandered the great land, riding their horses over the waving grasses. It was summer, the larks sang in the blue sky, the roses bloomed, the thoughts of the young turned to love. A Cree chief from Lake Winnipegosis came riding south to ask for the daughter of an Assiniboine chief camped here on the plains. The young man promised a bride gift of a pure white horse, called a blanco diablo in the tongue of the Spanish nation. This horse was from the famous white horses in the country far to the south, called Mexico. The horse could outrun anything it raced against. It could journey for four days longer than any other horse, and go without food or water all that time. It was nimble and swift.
‘So the Assiniboine chief and his daughter accepted the Cree suitor’s marriage gift, and a time was arranged for a wedding ceremony. But in the Assiniboine camp was a sorcerer who remembered that the Cree and the Assiniboine had once been enemies and not allies. It was wrong, he felt, for the chief’s daughter to be given to this Cree man even though he came with a blanco diablo horse as a gift. And this sorcerer sent word to the camp of the Sioux to the south, where another young man wanted the same daughter for his wife.
‘On his wedding day, the Cree chief arrived mounted on a grey horse and leading the blanco diablo, the pure white horse that could fly like the wind over the land. The wedding commenced with feasting and dancing but then a cloud of dust was seen in the distance. Sioux warriors were galloping over the prairie! The bride’s father cried to his daughter to mount the white horse and flee, and her Cree bridegroom must flee also. The two young people rode hard over the prairie, doubling back, hiding behind trees and bushes. They rode along ridgelines like smoke from a forest fire in a strong wind. They clattered down the banks of creeks. But no matter how hard or fast they rode, the Sioux followed them, for they could glimpse the white horse from many miles away.
‘At last, near St François Xavier – which is where we are going now – the young couple were shot. The arrows of the Sioux killed them both. The grey horse was caught. But the white horse, the blanco diablo, escaped. Wild and free, it roamed the plains. It was never caught.’
‘But what happened to it?’ asked Charlotte, her eyes stretched wide in her heart-shaped face.
‘Sometimes it is still seen, a ghost horse, slipping into a hollow in the summer grass. Some people have glimpsed it, swirling in the falling snow.’
Louise changed her nursing baby to the other side. One of the little boys began to whittle a flute from a willow branch, and Charlotte began to braid a girl’s hair. I stared ahead, out of the opening in the schooner’s canvas awning, and pulled my blanket tighter around my head again. Chills ran up and down my back. The story’s sadness seemed like an omen, like a bad sign on a hunting trail. Two lovers dead. A horse that no one could ever catch, that ran wild for ever until it became a ghost horse, lost in the tall grass, the drifted snow. A horse that could disappear again as though the Thunderbirds had lifted it into the clouds. I shivered.
We reached the settlement of St François Xavier shortly after this, and slept in the schooner surrounded by Métis farms, clusters of carts and wagons, groups of dogs running half wild, lowing oxen and whinnying ponies. To the north-west lay a long, low ridge which the Métis woman told me had always been a gathering place for the people of the land, a place where they held Dog Feasts and Sun dances. Tonight, against the stars, I saw the glow of the Cree campfires scattered on the ridge and sending their flickering light over the tipis and the horses.
In the morning Charlotte and I roamed the banks of the Assiniboine, the ridge of land to the northwest, and the flat expanse of the White Horse Plain amongst the celebrating crowds. The frosty air vibrated with the throb of drums and chanting from the Cree and Salteaux encampments. Horses neighed, sometimes shrill and sometimes challenging. Dogs barked and ripped up stolen hides or fought viciously over offal. Buffalo haunches roasted over fires, spitting grease, warming my nostrils with their thick, dark aroma. Métis men squatted in tent doorways and against the sides of schooners, playing cards, drinking firewater from jugs, cursing and singing. Fiddles and mouth organs made me walk with a bounce, and jigs tugged at my toes.
Horses of all shapes and colours filled my eyes; they breathed their sweet, grassy breath over my hands as I stroked their flanks, or smoothed their forelocks from their eyes. Métis women rode in saddles with swells of padded hide at the front and back, and I remembered Gabriel telling me that these cantles and horns were carved from wood or even bone before being covered with hide. Babies with eyes as small and round as berries hung from saddle horns, strapped inside their cradleboards. Very small children were tied to their mother’s backs with blankets, while older children sat astride the horses and held on to their mother’s back, or rode ahead of her, hanging on to coarse strands of mane.
There were horses with white coats covered in brown spots, and horses with brown coats covered in white patches; there were horses wearing bridles made of nothing but one piece of ro
pe cleverly twisted around their jaws and up over their heads, and other horses wearing fancy bridles intricately decorated with beautiful beadwork, with quills and tassels and coins. There were horses tied to picket lines, and horses hobbled by their own rein tied to a foreleg, and horses rolling in the dead grass, tossing their legs over the pale swells of their bellies. At all hours of the day, there were horses being raced, sometimes at a gallop and other times at a trot. The cheering and jeering of the crowds roared in my ears like waterfalls. Money and trade goods, weapons and wagons changed hands hour after hour as men won and lost their wagers.
The entire plain seemed to seethe with horses and dogs, with people in buffalo robes, capotes and Hudson’s Bay Company blankets; with headdresses of feathers; with faces painted in yellow and green stripes. The brightness of all the beads and earrings and bracelets seemed to shine in my eyes long after I lay down in the schooner, surrounded by snoring Métis, to sleep beside Charlotte. In my sleep, I seemed to mutter the same questions all night, over and over, as I had done all day, asking for rumours of a red horse, or news of a man called Simon Mackenzie. All night long my questions fell into a well of dark silence, and every day they were absorbed into the crowd’s roar and swept away from my mouth, from my aching ears. No one could answer me.
On the third day, a young boy walked past me leading a horse, a grulla gelding. I narrowed my eyes. Hard Twist? My breath caught. When the gelding swung his head to glance in my direction, I was sure of it. My gaze shot around the vicinity, ricocheting off a horse pulling a pole-framed travois loaded with kettles and pans, off men rolling dice and women braiding each other’s hair. Nowhere did I see Gabriel Gunner but still I rushed away as fast as I could walk, my heart hopping like a hare. I do not want to see him, I thought. I will not speak to him if I meet him accidentally. I waited, fearful, hopeful, for his voice calling my name but only drumming and laughter filled my ears.
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