Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  Dear Mr Litefoot Stuart, I finally wrote, while a baby began to cry in its wall hammock of woven thongs. Its mother went and stood beside it and nursed it without lifting it out.

  I am looking for Mr Simon Mackenzie.

  I am at the place called

  I had to stop and ask Gabriel’s mother for the spelling of the settlement’s name, and even she was not too sure.

  Sainte Fransis Exavier. Will you please tel me if you are mi father? Mi mother was Mary at York Factory. I have your broach.

  Sighned Amelia Otterchild Mackenzie.

  I looked up, surprised to find that the light was already growing dim as evening fell and brought more snow. Flakes whirled in as Gabriel, his father, and two of his uncles came inside on a gust of cold. They looked dishevelled and wild, their faces burning red in the cold. One of the uncles had a bleeding lip, and the other had a swollen eye.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  Gabriel shrugged. ‘Some men came wanting to look inside our barn. We sent them away again. Said we had nothing in there but a cow. Have you written your letter?’

  I folded the paper and handed it to him.

  ‘I have sent word to the stone fort with a man going north by dog team,’ he said as he stowed the letter in a pouch. ‘He will take the message to Mr Spencer that his horse is here waiting.’

  Just for a moment, I thought that maybe Charlotte and I should swing ourselves high up on that stallion’s back, and turn his head towards the west, into the blowing snow of the Carlton Trail. No one might ever discover that we had taken him. And weren’t he and I bound together by the times we had saved each other’s lives? By my pawakan’s power? By my vision quest dreams? Then I thought of how that stallion’s foals were going to make Orchid rich and build her a stone house with a veranda running around it, and maybe one day feed her babies. So I thanked Gabriel for sending the message to Mr Spencer, and went to wrap up some bannock, tea, and smoked tongue for his long ride.

  He left early in the morning when the snow was still blue and unmarked by footprints, and with my letter in the pouch beneath his buffalo robe. I stood and watched until he was a speck in the distance, and the first rays of sun gleamed on the mustang’s smoky flanks. Then I turned and went back into the cabin to help his mother sweep the plank flooring and stir porridge for breakfast.

  I tried to hold my heart still, like a small bird captured in one hand and fluttering with the hope of flying.

  Chapter 16

  For three days I embroidered Charlotte’s new buffalo robe with the help of Gabriel’s sisters. And all the while, bent over my strings of beads, making the tiny legs and heads of the yellow horses amongst the roses, I thought about Gabriel riding west along the Carlton Trail. I imagined the mustang’s hard black legs ploughing through the drifted snow, cresting the long swells of open land. I thought about the wind lifting the mustang’s dark mane, and the long hair of his rider. I saw the clouds scudding through the boy’s dark eyes. I saw the log cabins folded in some river valley, with smoke rising from their chimneys, and an oak door where Gabriel stood knocking. But when the door opened, I couldn’t imagine the man who stood there, the man who might know where my father was, or what had happened to him. The man who might even be my father.

  Today Gabriel will be starting to ride back, I told myself on the fourth morning, throwing fish to the sled dogs. I carried hay to the horses in the corral, and brushed the Norfolk stallion’s muddy coat, and laid my face against his shoulder. With a strong pawakan, a person could survive anything, even this feeling of hope that was a longing as sharp as a pain in the belly.

  On the fifth day of Gabriel’s absence, a team of dogs trotted into the yard with their bells ringing. Their blankets, embroidered with red woollen fringes and flower patterns, were bright against their grey brindled coats. The standing irons on their necks stuck up jauntily, bright with yarn and fluttering ribbons. I stood against the corral rails, where I was brushing Smoke Eyes, and watched as a man in a buffalo coat climbed from the cariole sled that the dogs pulled; a second man swung along behind on snowshoes and carried a dog whip in one hand.

  ‘Mr Spencer?’ I asked uncertainly. He pushed his hat back from his sandy eyebrows while the dogs milled around, yipping a greeting to the dogs staked by the cabin door.

  ‘Amelia, my dear young woman. You have the stallion here?’ His blue eyes were sharp with agitation, and he didn’t even seem to notice that his bright pink nose was running into his sandy moustache.

  ‘He’s here in the barn,’ I agreed and felt Mr Spencer crowding against me in his haste as I turned to open the barn door. The cousin sitting with a gun across his knees rose to let us pass. When Foxfire nickered a welcome to me, I was seized by a pang of sorrow. This is the last time he will speak to me, I thought. This is the last time that I will stand at his shoulder as he bends his head around, sheltering me in the curve of his neck, his breath running over my hands. ‘Heart of a bear,’ I murmured to him.

  This was the last time my face would hang reflected in his dark eye.

  ‘Splendid! Simply splendid!’ Mr Spencer was saying behind me. I ignored him as I slipped the stallion’s halter from a nail in the wall and passed one hand beneath his neck. He lowered his head politely as he always did, and I slid his silky muzzle into the noseband, and fastened the buckle against his cheek.

  ‘But what on earth has been done to him? This frightful colour! And how did you manage to recognise him?’

  ‘I just did,’ I said, running my hand over his cropped mane, over his flanks. Beneath my fingertips, I felt the flame of his coat, and the silver-like frost that would sprinkle it again as it grew back in and returned to a red roan color. With a smile, I recalled how I had first marvelled at this coat and how I’d wondered if the horse was turning white for winter like a hare or a ptarmigan changing colour. I had known nothing then about the nature of horses.

  ‘Will you rest and have a drink?’ the cousin was asking at the door, but Mr Spencer shook his head. ‘No, I thank you. We are in haste to travel back to the Forks today.’

  Like a dream walker, slow and gliding, my spirit not in my body, I led Foxfire outside into the sunshine; I ran my hand down his nearside foreleg to remove wisps of oat straw that clung there. His lips nuzzled the back of my neck as I bent down, as though he were kissing me goodbye. I remained there for a moment, after the straw had already been removed, and let the horse fumble at my hair.

  ‘I have brought his bridle,’ Mr Spencer was saying as I straightened slowly but I didn’t look at him, only stretched out my hand for the bridle when he fetched it from the cariole. I pulled off my glove and warmed the cold shaft of the steel bit in my fist. The stallion bent his head again as I slid the headstall over his ears, and I smoothed his forelock over the brow band.

  ‘I truly am most grateful. I am quite in your debt, Miss Amelia.’

  I turned from the horse at last and stared at the white man who knew nothing about vision quests or the power of my pawakan spirit.

  ‘You must care for this horse with your very life,’ I said. ‘His soul is precious. He is your future here in this land.’

  A flicker of surprise crossed his ruddy face. ‘Indeed, you are quite right. Have no fear; I shall indeed take the utmost good care of him. And if you ever wish to visit my wife, I am sure she would be most glad of your excellent company.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Spencer,’ I said, although I knew that, beneath his gratitude, he still did not consider me to be company of the better sort for his wife to be keeping.

  I held out the reins. For one last long moment, they lay across the palms of my gloves, and I stood in the warm shadow of that great creature who had swum to me in the fog of the Hayes River and saved me from drowning. Then Mr Spencer took the reins from me and the horse stepped forward. I laid my palm against his shoulder, then stepped back as Mr Spencer’s companion gave him a leg-up, and he swung on to the stallion’s high back. The other man climbed into the cariole
and his whip cracked. The dogs leaned into the traces, whining with excitement, their toes scrabbling for purchase in the snow. The cariole began to slide forward. Foxfire gathered himself under Mr Spencer and began to move. I ran my hand along his sides, across his hindquarters; his tail flicked against my shoulder. Then he was four strides away, then five. Now he broke into a trot, tossing his head, neighing shrilly to the horses milling in the Gunner corral. The sleigh bells pealed on the dogs’ harnesses.

  I turned away, and went down to the river and bashed the water hole open with the axe, and then I led the mustangs down to drink. I watched their greedy lips and saw how their snorting breath made concentric rings of ripples in the dark cold water.

  I felt gutted like a fish.

  The next day, I did not embroider Charlotte’s robe. Today Gabriel will be riding towards home, I reminded myself but no joy pricked on my numb skin. I cooked, I walked around outside, I lay bundled on a sleeping bench and turned my face to the peeled pine logs and the chinking of mud and grass. I thought about everything the red stallion had taught me about the nature of horses. With a strong pawakan, a person could survive anything. Even this gutted emptiness.

  On the sixth day, I walked a long way westwards, chilled with the cold, straining my eyes for the sight of a grulla gelding trotting towards home. But as the afternoon waned and the light lay thin as one of Orchid’s watercolour washes, the track to the west lay empty. Darkness fell as I trudged back to the Gunner cabin. All the next day as snow fell, coating the backs of the mustangs in the corral and lying along their dark necks, I waited and worried. Perhaps the knife wound had festered and Gabriel had fallen into the dark grip of a fever. Perhaps the gelding had placed a hoof in a gopher hole and broken his cannon bone, falling hard into the snow and thrashing there, helplessly. Perhaps Gabriel had lost his way and was drifting, roaming, fading away into the land like the blanco diablo, the white ghost horse of the Spanish nation.

  ‘Fretting is like drinking poison slowly,’ Gabriel’s mother said, giving me a sharp look over the piles of babiche that we were using to net snowshoes. When she rose and put her arms around me from behind, I leaned my head back against her chest and, for a moment, I remembered my mother was dancing on the wolf road, in the brilliant light.

  Today it has been a week since Gabriel left, I thought as I watered the mustangs early the next morning. Surely, he will return today. I gripped on to this hope as if it were a wild horse on the end of a rope. I held it all day, until my mind grew chafed and weary as I stitched mittens by the black wood stove where a pot of buffalo simmered in its dark, rich broth. Perhaps I dozed over my stitching, over the thousands of stitches I had made, for suddenly there were voices at the door, and a horse neighed, and men shouted, and sleigh bells rang on a dog team.

  I started up from my plain wooden chair, laying the mitten on the checked tablecloth. Gabriel’s mother, who had been lighting the lamp, moved towards the door carrying it in one hand. The draught almost blew the flame out as the door swung inwards and snow fell over the lintel and on to the planks. In the flickering light, Gabriel’s hard dark face gleamed like polished wood, and I saw him grin, although his eyes were shadowed with fatigue. His mother gave a cry of delight and darted forward, catching him by the arm to pull him inside.

  There was a man standing behind him.

  Not an uncle, not a cousin. A tall white man in a buffalo robe and a marten hat. Gabriel turned and ushered the man inside; his eyes flickered around the room, taking in the children playing on the sleeping benches, the squat, dark wood stove, the herbs hanging from the open beams, the steam escaping from the buffalo stew, the fur and hide heaped on the table that we were making mittens from. His eyes flickered over me, and then returned to rest upon my face. His eyes, green in the wind-burned creases of his long, thin face.

  I took a step towards him.

  He tried to speak, cleared his throat. ‘Amelia?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I am your father. I am Simon Mackenzie.’

  We did not hug or shake hands or touch; we simply stared at one another while Gabriel went back outside to care for the horses, and his mother moved away to hang the lantern on the wall and stir the buffalo stew, and Charlotte crept up beside me and slipped her hand into mine.

  ‘Where have you been, all these years?’ I asked at last.

  He pulled off his marten hat and I saw that his hair, once dark, was streaked with grey and worn long, pulled back into a single plait. Snow melted on the shoulders of his robe. The creases of his lean face shone with the scour of winter wind but his eyes, those eyes as green as my own, were clear and bright beneath his dark brows. I could see why my mother had waited so many years for him to return, a tall handsome man with a stern nose like a hawk’s beak.

  ‘I am sorry for your pain,’ he said at last and I knew, in that moment, that he was a man who could read faces and hear thoughts. My letter to him had said nothing of pain.

  ‘Take off your coat and come to the fire,’ Gabriel’s mother said, holding out her hands. My father shrugged out of his heavy layers of fur and moved to the wood stove with Charlotte and I beside him. He held his long lean hands, sinewy and callused, to the warmth. He was much thinner without his coat, dressed in buckskin leggings and a fringed buckskin jacket. A bracelet of blue beads and brass discs glinted on the bones of one wrist. For a moment, I thought that perhaps I was mistaken, that my father was a Métis and not a Scotsman, but then I remembered Betty’s stories about my father coming off the Company supply ship at York Factory with the other Scottish men.

  Gabriel’s mother ladled out bowls of stew and pulled chairs to the stove. ‘Please, eat,’ she said. ‘Empty stomachs do not make strong words.’

  Then she returned to the table and began to stitch mittens with her daughters. When Gabriel and his father came inside from the dark, she shooed them to the end of the table and brought them their stew so that my father and Charlotte and I had the place beside the wood stove to ourselves.

  My father ate thoughtfully, slowly, staring into his bowl as though it held answers to many questions. His dark beard was striped with grey. His lips were wide and thin and generous and once, when he caught Charlotte staring at him, his face lit up with a smile. All the creases ran the opposite direction so that I too stared at him; it was like looking at still water suddenly flowing, sparkling, running. The lantern light shone in his deep-set eyes.

  When I pulled out the luckenbooth from my pouch, unwrapped it, and held it out to him, my father’s gaze sharpened. A sound escaped his lips, part exclamation, part sigh – was it joy or regret that my father felt, reading that inscription, holding my mother’s name in the palm of his hand after all these years?

  ‘She is dead,’ I said, my voice harsher than I had expected. ‘She waited many years for you. She rejected a chief for you. Where were you?’

  My father sighed again and this time, it was pure regret that I heard. ‘I have loved your mother ever since I met her, a Swampy Cree woman bringing moccasins into the fort, smiling at me with those sparkling eyes. Mary.’

  His mouth lingered on her name as though he had eaten a summer berry.

  ‘When the Company sent me west to Pembina to hunt buffalo, I wrote your mother a letter and asked her to bring you and to join me here. But she never replied and she never came.’

  ‘She never received the letter!’ I cried. From my chest I brought that letter, the one that a chief had persuaded his half-brother to hide behind a board in the York Factory post office, and that had never been given into my mother’s hand. That chief, Eva’s uncle, had not wanted my mother to get a letter from my father but instead to stay at York Factory and accept his gift of trade blankets and to marry him.

  Now my father laid that ragged paper upon his knee, and smoothed it flat gently. He traced the water stains from when the paper had been damaged in the wreck of the York boat. I saw the black hair on the backs of his fingers. His lips moved as he silently read the puddled let
ters, those words that he himself had penned in blue ink and a flowing hand, on a summer evening by the bank of the Red River thirteen years ago: This is a fair place … look forward to good prospects …

  I explained how Mr Murdoch had found the letter when they were preparing to tear down the old post office at York and build a new one, and how I had travelled west myself to try and find my father.

  ‘But why didn’t you write my mother another letter? Why didn’t you come and find her for yourself? Find us?’ I asked. I pressed my lips together to still their trembling.

  My father sighed again and shook his head as though to clear them of the words in that letter but as he began to talk, his lean fingers kept smoothing the paper. The luckenbooth lay beside it, shining in the lantern light.

  ‘After I wrote this letter to your mother, bad things befell me,’ he began. In the corner of my eye, I saw the Gunner family lay down their spoons and their needles at the table, and listen to my father’s story.

  ‘I was hunting for the Company in Pembina, the fort to the south of the Red River colony on the war road to the Sioux nation. In those days, there were still two great trading companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. Men of both companies were trading with the Cree people and the Salteaux, with the Assiniboine and with the other tribes far to the west and the north. We were all trying to bring in the most pelts. Sometimes we helped each other out, but sometimes the men would fight. Lying and cheating and even murder have been committed in the competition between the men of the two rival companies.’

  My father paused to sip the tea that Gabriel’s mother handed to him in a tin mug.