by Don Gillmor
“This is the man I spoke of, Your Royal Highness. This is Mr. Mountain Horse.”
Michael looked at Edward’s face. The Prince of Wales had an expression that looked as if he had just received bad news but was taking it well. Edward extended a hand.
“Very good to meet you, Mr. Mountain Horse.” The Prince stabbed out his cigarette after only a few puffs. “I understand you were overseas.”
“Yes, the Royal Canadian Dragoons.”
“Hellish, hm.”
“Yes.”
“Back in God’s country, then. Very well.”
The fog along the river valley was contained by the banks as if it was liquid; the air cool, too early to be warmed by the sun. Michael walked softly through the tall grass toward the poplar groves in search of deer. To his right Edward marched with his exquisite royal gun cradled downward. On his left was Ballantyne, Edward’s royal handler. The dawn showed clear skies but Michael could see a slight massing of cloud near the mountains. This early walking was his favourite part of the hunt. He had no appetite for killing anything. In his rucksack, Michael had their lunch: two bottles of Pétrus, jellied pheasant, gherkins, grainy mustard like the kind he had in Paris, and bread. Michael observed Edward, who was walking slightly ahead of him. His nose was turned up at the tip, foxlike, giving his face a natural snobbery and a look of perpetual expectation. Let him bag his deer and he’ll go away, Michael had been told by a local. There was something in Edward, the impending throne, the implied formality of a palace thousands of miles away, that made people tense. Michael saw it in the eyes of the cattlemen. Some part of them was watching themselves with the Prince, as if they were on stage and in the audience at the same time. Still, Edward had a democratic bent. He talked to the locals, rode the boundaries of his property, and even spent a slightly staged morning chopping wood. He was a curious man, balancing glamour with a common touch, unsure of his role. Perhaps a bit shy, Michael thought, aware that he embodied something distant and shimmering to those who rose before dawn and wiped the snot from their children’s noses and saved suet in a can by the stove.
The west wind was picking up, coming over the mountains with its hint of snow. They were downwind; whatever was out there wouldn’t catch their scent. The clouds rolled toward them, the light still radiant, glancing off the royal guns.
They walked uneventfully for four hours, then, at eleven, Edward stopped and said, “Lunch, gentlemen, don’t you think.” There was no hint of the interrogative. Perhaps it was a form that had passed out of use among the royal family, an evolutionary casualty, like the useless gills that some lizards retained as reminders of their days as fish.
Michael put his rucksack down and spread out the blanket. He handed Ballantyne a bottle of Pétrus and three tin cups.
“How do your rate our chances, Mountain Horse?” Ballantyne asked. “Haven’t seen hide nor hair.” Ballantyne had a heavy face, small veins joining in a dense network at the nose and spreading onto his cheeks in the pattern of a butterfly. He might have been forty-five, a military background, now a royal minder, managing Ed, as the ranchers called him. Enjoying the comfort and collateral luxury, eating and drinking what Ed ate and drank, faced daily with Ed’s lofty emptiness.
Michael pointed to a stand of poplars that ran along a ridge to the northwest a mile away. “There might be something there. On the other side there’s a clearing.”
Ballantyne poured a glass of wine for Edward, who sipped it, and then stared blankly, assessing it.
“This is fine land, Mountain Horse, some of the finest I’ve seen,” Edward said. “There are aspects of the Scottish Highlands, a bit of Switzerland. Marvellous. Marvellous spot for one to be raised.”
“Yes.” Michael had abandoned the Highness appendix to every response, which felt alien and comic here in the foothills.
“Are there grizzly bears in this part of the country? I should like to get one on my next visit. Perhaps you can arrange a hunt.”
Michael nodded.
“I’m told they can stand to a height of ten feet. Enormously powerful. You’ve seen one, Mountain Horse.”
“Yes.”
Grizzlies were a rarity this far south and east, preferring the mountains or the northern bush. Years ago, when Michael was twelve, a bear had moved into the foothills, its path unmistakable: a shed swatted into kindling, a calf taken, its remains found two hundred yards away, dogs broken like toys. Maybe it had exhausted its own territory and kept shuffling east, or had been forced out by a larger rival, though this seemed unlikely given its apparent size. Men gathered and spoke of this new threat and hunts were organized. A rancher named Granger claimed he put four bullets into it but they didn’t have any effect. The bear became mythic and its singular menace grew. It was spotted in a dozen places, the sightings vivid and unreliable and occasionally coincident. Over the months its threat evolved, no longer mere nature but something primeval, conjured out of the dark imagination of settlers who recognized their essential puniness in God’s country.
After the first snow, the ranchers assumed it would hibernate and in spring they’d have another chance. But the killings kept up through December. Two calves from the Bar C, another from the Double D. A bluetick hound was found with its stomach missing. The tracks in the snow, widened slightly with the sun on them, showed the bear was as big as they thought. The fact that it wasn’t hibernating fuelled its mythology. Like all evil, it was relentless.
It was Stanford’s idea to track the bear. Winter was the best time; they could pick up a trail in the snow. He drew a map—local, unscaled, idiosyncratic—that showed sightings of the bear on it. It spanned an area of roughly twenty square miles. Stanford made a dot where he calculated the centre of the sightings to be, and he figured the den was somewhere nearby. The next day he and Michael took blankets, food, and a rifle and walked the ten miles to Stanford’s dot. They set up camp, cutting spruce boughs for a mattress and gathering wood for a fire. At dusk, they moved through the forest, sliding through its darkness, silent and thrilled, the ancient ritual sitting in their heads like a promise. It was early January, a warming wind coming down from the mountains. They walked for eight hours until Stanford saw a track. There was no mistaking it. They picked it up and followed carefully, tingling with fear and purpose.
They came on it in the dead light of a quarter moon: the grizzly standing in a clearing, its humped mass swaying over the carcass of a black bear, its muzzle red and glistening. The sight transfixed them. A bear eating a bear. Michael had never heard of this. The cannibalism seemed human in its wickedness. It stood up slowly, a graceful unfolding, and looked around, like a giant suddenly aware of interlopers. Stanford slowly raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel. Michael held his breath, waiting for the shot. Maybe Granger had been telling the truth; he put four bullets into it and it didn’t blink. Maybe it was unkillable, a monstrous totem that had endured through millennia and couldn’t be stopped by man. Stanford held the rifle there for a full minute. He had the shot, his cold finger on the trigger, the finger growing numb and less trustworthy. In that moment of hesitation he felt unsure of this kill. They were hunters, they had killed deer, patiently taking a large buck in September and watching it fall soundlessly. They bled and field dressed it, carving off pieces like a bloody puzzle, and then drew two lines of blood on one another’s cheeks as a private initiation. But killing the bear would be something else, somehow unearned; two adolescents following a map made of fear and rumour, and with blind luck they’d found the beast. Perhaps it was some nagging juju drifting back from the Bloods: They weren’t worthy of the bear. And maybe something else, Michael thought: Stanford realizing even then that he had more in common with the bear than he did with the ranchers. By the time he left for the war, Stanford was an uneasy presence. His temper was unpredictable, and he made people nervous and they shied away from him. And maybe Stanford weighed all of this in that minute he had its heart in his sights.
When h
e lowered the gun, they both stood motionless. Fifteen minutes later the bear moved off, going north in its threatening waddle. They waited another five minutes, freezing, their faces mottled with cold, and then walked over to the dead black bear, a male, not fully grown, torn apart like a chicken. They walked back to camp and made a fire and warmed themselves. What was left of the night passed slowly and they set off for home in the morning. A snowstorm blew in from the northwest, unable to penetrate the coniferous forest with any power, but waiting for them on the plain.
“Grizzlies don’t come this far south, usually,” Michael said to Edward.
Ballantyne surveyed the poplar along the ridge. “We’ll go to the east of that stand, Mountain Horse. You come in from the south and drive them out into the open. If there are any.”
So Ballantyne was taking care of the hunt now. It was fine with Michael.
Edward lit a cigarette, drawing deeply, and stared at the scenery. The Prince ate little of his lunch and had drunk more than a bottle of the Pétrus.
“This country, what you can see of it from the train, will be the future of the nation,” he said. “It is up to the Empire to see that its population is British and not alien.” He stabbed out his cigarette and stood up. “It’s a real life out here. I envy you that, Mountain Horse.” Edward and Ballantyne began walking. Michael packed up the remains of their lunch and followed.
An hour later Ballantyne and Edward split off to come from the east. Michael kept his western tack and approached slowly, curling up from the south, climbing the incline with effort. The cloud had rolled over them and the afternoon light was flat. Michael stepped carefully on fallen leaves that weren’t dry enough to rustle. There was deer scat on the ground, desiccated, a week old. Edward and Ballantyne would be set up by now. Michael edged to the east, staying downwind. He stood for a minute, looking through the trees, the dappled grey light sitting like a fog. Eighty yards away a schematic of horn bobbing lightly, the rest of the stag obscured by trees. Michael moved toward it in an arc, quietly stepping, keeping his eye on the deer. He came at it from the east, between the deer and the Prince, then broke into a run, spooking it westward, away from Edward. The haunches propelled it quickly through the trees, its magnificent silent speed briefly on display. Then it was gone.
Michael sat down and leaned against a poplar trunk. He wondered if Dunstan was bringing his mother any happiness, if happiness was possible. A part of her died with Stanford, and it would take an effort to animate what was left.
After twenty minutes he walked out of the trees and saw the Prince standing disappointed in the meadow among the last of the yellow flowers, a boy denied a sweet.
2
ALBERTA, 1923
“You whisky-kneed squaw-mongering deertick fuckbox,” said Alhew, an American horse trader who had brought his substandard nags to sell to the absent Prince. “You snivelling King-sucking stoat-shit mongrel.” Alhew was drinking shots of whisky in the bar at Longview, his curses delivered to his own reflection in the sepia mirror, though his target was Michael, standing farther down the bar. Michael had passed on every one of Alhew’s nags. The prices were inflated and the horses flawed.
“You think King Shit of Limeyville is going to even see the damn horses? What’s it to you? The price is fair, you can ask anyone. This could be a good arrangement for both of us.”
“What did you do with the good horses?” Michael asked, staring at Alhew’s reflection in the mirror, which revealed a slightly distorted version of his apoplectic eyes, his hat pushed back to reveal a high sweaty forehead.
“You know the pig-sticking son of a bitch is German. Whose side are you on? Them royals been inbreeding for two centuries it’s a miracle they ain’t born with two heads. Crap-eating Kraut defective and you’re taking his side. Why do you think we fought the war?”
“What outfit were you with?”
“Christ.”
Alhew downed another shot. He now had a string of useless horses that he couldn’t sell. He had heard about absentee royal money and thought he could cut a deal with Michael. Charge an inflated price, kick something back to Michael, and everyone benefits. The Prince visits six years from now and they’re dead of natural causes anyway.
“You wouldn’t know a deal if it lit a fire under your ass and fanned it.”
“But I know horses,” Michael said. He put his glass down and walked out of the bar.
“Blightfuck titty-brained money-killing shit-twit!” Alhew called out after him.
On Sundays Michael went to his mother’s house for dinner. In the three years he’d been home, it had remained a house of mourning over absent sons, Stanford, and Dunstan’s son Colin, who had died at the Somme. It wasn’t just the two men who weren’t there but the wives and children that would have arrived, the babies filling the space with hope and noise and shit. Michael’s failure to fill this void himself, his failure to arrive with a willowy girl who was shyly introduced, and then to arrive with news of a child on its way, threatened every Sunday. It was an unwelcome lacuna that waited for him on his mother’s porch and followed him into her parlour.
They ate a pleasant dinner discussing the price of beef and feed and the new McLaughlin-Buick Touring car. Afterwards Michael played chess with O’Connell, who had a guileless defensive game.
“They are out there, Michael,” O’Connell said, pondering his knight, one finger on the equine head, rotating it slowly in preparation of a reluctant move. “There are lovely girls. Practical. Loose if it comes to that. All kinds. But they aren’t going to set on you like hounds. They aren’t going to tree you.”
Michael nodded. He was familiar with this narrative. Dunstan would mention how he saw Sarah Arthur at the post office looking lovely, or how he had seen Olive Banks—a woman who was taller than Michael and moved like a crane, in jerky movements that seemed to apologize for her height—and how Olive was coming into herself.
“What about that French girl?”
“Marie.” He had written them about a girl he’d met in Paris, a mistake. Now she had taken on life in their heads, had become perfect.
“Nice name. I’ll bet she’s a swell girl.”
“She is.”
“You could bring her out here.”
But he couldn’t. Marie, what was the phrase he had heard so often in France? She wouldn’t translate. At any rate, she was gone. Perhaps married now, pushing a large pram through Paris, a baby girl with her mother’s smile. Michael won another game against Dunstan and drove back to the EP. The moon was distant and small, an afterthought.
It was late fall when he headed south. He didn’t have much of a plan but he had a little money saved and thought he’d take a look at the continent, perhaps go to Mexico. He wanted distance as much as adventure. He had thought that taking care of Ed’s horses would be the ideal job. Ed hadn’t returned to the ranch, and Michael was left on his own. But he had come to find it isolating. He needed movement or people, a change. His mother said her goodbyes at the house, telling him it was a vacation. He could come home when he wanted.
Dunstan drove him to the train station in Calgary. An early heavy snow had fallen in the night, and in the pale morning Michael saw a house being towed on skids down Fourth Street. It was being pulled torturously by two teams of horses, each team with ten horses yoked in twos. It looked like a funeral procession, the three-storey house being hauled away for burial.
On the train Michael sat across from a man with a meaty Irish head and thin lips. He reached a hand across. “Makin,” he said. “Bob Makin.” He was an American who worked in Hollywood and he’d been scouting locations in Alberta. They were thinking of making a movie here. “Beautiful country,” Makin said. “Look good on the screen.”
He asked Michael what he did and Michael told him he had worked for the man who was going to be King of England, Edward, the Prince of Wales.
Makin told him there was another version of royalty being created in California, made up of the sons and daughters
of farmers and factory workers made royal by luminous skin, expressive eyes, and a winning smile. They had millions of subjects. An artistocracy to be reckoned with.
“Ed’s going to be out of a job soon,” Makin said. “You aren’t going to need English princes or dukes or lords or any of that. This is the new royalty: Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks. These are the kings and queens. And the other ones, they’ll just disappear. You know why? I’ll tell you. Two reasons. First, let’s face it, they don’t do anything. Right? Second, even if they did, who cares? No one sees it anyway. The new royalty, they’re in every town in America, the world practically. Every theatre, every magazine. You can’t pick up a newspaper.”
Michael watched the country go by in ordered lines, cattle huddled near the fences.
“Mike,” Makin said. “You won’t believe the skirt down there. You look out that window. Every hick town has one pretty girl, one girl who everyone knows is going to leave soon as she’s of age. She’s too pretty to spend her life being gawked at by squarehead farmers. That girl goes to Hollywood. Skirt, I’m telling you.”
“Is there work there?”
“For the girls? Hell no, not what they came for anyway.”
“For me, I mean. You think I’d be able to find something?”
“You Italian? I know they’re using Italians in the movies to play Indians. Ride around without a shirt, look fierce.”
“I’m not Italian.”
“You could pass.”
Michael slept for a few hours and then watched the ripe promise of the Midwest, its dormant fields, the shining towns sitting primly beneath the afternoon sun, a country in bloom.
3
LOS ANGELES, 1924
The California sky, the religious ascension of its blue volume and distant descent onto the Pacific Ocean. It formed a kind of receptacle, a brilliant illusion of space and possibility, and fifty thousand people arrived that year to empty themselves into it. It was the year Charlie Chaplin married a sixteen-year-old girl. There were more than a million people in Los Angeles. The motion picture business was luring rubes from every hamlet in America. A dream had been articulated and there was no reneging on its promise. The clouds above the city looked like frayed gauze, an aureole of sun illuminating the western contours. The clouds blew east and suddenly Griffith Park was filled with light.
