“Sometimes,” he acknowledged, studying her profile. In the blocky shadows he thought she looked older than her eighteen years, her features harsher. He wondered about her time in the East. He knew vaguely that Big John had sent her to Montreal, and that from there she had gone to a Catholic convent in Vermont, but that was all. Although her grandparents in Montreal had sent Big John periodic updates on her progress, to Gabriel’s knowledge Celine had never written anyone in the valley, nor had Big John ever attempted to communicate with her.
Standing on the lip of the bank, slim and ramrod straight, she stared at the stars through the bare black web of overhanging branches. “My mother killed herself near this spot, did you know that?”
It was her matter-of-fact tone that rattled him more than her words. “Uh… I, ah…”
She turned, laughing. “Didn’t you know?”
Defensively he said: “Yes, I knew.” Her laughter came again, taunting, and he blurted out: “Everyone in the valley knows.”
She turned silent at that, then said more quietly: “Yes, I suppose they do.” She came toward him, seemingly gliding over the bent, tangled grass. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes wide and unblinking, without fear. Taking his hand in hers, she placed it firmly over her left breast.
Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat, and his fingers flexed convulsively as she ran the backs of her knuckles up his arm to his shoulder. In the shadows, her eyes looked black and bottomless. He drew her closer with his free arm, while the hand on her breast grew rough with desire. Leaning into him, she breathed softly against his throat. Her hands went behind his head and she tilted his face toward hers. Her lips brushed his, light as a downy feather, and her tongue traveled along his teeth. Gabriel’s arm tightened at the small of her back. Her knees buckled and she slid into the grass, pulling him with her. He moved hungrily over her, but, as he did, she suddenly twisted her face away, gasping: “Non! Gabriel, no!”
He grunted unintelligibly, moving his hand away from her breast to search for the hem of her skirt. Without warning she jerked her knee up between his thighs, driving it hard into his groin. Crying out hoarsely, Gabriel lurched to his side and rolled free. Overhead, the stars skittered and danced like lances of white fire.
“Animal!” Celine shouted. “Pig!”
Gabriel whimpered, his body spasming. He lay curled in a fetal position with both hands cradling his crotch. Tears streaked his cheeks, and the brassy taste of bile tainted the back of his throat. He could hear Celine pacing swiftly back and forth across the tiny clearing. The murmur of her words were too faint to catch, but the sound was furious. He rolled painfully to his knees.
“I liked you, Gabriel,” she cried, stopping and whirling to face him. “I thought you were my friend.”
Her words only slowly penetrated the sluggish clot of his brain, then had to be consciously arranged in order before he could make sense of them. She went on before he could even contemplate a reply.
“Big John will kill you for this.”
He stared up through a tattered, blue-black veil of his own hair, hanging limply across his face. Celine seemed to tower over him, a monument of flowing dark cloth topped by the tear-blurred oval of her face.
“God and le diable,” he gasped. “Why did you do that?” Yet even as he spoke, his mind began to clear. Leaning weakly against a tree, he said: “Go. Tell Big John if that is what you want to do.”
She looked startled by his response. “Maybe I will,” she said, taking a step backward. “But maybe I won’t.”
“Maybe I will tell him myself,” Gabriel said. “Maybe he would like to know what tricks the nuns have taught his daughter.”
“Gabriel, no!” She looked stricken. “Do you hate me so?”
Numbly he shook his head. No, he thought, he didn’t hate her, and the stark terror he saw on her face quickly wiped away his brief sense of triumph. The pain in his groin pulsed through his body, though, and he leaned his head against the rough bark of the tree and closed his eyes. “Sacre démon,” he murmured.
“Gabriel, you would not tell?”
“No,” he said wearily. “I will not tell.”
Whispered then: “You are my friend, Gabriel. You are the only friend I have out here.”
His thoughts listed against his will, starting down a long chute into blackness.
“Peter,” Celine said as if from far away. “You are like Peter, so brave and true.”
Celine and Peter, a canoe sliding through the murky waters of the Pembina. He could see the Chippewa warrior Big John had shot standing tall and proud and bloodstained on the prairie. Buffalo ran in the distance. Gabriel could hear their distinctive grunts, smell the musk-tinged dust of their passage. I am dreaming, he told himself, and thought it odd that he could be so aware as he slept.
He sat up with a start. The tiny clearing was empty, the breeze calm. The moon had risen nearly straight overhead. It stared down at him like a single, elliptic eye. Teeth chattering from the cold, Gabriel started to rise, then sank back with a moan. Slumping against the tree, he took a deep, steadying breath. After a couple of minutes, he braced his hands against the rough bark and forced himself to stand.
Off in the distance he could hear the sounds of celebration from the bois brûle camp. The reedy sway of a fiddle and the wheezing of Nicolas Quesnelle’s squeeze box added to the merriment. Mass would be long over by now, the election, too. He must have slept longer than he realized.
Gabriel’s stride was slow and cautious as he made his way out of the brush. He paused at the edge of the trees, looking across the bare, lumpy ground toward the cabin and sheds. The rawhide-covered blades of the windmill were silhouetted by the dancing light of the bois brûle fires. Men and women moved back and forth in the orange glow. Some danced a Red River jig near the village center. Laughter rippled everywhere.
Celine was nowhere to be seen, but Alec stood on the hub of a nearby cart, staring across the camp. Following the direction of his gaze, Gabriel saw René Turcotte, looking stunned and slightly overwhelmed amid a knot of friends and well-wishers who were shouting toasts to his victory over Joseph Breland in the recent election. To one side stood Big John, a grin as taut as catgut stretched across his face.
Chapter Eight
Reining away from the caravan, Pike loped his little bay east over the flat plain of the valley. It felt good to cut himself loose from the ear-splitting shrieks of the greaseless carts, the whinnying ponies and lowing oxen, the barking, snarling dogs—more wolf than canine—and the laughter, shouts, and cajoling of the half-breeds.
To a man accustomed to solitude, the constant babble and unrelenting cheerfulness of the mixed-blood village became a weight difficult to bear. It made the air he breathed seem thick and sullied, and smothered his senses with too many sights and sounds and odors.
Clear of the noise and grit, Pike slowed the bay to a walk. It was a fair day for leaving, he thought, cool but with the promise of warmth later on. There had been frost again that morning, but the sky was clear, the breeze coming in off the Hair Hills dry and comfortable.
They’d gotten a slow start this first day on the trail, but then quickly settled into what seemed to be a familiar routine. Pike counted more than two hundred carts stretched out along the river trail that followed the left bank of the Tongue, each drawn by a single ox or wild-maned pony, driven by a man, woman, or older child who walked beside it or, on occasion, rode in the seatless bed of the cart on a folded buffalo robe, legs dangling through the front slats. The lead cart, owned by René Turcotte and driven by his wife Camille, flew a Métis flag—a white figure eight laid on its side against a scarlet background—-atop an eight-foot staff lashed to the headboard.
Many of the carts were empty, in anticipation of the pemmican, dried meat, and robes yet to be harvested. Others carried personal gear and camping supplies, or firewood brought along to augment the skimpy lot the plains would provide. Maybe a third of the carts hauled lodge poles twelve to f
ifteen feet long, slid between the slats or canted over the tailgates and lashed in place, bobbing resiliently and rattling like old bones. Strung out single file, Pike estimated the whole affair ran close to a mile in length, with a fair-size herd of extra stock—oxen and horses—bringing up the rear.
Turcotte, his scarlet tuque settled snugly on his head like a knitted banner, rode at the head of the column. Perhaps half of the sixty-plus half-breeds who’d eventually come in for the hunt rode with him. Pike saw McTavish among them, his big roan feisty and hard to handle among the smaller, less aggressive Indian ponies. As he watched, the group began to break apart, scattering toward the hills or over the plain to the south. Only McTavish rode east, smiling as he drew near.
“Good mornin’ to ye,” the Scotsman boomed as he reined alongside. “Ye’re still with us, I see. I need to apologize for my lack of courtesy these past few days.”
“No need,” Pike answered simply. “I’ve fared well.”
“Good, good.” McTavish glanced at the crawling train. “’Tis a thing to see, is it not? ’Tis what they live for, Mister Pike. What they dream and breathe and love for. Every year I tell myself I’m too old to run buffalo with ’em, that I need to be stayin’ home, proper-like for a Scotsman of breedin’ and education, but I never do.” He laughed, his eyes sparkling. “’Tis a fever, running the shaggies is, and once ye’ve been touched by it, ’twill never let ye go, though I guess I don’t need to be tellin’ ye, what’s hunted yon mountains a spell, the feelin’s I’m speakin’ of.”
A smile feathered across Pike’s face. “Running buff can shine, for a fact,” he admitted.
McTavish fussed momentarily with the loose ends of his reins, his expression reluctant. “The lad, Gabriel. He was tellin’ me the other day of Duprée, who hailed from the White Horse Plain along the Assiniboine River before he ran off, and of Rubiette, both of ’em back from the far reaches.” He paused and cleared his throat, and Pike felt the muscles along his jaw tighten. The bay flicked an ear, sensing the change in his mood. “I’ll not insult ye by askin’ if ’tis them that brought ye here,” McTavish went on. “Nor what ye intend toward them. But I will say this. Be sure that if blood’s to be spilled, the man ye spill it from truly deserves it, for the mixed-bloods won’t tolerate a troublemaker, and they’ll hang a murderer quick if the cause isn’t just.”
“All right,” Pike said stiffly.
“Sometimes ye have to judge a people by their standards rather than ye own, whether ye agree with them or not. I’ve lived among the Métis for nigh on to thirty years now, and I don’t fully understand them yet. But I accept them, Mister Pike, and to the best of my ability, I judge them in their own light.
“They’re a noble race, taken as such, and not near the savage some would call them. ’Tis a thing ye may want to keep in mind in regard to Duprée and Rubiette. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“I reckon I can handle my own affairs, McTavish,” Pike said.
“Sure, and ’tis only right that ye do. I’ll say no more on the subject, Mister Pike, and thank ye for hearin’ me out this far.”
The wind strengthened briefly, carrying to them a veil of dust and the strong odor of cattle and horses. Within it, Pike caught the faint stanzas of a song he remembered from the mountains, a tune popular among the French trappers, although he couldn’t recall the name. Eyeing the distant line of the Hair Hills, he said: “Where are we headed, McTavish?” He nodded toward the steep, rugged slopes—a barrier to the plains beyond. “Is there another trail that’ll take us through?”
“Aye. We’ll be followin’ the Tongue River Trail to the top, though ’tis a guess and a wonder from there. Paget’s bunch left yesterday, headin’ straight to Saint Joseph and the trail that leads on up past Pembina Mountain. That’s the one we followed from Charlo’s cabin until we swung south to avoid the settlement.”
Pike nodded, putting it together in his mind. “That’ll put us well south of them.”
“Don’t I wish it were so, but I fear not. If they spent last night at Saint Joseph, they’ll be climbin’ through the hills today, then turn south to follow the Ridge Trail. ’Tis what we both want, the trail. ’Tis the quickest and easiest route to the buffalo, with wood and water along the way, and plentiful game to those who get there first. We’ll make fair time today with the country flat like it is, but we’ve got the hills ourselves to climb soon enough, and no easy road for the carts, to be sure.”
“Sounds like we’ll be coming out on top pretty close to one another,” Pike said.
“Aye, and the caravan that gets there first will have the road to themselves, while the other will be forced onto the prairie, unless they want to follow along behind on what the first lead caravan leaves them.”
Pike glanced at the cart train. In the light of this new information, its plodding gait seemed unmercifully slow.
“Ye’re right, of course,” McTavish said, as if reading his thoughts. “But ye can’t argue the point with them. They’re not interested in the white man’s logic so much as they are their own traditions. ’Tis the way of the land, they’d tell ye, if ye urged them to hurry. À la façon du pays.”
Pike didn’t ask for a translation. He understood the Indian mind well enough to know that McTavish was probably right. And he suspected that, despite their declarations of conversion to a Christian religion, their carts, and even their mode of dress, their mothers’ blood wouldn’t be so easily displaced.
“Still, ye have to admire them for it, too. If ye think about it, there’s sense to be made of their ways.”
“I don’t see it,” Pike said.
“Ye might, was ye to quit usin’ a European mind to do ye figurin’ with. Tell me. What would happen if we quickened our pace?”
“We’d beat the Pembina hunters to the Ridge Trail. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Well, sure, we’d beat the Pembina hunters this season. But what about the next hunt, or the one after that? Would we beat them then, or would they have learned to expect our dirty tricks by then, and maybe pull something a little dirtier? Like try to slip past us without our knowin’, or not tell us when they planned to pull out at all. Maybe they wouldn’t make any effort to stay in touch with us once we reached Sioux country, so that we’d be without their help, if the situation is desperate enough, and them without ours. We’re rival outfits, Mister Pike, true enough, but still of one mind and one heritage. Without traditions, includin’ that which sanctions collaboration, we’d… they’d… lose that thing that makes them unique. What makes them a nation.”
“A nation of half-breeds?”
“Exactly! A nation of people who would be without one if they hadn’t created their own. Neither white nor Indian nor Canadian nor American. Not French or Scottish, Cree or Assiniboine, either. Métis, Mister Pike, and, aye, a mongrel nation if that’s what ye want to call it, but a damn’ fine one, too, and workin’ pretty well, for all its peculiar ways.” He studied Pike thoughtfully for a moment. “Do ye see what I’m sayin’?”
“You’re talking a lot of noble crap, as far as I’m concerned. What it boils down to is that we’re gonna go hungry this year because the Pembina hunters will likely beat us to the Ridge Trail, where their hunters will scare off the game we need to feed ourselves until we reach the buffalo ranges.”
McTavish smiled, sadly, it seemed. “Well, ’tis true enough in its own way, I suppose, though I might argue that we’ll be maintainin’ our honor by maintainin’ our pace, and, in that way, we’ll be maintainin’ the trust and co-operation between our two groups. ’Tis a fragile thing, trust is. Once it’s broken, ’tis hard to repair.”
Pike shrugged but didn’t reply. McTavish seemed equally willing to let the matter drop. After a couple of minutes the lanky Scotsman began to whistle, the same melody the breeze had carried to them from the Métis caravan earlier. Heard in wind-tattered snatches, Pike hadn’t been able to identify it. Hearing it whole from McTavish, the name came to him quickly enough.
“‘Alouette’.”
McTavish glanced at him. “Ye know the song, do ye?”
“From the mountains. There was a Frenchman with Vanderburg’s brigade…” His voice trailed off in memory. They’d called him Frenchy, and Pike and Arch had trapped with him for a spell along the upper reaches of Rock Creek, which fed into the Yellowstone. Pike could hear him in his mind yet, the voice soft because it was Blackfeet country they traveled through, but rich and full all the same. It brought back a pang of sadness and loss to recall those days, and his face turned hard.
“Well, ’tis a lonely life sometimes,” McTavish said after a while, averting his eyes. “Some it doesn’t bother, or so I’ve been told. Meself, I had enough of it on the Jack River, my first winter in the pays d’en haut.”
“Pays d’en haut?”
“The North Country, Mister Pike. The land we call up there.”
“I don’t reckon loneliness ever bothered me much,” Pike replied.
In some ways, he thought loneliness could even make a man stronger; certainly it made him more resourceful. He considered it a weakness to depend on anyone too much. Arch was the proof of that, and he was dead now because of it.
Twitching the roan’s reins, McTavish began to angle away. “I’d best be gettin’ back. The first day or so is always a might touchy for the harness stock. I was wonderin’, though, would ye be interestin’ in scoutin’ some tomorrow? I’d send ye with Gabriel, if ye don’t mind the lad’s company.”
“Fine by me. I got nothing against the boy.”
“Good, and good day to ye, Mister Pike. I’ll see ye at supper tonight.” He rode off with a quick wave, the roan kicking up little spurts of dust that the breeze whipped away.
* * * * *
Reining up alongside Gabriel, Pike stared down the long, steep slope to where the Métis camp was entrenched at the base of the Hair Hills. The loose stock had been driven out onto the plain to graze for the evening. He noticed that Turcotte had already doubled the guard on the horses and oxen. Come dusk, they’d run the whole bunch inside the cordon of carts. Tomorrow the caravan would turn straight into the Hair Hills and, barring bad luck, would be on top by sunset. The country up there was claimed by the Sioux, but they were close enough here that no one wanted to take any chances.
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