Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  ‘For Charlotte to play with,’ I replied. ‘Or for me to use as patterns when I embroider designs with beads and silk thread. Tell me more about horses in your homeland, about Trotters.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Orchid, ‘my father should be here to answer this question, for he could expound upon horses by the hour with great passion …’ Her gaze became pensive, but after a moment she sighed and continued. ‘Still, I suppose I can tell you what little I know in comparison. Trotters are an old, old type of horse; they can be traced all the way back to the 1300s when the King of England decided that his subjects needed horses that were powerful and had great stamina. These horses could be ridden along at a trot for many hours even when carrying a large man. Still today owners of Trotters love to race them on the roads, wagering sums of money on the outcome of the race. Foxfire himself has been known to trot seventeen miles in one hour and arrive still fresh enough to buck off his rider at the end.’

  ‘They were all Trotters, those horses you named: Original Shales and the Darley Arabian?’

  ‘Gracious! What a prodigious memory you have!’ exclaimed Orchid, washing the sky in her painting with a mauve shade that she’d mixed from blue and red paint.

  ‘Original Shales was a stallion born in 1755 and was exceptionally fast. He is the foundation stallion for our modern Trotters. He was by the stallion Blaze, son of a racehorse called Flying Childers, and this horse was a son – no, a grandson – of the Darley Arabian. But the Darley was not a Trotter – he was a hot blood horse, an Oriental stallion with a dished face and an arched neck, who also contributed to forming the Thoroughbred horse much used in England for flat racing at a gallop. The Arab hot blood horses have been known to exist for almost three thousand years.’

  ‘Hot blood,’ I murmured to myself; I liked the sound of these words, for a creature’s blood contained life, and when I laid my hand upon the stallion’s sleek hide, it seemed to pulse with both heat and life.

  ‘Hot bloods have been imported from the Arabian desert to improve our English stock,’ Orchid said. ‘The Darley was smuggled from the Ottomans and brought into Britain in 1704.’

  ‘Why smuggled?’

  ‘The Ottoman Turks prized their horses very highly and did not wish to lose their pure bloodlines to foreign countries. In the desert, the people believe that their god, Allah, made the horse from a handful of the South Wind.’

  I gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘In our land, good medicine comes to those who dream of Sawanis, spirit of the South Wind.’

  Orchid mixed more purple paint to wash shadows on to the sides of the tent in her picture.

  ‘Does everyone in England own horses?’ I asked. ‘Does everyone ride around at a trot?’

  Orchid’s wide, thin lips curled in a smile and she rinsed her paintbrush in the tin cup of water that she used for this purpose. ‘It has been said that no one walks save for vagabonds and fools.’

  ‘What will your husband, Mr Spencer, use Foxfire for?’

  ‘He will breed Foxfire to the Indian ponies, and create a new strain of horse, one that has the toughness of the savages’ mounts, and the bone and size of a Trotter.’

  The point of my knife slipped a fraction when Orchid said the word ‘savages’; that word rolled off her tongue smooth as a rounded stone, the kind that lames you if it gets into your moccasin when you’re running fast down a trail. It rolled off her tongue so smoothly that she didn’t even notice it fall, or see how the point of my knife accidentally cut off the foot of a fox that I was creating from birchbark.

  ‘Yes,’ Orchid continued, staring dreamily across the river with her paintbrush momentarily forgotten in one hand, and dripping on to her gown, ‘Mr Spencer has high hopes for this stallion; he is going to create prosperity for us in the Red River colony. In coming years, many more settlers will arrive and there will be a great demand for strong, fine horses to trot on the roads, and pull the ploughs that will break the virgin prairie and allow us all to grow crops. A good horse will be worth a fortune, and foals from Foxfire will be worth more than any other.’

  I stared at the stallion as he gazed at the passing shoreline of rocks and white spruce, and wondered how many beaver pelts one would trade for him, adding one more beaver pelt, one more, then another on to the pile while the white trader added brass tokens to your own pile. I thought about how you would feel, under your fingers, the toil and weariness of trapping all those creatures, the ache in your legs at the end of the long trails, the ache in your shoulders at the end of the long days carrying the lodge poles on your back, carrying the cooking pots and the babies and the beaver pelts out of the bush to the trading fort. I knew that I would never have enough pelts to trade for a horse. Perhaps I was, in Orchid’s eyes, either a vagabond savage or a fool. Foxfire’s life, in Red River, would continue without me to groom him or whistle to him – I would never learn the joy of riding him, but would stumble along sadly in my moccasins.

  At noon, with the sun directly overhead and the trees standing in their own shadows, we ate cold bannock that I had made the previous evening from flour, water and baking soda. I had kneaded the dough, and stretched it round and flat before frying it over the fire in a long-handled iron skillet. With the bannock we ate strips of dried meat that Betty Goose Wing had shaved from a caribou and hung over poles to dry in the sun before wrapping them in scrolls of birchbark. They were chewy and dense and dark; their flavour lay for a long time on my tongue while the men continued rowing upstream, and Orchid dozed under her large grass hat, and Charlotte sang to herself and made the birchbark animals run along the gunwales of the boat, chasing each other.

  Presently, the roar of rapids filled our ears and, rounding a bend in the river, we saw their white boiling fury cascading down over grey rocks and sweeping to meet us in streams of bubbles and swirling knots of fast current. Often, at rapids, I took Foxfire ashore to lighten the boat’s load, and often Orchid came too for some exercise or to find something to sketch. But today, after our late start, and because the horse had been difficult, the boat captain decided that we should all stay onboard. The men pulled their oars into the boat and began instead to push the boat upstream, using their tamarack poles with iron tips to force the boat against that fast current and to thread it between the jagged teeth of the half-submerged rocks. At the front of the boat, the bows man, who had many years of experience and many miles of river running through his mind, shouted instructions. At the back of the boat, the steersman sculled with his oar, guiding the boat’s slow, erratic progress.

  I could feel the grip and pull of the river rushing past just feet away from me, on the other side of the boat’s planking. Its thundering voice filled my head, swept away all my thoughts. Sunlight bounced and swung off the boiling water in flashes sharp as arrowheads, blinding me. The stallion snorted uneasily and I stood to lay my hand against his face and stroke it, muttering soothing words that were barely audible above the river’s great shout.

  Slap! The river’s hand shoved the boat, the bow swinging wildly like the needle on a white man’s compass. ‘Hold her straight!’ roared the bows man. ‘HOLD HER!’

  Samuel Beaver’s dark, shining face contorted with pain as he poured every ounce of his strength into the length of his pole; I saw how he gritted his teeth together, and over his shoulder, I saw the pale wooden crosses built by other brigades to remember their dead, the tripmen who had drowned in these rapids. Or perhaps some had died of hernias, their guts pushing out of their bellies from the great weight of the loads they carried around the rapids on their backs, with tumplines around their foreheads.

  The boat’s nose swung again and suddenly the river seized her. I felt the triumphant surge of the water as it pushed the boat around, broadside now to the current. I glanced at the steersman as he clung to his long oar, swinging on it with his entire weight, like a wolf trying to bring down a large deer by one leg. The oar became still in his hand, a dead weight. I saw the panic flee across his face as he strained to free the end o
f the oar from where it had wedged between two rocks.

  Crash!

  A shock ran through the boat. She shuddered as if she had come alive. A jolt ran up the steering oar, and the steersman flew in an arc through the air and disappeared into the raging water; his head, sleek and wet as an otter’s, was swallowed instantly by the swirling foam. I gripped a gunwale and looked over to see that the hull of our boat was lying against a ledge of dark rock and pinned there tightly by the press of the current roaring down and down, mile after mile from the heart of the great continent, roaring out to the icy bay.

  I caught hold of Charlotte and gripped her to my side; her eyes stretched to fill her heart-shaped face, and the birchbark animals fluttered away from her fingers into the wind of that river’s rush, and were gone.

  ‘Hold your arms up!’ I shouted and when she obeyed, I tore her deerskin robe over her head, so that it would not weigh her down when we went overboard. She pressed against me, shivering in her beaded leggings, her brass bracelets gleaming on her naked arms.

  Crash!

  The boat lurched, shuddered, and began to tilt on to her side; green water poured over the gunwale and burned our legs with its cold torrent. Ride! I thought. I lunged towards the stallion, dragging Charlotte Bright Eyes with me across the pitching planks. Foxfire’s high screams of fear rang even over the river’s thunder as I yanked his rope undone – it was as well, I thought in that instant, that Orchid had shown me how to tie a knot that would slip free with one jerk on the loose end of rope.

  ‘Samuel!’ I screamed. ‘Get Orchid!’

  He dropped his useless pole and flung himself towards her; she was clutching her leather portfolio of paintings to her chest and still clung to it as Samuel wrapped one brawny arm around her waist and pulled her to the gunwale.

  I clawed my way up the side of the slanting boards, gripping Charlotte by one wrist, and caught hold of Foxfire’s mane; then I slung one leg over his back and felt the heave of his muscles. As he broke free of his stall and lunged towards the water, I dragged Charlotte on in front of me, over the horse’s wither, and we both wrapped our hands in his mane, coarse and strong as fishing line.

  He went over the side with a jump; misty spray and the taste of fish and algae and pine needles filled my mouth. The cold river tore at my legs, slapping and pushing the stallion downstream. He thrashed against the foaming green-blue-black glinting pounding water, against the swing and roll of that river. His forelegs struck out, his hooves pulling against the current, scrabbling against rocks. His nostrils were smothered in bubbles; emerged streaming white ribbons. His soaked mane plastered itself over our legs. His shoulders ran beneath us, his tail whipped in the surges, his eyes rolled white as fish bellies.

  ‘Far Runner, Wind Runner, Water Runner, come to me, carry me onwards,’ I chanted, the words from my vision dream. Water splashed into my eyes, and light shimmered there in a rainbow – for an instant, in the midst of my terror, I felt a moment of pure joy. I remembered that with a strong pawakan, one could even lie all winter beneath the ice but rise and walk again in spring when the white bears climbed from their dens.

  Then fear broke over me and I felt how the river pummelled the stallion. I felt how – like the men whose bodies were remembered with ramshackle crosses weathering on the rocky shoreline – we too might be swallowed in deep and never spat out again. Fear melted us together; Charlotte and Foxfire and I, so that we were one creature fighting for our lives in the rapids of Hill River while the sun shone bright as ice and bales of trade goods were torn from our boat and tossed downstream in the curling smash of the waves.

  Fighting sideways against the current, the stallion pressed towards shore but the river was too strong for him; it swept us away, amongst the trade bales, until at last we reached quieter water far downstream. His hooves clattering against stone, Foxfire staggered on to shore and hung his head, his sides heaving. I slid off and held out my arms for Charlotte; her face was pale, and wet with tears as well as water.

  ‘You are a brave girl,’ I told her. ‘And now you have ridden on a great horse! Dry your eyes, and we will walk along the shore.’

  She nodded and wiped at her eyes with her chubby bare arms, and I tickled her neck with the end of one of her black braids until she giggled, and took my hand. In my other hand, I gripped the horse’s lead rope. ‘Courage of a bear,’ I murmured to him. ‘Strength of a musk ox. Cunning of a fox. Grace of a deer.’ I pressed my forehead against his, and waited until his breathing calmed; staring down, I noticed that he had knocked a chip from the wall of one hoof, and that the shoe on that foot was missing, torn loose. An abrasion on one shoulder was already beginning to swell and trickle a thin stream of his hot blood.

  Presently, the three of us began to struggle along the shoreline, between groves of birch and pine, with bushes impeding our progress, and bugs circling our heads, with roots and rocks tripping us up, and one small swamp forcing us to make a detour. Finding a spruce tree, I used my knife blade to scrape off some gummy resin and smeared it over the abrasion on the stallion’s shoulder, sealing the lips of the wound together and stopping the flow of blood. Then we forged on for I was worried about Orchid’s safety, and the safety of Samuel Beaver and the other tripmen. I was also worried about whether my wooden box, containing my father’s letter and the silver brooch, had been saved from the boat wreck.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ shouted a voice in the woods ahead.

  ‘We are here!’ I cried, and presently a group of three tripmen, their clothes plastered to their skins and the fabric of their scarves and headbands bright against the dark pines, and their earrings glinting, toiled towards us. I saw the pale braids of the man who Eva had said was turning Witiko, saw the silver coins hanging from a chain at his throat, and the scar he bore, pale as gut string, across one forearm.

  ‘Thanks to God that we’ve found you,’ one of the other men said, halting before us. ‘Are you unharmed?’

  ‘Yes, and the horse. But Orchid, the white wo—’ I began to ask, but the man with the pale hair and the dark face suddenly gave a wild yell. Shivers ran down my spine. I had never heard a sound like this; it was not like the shout a man gives to convey instructions or call attention to danger, nor like the whoops that the men gave at the end of their rowing songs. It was not like the cry of a wolf, nor the bellow of a moose, nor the whistle of a marten. The echoes of that strange yell seemed to hang, ringing, amongst the thick trees, and the trees themselves seemed to crowd in around us like the walls of a mysterious lodge. I struggled for a breath of air.

  The man’s face contorted in spasms and his mouth gaped open, silent now, drooling threads of saliva. His pale blue eyes looked right at me, through me – I knew that he was seeing far off, into a wild place, a spirit world. When his eyes rolled back in his head, Charlotte gasped in terror. Then the man fell suddenly at my feet, into the pine needles and dead twigs covered in lichen. His arms flailed the ground as though it were a drum skin. His body convulsed, jerking and squirming, and the toes of his moccasins scored marks into the grey soil. I glimpsed the pale blur of his face and saw how his teeth gnawed on his lips.

  I pulled on the lead rope, backing the stallion up and hauling Charlotte with us by one arm again, until we were pressed against the base of a tall pine while the tripmen leaned over the man on the ground.

  ‘Put a stick in his mouth!’ one of them shouted, and the other man bent to obey, seizing a small dead one from the ground, but now the man’s jaw was clenched and nothing could be forced between his teeth.

  ‘He’ll choke on his tongue!’

  ‘Turn him over!’

  They bent, rolling the flailing body on to its side; it continued to bend and straighten in jerks. Charlotte began to cry again, as silently as she always did, and I turned her away and pressed her face to my soaking robe, its beaded decoration imprinting itself on her cheek. The stallion began to graze, snatching at shrubbery, the fur on his face already drying.

  ‘What is it
?’ one of the tripmen asked but the other shrugged, frowning.

  ‘Darned if I know. A fever of the brain perhaps. Temporary insanity. I saw him like this once before; it is brought on by extra exertion or strain. He will be tired and confused afterwards, then back at the oars the next day.’

  I stooped and meshed all my fingers together. ‘Put your foot in my hands,’ I instructed Charlotte and, when she obeyed, I boosted her on to the stallion’s wet back. ‘Don’t let branches poke your eyes,’ I told her, and then I tugged Foxfire’s head out of a bush he was stripping of leaves, and led him in a semicircle around the tripmen. The body on the ground was still now and a low groan escaped from the man’s mouth while the other men squatted on their heels beside him, muttering and looking concerned.

  Fever of the brain, I thought scornfully. What did white men know of such things? Anyone could see that the pale-haired man was turning Witiko, gnawing on his own lips, losing the power of speech, uttering terrible sounds instead of words, jerking and convulsing, rolling his eyes and straining to see far away into other worlds. Now, soon, as the frosts fell at night and the winter breathed down our necks, the man’s heart would turn to ice and he would begin to devour us.

  I must find Eva, I thought. The man rows in her boat so I must warn her about what I have seen today; I must see if we can feed the man some melted bear’s grease to warm him up inside again – to use the power of the bear’s heat to stop his terrible transformation.

  Ahead of us, a brown striped cat – bewitched with medicines from a leather pouch – dropped from a tree and ran away into the bushes, yowling forlornly. I hurried on, dreading what I might find when we reached the site of the boat wreck.

  Chapter 8

  The shoreline was strewn with goods: broken bales of dripping cloth, boxes of guns, soggy bags of pemmican. Men were using the other boats to ferry the cargo from our wreck which still lay, listing to one side, against a ridge of rock in the river’s foaming torrent. I scanned the scene, my eyes darting feverishly from man to man, boat to boat – and there! There was Samuel Beaver, bent over a keg from which he was prising the lid to check the state of the beans inside. And there! Orchid was standing on a rock, spreading out rectangles of something white! I panted with relief, and urged Foxfire through a grove of birch towards her.