Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  On the fourth day of the feasting and racing, as the crowds grew still thicker on the plain, and as the drumming rose higher in the Cree camp, I left Charlotte playing with other children and wandered off between a group of Assiniboine tents. My feet ached from the hard, cold ground. My ears ached from the surge of noise, and my belly growled with hunger. I paused to rest against a wagon wheel, slumping in my blanket. A line of picketed horses stood with heads drooping as they dozed in the thin sunlight. Their breath smoked white in the cold air. There was a scrawny black with a large head and a kind eye, a bright chestnut with a blonde mane, and two horses beneath layers of blankets. One had legs of muddy brown, and a black tail, while the other was a pale, sandy buckskin. The two blanketed horses were tall, especially the muddy brown. On its head it wore a mask made of hide, and bright red and yellow feathers; tassels hung down over its nostrils in a luxuriant fringe.

  My eyes wandered on across the scene; women were husking heads of corn and dropping them into an iron pot, suspended over a fire, to boil. The pot’s steam curled up and mingled with the plumes from the horses’ nostrils. A group of young women on one side of the fire were roasting marrow bones and then cracking them with stones and sucking out the fat; their mouths shone with grease as they giggled and chatted.

  Two men sat on stones nearby and played a game of change hands while a small crowd of spectators gathered to watch. The man wearing a hat of grey badger hair held one knuckle bone in the palm of one hand, and two knuckle bones in the other hand. He closed his fingers over the bones and swayed back and forth. His hands darted beneath the blanket draped over his legs, then waved in the air above his head in a blur of motion as fast as a bird’s wingbeats. Finally, he crossed his arms behind his back. The man in a red fox hat, who was his opponent, leaned forward, his eyes darting after the waving hands like the eyes of a hawk watching the scurrying of a mouse.

  ‘Haw, haw! Haw, haw!’ the onlookers shouted, trying to guess which hand the bones had been changed over into, and who would win this round of the game. At the men’s feet lay their wagers: a folded blanket, a buffalo horn for carrying gunpowder in.

  ‘The two bones are in your left hand. The one bone is in your right!’ cried the man beneath the fox hat.

  A shock jolted through my slumped body and my eyes, drooping with fatigue, flew wide open. I stepped forward, skirting the fire, brushing past the reaching nose of a picketed horse.

  ‘Pierre?’ I said, squatting to see beneath his hat.

  The steersman’s face tilted towards me; his grin gleamed mockingly. ‘Oui, c’est moi,’ he said. ‘Who is asking? Ah, c’est la jolie fille, Amelia.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘The Company sent me to trade,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘What are you doing here yourself, heh? I haven’t seen your Métis man, your Gabriel.’

  ‘I don’t care where he is!’ I said hotly but Pierre only winked.

  ‘My next wager!’ he called to his opponent. He thought for a moment. Then he reached into a pocket of his capote and pulled out something silver that he tossed on to the ground. Its twin hearts shone on the trampled stems of dead prairie grass, and the crown above the hearts was speckled with points of light.

  ‘It is my brooch!’ I shouted in astonishment.

  Pierre’s hand shot out and closed over the luckenbooth. ‘Prove it,’ he said. ‘Many people own brooches. What does it say, the writing on the back?’

  ‘True heart is true riches. Simon and Mary,’ I recited. Pierre grinned again, and opened his fingers, turning the brooch over. I leaned down, breathing hard as though I had been running. The girls with the marrow bones crowded around, and all of us could see the deep, spidery score of the lettering, of those words that my father had given to my mother, those words forming a promise that was broken.

  ‘It is my brooch,’ I repeated, and Pierre caught hold of my hand and laid the silver’s coldness on my palm, and wrapped my fingers over it, grinning.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded, my voice fierce with shock.

  Pierre shrugged, his eyes suddenly sullen. He spat into the fire, beneath the pot of boiling corn. ‘Eva gave it to me. She did not say it was yours.’

  ‘What? Eva? Why?’

  ‘She gave it to me in payment for untying the red cheval. At Robinson Portage. She wanted to get you in trouble with the white woman.’

  My mind reeled back to that terrible evening of rain and sleet, when the grandfather bear had chased the panic-stricken stallion away from our camp, thrashing aside the underbrush. I recalled how afterwards, Orchid had not spoken to me for many days and how Eva, instead of me, had sat on the bench beside her and how they had murmured together, bent over the sketching paper.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I thought it was the Witiko man, Angus, who kept causing trouble for the horse.’

  Pierre shrugged again. ‘Eva was jealous of you. Bad blood between your families in the past, non? She wanted revenge.’

  ‘She found my brooch after the boat wreck and stole it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But why are you telling me this?’ I asked, although I already knew the answer, for I had heard Eva and Pierre arguing on the edge of the Métis camp, the day that I rode with the buffalo.

  Now Pierre’s red lips curled in a sneer and he bit on to the end of a marrow bone so that it gave a sharp crack. ‘What do I care for her and her secrets and her revenge?’ he said. ‘I care nothing,’ and he spat a piece of bone on to the ground.

  ‘But what about the stallion?’ I demanded. ‘Didn’t you care about him? Didn’t you think that something bad could have happened to him running free in the woods?’

  Pierre spread his hands. ‘Nothing happened. Allez! Take your brooch and go before I ask for it back!’

  I glared at him for another moment but he ignored me, until finally I turned and walked off, awash with anger and shock.

  On the fifth day, the day before the white man’s feast of Christmas, I awoke in the schooner as usual amongst a heap of sleeping children. It was very early yet; only a hint of light softened the canvas roof above me. I lay still and thought about Pierre’s confession. It was to impress Eva that he had carried out her suggestion and not merely for the payment of a brooch. But it had done him no good in the end for Eva had her sights set on marrying a Company clerk and one day having a stone house. I thought about how I had misjudged Angus, and how Eva had clouded my judgement with her sly whispers about Angus’s heart turning to ice.

  If only I had known sooner that Angus had known my father. Then I might have been able to find out more. Instead, I had avoided him because of Eva’s hints of danger. Eva, I thought now, was like an ermine in winter. Its coat is all white but the tip of its tail is black, and it twitches this tip so that birds of prey notice it. When the bird goes for that tip, the ermine leaps away unscathed. Eva had used Angus like a black tip.

  Simon Mackenzie could ride any horse that was ever foaled, Angus had said. He had a stallion called Lightfoot, a buffalo runner. Now I treasured these words as though they might bring me closer to the man who had fathered me and then disappeared into the silence of the land.

  As I lay there in the schooner, the memory of the muddy brown horse that I’d seen the day before returned. My mind drifted away on to other things but that horse’s memory kept bothering me, like a black fly tangled in the hair around my ears. I didn’t know why I kept thinking about that horse, about how tall it had been, about the wide nostrils beneath the fringe of bright feathers on its face mask. Finally, I decided to throw off my blanket and slip quietly from the schooner to see if I could find that horse again on its picket line. I didn’t know why I was doing this. I just had a feeling in my belly like the feeling I got when it was time to check my trap lines or my snares; that feeling that there was something I needed to pay attention to.

  By now other people were stirring in the camps. Women were rousing flames from banks of embers and smoke rose int
o the dawn sky. My breath puffed before my mouth. I pulled a piece of dried meat from the pouch I carried, and sucked its dark sweetness as I wandered around, wending between travois and tents and schooners. A man shaved over a basin of water, the razor’s blade a gleam in the rising sun. A girl carried armloads of hay to a spotted pony that nickered in pleasure.

  ‘Amelia!’

  I swung around at the voice.

  His eyes were still and dark, and filled with wind and sky that I fell down into. Then I ducked my head and looked away. All I felt was shame because Gabriel Gunner had thought so little of me that he’d broken his promise to visit me at the stone fort and was here, instead, at a wedding feast.

  I broke into a fast walk, dodging around the spotted pony snatching up mouthfuls of hay, leaping aside as a dog pack rushed by.

  ‘Amelia!’ he called again but I didn’t turn. I broke into a trot, my face flaming. He was nothing to me, I thought. He was just one more broken promise. Just another man who disappeared.

  Chapter 15

  Gabriel’s moccasins beat the ground behind me. His hand caught me by one arm and slowed my rush. I kept my arm as stiff as a branch in his grasp.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s forgotten! You promised you’d come and see me at the stone fort!’ My lips were stiff as frostbitten fingers.

  ‘But I am coming! I only reached St François Xavier two days ago from the trading trip around Lake Winnipeg. Then my father asked me to stay here and race his horses. I could not go against my father’s wishes. I told him I would race for the last time today and then ride north tomorrow, to find you.’

  I allowed my eyes to flicker back to his face. In his own eyes there was no shadow of a lie; they were clear as water over stones.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m looking for Foxfire – he has been stolen.’ I tugged against his hand on my arm, turning away again, but his grip held me fast.

  ‘When did this happen? I will help you search for him!’

  ‘Let me go!’

  His hand jumped off my arm, and I turned and began to walk on, staring at the toes of my moccasins. ‘When was he stolen?’ Gabriel persisted, falling into step beside me as I continued heading for the brown horse’s picket line.

  ‘Two weeks ago,’ I explained. Suddenly, words poured from me like a spring torrent. I told Gabriel about my meeting with Pierre, and how I had learned of Eva’s treachery. I pulled the brooch from my pouch, and unwrapped it from its covering of deerhide. It lay in Gabriel’s broad palm, licked by morning sunshine. When he bent over it, his long hair swung forward, and the dentalia shells threaded on the strands laid their cool touch against my cheek. He turned the brooch over and read the inscription while I waited, gazing over his shoulder.

  Beyond him, on its picket line, stood the muddy brown horse still blanketed and wearing the feathered face mask.

  ‘It is strange,’ said Gabriel, his brow furrowed. ‘I have a fiddle at home with these same words upon it.’

  ‘What words?’

  ‘True heart is true riches. There is a small metal piece screwed to the back of the fiddle, with these words upon it. Is it a proverb from the Scottish nation?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe so. Or maybe it is from one of their stories. Or their heroes.’ My mind flashed quickly over stories that the Scotsmen had told around the stove in the long winter evenings in York Factory while my mother sat sewing mittens; stories about strange creatures called kelpies which were half woman and half seal, and about giants, and standing grandfather stones, and manitous of the land that the men called wee folk.

  ‘I must go and get the horses ready,’ Gabriel replied, handing the brooch back to me. ‘My father wants some of them to go in the trotting races.’

  He glanced up and scanned the sky for the position of the sun. ‘I must go,’ he repeated. ‘Amelia, my family’s farm is three miles west of here, at a bend in the Assiniboine. If I cannot find you after the race, will you meet me at the farm? There is a cabin of peeled logs, a stable and a small herd of horses. It is the only farm at the river’s bend.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a smile tugging at my mouth and at Gabriel’s mouth too. The dark brown fur of his buffalo hat flared reddish in the sun. Beyond this nimbus of light, the muddy brown horse at the picket line stamped a hind hoof beneath the hem of his blankets, and shook his head inside the feathered mask. Something about the movement caught my attention.

  My gaze sharpened. My eyes ran along the horse’s back – ‘the top line’ as Orchid called it – beneath the covering of blankets. I considered the black tail. I stared at the hard, dark legs, the flatness of the knees, the shape and size of the hooves. I thought about the arc of the blanketed neck. There was no forelock hanging between the ears for it had been braided and tied back. The horse’s muzzle was muddy brown beneath the mask’s fringe of feathers. I stared at the size and shape of the nostrils.

  ‘What is it?’ Gabriel asked, turning to look.

  I whistled, low and sweet. Once, twice. The horse had fallen back into a doze beside the blanketed buckskin. I whistled a third time. The horse’s head swung up; I saw the shine of eyes inside the holes in the mask. His ears flickered towards me.

  Into my stomach leaped the feeling that I got when I found something big in one of my traps, some animal larger and with a better pelt than I could have hoped for.

  ‘When is the trotting race?’ I asked, gripping Gabriel’s arm.

  ‘Very soon. Look, already the horses are gathering. I must go and get mine ready.’

  I followed the line of his pointing arm to see, beyond the wagons and tents, a knotted bunch of horses gathering on the main track leading through the settlement. They pawed and stamped, their mouths foaming with excitement, and sweat dampening their necks.

  ‘I am racing. Please help me!’ I said, and pulled him close. ‘That mud-coloured horse in the mask? I am riding him in the race. Just before it starts, I am going to jump on that horse. I need you to cut his picket line with a knife. Then I need you to do something here by his owner’s tent. Delay the chase.’

  He stared at me incredulously. ‘I have a horse you could ride if you –’

  ‘I think he’s Foxfire. That brown horse. I am going to steal him back. Help me.’

  He grinned in sudden delight. ‘Ah, it is the highest honour! Amongst warriors, it is the highest honour to steal a hobbled horse from the enemy camp.’

  Gabriel slid his knife out from its sheath inside his buffalo coat. The look he gave me was steady and shining; it held the solemn joy that I felt when I danced, stomping my feet to the drum. It was a joy that raised bumps along my skin.

  ‘Charlotte is with the family of Jean-Paul and Louise Laval,’ I said. ‘Whatever happens, will you find her and take her to your mother?’

  Gabriel nodded. ‘Don’t worry about her; I will keep her safe.’

  Shoulder to shoulder, we stared at the line of gathering horses being held in check behind a stretched rope that two men held across the track.

  ‘That man will start the race.’ Gabriel pointed to a tall white man in a rawhide jacket who stepped forward with a raised gun.

  ‘Now!’ Gabriel said into my ear; I felt the tickle of his lips.

  When we lunged forward, the picketed horses all shied in alarm like a school of frightened fish. I saw the flash of Gabriel’s knife arcing towards the picket rope, and I grasped the blankets and dragged them backwards over the horse’s tail, dodging to avoid the lash of a hind foot. As the blankets laid the horse’s neck bare, I saw his black mane was hogged off short. At this strange sight, a wave of panic washed through me. I was making a terrible mistake. But it was too late now to stop.

  I sprinted forward and flung myself upward, clawing that horse’s muddy side, up that familiar height of muscle and ribs. I flung my leg over as Gabriel threw the severed line from the halter rope to me. The end of it stung across my fac
e like a whip before I snatched it from the air and hauled the horse’s head around to face an opening between the tents. Two men were crowding out through a tipi doorway, pushing aside the flap of buffalo skin, shouting angrily. One of them raised his gun and fired it into the air. The picketed horses leaped again, and beyond the wagons the horses gathered for the trotting race leaped forward too, spooked and running too soon, plunging into the rope that was quickly dropped to lie beneath their thundering hooves. I glanced back in time to see Gabriel throw himself around the knees of the man with the gun and bring him crashing to the ground.

  I dragged on the halter rope, bringing the horse around to face the main track where the trotters were already darting away, their manes billowing. A snort shook my horse’s ribcage. He swung around a tent, a child, two dogs, a horse pulling a travois of branches loaded with blankets and kettles. His stride smoothed out; his legs became sweeping arcs of sinew and bone. Those flashing legs swung us on to the track. His hooves hammered the frozen ground. Breath streamed from his nostrils in one long, uninterrupted, white plume. His neck stretched out, his ears strained forward. His eyes bulged and sparked in the mask holes; he sucked in the sight of the hindquarters rising and falling ahead of us. His hind legs thrust against the ground’s resistance. His front legs disappeared under his belly with each stride. His back and front hooves breezed past each other; only a sliver of space existed between them.

  He was a horse, I was sure, who could trot seventeen miles in one hour.

  There were more gunshots behind us in the camp; and then the sound of galloping hoof beats and shouting. The spectators lining the track jeered and yelled. I glanced over my shoulder. The galloping horse was the buckskin that had been picketed under blankets. He pounded after us, a tiny struggling figure far back down the track.

  We swept on. I pummelled my mount with my heels but he wouldn’t break stride, for he had been trained to hold a trot in a race. Now we were catching up to the knotted mass of other trotters, now we were pushing our way through. Bridles, wild eyes, knees clad in wool and leather, brass tacks decorating saddles, feathers in forelocks, braided tails – they all surged through my vision. Now we were through, breaking free, forging ahead.