Red River Stallion

by Troon Harrison

  We waited while he fumbled in his doeskin pouch for a pipe, and filled it with wild tobacco, and tamped it down with one thumb. He drew on the stem to make it burn.

  ‘I had a horse, a buffalo runner called Lightfoot. That horse could outrun anything on the plains. It was descended from the Spanish stock brought over centuries ago, the stock that drifted north, traded by the tribes, running free. Lightfoot was a dappled grey, steel grey like a good gun barrel, like a stone. He had some of the blanco diablo blood in his veins.’

  ‘Like the story,’ Charlotte whispered in my ear and I nodded and hugged her closer.

  ‘One day,’ my father continued, ‘Lightfoot was stolen, rustled away when I was buffalo hunting south towards the hills. I was pretty sure that a man from the North West Company had taken him. This man had been tampering with trap lines before this, making a nuisance of himself, stirring up the Cree people against the Company traders, offering them better prices for their furs.

  ‘I set out on foot to find Lightfoot. I tracked him southwards and westwards for two days and then I came upon the body of the man, killed by the Sioux. I began to try burying him. The ground was soft, for it was early autumn and it had been raining. I thought if I could just scoop out a shallow grave, I would pile rocks upon the top of it. But while I was working, a band of North West Company men rode up to me; they had been tracking me while I was tracking their companion. They accused me of murder. They fought me to the ground and tied my hands behind my back, and led me north, walking behind a horse.

  ‘They took me to Fort Gibraltar, and lodged a formal charge of murder. They knew it was a false charge, but they wanted me out of their way so they could trade with the Cree themselves. The charge was never proven, one way or another, but my name was tainted. The Hudson’s Bay Company sent me back to England and terminated my contract. They shipped me out through Montreal. When I got back to Scotland, I found my old parents were dying, and I had two younger sisters who needed to be cared for. It took me several years to find them both good men to marry, and to see them settled. Then I took ship and came back, crossing at my own expense, coming up the St Lawrence River into Lower Canada, heading west to Rupert’s Land by canoe and horse. I came back to the Red River colony and began my new life as a free trader. By now the two rival companies had merged, but I wanted to work only for myself amongst the tribes and with the Métis. They gave me a new name because the old one was tainted, and to keep alive the memory of that good buffalo running horse.’

  ‘But what about my mother? Why didn’t you come to find us?’ I gulped tea, scalding my throat, choking and spluttering.

  ‘I sent a message to her with a tripman heading back to York Factory, a verbal message this time. I asked her again to come and join me. But in the autumn, when the boats returned, the messenger told me that Mary Mackenzie had married another trader, the fort’s baker, and had a second daughter.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Charlotte piped up suddenly in her grave, sweet voice. My father inclined his head and smiled again; just for a moment, his face flowed upwards like river water in summer. Then it folded back into its long creases.

  A log shifted in the wood stove. A baby wailed and was hushed. Children climbed beneath sleeping robes, giggling and talking in Michif.

  My father’s story soaked down into my understanding slowly, like rain soaking into ground after a long drought.

  ‘What happened to Lightfoot?’ I asked at last.

  ‘Gone to be part of the Sioux nation, never seen again in these parts,’ my father said, sucking on his pipe and gazing into the distance of the land. When the bowl was empty, he tamped the ashes out into the stove, and put the pipe bowl and stem away in his pouch. Gently, he refolded the letter and held it out to me along with the brooch.

  ‘You must always keep these,’ he said gently. ‘They are a part of you.’

  ‘Gabriel has a fiddle with these same words upon it,’ I said. ‘Is it a saying from the Scottish nation?’

  ‘No, it is the motto of my family. A fiddle?’

  Gabriel carried it over and laid it on my father’s knees; his lean fingers smoothed the shining wood in loving recognition. ‘Yes, this was mine once. I traded it for a horse, after I found out that Mary Mackenzie was never going to join me. I lost my music then.’

  ‘But you can still play?’ I asked.

  My father tucked the fiddle beneath his chin and lifted the bow to the strings. A short ripple of notes tripped hesitantly over each other. A slow smile stretched my father’s generous mouth. Faster, the bow slid over the strings and the fiddle sang out, pure and sweet. My father rose to his feet and began to play a sliding, swooping tune that sent prickles running up my spine and my neck, and up my arms. My toes twitched in their moccasins. Suddenly, my father let out a peal of laughter, and the bow flew over the fiddle, a blur like a branch in the wind, and his tall shadow leaped up the log walls as he danced by the wood stove, making the fiddle sing. Gabriel’s mother began to play the spoons. Charlotte and the little girls danced, holding hands, giggling. But I just sat and watched, still soaking in the nearness of my father, Simon Mackenzie from the land far away across the ocean, with his long braided hair slapping on his back as he danced, and the creases in his face streaming upwards like river water.

  He played jigs and reels and ballads. At last he stopped, laughing again, handing the fiddle back to Gabriel. ‘No, no, you must keep it. It is yours now,’ he said when Gabriel offered it to him.

  Then he crossed to where I still sat, and pulled me to my feet, and pressed me against his buckskin jacket. I felt the fringing imprint itself on my cheek, and smelled the woodsmoke and horses and cold snowy distances in the hide. A single drop fell from his eyes and wetted my scalp, in the parting line.

  ‘You look just like your mother, only with green eyes, Otterchild.’ My father’s hands smoothed my hair where it lay tight on the top of my head, pulled down into my braids.

  ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked as we sat by the fire again. ‘Do you want to come home with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered. I cleared my throat. ‘I want somewhere for Charlotte to live with kin.’

  ‘Amelia, there is one other thing. I did marry again. After I heard about your mother, I did marry a Plains Cree woman called Walking in the Wind, and we have children together. Two boys and a girl.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said stupidly. I wondered if my mother knew, up there on the ghost road, dancing in the light with the other spirits.

  ‘Will she mind? Your wife?’

  ‘No, she will make you welcome. She lost a girl once, before I met her. You would be about the age of the lost daughter. I have told her about you.’

  ‘We will come,’ I said.

  ‘Good, we will set out tomorrow, early. I have brought a dog team with a cariole for you to ride in.’

  Long after the lantern had been extinguished, and the heat had sunk low in the wood stove, I lay beneath the furs and thought about all my father’s words until at last I fell into dreams. In my dreams, I was on a red horse, thundering westwards across the snowy land, rising up over slopes like a log riding the waves of a river under the wild, open sky scudding with bright clouds. With a strong pawakan, a person could travel great distances without tiring.

  I awoke to dawn light seeping through the fawn skin window coverings, and the stamping of feet, and voices calling and shouting orders outside. I bundled into my furs and stepped out, blinking in the cold air and the thin light. My father was feeding his dogs and raised a hand to greet me. Beyond him, I could see the Gunner men harnessing horses to flat sleighs loaded with firewood, and heard Gabriel’s voice calling in the corral. I went and leaned against the rails, watching the mustangs milling around inside. Gabriel’s dark head emerged; the two grullas were following him on their halter ropes. I swung the gate open so that he could lead them out.

  ‘We’re leaving to hunt buffalo,’ he explained. ‘Their hides are worth the most now, in winter, b
ecause the hair is longest in the cold weather. The Company traders like the winter hides the best.’

  ‘I am leaving soon too. My father is taking Charlotte and me home with him.’

  ‘I am glad,’ he said. ‘In the spring, I am coming west along the Carlton Trail, heading for the new fort the Company men are building where the Qu’Appelle River merges with the Assiniboine. I am going to be a horse herder there. The valley is very beautiful, filled with running water. The land is wide and open, and good for horses. One day, I will have a herd there of my own.’

  ‘I am glad for you,’ I said, but something inside me was whimpering like a puppy taken too soon from its litter-mates.

  Gabriel reached for my hand, and our gloves fumbled together. ‘I will see you in the spring. When I go west. Look for me in the moon when frogs sing. Don’t forget about me.’

  ‘I won’t for –’

  ‘Winter is very long,’ he teased. ‘You might have a short memory.’

  I could feel his ribs heaving with laughter as he hugged me against them. When I stepped back, his eyes were filled with silence, sky and grass and long dusty trails.

  ‘Gabriel!’ shouted his father, and his glance broke from mine.

  ‘Coming!’ He strode away to the barn, the grulla mustangs following behind him, and I turned to run into the cabin and wake Charlotte up, and eat some porridge before packing my chest once more. I laid the luckenbooth and the water-stained letter on top of Charlotte’s unfinished moose hide robe, and threw in a pair of mittens I had just begun to sew. Gabriel’s mother gave me a pair of snowshoes, and kissed my cheek. ‘Daughter, we will meet again,’ she said, and slid a bundle of dried meat and tea into my hands.

  When Charlotte and I dragged the chest outside, the yard was quiet, and the snow was trampled into a thousand ruts and ridges. The sleighs and horses and men were gone and only my father’s dogs sat in their harnesses, ready to run. My father lifted Charlotte into the cariole’s nest of buffalo furs, and wedged my chest in beside her as I bent to strap on my snowshoes.

  ‘You won’t need those, not with the horse to ride,’ he said.

  I squinted at him as the sunlight lifted over the horizon and gleamed on the Assiniboine’s windswept ice. ‘I don’t have a horse.’

  My father gestured towards the barn. ‘Your mare? Gabriel said she was yours.’

  She turned her head and whickered to me, tied to a ring in the barn wall, and saddled with a Métis woman’s saddle decorated with blue beads and brass tacks. The first light gleamed over her thick winter coat, her coat that Kicimanitow had made from brown soil, wild honey and woodsmoke. Her dark eyes were banked embers.

  ‘He said you had a bridle,’ my father continued, strapping on his snowshoes at the same time that I was fumbling to undo the thongs on my own.

  I shoved the snowshoes into the cariole beside Charlotte, and wrestled open the lid of my trunk. Beneath the moose skin and the mittens lay the bridle that Gabriel had given me by the shore of Lake Winnipeg, the bridle that meant I would always have a horse to ride.

  The mare slipped her head politely down into it and opened her mouth for the bit of twisted buffalo hair that lay softly between her teeth and around her lower jaw. ‘Smoke Eyes,’ I whispered, smoothing her forelock between her ears, feeling the energy bunched in her, ready to run. A horse, I remembered, was the very best gift that a person could give to anyone in this land.

  ‘That’s a nice mare,’ my father said, swinging to my shoulder on his snowshoes.

  ‘She’s from Lightfoot’s line.’

  My father’s face gleamed with pleasure and he ran a gloved hand over her back. ‘A Spanish mare,’ he said appreciatively. ‘We will have to take good care of her. Did you know that she’s in foal?’

  I gave a start of surprise.

  My father nodded. ‘Gabriel says she’s in foal to the red stallion from Norfolk, the horse you brought on your journey.’

  My face broke open in amazement. ‘But what – but when?’

  ‘That young man said he put his mare with that stallion somewhere up on Lake Winnipeg when your York boat was beached by a storm. Said he couldn’t resist – they’re all the same, these men of the plains. They cannot resist rustling a good horse. Even a stallion’s seed!’ My father guffawed. ‘It will be a late foal, a very late foal due next September. But such a thing is not unheard of.’

  Astonished joy prickled over me. I nudged my toe into the iron stirrup and swung on to the mare as my father untied her lead rope; before I had even settled my weight fully on her back she bounced sideways, snorting plumes of white air. My father strode to his dogs, the red stitching on his cap flaring in the light, and the sleigh bells ringing clear and sweet. I glimpsed Charlotte’s heart-shaped face in the pile of buffalo robes as the dogs lunged forward yelping and the cariole runners glided over the snow.

  I circled Smoke Eyes in the trampled yard so that I could wave to Gabriel’s mother, standing in her cabin doorway. Then I turned the grulla’s head and sent her running after my father’s dogs, running westwards along the Carlton Trail towards my home, and the moon when frogs sing.

  Horses in a New World

  Wild mustangs galloping over the plains! Cowboys and Indians! Stagecoaches pulling up in front of hotels on the muddy streets of pioneer towns. Explorers riding through mountains in search of the Pacific. Farmers heading west in wagons, hoping for the perfect new home. All these images conjure up tales of early white settlement in North America. But where did all the horses come from? And what kind of horses were they?

  One million years ago, the ancestor of the modern horse was a small creature called Equus caballus. It spread from North America over the Bering land bridge into Asia, Europe and India. On the North American continent, however, Equus disappeared for unknown reasons. For centuries the grasslands and mountains of the great continent were empty of any horses. It was not until the Spanish conquistadores sailed westwards over the Atlantic that the thunder of hooves was once again heard in North America.

  The Spanish horses were considered the best in Europe at the time; they were Barbs, Iberians and Andalusians with arched necks, convex heads and short coupling, to create strength and endurance. The Iberian Peninsula in Spain was the first place where horses were domesticated in Europe, and for centuries the purity of the Spanish bloodlines was maintained by Carthusian monks. Travelling west, these Spanish horses hung in slings in the bellies of caravels as they rolled across the sea to the New World. After the brutal subjugation of ancient cultures such as the Aztecs, which would ultimately lead to the decimation of these Native populations, the Spanish began to settle the continent, importing cattle to form the basis of vast ranches. Their horses were sometimes turned loose or abandoned, sometimes stolen, sometimes lost, or taken in warfare. Gradually at first, then faster, this wave of feral horses washed northwards over the deserts and plains, growing tougher, hardier and more numerous, with each year.

  The indigenous peoples of the continent were quick to understand that the ‘big dogs’ of the Spanish could revolutionise their lives. Tribe after tribe – including Navajo, Nez Perce, Comanche, Blackfoot, Sioux, Shoshone, Cree and Métis – became people of the horse. The Native people learned to catch and tame the horses, using them to pull possessions on travois, to carry riders, to chase after buffalo. With horses, a raiding party could travel further and faster; a camp could be moved more easily. Tribes developed art forms based upon the pride they felt in their horses. They created beautifully woven saddle blankets, decorated saddles and bridles, as well as masks and carvings. The Native people became highly skilled at light cavalry and hunting on horseback.

  By around 1900, there were an estimated one million horses roaming the American west. These mustangs (probably from the Spanish mestengo meaning stray or wild cattle) were of all colours: painted, spotted, grulla, roan, dun and other solid colours. Although their conformation was not as classically perfect as that of their Spanish ancestors, these mustangs were to
ugh and wild and smart; they could survive predation from big cats, wolves and bears; they could find shelter in blizzards; they could survive drought, extremes of temperature and rocky footing.

  As the number of mustangs increased, landowners became angry about the amount of range being grazed, and the mustangs were cruelly rounded up using planes and trucks. Thousands were slaughtered for dog food. Today, various mustang preserves have been created where the horses can run free in safety, and where they are protected by law. New breeding programmes aim to preserve the best characteristics of the Spanish horse and a breed standard has been established.

  Horses did not only reach the New World from the south, however. The French sailed over the Atlantic and up the St Lawrence River of Canada, bringing with them black horses from the court of King Louis XIV. The settlers of Quebec (then known as Lower Canada) depended upon these sturdy, easy keepers for assistance in settling the land: they dragged logs from the forests, pulled ploughs through the virgin soil, hauled sleighs and wagons filled with farmers and their families, carried children on their backs to attend class in one-roomed schools. Today, the Canadian horse remains a solid, strong, docile creature with a black or dark brown coat.

  As the Canadians moved westwards with settlers, and the mustangs moved northwards, it was inevitable that they would meet somewhere, someplace. It is believed that the crossing of these two breeds led to the development of the breed known as the Ojibwa pony or the Lac la Croix pony. The Ojibwa tribe did not need horses strong or large enough to pull ploughs or wagons, but did appreciate the ability to ride through the hills and forests on a smaller horse. Although almost extinct by 1970, this breed has been preserved. The modern ponies have comfortable riding paces, are very tolerant and tractable, have profusely haired ears and nostrils with flaps to keep out bad weather.

  While the French were sailing up the St Lawrence, the English were reaching the continent along a more northerly route. At first, only the traders and other employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company arrived. They sailed into Hudson Bay and from there travelled hundreds and even thousands of miles along the rivers, heading west, north and south over the land and bartering for furs (especially beaver) to ship back to England. Eventually, in the early 1800s, settlers began to arrive along this northerly route through the bay, and with them they brought domestic animals – chickens, sheep, dogs and oxen. They even brought a horse, a very special horse.