Song of Batoche

by Maia Caron

  Josette slipped behind the pool table across from him and lifted the tea tin like an offering. “I have something for your head.”

  His eyes shifted to it, a dubious expression. “It makes me want to sleep. I would rather feel this damn head and think straight.”

  “You should sleep.”

  He glanced at the map. “I have a man in Middleton’s camp, Jérôme Henry—he escaped to bring me their marching plan. The general spent three days ferrying half his force across the river in an old scow. He’s ready to break camp tomorrow.”

  “How did they come north so quickly?”

  “The Hudson’s Bay Company made teamsters and wagons available—for a price of course.”

  He told her how Henry had heard soldiers bragging about their general as a master of frontier warfare. In the British colonies, Middleton had fought rebellious “natives” and knew how to “put them down.” Gabriel laughed bitterly. “If he knows bush fighting why carry a book about Custer? Henry says the old man has a lamp going in his tent at night, studying it. He doesn’t want to make the same mistakes as the long hair. Henry made sure to spread the story that Little Ghost is in Batoche, son of Inkpaduta and brother of the warrior that killed Custer.” Gabriel cocked an eyebrow in her direction. “Now Middleton will not go anywhere without a bodyguard.”

  She tried to focus on the map. In Batoche, news had come that Middleton’s men had struggled north from Qu’Appelle over the frozen sloughs, suffering with frostbite and dysentery. Many said that God was working His miracles.

  Gabriel rubbed his eyes. “Henry says there’s a Lieutenant Hugh John Macdonald there. Says he’s Sir John’s only son. A fucking officer in charge of his own men.” His face was dark with contained anger. “Riel has heard there are Canadiens with Middleton. He does not want them harmed.” He met her eyes. “Scouts have brought news of your grandfather. Wandering Spirit leads the pillaging as they run north. They took Fort Pitt. Burned it to the ground. The traders and families were spared only because your grandfather warned them.”

  She could almost see Big Bear pleading with his war chief and remembered who was responsible. “Riel’s God will punish him for sending letters to the Cree.”

  Gabriel frowned. “Macdonald will burn in hell for refusing them rations. Why do you think Wandering Spirit shot the agent Quinn first?” He suddenly bent over, hands on his knees. When the episode passed, he said, “The men are deserting after the Duck Lake battle. How can I make them stand with us without the need for threats?” In his eyes was a mix of hopelessness and determination, as if in asking the question he had already answered it. A good enough moment to tell him.

  “Riel has asked me to go to the Montana Territory with a letter—Poundmaker won’t come south unless he knows the Americans have taken the railway.”

  Gabriel punched his open palm and winced at the resulting pain he’d caused in his head. “Riel, nisakahpitik—he has tied my hands. He will not let me take forty good men to attack Middleton’s camp at night, but sends you across the line, through country thick with Dominion soldiers. You will remain here.”

  “Riel is kiskwesew.”

  Gabriel walked away from the pool table. She had said it as a simple statement of fact and waited for him to disagree, but he stopped and appeared to think. “We have petitioned for years and did not get results. Riel knew the words to make Ottawa listen, did he not?”

  She saw that he wished to be reminded only of Riel’s decisive actions in Red River. But she could not resist pressing him with the truth. “Macdonald has answered Riel,” she said. “With guns and soldiers—an English general.”

  “You were too young to remember when the Queen sold Red River to Ottawa. Surveyors came and marked off the lands of your relations,” he said, his voice now heavy with fatigue. “Riel stepped on their measuring chains and told them, ‘you go no further.’ Did your father have the courage?” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Ask yourself why we should not follow that man today. He is the only Métis smart enough to take on Macdonald. We asked him here. It is our duty to support him.”

  Disturbing rumours had circulated: how Ottawa had sent salesmen to Europe, advertising 160 acres free to “real farmers” in the vast North-West, land already cleared and ready to till. They had received confirmation of those rumours last week when news came that Métis near Fort Edmonton had returned from hunting to find their farms taken by white settlers. Squatting rights they called it. A cabin on cleared land was now an invitation to steal. Gabriel did not care that Riel was kiskwesew. He admired his politics, his history, and through the force of his own will, would try to win this rebellion despite what Riel had brought to their doorstep.

  “Take your men regardless of what he thinks. Attack this Anglais general.”

  Gabriel stared at the wall, logs that he had cut and squared with his brother years ago. “A group of Métis men—ones I didn’t think were traitors—came to me in secret last week, said they don’t like Riel. They want me to take over, run him out of the territory.”

  “Wandering Spirit set up his soldier’s lodge in my grandfather’s camp,” she reminded him. “Fine Day will soon do the same in Pound-maker’s—young warriors taking power from the great chiefs. You are Riel’s war chief. Do the same and he must listen to you.”

  Gabriel leaned against the pool table, watching her. She wanted to look away, but couldn’t. “God owes me two lives—one for the man who killed my brother and one for Clarke, whose rumour started this war.”

  “Go at night, like the ancestors,” she urged him. “Count coup.”

  “Little Ghost and his warriors have been making medicine for a raid. It is all I can do to stop them going down there.” His deep-set eyes were on her face, almost dazed, as though weathering his pain or remembering the days he’d ridden against the Blackfoot, striking his enemy and escaping unharmed to tell the tale. Gabriel closed his eyes. “Fuck les Canadiens. If they fight with les Anglais, they deserve what comes to them. It’s Middleton I want.”

  “God has told Riel we will be victorious at Batoche—the City of God.” She paused. “Do not let them get that far. Run them like buffalo through the pounds.”

  “Eh bien.” He looked up at her, his eyes blazing. “I will bring the goddamn City of God to Middleton.”

  river of blood

  Later that same evening, Madeleine Dumont stood in front of the stove, her eyes on a bannock that browned in the pan. Gabriel sat at the table with his rifle and cleaning supplies laid out before him, handling le Petit like a mother with a newborn bibi. He had just come back from Batoche, where he’d convinced Riel to allow an ambush of Middleton on the Humboldt Trail. She had sent Alexandre to the barn, for she wanted a word with Gabriel, who had taken the boy to the Duck Lake fight without her permission.

  “Alex will remain here,” she insisted. “He is only sixteen.”

  Gabriel looked up at her, distracted. “He will be out of the line of fire. I need someone to keep a gun loaded.”

  “Was he out of the fire when you got that?” She pointed at his head wound, her voice rising. She had given Gabriel a draught of one of Josette’s medicine teas for his pain. The effects would wear off in a few hours, but her husband seemed almost giddy or reckless.

  “Riel only agreed to the ambush,” he said, “if he is allowed to stop every few miles to say the rosary.”

  She pulled the bannock out of the pan and flapped a towel to cool it for his saddlebags. “Don’t go,” she said. “I have seen a vision of your death.”

  “Some say we should run them like buffalo through the pounds.” He pulled a box of bullets out of his coat pocket and threw them on the table. “Riel will be here in a few hours with two hundred men. Who do you think I listen to?”

  “Some say? You mean Josette.” He looked away and she closed her eyes, trying to keep her temper. Every time he came or went, Josette was up there on her porch with a blank stare, finger tracing the scar at her lip. Before Duck Lake,
Madeleine had seen him stop at her house and had watched, knowing they spoke of Riel, but seething that they had to stand so close to do it. This blind jealousy was eating at her heart. It was ridiculous to envy Josette Lavoie, a woman beaten by her own husband. The premonition she’d had at berry-picking camp floated behind her eyelids, of Gabriel lying on the snow, red with his blood. “God showed me you would die in the snows.”

  His gun in one hand, he took up the cleaning rod and threaded a small patch through the slot. “The snows have melted,” he said with a twitch at his mouth. “The river is breaking up, you saw yourself.”

  She was livid that he considered her visions a joke. “You forget that your own brother’s blood was the first to be shed.”

  Her words hung in the air like knives. He paused with the rod down the inside of the gun’s bore. The stillness of his eyes and a certain rigid quality in his posture made her regret mentioning Isidore’s death. In the early years of their marriage, Gabriel had often said, “I love you, even if you like to break my balls.” Oui, she was hard on him at times, for a man could not often see he was headed to disaster, even when it stared him in the face.

  She turned away, pulled a handkerchief from her skirt pocket, and smothered a cough. It was getting more difficult to hide her worsening condition from him. For almost a year now she had made excuses: drafts, dust, a chill in the air. She did not want him to think her less than she already was—barren and now dying. He would have suspected something else by now if he were not preoccupied. Last week, she had thought him gone scouting and boiled water to wash her handkerchiefs, but he had come back for some reason or another. Her heart had been in her mouth the entire time he was in the house, praying he would not lift the lid of the pot and find them floating in a broth of blood.

  He had brought out a tin of precious buffalo fat, saved from the last hunts, and she watched as he dabbed a bit of it on a cloth and greased the gun’s mechanism. His calm intent angered her. Not even a moment of indecision showed on his face.

  “Riel told you he did not want bloodshed,” she said, “and in the next minute he wanted to exterminate the police.” Gabriel lifted the lever to close the breech of his gun with a decisive click, his expression dark, as though he regretted telling her about the letter Riel had written to Crozier. “Rome est tombée,” she said with a snort. “Rome is still alive and well in Batoche. I saw Louise Gravelle sneak to the rectory the other day and beg for the sacraments. I hear she told Moulin her husband only follows Riel because he does not want his cattle shot.”

  Gabriel carefully placed his gun on the table and took cartridges from the box. He would not look at her. “Jérôme Henry tells me Middleton flew into a rage,” he said, pressing fourteen bullets, one after the other into the magazine, “to discover so many of his men have never fired a gun. He forces them into daily rifle practice, shouting, ‘You’re going against an enemy of crack shots.’”

  The mocking bitterness in his voice and his insistence on changing the subject infuriated her. “They have more courage than the men who desert you each day—”

  “—Not one of my old capitaines has deserted.”

  “There is an army of Métis through the Territories, in Red River. These men will cry at Riel’s funeral, say they are patriots, that it was their war too, yet they do not come to help you now.” Madeleine had seen the posted council motion outside of Letendre’s: that they had declared, “Louis David Riel a prophet in the service of Jesus Christ and the Son of God and only Redeemer of the world.” It had pained her to see Gabriel’s mark under those voting in favour. She heard that Albert Monkman, a member of the council, had refused to vote and when Riel asked him to relent, Monkman declared that if he was forced to speak on it again, he would have to desert. “At least Monkman was strong enough to go against this madness.”

  “He has since examined his conscience,” Gabriel said without looking up. “Yesterday he signed a sworn oath in front of the Exovedate—that he had a false idea.”

  “A false idea! He was afraid of his own neck. Did Riel tell you on the long trip up from the Montana Territory that he was a prophet at the feet of Mary Immaculate?” Gabriel would not respond and pulled the lever upward to cycle a cartridge into the chamber, setting the hammer in the half-cock position. Madeleine felt desperate enough to add, “I would like to know if he confided it to his own Mary Magdalene.”

  Gabriel’s back stiffened, but he still refused to glance her way. She could see that he was in one of his rare, quiet rages.

  “You will not speak against Riel in Batoche,” he said, an uncharacteristic warning in his voice.

  “Why would I speak against him when Father Moulin said it best at the novena.” She looked to the ceiling in mock drama. “What was it? Riel is misguided, delusional, even insane.” Gabriel lifted his gun and sighted down the barrel, and she, furious at his silence, continued. “I could not fail to notice when Riel said our church had fallen, that Josette was relieved to hear it.” Gabriel set his gun carefully on the table and emptied the box of cartridges, counting the remaining bullets before they went into his pockets. “Josette will be to blame for our destruction,” she said, “if she did not tell everyone, months ago, that Riel had other reasons for being here.”

  “Other reasons?” He stood slowly, his face turned ashen with pain. He reached for his saddlebags, and said through his teeth, “Can you not see what he means to do?”

  “I am the only one to see.” She clumsily wrapped the bannock in a towel and tossed it on the table in front of him. “If Macdonald has not honoured our claim to this land, he never will. And you stand behind Riel, a madman who is locked in a fight to the death with him. Dead and landless. That is your dream?”

  Gabriel took up the wrapped bannock and looked at it for a moment before stowing it in the saddlebag, and she could tell by the set of his shoulders that he did not agree with her. Or he did, and was too stubborn to admit it.

  “There is no other way than to finish the job,” he said. “I need you to trust me.”

  She was silent, feeling her face flushed, her breathing shallow. Always she had trusted him, but she wavered now before a man she no longer knew, a man who followed Louis Riel.

  tourond’s coulee

  Gabriel looked sideways in the dark. Riel was about to do it again. The Métis leader lifted the wooden cross he had kept from the Duck Lake chapel and called a halt. Behind them, two hundred men paused in the deep shadow of a stand of cottonwoods, their horses snorting in the cold night air.

  Riel began to say the Lord’s prayer. “Our Father Who Art in Heaven …”

  He had insisted they beseech God in the most dangerous spots, including the bald prairie, where they could have been picked off easily if Middleton’s scouts had dared come that far north. Gabriel would rather pray as they had on the winter buffalo hunts. Riding with the men to find the herds, he would close his eyes and ask the Great Bull,

  Lead your cows out of the woods and onto the shifting snow of the great plains.

  Gabriel studied the sky, stars hidden behind a haze of cloud. It was midnight or close to it. He was impatient to ride if they were to find Middleton’s camp before dawn. It was nearing the end of April yet sudden gusts of icy wind went through the old buffalo robe coat that Madeleine had made for him years ago. There were patches of underlying hide showing through at the sleeves and collar, but he would not part with it. The effects of Josette’s medicine tea had worn off, and now he keenly felt the wound at the top of his head. Madeleine had packed it with a poultice, but the simple act of getting on his horse had made it pulse and throb.

  Madeleine’s anger at Riel had only served to bolster his resolve. If they were to lose their lands, regardless, he would rather go down fighting. He surveyed the Métis and Indians who had come down to ambush les Anglais. Farmers, blacksmiths, freighters, trappers—men he’d known for decades, their eyes glinting in the dark like spooked horses. Lean Crow’s and White Cap’s men had some Springfield si
ngle-shot carbines, but a few of the Métis were armed only with potato tillers. Young Modeste Ladouceur carried one of Riel’s religious flags. Most, like Gabriel’s nephew, St. Pierre, had old muzzleloaders, the powder horns slung across their chests, as they had worn them in the buffalo hunts.

  Gabriel’s friend and ally Charles Trottier was there, his broad-shouldered form in the saddle distinct from that of Maxime Lépine’s, who sat hunched and miserable upon his horse. Earlier, Riel had removed the Christ figure from the Duck Lake chapel crucifix and given it to Maxime in a ceremony meant to show the men that he would not suffer the same fate as the Lord. Gabriel could see the Christ in Maxime’s hands, its alabaster arms outstretched and gleaming.

  In preparation for battle, the Sioux had painted their faces and freshly braided their hair. They held their horses’ reins tight, impatient to ride. One of them, a man named Scarlet Bear, sidestepped his pony toward Gabriel’s.

  “I will be the first to touch the white chief with this.” He held up his coup stick and shook it until the beads rattled.

  Gabriel met his eyes. If they did not find Middleton’s camp soon, the Sioux would leave. They did not take unnecessary risk in battle and preferred night raids to lining up in pretty rows before an enemy in the light of day.

  Not to be outdone, another Sioux with the name of Black Bull said, “I will eat the white chief’s heart. He will go to the Great Spirit without courage.”

  Riel faltered in his prayer and held the bare wooden cross higher, its metal embellishments shining dully in the dim light of the grove. “And lead us not into temptation,” he said with a raised voice. “But deliver us from evil.”

  Gabriel did not look forward to keeping Riel—a man who said he would fight Middleton only in the City of God—safe in a night skirmish. It was not the Anglais bullets he worried about, but those from his own men. He didn’t put it past a few of them—who had sought him out last week with talk of mutiny—to “accidentally” take out Riel during the fight. Gabriel watched them now, their heads turning, flinty looks passed in silent dialogue.