Apparition Trail, The (21 page)

“Are you all right, Grayburn?” he asked. “I heard you groaning in your sleep, and then you called out for help. Are you ill?”

Realizing that I was still gripping my stomach, I moved my hand away. Wincing at the pain that gnawed at my guts, I gestured at my haversack. Davis handed it to me.

“Just a bout of typho-malaria,” I said as I fished the bottle of patent medicine from the pack. “Several of the men at my detachment have it; the water at Moose Jaw is miasmic. I’ve just got a mild dose — nothing a little painkiller won’t manage. No sense in incurring a hospital stoppage if I can still perform my duties.”

I took several good swallows of the Pinkham’s, and after a moment felt a warm glow begin to replace the ache in my stomach. The young constable nodded, yawned, then crawled back into bed. I heard the crackle of the straw in his mattress.

“I don’t know what the bastards in Ottawa are thinking,” he muttered. “Docking a man’s pay just because he’s sick just doesn’t seem fair to me.”

“Nor to me,” I said, taking another swallow of painkiller. “So please, keep my infirmity to yourself, would you?”

“I will,” he said.

I lay in the dark for some time after that, listening to the other constables breathing. I was jealous of these men who slept so soundly; every time I tried to drift back to sleep I was awakened by the pain in my stomach, and imagined I heard Chambers’s voice calling to me. Was he somewhere out on the wide prairie even now, confused and befuddled by his buffalo form, praying I would come to his aid? My dream seemed to be urging me to cure him — but warning that any cure I effected might prove fatal.

At last, giving up on sleep, I rose from bed and pulled on my breeches. I stepped outside the barracks and tamped some Capstan into my pipe, then struck a match and drew until the tobacco was cherry red. Leaning against the rough wooden wall of the barracks, I looked across the parade square that was bathed in moonlight. I tried to imagine the prairie in ten or twenty year’s time. Two decades earlier, there had been nothing on this spot but windswept prairie and a few tepees. Now there was a bustling police detachment. A hundred miles to the north lay Calgary, the current terminus of the CPR line. The town had only been surveyed last December, but already it had a population of 500. The
Calgary Herald
, a newspaper whose printing press had arrived by train only last month, was already boosting the town — claiming it would have a population of more than 1,000 before the year was out, and was further predicting a population of 5,000 in a decade’s time.

I glanced up at the moon, its “dark side” now bathed in light. If my dream were truly a prophetic one — and I had no reason to believe it was not — then in one month’s time the moon would be beaming down on a very different world. I tried to picture Fort Macleod, Calgary, and all of the other outposts and towns of the North-West Territories, large and small, with buildings vacant and silent. Nothing but ghost towns would dot the prairie then: ghost towns, and tepees, and the skulls of buffalo that had once been men, women, and children.

“Heya,
napikwan
. Gotta smoke?”

I started and dropped my pipe, which landed with a shower of sparks on the wooden boardwalk at my feet. Beside me, a stoop-shouldered man bent down to pick it up. When he handed it back to me, I recognized him at once by his short stature and the drooping moustache that matched the slouch of his shoulders: Jerry Potts, the most famous — and notorious — scout in the whole of the North-West Territories. At forty-seven years old he was nearly twice my age, but I say with no shame that he was easily twice the man I’d ever be.

It seemed, in addition to precognitive dreams, that I also had a talent for running into just the person I most needed to meet. I decided to take advantage of it.

“Hello, Potts,” I said, passing the half-breed my tin of tobacco. I watched him pull a pipe from the pocket of his frayed trousers and light up. Potts might wear the pants, jacket and hat of a white man, but his soul was pure Indian. The knife that hung in a beaded sheath from his belt had taken more than a dozen scalps from his enemies, and I knew that under his jacket, against his hairy chest, was the skin of a black cat that Potts had killed because he dreamed that its hide would protect him. He might well have been right: even though he’d taken a musket blast in the face during the last big confrontation between the Blackfoot nation and the Cree — the battle that Piapot dreamed would lead to his own death — Potts had walked away with only a powder burn. I wondered if the cat skin also gave him the ability to pad along so silently in his moccasins.

“Potts, will you help me track someone?”

The man beside me grunted. I couldn’t tell if it meant “yes” or “no.”

“Tonight?” I asked.

Potts squinted up at the moon, thinking. Then he yawned. I could smell liquor on his breath, but he was steady enough.

Suddenly inspired, I added: “There’s a bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Painkiller in it for you, if you’ll ride with me right now.”

“Where?”

I smiled. “Earlier today, I saw a buffalo about three miles up the creek. I want you to track it from the spot I last saw it.”

“Gonna shoot it?” Potts asked.

“No!” I exclaimed. “I just want to … to find it. Once we do, you can return to the fort. I’ll find my own way back.”

Potts stared at me a moment, then sucked on his pipe. “Lotsa Cree,” he said, each word a puff of smoke.

“Yes,” I answered. “Big Bear’s band is camped nearby.”

Potts spat.

We stood in silence as I puzzled out what he had been getting at. Potts wasn’t noted for his loquaciousness, but the clues were plain to anyone who knew his history. His mother was a Blood Indian, and Potts himself had two Peigan wives. Both of those tribes were part of the Blackfoot Confederacy — and the Blackfoot and Cree were mortal enemies. It would come as no surprise to me if more than one of the warriors in Big Bear’s camp was a vengeful relative of a man Potts had scalped.

I indicated my bandaged thigh. “One of Big Bear’s warriors shot me today. Maybe we’ll run into him.”

I saw a sparkle in Potts’s eye that told me I’d said just the right thing. Potts nodded, then said, “Let’s go.”

I stepped into the barracks and hurriedly dressed, not wanting to give Potts time to change his mind. As we made our way across the parade square to the stables, I checked my watch. Assuming it was running properly, the time was nearly four o’clock. Already the eastern horizon was brightening; it would be dawn soon, and Superintendent Cotton would be sending out a patrol to arrest Wandering Spirit — a patrol that would presumably require Jerry Potts to track the man down. I knew I’d catch hell for taking the force’s most valuable scout out on what Cotton would see as a “wild buffalo chase.” I just hoped that he would allow me to contact Steele before clapping me in the guardhouse for desertion of duty and misappropriation of a police horse.

Potts and I saddled up, then led our horses out of the stables. We were challenged by one of the constables on picquet duty, but a little bluster on my part convinced him that no sane man would be setting out at four in the morning except under orders.

We headed west, across Willow Creek. The horse I was riding — a grey mare — was a playful beast that liked to repeatedly plunge her forefoot into the water, splashing for all she was worth. By the time I managed to spur her across the creek, my riding breeches and jacket were soaking wet. Potts just glanced back at me, not even cracking a smile at a sight that would have evoked gales of laughter from any other man.

We rode in silence for some time. Then, remembering that Potts’s own two wives were Peigan, I asked a question.

“I met a Peigan woman earlier toda … ah … earlier this month,” I said. “Her name is Emily. She’s the wife of a white man, a gambler by the name of Four Finger Pete. Do you know her?”

“Nope,” said Potts, without even looking back over his shoulder.

I spurred my horse to come level with Potts. “The woman had a daughter — a girl with pale skin and white hair.”

I waited for a reaction, watching Potts out of the corner of my eye, but his face remained impassive.

“The daughter was named Iniskim. The word sounds Peigan. What does it mean?”

Potts grunted. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. Then he said: “Blackfoot word.” After a moment more, he added: “Means ‘Buffalo Stone.’”

I suddenly guessed the connection and leaned across my saddle toward Potts as our horses walked, side by side.

“I saw a strangely shaped stone. It curved in upon itself, like this.” I crooked my index finger, imitating the curve of the spiral-shaped stone I’d found near the McDougall home. “Is that what a buffalo stone looks like?”

Potts grunted. I thought I’d seen a slight nod of his head, and took his answer to mean “yes.”

I fell silent, thinking about my dream. In it, the curious stone I had found had returned Chambers to his human form. My waking mind now acknowledged what I had intuitively known all along: the stone had the power to transform people into buffalo, and vice versa. But how?

Thinking back to my confrontation with Wandering Spirit and Big Bear, I realized that the chief had avoided touching the stone; he’d used my tobacco pouch to pick it up. Had he been afraid to touch it? If the stone could transform with a touch, why was I able to hold it in my bare hand?

The stone’s magic also seemed to work at a distance. The stone had been in a tree outside the McDougall home, yet from the evidence I’d seen, it looked as though the McDougalls had been transformed all at once as they sat at breakfast inside their house. Like maddened beasts, these newly created buffaloes had charged about their home, seeking an escape — which explained the torn clothing and destruction I had seen inside the lower floor of the building, and the hole in the wall near the door where a horn had gored the wood.

“The buffalo stone is magical, isn’t it?” I asked Potts. I knew he was superstitious, and that he would have believed any stories he’d heard about the buffalo stone; he wouldn’t find my questions odd, as a white man would. “What does it do?”

Potts grunted derisively, as if the answer was obvious. “They call buffalo.”

They? I frowned. “Is there more than one buffalo stone?”

Potts merely grunted.

I thought of Iniskim’s pale skin and hair. “Do the stones call white buffalo?”

Potts gave me a sharp look. “White buffalo leads the herd. Napi sends it.”

“How?”

“Same as any other thing. It’s born.”

For Potts, it was a long-winded statement — and an informative one. Napi was the Blackfoot creator: the equivalent, in the Indians’ eyes, of the whites’ Christian God. Did that mean that Iniskim was some sort of Christ child?

“Could the white buffalo be born as a human?” I asked. “As a girl child? And then be transformed into a buffalo when it—”

Potts gave me a quick, uncomfortable look, then dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The animal trotted ahead, putting an end to our conversation.

I wondered if I’d said too much. I had no idea where Potts’s loyalties lay. He had worked for the North-West Mounted Police for ten years, and given loyal and faithful service during that time, despite his love of liquor and the scrapes it got him into — but he was a half-breed. He might very well rejoice if the white settlers were all transformed into buffalo. For all I knew, he might be in league with the Indian shamans who were plotting this transformation.

By now, the sun was up and it was full daylight. We were riding along the grassy bank of the creek, with no cover in sight. I slowly lowered the reins I held until my right hand was against my horse’s neck, close to my holstered Winchester. Even as my hand brushed the butt of the rifle, however, Potts glanced back over his shoulder, wary as a cat. I gave him a nervous smile, and moved my hand away.

The odds were not in my favour. I’d heard the stories that had given rise to Potts’s infamy. Once, seven Crow Indians had attacked him; four of them were armed with rifles. Potts had killed all four and sent the others fleeing for home. Another time, three Indians had lain in ambush and killed Potts’s cousin, capturing Potts himself. Pretending to let him go, they’d shot at his back, but missed and knocked his hat off instead. As he fell from his saddle, Potts had drawn his revolver and killed all three.

If Potts’s sympathies did lie with the Indians, and if he decided from my questions that I already had learned too much, I was a dead man. On the other hand, he may have just been relating to me stories that he’d heard as a child at his mother’s knee — just as my own mother had read me stories of pixies and sprites when I was a boy. It made me wonder now if pixies and fairies were also real.

Potts reined his horse to a stop. I tensed, but then relaxed when I saw him dismount and peer intently at the top of the riverbank. I pulled my own horse up, and looked down at the soft ground. I saw buffalo hoof prints, the prints of a shod horse, my own boot prints, and furrows in the ground. This was the spot where Chambers had scratched out his message, and where the constable from Fort Macleod had found me.

“Strange tracks,” Potts said.

“They were made by the animal I’m looking for,” I told him. “Can you track it?”