Apparition Trail, The (3 page)

Thunderbird.

It was all nonsense, of course: Indian superstition and balderdash. That was a storm cloud over Regina, not some fantastical monster. But as I saw lightning crackle from those eyes and felt the baleful glare of Thunderbird upon me, I at last understood the premonitory dream that had awakened me early that morning. A fate far worse than dishonourable discharge awaited me in the skies over Regina. When that black, evil bird caught me, I would die.

I found that I had to turn my head to watch Thunderbird, and that prompted a realization: the operator was turning the air bicycle about. At the same time, he shouted an explanation: “We’ve no choice. We can’t put down in Regina in this weather. We’ll have to run before the storm.”

I nodded, but my attention was still fixed on the shifting clouds that now were behind us. Mighty wings flapped as Thunderbird ceased hovering over Regina and set out in pursuit. Whatever the thing was — storm or monster — it was fast. I could see that it would catch us — and when it did, it would buffet our air bicycle until it was torn apart.

There was nothing I could do except prepare to meet my maker. Or was there? Frantically, I thought back to the stories I’d been told by Mary Smoke. There was one about Thunderbird that came to mind now. The great storm maker might be the most powerful of creatures, but he had been laid low by one that was smaller and more cunning — by a small black bird that had tricked Thunderbird into losing his eyesight. As a result, there was one animal Thunderbird feared: the raven.

I glanced up at the lettering on the side of the balloon. It was a crazy, desperate idea, based on superstition rather than science, but it was the only one I had.

“We’ll be torn to pieces if we try to outrun the storm,” I shouted at the operator over the drumming of the rain on the balloon overhead. “But if you turn us about, there’s a way we might get through. Turn the air bicycle quickly, so that it points directly at the largest thunderhead. It’s our only chance!”

“You’re mad!” the operator shouted back. “If we do that, we could wind up caught in an updraft that will force us into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. If we climb to a point where the air pressure is too low, the bag will burst!”

A fresh wave of pain gripped my stomach as another lightning bolt streaked out from Thunderbird’s eye toward the ground. Knowing that it was do or die, I released one of my hands from the handlebars and fumbled open the flap of my holster. The rain made everything slippery, and I nearly dropped my revolver as I pulled it out. I tapped the butt against the operator’s shoulder to get his attention, then raised the gun until the barrel was touching the balloon overhead.

Thunderbird was almost upon us.

“Turn us now! Point the air bicycle at the thunderhead or I’ll explode the balloon with a shot from my revolver!” I screamed.

I had no such intention. But the wild look in my eye must have convinced the operator. Furious, his lips set in a thin white line, he turned the air bicycle about.

The boiling clouds that were Thunderbird bore down on us. Closer … closer … beak open wide and a look of doom in its eye. Just as the beak was about to snap shut on us, the front of the
Raven
pointed directly at the monster.

Instead of rising, the air balloon slipped violently to one side as Thunderbird dodged out of the way. Like a kite with its string cut we hurtled sideways, rushing toward the ground at an angle. I held on with the one hand that remained on the handlebars, lowering my revolver at the same time. In front of me, the operator fought with the controls.

When the ground below stopped rushing up at us and we came level again, Thunderbird was gone. There was no more lightning, and no thunder — just ordinary clouds in the sky. The rain slackened off to a mere drizzle, and after a minute or two it was gone. The sun broke through the clouds, shining down on Regina. I looked down and saw the Mounted Police headquarters bathed in yellow light, and nearly wept with relief as I re-holstered my revolver.

We landed in the parade square, wheels sinking into foot-deep mud. I alighted from the passenger seat, still trembling, and caught the operator’s eye. He’d pushed up his goggles, and his face was ashen.

“About drawing my revolver,” I said. “I’m sorry about that, but I—”

He wasn’t listening. “Did you see it?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “That … creature?”

I nodded grimly, then glanced up at a perfectly normal looking sky.

“No one will believe it,” the operator added.

“I know,” I said. I touched him on the shoulder. “We’d best keep this to ourselves, eh?”

He nodded. “How did you know what to do?”

I shrugged. “Just a hunch.” Then I strode away through the boot-sucking mud.

By the time I reached the Commissioner’s office, the heat had returned full force and my sodden uniform was steaming. The collar of the jacket, normally stiff against my neck, was damp and drooping and my high brown boots were caked with the thick gooey mud that prairie dwellers call gumbo. I’d gotten the worst of it off by using the scraper outside the door, but my boots had left red smears all the way down the hallway carpet.

A constable showed me into the empty office, and once inside I stood nervously waiting, wishing my uniform was more presentable. The knot in my stomach was tightening and twisting — I was almost tempted to pull up my shirt and see if the scar from my operation had opened up again, after all these years. The typho-malaria made me feel as dizzy and light headed as I had when the doctor had administered the ether. Yet I didn’t dare sit down in any of the hard-backed oak chairs scattered about the room. I intended to make a good show of it, to be standing properly at attention when the Commissioner entered the room.

Using the glass front of the wall clock as a mirror, I adjusted my helmet so it sat square on my head. My reddish hair has an unruly curl to it, especially when it is wet. But at least my face was clean below my pale blue eyes. I’d never grown a beard or moustache, despite the fact that regulations permitted it — not after the hilarity that greeted my one feeble attempt to grow whiskers, four years ago. You would think that, at twenty-seven years of age, I would be able to produce a fine crop of whiskers like the ones my father had, but such was not the case.

The harrowing storm we had just passed through had left me shaken, and I yearned for a calming smoke of my pipe. Yet now that I was within the walls of headquarters, Thunderbird seemed nothing more than a bad dream. Perhaps the pain of my stomach — only now abating to a tolerable level — had caused me to hallucinate. In any case, I had other things to worry about now: the reason for the Commissioner’s summons.

The wall clock ticked off the seconds to my impending doom — a little faster, now that I was standing near it. The merciless eyes of Queen Victoria bored down at me from a painting that hung on the wall beside the Union Jack, as if chastising me for mucking up the clock’s mechanism. Then the door opened.

I snapped to attention, then blinked in surprise when Superintendent Sam Steele entered the room. I’d gotten to know Steele back in the spring of 1879 when I first joined the force; he was the Inspector that accompanied myself and the other new recruits on the long journey from Ottawa to Winnipeg, via Dakota Territory. Steele was fair-haired and every bit as slim as I; he had impressed me with his knowledge of the West, his riding skills and his tireless endurance. He was one of the “old originals” who had signed up when the force was first created in 1873, and had risen rapidly through the ranks since then.

Just thirty-four years old, Steele had neatly parted hair and a trim moustache that curved up at either side of his mouth. He strode into the room, one hand clutching the Stetson that was the unofficial headgear of the mounted police. He stared at me with a look of such penetrating intensity that my hands began to tremble. In that instant, I was certain that he, too, had learned my secret. I clenched my fists until the leather of my white dress gauntlets creaked, and I willed my hands to stay still.

Commissioner Irvine followed Steele into the room. He stared at me with a curious, measuring look. He wore his reddish beard neatly trimmed, and had a thick moustache that completely covered both upper and lower lip. His face was narrow and rectangular, and his nose long. There was a worried look in his keen grey eyes.

The Commissioner seated himself behind the table as Steele closed the door. I waited for someone to speak, every nerve at attention. At last, the Superintendent cleared his throat.

“At your ease, Corporal,” Steele said.

I moved my left foot a fraction apart from the right, and slid my hands behind my back. Trying to disguise the tension in my shoulders, I grasped one hand tightly in the other.

The Commissioner laid a dun-coloured folder on the desk and sat forward in his chair. “Do you know why you’ve been called to headquarters, Corporal Grayburn?” he asked.

“No sir,” I said. Then, realizing that my voice had been somewhat hoarse, I cleared my throat and added in a louder tone: “I do not.”

It was a lie, of course. Another falsehood, laid upon the rest.

The truth was that Marmaduke Grayburn, the name I had answered to for the past five years, was not my own. The real Marmaduke Grayburn was still in Ontario, living under another name. He was an old friend of mine — one who had known me long enough to trust my strange “hunches” and premonitions. When I’d told him that death would swiftly find him in the North-West Territories, were he to travel west with the other new police recruits, he’d readily believed me, and asked with a pale countenance what he should do. That was when I suggested that I go in his place.

Swapping places with Marmaduke had been more than an act of mere altruism. It seemed my one and only chance to escape the dreariness of working in the tobacco shop, and of marrying a woman I didn’t love. It was also a chance to prove my moral fibre, by meeting head-on the rigours of life on the frontier.

Marmaduke at first declined my offer, but was at last persuaded by my gift of the one hundred and sixty-three dollars I’d withdrawn from my savings account. He handed his uniform to me — fortunately it fit well and required no tailoring — and I mustered with the other recruits for the trip west, to pursue a life of adventure under an assumed identity. I was the only man among them who had bypassed the North-West Mounted Police medical exam.

The Commissioner pulled several sheets of paper from the folder and smoothed them with his hand. Peeping out from under them was a photograph. I had a wild thought that these papers might include the letter of character and other documents that the real Marmaduke Grayburn had provided upon his enlistment. But then I saw my own handwriting upon the uppermost page.

“Your summons to Regina was due to this report, made by yourself on—.” The Commissioner paused to glance at the date in the upper left-hand corner. “On June 1, 1883.”

I felt a slight frown crease my brow. I wondered how the events of more than a year ago might be relevant to the matter at hand. I’d been stationed at the detachment of Maple Creek in 1883, at what was then the end of the CPR line. The railway navvies were working hard that summer, laying better than four miles of track a day as they pushed toward the Rockies….

“The Piapot incident,” Steele prompted. His callused, suntanned hands gripped the brim of his Stetson. “And your premonitory dream.”

The Commissioner shot Steele a look, and the Superintendent fell silent under the sudden glare in his grey eyes. When they turned back to me, the Commissioner’s eyes held that same measuring look I’d seen earlier.

“Sir?” I asked.

I knew exactly what Steele was referring to, but I still couldn’t see the connection between my strange experience of a year ago and my impending discharge. I avoided Steele’s eyes and concentrated instead on the mechanical brass clock shaped like a shaggy buffalo on the Commissioner’s desk. As it softly chimed the hour, the tiny perpetual-motion device inside it caused it to rear up and kick its hind legs. One of the hinges inside it was squeaking a little, and there was on tarnish the buffalo’s horns and hooves; like me, it needed a good polish. These deficiencies would have driven my father to distraction, for he always insisted that machinery be well oiled and gleaming.

“Superintendent Steele wants to form a special division within the force,” the Commissioner said, in a tone of voice that was carefully non-committal. “It would be a hand-picked troop made up of constables drawn from our existing divisions, and special constables recruited from the civilian population. Each man must fulfill the peculiar qualifications that Steele has set out — qualifications that he believes you possess.”

This left me completely at a loss. “Sir, I … I don’t….”

The Commissioner held up a hand and I fell silent. His eyes bored into me as if I were a man charged with a crime and he the judge who would decide my fate. Then he glanced down at the paper on the table in front of him. “Your report of the incident suggests that you weren’t surprised by the death of Sergeant Wilde. In it, you state that you had a premonition of his death.”

“It was just a dream, sir,” I sputtered.

It was a lie, of course. The dreams that contain premonitions of the future are always especially vivid for me, and every detail remains etched in my memory for years thereafter. Yet was I to recite these details now? If I did, they would think me some kind of fanciful lunatic.