Apparition Trail, The (40 page)

“Bravely done, Buck,” I said, moving my hand up to stroke his neck instead. “Now we just have to find—”

Buck’s neck was not where I expected it to be — my hand encountered nothing but air. I lowered it, patting around to find the reins, and found that they rested on a neck that was at once too wide and covered in coarse, woolly hair. In that same instant, Buck made a sound — not the delicate
whuffle
of a horse, but the low, heavy snort of a much larger beast.

I reached into my pocket for my box of matches, and struck one.

The yellow circle of light it cast shook as I saw what I was sitting upon. My mount was no longer a horse. Just ahead of the saddle, massive, shaggy shoulders descended to a pair of curving horns. Buck turned his head, and I could see that the bit and bridle were still in his mouth. He looked back at me with a small, round eye and tossed his head, as if impatient to be off. He didn’t seem to notice — or else didn’t care — that he had been transformed into a buffalo.

As the match went out, I felt the saddle shift. I slipped my feet out of the stirrups, jumped to the ground, and felt under Buck’s belly to see why the saddle had come loose. The strap ended in a frayed bit of leather that hung down at his side; so large was Buck’s girth that it had snapped during his transformation.

I had no way to repair the saddle. I hauled it from Buck’s back and cast it aside, and then removed my saddlebags. I paused only to retrieve my bottle of Pinkham’s and put it in my pocket, then took a fistful of Buck’s shaggy shoulder. “Easy now, Buck,” I said. “There’s a good hor … ah, buffalo.”

I hauled myself onto his bare back and settled in just at the point where the matted hair ended and his smooth-coated flanks began. Buck stood patiently, snorting and moving his head gently from side to side, his teeth making grinding noises as if he were trying to adjust his mouth to an ill-fitting bit.

I gave Buck a gentle prod with my spurs and he walked forward as obediently as any horse. His gait was different — heavier and more jarring — and the width of his back bowed my legs out even more than usual.

I decided to risk a shout — if being transformed into a buffalo didn’t cause Buck to spook, neither would my call.

“Chambers!” I cried. “Where are you?”

I strained my ears, but heard no reply. It didn’t surprise me; I assumed that Chambers had been transformed, once again, into a buffalo. He could hardly respond to my shouts. I listened instead for the sound of hoof beats, knowing that he and Iniskim must have been just ahead of me. Perhaps he would hear my call and run back to show me the way.

“Chambers!” I cried again.

I counted my matches by feel. I had only seven left, so I decided to let Buck pick his own way through the darkness. The thud of his hooves soon turned to a
clip-clop
noise; the tunnel must be passing through a section of solid rock. I raised my arm to protect my head, in case there were any low spots in the roof above. A few minutes later, I heard a faint slurping sound, just up ahead. Buck jolted to a halt, and as he did I could hear air whistle in and out through his wide nostrils. He’d smelled whatever I had heard.

I lit another match. Then I gasped.

No more than three or four paces ahead of me, at a place where the tunnel bent sharply, stood a buffalo calf with hair as white as the snow. It looked no more than a year old — already firm on its feet but still small, with only vestigial horns. Its pale pink eyes reflected the light of my match back at me as it looked up — and then it lowered its head once more and an equally pink tongue began dabbing at a body that lay on the floor — a human body.

The match went out.

I dropped Buck’s reins and slid down from his massive back. I hurried forward through the tunnel and struck another match. Iniskim shied at my approach, backing away from the body.

I recognized Chambers at once by the silk pyjamas he wore and the smell of the Brilliantine in his dark hair. I was relieved to see that he was not dead; his back rose and fell slightly as he breathed. He lay on his stomach on the stone floor of the tunnel, his face turned away from me. Iniskim had been licking his cheek. I held the match closer, and saw an angry-red bump on his forehead. It looked as though he had struck his head in the darkened tunnel — either that, or he’d been rendered unconscious by a kick from a tiny hoof.

I gently rolled him over, lifting him into a sitting position. As the match went out, I fished the bottle of Pinkham’s out of my pocket and pulled the cork with my teeth. I found Chambers’s mouth by feel, and pried his lips apart. Then I sloshed a little of the painkiller into it.

Chambers sputtered, then broke into a choking cough. As he felt someone holding him, his arms immediately began flailing.

“Chambers,” I said reassuringly. “It’s me — Grayburn.”

Chambers was patting his body, checking shoulders, arms, legs. At first I thought he was looking for injuries, but then I realized what he was doing.

“You’re all right,” I told him. “You’re still a man.”

I heard Buck snort behind me, and the scrape of a large hoof against the ground. A ringing, metallic noise echoed through the tunnel, and after a moment I realized what it must be: Buck was trying to pry off a loose horseshoe. Now that he was a buffalo, the shoes no longer fit his massive hooves.

The bottle of Pinkham’s was wrenched from my grasp. I heard a gurgle as Chambers drank. Lighting another match, I saw that Iniskim hadn’t strayed. The albino buffalo calf stood a short distance away from us, her eyes already focused on us as if she could see in the dark and had been watching us all this time.

I shook my head in wonder. I couldn’t believe that I was face to face with Iniskim at last. A fierce pride filled my breast. Like the proverbial Mountie who gets his man, I’d gotten my buffalo. I was glad, now, that the tunnel had closed behind me — it meant that Iniskim wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Indians that Potts had said were on their way to the ford. Now it was up to us to see her safely to the Manitou Stone and prevent the Day of Changes from occurring.

Chambers was sitting up without my assistance. He seemed to have fully recovered from his brief spate of unconsciousness. Ignoring the fact that he was drinking more of my Pinkham’s, I rose to my feet. I dropped the match and reached into my pocket to pull out the hymn book. I found the feather by feel, then held it in my hand as I struck another match.

“Iniskim,” I said. “This was your mother’s.”

The white buffalo calf snorted. I realized then that, even if the soul of Iniskim was inside that buffalo body, the girl was too young to understand me. She was barely a year old — and at that tender age she probably didn’t speak the language of her Peigan mother yet, let alone English.

I tried again, at the same time attempting to project the essence of my message via thought transference. “White Buffalo Woman, I know that you are looking for the Manitou Stone, so that you can escape from this world. I’ve come to help you find it.”

I wasn’t paying attention to the match, which burned right down to the end. I dropped it with an oath and sucked on my burned fingers. As I did so, I heard the
clip-clop
of unshod hooves. A moment later warm breath stirred the feather, and then a soft wet nose nuzzled my hand.

I reached out with my other hand and stroked her head. For the briefest of moments, I imagined that my hand slid across soft human hair, but then a familiar coarseness was under my fingertips again. My hand rested on a buffalo calf — but just to make sure, I struck another match.

Chambers had gotten to his feet and as the yellow circle of match-light filled the tunnel, he stared at Buck.

“By Jove, Grayburn,” he said. “Did you really saddle up a buffalo to come and find me?”

I walked back to Buck and inspected his feet. He’d managed to scrape one horseshoe off, but the rest were still firmly in place. He stood placidly, waiting for me to mount him.

“This is no buffalo,” I told Chambers. “It’s my horse, Buck.”

I saw Chambers eyes narrow thoughtfully just before the match went out. “You don’t say,” he muttered.

I found Chambers’s hand and pressed the reins into it, taking back my bottle of Pinkham’s. My stomach was twisted in its customary knot of pain — in all of the excitement, I had been able to ignore it until now. I drained what was left in the bottle, then cast it aside. I heard it roll across the stone, then fetch up with a sharp crack against one wall.

“Get on his back, and let him have his head,” I told Chambers. “I have a hunch he’ll find the way for us. I’ll follow along behind, with Iniskim.”

Chambers did as I had instructed. I slapped Buck forward and then followed the sound of his hooves, my right hand resting on Iniskim’s shoulders as she walked daintily along beside me. In my other hand I held Emily’s white feather. If the way ahead was blocked, I hoped that the feather would open it.

We passed a tunnel on the right that opened into the one we were in, but we carried on along the main route, always following the curve to the left. I was counting on us not having to walk too far; according to the size of the spiral I’d drawn on Steele’s map, the end of the spiralling ley line — and the Manitou Stone — couldn’t have been more than sixty miles away from the ford on the South Saskatchewan.

I could feel that we were close; etheric energy flowed over me like a chill wind, causing the hairs to rise on my arms, and on the back of my neck. My ears were filled with a faint crackling noise that had grown steadily as we passed through the tunnel, and my skin tingled. Strange to think that we were moving through a current of magical energy, and were yet immune to it. Then I realized something.

“Chambers,” I asked the darkness. “How did you manage to avoid being turned into a buffalo? Did you know you’d remain a man when you followed Iniskim into the tunnel?”

The answer was preceded with a relieved chuckle. “It was an educated guess,” he said. “I knew from observation that the transformative magic didn’t work on those who had been ‘reborn’ once already. I gambled that my previous ‘rebirthing’ in buffalo form had inoculated me. I won that bet — although I probably would have been more sure-footed on four feet. Iniskim led me a merry chase through the tunnels, and I was going full bore when I ran into that bend in the tunnel. Had I been a buffalo, with horns and a thick skull, I wouldn’t have been rendered unconscious.”

I mulled that over, listening to the
clip-clip-clip-thud
of Buck’s hooves and the lighter
clippity-clop
of Iniskim’s daintier feet. With an unlimited amount of time, I could use the buffalo stone in my pocket to inoculate all of the settlers in the North-West Territories, one by one, by changing them briefly into buffalo and then back into human form again — but time was something we had precious little of.

I wondered how much time was passing, up in the world above. I was tempted to slap Buck on the rump and have him pick up the pace, but didn’t want to run the risk of Chambers being knocked unconscious a second time — or of him being separated from us. My hand gripped Iniskim’s shaggy shoulder more tightly. At least she wasn’t going anywhere. She walked along beside me as obediently as a small child guided by its mother’s hand.

“Chambers,” I asked again. “Why was my horse transformed into a buffalo? When the buffalo stone touched a snake, nothing happened. I didn’t think that it would work on animals.”

“I was wondering when you would think of that,” Chambers said.

Despite his knowing tone, I wasn’t irritated. He was the expert on ley lines, after all.

“There seem to be three mechanisms for producing a transformation,” Chambers said. “The first — the buffalo stone — is the simplest. It works only upon the physical plane, and must come into direct contact with the physical body itself — the human body. It will not transform animal into animal.

“The second mechanism for transformation is the energy contained in the ley line. The etheric force that flows along it can be used to augment the magic of the buffalo stone, allowing transformations to occur over a great distance. By using this energy, every human being bounded by the spiral — which takes in virtually all of the North-West Territories — can be made subject to the magic of a single buffalo stone.”

“Not every human being,” I reminded him. “The Indians will be protected by their guardian spirits.”

I could imagine Chambers nodding in the darkness as he replied. “Quite so — and why?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Chambers plunged on before I could speak. “The transformative magic, when spread over so wide an area, is weakened. It must spread across both the physical and astral planes. Encountering a barrier in the astral plane — the body of a protective spirit that stands between that magic and a human being like a shield — it is unable to transform the physical body.”

“And that protective spirit must be an animal,” I guessed. “A Christian angel or saint won’t do the job.”

“It would appear so,” Chambers concurred. “But perhaps some angels are stronger than others.”

I frowned, thinking about the half-breed scout Peter. He’d been raised by an Indian mother and spent time among the Blood Indians. He’d presumably been given a guardian spirit by his mother. Why did he feel the need for the additional protection of a Catholic saint?