When I awoke again
, night had fallen. I didn't know which night it was, or how many I had slept through or ignored in my delirium. The fire was still burning outside, casting rippling shadows through the canvas.
The frozen earth beneath me was as stiff as hardrock maple and made me ache in a hundred places where my body curved and it didn't. My bladder was full to the point of agony. But I was reluctant to try to get up because I knew a universe of pain was hovering just above me, waiting for me to stir from the safe haven beneath. I was forty years old, if the faded brown ink on the end pages of the Bible that had come over from Scotland with my father meant anything, and had faced more punishment than most adventurous men twice my age, but the older I got, the more it hurt, and the less prepared I was to suffer it. I was going to be a cowardly old man.
I rolled over slowly, out from under the bearskin cover, stopped to breathe, placed my palms flat against the earth, took in as much breath as I could hold, and pushed myself up onto my knees. A wave of thick gluey fog rolled in, gray and glistening.
My eyesight started to go. I caught it when it was reduced to pinpoints of light and forced them open by sheer force of will and a lifetime's experience of blackouts; when you've lived through the same nightmare a score of times you learn to recognize it and exercise some control over it. My elbows wanted to buckle, I wobbled. The wave passed on through the other side of my skull. I remained motionless on my hands and knees until I was sure it was all out. Then I shoved myself upright and let the momentum carry me off my knees and onto my feet. I did this all in one movement, like ripping off a bandage. Getting the worst part out of the way all at once.
The worst was worse than I thought. The wave reversed itself in a towering curl, blocking out the light. I grabbed for the tent pole with both hands, felt the coarse bark, and tightened my grip, imprinting the whorls and ridges on my palms. The inside of the curl was lined with hot orange pain. It was like getting shot all over again. I increased my grip on the pole, tried to crush the straight pine, to make my hands hurt worse than what was going on around the middle of my body. The wave crested, hung frozen for a week, then ducked its head and went on over. I hung on to the pole and rode it out. The burning slid down from my trunk to my pelvis and down my legs and out the ends of my toes. I stood shaking in the aftermath.
When I thought I could support myself I took one hand away, then the other. Some of the bark came off with them. My fingernails were bleeding. They throbbed when I fumbled the bone buttons of my shirt through the eyelets. One side of my body, the side opposite the fire burning outside the tent, was cold. I looked down at the bearskin, lying at my feet, as far away as Helena. I didn't dare bend down and try to pick it up. I didn't have enough left to make that trip all over again.
I pulled aside the flap and stepped outside, hugging myself
to keep the heat in. The sky was clear of clouds, allowing outer space to come clear to the ground, black as a bottomless well and studded with stars like ice crystals. The air was searingly cold; breathing it in was like plunging chest deep into an icy creek. A fresh fall of snow, over now, covered the raw broken edges of the ruined settlement and gentled the steep slope to the river, chuckling away between the jagged wafers of ice that lined its banks. The place looked as it might have before civilization had stretched out its left arm and closed its fingers around it.
Hope Weathersill sat cross-legged in the snow twenty feet from the tent, on the far edge of the firelight. Her back was turned my way, but she must have heard me, because the snow squeaked like sprung planks beneath my boots. She didn't turn around or stir as I approached the fire. It had begun to burn down. I spotted a pile of limbs nearby, powdered with snow. I went over, bent my knees to keep from stooping, slid one off the pile, shook off the snow, and dragged it over to the fire, where I dropped the end into the flames. Breaking it up would have damaged me worse than the limb. I saw the other end had been chopped with an axe or a tomahawk; either the pile was left over from Vivian's last visit or the Indians were helping out.
A spluttering snort drew my attention to the horses. The sorrel mustang and the woolly gray were standing a hundred feet closer to the tent than the spot where I had hitched them. I walked that way. They were hobbled with braided rawhide thongs and someone had unsaddled them and unfolded their saddle blankets and spread them over their backs for warmth. I found the saddles themselves close by, stacked and covered with the canvas wrap from my bedroll, sifted over with snow. The bag of oats was there as well and I fed two handfuls apiece to the horses, who accepted them greedily as if they hadn't eaten in days. But whoever had relieved them of their burdens and
bothered to cover the saddles would have taken care to feed them as well. I assumed the bedroll and my pouches were also underneath the cover but I didn't investigate that far because I felt myself getting weak.
The fire was going well now. I stopped next to it to warm my hands and draw the chill out of my bones, then approached the woman, once again making plenty of noise to avoid startling her. She didn't move. Her back was so straight and she was so still sitting there in just the canvas coat with her head uncovered that I had a bad feeling even before I circled around to face her. Her eyes were open. There was frost in her eyebrows and bits of ice in her wild hair. The shotgun lay across her lap with her hands resting on it, the fingers as blue as bottle necks. I took in air, held it against the pain in my ribs, then let it out in a thick plume and bent my knees to see if there was any vapor at all coming from her nose or mouth.
The shotgun came up fast and struck me along my right jawline with a noise as if a great iron bell had rung inside my head. I lost my balance and fell backward into the snow, which wasn't as soft as it needed to be for a man who didn't take pain as well as he used to. The wave came back, all bright orange now and no longer thick or sluggish. When it subsided, dragging its flotsam of razor-sharp needles, I found myself staring up both barrels of the shotgun. The woman was standing over me once again, with the wildness in her eyes and her hair blowing about like smoke. Both hammers were back and her finger rested on the front trigger.
The only thing I was thinking was what a shame the Indians had wasted all that time wrapping my ribs, just to get shot again and for keeps.
Her expressionâit was no expression at all, comes to thatâdidn't change. She lowered each hammer in turn, using her
thumbs, then poked me in the chest with the muzzles. When I didn't react she poked me again, hard enough to awaken the pain. I got the meaning then and gripped the barrels with both hands, feeling them weld themselves to the metal in the cold. I drew up one knee and she braced herself and leaned back, hauling me to my feet with the shotgun as a lever. I hoped neither of the hammers was loose and the powder in the shells was stable, because the muzzles were pointed at my midsection the whole time.
Then I was on my feet and she snatched away the gun, taking some of the skin of my palms along with it, and returned to the hollow in the snow where she had been sitting. In another second she was back in position with the shotgun across her lap with hands resting on it and her eyes wide open, breathing so shallowly she made almost no steam. I followed the line of her gaze to the charred timber of the cross overlooking the mass grave on the ridge, where her husband and children were lying in a jumble with the rest of the massacred, joined for eternity.
I waited with her for a little, then I got cold. I went back to the fire and stood with my back to the flames to dry my clothes. When that was done I dragged another two feet of unburned limb into the fire and returned to the tent, where I picked up my dream where I had left off, my first lucky break of the trip.
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When morning came aroundâthe next one or the one after that; it's been too long and at the time the passage of hours and days held no significanceâI knew I was getting better because my brain had begun to go bad from boredom. I was slept out. The soup, which never seemed to run dry, had lost all taste, and I only tolerated it because the feeding sessions broke up the day. For a time I amused myself wondering why the Weathersill
woman bothered. That stopped interesting me when I decided it gave her something to do aside from sitting and staring. She had me down as the enemy, but she had spent too much of her life taking care of someone to resist the habit. She didn't give this any more thought than one of those birds that continue to care for strange hatchlings long after they were aware that the eggs had been left in their nests by a trespasser. Everything she did came from instinct, like breathing. Bliss and Whitelaw had gutted her as effectively as their torches had the buildings of the settlement.
Or perhaps not. For all I knew she spent her silent hours thinking up recipes for when the soup finally ran out or composing speeches for the Grand Army of the Republic. Assuming too much was what got lawmen shot.
When I sat up this particular morning, the pain had backed off to the extent that I welcomed it as a troublesome friend whose visits gave structure to one's life. I stood, caught my breath when one of my cracked ribs pinched my side, but prevented myself from grasping the tent pole. I found my balance without it and even worked up courage to lift the bearskin and slide it over my shoulders cloak fashion. I had trained myself to take shallow breaths and make them satisfy. I stroked my matted beard, attempting to reckon the time I'd been there by the length of the whiskers; but if I were good at arithmetic I wouldn't have agreed to the salary I was being paid.
I went outâand blinked at the sight of a thousand bright-red tunics facing the tent in a semicircle on horseback. It was more color than I'd seen since the leaves fell in autumn.
“Behold the prodigal,” Inspector
Vivian said. “Except his father didn't have to go looking for him.”
He was seated astride a tall chestnut so dark it could have passed for a black in slight shadow, curried to a high gloss like burnished leather. He held the reins in one gauntleted hand while the other rested on his thigh. Only a career British cavalryman could have looked so uncomfortable in the saddle. He was dressed, like the others, in heavy scarlet wool, with a belt making a diagonal white slash across his torso and a white cork helmet with a spike on top and the strap buckled tight to his chin. The red-white combination put me in mind of strawberries and cream.
There weren't really a thousand of them, of course. The actual number was closer to fifty, but the effect of that crimson band separating white earth from blue sky inflated the initial estimate. I understood then the reason behind the color choice in London; no matter what the size of your own force, you couldn't look at it without feeling outnumbered.
In the middle ground between the semicircle and the tent,
Hope Weathersill sat Indian fashion in her usual spot, still as a plaster Buddha. The great armed body of men didn't exist for her. She saw straight through it to the cross on the ridge.
I slid my gaze from one end of the line to the other and back to Vivian. “All for me?”
“Yes, they are debating your predicament on the floor of Parliament. Gladstone himself took up your case. We are here on his orders to escort you to Balmoral, where you will be knighted by Her Majesty. Moose Jaw Murdock, they shall call you in the
Times
. Like Chinese Gordon.”
“She'll have to come here. I get seasick.”
His sense of humor had reached its shallow bottom. “When you hadn't returned after five days I decided to look in on you on our way north. These men have been dispatched from Fort Walsh and placed under my command. This expedition is bound for Fort Chipewyan.”
I had to pry my brain loose from where it had been stuck for days to recall our conversation in the Prince of Wales. I remembered the dead trader on the Methye Portage. “On your way to avenge John Cutthroat?”
“Not entirely. The mail packet I was expecting from Chipewyan arrived the day after you left. It contained a general rec-quisition for reinforcements from throughout the Dominion. The commander up there believes the same band that killed Jean-Baptiste Coup-Jarret and burned his post are responsible for the slaughter of a Métis family living on the south shore of Lake Athabasca, directly across from the fort. With the Métis situation as it is, the government in Ottawa is granting the request for reinforcements to prevent civil war.”
I felt my strength returning. It started as a tingling sensation at the base of my neck and shot through my body in a flash of heat. “Survivors?”
“One, briefly. A boy of about ten. Before he died he provided a description of the men he saw assaulting his mother after they shot him in the chest, evidently to weaken her resistance. Two of them match the readers your Judge Blackthorne sent on Lorenzo Bliss and Charles Whitelaw.”
“I'll get my gear together.” I started toward the canvas covering my saddles and pouches.
“You'll slow us down. What happened to you, by the way?” He might have been asking about a holiday in Scotland.
I found the Winchester carbine and Evans rifle under the cover, also the Deane-Adams with my cartridge belt neatly wrapped around the holster. Whatever medicine a crazy woman carried, it must have been plenty powerful to prevent the Indians from confiscating good weapons.
“Let's just say I got a little more out of the Weathersill woman than I came for.” I buckled on the belt.
He turned his pale eyes on the woman. “I'm half surprised she didn't make an end to the job once she'd started.”
“Only half?”
“I doubt even Canada could blow all the female out of her. Or out of any woman, for that matter. I suppose it was she who patched you up.”
“No, I have your renegade chief to thank for that.”
“Piapot? That old rotter! You must have made quite an impression on him.” He gathered his reins. “When you get back to Moose Jaw, ask for Bernard Eel. He ain't a doctor, but he put in a year as a dresser at St. Bart before he lost his place; something about theft. He's the closest thing to a medical professional in this damned part of the country.”
I checked the load in the Deane-Adams. “I'm not going back to Moose Jaw.”
“Go where you like, so long as it ain't with us. I'm not in the habit of carrying wounded
into
battle.”
“A few days ago you told me three hundred Mounties ought to be more than enough to handle Bliss and Whitelaw. One battered American lawman more or less shouldn't make any difference.”
“Ottawa doesn't agree. When a general order goes out, it's to be obeyed yesterday. We're not waiting round while you get saddled. Sergeant Major?”
A pair of black moustaches with a sunburned face behind them stood in his stirrups and bawled something incomprehensible, at least to me. The line of men turned their horses north in a single graceful movement, as easily as a man swinging one arm.
I had to raise my voice above the jingling of bit-chains. “When you see you're being followed, do me a favor and don't shoot.”
“It won't be a favor when you lose the trail in a great bloody blizzard,” he called back. “I smell one coming.”
“Where can I find a guide?”
“Moose Jaw.”
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If I'd been any longer outfitting the sorrel and getting the pack saddle and the supplies and provisions I needed onto the gray, the Canadian Pacific would have finished laying its tracks, and I might have ridden to Fort Chipewyan in a Pullman. I had to rest often to keep my ribs from poking out my side, and when the damn mustang puffed its belly to prevent me from tightening the cinch I had to wait until it couldn't hold its wind any more, then yank fast; kicking the animal in the gut wasn't an option in my condition. Finally I cut the hobbles, found my badger hat,
and stepped into leather with the help of a pile of half-burned logs to start from. I snicked my way over to where the woman was seated. Her hands, red and chapped with black ragged nails, dangled between her spread thighs, and the only movement was her hair crawling in the gusts and the faint gray jets of smoke her breath made when I leaned out from the saddle to see it. She neither blinked nor moved her eyes from the cross on the ridge. I couldn't tell if she was aware of the Mounties' visit or if she cared. To this day I don't know whether her method of living was a form of surrender or a determination to survive; or if the enormity of the catastrophe that had befallen her had reduced her to the level of a machine, which continued to operate long after those who had depended on it no longer had a use for it. If that was the case, I wondered how long it would go on. I couldn't tell if the assistance she received from the Indians and Vivian was a kindness or a despicable evil, sentencing her to a lifetime of bleak vigilance at the grave of those she loved when it would be more merciful to let her perish. Whatever the situation, I have only to sit back with nothing occupying my thoughts to see her again as clearly as if I were still in that ruined settlement; watching, always watching.
I turned the mustang's head, jerked the pack line, and left her there.
I had no intention of going back to Moose Jaw. I'd brought enough provisions beyond those I'd left for the woman to see me through several more days on the road. If I could follow the Mounties' trail as far as the next settlement or lumber camp, where I could trade for more or at least hire a guide, I stood as good a chance of survival as came to a peace officer west of St. Louis and north of God. Game was plentiful, according to the rabbit and deer tracks and great cowlike prints left by elk that
crisscrossed the trail. I wouldn't starve, although I'd miss the coffee when it ran out.
Vivian was right about snow coming. I'd grown up in mountain country, recognized that bitter-iron smell, and felt a fresh ache in my damaged ribs and in an old bullet wound I'd forgotten except when the weather was about to change sharply. I calculated I had about twenty-four hours before it came in hard enough to obliterate the trail and picked up my pace. The hide wrap was acutely uncomfortable in the saddle, but as it kept the cracked bones from shaking the rest of the way apart on the trot I was happy I had it.
I'd brought a map of western Canada I'd acquired in Helena, full of blank spots and scratchy lines that might have been rivers or marks made by hairs stuck to the cartographer's pen. Nearing dark I heard water chuckling and decided I'd reached the north fork of the Saskatchewan River. There was a Mountie post in that area, Battleford, where Vivian's men would likely put in for the night, but I could no longer see the trail. The energy I'd have to spend looking for it was better invested crossing the river; fordable streams had a way of becoming torrents overnight, adding days or weeks to a journey in the search for a place to cross. I had just enough light to pick my way among the rocks visible in the shallow bed, kneeing the reluctant sorrel and jerking at the lead line when the gray balked at the icy water coursing past its fetlocks. Once on the opposite bank I dismounted quickly and built a fire with pine needles and boughs for the horses to thaw their numb legs. The air was bitter cold, and not cold enough; not far enough below zero anyway to prevent snow from forming. I smelled the air and changed my mind about my earlier estimate. The flakes would be falling by dawn.
I fed the horses, cooked bacon and beans in the skillet, washed them down with coffee, and wrapped myself in my furs
and blanket, drawing down the badger hat until it touched my collar and leaving no skin exposed. Sometime during the night I heard the wind starting, whistling through distant pines and coming my way with the speed of a late freight racing to make up time on the downgrade. By the time it got to the branches overhead it was howling. I got up to feed the fire and ran right into the gray. Both horses had moved in close, rumps to the wind. I stroked and patted them to assure them I had things under control and bundled myself up again to sleep the sleep of the innocent. There's no sin in lying to a horse.
I heard the first grainy flakes pelting my furs, then slid off into senselessness. When gray light woke me, the furs felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds. I raised my head and a shelf of snow avalanched down my neck, chilling me to the base of my spine. When I looked down, my body had disappeared. In its place was a white tent. I was a human snowdrift.
Pushing myself to my feet required both hands. It was like sliding out from under a cloak of lead. The stuff was still falling, if
falling
was the word; the wind hooted and the snow came in sideways, stinging my face like flung pebbles. I leaned into it, snapping my eyes open at intervals to see where I was going, then squeezing them shut, full of water, to keep the snow out. The fire had gone out long since, suffocated beneath a thick wet blanket.
The horses were huddled together for warmth. Snow clung to their coats and masks of hoarfrost encased their faces, made of their frozen breath with their eyes looking pitiably through the holes. I used the Deane-Adams to break up the ice, fed them each a handful of grain to start their blood flowing, shook the snow off my gear, and led them to the shelter of a tight stand of pines farther up the slope from the river. The snow was nearly waist high where the ground dished in. Inside the stand, where
the trunks grew so close they made a sort of rick and acted as a drift fence, the earth was almost bare. I strapped on the horses' nose bags, opened a can of sardines with my knife, and sat down in a cradle formed by forked trunks to eat and wait out the worst of the storm. I couldn't build a fire for fear of loosening the snow in the treetops and creating a slide that would bury us all.
The blizzard broke shortly before noon. The last gunmetal-colored cloud slid across a hole in the trees like a window shade going up, exposing bright blue sky. The wind leveled off, then quit abruptly. The silence hurt my ears. When I stepped outside the pines, into a horseshoe of ankle-high snow left by the passage of wind around the dense stand, surrounded by towering drifts, the geography had changed completely from the night before. From one horizon to the other stretched a dazzling clean sheet of white. Even the trees were mere shadows beneath heavy clumps that bent them nearly to the ground, as if the wind together with the flinty abrasive grains had planed the landscape clear of everything vertical except the mountains, which stood impossibly high and aloof to heaven and earth. Sunlight walloped off the brutal white, blinding me like a photographer's magnesium flash. I was looking out at a white desert.
The trail I had been following was gone, utterly and forever. I went back, blacked my eyes from the can of lampblack, mounted the mustang, and led the gray out of the trees. The little sorrel had to raise its legs to its belly to gain leverage against the drifts. I rode it down the slope to the river and turned west. If there was a guide to be found who could lead me to Fort Chipewyan, I would find him near water. Failing that, I stood a better chance of having my remains discovered on the bank come the thaw than if I ventured across the vast blankness to the north. I couldn't have Judge Blackthorne thinking I'd welshed on our bet and deserted.