Apparition Trail, The (48 page)

“It’s a great deal for our government to bear, all in one go,” Macdonald told the Indians. “We’ll agree to it — but only if we can make it in installments. Will equal payments over the next ten years suit you?”

The translator conveyed the Prime Minister’s words, and after only the briefest of murmurs from the chiefs behind him, Big Bear answered. Knowing how the Indians love to debate, I realized they must have anticipated an offer like this, and already decided upon what they would or would not accept.

“Four years,” Big Bear said. “No more. My
pawakan
has said it must be so.”

I coughed gently, and caught the Prime Minister’s eye. “Excuse me, sir, but I think you’ll find that Big Bear won’t budge on that point. Four is a sacred number to these people, and if his guardian spirit has told him that this is the way it must be, he’ll insist on those terms.”

Macdonald’s eyes narrowed as he stared at Big Bear, and then he sighed. “At least the wee rascal isn’t charging interest,” he said grimly.

He turned back to the chiefs. “Very well. The government agrees.”

The proceedings went on much longer, well into the night. They concluded with Poundmaker, an eloquent orator, repeating the words that the Lieutenant Governor had used himself, a decade ago: “So you have promised, and so it shall be. For as long as the sun shines and the rivers flow.”

By the time the negotiations concluded, the moon was up, painting the snow-covered prairie with a ghostly white light. It was nearly full once more — a celestial reminder of the Day of Changes, and the strength of the Indians’ magic.

I was stiff from sitting on the cold ground. I rose from the buffalo robe I had been seated upon and repaired to my lodging for the night: a standard white canvas tent of police issue. I entered it and lit the lantern that sat on the rough wooden table beside my bed. I hung my helmet on the centre post and sat on my palliasse to pull off my boots. Outside the tent, the sound of drums and Indian voices raised in celebratory song filled the night. Already the Indians had slaughtered several of the cattle from the herd the treaty commissioners had brought as a sign of good faith. There would be full bellies and much joviality tonight. The children conceived on this night — and on all the nights hereafter — would never have to go hungry again.

My thoughts turned to Stone Keeper. I had traveled to the treaty negotiations alone; she and our daughter Iniskim were waiting for me back in Medicine Hat. Stone Keeper still hadn’t decided whether or not to accept my proposal of marriage, but I had high hopes.

I stripped off my jacket and riding breeches and folded them carefully. The brightly polished buttons on the front of my jacket gleamed gold in the lantern light, as did the sergeant’s stripes on my sleeves. Steele had promoted me — even after my confession that I had been serving under an assumed name. He’d merely said that one name was as good as another, and that it was the man that counted.

As I stood in my long underwear and stocking feet, staring at the new stripes on my red serge jacket, I thought of the uniform they’d buried Chambers in. He’d been promoted too — albeit posthumously. They’d buried Chambers in red serge, in full dress uniform. My last act of kindness to him was seeing to it that the uniform was properly tailored and turned out. I’d burnished the buttons myself, and ensured that his helmet was pipeclayed white and his boots were gleaming.

I sat back upon my palliasse, settling myself comfortably upon its straw stuffing, and pulled the blanket up over my knees. I was sleeping comfortably now — the claw wounds that Wandering Spirit had inflicted upon me had healed, as had the knife wound in my palm. My dreams, although sometimes troubled, seemed to contain no more prophetic messages. Strikes Back had spoken the truth: when I’d healed my cancer, my powers of precognition had disappeared.

I pulled open my long johns, and stared at my stomach — something I’d done more than once in the weeks since the Day of Changes. Despite the fact that Steele and Stone Keeper both witnessed me pulling out the bloody bundle of feathers from my abdomen, there was not a mark to be seen on my stomach. It was as if it had never happened. Yet my cancer was completely healed — the police surgeon who had treated my wounds at Medicine Hat had felt no tumour, and the pains had troubled me no more.

Reaching into my kit box, I pulled out my pipe and filled it with a pinch of Old Chum. I puffed on it gently, filling my tent with aromatic clouds of smoke. As I placed my tobacco pouch back inside my kit box, my eye fell on a small square bundle, wrapped in a black silk handkerchief: Chambers’s cards. So strong had been my compulsion to possess them that I’d stolen the cards from his personal effects when they were being wrapped up for delivery back to his brother in England. Filled with guilt at my petty theft, I hadn’t even looked at them these past few weeks, but now I slowly unwrapped the handkerchief that held them.

The cards still looked the same as when Chambers had used them to test my psychic abilities, that day on the
North West
. A host of priests, fakirs and shamans stared up at me from the face cards, their eyes imploring me to test my powers once more. I shuffled the deck and held the cards in a neat stack, then turned them over one by one, guessing what each might be. No matter how hard I tried, however, I couldn’t guess a single one. My powers had deserted me.

Uttering an oath, I cast the cards to the floor. They fell in a scatter around my stocking feet, mostly face down. One of the face cards, however, landed face-up. The character printed on it — a magician in an elegant black suit and top hat, holding what looked like a shell in his hand — caught my eye. I picked it up.

When I gave the card a closer scrutiny, my hand began to shake. I saw something I’d never noticed before. The fellow depicted on the card was the spitting image of Chambers, right down to his dark curling hair, moustache, and the beard worn below the chin, with cheeks shaved. The object in his hand wasn’t a shell — it was a spiral-shaped buffalo stone.

I swore out loud and nearly dropped the card when the character on it started to speak. I heard a
tisk-tisk
noise, and then Chambers waved a finger at me.

Hello, Grayburn
, he said.
I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time, but it’s damnably hard to catch your ear. You must have been a busy man, this past month.

“How—?” I gasped. “Where—?”

I turned the card over and looked at it, like a child searching for a person behind a mirror. The back was the same solid black it had always been. I turned the card face-upright again. Chambers was still staring at me.

I’m in the astral plane, of course. And do you know, it’s quite a fascinating place. It seems to conform to my notions of what Heaven might be like, although it changes whenever someone new ventures along. I’ve developed a theory to explain that — I call it Belief Convergence. When two astral beings with different notions of what the afterlife should look like meet, the scenery shifts through a riot of surrealistic imagery. It’s very much like the stuff of dreams, and so I’ve concluded that—

“You’re dead,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

Of course I am
, Chambers said with an exasperated sigh.

“But how can I talk to you? When I used the song to cure my cancer, my psychic powers vanished. I shouldn’t have been able to contact you at all.”

Chambers put his hands on his hips and frowned at me. The gesture reminded me of a schoolmaster I’d once had.
Strikes Back lied.

It took a moment for his utterance to penetrate my brain. When it did, my eyes widened. “You mean that I can still have precognitive dreams and contact the dead?” I asked wonderingly.

Chambers laughed.
You’re doing it at this moment, are you not?

I could only nod.

You have a great gift, Grayburn. You’re a true sensitive, in every aspect of the word. You’ve a talent for communicating with the dead. It’s no wonder the owl spirit chose you as its own — the messenger of death could find no more appropriate person to serve as a bridge between the dead and the living. That was why the owl came to you at the moment of your death, in the operating theatre, and sent you back to the land of the living.

Chambers looked around, as if trying to see beyond the edges of the card.
Have you a pen and ink — and paper?

“I think so,” I replied.

Good. Then take them in hand, and get ready to write.

He waited while I reached for pen and ink. When I was ready, he gave me a twinkling grin.
I’ll wager this will be the most renowned pamphlet the Society for Psychical Research has ever seen. Just make sure you get the title right — “Observations From the Other Side” — and spell my name correctly.

I had to smile. “Have no fear, Albert. I will.”

Chambers dictated the first lines of text to me, and I began to write.

We spent no more than an hour or two on the text that first evening, but in the weeks that followed I used the card to speak to Chambers on several more occasions and, eventually, the manuscript was completed.

By that time, I was back in Medicine Hat, waiting for Steele to assign my next case. Q Division was out in the open now — since the Day of Changes, there was no profit in concealing our existence. Indeed, the reverse was true. Knowing that a special division of policemen had been formed, each man of which was handpicked for his psychic powers or magical abilities, was a comfort to the settlers of the North-West.

Much later, I set pen to paper a second time. This time, the words were not Chambers’s, but my own.

I awoke with a start, my heart pounding, certain that I’d heard someone shout my name
, I wrote.
Yet all was silent in the darkened barracks….

Afterword

Marmaduke Grayburn was the first North-West Mounted Police constable killed in the line of duty. He was shot in the back on November 17, 1879, near the NWMP horse camp at Fort Walsh after he rode back up a trail to retrieve an axe. While an Indian named Star Child was arrested for the murder, he was later acquitted. The identity of Grayburn’s killer remains unknown.

While most of the characters and some of the events in
The Apparition Trail
are drawn from history, the story as a whole is fictional.
The Apparition Trail
is alternative history: an attempt to answer the question of what might have happened had magic awakened in the world — enabling Native rituals to produce concrete effects and European attempts to create perpetual motion devices. With magic, the history of the Canadian west would have been greatly changed.

In 1884, the year in which
The Apparition Trail
is set, the Indians who ranged over the North-West Territories (the current provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan) were in desperate straits. The buffalo on which they relied for food, shelter and clothing — herds that had numbered several million animals just a few short years before — were on the edge of extinction. The preceding few winters had been the coldest and most difficult in living memory, and all game animals were scarce. After consuming their horses and dogs, the Indians were reduced to eating gophers and grass in an attempt to survive. Several thousand people starved to death. Adding to this tragedy were the ravages of smallpox and other European diseases, which killed thousands more.

In 1876, the Cree signed Treaty Six, which (at the Indians’ insistence) included the provision of food in times of famine. Rather than living up to this promise, the Canadian government issued the Indians rations that were inadequate (the per-person ration for Indians was only half that issued to a North-West Mounted Policeman). The government further stipulated that food would only be given to those Indians who worked in exchange for it — this at a time when some were too weak from hunger to hunt. Indian agents like Tom Quinn took a hard-line approach: the Cree nicknamed Quinn “the bully,” and the “man who always says no.”

Some bands made an attempt to switch to farming, but the equipment the government provided was inadequate, and many of the farming instructors who were sent to teach the Indians had no knowledge of Prairie farming requirements. Crops failed, and again the Indians went hungry.

Some Indians did fight back, staging acts of political protest. In 1880, Chief Beardy erected a toll-gate across the Carlton Trail. In 1883, Chief Piapot set up camp in the path of the Canadian Pacific Railway in an attempt to stop construction of Canada’s first coast-to-coast railway line. It was Chief Big Bear, however, who worked the hardest to advance the Indian cause by way of his attempts to unite the scattered tribes of the North-West Territories and to present a unified voice to the Canadian government.

Sadly, Big Bear is recorded in the history books as a traitor and instigator of murder, rather than as the spokesman he tried to be. On April 2, 1885, warriors from his band, led by Wandering Spirit, shot and killed nine settlers at Frog Lake — including two priests. The shooting started when Quinn refused Wandering Spirit’s order to join settlers that the Indians had taken hostage. After two warnings, Wandering Spirit shot him; Quinn had said no for the last time. The Indians looted the settlement, then fled, taking their hostages with them.