Apparition Trail, The (2 page)

Now that I knew — officially — about the summons to Regina, I pushed my breakfast aside. I immediately repaired to the barracks, using as my excuse the need to give my dress uniform a going over. When I was satisfied that it was absolutely spotless, I put it on and conducted a final inspection in the mirror. Everything appeared in order: scarlet Norfolk jacket, heavy blue riding breeches with a gold stripe down each pant leg, service belt with Enfield revolver holstered and snapped in place, high brown boots with steel spurs, white leather gauntlets and helmet.

I was excused from fatigue duty that day, and so I spent the rest of the morning pacing the boardwalk in front of the barracks, waiting for the air bicycle to arrive. The summer sky was a clear blue, marred only by a few dark clouds on the eastern horizon. By noon the air was hot and dry. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and spit dried before it hit the sun-baked ground.

At last I spotted the air bicycle in the eastern sky. I watched it warily as it descended. It looked like an ordinary bicycle, but with two seats and two pairs of handlebars, suspended from a large, inflated sausage of a balloon. The operator sat on the foremost seat, intent upon flying the craft. His feet rested on pegs, instead of bicycle pedals, since the motive power for the air bicycle came not from a man’s muscles but from a perpetual motion device.

I have always been fascinated by mechanical workings, despite the strange effect I seem to have upon them. I prayed that the perpetual motion device that powered the air bicycle would be an exception to the rule — that my premonition of danger this morning wasn’t because it was destined to malfunction in mid-flight.

The device looked sturdy enough: a large, hollow disc of metal, affixed to the frame of the air bicycle by a complicated system of gears and chains in the spot where an ordinary bicycle’s larger wheel would be. I had seen diagrams of similar devices, so I knew that the wheel was filled with steel balls that tilted and fell, propelling it in a circle. The wheel was perfectly counterbalanced so that its rotation went on indefinitely, once it had been set in motion. The balls inside it made a clattering noise, like beads rattling against the sides of a tin cup.

Jutting out from the bicycle on either side were sails that flapped like wings, and at the front and rear were lightweight propellers, made of sheets of duck cloth that had been stretched over metal frames. The air bicycle’s operator — a member of the Mounted Police who was wearing balloonist’s goggles under his pillbox cap — adjusted the flapping of the sails by means of hand cranks, causing the air bicycle to descend. He meanwhile alternated the motive force between the fore and aft propeller by means of a large lever, nudging the air bicycle forward and back to bring the craft to a landing.

I watched the air bicycle’s descent, which was somehow graceful and ungainly at the same time. My father would have been fascinated by such a mechanism. I wondered — had he lived to see perpetual motion become a reality — whether he would have denied its existence, just as he had denied everything else that he deemed “impossible” or “mere coincidence.”

Shouting at a constable, who was puffing on a pipe, to stay clear, the operator set the air bicycle down with a thump on its four small landing wheels in the middle of the parade square. The propellers stopped turning as he threw the lever into neutral but the wings continued to flap, raising a cloud of dust. He obviously was under strict orders not to tarry in Moose Jaw, but to bring me to Regina posthaste.

A handful of men ventured forth from the shade of the barracks to view the machine at close range. They stood around like boys admiring a grand new toy, casting the occasional envious glance in my direction. I, however, was more concerned with the dust that was settling upon my uniform. After taking such care to make myself as presentable as possible, I was covered head to toe in the stuff.

The operator lifted his smoked-glass goggles from his eyes and shouted over the creaking of the air bicycle’s wings at the group of constables. He smacked dusty lips. “Is there any cold water to be had?”

“I’ll fetch you a cup,” one of the constables said, and hurried inside.

I hoped that they remembered to serve him the boiled water. The springs around Moose Jaw had turned miasmic, of late, and several of the men were down with typho-malaria. The last thing I needed was an operator who was suffering from fever and dysentery. He looked fairly robust, though, with broad shoulders and wide, wind-burned cheeks. Despite the distance he’d just traveled his eyes were bright under his thick dark hair.

“Are you Corporal Marmaduke Grayburn?” he asked as I approached.

“I am.”

He jerked a gloved thumb at the seat behind him. “Then climb aboard the
Raven
.”

I glanced up and saw the name of the air bicycle painted in neat yellow letters on the side of the balloon. I shuddered at the thought of being borne aloft by a bird of such ill omen, but settled onto the seat, hearing it creak beneath my weight, and gripped the handlebars in preparation for our ascent.

While there were some in the North-West Mounted Police who said the air bicycle would eventually replace the horse, I wasn’t so sure. It was an extremely ungainly craft, difficult to master, and subject to the whims of the wind. The air bicycle was also expensive; thus far, they had been used only by officers deployed on important police business — and by a corporal responding to an urgent summons from his Commissioner.

My premonition of impending calamity grew as I settled into the seat; I had to steel myself as I waited for the operator to drink his water and ready his craft for the skies. The feeling wasn’t quite as urgent or as clear, however, as the premonition I’d had back in November of 1879, just a few months after joining the police.

On that fateful day, I’d been working at the horse camp upriver from Fort Walsh, and had forgotten an axe a mile or so up the trail. When I considered returning for it, I felt an absolute dread that froze me to the spot. It came to me with fantastic clarity that, were I to ride up that trail, I would die.

My friend George Johnston laughed at my foolishness, and rode back himself to fetch the axe, ignoring my pleas for him to remain in camp.

He never came back.

The next day, a search party found George’s body lying in the brush and snow at the bottom of a coulee. He’d been shot in the back. The search party started to follow some horse tracks that crossed George’s trail — unshod hooves, which meant Indian ponies — but a chinook came up suddenly and melted the snow, obliterating the trail. Even the remarkable Jerry Potts, a half-breed scout who could track a fly across a pane of glass, couldn’t find any trace of the hoof prints after that.

We later learned that a Blood Indian by the name of Star Child had boasted of committing the crime, but when he was brought to trial two years later, the jury acquitted him. Their final verdict: George Johnston was murdered by person or persons unknown, thought to be Indian.

But for my premonition, it would have been myself — and not poor George — who had the dubious distinction of being the first North-West Mounted Police constable to be murdered in the course of his duties.

My feeling of dread as I sat on the air bicycle was less precise, but equally gloomy. I had the distinct sense that disaster awaited me in Regina, but no clear warning of the form it might take. No matter what lay ahead, however, I could not refuse the Commissioner’s summons.

The operator slid his goggles back down over his eyes, and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hang on tight!” he said with a grin. “And make sure the chin strap of your helmet is loose.”

As I obeyed this strange instruction, he engaged the crank that reversed the angle of the wings, sending us lurching into the air. My stomach descended into my bowels even as a sudden pressure filled my ears. I worked my jaw to clear it, opening my mouth wide in a forced yawn to pop them.

Within a few minutes we’d reached a dizzying height of more than two hundred feet above the ground. The barracks roofs were laid out below us, and the knot of men who had gathered on the parade square were blots of red, waving the smaller spots of brown that were their Stetsons. I am not normally afraid of high places, but as the operator threw the lever that engaged the rear propeller, sending the air bicycle forward, I gulped and gripped the handlebars more tightly. Moose Jaw slid away below.

The feeling that something awful was about to happen intensified as we winged our way east toward Regina, following the thin black ribbon of the CPR tracks and the telegraph line. For the first while I ignored it, concentrating on the magnificent view of the prairie, but after an hour or so, the feeling was joined by an all-too-familiar ache in my stomach. I wished I’d brought my bottle of Lydia Pinkham’s Painkiller along, then decided the patent medicine would be impractical to me up here in the air, where I needed both hands to hold tightly to the handlebars.

As the air bicycle flew east, the pain in my stomach grew. My eyes teared as terrible cramps gripped my intestines, and my legs became so weak that one of my feet slipped off the footrest. The air bicycle shifted slightly and the operator glanced back at me in alarm, but I gave him a nod that I hoped was reassuring. Then I went back to my suffering.

I supposed that I was suffering from a bout of typho-malaria. If it was dysentery from the miasmic water, I was in trouble. We were nearly three hundred feet in the air now, and still rising. My ears popped a second time. I shut my eyes and clung on grimly.

“We’re caught in an updraft,” the operator said a short time later. “And it looks as though there’s bad weather ahead. The ride could get a little bumpy.”

I opened my eyes and saw that the sky was dark with thunderheads. So absorbed had I been in my own misery that I’d failed to notice the change in the weather. I’d assumed that the air felt hotter and stickier due to my debilitated condition, but now I saw a sky that churned as violently as my stomach.

In the distance ahead of us, I could see the familiar red roofs of the Regina headquarters, its buildings laid out in an open rectangle around a parade square and flag pole. A mile or so down the railway track, a cluster of frame houses surrounded the station, together with the slate-coloured rooftop of the Pacific Hotel and the tiny cottage where the corporal and constable who met the trains were quartered. Nearby were the heaps and heaps of sun-bleached buffalo bones that had given the town its original Indian name:
Wascana
— Pile of Bones. They were awaiting shipment to the east, where they would be ground as fertilizer. Farther out was a scattering of canvas tents, erected by the town’s newest inhabitants.

The town lay no more than a few minutes away from us now, but the air bicycle was shaking violently. The right wing dipped, and then the left, as the operator fought to bring it back to trim. Gusts of wind caught at the propellers, forcing them alternately into a blurred spin or slowing them to a chuffing crawl. One instant we plummeted down toward the prairie so fast the balloon above us creaked under the strain, bending like a sausage in a pan; the next we soared up to the heavens on an updraft.

“Can we make it?” I asked, fixing my eye upon Regina, which seemed hopelessly distant from us now.

“I hope so!” the operator gritted. “I’ve never seen a storm as bad as this one. It blew up so fast that I couldn’t—”

A fork of lightning leaped from cloud to ground just ahead of the balloon. So close was it that the thunderclap was almost instantaneous. It roared over us like a train engine, vibrating the frame of the air bicycle and setting my very teeth to chattering. For a moment, I thought the balloon above me had ruptured explosively, but when I looked up it was intact.

That was when I realized what the balloon was filled with: hydrogen.

“Can you set us down?” I urged.

The operator shook his head. “It would be worse if I did,” he shouted back over the wind. “The prairie here is as flat as a billiard table. The balloon would be the highest point on it; the lightning would certainly strike it. We’ll just have to stay aloft and pray that a bolt doesn’t hit us.”

I nodded mutely and swallowed my fear. It settled in next to the ache in my stomach.

Another bolt of lightning split the air next to us and, with a booming rumble, the heavens opened up. Fat drops of rain splattered on the top of the balloon overhead. We remained dry for a moment or two, and then rain rolled down the sides of the balloon, dripping onto our heads.

Regina was getting closer, but so were the lightning flashes. The next one momentarily blinded me, and the thunderclap nearly knocked me from my seat.

When I could see again, I noticed a curious thing. The clouds were darkest and thickest directly over Regina. And there were two lighter circles — holes in the cloud — that looked distinctly like eyes. The hair at the back of my neck prickled as I fancied that they were looking straight at me.

Then they blinked.

My mouth fell open in wonder as the cloud took on an ever more distinctive pattern. I could see it clearly now: the roundish head in which the eyes were placed, the curved beak, the widespread wings. In that moment, I recognized the creature as the one that had figured so prominently in the stories told by Mary Smoke, the elderly Cree woman who’d done our cleaning at Fort Walsh — stories she’d told me as I sat with her in the evenings over a pipe of Old Chum tobacco.