Apparition Trail, The (42 page)

At the centre of the pound was a tree, its uppermost branches bent to form a platform. Something or someone sat atop this platform, chanting and beating a drum, but I could not make him out clearly.

Inside the pound, the bodies of four large buffalo lay a short distance from where we stood. Although they were all adults, each had the yellowish-brown hair of a newborn calf. They’d been butchered some time ago, judging by the smell that rose from the carcases. I realized that I’d found the missing patrol — the poor wretches who had disappeared from the ford.

Just outside the pound, ghosts whooped and danced. I took a fistful of Iniskim’s hair and tried to drag her toward the ramp, but too late — the ghosts were already piling skulls across the entrance with tremendous speed, sealing us inside. Already the pile was knee-high.

The ramp we’d run along to enter the pound was too high for Iniskim to jump back up to, especially with the gate of bones now atop it. Our only hope was to clamber over the fence itself. Iniskim couldn’t climb, however, and I couldn’t lift her — a buffalo calf is a heavy creature, weighing more than two hundred pounds. I’d only be able to carry her out if….

It was a gamble I had to take. Holstering my revolver, I pulled the buffalo stone from my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “It’s the only way.”

The buffalo calf blinked, and looked trustingly up at me.

I touched the stone to Iniskim’s forehead, and in the place where an albino buffalo calf had stood a heartbeat before, there now crouched a naked toddler. Her hair was a dull white, her pale skin flushed and blotched with red. I caught her as she crumpled to the ground, and could feel the fever that infused her skin. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her frail body began to tremble as a sheen of sweat broke out on her forehead.

I scooped her to my chest. “Be strong, Iniskim,” I told her. “For just a few minutes more.”

Cradling the toddler in my arms, I ran for the side of the fence nearest the Manitou Stone. I ran straight at the wall of bones, shouting my own defiant war cry and praying that my feet would not slip. They didn’t — I climbed the stack of skulls like stairs, somehow keeping my balance as the pile shifted beneath me. Then I leaped over the head of a ghost who reached out to grab me with hands that looked as though they had been gnawed by beasts. I flew through the air, envisioning the wings of an owl lending me extra height and speed, then landed, stumbling and twisting my ankle.

It took me only an instant to find my footing again. I ran on, gritting my teeth against the pain of my injured limb. I spared one glance over my shoulder and saw that the ghosts were still single-minded in their task of piling ever higher the walls of the pound, even though their quarry had escaped. One or two, however, were pointing in my direction.

As I ran up the hill, my eye was drawn to a patch of red halfway up its slope. As I drew closer, I saw a body that lay twisted on the hillside, its head crushed like a melon. The red serge jacket and riding breeches it was clothed in told me this was a policeman, but who he was I could not say. I knew only that he was a constable, by the stripe on his sleeve.

I ran on, past a second dead constable, this man lying on his back with his jacket torn open. A bloody hole had been clawed into his chest, over his left breast. A part of my mind registered the mechanism of death, identical to that used against the Indian agent Quinn: this murder was Wandering Spirit’s work. Yet I saw no Indians anywhere about — aside from the ghosts behind me.

The ghosts that had driven Iniskim and me into the pound were now surging up the hill, rifles making faint popping noises and mouths screaming war cries. I stepped on something soft — and felt a wash of revulsion as I saw I had trod upon the fleshy arm of Bertrand, who gazed sightlessly up at the sky.

Up ahead, I could see a bird circling the Manitou Stone. With a sinking heart, I realized that it was the aerograph. My idea had worked, and Steele’s patrol had followed the aerograph to this spot. Judging by the bodies that lay on the hill, they’d encountered Indians who had put up a stiff fight. I just hoped the Superintendent was still alive.

Although she was barely a toddler, the child in my arms felt heavy as a stone. The hill seemed suddenly very steep, and the Manitou Stone that crowned it very distant. I was hot, as sweaty as if I had a fever myself, and the air came to my lungs in ragged gasps. I struggled upward. Just a few yards more….

I crashed into something I could not see, and was knocked to my knees. A painted buffalo skin fell to the ground, and there, standing before me with his arms crossed upon his chest, was Big Bear. As I staggered to my feet, his wizened face broke into a smile. He let go of the bear’s paw amulet that hung about his neck. In the blink of an eye, nearly a dozen other Indians became visible: Piapot, Little Pine, Beardy, Mountain, Red Crow, Crowfoot — all of the chiefs who had been in council inside the shaking tepee, save one. Beyond them, on the other side of the hill, I saw a cluster of Indian tepees.

Hearing a noise behind me, I glanced around and saw that the ghosts had disappeared. Poundmaker was striding up the hill, a newly mended drum in his hand. I now knew who had summoned up the apparitions that had driven Iniskim and me into the pound.

Close behind him was a bare-chested and bare-headed Wandering Spirit, now bereft of his lynx-skin headdress and painted buckskin shirt. Draped over his shoulder was the limp figure of a policeman. I recognized the officer at once by the amount of gold braid on his sleeve and his handlebar moustache: Superintendent Steele. Whether he was alive or dead, I could not say.

Encumbered as I was by Iniskim, I did the only thing I could think of. The buffalo stone was still in my right hand. I threw it at Big Bear, hoping he would dodge to the side, and in the same moment sprinted desperately past him, making for the Manitou Stone.

I got no further than a step or two before I was knocked down from behind. Iniskim fell from my arms onto the ground, and landed a mere two yards from the Manitou Stone. Her eyes opened for a moment and she whimpered, but she was too weak even to crawl. Her eyes closed.

I struggled against whoever had knocked me down, and found myself staring up into Wandering Spirit’s angry face. His body smelled musky, like a buffalo’s hide. His hand shot out to clasp my injured hand and squeezed, and the knife wound in my palm opened up again. Blinking away the pain, I fumbled with my left hand for my revolver. Wandering Spirit might be immune to its bullets, but I could always use the pistol as a club.

I never got the chance. Wandering Spirit pinned my other arm to the ground with his knee, then formed his free hand into the shape of a lynx’s claws. In that instant, I knew I was a dead man. All he had to do was gesture, and my heart would be ripped from my chest.

Big Bear shouted something in Cree, and Wandering Spirit paused. Then the warrior looked in the direction that Big Bear was pointing. I glanced up at Big Bear, who held the buffalo stone in his bare hand. Like me, he now was immune to its magic. I wondered if he had allowed himself to be transformed into a buffalo and back into human form again, in order to inoculate himself. I hoped that it wasn’t my transformation of Wandering Spirit that had given him the idea.

I tried to shift Wandering Spirit off, but he had me well pinned, and I was utterly exhausted from my run. Peeking out under his arm at the spot that Big Bear was pointing to, I saw a large, four-legged creature that could only be a buffalo. Something trailed from its mouth: reins. Buck must have finally summoned up his courage and emerged from the tunnel. What he was doing on the opposite hill, I could not say.

“Big Bear!” I shouted, trying to get the chief’s attention. “You see? That buffalo was once a horse.” I cast desperately about in my mind for the Cree words, and strung them together as quickly as I could, trying to persuade him that it was not necessary to change human beings into buffalo — that animals could be transformed instead. I used the first animal that sprang to mind, a word I knew well: horse. “
Wapastim meskocipayiwin paskwawimostos. Namoya napew maskocipayiwin paskwawimostos, paskwawimostos wapastim. Kitahamakewin
— Stop!”

Poundmaker trudged up the hill at this moment and dumped the limp body of Steele next to me. I tried to call out to the Superintendent, but Wandering Spirit’s grip shifted from my injured hand to my mouth. I wrenched my head further to the side — and got an even better view of what Big Bear was pointing at.

It seemed that Steele’s wasn’t the only patrol to have reached the Manitou Stone. Sitting on the hill on the opposite side of the pound, its muzzle swinging round to point at the Manitou Stone, was one of our nine-pound artillery guns. It must have been the one from Maple Creek, for its limber bore not only the gun itself but also a perpetual motion device. Its pendulum was still swinging back and forth, producing the steady ticking noise I’d heard earlier, but that wasn’t what had brought the gun to the top of the hill. The limber had been drawn there by brute force; Buck was yoked to the front of it.

Standing next to the gun itself, working frantically with something he held in his hands, was the pyjama-clad figure of Chambers. As a flame sprang to life on the end of a brand that had been resting on the limber — he must have been struggling to light it with a match — I saw what Chambers intended. He was going to blow the Manitou Stone to pieces!

We were too far away for our eyes to meet, but even so, a silent communication passed between us. I knew that I was close enough to the Manitou Stone that I might be killed, either by the explosion of the shell itself or by the shrapnel of splintered stone. I didn’t care.
Do it
, I silently urged him.

With a triumphant gesture, Chambers saluted me with the burning brand — and in that instant, I realized my mistake. The gesture was the same one Chambers had made in my prophetic dream: the one in which the Manitou Stone had crushed him under its weight.

I threw every ounce of will into one last attempt at thought transference.
Stop!
I implored him.
It won’t work!

Too late. Chambers had already lowered the flame to the gun, touching off its powder. It exploded with a tremendous roar and a belch of white smoke and flame — and a second later it exploded a second time. I couldn’t say whether the gun itself was faulty and blew apart — or whether the artillery shell, deflected by the Indians’ magic, had somehow doubled back on its course to blow up the gun instead of its intended target. All I know is that one moment Chambers was standing there, his body radiating triumph, and the next both he and Buck were gone. The artillery piece had disappeared altogether from the limber, which rolled slowly backward, wheels squealing as it passed out of sight. All that remained on the hill were two lumps of mangled flesh that might once have been a buffalo and a man.

I finally succeeded in wrenching my head out of Wandering Spirit’s grip. “Damn you!” I shouted at Big Bear. “That man was my friend!”

Big Bear ignored me. I saw tears trickle down his wrinkled cheeks as he picked up Iniskim, and as he gently brushed the hair from her eyes, I realized that he must have felt regret at the child’s grave illness. He passed the girl to Mountain, then turned and reverently placed the buffalo stone I’d thrown at him at the foot of the Manitou Stone. I saw that there was a cluster of other stones already there: some of them small and spiral-shaped, like the one I’d carried in my tobacco pouch for so long, others a dusky red colour, with protuberances that gave them the appearance of four-legged animals.

This done, Big Bear turned to Wandering Spirit, and made a curt gesture. I thought it was a signal for Wandering Spirit to claw out my heart, but instead of attacking, Wandering Spirit hissed at Big Bear, then hauled me to my feet. I saw that the Cree chief had his own coup stick, this one tipped with what looked like a bear’s tooth. He advanced upon me, coup stick at the ready. It looked as though Big Bear wanted the honour of killing me himself.

The chiefs behind him began to chant and, as their song grew, a cold wind that prickled like a premonition swept up over the hill. It swirled once around the Manitou Stone, swept across Steele — who transformed before my eyes into a buffalo, his uniform tearing away from his body like rotten cloth — then spiralled away toward the horizon. My mind was flooded with thousands of anguished cries — and then Big Bear’s coup stick flashed toward my chest.

I tried to wrench free of Wandering Spirit’s grasp, twisting away in a final, desperate attempt for freedom — only to feel the coup stick touch my stomach instead of my chest. My stomach filled with a pain one thousand times more fierce than the cancerous tumour had ever produced, even when the disease was at its worst — and then I knew no more.

I found myself standing in a place very much like the rolling prairie on which I’d just lain, except that everything around me appeared in faded shades of grey. The sky overhead was a uniform, desolate grey, devoid of sun or moon or stars, and the ground underfoot was a similar colour, dotted here and there with crusts of white salt where pools of water had once stood. All around me were endless, rolling hills, with nary man nor beast to be seen. The breeze carried snatches of sound that I took to be voices, but every time I strained to listen, they disappeared into the hiss of the wind.

That wind stirred the grass that tufted here and there like the hair on a mangy animal’s hide. Sand blew around my feet in swirls, dusting across the tops of my boots. I realized then that I was still in uniform — although when I looked down at my riding breeches and the serge of my jacket, both were a leaden grey.