Apparition Trail, The (32 page)

I gulped. I’d never known Steele to lose his temper before. When he looked up at me, however, there was a determined gleam in his eye.

“The Indians seem to know that we’re coming.” He smiled. “Good. That means we’re on the right track.”

I heard another grumble of thunder, and glanced up at the sky. It was still cloudy, but the lightning had stopped. The thunder was retreating away into the distance, and there was not an eye to be seen among the clouds.

Steele looked around and spotted the scout. “Leveillee!” he shouted. “It seems you were right, after all. We’ll leave this afternoon, instead.”

Our patrol didn’t leave that afternoon — nor even that evening. No sooner had Steele traded his air bicycle for a horse than the aerograph operator and three constables were struck down by a bout of typho-malaria. The constables could easily be replaced, but Steele wanted to send dispatches as swiftly as possible back to Inspector Irvine, who was personally monitoring Q Division’s progress in this case. The nearest replacement operator — Bertrand — was at Fort Macleod. Even though our own operator was able to struggle from his sick bed and send a message to Bertrand, ordering him to Medicine Hat at once, it would be three days before his replacement arrived.

Steele decided to depart without an aerograph operator — only to have his plans thwarted once again. This time, it was the horses that fell ill. One after another, they succumbed to trembling fits. The veterinary surgeon shrugged his shoulders, claiming he’d never seen anything like it before, and that they must have been poisoned. Steele responded by arresting every half breed and Indian within a mile of the detachment. Even the gracious Leveillee was temporarily placed behind bars.

It didn’t do any good. When he sent a telegram, calling for replacement horses to be sent, a response soon arrived declaring that all of the horses in the nearby detachments had succumbed to the strange malady as well. Horses would have to be sent in by train from the nearest unaffected detachment — Moose Jaw — and organizing their shipment would take another three days. We might as well wait for Bertrand.

Chafing at the delay, Steele did what he could to mobilize his forces. He telegraphed Maple Creek, ordering that detachment to limber up its nine-pound muzzle-loader and stand by. The limber was one of those powered by a perpetual motion device, and could travel swiftly over open prairie. If the Manitou Stone did turn out to be at the place where the spiral crossed the South Saskatchewan River, it would be a simple matter of sending a rider back to Maple Creek to alert the artillery crew, and the gun could be driven to the spot within twenty-four hours.

Just in case the Manitou Stone had wound up elsewhere on the ley line, Steele sent telegrams to every detachment that was close to a spot where a disappearance had taken place, requesting the commanding officers to search the area for large or unusual boulders, and to use their field guns to blow these stones to pieces.

As might be expected, the commanding officers responded with a barrage of questions. Why were they being given such strange orders? What was this new division — which they had barely heard of — up to, and under whose authority was the Superintendent acting? Steele had to come up with a plausible reason for his orders, and wound up weaving together fact and fiction. He explained that the stones were of religious significance to the Indians, and that they were to be smashed in order to demoralize the Indians and to make them think twice about supporting the much-anticipated Metis uprising. When Commissioner Irvine himself backed up Steele’s orders, the commanders at last agreed.

Never one to sit idle myself, I used the time to send a telegram to the detachment at Fort Qu’appelle. I addressed it to Acting Hospital Steward Holmes, the fellow who had delivered the stillborn Iniskim and seen her alive several months later. I hoped that he could shed some light on the medicine woman’s identity, and urged him in my telegram to find out everything he could about her.

I told Steele we needed to find and question the medicine woman about the Day of Changes and Iniskim’s role in it. Secretly, however, I hoped to persuade her to cure the cramps that had wracked my gut for the past six weeks. Although I was able to carry out my duties, the lingering of this bout of typho-malaria was starting to worry me. I wondered if I would ever be free of it.

The return telegram from Holmes was a disappointment, however. It simply reiterated what he’d said in his report to Steele.

Convinced that there had to be something more, I asked Steele if I could again see the report on the birth and resurrection, and read through it carefully. I found one detail that Steele had neglected to mention: according to Holmes, the birth had been a difficult one. I knew that already; Emily had told me as much herself. Holmes’s report added something more, however. Emily had lost a great deal of blood while giving birth, and at one point Holmes was convinced that he’d lost her. Yet even though he’d been about to give her up for dead, along with her child, she’d lived.

I thought my efforts to find the medicine woman had come to an end, but then I heard that a scout by the name of Many Eagle Feathers had been ordered to report to Medicine Hat for questioning. I didn’t pay him much attention at first: he had been hired by North-West Mounted Police just six months ago, and turned out not to be the scout who had guided Constable Davis and the Assinaboine. He wasn’t the man we were looking for.

He was half Blood Indian, though — the same tribe that the medicine woman who healed Iniskim was from — and he’d briefly spent time in a Blood camp, after his father had died. I decided to ask if he knew of the medicine woman, even though the odds were against it.

I caught up to Many Eagle Feathers as he was getting ready to ride back to his detachment. He stood outside the blacksmith’s shop, watching the farrier shoe his horse. That surprised me — I thought that all half-breeds rode unshod ponies, as Indians did. This fellow, however, looked more white than Indian. He had close-cropped hair and wore trousers and a jacket. His only Indian accoutrements were his moccasins and a string of trade beads around his neck. Suspended from them was a silver crucifix, and beside it an amulet bearing the image of one of the Catholic saints. When I hailed him, and he greeted me in flawless English, I started to doubt that he’d have any information for me at all. Still, it was worth a try.

I motioned him away from the ringing clangs of the farrier’s hammer. “Many Eagle Feathers, can I have a word with you?”

“My name is Peter,” he said.

He must have changed his name in the six months since he signed on as a police scout. I supposed he had adopted the Christian faith only recently. “Peter, then — can we talk?”

He nodded.

“I’m looking for a woman from the Blood tribe. I’m wondering if you know her.”

“Maybe. What’s her name?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But she’s a powerful medicine woman — so powerful that she can cure any illness — even bring people back from the dead.”

The scout merely nodded, as if I hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary, and fingered the cross that hung around his neck. “Only Christ can raise the dead. God’s is the only true power; medicine men are false prophets.”

“This was a medicine
woman
,” I reminded him. I had no desire to get into a religious debate; I knew from observing my parents that it only led to anger and tears. “She was in Fort Qu’appelle last summer.”

“I’ve never been to Fort Qu’appelle.”

He’d replied a little too quickly, the way a guilty man will when questioned about a crime.

“There was a girl born in Qu’appelle in May of last year — a stillborn. This woman brought her back to life.”

Peter merely shrugged, but his silence and his refusal to meet my eye were speaking volumes. He knew something and didn’t want to tell me. I could see that I needed to be more persuasive — but how? Then I noticed a puckered scar on the inside of his forearm, just peeping out from the bottom of his sleeve. I thought about how much the wound must have hurt, and that gave me an idea.

I pointed to my stomach and doubled over, as if wracked with pain. It didn’t require much acting; my eyes had already begun to water as a wave of nausea gripped me. “I’m ill,” I told Peter in a lowered voice as I straightened up. “I need to find the medicine woman so she can cure me.”

It took Peter a moment to meet my eye. When he did, his expression was guarded. He pressed his lips together in thought. My hopes lifted — I was certain he was going to tell me what I needed to know — but then he shook his head.

“You should pray,” he advised. “Perhaps God will hear you, and send a saint to heal you. They are very powerful.”

I could see that even my impassioned plea wasn’t enough. Peter wasn’t going to help me find the medicine woman. Why was he so reluctant to talk about her? I could guess by his carefully neutral expression that he knew the woman. I stared at him, and after a moment I realized that he had crossed his arms in such a way as to conceal his scar.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “The farrier is finished with my horse.”

He was right. The ringing of the hammer had stopped.

“Wait.” I grabbed Peter’s wrist and yanked up his sleeve. His scar ran all the way up to his elbow on the inside of the forearm, and looked as though it had been made by a knife. It had probably been a bloody wound — very nearly fatal. Yet there were no stitch marks.

“This medicine woman healed you, didn’t she?” I guessed. I glanced at his crucifix. “And the priests told you that it was the work of the Devil.”

Peter jerked his hand away and gave me a frightened look. “She is the Devil.”

“So you do know her!” I cried. “Well I don’t care if she is, or if she has horns and a pitch fork. I want to be healed by her.”

Peter thought about this for a long moment. “I know the woman,” he said slowly. “Her name is Strikes Back.”

Relief washed through me like a dose of Pinkham’s. “Where is she now?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Which of the Blood bands is she with?”

“None of them. Strikes Back is a half-sister to Chief Red Crow; she used to travel with his band, but she had a fight with him many years ago and has gone her own way since.”

It was all I could do to contain my excitement. Of the chiefs that had been present in the shaking tepee, Mountain had described Iniskim as his granddaughter, and now Red Crow turned out to be related to the medicine woman who had used her magic to restore life to Iniskim. Was Strikes Back part of the plan to effect the Day of Changes — or, given her animosity toward Red Crow, was she working to prevent it?

“What was the fight about?” I persisted.

Peter’s earlier hesitation was gone. Now that the stopper of fear had been removed, he proved to be a font of information.

“About ten years ago, Strikes Back learned that Red Crow had kept some of the horses that should have been given to her husband when she married. She became angry and shot them.”

“She shot the chief’s horses?” I asked. It was an incredible act of defiance among a people who valued horses above all else — even more so for a woman. I’d already seen one demonstration of an Indian woman’s mettle when Emily shot her husband, but that had been a desperate act to save her child. I still imagined women to be the weaker sex, not prone to such acts of violence.

Peter chuckled. “If you met Strikes Back, you’d understand. She’s a woman with a man’s heart. She rides and hunts buffalo as well as any man, and is as tough as a man. I heard that she was once found in a snowdrift, frozen to death. They carried her back to her tepee, thawed her out beside the fire, and she came back to life.”

“Where did she go after leaving Red Crow’s band?”

“She married a white man — a trader. She lived with him in the trading post at Fort Macleod for many years. That was when I met her — and she healed me.”

Fort Macleod! I’d been there only a few short days ago.

“Is she there still?”

Peter shook his head. “She quarrelled with her husband more than a year ago and walked away, leaving him and their four children. That was the last anyone saw of her.”

“What was the trader’s name?”

“Davis.”

That took me aback. “Any relation to Constable Davis? The one they call ‘Peaches’?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did you have to pay Strikes Back to heal your arm?”

The scout gave me a strange look, but before I could interpret it, the farrier walked Peter’s horse over to us. Peter paid him for the shoeing, then swung up into his saddle. “I’m still paying her,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross upon his breast. Then he kicked his horse into a trot.

“With what?” I asked, running after him. “Money? Furs? Trade goods? What did she want?”

His horse increased its pace and galloped away in a cloud of dust. I thought for a moment about chasing after him, but realized that it would do no good. If he’d wanted to tell me more, he would have.

I walked back to the blacksmith shop, kicking the dusty ground in my frustration. Then I noticed that the horseshoes of Peter’s horse had left a peculiar pattern. I called the farrier over, and pointed it out to him.

“He was a strange one, all right,” he said. He scratched his beard with the clawed end of his hammer, then shrugged. “Not your typical Indian scout, at all. He must be a really religious fellow. He wanted to re-shoe his horse, even though the shoes were brand new. He wanted me to use nails with cross-shaped heads. He says they’re for good luck. Maybe he thinks they’re gonna help his horse to walk on water.”