Apparition Trail, The (6 page)

The Sergeant’s horse proceeded skittishly, tossing its head as if it wanted to bolt. Wilde kept it in check only by sharp tugs on the reins. Buck gave a short whinny of fear, then fell quiet, his tail tucked tight against his rear.

The wind began to produce ever more curious noises. The thudding of Buck’s hooves sounded like the chopping of an axe blade against wood, and at one point I thought I heard the barking of a dog. I could swear that I heard a woman’s voice, and the laughter of children, and the crackled chatter of old men. I couldn’t make out any of the words but the speech had a slow cadence, as if the language spoken were an Indian dialect. If it weren’t for the fact that we were completely alone in this desolate place, I would have sworn we’d ridden into an Indian encampment.

I was just about to ask the Sergeant whether his senses were registering the same impressions when I saw the pipe lying on the trail. I recognized it at once: a tobacco-stained French briar whose mouthpiece bore the teeth marks of long and frequent use. It had belonged to Mary Smoke, the aged Cree woman formerly employed at Fort Walsh to clean the barracks. She’d had a penchant for smoking, and one fateful day her primitive impulses got the better of her. She was caught stealing tobacco from the men.

Because I’d grown friendly toward her, over our many long chats, I’d tried to intervene on her behalf, explaining that she used the tobacco smoke to comfort her aching teeth, one of which was abscessed. The men, however, were too furious to listen. They would hear none of my pleas for mercy, and instead had charged Mary Smoke with theft and locked her in a cell.

When they’d opened it the next morning, she was stone cold dead.

I suspect it was a combination of her panic at being caught and her advanced age that killed Mary Smoke. The Indians have a morbid fear of the hangman’s noose, and it is possible that Mary Smoke, incapable of realizing that her theft was a petty crime that would result in only a fine, had died of fright.

Her children came the next day and disposed of her body according to their own practices. Rather than burying their dead, the Cree lash them on platforms in trees, wrapping the body in a buffalo hide together with the earthly possessions that the departed soul had held most dear in life.

Had someone robbed Mary Smoke’s bier, stealing her battered pipe and later losing it in this desolate place?

Buck had stopped dead in his tracks in the same instant that I’d spotted Mary Smoke’s briar, but the Sergeant’s horse continued to move skittishly forward. One of its hoofs landed square on the pipe. I heard a loud snap as the stem broke, then saw it lying in pieces as the hoof lifted from it.

As I stared at the broken pipe, transfixed, I thought I heard the aged crone’s voice: “Heya,
samogoniss
,” it said, using the Cree word for mounted police. “Gotta smoke?”

Something moved, just at the edge of my vision: a human figure, huddled in a blanket or robe. Startled, I twisted in my saddle, and thought I saw Mary Smoke. But as I looked at the figure full on, I saw that it was no more than a large boulder that had roughly the shape of a squatting figure.

I allowed myself a nervous laugh and turned to the Sergeant to ask whether he’d imagined a figure there, too. Just as I looked in his direction a violent shudder passed through his horse. Then a shriek of utter terror erupted from its lips. The black horse reared up, lashing out with both forefeet at the empty air in front of it.

Sergeant Wilde swore a violent oath and drew his revolver as a figure suddenly stepped in front of his panicked horse. No boulder this! It was an Indian brave in a feather bonnet, his entire body painted with ghostly white war paint.

Buck whinnied in fear, and was proving difficult to control, but the Sergeant’s horse was far worse. Terrified at the Indian’s sudden appearance, seemingly from out of thin air, it bucked wildly, causing the sergeant to nearly fall from his saddle. Clinging to the pommel with one hand, Wilde drew his revolver and fired a shot at the Indian brave. The bullet missed, and kicked up a tuft in the sandy soil behind the Indian.

The brave gave an unearthly wail and hurled a stone-bladed knife at the Sergeant’s chest. I could not see whether it struck the Sergeant, for my own mount shied violently to the side, but I did see Wilde’s horse kick violently, tossing him into the air. The Sergeant landed heavily on the ground, his revolver bouncing out of his hand. His horse, at last free of its rider, bucked once or twice more, then turned and bolted to the south, reins fluttering over its back.

When I got Buck turned around again, I looked wildly about for the Indian who had thrown the knife, but he had disappeared. There was no one present in those lonely hills save the Sergeant and myself. Wilde rose, spitting sand from his lips, and scooped his revolver off the ground.

“Damn that horse!” he spluttered, then swept his Stetson from his head and threw it angrily down on the sand. He shoved his still-smoking revolver back into the holster at his hip.

Now that the Sergeant’s temper had cooled, I expected him to set off to the south in pursuit of his wayward mount, or to order me to ride after it, but instead he turned once again to the north. “Come on,” he said in a voice that was devoid of the passion that had enflamed it a moment ago. “We’ve got to press on.” Without another word, he began trudging across the sand on foot.

My mouth dropped open in surprise. “Without your horse?” I asked. I looked around at the desolate hills that surrounded us. The light had dimmed, as if dusk were approaching, and the breeze held a chill that cut right through the cloth of my Norfolk jacket, yet I was certain that it must still be the middle of the day. I shivered, and clenched Buck’s reins more tightly. The bronco’s eyes were wide, and shivers coursed down his shoulders.

“Sergeant, I don’t think that’s wise,” I said cautiously.

Wilde ignored my protest. “We have to follow the trail,” he said without looking back at me.

“But why?” I sputtered. “Where does it lead? We dispersed Chief Piapot’s band, as ordered. Shouldn’t we return to the detachment and make a report?”

I still sat on Buck, who had remained rooted to the spot after the Sergeant’s horse bolted. Wilde halted, then slowly turned. His lips were twisted into a grimace that reminded me of the face of a frozen Indian corpse I’d found along the trail one winter, and his face had gone strangely grey. His eyes held a look of pure malevolence. His right hand settled upon the handle of his revolver.

“We follow the trail,” he growled. “That’s an order.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” I hastily replied, despite the fact that every fibre of my being screamed in protest. Even so, I spurred Buck forward. After a second tremendous shudder, he plodded reluctantly ahead, following the Sergeant.

Things became confused after that. The breeze that had been blowing died away, but a strange chill lingered in the air. I was certain now that I saw tepees and the moving figures of Indians, horses, and their dogs all around us — but whenever I looked at them square on, these apparitions would disappear. I chewed my lip, casting about desperately for something I could say to dissuade the Sergeant from this madness, but could think of nothing. Where were we headed? What strange and secret orders was the Sergeant following?

It seemed to me that, although we steadily headed north, we were traveling in a circle. The travois line we had been following soon was overlaid with our own hoof and foot prints.

I was just about to point out to the Sergeant this indisputable evidence that we were lost when I noticed a peculiar thing about his boot prints. Wilde is a large man, and leaves a heavy print in the sand. Although the hues of the landscape all around me had faded to a dusky grey, one colour stood out vividly: red. The Sergeant’s footprints were scarlet with blood. The Indian’s stone-bladed knife must have struck home, after all.

I didn’t need to rein Buck to a halt. He stopped of his own accord, forelegs stiff, and nostrils quivering. Then he let out a low whicker of fear, barely audible in the oppressive stillness. In that same instant, the Sergeant sighed and slumped to the ground in a loose-boned heap.

A sudden realization chilled me to my very core. I knew in that instant that I had been following a dead man: the dog I had seen in my dreams. I also knew that I was hopelessly lost. I thought I heard the ghostly laughter of savage voices, and the beat of a drum, but it was only my own heart, pounding in my ears.

A sense of dizziness caused me to sway in the saddle as the drumbeat increased in tempo. I heard a ringing in my ears and instinctively knew that death was hovering near.

I am not a religious person, and so I did not pray. I cannot say what it was that saw me through that awful moment when I thought my heart would stop. I can only suppose it was the dream, for the feelings I was experiencing now were exactly the emotions I had felt on realizing that I was trapped in the cave with the dead dog. All the while, laughter filled my ears: the evil laughter of the dead.

I raised a hand to my head, pressing it against my temple in an effort to make the dizziness stop. As the fingers of my hand covered one eye, I closed the other eye.

Silence. The drumbeat and voices stopped.

I started, and nearly tore my hand away, but some instinct of self-preservation caused me to keep my eyes screwed tightly shut. I moved my palm fully over both eyes, like a child playing at hide and seek. Then I applied my spurs — lightly — to Buck’s flanks.

The horse took a step forward.

Again the spurs, and again another step by my unwilling mount. I let the reins go slack, giving Buck his head. At last, under my prodding, he began to walk.

I don’t know how long I rode like that, with one hand over my eyes and the other on the pommel of my saddle. It might have been five minutes; it might have been five hours. I only know that Buck eventually came to a halt and no end of urging or spurring would prompt him forward. Once more I felt the heat of the sun on my back.

Cautiously, I opened my fingers a crack and peered out through it. I can only describe my stupefaction at the scene that lay before me. Just ahead of where Buck had drawn to a halt, Sergeant Wilde and his horse lay still on the ground. The Sergeant’s revolver was in his hand, and a gory bullet hole in the animal’s neck was leaking blood. The Sergeant’s foot was tangled in one stirrup. His leg was bent, but did not appear to be broken.

Perhaps most curious of all, we were right beside the railway tracks — still within the Cypress Hills. I recognized the area as being only a mile or two away from the detachment. We hadn’t journeyed north at all.

I slid from my saddle and walked to where the Sergeant lay. His Stetson lay by his side, but his clothes were otherwise undisturbed. When I searched his body, I found no mark on him, save for a faint black smudge on his left breast when I opened his jacket to listen for a heartbeat. I heard none.

I turned back to Buck, and noticed that his head was drooping. Despite the fact that he had been traveling at a walk, his sides were lathered. I stroked him on the cheek, telling him what a good horse he’d been to bring me home again. It was a sentimental gesture, but heartfelt in that moment.

For my part, I felt drained and ill, as if I had not slept in several nights — which, of course, was precisely the case.

“Are you up for one last push for home?” I asked Buck.

I fancied that he nodded. With all due haste, I rode for the Maple Creek detachment, to report the Sergeant’s untimely death.

They put the cause of death down to failure of the heart, which is what I put in my report. That explanation appealed to the rational side of me, even though the Sergeant was a hale and hearty man. I needed some explanation for what I had seen, some way to make sense of my strange experience. I decided later that all I had seen and heard had been mere hallucination, provoked by a lack of sleep. Which was the reason, I suppose, why I mentioned my dream in the report in the first place: to make the state I was in known, and to explain why I wasn’t able to minister to the Sergeant.

In my report, I put down the only sensible explanation: that the Sergeant’s ill-tempered horse had bucked, throwing him from the saddle. With his foot caught in the stirrup and his brains about to be dashed in by pounding hooves, the Sergeant had done the only thing he could to save himself: shoot his mount. And then, in all of the excitement of the moment, his weakened heart had stopped.

Of course, there was one thing that was never fully explained — something that has made me wonder, all of this time, if my strange dream didn’t in fact contain a grain of truth. When they removed the Sergeant’s clothing to prepare him for burial, the constables who were ministering to him were interrupted by Wilde’s two dogs, which tried to seize their master’s clothing. In the resulting tug-of-war, the constables noticed a peculiar thing.

We had ridden to Piapot’s camp along the railway line, across terrain that was thickly forested, and had presumably proceeded back to Maple Creek the same way. The weird landscape I had seen — the rolling, barren hills, and sandy ground — could have been nothing more than an illusion.

Yet both of the Sergeant’s boots contained a trickle of sand.

When I finished my tale, Superintendent Steele and the Commissioner were silent. Steele nodded at me, a pleased look on his face. The Commissioner picked up the reports and photographs, tapped them against the table to straighten the pile, then slid them back in the folder. As he closed the flap, I noticed it was marked with big block letters in red: confidential.