Kanata (19 page)

When winter arrived, Catherine saw fewer buffalo. She walked with her father in the deep snow and most of the time they came back to the camp without anything. She noticed the faces becoming thinner, the lines deeper. Perhaps her own face was doing the same. There were nights when she crawled under the buffalo robe and was cold and knew she would be colder. Her mother had died when she was an infant, and when she thought of her, she thought of warmth, a warm mother who would come into their tent and banish the cold.

There was an outbreak of measles during the winter and families died. They burned the grey cloth tents and blankets and possessions of the dead families. Sometimes they burned the families. In the spring the whisky traders found them again. Warriors traded buffalo robes and horses and women and reeled on the plain under the stars. The whisky took what starvation and disease hadn't. Most of the horses were gone. Many of the children dead. The old and the weak were culled. Brothers killed one another in drunken brawls, warriors humbled by whisky made with potatoes, tea, and molasses.

In the heat of summer, Crowfoot came to talk to Catherine's father.

“There are no more buffalo,” he said. “The whisky traders have taken what little we had left. We cannot last the winter.
We must walk north and hope for the protection of the Great Mother.”

Her father nodded.

The Blackfoot set out on a warm, dry morning in the middle of summer, fewer than half of the seventeen hundred who had come to Montana. Catherine walked behind her father. They made almost twelve miles that first day, walking until the sun set. There were some who were sick and many who were weak with hunger, or shaking from the absence of whisky, men who sweated and screamed for spirits that had vanished, who suddenly fell to the earth, flopping like fish taken from a stream.

At first it was the weak and sick that held them back, and the whisky-headed warriors who collapsed onto the grass in their own peculiar pain. Then it was the dead. They stopped to place withered bodies in trees, lashing them to branches.

On the fourth day, Crowfoot came and talked to Catherine's father and the two of them disappeared, walking back along the trail they had just walked. She found out later that her father had shot one of the horses that a whisky trader was riding. A warning.

Catherine could see her father getting thinner, slowly disappearing. Perhaps that was what happened to her mother; she was less and less and then she was nothing. They walked for more than one full moon and she woke one morning to find frost on the grass. When the first spot appeared on her father's face, she felt a cold wind inside her.

“It is nothing,” he told her.

But then there were more. He was already as thin as he could be. There didn't seem to be many places to put spots, and maybe that would help. That night he talked as she lay
beneath the robe. He told her how the stars got into the heavens, and pointed out which one was her mother. In the night Catherine woke and touched her father's face. It was cold and Catherine shook him and whispered into his ear but he didn't wake up. She told him a story about how the bear came into the world, a story he had told her when she was a child, then she laid against him and wept until morning. When the sun rose, three men took him away. They placed him in an aspen tree and Catherine sat beneath him until they carried her away. She walked north behind Crowfoot, and her father joined the line of blackened bodies rotting in trees that stretched into Montana.

Catherine walked as if in a dream, imagining her father's voice, his touch, those things she needed to preserve. She was empty with hunger, and her head ached and she felt, as she saw Grey Eyes hoisted reverently into a tree, as she watched Fierce Owl foaming on the ground, his skeletal body seized into a sinewy fist, as she saw her people shuffling northward, bent, that she was already in the spirit world, that she would find her father standing, smiling, at the end of this. His arms would be open and she would walk into them and stay there. For a week she uttered not a word, hoping that if she didn't engage the real world, she wouldn't be part of it. When her father was alive, she felt the protection he offered. Now, there was no protection. The nation couldn't protect itself. She hungered for the spirit world.

They trudged across the buffalo grass, through rivers, along alkaline coulees, past juniper and dusty bushes. A creek valley had turned to powder and it rose as they crossed it, a fine mist that caught the wind and coated them, making them appear as ghosts. Catherine saw a large shape on the
ground ahead of them and smaller shapes around it. When she got closer she could see that the large shape was a buffalo. The other shapes were wolves that had been skinned, their still shiny carcasses wet under the sun. They were twisted into strange shapes, their teeth bared, turned in upon themselves. The wolfers had been here. They shot the buffalo and slit it open and laced the meat with poison and waited for the wolves. After eating the meat the wolves began to writhe, trying to rid themselves of the poison. Catherine had come upon them once with her father, howling madly, twisting like wild horses, leaping, briefly standing on their hind legs in a grotesque dance, as if they were in the throes of becoming human, then flopping onto the ground. The Blackfoot were starving but if they ate this meat they would dance like the wolves.

It took six weeks to walk to the Cypress Hills. A government man gave Catherine some bread and a bowl of soup and she sat and ate them both as quickly as she could.

T
here was another migration. Fifty miles west of the Blackfoot, heading north out of Montana, were thirty cowboys driving 6,800 head of polled Black Angus and Shorthorns to the Cochrane Ranche, the first large-scale cattle-ranching operation in the West. Senator Matthew Cochrane had 360,000 acres of grazing land. The cowboys drove the cattle hard, making eighteen miles a day. Calves were lost, cows with broken legs abandoned. By the time they arrived, they had lost a thousand head. They went back to Montana and got a second herd, driving them north through winter, getting caught in heavy snow and waiting
for chinooks that didn't come. The cattle instinctively tried to move southeast, to find something to graze, but the cowboys had orders from Montreal to drive them north, damn the consequences. They lost half the herd, and in the spring the carcasses filled the coulees where the cattle had become bogged in deep snow. There were stretches where you could walk on the bodies for a mile without touching the ground. The meat was tainted but the hides could be salvaged. The foreman went to the Blackfoot camp and asked for skinners; they were paying twenty-five cents a hide.

It was another walk, this time without the red dress, dressed as a boy, twelve years old but grown. There were sixty of them, and Catherine could smell the job before she saw it, a thick taste of death. She had helped her father skin buffalo and she surveyed the expanse of spoiled meat beginning to bloat in the spring sun, and then set to work amid the men of her tribe, steering the large knife around the distending flesh, finding the lines that defined it and pulling the hide away and dragging it to dry in the sun. Ravens hopped nearby, picking at the faces. Magpies pulled at soft red threads and danced away. The smell infected the air, and the western breeze couldn't carry away the rot. The sound of flies changed in pitch, subtle notes that inflected upward as they moved, a screaming feast that covered the exposed meat like black blankets. A million beetles invaded from below. Sixty Blackfoot covered in blood, skinning the casualties of Senator Matthew Cochrane's eastern management. Catherine laboured until dark, her arm finally too tired to cut the stinking hide. She washed in the stream that ran through the hills, careful not to drink from it in case there were dead cattle upstream. She cleaned her knife, sharpened it on a stone, and then fell asleep by the fire.

8

D
EXTER
F
LEMING,
1882

The crossing wasn't pleasant, a slurry of gin and vomit, the ship pitching in the waves, the aristocracy as miserable as the cattle. Four deaths followed by burials at sea, the last one—an infant with the misfortune of being born on the ship—poorly attended due to violent weather. Dexter Fleming was tall, with dark hair, a weak mouth, and a voice that sounded as if he was judging you, even if he was only asking for milk in his tea. He was coming from London, heading for the North West on the slurred advice of Bertie Beckton. Beckton's grandfather had made a fortune in textiles (and been Lord Mayor of Manchester, an ambitious man in all things) and left that fortune to his three grandsons: Bertie, William, and Ernest. Their plan, divined one
evening after several bottles of port, was to go to the Canadian North West. They had read of an aristocratic farming community started by Captain Edward Pierce, who was recreating a utopian version of England on the endless prairie that he named Cannington Manor.

The Becktons had already gone there and built a twenty-six-room mansion out of limestone and blue rolling stone. They christened it Didsbury, a reminder of Manchester. Inside were hand-carved mantels, Turkish carpets, and oil paintings sent from their grandfather's country place. The bunkhouse had room for eighteen men and the kennels were filled with foxhounds imported from the Isle of Wight. They had poached a jockey and the head groom from the Lincolnshire stables of Lord Yarborough, and the stalls for the racehorses were lined with mahogany, the horses' names engraved on brass plaques. All of this situated on 2,600 acres.

Pierce was recruiting the English aristocracy and those who aspired to it with ads in British papers. “With a few hundreds a year, a gentleman can lead and enjoy an English squire's existence of a century ago!” At Cannington, Pierce had established a trading company, general store, dairy, cheese factory, flour mill, a land titles office, and an agricultural college to teach these young gentlemen how to farm.

Dexter Fleming couldn't imagine Bertie Beckton as a farmer. And when he finally arrived—after an interminable train ride and an uncomfortable slog on horseback—Bertie was standing outside the limestone mansion, cradling a drink, dressed to shoot.

“Dexter!” he said. “Welcome to the New World!”

“It looks somewhat like the old one,” Dexter said. “Only without the scenery.”

“And without the dreary convention, and without the
dreary relatives, dear boy. And those nagging laws. No nagging in-laws or nagging laws. You look like a pile of buffalo dung. Got you out here just in time.”

Bertie, Dexter was suddenly reminded, was the kind of person you tired of rather quickly, his boundless energy for mischief eventually a burden.

If this was his prison, Dexter thought, it could be worse. He had quietly failed at several things—school, the military, a legal career—and his father had finally sat him down in his barely illuminated study and presented him with this opportunity: go to the colonies. They both knew it wasn't an invitation. Go to the New World or be cut off. He may shame them there, but it would be a distant and diluted shame. And perhaps, Dexter thought, in the way he thought of all new beginnings, and since his life was made up exclusively of beginnings—a life of fresh starts and routine failure—he might actually accomplish something here. Maybe what he needed was this blank canvas. Also, to succeed at something might send his father to an early grave, reward in itself.

“Let's get you a drink and a weapon,” Bertie said.

His valet brought out a glass of gin and a shotgun, handing Dexter the glass and following the two to the stables with the gun.

Dexter picked out a horse and the stable boy led it outside. Dexter examined the shotgun, then slipped it into the sheath and finished his drink.

“Do you have any idea how free you are?” Bertie said.

C
annington wasn't the only social experiment in the North West. There was Benbecula, a Scottish crofter colony, the East London Artisan's Colony, New Sweden, Thingvalla,
and the Harmony Industrial Association. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, this utopian putsch into the New World replaced the state with a sense of brotherhood and co-operative labour. A dozen visions of man's higher instincts, most of them slowly failing. The Barr Colony, like Cannington, had a British theme, although it was more imperial in its aim: “Let us take possession of Canada,” it counselled. At Cannington there were fox hunts, cricket matches, tennis, football, and gin.

Bertie and Dexter played billiards at Didsbury, sipping their drinks.

“This is a novelty, Bertie, but it's bound to become tiresome,” Dexter said. “Then what?”

“I can't wait for Pierce to die,” Bertie said. “Then Cannington will be paradise.”

“I'm not sure of that,” Dexter said. “He does rather a lot.”

“The man's a dictator. He's in the wrong colony. He should have his own African state to bully.”

Pierce was an autocratic leader, certainly, though he was also the driving force behind the various industries that had grown up at Cannington Manor, and effectively the force for moral order. There was still an element of education under his tutelage. Dexter had taken some instruction in farming and ranching, and had a loose sense of how to manage an enterprise out here, a tenuous grasp of crops, markets, and weather.