The End of the Line (2 page)

•  •  •

The winter camp was quiet when Penner emerged into the night. He looked up at the stars and calculated that it was midnight. It was very cold, and the stars stood in stark relief against a cloudless sky. Beyond the rim of dark forest the mountains rose in silhouette against the wheel of heaven. With no clouds to hold in the day's faint heat, the evening had become frigid, and Penner guessing it to be minus twenty. His breath formed a dense brume before him.

By starlight he made his way between the ramshackle huts huddled along the banks of the Pipestone River toward his own cabin, a few hundred yards away from the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Something would have to be done. It was the end of March, and though it was nearly impossible to imagine now, in a little over two months as many as ten thousand men would be making their way west, over the prairie from Winnipeg, Brandon, and Regina, for what without a doubt would be the most difficult construction season of the
CPR'
s exhausting journey across Canada. Penner would be in charge of the contract to blast the way down the Big Hill, the thousand-foot plunge on the west side of Kicking Horse Pass, into the valley of the Kicking Horse River. Then, if things went well, come the fall, they would have to do it all over again, blasting their way down the Lower Canyon of the Kicking Horse, an even more treacherous descent than the one they would face in the spring. He needed his men to have their wits about them. If they didn't, many of them would die.

As Penner walked towards his cabin, the snow scrunched under his boots. He'd heard the stories that men, desperate for drink, would hike ten miles through the woods to find a still where they could drink corn whiskey outside the regulated exclusion zone imposed by the
CPR
. Ten miles for a drink! Some got so drunk that they would wander lost in the woods. Others would fall into one of the region's raging rivers and never be found again. Worse, thought Penner, is that they
would
show up for work a few days later half out of their minds, and imperil the safety of everybody around them. Dropping rail ties on each other's legs; missing their mark when using a sledge hammer and crushing a man's hand; dropping a pail of explosives and blowing themselves, and everybody around them, to pieces.

Penner couldn't stop all that by himself, but he was a foreman, and he had a responsibility to try.

He reached his cabin and stopped. Would telling Hep Wilcox, the winter camp's general manager, make much of a difference? Penner figured Wilcox would have to do something to shut Dodds down, but Penner harboured no illusions that the
GM
would clean up the entire camp. Not when he had so much
else
at stake.

Penner wondered, given his suspicions about the man, if he could trust the general manager at all. Whiskey was just one thing that threatened the safety of those Penner would be overseeing come the spring. He suspected that there were far worse trials afoot for those working with explosives during the coming season.

He stood at the door to his cabin, regarding the stars and the pale silhouette of the mountains that flanked the valley of the Bow River on either side of him.

“If I wait till morning, it will give Frank time to pull himself together. If I wait till morning I might loose my chance,” Penner said aloud to the night sky.

He turned and started back down the path, the snow waist high. Instead of taking the well-worn trail to the general manager's sleeper car parked on the siding, he followed another path, toward the small station building containing the telegraph machine that sat on the banks of the frozen, snow-covered Bow River.

There were no lights on at the distant station as Penner entered a patch of trees spared from Dodds' saw. The forest was close, and the light of the stars grew dim as the trees pressed in overhead. He found his way along the path by feel, unable to stray one way or the other between the six-foot-high snowbanks.

Something would have to be done about the whiskey. And something would have to be done about the explosives contracts, thought Penner. Why did there have to be so much politics around something as simple as blasting a tunnel through the rock?

He was absorbed in that thought when he heard something behind him and stopped. He turned, expecting to see a deer stepping from the woods, but instead was startled to see the shadowy shape of a man not a dozen feet behind him. The bulk of the man's coat, his heavy beaver pelt hat, and the darkness obscured his identity. He closed on Penner fast, and before Penner could move, the figure had raised a metal bar and was swinging it toward his head. Penner called out sharply. The blow struck him across the cheek, crushing his jaw and the bone below his eye, causing his skin to split in two in the frigid cold. He fell sideways into the snow, blood pulsing from the wound.

His assailant stepped close over him. Penner blinked as blood pooled around his eyes. He tried to push himself back in the snow, but was unable to get any purchase in the deep drift next to the path. He felt the life draining from his limbs. His attacker hovered above him like a wraith, hoisting what Penner could now see was a star drill over his head. As he did so, his assailant's face became visible in the faint light of the stars.

Penner managed to mutter a bewildered “
not you?
” through his broken visage before the drill swung down, connecting with his skull again, this time killing him instantly.

THE DREAM WAS ALWAYS THE
same.

He lay on the frozen earth of Saskatchewan's Cypress Hills, his leg blown apart below the knee, his horse dead beside him. His right hand still clutched his pistol, the six chambers of the revolver empty, its barrel hot from the explosion of the cartridges he had just fired. Where it lay against the ground it melted a small impression in the windblown ice. Snow fell on his face as he blinked into the pale grey sky. He could hear a man laugh, his voice fading into the distance. “Good riddance, Durrant Wallace.” Durrant knew that he would bleed to death there on the frozen earth.

Moments before, he had been guiding Mack, his solid twelve-year-old quarter horse, over the windswept hills that marked a high point on Palliser's Triangle. Mack had been his mount since the now famous summer of 1874 when three hundred and fifty men took part in the March West, from Dufferin, Manitoba, to various trading posts scattered across the North West Territories, bringing law and order to the Canadian West. The Cypress Hills were a rugged upland of tangled lodgepole pine and white spruce forests on their summits with bare, rough fescue meadows below. In the summer they bloomed like the fabled Garden of Eden, but now, in the winter of 1881, they were as desolate and unforgiving as the plains of Hades.

Durrant stepped carefully over the stony ground, Mack's reins in his left hand, his Winchester 76 in his right, as he examined the patchy snow and frozen meadow for signs of recent passage. He heard the snap of a frozen branch and dropped onto his right knee. Mack whinnied, the horse's head pitching as he took in an unfamiliar scent. The world around him was gripped in a stony silence. Durrant didn't have time to raise the lever-action Winchester when the woods in front of him exploded with gunfire.

Mack went down heavily beside him, legs thrashing, knocking Durrant to the ground with a violent blow to his chest from the animal's winter-shod hooves. The Winchester was kicked from Durrant's hands, its wooden stock shattering.

Durrant fell on his side, his lungs screaming for air from the blow to the chest as gunfire ricocheted off rocks and into snow all around him. Prone, he reached into his coat and fumbled for his Enfield Mk II revolver, and rising onto his right knee, he aimed into the woods where the gunfire continued. He fired twice left and then twice right, the whir of bullets spinning past his ears. The gunfire created a funnel of sound that seemed to stop time and narrowed his sight into a dark corridor between him and his hidden assailants.

In the passage of a split second, Durrant became aware of his precarious position. He was alone, miles from Fort Walsh, caught in the open, his attackers concealed by the cover of the hilltop's dark forest and undergrowth. He fired the Enfield's final two rounds into the woods, and then worked the pistol's awkward self-extracting cylinder to eject the spent shells.

While he fumbled with the chamber in the frozen air, the fateful bullet found its mark. It might have been his heart if the shot had been a little higher, but instead, the bullet bore into his shin, shattering his tibia two inches below the knee. The force of the blow spun him sideways, his busted leg collapsing, and he fell, face forward, onto the ground. Lying on his side, Durrant fired the two rounds he had managed to load into his pistol towards the woods before the world went dim. He slumped onto his back, his right hand gripping the well-worn handle of the Enfield, his mouth opening and closing as if trying to express the white-hot agony that shot up from his ruined leg.

The gunfire stopped and was replaced by laughter. Good riddance, Durrant Wallace.

The world seemed to disintegrate around him. He would die beside his horse on the barren earth of the Cypress Hills.

•  •  •

The dream was always the same. Durrant woke; the Enfield was in his left hand, his face flushed despite the cold, sweat stinging his eyes. He leveled the pistol into the darkness, the hammer back, ready to fire.

Gunfire.

He blinked the sweat from his eyes. The dream was over. He was awake. With his game right hand he wiped the perspiration from his forehead, his left hand still holding the pistol before him. He was in his bunk. This wasn't the Cypress Hills. Not Saskatchewan, but the Alberta Territory. Not 1881, but 1884. Not Fort Walsh: this was Fort Calgary.

He heard more shots. Not an ambush; revellers, drunk on illegal whiskey, bored with the interminable winter of the Alberta foothills.

Durrant lowered the pistol and reached for the lamp beside his bed, his right hand fumbling with the trim wheel while he struck a match with his left. The yellow flame flickered as he adjusted the wick and then a pale glow was cast across the stark room. Bare board walls measuring twelve feet by ten, a rough hewn plank floor, and a single small window shuttered against the unremitting winds and piercing cold; these were the parameters of Durrant Wallace's world.

The table at his bedside held the single lamp, a prized golden locket, and a few well-worn books. On a low bench against the wall adjacent to his bed was his prosthetic leg. He released the hammer and put the Enfield down on the table next to the lamp and reached for the artificial limb. There would be no returning to the temporary sanctuary of a dream-plagued sleep for Durrant this night. The gunfire and the nightmare ensured that he would lay awake until dawn. Come the rising of the sun, his day would begin, almost as bleak as his night.

Durrant used the limb's suction socket to attach it and then reached for his trousers and heavy winter coat. He stood, somewhat awkwardly, and took up his single crutch. He extinguished the lamp, then took the Enfield in his left hand and tramped for the door. Before he reached it, he turned and limped back to his table. He opened the tiny drawer and took a second pistol from it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his coat. Durrant had sworn never to be caught reloading again.

Bracing himself for the cold, Durrant opened the door and felt the icy chill slap him in the face. He stepped from his room into the darkness of the night. It was cloudless above and the stars seemed to rest only a few feet above the Mountie's head, their twinkling undisturbed by campfire, torch or lantern light.

Durrant was neither a commissioned officer nor a mounted horseman; Durrant served the North West Mounted Police in a sort of constabulary purgatory. While some Mounties were pensioned off or put on the dole after being zinged, Durrant had chosen “light duty” instead, and suffered both the insolence of the civilians he tried to police and the unendurable pity of those he served with.

The expanded Fort was only a year old but Durrant knew it well. He'd spent nearly every day of that year confined to its parameters. Durrant's colleagues were gone for weeks at a time riding the rugged foothills, talking with the Blackfoot Nation, or breaking up illegal whiskey and rum operations up and down the Bow and Elbow Rivers. Durrant Wallace, however, veteran of the March West and decorated member of the North West Mounted Police, sorted the mail, sent telegraphs, collected customs from the I.G. Baker Company, and attended to the administrative aspects of the enrolment and discharge of prisoners at the Fort's guard rooms. He hadn't sat a horse since February of 1881: more than three years. What good was a mounted policeman if he couldn't sit a horse, Durrant wondered for the thousandth time, as he made his way through the pallid darkness of the barracks.

Durrant crossed the parade ground, pulling his coat up around his chin. For once the night was still, the temperature a numbing ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit. He slipped the Enfield into his pocket and fitted the regulation seal skin cap on his head, pulling the flaps down over his stinging ears. He stood a moment at the centre of the grounds and contemplated the scene before him.

Fort Calgary was built at the confluence of the Elbow and the Bow Rivers. It had been constructed in 1875 when members of the original
NWMP
's “F” company had been dispatched under the command of Inspector Brisbois to break up the whiskey trade which had spread malignantly into Blackfoot territory.

During the Fort's early days, the little settlement had grown slowly, and was nothing but a few log buildings chinked with mud that all but disintegrated into the prairie sod during the spring rains. In 1881, when the first cattle were herded along “Stephen Avenue”—then just a dirt track through the centre of mud-splattered tents—the town was still little more than tepees and temporary huts.