The Trickster

‘Tasty?’

Wilber choked on the liquid burning down his throat and coughed like a consumptive. His eyes were streaming as he pirouetted round to see who had addressed him from the other side of the wire.

A man, a man just like him, stood smiling from the sidewalk outside the compound, his eyes piercing Wilber like skewers.

‘What the fuck …’

The man put one hand up to the wire, coiled his fingers through the diamond-shaped hole and with the other hand put a finger to his lips to make a hushing mime, as if to a baby crying in its cot.

Wilber was confused and not a little pissed off. He wrestled his coughing under control, and blinked at the guy like he was crazy. Still hanging on the fence the man put his hand back into his pocket and spoke deliberately, in the manner of someone making an announcement.

‘I am …’ he paused as if for dramatic effect, and smiled, ‘… Sitconski.’

Wilber blinked at him at again. He screwed the top back on his whisky and stepped back slightly from the wire. ‘Yeah?’

The man stood perfectly still, waiting.

Wilber flicked through a mental filing cabinet of what this guy wanted. He took a guess. ‘You from Welfare?’

There was an almost imperceptible change in the man’s demeanour, but Wilber Stonerider picked it up. Was it anger? Why would a total stranger be angry at him? He’d done nothing. Well, nothing he wasn’t already paying for. But there it was in this guy’s eyes. Anger. Definitely.

This time the man spoke softly, and if Wilber were honest with himself, menacingly.

‘My name is Sitconski.’ He scanned the forty-two-year-old Indian’s face as if searching for a concealed message, a smile forming on his lips again. This time, an unmistakably cruel smile. ‘Moses Sitconski.’ The smile gave way to a dry laugh, like ice cracking under a boot.

Wilber was out of his depth here. The guy was obviously a nut. And he was a nut interfering with the only serious drinking time he might grab this morning. Any moment now the foreman would walk out of the shed looking for him and it would be too late to take another swig. If he wasn’t here to pin something on him, this guy could get lost.

‘Nice meeting you, Mr Sitconski.’ He turned his back on the guy and picked up his shovel. There was, after all, eight feet of wire netting between them. The voice that came back at him this time made Wilber freeze like an animal in headlights.

‘Do you know my name?’

What was wrong with that voice? It was a human voice. Was it though? There was something horrible running beneath the syllables, like a sewer running under a sidewalk. Frightened, Wilber turned round slowly to face the man again. The snow was falling thick and silent between them and Wilber’s breath sent white clouds billowing between the flakes. If the man was breathing at all it was like an athlete. There was no vapour from his mouth or nose at all. Wilber realized the hand holding the shovel was shaking and that he still held his bottle in the other. He leaned the shovel on the fence, unscrewed the bottle and took a long draught. Of course he could always run away, but something told him no one would ever run fast enough from this man.

The whisky hit the spot and gave him back his voice. He laughed nervously. ‘Sure. Sure I know your name, mister. You just told me it. Moses Sitconski.’

Wilber thought he saw ripples in the man. That was the only way he could describe it. Like the guy had something under his clothing. No, under his skin. And it was stirring, getting restless.

‘Do you know my name?’

He wanted to cry now. What was this? Something was happening to the air between them, and all the alarm bells had just gone off in Wilber Stonerider’s brain. What did he mean? The crazy son of a bitch had told him his name about three times. He found himself looking to the side to see if anyone in the shed could see them from here, but he’d made sure they were well out of sight when he’d sneaked behind the bus. Through the wire, he could see the white blanketed scrubland on the other side of the road. In short, no one could see Wilber Stonerider and his insane visitor Moses Whatever.

‘Look, mister. I don’t want no trouble. I know your …’

‘DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?’

The force of the words, spoken quietly, almost gently, was so unexpected that Wilber fell back against the side of the bus. The voice had come from somewhere distant and dark and although its volume was that of an explosion, he knew somewhere deep inside him, that only he, Wilber Stonerider, had heard it. It contained so much malice, so much rage, it stunned him. He started to weep. There was something happening to the man, something Wilber couldn’t even begin to address. It wasn’t so much that he was changing, more that he was becoming what he was. The tears rolled down his cheeks as he pressed himself against the bus.

‘Are you pullin’ your pecker back there, chief?’

It was the foreman. Wilber opened his mouth to yell, but found he couldn’t. The thing through the wire looked back at him with a wrath that promised to erupt into frenzy. It whirled its head round to where the shout came from and as it broke contact with his eyes, Wilber ran. He ran, skidding in the snow, round the bus and into the chest of foreman Taylor. They fell together in the snow, Wilber’s bottle smashing with a thud instead of a tinkle in the snow a few feet away. The alcohol melted a tiny patch of snow round the shards before it disappeared into the ground.

‘Ah! You fuckin’ moron.’

Taylor, clad only in his work jeans and an ex-army sweater, tried to peel the jabbering Indian off him as he rolled on his back like a turtle. Wilber clutched at him like a two-year-old, making gasping noises and dribbling from the mouth and nose. Taylor pushed him off and struggled to his feet, leaving Wilber on the ground, his arms covering his head.

‘Get up! I said get up, you drunken shit.’

Taylor was really angry. An Indian with DTs was not what he called help. He was cold and wet now, sweater soaked through, jeans covered in snow, and it was this snivelling idiot’s fault. How did the numbskull manage to get so sauced in such a short time? He’d handed him the snow shovel only twenty minutes ago and the Indian had been sober. Look at him now.

Wilber peeled one arm from round his head and pointed to the bus. ‘He’s there. He’s goin’ to get me. Crazy guy. Keeps asking me his name.’

He was still weeping. Taylor swept the snow angrily off his thighs and marched over to where Wilber was pointing. Nothing. Of course. He came back round the front of the bus, stood over the wreck of a human being and hauled him up roughly by the arm. Wilber resisted, but Taylor was a powerful man and the Indian was on unsteady feet before he could protest further. Taylor shook him by the collar of his frayed and dirty parka. ‘Now I don’t need to tell you there’s nothin’ over there. And I also don’t need to tell you you’ll be back with the RCs faster than you can say I fuck dogs unless you pick up that shovel and shift this snow.’

Wilber looked towards the bus, then up at Taylor. ‘He gone?’

‘Don’t give me that. Get shovelling.’

He let go of Wilber’s jacket with a push and stood with his hands on his hips until the sniffing man walked gingerly to the edge of the bus and peeked round. It was true. No one there at all. Just the shovel lying on the ground where it had slid off the fence.

He walked round the back of the bus, looking left and right as though expecting an ambush, picked up the shovel and scurried back into the foreman’s sight. Where did the guy go? There was no one in the road at all. Not even a car. Unless he’d run off into the scrub, he couldn’t have just disappeared. There were no tracks leading to the scrub, but then as Wilber looked back at the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, he noted that there were no tracks at all. Anywhere.

Taylor spat, and tramped back into the shed in search of dry clothes, leaving Wilber Stonerider with the horror that maybe it was true, the sauce was hitting him bad. He looked forlornly at the smashed bottle in the snow and scooped it up in the plastic snow shovel.

A large black bird was perched motionless on the wing mirror of the broken bus and it stared at Wilber.

‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’

He resumed his shovelling.

The bird looked back at him for a long, long time, then flapped its waxy wings and flew off.

10

Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three

‘Well? Are they going to move?’

Angus McEwan looked up from his makeshift table in the centre of the cabin, glaring past the man who stood in front of him as though speaking to a ghost at his side.

‘I fear it is more complex than that, Mr McEwan.’

McEwan allowed his eyes, raising them slowly and insolently, to find the face of the speaker. What an absurd figure the Reverend Henderson made. His considerable height, twinned with a slight build, made a mockery of the sombre black clothes he wore. He had the appearance of a gangly adolescent forced into ill-fitting Sunday best for a relative’s funeral, the white dog-collar rendering him almost comic, aided in its farce by a nose and cheeks turned purple by the cold. But he spoke these savages’ language, and the man was indispensable.

‘Complex in what respect, Reverend?’

Henderson stamped his great feet in a vain attempt to keep warm, and cleared his throat.

‘I have already explained their campaign to you. That is unchanged. I think it unlikely they will move at all. Not without force that is, and that would clearly be inadvisable, not to mention illegal.’

Angus McEwan paused to consider why he disliked this man so much. They were both from Scotland, albeit different parts of the country. Henderson was an east coast Church of Scotland minister, and McEwan was a west coast engineer. But there was little patriotic bonding between them, even though some such comfort would have been welcome in this distant, alien continent in which they both found themselves. It was Henderson’s stubborn and naïve allegiance to these base heathens that irritated McEwan so deeply. Any Christian man could see the Indians were not civilized beings, not fit to be treated as equals, and yet this ridiculous man treated them as though they were Lords.

To see a white man, a Scot, so humbled before savages, was disgusting to McEwan.

‘If we are to discuss legality, perhaps you would care to mention to your new flock that their forebears signed a treaty concerning this railroad and its building many decades ago. Mention that approximately ten minutes from now, when we kick their bloody behinds off the mountain.’

Henderson flushed slightly, giving new life to the broken purple veins the frost had drawn on his cheeks. McEwan often cursed to rile him. Not this time though. This time there was too much at stake.

‘I’m afraid I cannot allow you to do that, Mr McEwan.’

McEwan looked interested, and mildly excited.

‘And how do you propose to stop me?’

‘I will have words with the men. If they are for me, who will do your kicking of behinds?’

McEwan rose from the table and walked to the small pot-bellied stove at the back of the cabin. Turning his back to the minister, he knelt down, opened the door and threw in a log. Facing the wall, he spoke in a low voice.

‘You underestimate these men. They want this job finished as much as you and me. The weather is against you, Henderson.’

It was true. The blizzard that had been raging for over three weeks now, had cut off Siding Twenty-three from the world. No trains had been through since the snow built an impenetrable barrier at the top of Wolf Pass, and McEwan had been there when a futile attempt was made to break through with a snowplough on the engine, bearing witness that passage was now quite impossible.

But with or without communication, they would have to begin the initial blasting of this tunnelling operation immediately, or the whole project would be in jeopardy. But it was not the snow holding them back; it was a band of thirty-two Kinchuinick Indians, taking it in shifts to squat night and day on top of the very rock that had been drilled, ready to receive the dynamite.

When McEwan turned round to receive the minister’s response, Henderson had gone. He smiled. Well let him try, he thought. There were nearly fifty cold, homesick railroadmen out there. Christians or not, they would not take kindly to being kept away from their families an extra month or more by a bunch of unwashed barbarians. Henderson would soon see how much authority his God had, over men who dreamed nightly of their homes, tossing in their bunks and calling out the names of their wives.

Through the tiny ice-coated window he could see Henderson stumbling through the snow to the gang of men hacking at rocks with picks, the wind tugging at his black coat as he went.

McEwan resumed his seat at the table and flattened out the crumpled plans in front of him, the creases throwing flickering shadows in the light of a guttering lamp. Henderson could do as he wished.

They would blast tomorrow.

The man was coming again. Chief Hunting Wolf pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and composed himself. His warriors said nothing as they watched the tall man in the flapping black clothes scramble up the rocks towards them, but Hunting Wolf sensed them shift uneasily beside him in anticipation.

When the Reverend James Henderson reached the small group of natives, he was battling for breath, sweating with the exertion of the climb.

‘Big walk I do,’ he gasped.

Hunting Wolf laughed internally. This man’s command of their tongue was quite preposterous.

‘Sit down then, Henderson. You will not regain your breath by remaining on your feet.’

The Reverend made a small and silly bow with his head and joined them in the shelter of a rock, where six of them were squatting in the snow. Despite being out of the wind, the temperature on the mountainside was unbearable. Henderson could never get used to this dry, biting cold, not after so many years in the wet and windy land where he grew to manhood.

He looked at the six dark men, sitting calmly in the snow with nothing more than buckskin and wool to keep them warm, and wondered at their constitution.

‘And is there news from the man McEwan?’

Hunting Wolf fixed him with his deep black eyes.

‘He big trouble with me. I no can tell him you think. He take rock tomorrow. Men come.’

Hunting Wolf took time to decipher this jumble of words from the frowning Scot, then spoke slowly and as simply as he could to help this white man’s poor comprehension. It was like dealing with a child.

‘This is very bad, Henderson. You realize that we cannot allow the mountain to be opened. I have explained. We will remain here. You must tell him that. We will remain.’

Henderson sighed, the cold hacking at him through his coat.

‘No more I do. Men with man McEwan. Danger for you. Please to come with me now.’

Fishtail and Powderhand exchanged looks of mirth, crushed quickly by a glance from their chief.

‘I am sorry, Henderson. We will remain. There is more danger for you if we do not. If we let you open the mountain, you will all die. This way, we save many lives. Not merely our own.’

Henderson looked deep into Hunting Wolf’s eyes.

‘You not change story? Trickster still?’

It was Hunting Wolf’s turn to sigh.

‘Yes. The Trickster, Henderson. We have told you plainly, many times.’

‘Think you about Great Spirit I tell you. Good Lord Jesus Christ?’

‘Of course. We have thought a great deal about your spirit and his teachings, as you asked us to. We do not believe this.’

Henderson looked as if he might cry.

‘Is truth. Is only truth. Jesus Christ your great Spirit. He bring love to you. You have must to him love. He save you. Save you from Trickster also. Trickster not true.’

Powderhand gave a snort and crossed his arms beneath his blanket, fishing under one armpit for a mite he could feel shifting in the warmth.

This time, he was not reprimanded by Hunting Wolf. Hunting Wolf was growing tired of the well-meaning foolish white man.

‘We thank you, Henderson, for your kindness and concern, but you must understand that we are well aware of what is and is not true. You should explain these things we know to be true to the man McEwan again. We will remain.’

The seven men squatted silently for a few minutes while Henderson wondered what he should do. He was a failure. A spectacular failure. Was God testing him? All he longed for in this life was to save more souls, gather more precious gifts for his Lord Jesus Christ. He knew he could save these people if they would just listen, just believe the words of joy he had to share with them. He’d learned the complex rudiments of Siouan, slowly and painfully from a logger in Montreal, in preparation for his task ahead. The task of bringing these people to Jesus.

But he was failing. It was James Henderson at fault, not the natives. An English Catholic had saved an entire band of Blackfoot Indians a few hundred miles away, building a mission school and converting every last one to Christianity. The Catholics were good at it. They used the weapon of fear, something these natives seemed to understand.

Henderson’s weapon of love was going nowhere.

No, it was Henderson’s own failure that was condemning these people to Hell, and he was finding it hard to live with.

Meg was right. Her words had been in anger and through tears, but she correctly predicted that he would achieve nothing here. Perhaps he should have listened to her and not to God, when she insisted he stay in Edinburgh, ministering to the souls as much in need there as here. But if she loved him she must have known how it was suffocating him, killing the spirit in him a little more every day, with the smothering middle-class indifference his parishioners had to the word of God and His purpose.

She had refused to come with him. A chance to do missionary work in the new world and she had refused. James thought of Meg, forever taking tea in Jenner’s on Princes Street with the ladies of the parish, gossiping over fine china and fresh cream confections, and admitted to himself for the first time that she did not love God in the way he did. He was quite certain now she did not love him either. If he were honest, he’d always known she had married him because he ministered in a fine part of the city, to people who had money and what Meg constantly referred to as ‘respectability’. She kept three servants busy maintaining their respectability, putting a strain on James’s church stipend, but she regarded it as a major part of being a minister’s wife. No wonder her world had been shattered when he had rushed home that breezy April day, cheeks burning with fervour, to hold both her hands in his and tell her of his plans to work for God and Canadian Pacific Railways. She pulled her hands out from his large fists and put them to her cheeks in horror. He had looked at her for the first time then. Really looked at her. Dressed in her heavy expensive skirts, her hair tied in a fashionable twist, her face lightly powdered and rouged, she was in every way a model of those hideous Edinburgh women who loved nothing but themselves and their position in some imagined pecking order of that ‘respectability’ James was not privy to.

So he had left without her. And now here he was, squatting on a mountain with six Indians, who not only refused to accept Christ as their saviour, but also harboured some insane superstition that was bound to result in violence. He had lost the love of Meg, and now it seemed he had lost the love of God.

Hunting Wolf spoke first, breaking the silence above the soul-chilling howl of the blizzard.

‘You should go now, Henderson. Night is falling. There is nothing you can do.’

Henderson looked tragic. ‘You pray with I?’

The chief smiled and looked to his warriors. They returned his gaze impassively. He looked back at the minister, huddling in the snow. He was like a crow that had been broken and smashed against the rock, the dark fabric of his big coat spread crazily around him.

Hunting Wolf spoke gently. ‘Can your prayers protect you? Do they have power against great and terrible evil?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us hear them, Henderson. We will join you.’

James Henderson stood up, raised his right hand, held his coat shut with his left, and closed his eyes. He spoke in English this time. What did it matter if these men understood him or not? He was praying for them, not with them. It was all he could do.

‘Almighty Father …’

11

The blond boy stared up at the wolf with a mixture of awe and expectation. He jumped about three miles high when Katie spoke softly behind him.

‘It’s a female. She’s protecting her cubs. See? Behind her there.’

The boy breathed out hard, whirling round to look at Katie.

‘Did I give you a fright? I’m sorry. Guess I shouldn’t sneak around like that. Do you like the wolves?’

The boy’s heart rate had slowed enough to speak. ‘Sure. They’re neat.’

‘That’s the male over there. Do you notice he’s a bit bigger and a slightly different colour?’

She had an arm round the boy now as they both stood looking up at the stuffed animals whose dry, painted jaws gaped back at them in silent roars.

The boy’s mother appeared from behind a snarling grizzly bear to join them, her face registering curiosity when she saw Katie with her arm conspiratorially round her son’s shoulders.

‘Will the male wolf eat the cubs?’ The boy’s eyes were wide.

‘Well sometimes they can, but the mother wolf is a pretty strong force to be reckoned with. If I were him, I wouldn’t mess with Mom.’ Katie looked round to greet her young charge’s mother. ‘Hi. Hope you’re enjoying the museum. Can I tell you that we’ll be closing in about twenty minutes? Don’t rush on out or anything, but if there’s something else you need to see, now’s the time.’

The woman smiled gratefully and politely. ‘Sure. That’s fine. We’ve just about covered it all. It’s been very enjoyable, thanks. Hasn’t it, Randall?’

The boy was awestruck by the wolf again. ‘Sure. It’s neat,’ he said absently.

Katie smiled and left them to it. One quick circuit of the railroad display on the balcony to check everybody was out and she could cram in a coffee and a sit-down before locking-up time. The wooden stairs to the balcony creaked in protest as she mounted them, but offered her a view of the whole ground floor as she climbed.

The vantage point told her that the mother and son were the last ones in, and if the boy could tear himself away from the stuffed wolves she should have the place cleared in five minutes. Already she could hear the comforting sound of Margaret cashing up the till on the front desk, counting out the few dollars and cents that the handful of visitors to the Silver Heritage Museum had spent on postcards, pamphlets and bookmarks.

Katie cherished this time – the feeling of the museum having done its job, as though all the exhibits were silently shaking hands, or paws, congratulating themselves for another successful day intriguing, entertaining and educating the visitors. During the winter, this was where the vacationing wives and children who weren’t skiing came to look round, while Dad perfected his parallel turns on the slopes, or the stray family and seasonal worker who passed by and entered on impulse. All left delighted by the display of unpretentious, idiosyncratic mixture of local information that Katie had put together over the past five years. Stuffed animals raged beside solemn Indian artefacts. Posters trying to win the custom of potential Canadian Pacific Railway travellers in the 1900s were framed beside ancient and torturous-looking wooden skis. Fossils, millions of years old, sat happily in cases with blown bird eggs.