Chance was greedy for the apocalypse. More, he wanted to have a hand in creating it. For thirty years I’ve stood at the back of my theatre watching men like him in the newsreels. Hitler ranting like some demented Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini posturing on a balcony like some vain, second-rate Latin screen star. Now Senator Joe McCarthy bullies his way through his hearings, the gods and goddesses of Hollywood facing a different kind of public judgement than the box office, frightened, cringing before the cameras they love so dearly.
I can offer no judgement of Chance’s picture Besieged because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance’s murder became bigger than the picture itself. As so often happens in Hollywood, scandal became the story, obscuring everything else. The man who wanted to be another D.W. Griffith, a visionary filmmaker, is remembered today only as the man who got killed at a premiere. A small footnote.
Shorty’s story fared no better in the history books I consulted when I got back home to Canada. Searching them, I found a sentence here, a paragraph there. What I learned was little enough. For a brief time the Cypress Hills Massacre had its day in the sun; members of Parliament rose in the House, hotly denouncing the wolfers as American cutthroats, thieves, and renegades. Nobody seemed to mention that among them were Canadian cutthroats too.
Those few paragraphs always pointed to one result of the massacre. The Canadian government formed the North West Mounted Police, sent it on a long, red-jacketed march into a vast territory, establishing claim to it. A mythic act of possession.
Chance believed character didn’t count for much in history. But, looking at the river, I remind myself the map of the river is not the river itself. That hidden in it are deep, mysterious, submerged, and unpredictable currents. The characters of all those wolfers, Canadian and American, cast longer shadows than I had any inkling of that endless night in which McAdoo made his confession, crouched on a cot in a desolate bunkhouse, an old man reliving his pain and guilt thousands of miles from an obscure dot on the Saskatchewan prairie.
Each night I stand at the back of my theatre, watch spectres and phantoms slide across the screen. The picture done, the audience gone, I lock the doors, go out into the night.
But the past cannot be so easily dismissed. The faces of Rachel, Chance, and Fitz, of Wylie and of Shorty McAdoo, accompany me on my long walk home in the dark. I cross the black iron bridge, my limp a little worse each year, the water rushing underneath me in the darkness, pulling for the horizon.
32
Pushing hard, Fine Man and Broken Horn had driven the stolen horses a two-day ride to the northwest of the Cypress Hills, making for where their band waited, the band of Chief Talking Bird. Last night they had made camp in the trees near the river, hiding the horses from sight so they might approach their people with the sun on their faces, the horses they brought revealed in the best light of all, morning light.
As dawn broke, they removed their travel-stained clothes, the moccasins worn thin by the long walk south, the shirts they had slept in for nine nights, the leggings cut to ribbons in scrambles over sharp rocks, the blanket breechcloths snagged and torn by wild rosebushes. Naked, they waded into the shallows of the river and washed in the cold water, scrubbing themselves with handfuls of sand while the mist rose like pipe-smoke all around them and the fish leapt for a taste of the sun.
When they had cleansed themselves, they took up hand mirrors and paint. Fine Man divided his face with the strong colours of blood and the burned-out fire, his upper lip and everything above it red, his lower lip and everything below it black. While Broken Horn was daubing yellow stripes on his forearms to record his horse raids, Fine Man stared in the glass and pondered the blue horse which had led the rest of the ponies to give themselves up to the Assiniboine. As he did, the spots where the quicksilver backing of the glass had flaked away began to swirl in his eyes like falling snow. A sign. Quickly, he mixed a pot of white paint, held it to the nose of the roan horse, letting him smell it as he softly explained what he meant to do – dab his blue coat with white spots to make a picture of the night blizzard which four days ago had frozen the wolfers to the ground in sleep, hiding Fine Man and Broken Horn behind a spirit screen of whirling, blowing snow.
As his forefinger gently swept down the neck of the horse, dotting it with white, Fine Man decided he must not ride the blue horse into camp. Better for the horse to move in freedom, as he pleased, like a winter storm.
As he carefully placed each flake of snow on the chest, the ribs, the back of the winter horse, Fine Man’s mind was filling with the memory of how he had gone humbly to Strong Bull, the holy man, to ask him to beseech the One Above on Fine Man’s behalf when he sought the horses of his power-dream. To have such a man pray for you, to have him ride his horse among the lodges shouting out your name so the people would not forget you were alone and far away, was a good thing.
It was not so very long ago that Strong Bull was the one the young men went to with the pipe, asking him to lead them on their raids. In his dreams, Strong Bull could see where horses would be found, see how enemies would be overcome. All the country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan was contained in his mind, every bend in the rivers, every poplar bluff, every buffalo wallow. Four times he had received wounds from the Blackfoot that would have killed any other man. But so great was his medicine that when he painted the sun’s healing rays around his bleeding flesh, four times the One Above had taken pity on him, closed the bloody mouths of his wounds, restored him to health.
Yet a time came when Strong Bull refused to carry the pipe. Many, like Broken Horn, said that Strong Bull’s heart had withered inside him, afraid that if its blood was let loose to flow one more time, it would die. The strong medicine which had brought the Assiniboine scalps and horses was gone and no one knew why. Neither did they know why Strong Bull now played with the white man’s drawing sticks and paper like a child. He was a man after all, a man who owned a better gun than any of them, the Many Shoots Gun, the gun the white men called the Henry.
But he bought no bullets for it. It was true bullets were costly, one buffalo robe for three cartridges, but that did not explain why Strong Bull traded his prime robes for drawing sticks and the books the white men made the marks in, the lying marks which told falsehoods about how much you owed the trader.
Where once three buffalo runners had stood tethered before the entrance of Strong Bull’s lodge, now there was only one thin horse to drag his teepee poles and coverings when camp moved. Now he walked beside the travois and the sight of a proud man eating dust was like sickness to the young men.
Still, Fine Man could not believe that strong medicine could ever be wholly taken from a man as holy as Strong Bull; that is why he had gone to him to request his prayers. And when Strong Bull had promised his help, Fine Man had asked him another thing too, asked him why it was he spent his days drawing pictures in the lying books.
For as long as it took to smoke the calumet Fine Man had filled for him from his own tobacco pouch, Strong Bull made no answer. Then he laid aside the pipe, drew his blanket about his shoulders, and spoke in a solemn voice. Two years ago his power-dreams had stopped, making him lonely and afraid. Many times he prayed, begging the One Above to send dreams as before, but the dreams remained lost and wandering in the Mystery World.