The drum of the Mystery World, the drum of this world, of the sky, of the earth, of his wives and his child, was beating, swelling in him, throbbing wildly against his breastbone, filling Fine Man with happiness. Sitting his horse, he began to sing a song of praise for the man to whom the winter horse was giving himself.
The faces of the people bobbed up in astonishment and the sun bowed down when he sang the name of the great holy man, the man who lived now for the sake of the grandchildren. Between the lodges Fine Man could see the horse moving like a storm readying to empty itself, blowing from lodge to lodge, searching while he sang.
Then the blue horse stopped. And Fine Man did too.
Acknowledgements
The works I consulted while writing this novel are too numerous to cite, but I would like to make particular mention of several. Paul Sharp’s Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865-1885 (University of Minnesota Press, 1955); Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (The Viking Press, 1962); James Willard Schultz’s My Life as an Indian (Beaufort Books, 1983); and articles in the Montana Magazine of History: Jay Mack Gamble’s “Up River to Benton,” and Hugh A. Dempsey’s “Cypress Hills Massacre” and “Sweetgrass Hills Massacre.”
I would also like to acknowledge Richard Schickel’s D.W. Griffith: An American Life (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Frances Marion’s Off With Their Heads!: A Serio-comic Tale of Hollywood (Macmillan, 1972); Diana Serra Cary’s The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); John Tuska’s The Filming of the West (Doubleday, 1976); Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Crown Publishers, 1988); and Christopher Finch’s and Linda Rosenkrantz’s Gone Hollywood (Doubleday, 1979).
I would especially like to thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for all the advice and the assistance they have given me.
Excerpts from this novel, in slightly different form, appeared on CBC Radio’s “Ambience” and in the journal Planet: The Welsh Internationalist.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishman’s Boy (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. The Last Crossing was the winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2004. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).
Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once, was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancock’s Dance, was produced in 1995.
Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.
