“Well, we sure are popular up here.”

  Philippe blew through his flute to clear it of lint from his pocket. “I like you, Deputy Marshal Murdock. However, I do not run with the herd. The one time I did I got shot.”

  “Brother Hebron said Wolf Shirt harbors fugitives to make himself a nuisance.”

  “He was right. The Sioux know they cannot win this war, but they can make winning less pleasant for the victors.” He moved his shoulders in a Gallic shrug. “It is a small thing, but it is all your army has left them.”

  “The Sioux must want something they’ll take in trade for Bliss and Whitelaw.”

  “The Black Hills of Dakota, free of white settlers. And sixty million buffalo.” He played the flute.

  The storm blew for a week, after which the sun came out and we waited another week for the drifts to melt before we could resume our journey. We finished the bacon and the last of the moose. Claude earned his keep by running down snowshoe hares and bringing them into the clearing at arm’s length, kicking and screaming at the ends of their powerful hind legs, for Fleurette to bash in their skulls with a chunk of firewood and then skin and clean and cook them on a spit made from pine branches. For variety I went goose-hunting with the Winchester, and nearly wound up meat myself when what I thought at first was a big muskrat hut sticking up out of a frozen pond raised itself to its full height, streaming water, and I found myself staring face to face at eight and a half feet of grizzly. It was covered with silver-tipped hairs like hoarfrost. Its head, with the hair parted in the middle the way bartenders wore it, was as big as a pig, with the little black eyes glittering alongside the great snout, so like the butt end of a charred log.

  Bears are nearsighted, but they can detect movement at a greater distance than most humans can. I froze. If I was lucky it would take me for a tree. It grunted, the noise as loud as gravel shifting at the bottom of a sluice, and raised its snout, the nostrils working. I hoped I was downwind. A .44 Winchester will stop a bear, they say, but the bear doesn’t always realize it. Not in time to do the shooter any good. At thirty yards only ten leaps kept us apart. I wasn’t sure if I could get off twelve rounds in that time, or whether twelve rounds would do the trick.

  I willed myself into a pile of rock. A magpie could have landed on me and plucked out an eye and I wouldn’t have budged. An eye is a fair trade for not being eaten. The patch and the story would keep me in free drinks for the rest of my life.

  The grizzly wasn’t any more sure of me than I was. If it thought I was another bear in my coat, it might challenge me for the fishing hole, or go off and look for some less populated spot. It made a test roar: a ripping, rending sound like someone tearing corrugated iron with a wrecking bar. It made every hair on my body stand out, but I didn’t move. When it lowered itself I thought it was getting ready to charge. Instead it slapped at the water with a paw the size of a kitchen table, splashing water out over the edges of the jagged hole and onto the ice. Still I didn’t react. The bear grunted again and sat back on its haunches, sinking into its rolls of fat and fur in an attitude of frustrated contemplation. It did everything but scratch its head.

  It sat there a long time, although nowhere nearly as long as it seemed. I second-thought my plan. If I could shoot it where it sat; but I couldn’t will myself to raise the carbine and trigger an attack. I could make a run for it, climb a tree. This time ignorance held me. I couldn’t remember if it was a black bear or a grizzly that could climb trees like water rushing up a straw.

  And I wondered why in hell this brute wasn’t hibernating with all the rest of the bears.

  All of which helped to pass the time while the grizzly got tired of waiting. It raised itself again, cuffed the air with a set of claws like railroad spikes, roared again, then shifted its fifteen hundred pounds or so of fur and fat and muscle and short temper onto its forefeet and turned around and mounted the bank on the other side of the pond. It shook itself, water radiating everywhere in lances, and looked back at me over its shoulder one last time, just in case I’d moved or grown a moustache or done something else to make myself look edible. Then it swiveled its head back around and moved off into the trees, making no more noise than a drawer sliding shut.

  I held my position, and my breath, for another minute. I didn’t want to repeat the episode of the returning moose. Then I heard a crashing back in the underbrush, the bear picking up speed as it went in search of less complicated prey. I let the barrel of the Winchester droop finally. My shoulders ached and the muscles in my jaw felt as if I’d been chewing rawhide for an hour. My clothes beneath the bearskin were drenched. I couldn’t have been wetter if I’d swum across the pond. The chill set in then and I turned back toward camp. I completely ignored a goose that exploded from the ground ten feet in front of me and flew in a long rainbow loop down to the hole in the ice the bear had made. I had lost my taste for meat.

  I found Philippe clawing the tangles out of King Henry’s shaggy coat with a curry comb and told him about the bear.

  “You disappoint me, Deputy Marshal Murdock. A bear steak is worth ten rabbits for stamina on a hard trail. The heart will take you as far as Siberia.”

  “It was more a question of how far that bear could travel on a Murdock steak.”

  “You are armed.”

  “So was he.”

  “You are sure it was a grizzly?”

  “It was big and hairy and a swipe of one of its paws would have sent my head into camp ahead of the rest of me. I didn’t ask for further identification.”

  “Up here the black bear grow nearly as big. Some of the older ones are tipped with silver, as well. One way to make certain is to anger him and then climb a tree. If he climbs up after you, he’s a black. The grizzly will merely wait with the patience of Saint Anne for you to come down and be eaten.”

  “I wasn’t that curious.”

  “You disappoint me,” he said again. “I was told all you American frontiersmen shit bear and keep puma for pets.”

  “That was Jim Bridger. He died last year of a goiter.”

  “You should have brought the marvelous Evans rifle. Even if you did not kill him the weight of the lead would have slowed him down so you could walk up to him and cut off a steak for your friend Philippe.”

  “I went out after geese. I didn’t think I’d need eighteen rounds to bring down a gander. Do you want to talk about that bear all day?”

  “I did not introduce the subject.” He slapped the big dun on the neck and got a purring snort in reply. Then he slipped the comb into the kit at his feet and stretched the kinks out of his small frame. Currying was strenous work; he’d chucked his coat and rolled up his sleeves to expose muscles in his arms as big as train couplings. “How were the drifts?”

  “Down,” I said.

  “Good. We will leave for the stronghold at first light.”

  The sun was well up when we cleared the woods at last and squinched up our eyes against a plain of white as bright as a salt flat. The trees stood out like embroidery on a sheet, and the sky was bottle-blue and just as clear. A bald eagle had it all to itself, flapping its wings dreamily between updrafts, where it rode the air like a kite. I thought of the eagle bones in the leather pouch in my pocket and hoped they were genuine. It wasn’t country for chickens.

  “Monsieur le depute!” Philippe’s whisper was a harsh rasp, accompanied by his upraised hand.

  I heard nothing but the wind in the pines behind us; but the ears of the Métis were as sharp as a deer’s. I drew rein.

  Fleurette removed her arms from around her husband and craned her neck, pointing her sharp features to the sky as if to smell the air. Young Claude, who had been walking behind King Henry to avoid wallowing in snow to his waist, leaned out to see past the big dun, fixing his bright eyes on what appeared to be an empty space of ground some three hundred yards from where we were waiting. I felt blind and deaf.

  The landscape was deceptive. It was not as flat as it seemed under its blanket of snow, which masked long deep depressions gouged by glaciers, like the troughs between waves at sea. As we waited amid clouds of steam from our horses, I heard the first silvery tinkles and flatulent leathery creaks that Philippe had been hearing for minutes, and the others had heard before me. The sounds chilled me to the marrow. In a magnesium flash I was transported back to Murfreesboro, where I had waited with a small patrol in a stand of hickory, covering our mounts’ muzzles with our hands to keep them from wickering while Braxton Bragg’s Confederate cavalry passed by within pistol range.

  The nearest trough shallowed out where Claude was watching. I caught a glint of sunlight off burnished steel, then the brown head and neck of a horse whose coat gleamed like a well-polished boot, and then in a burst like a flock of cardinals, the bright red tunics and brass buttons and spiked white cork helmets of the North-West Mounted Police drawing a brilliant slash four abreast and a quarter of a mile long against the stark white countryside. The Mounties had come to the stronghold.

  23

  “Companyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy … Ulp!”

  The master sergeant who bawled the order had been in the military twenty years, minimum; a figure arrived at by assigning a year to each y in company and adding three for the total incomprehensibility of his pronunciation of Halt. When their commands could no longer be understood by anyone they were forced into retirement.

  It was the same sergeant with black handlebars I’d seen on the Saskatchewan. He relayed the order as reluctantly as he’d put away his side arm when Inspector Urban Vivian identified me as an ally and not an enemy come to ambush four hundred Mounties with a force of two men, a woman, and a boy. The command was repeated a couple of times farther back, and with a racket of creaking saddles, jingling bit chains, snorting horses, and rattling rifle stocks, the column came to a stop. A warm vapor of perspiration and spent breath drifted forward and settled over Philippe, Fleurette, Claude, and me like a mist of rain. Then there was eardrum-battering silence.

  Vivian broke it. Weeks of riding with the sun slamming off the snow had burned his face as dark as the chestnut he rode and bleached his hair and brush moustache as white as his helmet and belt. His pale eyes stood out like newly minted coins.

  “I gave you up for bear bait long ago,” he said.

  He didn’t know how close he’d come to guessing right, but I didn’t give him the point. “In Montana we use bears to catch buffalo. I’ve been taking in the scenery.”

  “Who is that with you?”

  I introduced the du la Rochelles. Vivian surprised me by unstrapping and removing his helmet to nod at Fleurette. His hair, darker on top, had grown out at the temples. He put the helmet back on to address Philippe. “I know you, I think. We have you down as an insurgent.”

  “Your information is out of date, monsieur l’inspecteur. I fight no one these days.”

  “What brings you this far north?”

  I said, “I hired him as my guide.”

  “He must not be very good. I’ve been to Chipewyan and back, and this is as far as you’ve got.”

  “We liked Shulamite too much to leave. Then a blizzard hit.”

  One eye twitched. It was as much surprise as he would show in front of his command. “I don’t believe you. Shulamite? You’re a liar.”

  “I’d throw down my glove, but I need it.” I let my gaze wander down the line of horsemen. “Every time I see you, you’ve got a bigger army. Another week or two of Bliss and Whitelaw on the loose and you’ll strip the queen of her palace guard.”

  “That Métis family they butchered up north had a house guest the night they visited. The guest was a priest. If we don’t get them first the Metis will do it for us, and burn down every square mile they pass through on the way. This isn’t your fight any longer, Murdock. Canada has the greater claim.”

  I took another look at the column. It was as good a light-horse cavalry as the continent had, if you didn’t count the Comanche and northern Cheyenne. In nearly ten years fighting renegades and settling disputes, the North-West Mounted had lost just four men, as opposed to Custer’s two hundred during one day’s fighting in southern Montana. If I ever wanted to turn over a manhunt to someone else, I wouldn’t find a better candidate.

  “I’ll go home if you’ll put it in writing that Judge Blackthorne’s court gets Bliss and Whitelaw when you’re through trying them.”

  “I can give you my word to that, as an officer and a gentleman.”

  “I believe you, Inspector, but if you take a bullet to the head, your word won’t be worth one cent more than your brains. I’ll need it on paper.”

  He flushed beneath the sunburn. “Damn it, man, I haven’t writing materials to hand.”

  “Then I’ll just ride along with you.”

  “I can’t offer you safe passage. You might think about that before you drag along a woman and a boy. We are on our way to parley with a band of Sioux.”

  “Wolf Shirt. I got that much from Brother Hebron.”

  Vivian recognized the names. His nose was running in the cold; he flicked a drop off the end with a white-gloved finger. No one before had ever made so elegant a gesture of it. “Perhaps you were telling the truth about Shulamite. I ask your pardon.”

  That surprised and irritated me. Most of the fun I’d had in Canada so far, after the weather and renegade slaves and madwomen, was hating Inspector Vivian. “I’ve been called worse than a liar, and earned some of it,” I said. “What’s your plan? From what I’ve heard about Wolf Shirt, he won’t give up Bliss and Whitelaw for a sack of beads.”

  “That’s how you Americans handle it. That’s how he and his people came to be up here in the first place.” Having thus reestablished our animosity, he said, “I intend to appeal to his common sense. Up until now the Sioux have enjoyed the hospitality of the authorities in Canada and sanctuary against prosecution for their differences with the United States of America. If he insists upon harboring fugitives from Canadian law, he sacrifices everything. We have warrants for the arrest of Bliss, Whitelaw, and their companions, and we shall serve them if it means war with the entire Sioux Nation.”

  “Now you’re beginning to sound like Phil Sheridan.”

  He turned to the man with the black handlebars. “Sergeant Major. Walk-march-trot.”

  “Wukmutchtut!” bawled the other.

  The column started forward. I turned the mustang’s head and gave the lead line a flip to clear the path. Philippe backed King Henry out of the way.

  “Indians are muleheaded,” I called out above the noise. “They can’t count, or they won’t. They’ll go to war with the rest of the world rather than back off from a position.”

  “Then they have something in common with Great Britain,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Philippe and I watched the Mounties pass with our arms folded on our pommels. “What scares me is he thinks that’s a good thing,” I said.

  “It is the same with buffalo,” said the Métis. “That’s why there are so few left.”

  We watched the scarlet column trot past, their mounts’ hooves churning clouds of powdery snow. Rattling at the rear was a sight that never failed to chill my blood: A pair of men driving a reinforced wagon with the brass bunched barrels of a Gatling gun mounted on a tripod poking out the end of a canvas tarpaulin.

  Philippe took in his breath sharply. “A machine for killing,” he said. “It is a great time in which we live.”

  Fleurette, looking confused, leaned forward and said something to her husband, who responded briefly in French. She sat back, crossed herself, then looked around for Claude, who had slid down from behind her. When she spotted him she called his name shrilly. Startled, he scampered over and was caught in a maternal headlock.

  I got out my leather pouch and placed two double eagles in Philippe’s palm. “The extra is for Shulamite,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Brother Enoch was in favor of killing all three of you for riding with me. You didn’t have to wait around to watch the fight after the committee said you could go.”

  He didn’t close his hand. “The job is not finished, Deputy Marshal Murdock.”

  “I hired you to guide me. If I can’t follow four hundred Mounties and their eggbeater on wheels from here, I’m no kind of a manhunter. Go home and shoot buffalo.”

  Fleurette asked another question. When Philippe translated what I’d said, she shook her head, let go of Claude, scooped the gold coins out of her husband’s hand, and thrust them toward me.

  “She says you hired me to take you to Fort Chipewyan,” he said. “Since that is no longer necessary, we will accompany you the rest of the way to the stronghold.”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  He showed me his gold teeth. “We have been married a long time, Deputy Marshal Murdock. We do not always have to speak to say what we are thinking.”

  I took back the eagles. There is no arguing with a woman in any language.

  24

  French blood leads to exaggeration, and I was prepared to find the Sioux stronghold at Cree Lake a good deal less formidable than Philippe had described it. A half-day short of the lake, however, I saw the broken granite peak of the formation sticking up above the towering white pines that separated us, as straight and tall and imposing as any of the multi-story buildings that were going up in Chicago for the greater glory of the meat barons whose slaughterhouses butchered western beef for New York and London and Paris and a hundred other cities whose residents had never seen a cow any other way but cut up and packaged for sale: Skyscrapers, they called them; but the name had never seemed so appropriate as when one applied it to the present feature. When Wolf Shirt and his followers first set eyes upon it, they would have given thanks to the Wise One Above for his sacred gift to Custer’s conquerors. I had to think there was something to that, or the Last Stand would have taken place somewhere more defensible than that pimple of a hill on the Little Big Horn.