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.
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