Apparition Trail, The Read Free

settled onto the seat, hearing it creak beneath my weight, and gripped the handlebars in preparation for our ascent.
    While there were some in the North-West Mounted Police who said the air bicycle would eventually replace the horse, I wasn’t so sure. It was an extremely ungainly craft, difficult to master, and subject to the whims of the wind. The air bicycle was also expensive; thus far, they had been used only by officers deployed on important police business — and by a corporal responding to an urgent summons from his Commissioner.
    My premonition of impending calamity grew as I settled into the seat; I had to steel myself as I waited for the operator to drink his water and ready his craft for the skies. The feeling wasn’t quite as urgent or as clear, however, as the premonition I’d had back in November of 1879, just a few months after joining the police.
    On that fateful day, I’d been working at the horse camp upriver from Fort Walsh, and had forgotten an axe a mile or so up the trail. When I considered returning for it, I felt an absolute dread that froze me to the spot. It came to me with fantastic clarity that, were I to ride up that trail, I would die.
    My friend George Johnston laughed at my foolishness, and rode back himself to fetch the axe, ignoring my pleas for him to remain in camp.
    He never came back.
    The next day, a search party found George’s body lying in the brush and snow at the bottom of a coulee. He’d been shot in the back. The search party started to follow some horse tracks that crossed George’s trail — unshod hooves, which meant Indian ponies — but a chinook came up suddenly and melted the snow, obliterating the trail. Even the remarkable Jerry Potts, a half-breed scout who could track a fly across a pane of glass, couldn’t find any trace of the hoof prints after that.
    We later learned that a Blood Indian by the name of Star Child had boasted of committing the crime, but when he was brought to trial two years later, the jury acquitted him. Their final verdict: George Johnston was murdered by person or persons unknown, thought to be Indian.
    But for my premonition, it would have been myself — and not poor George — who had the dubious distinction of being the first North-West Mounted Police constable to be murdered in the course of his duties.
    My feeling of dread as I sat on the air bicycle was less precise, but equally gloomy. I had the distinct sense that disaster awaited me in Regina, but no clear warning of the form it might take. No matter what lay ahead, however, I could not refuse the Commissioner’s summons.
    The operator slid his goggles back down over his eyes, and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Hang on tight!” he said with a grin. “And make sure the chin strap of your helmet is loose.”
    As I obeyed this strange instruction, he engaged the crank that reversed the angle of the wings, sending us lurching into the air. My stomach descended into my bowels even as a sudden pressure filled my ears. I worked my jaw to clear it, opening my mouth wide in a forced yawn to pop them.
    Within a few minutes we’d reached a dizzying height of more than two hundred feet above the ground. The barracks roofs were laid out below us, and the knot of men who had gathered on the parade square were blots of red, waving the smaller spots of brown that were their Stetsons. I am not normally afraid of high places, but as the operator threw the lever that engaged the rear propeller, sending the air bicycle forward, I gulped and gripped the handlebars more tightly. Moose Jaw slid away below.
    The feeling that something awful was about to happen intensified as we winged our way east toward Regina, following the thin black ribbon of the CPR tracks and the telegraph line. For the first while I ignored it, concentrating on the magnificent view of the prairie, but after an hour or so, the feeling was joined by an all-too-familiar ache in my stomach. I wished I’d brought my bottle