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the trading post, Simpson told him that his mother had been a Cree-Scots woman and his father the Little Emperor.
    James Simpson said, I was his first son. I heard he died last fall (September 1860), in the far east, Montreal.
    First son. After a moment Big Bear asked, What is that, Montreal?
    A place where many Whites live close together. Sixty thousand, more people than there are on the prairie, or were, even before the smallpox.
    More Whites than Red River?
    Twenty times. I went to school there. They have houses six floors high on an island where their river is three times wider than our Saskatchewan. Ships come from across oceans, from everywhere in the world. They have a railroad too, though not as long as the Americans’. My father told me they were talking about it.
    About what?
    Building a railroad to Red River. My father didn’t like that, he said too many Whites would come and ruin the Company trade. But he’s gone, so they must be thinking about it again. Maybe a railroad over the prairie.
    Could that be believed? Simpson sat on his thick buffalo robe as lightly as a Cree, but it was spread on a wooden floor, not good earth. His face slanted into a straggly brown beard—he looked so White, but spoke the language clear as any Elder.
    And Big Bear remembered a disturbing boyhood dream of uncountable Whites streaming from somewhere east and south onto the prairie and chopping down trees and pounding together square houses in every river valley, so many houses that there was no wood to shelter People from winter storms. The Elders had marvelled when he told them. Look at the Whites here, they advised him. We’ve known them from Elders beyond Elders, and the places they build with posts are no more than specks four days apart along one river. What can your dream mean?
    Catherine, Simpson’s wife, joined them with a kettle of steaming water for the pot. A beautiful woman, Big Bear thought, with her eyes shining black against her dark skin. How could she be Gabriel Dumont’s, the ugly Métis leader’s, sister?—and he had to laugh at himself. Simpson looked up,and Big Bear could only offer him tobacco for his pipe, though Simpson had bales of it and he had no more than what filled his pouch. Simpson cut off a plug, and Big Bear could ask:
    His first son. So, are you, now, the Company’s Big Boss?
    Simpson watched the smoke curl until he passed the short pipe to Catherine. I have my father’s blood, he said, and name. He paid for my school as long as I could stand it … I saw him five times in my life … no … no, he had enough children, especially all White ones. I’ll never have more from him.
    What more would you need? You’ll grow rich trading with me.
    They laughed together, seated on the robe drinking tea and smoking. As they did every fall at Fort Pitt, and sometimes in summer when Simpson brought his well-bred horses to the Cree on the plains. A good horse could cost four bags of pemmican, but they were needed more than ever because, with renewed enemy attacks, there were not enough Young Men left to steal them from the Blackfoot or Shoshone even when they pushed that far south. And sometimes now whole camps of Blackfoot were naked beggars, on foot because they had given away their horses and everything else for the whisky that Whites carted fromthe Missouri. Some warriors went crazy drinking it, and often the women and Elders couldn’t stop them.
    Simpson told Big Bear, Those bastards are American. They’re not supposed to drag their rotgut over the border. But there’s no Canadian here to stop them.
    Big Bear snorted. That Medicine Line is for Whites. The land is ours; the Blackfoot have to protect it themselves.
    But you know whisky, Simpson said. You’ve drunk it.
    Enough to feel sick, not become stupid.
    Once that summer (1861), when Black Powder’s band was hunting with their Assiniboine allies so far south that the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana loomed over the horizon, they heard the shriek