Apparition Trail, The by Lisa Smedman

I knew in that instant that I had been following a dead man: the dog I had seen in my dreams. I also knew that I was hopelessly lost. I thought I heard the ghostly laughter of savage voices, and the beat of a drum, but it was only my own heart, pounding in my ears.
    A sense of dizziness caused me to sway in the saddle as the drumbeat increased in tempo. I heard a ringing in my ears and instinctively knew that death was hovering near.
    I am not a religious person, and so I did not pray. I cannot say what it was that saw me through that awful moment when I thought my heart would stop. I can only suppose it was the dream, for the feelings I was experiencing now were exactly the emotions I had felt on realizing that I was trapped in the cave with the dead dog. All the while, laughter filled my ears: the evil laughter of the dead.
    I raised a hand to my head, pressing it against my temple in an effort to make the dizziness stop. As the fingers of my hand covered one eye, I closed the other eye.
    Silence. The drumbeat and voices stopped.
    I started, and nearly tore my hand away, but some instinct of self-preservation caused me to keep my eyes screwed tightly shut. I moved my palm fully over both eyes, like a child playing at hide and seek. Then I applied my spurs — lightly — to Buck’s flanks.
    The horse took a step forward.
    Again the spurs, and again another step by my unwilling mount. I let the reins go slack, giving Buck his head. At last, under my prodding, he began to walk.
    I don’t know how long I rode like that, with one hand over my eyes and the other on the pommel of my saddle. It might have been five minutes; it might have been five hours. I only know that Buck eventually came to a halt and no end of urging or spurring would prompt him forward. Once more I felt the heat of the sun on my back.
    Cautiously, I opened my fingers a crack and peered out through it. I can only describe my stupefaction at the scene that lay before me. Just ahead of where Buck had drawn to a halt, Sergeant Wilde and his horse lay still on the ground. The Sergeant’s revolver was in his hand, and a gory bullet hole in the animal’s neck was leaking blood. The Sergeant’s foot was tangled in one stirrup. His leg was bent, but did not appear to be broken.
    Perhaps most curious of all, we were right beside the railway tracks — still within the Cypress Hills. I recognized the area as being only a mile or two away from the detachment. We hadn’t journeyed north at all.
    I slid from my saddle and walked to where the Sergeant lay. His Stetson lay by his side, but his clothes were otherwise undisturbed. When I searched his body, I found no mark on him, save for a faint black smudge on his left breast when I opened his jacket to listen for a heartbeat. I heard none.
    I turned back to Buck, and noticed that his head was drooping. Despite the fact that he had been traveling at a walk, his sides were lathered. I stroked him on the cheek, telling him what a good horse he’d been to bring me home again. It was a sentimental gesture, but heartfelt in that moment.
    For my part, I felt drained and ill, as if I had not slept in several nights — which, of course, was precisely the case.
    “Are you up for one last push for home?” I asked Buck.
    I fancied that he nodded. With all due haste, I rode for the Maple Creek detachment, to report the Sergeant’s untimely death.
    They put the cause of death down to failure of the heart, which is what I put in my report. That explanation appealed to the rational side of me, even though the Sergeant was a hale and hearty man. I needed some explanation for what I had seen, some way to make sense of my strange experience. I decided later that all I had seen and heard had been mere hallucination, provoked by a lack of sleep. Which was the reason, I suppose, why I mentioned my dream in the report in the first place: to make the state I was in known, and to explain why I wasn’t able to minister to the