Prairie snow blankets a companybuilt settlement
beside the Canadian Northern Railway’s advancing
edge. A man known as Thomas Riel registers
orphans and widows displaced by track grading,
filing reports in neat ink while avoiding eye
contact at the Hudson’s Bay canteen. He wears
gloves in summer, sleeves pulled low—scars run
from wrist to forearm, old burns from a mill
fire he did not survive on paper.
The railway operates as a sovereign force: land
surveys override treaty boundaries, time zones
shift to Ottawa’s schedule, and workers paid in
scrip find it void beyond company stores. A new
rule spreads—any man absent three days is
replaced, his belongings auctioned at dawn. When
a Mohawk bridge crew vanishes after refusing
dynamite work on sacred ridge stone, their camp
erased overnight, no inquiry opens.
Thomas walks the sidings at dusk, noting names
of men not on payroll lists. He delivers flour
sacks filled with medical supplies to a Métis
midwife in a halfdugout south of Smoky Creek.
She says nothing when he flinches at steam
whistles—the sound recalls the factory collapse
back east, the one where twelve men died and
only one body was claimed. His real name was on
that claim.
Winter halts the steel. Frost bites through
walls. A child dies from coal fumes in an
improperly vented bunkhouse. Thomas submits a
report citing negligence; it returns stamped Not
consistent with national progress. That night,
he digs out his buried kit—Ontario College of
Social Workers badge, a birth certificate under
Daniel Marsh, letters from a sister who believes
him dead.
He boards a supply train westward, papers in
hand to expose unsafe conditions under the new
federal oversight act. At Fort Qu’Appelle
junction, inspectors refuse his evidence,
calling him a saboteur. The chief engineer
recognizes him—not from the fire, but from a
classified project in Capreol: Marsh had signed
confidentiality oaths binding for life,
punishable by state erasure.
Thomas burns his credentials in a stove. Returns
on foot to Smoky Creek. The midwife shows him a
newborn wrapped in red cloth—its father among
the vanished. He carves a new name into a
railway tie with his knife: not Thomas, not
Daniel. Just here.
Spring thaw softens the grade. Track layers move
on. The settlement empties, swallowed by brush
within months. Near a crooked milepost, a single
glove remains snagged on barbed wire—leather
worn thin, palm scarred through. The rails hum
east to west, carrying everything and
remembering nothing.
