The snow held fast over Pine Ridge well into
April, but the thaw came sudden, like a broken
dam behind the old CPR depot. Mayor Elias Voss
walked the tracks alone each dawn, his boots
sinking into slush that smelled of rust and wet
pine. He hadn’t voted in twenty years, but no
one dared run against him—not since ’87, when
the hydro lines went dark for six weeks and he
fed half the town from his freezer while the
city council argued about funding.
He’d taken in the man three winters back, a
stranger with no papers, no accent but the kind
of silence that comes from being hunted. The
RCMP never came to Pine Ridge—they knew better.
The town’s loyalty ran deeper than federal law.
Elias kept him in the old stationmaster’s
quarters, behind the false wall where the 1912
tunnel entrance still opened, a relic from the
days when the railway carried more than coal:
children from northern reserves, shipped south
under the guise of “reeducation.” The tunnels
were sealed after ’69, when the Truth Commission
started asking questions. But the walls
remembered.
The thaw cracked the earth near the abandoned
siding. A child’s mitten, blue wool frayed at
the cuff, surfaced beside a rusted tin box.
Inside: a single hockey puck, carved with a Cree
syllabic name, and a folded letter from a mother
who never got her boy back. Elias didn’t touch
it. He knew who left it there—old Marie Kootenay,
now blind, still knitting mittens for ghosts.
That night, the fugitive—no name, just the
number 14 in his prison tattoo—left a note on
Elias’s kitchen table: They’re coming with the
dogs. The RCMP had finally tracked the missing
records to the old rail archives in Thunder Bay.
Elias packed a satchel: two loaves, a flask of
birch syrup, the puck. He didn’t lock the door.
At dawn, he walked the length of the tunnel
alone, the ceiling dripping, the air thick with
peat and old grief. He found the final chamber—
the one the nuns never reported. Twelve names
scratched into the stone, each beside a date,
each a child who never came home. He laid the
puck on the floor, then lit the dynamite he’d
kept since ’93, bought from a trapper who said,
Some things need burying twice.
The blast echoed through the valley, loud enough
to wake the church bells in Fort Frances. The
tunnel collapsed. The puck was gone. So was the
fugitive—he’d slipped out before the detonation,
vanishing into the bush with nothing but the
name on the puck.
The RCMP found Elias sitting on the ruined track,
coat buttoned against the chill, staring at the
fresh earth. No charges were laid. No press came.
The town buried the tunnel again, quietly, with
new gravel and a plaque that read: The Railway
That Moved Us All.
Pine Ridge never spoke of it again. But every
winter, someone leaves a new mitten on the
station bench—blue wool, frayed at the cuff. And
Elias, now seventythree, still walks the tracks
each dawn, his boots crunching over snow that
never quite melts the same way twice.
