In 1973, the last steam locomotive on the CNR’s
northern branch was retired, but its final car—
Boxcar 7—remained parked at the abandoned siding
near Peigan Crossing. No one touched it. Not the
lumberjacks, not the trappers, not even the RCMP.
The car had carried twentythree people between
’68 and ’71. All vanished. No bodies. No notes.
Just empty boots and halfeaten bannock on the
floor.
Marie Lacroix, fortytwo, social worker for the
Manitoba Child Services outpost, had filed
twelve missing persons reports in five years.
All kids from the rez, all last seen near Boxcar
7. She didn’t believe in curses. She believed in
cold winters, broken foster systems, and parents
who vanished faster than the ice on Lake
Winnipeg in April.
When fifteenyearold Elijah Two Feathers
disappeared after leaving his aunt’s house with
a duffel bag and a hockey stick, Marie drove the
gravel road to the siding in her ’69 Dodge Dart,
snow crunching under tires like broken glass.
The car door hung crooked. Inside, the
floorboards were stained with tea and something
darker. On the bench: a pair of worn mukluks, a
folded letter from the band council, and a
single maple leaf puck.
She sat down. The heater coughed. Outside, the
wind howled through the spruce like a choir of
lost children.
The rules were simple: no one rode Boxcar 7
alone. No one left the car until dawn. No one
spoke to the shadows. Marie had read the RCMP’s
sealed reports. They didn’t say why. Just that
the car “rearranged time.” One man boarded in
’69 and was found in ’72, screaming about a
hockey game in 1947, his boots full of prairie
grass.
Marie didn’t leave. She lit a cigarette. She
didn’t smoke. But she was tired. The car
shuddered. Outside, the snow fell sideways.
Inside, the air thickened like molasses. A voice—
clear as a whistle on a frozen rink—said,
“You’re late, lady.”
She didn’t answer. She pulled Elijah’s puck from
her coat. Tossed it against the wall.
It bounced. Once. Twice. Then rolled under the
bench. And from under there, a child’s laugh—
bright, sharp, Canadianbred—echoed. Not cruel.
Not mournful. Just… amused.
The walls softened. The floorboards cracked open.
Not to swallow. To reveal.
Twelve pairs of boots. Twelve hockey sticks.
Twelve mittens. All neatly stacked. All smelling
of pine resin and bannock. Each one tagged with
a name, a date, a band. Elijah’s name was there.
His stick, too.
The car didn’t take them. It held them. Like a
locker at the community rink. Waiting for
someone to show up. To say: I see you.
At first light, Marie walked out. Elijah sat on
the steps of the abandoned station, eating a
granola bar. He didn’t remember boarding. He
remembered the puck. “It felt like home,” he
said. He didn’t say it like a kid. He said it
like a man who’d spent years in a room with no
door.
Marie didn’t report it. She filed it as
“recovered, minor trauma.” The car was towed
three days later—by order of Transport Canada.
No one asked why. No one wanted to.
But now, every winter, someone leaves a hockey
puck on Boxcar 7’s rusted threshold. And
sometimes, if you’re quiet enough, you can hear
it chuckle.
