The 1973 winter grips the abandoned Canadian
Pacific line west of Thunder Bay, where the
frost doesn’t just settle—it sings in the gaps
between rail joints, a sound only those raised
on rez winters hear. Sixteenyearold Elise Vachon,
known in town as “the ghost girl” for never
speaking at school and always walking home
through the bush, scavenges rusted brake pads
for scrap cash. Her mother works double shifts
at the cannery; her brother’s hockey scholarship
died with the team’s funding. The town’s new
mayor, a Toronto transplant, just approved
clearing the old rightofway for a luxury cottage
development. The land, once part of Treaty 3, is
now zoned “nonIndigenous recreational.”
Elise finds the engine under a tarp of frozen
moss and pine needles. Not a locomotive—
something older. No manufacturer’s plate. The
boiler still holds heat, but no coal, no steam,
no wires. When she touches the brass valve, the
frost on her fingers turns to black soot that
smells like burnt sweetgrass. That night, the
radio in her mother’s kitchen crackles with
static, then plays a lullaby in Ojibwemowin—no
station, no signal. The next morning, the town’s
only Indigenous elder, Josephine Kakekay, leaves
a woven birchbark basket on Elise’s doorstep.
Inside: a single red moccasin, stitched with
thread that hasn’t been made since 1912.
Elise returns to the engine. This time, she
presses her palm to the side. The ground
trembles. The rails glow faintly blue beneath
the snow. For three seconds, the air smells like
cedar smoke and wet earth, not diesel. She sees
a vision: children running barefoot along the
same tracks, not in boots, not in winter coats,
but in buckskin, laughing as a train made of
woven willow and caribou sinew glides silently
past. No whistle. No steam. Just song.
The town’s new development crew arrives with
survey stakes. One worker kicks the engine’s
cover off, calls it “junk.” He drops a cigarette.
The embers hit the boiler. The engine doesn’t
burn. It inhales. The fire curls inward,
swallowed like smoke into a lung. The man
screams—not from pain, but from memory. He sees
his grandfather’s face, drowned in a flooded
reserve during the 1950s dam project, the one
the province never documented. He drops to his
knees, weeping, whispering, “I didn’t know.”
The next day, the mayor cancels the project. The
railway board, shaken by the man’s breakdown and
a sudden flood of anonymous letters from retired
CN workers describing “ghost trains” in the
1970s, orders the site sealed. But Elise doesn’t
wait. She slips away at dawn with the red
moccasin, the engine’s last valve still warm in
her coat pocket. The town doesn’t chase her.
They’ve seen too many disappearances—too many
Indigenous kids who walked into the bush and
never came back. They assume she’s gone for good.
She walks the old track north, toward Lac Seul,
where the land still remembers. Behind her, the
first snow of spring falls—not white, but grey,
like ash from a fire that never burned. The
engine’s pulse, faint now, thrums against her
ribs. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t need to. It
remembers. And now, so does she.
