The Trickster
He is a shape-shifter. He is as old as time. He kills without mercy.Life is good in Silver, a small town high in the Canadian Rockies. Sam Hunt is a lucky man. with a loving family and an honest income, he has everything he wants.But beneath the mountains a vile, demonic energy is gathering strength and soon it will unleash its freezing terror upon Silver. In the eye of the storm, one man struggles to bury the private horrors of his childhood. He knows nothing, yet seems to know everything: Sam Hunt.All he loves may be destroyed by an evil beyond imagining. An evil from the buried, hated past. An evil named the Trickster.
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MURIEL GRAY
The Trickster
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Muriel Gray 1994, 2015
Introduction © Mark Millar 2015
Cover photograph © Sverrir Thorolfsson Iceland/Getty Images
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008158248
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008134730
Version: 2015-10-14
For
Hamish MacVinish Barbour
and Hector Adam Barbour.
With love.
Contents
Preface to the 20th anniversary edition
Chapter 1: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 10: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 16: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 22: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 28: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 33: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 38: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 42: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 46: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 49: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 53: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Chapter 55: Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
Here’s a confession. If The Trickster had been written today instead of twenty years ago it would probably be a much lazier book. There was no internet in 1994. Well, there was a sort of internet. It was called ‘a library’.
The story grew after a two-month winter stay in the Canadian Rockies, in and around the Alberta town of Banff, named after the Aberdeenshire town by the Scots who built the great railway that opened up Western Canada to the world. That fascinating historical connection, combined with the local Native Canadian lore and backdrop of fiercely beautiful, unforgiving mountain landscape, would set any imagination alight. And it did.
The history of the Canadian Pacific Railway alone is enough to fill a whole library of books, as indeed it has, as I discovered when I set out to find more, poring over volumes in Glasgow’s grand Mitchell Library.
But as the story evolved around the native people, whose land this had been long before the Scots and their Chinese labourers arrived to lay iron rails through previously unnavigable wilderness, it was clear there was only one way to gather accurate information. Go back and talk to them.
I was warned by local non-native Canadians that trying to gain access to the Stoney Indian Tribe, whose First Nation reserve lies to the east of Banff by the small town of Cochrane, was all but impossible. Wary of outsiders, with a depressing range of serious social problems, these were not people who would be instantly eager to share tales of their ancestors with a stranger from Scotland.
But since the clan motto ‘Hold Fast Craigellachie’ was the telegram sent to the team leader nearing exhaustion during the railway construction’s most challenging section, it seemed right to follow suit.
To meet a reserve resident you make a date and a place, and then you go and wait. They don’t turn up. Well, they do. They watch you from afar. And if you keep coming back at the right time and the right place then eventually they come too.
It took nearly two weeks. Same place, same time, every single day. And then suddenly, one day I was in. My guide was a young woman, Co-Co Powderface, a champion barrel-rider and hunter. We talked and talked. We visited her home, a corrugated iron hand-built house, the tiny shack of her grandmother, a non-English speaker, and the surprise was that everything about it was resonant of lives I’d seen as a child in Scotland, when travelling in the Outer Hebrides and the far north Highlands. Strangely familiar territory.
