The balcony that ringed the main ground floor space of the museum was a mixture of displays that hadn’t quite been rationalized. Katie had acquired some Victorian glass cases from an auction in Edmonton and these were now filled with an assortment of items that couldn’t be crammed in downstairs. She had wanted the theme to be the building of the railroad in the late 1800s, and Silver’s important part in it. However, lack of space had made them include the history of the Kinchuinick Indians from the area; how they broke away in the eighteenth century from the larger Assiniboine and Stony tribes to live here in the mountains. And although the native Canadians had no part in the building of the railroad, Katie dug up a tenuous historical tie-in about how tribe members had apparently hindered the largely Scottish railroad work-gang during the final stages of building the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. The tunnel was the engineering feat of the century, that saw CPR blast that mad doubling-back tunnel two miles long right through the centre of Wolf Mountain.

In fact the centrepiece of the balcony display was a working model of the tunnel; a papier-mâché masterpiece they had commissioned from Calgary, where a tiny model train wound its way through the half cut-away mountain when you pressed a red button on the side of the case. The kids loved it. They would stand for an age pressing and re-pressing the button, making the train spiral its way round the tunnel until a bored parent dragged them downstairs to the bird display.

With the mountain cut in half you could see exactly where the line went, a luxury not available in real life. The papier-mâché world was much easier to understand.

Katie knew the whole floor should have been railroad history, but she had all these great Indian domestic tools, and artefacts to do with tribal worship and mythology to show and nowhere to show them. So she banged them in the cases and hoped for the best. Sam, of course, called the Indian stuff junk. She had watched his face as he walked round the display for the first time with her and the clouds of emotion that blackened his normally smooth brow were hard to fathom.

This contempt for his Indian past was something Katie had struggled to understand all their married life. Since it was virtually a taboo subject in the Hunt household she didn’t reckon she would ever be permitted to cross that bridge into the secret place that fed Sam with his self-loathing. Nevertheless, she grieved for him when she saw it manifest itself.