Free Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden Page B

into what to name the council that will run this nascent government and decides that he must create a new phrase if he’s to capture the essence of his vision. He calls this new council the Exovedate, meaning roughly “those who have left the flock.” Perhaps his friend Gabriel would have preferred a more masculine name that brought back to life the all-but-vanished buffalo herds rather than the docile and somewhat dumb beasts that a flock suggests, but Louis best understands the Christian symbolism of sheep and departing the fold. The Métis who have gathered around Louis and Gabriel have a difficult time pronouncing—or really understanding—Exovedate, and so they call the new government le petit provisoire.
    Louis, who believes his health has been pushed to its limit over the now dying winter, begins to feel the exhaustion leaving his body at the telltale signs of spring’s approach; the river ice will soon break and the water will surge. Louis’s life is like a river. He has been pulled along from his earliest days in a direction that’s been preordained. This river, this life, has led him finally here to Batoche, and now he senses the river quickening. The waters are beginning to eddy and swirl, indeed are beginning to froth underneath the winter ice. The power of the river, of Louis’s life, pushes hard against the ice that holds it down. This is all preordained, like the seasons, like winter to spring. Soon, very soon, the ice will give with an echoing boom that will be heard clear across the country, across the world, and the water will flow again, free of the ice’s constraints.
    Louis, feeling the pulse of the river in his veins a few days before installing the Exovedate, makes his boldest public statement to date in front of the Saint-Laurent church. “Rome has fallen!” he declares to the priests and the Métis gathered on the steps of the church which Father Fourmond forbids him to enter. This is the first dove to burst forth from his chest. And the Métis are with Louis now, not with the priests.
    More doves follow. It makes perfect sense for Bishop Bourget, the conservative and powerful bishop who has influenced so much of Louis’s thinking, to be the first pope of the New World. And so it should be. Rome has rotted from the inside and here, finally, on the soil of the grand North-West, a new Rome can be built. Louis has many more specific plans, from renaming the days of the week to praying for the resurrection of a dead American politician who will help the Métis cause, but first he must deal with the most daunting of issues: forcing John A. to recognize that the Métis have fair claim to the lands upon which they live.
    Louis believes that all he wants is realistic, but there are those who have labelled him mentally unsound in the past. Indeed, he spent almost two years in an insane asylum for behaviour that those who care for and love him couldn’t understand. They couldn’t grasp that God spoke to Louis on the mountain near Washington, D.C., during the days he attempted to hold secret court with American president Ulysses S. Grant, during those days when Louis firmly believed nothing short of an American military invasion of western Canada could help secure a real Métis homeland.
    Yes, Rome has fallen, and Bishop Bourget is the perfect man to become the new pope. Ten years before, Bourget himself sent a letter confirming Louis’s deep-seated belief that his path was a righteous and important one. Ten years ago, in July of 1875, Louis was deep in the wilderness of his soul, officially banned from Canada, a bounty on his head. The Orangemen clamoured for his assassination in a year when he had already been elected to the Parliament in Ottawa by the people of Manitoba but could not claim his seat. It was a year of torment and true suffering, made worse in that he was separated from his large and beloved family. But a letter from the bishop helped quell some of the pain, for the letter stated