Those pines offered Breckinridge his only real hope of escape. If he had to keep running, sooner or later the bear was going to catch him.
He had to climb if he wanted to live.
Mentally, he cursed his foolishness. Even though he hadn’t been in the Rocky Mountains for very long, common sense alone should have told him that it was a bad idea to have anything to do with a bear cub. Having grown up in the Smoky Mountains back in Tennessee, he knew good and well that messing with any animal offspring was dangerous.
The fuzzy little thing had been so doggoned adorable, though, as it rolled around in the wildflowers, and Breckinridge hadn’t hurt it. All he’d done was pick it up . . .
Then the mama bear had exploded out of some nearby brush with an ear-shattering roar, and the race was on. Breckinridge had spied some trees in the distance, so he dropped the cub and lit out toward them.
Bears could climb trees, of course, but a man could climb higher—or at least so Breckinridge hoped. All he had to do was stay out of reach of that maternal rage until the mama bear got tired or distracted and moved on.
Assuming, of course, that he was able to make it to the trees before she overhauled him.
His long, bright red hair flew out behind him as he ran. Some Indians he’d run into in the past had dubbed him Flamehair because of it. He was running so fast now that it seemed like his hair might actually catch on fire because of his speed. Breckinridge knew that was a pretty fanciful notion, but it crossed his mind anyway.
He looked over his shoulder, saw that the bear had gained on him, and tried to move even faster. That wasn’t possible, though. His long legs were already flashing back and forth as swiftly as they could. He covered ground in great leaps and bounds. His salvation, in the form of those pine trees, drew ever nearer.
But so did the bear.
Breckinridge was still carrying his long-barreled. 50-caliber flintlock rifle. He tossed it aside to lighten his load. A few steps later, he pulled the pair of flintlock pistols from behind his belt and threw them aside, as well. Breck hated to discard his weapons, but they were only slowing him down. He could always pick them up later—if he survived.
For a second, when the mama bear charged him, he had thought about shooting her. He’d abandoned that idea pretty quickly for a couple of reasons.
One, he wasn’t sure he could bring down the bear with a single rifle shot, and he didn’t figure the pistols would do much damage to her.
And two, he didn’t want to deprive that cub of its mother. The little varmint might not survive without somebody looking after it, and it wasn’t the cub’s fault that Breckinridge was such an impulsive galoot.
The bear was so close behind him now that the earth seemed to shake under him every time its ponderous paws slapped the ground. He thought he felt the creature’s hot breath searing the back of his neck, but that was probably just his imagination. If the bear was really that close, it would have already laid him open with a swipe of the razor-tipped claws on its paw.
He was only a few yards away from the closest tree now. He saw a likely branch about eight feet from the ground and barely slowed down as he leaped for it.
His hands slapped the rough bark and closed around it with a desperate grip. His weight and momentum swung his body forward. With the athletic grace he had been blessed with since childhood, Breckinridge kicked his legs upward, continuing the swing and twisting in midair so that he was able to hook a knee over the branch, as well.
Below him, the bear roared and reared up on her hind legs to swat at him. Breckinridge felt the claws rake through his hair. That was how close he came to having his head stove in like a dropped melon.
He reached up, grabbed a higher branch, and the powerful muscles in his arms and shoulders bunched and swelled even more as he pulled himself higher in the tree. The pine’s sharp needles jabbed at his face, but he ignored the discomfort. It would be a lot more painful to fall into that bear’s not-so-tender embrace. He got a booted foot on another branch and pushed himself up.
Below, the bear stopped trying to hit him and started climbing instead. The branches were close together, though, and the beast had trouble forcing herself through the dense growth. Breckinridge, even with his broad shoulders, was able to twist and writhe as he climbed, making his ascent easier.
The branches got thinner the higher he went, and so did the trunk. Breckinridge felt the tree start to sway a little from the combined weight of him and the bear. He started to worry that the tree would lean over so far the bear would be able to get at him easier.
For a second, he dropped his right hand to his waist and closed it around the bone handle of the hunting knife with its long, heavy blade. If he had to, he would draw the knife and try to fight off the bear with it. Cold steel against fang and claw. He still didn’t want to hurt the bear, but he would defend himself if it became necessary. His instincts wouldn’t let him do anything else.
He climbed until he was a good thirty or forty feet off the ground. The view from up here was spectacular, he thought briefly, but he was more interested in what was directly below him by about fifteen feet.
The bear had stopped climbing, perhaps sensing that the trunk was getting too thin to support her. With her claws dug into the rough bark, she roared in anger and frustration and shook the tree. Breckinridge had moved in closer to the trunk himself, so he was able to throw his arms around it and hang on for dear life as the pine tree rocked back and forth.
That went on for several minutes, long enough that Breckinridge felt himself getting a little sick to his stomach. Finally, though, the bear stopped shaking the tree. Making grumbling, disgusted sounds almost like a human, the huge, shaggy beast began climbing back down.
Breckinridge clung to the trunk and tried to catch his breath. His pulse was pounding inside his head like a blacksmith’s hammer beating out a horseshoe on a forge.
The bear dropped the last few feet to the ground, then started pacing around the tree. From time to time she looked up and bellowed at Breckinridge. He wondered just how stubborn she was going to be about this. She wasn’t showing any signs of wandering off like he’d hoped, that was for sure.
So for the time being, he was stuck up here, and as it did every time he was trapped in enforced idleness, his mind began to wander. His thoughts went back to the way he had come to the Rocky Mountains in the first place . . .
Chapter Two
Trouble had a way of finding Breckinridge Wallace. It wasn’t that Breck ever went out looking for it . . . well, maybe he did every now and then . . . but for the most part he was a peaceable young man.
True, he had a thirst for adventure, for new places and new experiences. That fiddlefooted nature surely would have led to him leaving his family’s farm near the town of Knoxville, Tennessee, sooner or later. He knew his pa and his four older brothers could take care of the place just fine without his help.
It wasn’t like he’d ever been that diligent about carrying out his chores anyway. As far back as he could remember, every chance he’d gotten he would run off to the woods to hunt and explore and just be out in the world, enjoying it.
Now and again those adventures had landed him in trouble, of course, like the time those four Chickasaw renegades had tried to kill him. That had gained him a bitter enemy in the person of the scarred, vengeful warrior called Tall Tree.
Tall Tree was dead now, but Breckinridge Wallace had other enemies in the world, through no real fault of his own.
Take Richard Aylesworth, the son of a wealthy merchant in Knoxville who had been Breckinridge’s main rival for the affections of the beautiful Maureen Grantham. Of course, as it turned out, the rivalry hadn’t really amounted to much. Maureen had chosen Aylesworth over Breck without really hesitating. Aylesworth was handsome and rich, after all, a polished and sophisticated gentleman, instead of a big, redheaded galoot with none of the rough edges knocked off.
To be fair, though, Maureen hadn’t married Aylesworth until
after Breckinridge was gone from the area, having taken off on the run from a dubious murder charge that, when you came right down to it, was Richard Aylesworth’s fault.
Fleeing the law, away from home for the first time in his life, Breckinridge had fallen in with assorted shady characters, found himself in and out of danger, lost everything he had, fought river pirates and Indians, shot a man in St. Louis who had it coming, scouted for the army, and made a good friend, Lieutenant John Francis Mallory, with whom Breck had made a pact to go west to the Rockies, known by some as the Shining Mountains, and become fur trappers.
Mallory hadn’t lived to see that day arrive, but to honor his friend’s memory Breckinridge had followed through on the plan they had made. After a disastrous trip home, back to Tennessee, Breck had hired on with a party of trappers headed up the Missouri River.
That just led to more trouble, of course, since it had a way of finding Breckinridge. Trust had been betrayed, lives had been lost, old scores had been settled, and four survivors from the party had continued on west.
In addition to Breckinridge, the other men were Morgan Baxter, Roscoe Akins, and Amos Fulbright. Baxter was the son of the man who’d financed the expedition, and as the sons of rich men usually were, at least in Breck’s experience, he was a real jackass starting out.
The hardships and tragedies they had suffered along the way had forced Morgan to grow up a mite, though, and Breck had come to like him.
Akins and Fulbright were typical trappers, rough, stolid men without much education or imagination, but you could count on them when the chips were down, and out here that was perhaps the most valuable quality of all.
After the violence that had shrunk the group to its current level, the four men had pushed on upriver, into the heart of the Rockies, until they found this long valley with its lush meadows and numerous streams.
This was prime beaver country, Breckinridge thought, although from everything he had heard back in St. Louis the beaver weren’t as plentiful anywhere as they had once been. Trappers had been coming out here for more than twenty years, and their efforts had shrunk the beaver population.
Breckinridge and his companions meant to give the business a try anyway, so they had set up camp and gone about running traplines along the creeks in the area. Every day they split up to check those traps, and that was what Breck had been doing when he spotted something that made him curious and wandered away from the creek to look at the little bear cub . . .
And that was how he’d come to find himself up a tree with a couple of thousand pounds of furry rage pacing around below him, waiting to tear him apart.
* * *
The mama bear was nothing if not stubborn. She stalked around and around the tree for what seemed like hours while Breckinridge waited up in the branches. He was starting to get hot and thirsty, but he didn’t have any water with him. He tried not to think about it, but that didn’t always work.
Morgan, Akins, and Fulbright were elsewhere in the valley, probably within a few miles. If he’d been able to fire a shot, they might have heard it and responded to see what was wrong, but his rifle and pistols were lying out there in the meadow. The guns might as well have been back in St. Louis, for all the good they could do him right now.
He had his powder horn, though, along with steel and flint. Maybe he could start a signal fire . . .
And burn the tree down around him. Yeah, that was a fine idea, Breckinridge told himself caustically. He needed to do a better job of thinking things through. If he’d done that in the first place, he would have stayed far away from that bear cub and wouldn’t be in this fix now.
No, he was just going to have to be patient. There wasn’t any other way around it.
Once he had come to that conclusion, he decided that he might as well put the time to good use. He used the rawhide strap from his powder horn to tie his left wrist to a sturdy branch, then wrapped his legs around a lower branch, leaned against the tree trunk, and went to sleep.
Breckinridge had no idea how long he sat there dozing, but after a while he heard shouts that jolted him out of his slumber. He lifted his head and shook it to clear out the cobwebs of sleep. He heard a chuffing and growling below him and knew the bear was still maintaining her vigil.
“Breckinridge! Breck! Where in blazes are you?”
“Hey, Breck! You around here?”
Breckinridge recognized the voices of Morgan Baxter and Roscoe Akins. A moment later Amos Fulbright joined in, calling, “Hey, there! Breck Wallace!”
The three voices came from slightly different directions. Breckinridge figured they had returned to camp from checking the other traplines, then when he didn’t show up, too, they had come to look for him. They knew which direction he had gone when he left that morning, so it wasn’t difficult to follow his trail.
He untied his wrist from the branch and looped the powder horn strap around his neck again. Standing up carefully, he balanced on a branch and parted some of the other growth to look out across the valley.
His keen eyes spotted a man wearing a buckskin jacket and a broad-brimmed hat of brown felt about a quarter of a mile away. That was Morgan Baxter, Breckinridge thought.
He held on to the tree with one hand and cupped the other to his mouth as he shouted, “Morgan! Hey, Morgan! Over here in the trees!”
Morgan’s head lifted, telling Breckinridge that he’d heard the shout. He turned and called to the other two men, then started loping toward the trees, carrying his rifle.
“Morgan, don’t get too close!” Breckinridge yelled. “There’s a bear!”
He kept calling the warning until Morgan slowed down and waved to the others to be careful, as well. Morgan came to a stop about a hundred yards away and cupped his hands to shout, “Breck, where are you?”
The bear’s head swung toward him. Folks said that bears couldn’t see very well, but that they had excellent senses of hearing and smell and relied on them to locate enemies. Breckinridge didn’t know for a fact that any of that was true, but this bear heard Morgan, no doubt about that.
“Stay back!” Breckinridge called again. “Don’t come any closer!”
“Good Lord!” The exclamation came from Fulbright. “That griz has run him up a tree!”
“Breck, are you all right?” Akins called.
The bear’s head swung back and forth as she tried to figure out where all the humans were. The way the voices were coming from different directions seemed to have confused her. That gave Breckinridge an idea.
“Boys, keep yellin’! Whoop it up!”
The three trappers followed Breckinridge’s suggestion. They whooped and hollered and created a racket that echoed back from the hills at the edge of the valley.
At the foot of the tree, the bear lurched one way and then another, growling and occasionally bellowing in frustration. She wasn’t sure which way to turn because she had no way of knowing which of the humans represented the greatest threat to her cub. Her exasperation led her to rise up on two legs, paw viciously at the air, and let loose with a tremendous roar.
Then, muttering almost like a person again, she dropped back to all fours and started toward the creek. Breckinridge figured she had decided her best course of action would be to return to her cub and forget all about these crazy two-legged critters.
Morgan, Akins, and Fulbright waited until the bear was several hundred yards away before they approached the tree Breckinridge had climbed. Breck was still up there in the branches, gazing off into the distance.
“You can come down now,” Morgan called to him. “The bear’s gone.”
“Or are you stuck?” Fulbright asked with a grin on his whiskery face.
“No, I ain’t stuck,” Breckinridge replied with a little annoyance of his own. “I just noticed somethin’. Looks like somebody else heard all the hollerin’ that was goin’ on.”
He lifted a long, muscular arm and pointed at a thin, broken column of smoke rising in the distance.
Smo
ke signals. Indians were talking to each other over yonder . . . and Breckinridge had a pretty good idea what they were talking about.
Keep reading for a special preview of
the next epic from National Bestselling Authors,
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE AND J. A. JOHNSTONE.
THE TRAIL WEST: MONAHAN’S MASSACRE
The accidental gunslinger Dooley Monahan
has quit wandering and settled down to a
farmer’s life. But when the itch for adventure
gets too strong, he packs up and rides west.
Along with his horse, General Grant, and Blue,
a dog who’s too smart for his own good,
Dooley rides for the Black Hills to strike it rich in
the gold fields. But fate has other ideas.
When the trigger-happy Dobbs-Handley gang
holds up the Omaha bank, Dooley is mistaken
for one of the robbers and a price is plastered
on his head. With every lawman in the territory
hot on his trail, Dooley has no choice but to join up
with the murderous outlaws. If the hangman
doesn’t get him, his new friends will, but Dooley
won’t turn back. With Blue and General Grant at his
side, Dooley will make his fortune—come hell,
high water, and everything in between.
Coming this March.
Prologue
Naturally, Dooley Monahan had never cared a whit for Nebraska. After all, when a man is born in Iowa, he frowns upon that great state due west that lay just across the Missouri River. Come to think on it, Dooley never liked Illinois much, either, over to the east. And especially not Missouri, what with its bushwhackers and outlaws such as the James boys and the Younger brothers and that crazy governor named Boggs the state south of Dooley’s home state had once had elected. Had he ever really given Wisconsin or Minnesota much thought, Dooley might have decided that he didn’t care much for those places, either.
The Frontiersman Page 26