He started to reach inside the Drover’s coat for his poke and the Glock appeared in the Chief’s hand again. “Carefully. Very carefully.”
Craig nodded and used his right hand to open the coat just slightly to reach into the inner pocket and take out his leather poke. He opened it and asked, “Ten ounces of gold okay?”
The Chief, surprised once again, put the Glock away and nodded. “I had not expected any prepayment, but if you are willing, I am certainly not going to turn it down. These are still difficult times and many things can happen.”
“That’s the way I approach things,” Craig said, counting out ten of the gleaming gold coins into the Chief’s hand.
“You really like to push it, don’t you?” the Chief asked, when he took a close look at the coins. All but one were the last US gold coins minted before the war. The Buffalo 24 carat one-ounce coin, with a standing buffalo on one side and the profile of a Native American on the other.
The Chief pointed out the portraits on the coins. “Oh,” Craig said, “Those.” He looked up at the Chief and said, “I can give you different coins if you want. I didn’t realize…”
The Chief shook his head, slipping the coins into a pocket, and with an amused smile said, “I wonder how you managed to make it this far from home.”
“My good looks?” asked Craig. He rather liked the Chief.
Chief Joseph laughed. “I think not. There is more substance to you than that, obviously. Now, is there anything I can do for you before you leave our territory?”
The message was plain to Craig. He was expected to leave, and leave soon. “Well… If it is possible, I’d like to do some trading. I came out here looking for buffalo and I’d like to be able to take some product back with me, if that is possible.”
“I suppose that could be arranged. Follow us back to town. There is a trading post there that most of us use as an exchange point.”
Craig opened the door and walked over to where Clyde was tied to the back of a stake bed flatbed Dodge truck. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the Chief apparently laying down the law to the man that had punched Craig. The men that had ridden horses to the roadblock climbed aboard their horses, as did Craig.
They all waited for the few vehicles to get turned around and headed up the road before they trailed along behind at a steady pace. The vehicles were long gone. Craig started up a conversation and was already making trade deals when they rode into the small town that was the base camp for Chief Joseph and his people.
Craig made his trades, spent the night in the motel that the Chief owned, forking over a bit of silver for the privilege, and left early the next morning. After much thought, Craig decided against going further west. Instead he turned northeast with the intention of picking up I-90 and going east to Lake Michigan to see what he might be able to turn up in profitable trade agreements.
The weather was a nagging worry and he kept a sharp eye out for a good situation where he could lay over in relative comfort for the winter, working for his keep, as he had in the past. Craig was a very good judge of the post-apocalyptic world weather normally. But he badly misjudged the coming of this particular winter.
He said more than one prayer of thanks for being where he was when the first big snowstorm caught him out in the open. Fortunately he had been taking it easy a couple of days for the very reason that he was able to stay where he was when the blizzard started. All the things the valley offered.
He’d found a large, currently uninhabited valley in the Black Hills west of Rapid City, South Dakota. The valley floor was covered with waist high wild grass. Craig wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but it looked like oats growing wild with the grass. True or not, the horses loved the just cured grasses.
There was a small stream right down the middle of the valley, paralleling an old, mostly overgrown, gravel road leading somewhere up into the higher hills. There was one copse of trees near the road and the stream, and Craig set up camp in a tiny clearing inside the copse.
He cut down a few saplings and made a pair of large lean-tos facing each other, about three and a half feet apart. Craig dug a small fire pit between the lean-tos. The area between them was roofed over with more saplings, small limbs, and thatched grasses, high enough up to allow the smoke to escape without any going into the lean-tos. He began cutting wood for a fire that wouldn’t go out for months.
Since he was going to be stuck there for the winter anyway, Craig didn’t beat himself up very much for taking the two weeks he had when he killed a large grizzly bear out getting that last little bit food in its belly to hold it over the winter in hibernation.
Craig had just hit the edge of the Black Hills range when he spotted a small herd of antelope. He pulled the Marlin out of the scabbard, ground hitched Clyde and began stalking the antelope. It took him three hours to ease up on them. They just went over the ridge.
Afraid he’d lose the chance; Craig ran the rest of the way up to the top of the ridge and started to take a shot at the nearest antelope. They were about to disappear into a stand of trees. Craig got ready to fire at a range of just under two-hundred yards by his estimation. When he fired, the antelope dropped like a rock and the other antelope began to run in a panic.
Craig was amazed that they were running toward him. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Craig dropped another at close range as it ran almost up to him. The rest of the antelope sped past. Craig wouldn’t take another. Two were enough.
Then he saw why the antelope had run toward him and not down the slope away from him. An extremely large, and extremely disturbed, grizzly was running at full speed after the antelope, having started his charge just as Craig had shot the first time. But when it saw Craig standing there, it made the slight change in course and headed for Craig.
There was no tree to climb close, and there was no way he could outrun the grizzly. The grizzly slowed some, due to the distance it was traveling at a run, but showed no signs of stopping. Craig waited, rather nervously, for the bear to get a little closer, and then began firing the Marlin as quickly as he could work the lever.
His prayer to heaven for it not to hurt too much was passing his lips when the still running bear dropped, its nose plowing to a stop a few feet from Craig. Craig suddenly sat down. His legs wouldn’t support him. It took some little time for him to recover and get up. He checked the bear carefully. It was definitely dead. So were the two antelope. Craig walked back and got the horses, finally his normal calm self.
He’d never intended to have that much meat at one time, but Craig wasn’t one to waste anything. Times had been tough right after the war and the lessons learned stayed with him. So Craig took the time to skin out and butcher all three animals. He brain tanned the hides, and cut up all the meat.
There was no way he could carry the hides and all that meat, the way it was. He was packing a fair load as it was. So more time was taken to preserve all the meat he could. The antelope, both of them, were mostly converted into jerky on racks he built in place, with a slow fire under them.
He built a smoke house and smoked most of the bear, trimming out the massive amount of fat and rendering it for future use. It all went into the cleaned out intestines. It took more time than it normally would using only the iron skillet and Dutch oven that Craig carried.
As it was, he had to leave some of the less desirable cuts of meat of all three animals, and travel much slower than usual, because of the heavy loads that the horses were carrying. Craig stopped more often, as well, traveling only a few hours a day. Craig quit switching between Clyde and Mule Ears as Mule Ears was carrying a good pack load on the saddle.
Between the delays, and the actual misjudging, Craig found himself snowed in for the winter, in about as good of shape as one could ask to be in such a situation. The few fresh potatoes, carrots, and onions he had with him didn’t last all that long, despite rationing himself harshly. The dried fruit lasted longer, as he rationed that even more harshly.
Fortunatel
y he did have the meat from the antelope and the bear, along with all the buffalo jerky, pemmican, and pinole he’d traded for as future trade goods.
The mostly cured bear skin went down on the bedroll tarp under one of the lean-tos, with the buffalo robe used for extra cover when Craig slept, using his regular bedroll wool blanket on top of the bear skin.
The two antelope skins were hung from either end of the roof between the two lean-tos. With them in place, and the thatching of the lean-tos covered with a thick layer of leaves, and then snow on top of that, Craig was as snug as a bug in a rug.
Besides the corral he made inside the copse so the horses had some protection, he built a couple of wind walls to cut the bitter wind even more. He took them out just about every day for them to graze on the grasses of the valley outside the copse and to water them and get water for himself.
As the snow accumulated, the horses had to paw some to get to the dried grasses, but they seemed well able to do it and get more than enough to eat. They actually gained weight during the winter. Their coats were long and shaggy. Between that and the cover the wind breaks and the copse provided, they weathered the winter without suffering.
The small stream ran well into the winter, but finally froze over. Craig was able to chop a hole in the ice to get to the small amount of water still flowing for the horses to drink and for him to fill his several canteens when needed.
Craig was just getting ready to shed the Drover’s coat and climb into the bed for the night, one very cold night in late January, if his calendar keeping was accurate, when the horses started acting up.
The horses were seasoned travelers and caused Craig few problems. If they were disturbed, there was a good reason. Craig grabbed his wind up flashlight, gave the crank a few turns and then picked up the Marlin and stepped out into the dark, to see what was going on.
The corral was just a few steps from the lean-tos and the horses moved toward the man and the light, comfortable with both. Craig went one way around the corral. The horses stayed where they were, near to the lean-tos, still riled up.
Craig suddenly saw why the horses were agitated. Light was reflecting from animal eyes several feet away, in the trees. At first, Craig thought it was a wolf, but suddenly doubted there would be just one. He was easing the Marlin up into position when the animal charged him. Craig dropped the flashlight; snap fired the Marlin, worked the lever and fired again.
But the cougar was on him. The animal raked Craig with a paw as it knocked him down and kept going. Scrambling to his feet, Craig worked the action of the Marlin again, squatted down cautiously and picked up the flashlight. He followed the tracks of the cougar out of the copse and into the valley on the side toward the closest hill.
Craig didn’t go far. The cougar was lying on its side, breathing heavily, unable to move. Pulling the derringer from its belt buckle holster, Craig put the animal out of its misery with a shot in the back of the neck.
Deciding to deal with the carcass the next day, Craig turned around and headed back into the copse to his camp to calm the horses some more. He saw the blood trail of the big cat. Both rounds from the Marlin had hit it. The blood was obvious. It was right in the line of the cougar’s tracks.
But Craig saw the small spots of blood in his track. “Why is there…” Craig’s voice faded away and he looked down at his chest. His shirt was ripped in three parallel lines. Blood was dripping from two of the tears. Craig said a bad word and ducked into his lean-to shrugging out of the Drover’s coat and putting it down by the Marlin he set handy. He took off the gun belt and set it by the Marlin.
Starting to feel the pain, Craig eased the shirt off and looked at his chest in the light from the windup flashlight. There were two jagged rips in the skin in the middle of his chest, with one scratch parallel to the deeper wounds. Craig washed the wounds with soap and hot water, and then fished a bottle of whiskey out of one of the panniers.
Holding the cuts open wide, Craig poured some of the whiskey into each one, gritting his teeth at the intense pain. The whiskey hurt far worse than the washing had, but Craig was afraid not to do it. An infection could kill him. His first-aid kit was little more than Band-Aids that wouldn’t stick anymore.
The shirt he’d been wearing he’d put on just that morning and was still clean. Craig cut it up with the scissors on his Swiss Army Knife, and made a bandage and wrappings out of it. Craig took a little nip of the whiskey and put the bottle away. He was already getting stiff.
Craig stretched out gingerly on the open blanket and pulled the other half up and over him. He pulled the buffalo robe over himself and finally fell asleep a few minutes later.
He didn’t awaken until late the next morning. Stiff and sore, Craig put on his other shirt and then the gun belt. He shrugged into the Drover’s coat, picked up the Marlin and went outside to take care of the horses. They all seemed fine, except for being somewhat eager to get to water and some feed.
While they fed, Craig went back through the copse and walked over to the dead cougar. Meat was meat, and a pelt was valuable. Despite the pain and awkwardness, and the fact that the big cat had frozen solid during the night, Craig clenched his teeth, pulled out the Natchez, and began to skin and then butcher the cougar.
He was weak and sick to his stomach when the task was complete. He couldn’t do much with the pelt with it this cold, so he stretched it out and hung it from a tree, to be dealt with in the spring when he could work with the pelt.
Craig took it easy for the next two months, the only strenuous thing he did being the cutting of more wood for the fire. With plenty of meat available, now including the cougar, he ate all the protein he could get down, to help the healing process. With the few vegetables and fruit long gone, Craig harvested a bit of the grain that was growing with the natural grasses and added a bit of carbohydrate and roughage to his diet.
With a foot of snow still on the ground in the valley, and the horses feeling sassy, a nearly healed Craig packed up and saddled up in mid-March and headed east, to pick up I-90 east of a demolished Rapid City.
He spent an excessive amount of silver the first place he found that had fresh vegetables and dried fruit left from the winter. Craig ate himself sick one day, came to his senses, and left the little town well fed, and a bit poorer, but with a goodly supply of root vegetables and a small amount of dried fruit, obtained by trade and not coin. He still had much of the buffalo, having eaten the less well preserved antelope, bear, and cougar, though he did keep some of the antelope jerky and smoked bear meat, for variety in his diet.
There was still the occasional snow as he traveled easy, staying mostly on I-90. He traded for the sake of trading, and keeping his food supply up, in the small towns across South Dakota. Craig discovered many totally abandoned towns. The fallout had been heavy in the area from the nuclear attacks on the missile silos in Montana.
Many of the survivors, located here and there all across western and central South Dakota had to band together to make life possible and moved to the nearest small town that had a decent surviving population.
From what Craig was hearing, there hadn’t been as much banditry in the northern states as he’d run into down south. Craig kept traveling east, hooking up with one group of people migrating over to Lake Michigan to look for a better life on the lake shore.
None of the people were well equipped or very experienced in the kind of travel they were doing. Craig found it hard to believe that several of them had planned to use vehicles, diesel admittedly, to go the whole way, refueling as they went.
Unlike I-70 much further south, there wasn’t the kind of traffic that had extra fuel available, in amounts that were adequate for the group. Craig gave a teenager some extra provisions for him to ride Mule Ears and lead the pack horses for him while he roamed north and south of the highway, looking for game and fuel.
He found plenty of game to supplement the rations the group had, but very little fuel. He was able to arrange for the purchase of som
e extra horses and a couple of trailers for those with the vehicles that they could no longer keep supplied with diesel.
Craig came to the conclusion, based on the attacks he’d suffered by the grizzly and cougar, and the number and kind of animals he was seeing, that since the war, due to the severe winters, and lack of human population in the area, that animals, both predator and prey, had multiplied and moved southward.
While there might not have been much banditry in the years since the war, the slow, inexperienced wagon train was too good of a target to be let go by someone with the least bit of larceny in his heart.
Craig was able to save the members of the wagon train, mostly relatives of each other, from the scams and hustlers that tried to take advantage of them. He started doing all the buying and trading for the group so they wouldn’t lose everything they had.
Aside from the larceny, the group was openly attacked twice. A small number of the group had firearms and made a heroic attempt to protect themselves and the group, but it was Craig’s skill and the firepower from the M14E2 and Calico that saved the day, both times.
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