Battle of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  Spits of snow blew across a ridge to the northwest, flakes falling gently, almost soundlessly, around him. He inspected the horses; two pack animals, Sally’s chestnut mare, and a bay and white Palouse three-year-old, sired by Horse, that he was breaking to mountain trails so it would be bridle-wise climbing narrow ledges, where surefootedness counted. When he was satisfied they were in good flesh and warm inside the shelter, he turned away from the pole corral to fetch pails of water from the slender stream at the foot of the slope where the cabin sat.

  Carrying wooden buckets down to the creek, he was again reminded of Puma. This cabin and valley, the mountains, were full of old memories, and in some strange way it wasn’t painful to remember them this morning. A part of him was comforted by those recollections of bygone days. The moments of sadness he felt when they first arrived here weren’t with him now. He could remember Puma without feeling lonely for his company.

  He came to the stream, brightened by a slow sunrise above thick storm clouds moving across the valley, his boots crunching softly in a few inches of newly fallen snow. There was a crispness to the air he didn’t notice as often down at the ranch, a part of the experience in higher country, where most of his life he had felt at home. What had changed his feelings, his love for the high lonesome, was Sally. His whole life had changed because of her, and he’d never been so happy, so content. As he knelt beside the stream, he vowed to keep the promise he had made her last night, to steer clear of trouble whenever he could… not because he had any fear of it, of bad men. But because he loved her.

  A small brook trout darted away from his shadow, moving downstream. Crystal clear water gurgled over multicolored rocks in the streambed, a sound so peaceful he couldn’t help listening to it before he dipped his buckets full. To his right was a deep pool where, as the creek froze over, he would be chopping through ice to get their water, or using melted snow should temperatures drop and remain low for long periods of time.

  Hoisting his buckets, Smoke thought about how different this was from his usual existence, or his more violent past. He gave a grin when he considered it, laughing at himself. His biggest worry now was chopping through ice, instead of chopping off the heads of his enemies. This was truly going to be a winter of contentment with Sally, not his usual fare of seemingly endless ranch work, always vigilant for the possibility of the return of old enemies, worrying about Sally while he was away.

  When he entered the warm cabin, he found Sally building up a breakfast fire in the fireplace. Puma had installed two swinging iron cooking hooks, holding cast-iron cooking pots, that could be moved over the flames. A rusted iron frame for a skillet or a coffeepot sat to one side of the fire.

  She smiled at him as he was closing the cabin door. “This is so nice,” she said, adding split wood to a pile of glowing coals. “I thought I might miss my wood-stove, but I was wrong.”

  Smoke placed the buckets near the fireplace and took her in his arms. “The only thing I would have missed would’ve been you, if you hadn’t come with me,” he said gently.

  “Nonsense,” she replied, pretending to sound serious. “You would have found Huggie and Del. The three of you would have been so busy swapping yarns you wouldn’t have noticed I wasn’t there. I know why you wanted to come up here this winter. You get this yearning look in your eye when you’ve been away from your mountain men friends too long.”

  “That isn’t true,” he protested. “I’d much rather be with you.”

  She rested her cheek against his chest “I believe that too, and I’ve never doubted you loved me, but it’s something else that brings you up here. You want to keep in touch with your past every now and then. I understand, darling. I know it’s not just Huggie and Del and some of the others. It’s this place, these mountains and valleys, the quiet, and the beauty of it drawing you back. It’s okay. I love this high country as much as you do, in my own way. You don’t have to make excuses.”

  “It wasn’t an excuse,” he mumbled near her ear. “Seems we never get any time alone.”

  “We’re making up for that now,” she whispered, tightening her embrace around his chest. “But I want you to know I will understand when you go off to look for your friends.”

  Once again, Sally was reading him like a book. He’d been thinking about Del and Huggie for a couple of days without any mention of it. “Maybe after we get things squared away around here we’ll go looking for Del. He’ll get word to Huggie and a few of the others… like Grizzly Cole and ol’ Happy Jack Cobb, if any of them are still around, or still alive.”

  Sally giggled, drawing away to look at him. “Who is Happy Jack Cobb? I’ve never heard you mention that name before. And why is he happy?”

  “That’s just it,” Smoke told her. “Happy Jack would have to be close to sixty now, an’ nobody can recollect ever seeing him smile in the last forty-odd years. Puma named him that, best I remember. He said Jack Cobb wouldn’t crack a smile if he was to discover the mother lode up here some day. He wears this frown all the time, like he’s mad at somethin’, only he isn’t. It’s just his natural expression.”

  She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “I’m happy,” she said while searching his face. “I hope you are too.”

  He swallowed when a strange dryness occurred in his throat. “I’ve never been happier in my life, and that’s on account of you being with me.”

  They were Shoshoni by the way they wore their hair and their dress, wrapped in buffalo robes, guiding half-starved ponies into the far end of the narrow valley, riding into the brunt of winds accompanying the snowstorm. He pointed them out to Sally as she was going inside with an armload of green limbs from a pine tree for smoking trout he’d caught just before noon. “Appears they’re Shoshoni and they’re way off their range, this far south. Fetch me my rifle, just in case these boys are renegades.” It had been hard to tell, due to increasing snowfall, until they came out of the trees, a good sign in Smoke’s experience.

  Shoshoni warriors looking for a fight would have stayed hidden until they were very close to the cabin. “They smelled our smoke, being downwind.”

  “I see six of them,” Sally said, her voice tight, changing pitch after she counted the warriors. “I thought all the Indian troubles were over up here.”

  “The Utes are gone. Shoshoni range north of here by more’n a hundred miles in Wyoming Territory, This isn’t their usual hunting ground.”

  “I’ll get your rifle. Maybe they’re only looking for food and a place to get out of this storm.”

  “Maybe,” Smoke agreed, thinking otherwise. There was no sense in worrying Sally until he found out what the Indians were up to. He put down the snowshoe he was repairing, watching the Indians ride toward him, wondering why they were so far south of their ancestral homeland.

  Sally came out with his .44 Winchester and a box of shells, like she too expected the worst. She gave him the rifle and cartridges, shading her eyes from the snowfall with her hand.

  “Those calico ponies look mighty hungry,” he said, talking to himself more than for Sally’s benefit. “Could be times have been hard up north. Buffalo hunters have damn near wiped out the big herds.”

  “Perhaps all they want is food. We have enough venison to give them—a hindquarter off that deer you shot. The meat’s still good. I can roast it, if that’s the reason they’re here. Or we can give them all of it. You can go hunting again when this storm breaks.”

  “We’ll give ’em a chance to explain,” Smoke said, working a shell into the firing chamber, pocketing the extra shells. “You go back inside until I find out. It’s real clear they’re headed straight for the cabin.”

  Sally backed away, turning for the door. “I hope it’s only food they want,” she said again, her voice almost lost on a gust of howling winter wind.

  Six mounted warriors crossed the stream and now Smoke was certain they weren’t looking for trouble. Their bows and arrows and ancient muskets were tied to their ponies or balanced across their ho
rses’ withers in a manner that was clearly not meant as a threat.

  The leader halted his black and white pinto twenty yards from Smoke and gave the sign for peace, and true words, closing his fist over his heart. Smoke returned the sign, then he held one palm open, inviting the Shoshoni to speak.

  The Indian began a guttural string of words, a language not much different than the Ute tongue, asking if Smoke understood him.

  Smoke replied, “Nie habbe,” meaning he spoke their tongue and understood.

  The Shoshoni began a lengthy explanation of a tragic tale, how his people were starving because of white buffalo hunters on the prairies, leaving meat to rot in the sun this summer, only killing buffalo for their hides. Shoshoni children and older members of the tribe were dying of starvation. A dry spring and summer left little grazing for deer, elk, and antelope, and most of the wild game had drifted south into lands once controlled by the Utes.

  “We have deer meat we can give you,” Smoke told him in words he hadn’t used for years. “You are welcome to make camp here until the snow ends.”

  “We would be grateful for the meat,” the Indian said, his head and face partially hidden by the hood of his buffalo robe. “We have very little gunpowder and shot. Our arrows have been cursed by the Great Spirit and they do not find their mark on this hunt.”

  “I will have my wife cook the deer if you want.”

  The warrior shook his head “We must take it back to our village for the hungry children.”

  Smoke gave the sign for agreement, a twist of his right wrist with two fingers extended close together. He turned and walked to the dogrun between the cabin’s two rooms, where the carcass of the deer hung from a length of rawhide.

  Resting his rifle against a cabin wall, he cut down the deer and carried it out to the Indians. Another Shoshoni jumped off his pony to take it, cradling almost a hundred pounds of raw meat and bones in his arms.

  The Shoshoni leader spoke, his voice softer to convey his gratitude. “You will be welcome in our village, White Giver of Meat. We leave you as friends in peace.”

  “Suvate,” Smoke replied, a single word to say the talk had ended and all was well, then he added a few clipped words.

  With the deer slung over a pony’s rump, the six Shoshoni reined their ponies away from the cabin, riding north up a very steep ridge that would take them into the worst of the winds and snow.

  “Tough people,” Smoke said under his breath, hearing Sally come out as the Indians rode off.

  Sally came over to stand beside him, watching the buffalo-robed men disappear into a veil of snow-flakes. “Food was all they wanted,” she said. “I’m glad you gave it to them. We have more than enough for ourselves.”

  “Their leader told me his people were starving up in Wyoming country… that white buffalo hunters had killed off most of the herds and Shoshoni children were dying of hunger.”

  “We’ve both seen what buffalo hunters can do. It’s a shame to see all that meat wasted,” Sally said, “especially when Indian children are dying from starvation.”

  Smoke picked up the snowshoe, thinking out loud, “Our government doesn’t seem to mind breaking its word to a few Indians,” he replied to her remark. “Never had much use for politicians or the army in the first place. The more I hear about what they’re doin’ to most plains tribes, the less use I have for ’em.”

  Sally took his arm. “We’ve done all we can for them now. You can’t change the world, Smoke. The government in Washington is going to continue its policy toward the Indians no matter how we feel about it.”

  He saw the Shoshoni as they crossed the high ridge in one brief letup in the storm. “I know you’re right, Sally. I can’t change the world, maybe, but when I see a wrong bein’ committed it makes me wish I’d started shooting politicians and bureaucrats a long time ago. I’ve killed my share of men who carried guns, but there’s times when it seems to make more sense to kill the bastards who run this country.”

  “I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to talk about killing at all this winter.”

  Smoke squeezed her delicate hand. “We won’t. If people will just leave us the hell alone.”

  “Maybe they will,” she said hopefully. “Raising good cattle should be a peaceful enterprise. For so many years now I’ve been hoping your past would be forgotten, so we could get on with our lives together, as ranchers. You’re not a gunfighter anymore, and I hope the word spreads.“

  He turned her toward the cabin, ducking his head into the wind and snow. Sally would never understand that for some men a gunfighter’s reputation followed them all the way to the grave, in spite of their best intentions to change.

  He had asked the Shoshoni to tell solitary white mountain men they encountered where he was, what part of the Rockies he was in, and that his name meant smoke in Shoshoni, hoping Del or Huggie or Griz would come down when one of them learned he was camped in Puma’s summer cabin near the White River. Any one of his old friends would know who was staying here. Maybe when this storm let up, he and Sally would have some welcome company.

  Eleven

  He was wearing his old deerskin leggings, bloodstained in places from previous battles, one clear cold morning after the storm moved south, taking aim at a fat young doe to replenish their fresh meat supply. They had plenty of jerky and smoked fish, but every so often Smoke got a hankering for venison, the tender backstrap fried in a skillet or slow-roasted on a spit above a bed of coals. In a clearing half a mile from the cabin, he watched the doe paw through snow to find grass, unaware of his presence entirely. Sighting down his Winchester, he aimed for the deer’s heart, hoping to make it a quick kill, when something to the east alerted the doe to danger, a distant noise or a scent on the wind. She bounded off into the ponderosa forest, leaving Smoke without a clear shot.

  “Damn,” he whispered, looking east to where the deer had sensed a threat seconds earlier.

  Out of old habit, he didn’t look at anything in particular, the way Preacher had taught him, waiting for something to move on a snowy mountainside dotted with pines and leafless aspen. Tiny hairs prickled on the back of his neck… something, or someone, was up there. Was someone watching him, he wondered, standing in the shadow of a pine, motionless, unwilling to make the first move, becoming a target, hunted rather than a hunter if the danger frightening the deer had two legs. Black bears and much larger grizzlies would be in hibernation by now. Mountain lions hunted all winter, and it could be a big cat up there somewhere, one of the most difficult wild animals to kill because it rarely came close to the smell of men.

  He studied the slope, frosty breath curling away from his nostrils in below-freezing cold. Nothing moved.

  “If it’s a man, he’s a careful son of a bitch,” Smoke said softly. It could be more Shoshoni hunters, he guessed, another party ranging far to the south looking for meat. With that looming as a possibility he decided to creep backward and make for the cabin to make sure of Sally’s safety. While she was more than capable of taking care of herself in most any situation, he couldn’t let her face hungry Shoshoni alone. Sally was a hell of a shot with a pistol or a rifle, and she had his Spencer, along with one of his ivory-handled Colts.

  When nothing showed itself on the mountain, he backed away to the shadow of another pine and inched from tree trunk to tree trunk on the balls of his feet, heading for the cabin by a route through stands of pine… longer, but far safer if he was being watched from the eastern slope, a sensation that lingered as he made his way among dense trees. He was certain now that someone was up there, a sixth sense telling him this was no mountain lion or late-feeding bear.

  He was close to the cabin, less than a quarter mile, when he heard a voice that sent him ducking behind a ponderosa trunk.

  “You ain’t near as cautious as you used to be, Smoke!” It came from a snow-covered ledge two hundred yards away, a shout. “If I’d took the notion, I coulda dropped you a couple of times. I ain’t sayin’ you ain’t still one of the b
est, but that easy life yer livin’ close to town has made you careless!”

  He grinned, recognizing the voice now, swinging away from the tree to stand in plain sight, his rifle barrel lowered near the ground. “Show yourself, Del! You’ve got me cold! I’m a city slicker now!”

  A shaggy mane of black hair peered above the ridge, with a beard to match. The man grinned a toothless grin and stood up with a long-barrel Sharps balanced in one hand. “It’s damn sure good to see you, Smoke! Been a hell of a long time!”

  Del Rovare began a gradual descent off the ledge, his odd bowlegged gait almost a swagger. He was a bull-like man who had learned to move his tremendous bulk across the mountains without making a sound, somehow. His moccasined feet barely made any noise through difficult snowdrifts where most men would have had trouble remaining quiet. Part French, he spoke Ute and Lakota and Shoshoni fluently. His fierce appearance often made outsiders fear him, when in fact he was most often a gentle giant who avoided difficulties whenever he could. But when he was challenged by man or beast, including rogue grizzly females protecting their cubs, he could be deadly, dangerous with a gun, a knife, or his bare hands.