The Saga of Harlan Waugh (The Mountain Men)

by Terry Grosz

  Leaving the two men where they had fallen, Big Eagle and Harlan quietly began the long walk back to the camp of Bosco de Gamma. They hoped to ambush the remaining two killers and give them the same treatment rendered to their partners. In fact, Harlan had some special treatment for Bosco de Gamma when the time came. Treatment that would even make God turn away...

  Zipppp went an arrow by Harlan’s head, so close that he felt the sting of the wind from the shaft! Zippp-zippp-zippp went three more arrows by his body as Harlan quickly stepped behind a large tree for protection. An Indian exposed himself from behind another tree before him, and Harlan killed him with a quick shot from his Hawken.

  "Hey-yeh-yeh-yeh ” yelled two more Indians as they charged Harlan’s position with tomahawks upraised now that they knew he had fired his one and only shot from his rifle.

  Pow went Harlan’s pistol as he shot the closest charging Indian in the face. Then he grabbed his own tomahawk from his sash and threw it at the next man rushing at him. That throw hit the man squarely in the mouth in a splash of blood and flying broken teeth.

  He careened into the tree partially protecting Harlan in the shock of the impact. Turning in agony, he met Harlan’s knife plunged deeply into his guts, splashing blood over the tree bark and Harlan’s arm. A fourth Indian, seeing the quick demise of his companions, took off running through the trees in an attempt to escape.

  Harlan, now in a killing haze, took off after him with his remaining unfired pistol in one hand and his knife in the other. Closing fast, Harlan fired one shot at the fleeing Indian, hitting him low in the leg and effectively slowing him down. Harlan was on him in a flash, cutting his throat with one swipe of his knife. When he did, the impact of the two bodies hitting each other spun both to the ground. Jumping up, Harlan saw that his adversary was dying as he gurgled his last through a set of wide-open and surprised eyes.

  Then, remembering Big Eagle and wondering where he had gone during the fight, Harlan ran back to where the attack had started. Sitting on the ground with his back against a tree was Big Eagle. Driven deeply into his guts just below his breastbone was the shaft of an arrow!

  “No!” screamed Harlan as he reached his son’s side.

  Their eyes met, and at that moment both realized that they would be separated for only a short time before they met once again on the Happy Hunting Grounds. Gathering up his son in his arms, Harlan cried like a baby as he felt the life go out of Big Eagle with just a last quiet gasp, a shudder, and no words. The surprise and agony in the dying man’s eyes said it all.

  It was an hour before Harlan let go of Big Eagle, finally letting him slip gently to the ground. Harlan’s very heart and soul left with the loss of life from Big Eagle, the last of his frontier family.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Final Trip

  The Paiutes had the last say, Harlan thought bitterly as he surveyed the battleground around him. Even though the four of them died, they avenged their two brothers killed on the Duchesne River by killing Big Eagle. Not only that, they ruined any chances of surprise in catching and killing Bosco de Gamma with all the gunfire.

  Shaking his head in disgust, he took two buffalo robes from the trappers’ camp and buried Big Eagle high in a large oak tree on the hillside. As he stood there looking up, the tears flowed down his cheeks and onto his buckskin shirt, leaving dark brown stains. God, how he hurt inside! He had lost everything dear to him, once again he stood alone in a land that was seemingly uncaring.

  Those were the last tears he ever shed. With a hardened heart, he turned away from Big Eagle’s burial site and walked back to his horses. I still have some unfinished business to attend to.

  Returning to the trappers’ campsite with his horses and mules in tow, he let the horses belonging to those whom he had pursued for so long loose from the corral so they could survive on their own. Then he turned to the trail leading away from the battle site to the one of the last two remaining killers. He was now on a hunt with a determination that was not of this world.

  High up on a ridge, Bosco de Gamma, upon hearing the shooting, had started back to help Nance and Puzier. But the shooting was over so quickly that he stopped so he could watch his campsite from afar until events could untangle themselves and become clearer.

  There on his trail far below was the lonely figure of one man, and from the looks of the intensity of his cold-tracking, it had to be none other than Harlan Waugh.

  “What we gonna do, boss?” whined a nervous Pete Sites. “That bastard is gonna dog us until the end of time unless we kill him.”

  “That is just what we are going to do,” said Bosco de Gamma with narrowed, hate-filled eyes.

  “How we gonna do it, boss?” Sites asked with fear still in his eyes and in the sound of his voice. “He has killed all our pards, and now he is on our track. Is there anything that will stop him afore he stops us?”

  “Since he is cold-tracking our trail, we will go up into those rocks yonder, and when he gets within range of our rifles, we will ambush and kill him. When that is done, I will tear out his heart and eat it like I ate the hearts from those damn Comanches back on the Arkansas who tried to kill me so long ago!” said Bosco de Gamma with a killing look in his eyes.

  Strangely, it was the same look as that in Harlan’s eyes at that very moment as he closely followed three sets of tracks.

  The two trappers being pursued took their horses to the high ground and tied them off in the trees. Walking back down the mountain to a rocky point, the two men took up ambush positions and waited for the ever-patient, hard-tracking Harlan Waugh to walk into their trap.

  Harlan, lost in his immense grief and not paying attention to the lay of the land around him as he should have, felt Martha pulling back hard on the reins. Looking back, he could see that she was looking up the mountain as she usually did when she spotted a grizzly.

  Turning, Harlan looked hard in that direction but did not see any danger. Discounting Martha’s warning, he continued following the fresh, clear set of tracks of two riders and a pack animal. He knew he had to continue his hard-on- their-heels pursuit, or they would get away once again. The last time Bosco de Gamma had escaped, it had cost him two of his sons. It would not happen again, he resolved bitterly.

  However, Martha continued balking and pulling until Harlan got pissed and started to jerk her lead rope. Then it dawned on him: Martha didn’t like Indians. Recalling that he had just been ambushed by Indians and suspecting more of the same, Harlan quickly got cautious as he moved along the trail of fresh horse tracks. All of a sudden, as if on a whim, he moved his horses and mules into the brush of a deep covering draw with a rocky overhang and out of sight of any prying eyes.

  Boom went Harlan’s Hawken, and a one-ounce slug of lead bounced off the rock just underneath Pete Site’s prone body as he overlooked the trail below. The glancing impact of the heavy lead slug exploded his guts over the rocky face on which he lay. The impact of the big slug was so great that he rolled down the rock face and dropped eighty feet onto the talus slope below, then rolled down into a brushy draw. Pete was dead before he had hit the ground.

  As he calmly reloaded the Hawken, Harlan got a deadly grin. His dad had taught him to shoot low on a rock on which a crop-eating varmint like a woodchuck was lying so that the slug hitting the rock would mushroom tremendously. Then it would ricochet upward into the body of the varmint, blowing the guts clear out of the critter!

  From the way the killer lying in ambush sailed off the rocky ledge, Dad’s theory has borne fruit once again, Harlan thought with a smile.

  In the same instant, Bosco de Gamma looked wildly around for the white puff of smoke from the rifle that had just been fired. Seeing it high on the ridge above where he also lay in ambush and knowing he was in a poor defensive position, Bosco de Gamma scrambled to jump up for the run to his horses.

  Boom went the reserve Hawken as the big slug whistled down, finding Bosco de Gamma’s thighbone. The soft, speeding lead bullet s
hattered the thighbone into numerous pieces in a microsecond. Crashing back down on the rock face and screaming in pain, Bosco de Gamma tried to roll out of the way of what he knew was another shot to come.

  However, he was unable to roll into cover because of the pain of the exposed bone, which was now sticking into a crevasse of the rock on which he lay. Boom went another shot from high above, and this time the bullet struck the rock at the base of Bosco de Gamma’s left arm, shattering it instantly at the elbow.

  Screaming in even more pain, he dropped his rifle, which clattered off his rocky perch into the canyon below. Still trying to move out of the line of fire, Bosco de Gamma heard another report from a rifle just as another heavy lead slug blew his other leg almost off at the knee. With that, he passed out in pain from shock and loss of blood.

  When he came to, he saw Harlan quietly standing over him. Even in his pain, Bosco de Gamma used his one good hand to grope for a weapon. He discovered that he had been disarmed except for his sheath knife.

  “Harlan, you bastard, finish me off,” mumbled Bosco de Gamma in utter pain.

  “Not before I let you know you killed my wife, daughter, granddaughter, and their unborn children in that raid on the Crow village with your Gros Ventre buddies last winter. You also back-shot my two sons at the last rendezvous while they were butchering a buffalo. And now you and Sites just tried to ambush and kill me. I want you to know, me and my boys killed everyone involved in that raid with the exception of you. Now,” Harlan said coldly, “it is your turn.”

  Harlan took Bosco de Gamma’s knife out of its sheath and dropped it onto his chest, where it could be reached with his remaining good hand. “When you are ready, you now have the tool to kill yourself,” he said.

  Turning, he walked off the rocks and headed back down to his horses and mules, which were tied below. As he rode off, he could hear Bosco de Gamma screaming for him to come back and kill him.

  The wolves, grizzly bears, or cold of the night will do that in time, thought Harlan as he continued riding back down the trail. But whatever way you die, there is always your knife.

  The screaming continued until Harlan rode out of sight and sound.

  ***

  Harlan Waugh was never heard from or seen again. He eventually joined the soil, as had so many mountain men before him—alone and somewhere in the mountains he loved.

  Jim Bridger took Harlan’s credit the next year once he figured the mountain man was lost to the ages and used it to build Fort Bridger. The crude trading post along the Oregon Trail was used for several years by the wagon trains of Argonauts heading west to make a better life on many trails blazed by the mountain men. With that and a few more short years, the glorious days of the mountain men faded into the soil from whence all of us came.

  “Wagh!”

  THE END

  Now look for Crossed Arrows, also by Terry Grosz…

  In 1829, Jacob and Martin left Kentucky to become Mountain Men, trappers of the Rocky Mountains. The rugged mountains that lay beyond America’s frontier remained mostly unexplored. In those days, when beaver were plentiful and the buffalo roamed freely, the killing was good. The two young men would also find that life would be hardscrabble in the high frontier. They would face grizzly bears and hostile Indians. And they would risk horse wrecks and mountain storms to trade their furs each year at “rendezvous.” Crossed Arrows is the story of two adventurers who lived hard in the earliest days of the Wild West.

  To purchase your copy of Crossed Arrows, click here.

  About the Author

  Terry Grosz earned his bachelor’s degree in 1964 and his master’s in wildlife management in 1966 from Humboldt State College in California. He was a California State Fish and Game Warden, based first in Eureka and then Colusa, from 1966 to 1970. He then joined the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and served in California as a U.S. Game Management Agent and Special Agent until 1974. After that, he was promoted to Senior Resident Agent and placed in charge of North and South Dakota for two years, followed by three years as Senior Special Agent in Washington, D.C., with the Endangered Species Program, Division of Law Enforcement. While in Washington, he also served as Foreign Liaison Officer.

  In 1979, he became the Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Two years later in 1981, he was promoted to Special Agent in Charge and transferred to Denver, Colorado, where he remained until his retirement in 1998.

  He has earned many awards and honors during his career, including, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Meritorious Service Award in 1996, and Top Ten Award in 1987 as one of the top ten employees (in an agency of some 9,000). The Fish & Wildlife Foundation presented him with the Guy Bradley Award in 1989, and in 1993 he received the Conservation Achievement Award for Law Enforcement from the National Wildlife Federation.

  Unity College in Maine awarded Grosz an honorary doctorate in environmental stewardship in 2001. His first book, Wildlife Wars, was published in 1999 and won the National Outdoor Book Award for Nature and Environment. He has had ten memoirs published since then—For Love of Wildness, Defending Our Wildlife Heritage, A Sword for Mother Nature, No Safe Refuge, The Thin Green Line, Genesis of a Duck Cop, Slaughter in the Sacramento Valley, Wildlife on the Edge, Wildlife’s Quiet War, and Wildlife Dies Without Making a Sound (in two volumes) —and his Mountain Men Novels — Crossed Arrows, Curse of the Spanish Gold, The Saga of Harlan Waugh, The Adventures of the Brothers Dent, and The Adventures of Hatchet Jack.

  Several of Grosz’s stories were broadcast as a docudrama on the Animal Planet network in 2003.

  Terry Grosz lives in Colorado.

  Find more great work by Terry Grosz and Wolfpack Publishing, here.

  Gary McCarthy

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About the Author