Tim Curran - Skull Moon

Curly didn't even move to relieve himself. He pissed his pants and his crotch steamed with spreading warmth. If he moved his head just a few inches, he could see the mouth of the shaft and the world beyond. A huge drift had insinuated itself there now and he could see only a few feet of the world. He saw parting, rolling clouds and cold stars. And a sliver of moon growing fat by the day like a spider gorging on flies.

Long before dawn, a savage, primal baying rode the screaming winds. Curly wondered again when death would come.

Then, before sunup, with the decayed stink of an old slaughterhouse, it did.

It was two days later when Joseph Longtree approached Wolf Creek.

He came from the southeast, across the Madison River on a night of blowing snow and subzero winds. He paused astride his black on a ridge outside town, looking down at the sprawl of houses, buildings, and farms below him. Wolf Creek was a mining town, he knew, its blood running rich from transfusions pumped in from ore veins. There were miners here and ranchers. That and a lot of hatred between the whites and local Blackfeet tribe. Tom Rivers had told him this much.

Not that he needed to be told.

Whites hated most Indians as a rule.

And the Blackfeet, he knew, were a hostile bunch. They'd fought whites and, before them, other Indians. And with a vengeance next to which even the Dakotas often paled. But Longtree knew the Blackfeet weren't a bad lot. Not really. Just fiercely territorial and unrelentingly proud.

Longtree held no prejudices against them.

In his line of work, he couldn't afford to. Such things blinded a man's judgment. And the last thing he ever wanted was to arrest a man and see him brought to trial (and possibly the gallows) simply because of his skin color.

Longtree accepted long ago, that although he might've been a lot of things, no one would ever accuse him of not being fair or honest.

Joseph Smith Longtree was born in 1836, the son of William "Bearclaw" Smith, a mountain man, and Piney River, a Crow Indian. His father had died fighting Commanches in 1842. Longtree had barely known him. In 1845, a Sioux raiding party attacked Longtree's village on the Powder River, killing everyone but himself and a few others that had scattered. His mother was among the dead. Longtree was taken away by a local missionary priest to a mission school in Nebraska. After seven years of strict Catholic upbringing and schooling, Longtree left.

He ran away, making his way west.

He fell in with a reformed gunman named Rawlings who was canvassing the Wyoming and Montana Territories in his new profession as a Baptist preacher in search of a congregation. Rawlings still carried a gun; only a fool didn't in the Territories. During their months together, Rawlings, very impressed with Longtree's knowledge of the Bible and other matters spiritual, taught him how to shoot. Getting the boy an old. 44 Colt Dragoon, he drilled him every day for hours until Longtree could knock an apple out of a tree from forty feet with one swift, decisive movement.

In southeastern Montana, Rawlings and Longtree went their separate ways. Longtree sought out his Uncle Lone Hawk, who'd been away on the day the Sioux raided their village and hadn't returned until long after Longtree had been carted away by the missionary. Lone Hawk and his family had a cabin on the Little Powder River and it was here that Longtree spent the next five years.

His mother's brother was a practical man.

He knew the old ways were dying fast and a new world was beginning for the Indian. He himself lived more like a white man than a red one. He knew a young man needed a trade, a skill with which to eke out a living. But he also believed one should be acquainted with and be proud of one's ancestral heritage. He found a way in which he could bestow both upon young Joe Longtree-he would train him in the time-honored ways of the Indian, he would school him as a scout.

For the next five years, under Lone Hawk's tutelage, Longtree learned how to "read sign": tracking animal and man, learning a wealth of information from such subtle clues as footprints, hoof marks, and bent blades of grass. He learned the fine art of pathfinding. He learned how to doctor wounds with expertise. He learned how to live off the land-what plants and roots could be eaten, which could not, and which could be used as medicines; how to locate and stalk game; how to find water and dozens of other tricks. He learned how to hunt and fight with a knife, a hatchet, the bow and arrow, the lance. He received advanced instruction in shooting and navigation by the sun and stars. He was taught the arts of stealth and concealment.

All in all, everything the Crow had learned in thousands of years of survival were taught Longtree in a few years.

After five years, Longtree left and signed on as an Indian scout to the army. For the next six years he fought with the whites against the Commanche and Cheyenne.

Afterwards, his belly full of blood and death and atrocities committed by Indian and white alike, he drifted to San Francisco. Where, among other things, he made a name for himself (Kid Crow) as a barefisted boxer. Made a good run of it until an Irish hothead named Jimmy Elliot gave him a thrashing he wouldn't forget this side of the grave. Restless, tired of hitting and being hit, Longtree headed into the Arizona Territory where he turned his skill as a scout to tracking men as a bounty hunter. After six years of that, with a record boasting of tracking thirty men and bringing them all in (dead or alive), he was appointed as a deputy U.S. Marshal in the New Mexico Territory and later, Utah Territory, and finally, a special federal marshal.

And now after all the killing he'd done, all the men he'd tracked, all the convicts and murderers he'd brought in, Longtree was going after something a little different.

A killer that acted like a man.

But sported the hungers of an animal.

It was late when Longtree found the body.

He was just making his way down a slope of scrub oak towards the outskirts of Wolf Creek when he saw what might have been an arm covered with a light dusting of snow. Bringing his gelding to an abrupt halt, Longtree dismounted and fought through the snowdrifts to what he'd seen. The wind was blowing with fierce raw-edged gusts that whistled through the hills. His long buffalo coat flapped around him as he bent down and began to dig through the drifts to expose the rest of the corpse.

He got his oil lantern out and lit it.

The corpse wasn't worth revealing.

Especially on this night of black, howling wind and bitter flurries. Longtree judged the man to be in his mid-forties and this was about all he could tell. The body was mutilated, chest and belly gouged open. The flesh clawed and shredded to the point that it and the ripped garments it wore were knotted into each other. Both legs were snapped off below the knees, skin stripped free. The head was twisted around so it was face down in the snow. Both arms had been pulled off. One was missing, the other nearby, mangled and punctured with teeth marks, a Colt pistol frozen in its red fist.

Longtree tried to turn the remains over, but they were frozen into the earth. He poked and prodded gently in the snow with his gloved fingers. There was very little blood around, most of it frozen into sparkling crystals.

Not enough for a slaughter of this magnitude.

Longtree surmised from this that the man had been killed somewhere else and dragged here, gutted and dismembered on the spot.

He looked around for the remains of the cadaver's legs, but they were gone.

He studied the body again in the dancing light.

It was hard to say exactly how the man had died, such was the nature of the carnage. His throat was torn out. Little remained of it but a twisted spiral ladder of vertebrae and hacked ligament. He had been opened up in countless places and could've bled to death from any of a dozen wounds. Longtree figured the attack must've been sudden and vicious. But not too sudden; the man had drawn his gun, precious little good it had done him.