Johnstone, W. - Last Mountain Man

“He’s doing it because he’s a mountain man.” Smoke’s eyes were on the mountains in the distance. “I’ve got to do something.” He rose and walked to the lean-to.

He selected a gentle horse, a mare, too old for breeding. He saddled her and took her back to the cabin. Preacher was waiting with Nicole on the porch.

Preacher’s eyes touched the horse, returned to Smoke. “I see you didn’t forget ever’thing I learned you.”

“No, sir,” Smoke said, fighting back tears. “Preacher? What is your Christian name?”

The old man smiled. “Arthur was my first name — why?”

“Because if we have a son, I want to name him after you.”

“That’d be right nice. Now help me on that nag yonder and stand back.”

Preacher was dressed in clean, beaded buckskins. His dying suit. He wore new leggings and moccasins and a wide red sash around his waist. A cap of skunk hide and hair on his head.

“You look grand,” Smoke said.

“You tell lies, too,” Preacher retorted. “Help me on the mare.”

In the saddle, Preacher looked at Smoke. “You know I’m gonna shoot this horse, don’t you, son?”

Smoke nodded. Nicole put her face in her hands and wept. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“So I can have something to ride when my human body is gone, girl. So don’t you fret and carry on. One old life is endin’, but you carryin’ new life. That’s the way of the world.” He looked at Smoke. “You be mindful of what I learned you, boy, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

He rode off without looking back, riding toward the high, far mountains. There, he would select his place to die. He would go out of this world as he had lived in it — alone.

“You know what?” Smoke said to Nicole, as they stood and watched him disappear. “I never even knew his last name.”

Autumn touched the valley under the shadows of the great mountains, painting the landscape with a multicolored brush: the grass a deep tan, the trees golden, the sky blue, and the flowers white and purple and red. On a huge rock by the banks of the creek, Smoke chipped Preacher’s name, when he died, and his approximate age. The course of the creek has long since shifted, the bed now part of grazing land, but the huge rock remains. And far in the mountains, high above the West Delores, time and wind have scattered the bones of man and horse. But some locals say that in early fall, on a clear night, if one listens with ears and heart, you can hear the sounds of a slow-moving old mare, carrying a grizzled old mountain man. The old man is singing a French song as he completes his circle, before dismounting to rest for another year, his eyes on a valley far off in the distance.

Of course, that’s just a myth. A local legend. Folklore. Certainly isn’t real. But in the 1930s when the CCC boys were working in the valley, they tried to move the huge boulder with four names chipped deep into it. Something frightened them so badly none of them would ever again go near the boulder. Work was halted at the site.

The local rancher would only say, “I told you so.”

And some say Preacher did not die of his wounds, but lay near death in an Indian village for months, while one of his daughters took care of him. Some say the old man returned to help the man called Smoke in his vendetta. Many people insist that is the way it happened. That Preacher and Smoke …

Well, that’s another story.

As the winds changed from cool to cold, and the first flakes of snow touched the valley, Nicole gave birth to a boy.

While Smoke paced the cabin floor, feeling totally inadequate — which, in this situation, he was — a tiny squall of outrage filled the bedroom, as breath was sucked into new lungs. Nicole’s hair was stuck to her head from sweaty, painful exertion, and her face was pale.

“Take the knife,” she told her husband. “And cut the cord where I show you.”

His hand trembled and he hesitated for a second. Her sharp command brought him back.

“Do it, Smoke!”

The umbilical lifeline severed, the baby washed, the tiny wound on his belly bandaged, Nicole wrapped the boy in clean white cloths and the baby nursed at her breast.

“You look like you’re going to be sick,” Nicole told him. “Go outside.”

He did and thought, what I know about birthing babies would fill volumes. And what I know about the inner strength of women would, too .

When he again entered the house, Nicole was nursing the child at her breast, and Smoke thought he had never seen a more beautiful sight. He stood in speechless awe.

Fed, warm, and secure, the child then slept beside its mother.

“You sleep, too,” Smoke told her. “I’ll stand watch.”

“If baby Arthur starts to cry,” she said wearily, “just take him.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

She smiled at him. “It will come natural to you. Just keep your hand under his head for support.”

“Oh, Lord,” Smoke said.

Nicole drifted off into sleep and after an hour, the child awakened. With much trepidation, the young man took his son in his big, work-hardened hands and held it gently.

“Now what do I do?” he said.

The baby looked up at him.

“Arthur,” Smoke said. “You behave, now.”

And the baby, like his namesake, promptly started squalling and grousing.

Winter locked in the valley and Smoke knew, as long as the hard winter held, the three of them would be safe from the stalled pursuit of the bounty hunters. But in the spring, their coming would be inevitable and relentless. Smoke would have to move his family to a safer place.

But where?

His smile was grim. Sure, why not. Right under their noses would be the last place they would look. Idaho. He would have to hang up his .36s — maybe get a new Remington or Colt — carry just one gun. Use Seven for breeding, never for riding. Maybe, he thought, they could pull it off.

Preacher drifted into his mind. God, how he missed that ornery old man, so full of common sense and mountain wisdom. He would have been a great companion for the baby.

Smoke shook his head. But Preacher was gone. And the living have to go on living. Preacher told him that.

He struggled to remember what Preacher had told him about Idaho Territory. He recalled Preacher telling him there was a lake on the eastern pan (Gray’s Lake). So wild and beautiful and lonely it had to be seen to be believed. No white men lived there, Preacher said. So that’s where Smoke would take his family to live, hopefully, in peace.

But he wondered if he could ever live in peace. And that ever present speculation haunted him, especially when he looked at his wife and son.

If anything ever happened to them …

Baby Arthur cooed and gurgled and grew healthy and strong and much loved during the winter of 1871–72. He would be big-boned and strong, with blond hair and blue eyes that flashed when he grew angry.

The three of them waited out the winter, making plans to leave the valley in late spring, when the baby was six months old, and they felt he could stand the trip. They both agreed it would be taking a chance, but one they had to take.

In a settlement that would soon wear the name of Telluride, in the primitive area of the Uncompahgre Forest, bounty hunters also waited for spring. They were a surly, quarrelsome bunch as the cold days and bitter nights drifted toward spring. With them, a young man who called himself Kid Austin. Kid was quick with a pistol — perhaps the quickest of them all — but the only man he had ever killed was a drunken old Mexican sheepherder. Even with the knowledge that the Kid was untested, the bounty hunters left him alone. For he was uncommonly fast and quick-tempered. And because the man they hunted was a friend of the old mountain man who had humiliated the Kid in front of that saloon. Kid Austin thus hated the man called Smoke. He dreamed of killing this Smoke, of facing him down in a street, beating him to the draw, and watching him die hard in the dirt, crying and begging for mercy, while men stood on the boardwalks and feared him, and women stood and wanted him. Those were his dreams — all his dreams. Kid Austin was not a very imaginative young man. And he would not live to dream many more of his wild dreams of glory and power.