Charles West - Day of the Wolf

He was eleven years old when his parents were killed along with twenty-eight others as their wagon train traveled through South Pass. Eight men and their wives perished on that day, and all their children, save one, were murdered by an Indian war party. By which band, Wolf never knew, for none of the settlers could tell one Indian from another. With a shotgun taken from his dead father’s hand and a sack of shotgun shells, the boy crawled nearly seventy-five yards up a narrow streambed to escape the scalping party that overran the wagon train to finish off the wounded. From a small stand of pines, the boy lay and watched the ransacking of the wagons and the mutilation of the dead. Tears had streamed down his face as he witnessed the desecration of his parents’ bodies, and the agony he felt burning inside him almost caused him to rush to avenge them. But he knew that it would be useless to try. There were too many to fight. So he sat, helpless, and watched for what seemed an eternity while the savages darted from wagon to wagon, scattering furniture and belongings that had been hauled halfway across the continent, destined to be the seed for a new life in the Oregon country.

Finally, when the Indians had satisfied their lust for mayhem, and the sun dropped lower in the sky, they departed. So young Tom Logan left his hiding place and went back to stare at the inhumane carnage left by the warriors, temporarily paralyzed by the stark brutality and disregard for human life. He had not known such savagery existed in the world until this moment, but it was a lesson that would remain with him all his life.

After what seemed forever, he forced his mind to focus on what must be done to survive. The most important thing, he decided, was to bury his parents and perhaps to salvage anything that he might be able to use. The Indians had attempted to set the wagons on fire, but all but a few of the wagons survived with little more than scorched wagon beds and ruined wagon sheets. With no idea as to what he was going to do from this point forward, he occupied his mind with the task of giving his mother and father a decent burial. Pick and shovel were readily available on nearly every wagon, since the savages evidently had no regard for the tools.

It was close to dark by the time he had finished digging the grave and resolved himself to the task of dragging his parents’ bodies into the shallow hole. He choked back a sob when he looked again at his mother’s bloody body, her blouse soaked red from two bullet holes in her breast. But determined to save their remains from the wolves and buzzards, he pulled both bodies to the grave. Gently wrapping their bloody faces with the remains of a half-burned bedsheet, he then proceeded to shovel the dirt over them. It was the worst part of the ordeal for him, but when the grave was finally filled in, he felt more at peace with his parents safely settled in their eternal rest. That done, he sank down beside the grave, unable to think of what he should now do. The whole world seemed to be suddenly devoid of all sound—no birds, no rustling of night critters in the underbrush, no sounds of the horses. It was as if there was nothing left alive but him. Exhausted, he sat there for almost an hour, hardly moving, until at last he lay back on the ground and drifted off to sleep.

He was awakened early the next morning by the sound of an animal snuffling around the half-burned wagon behind him. Sitting upright, he discovered a pack of coyotes sniffing around the bodies strewn on the ground. A shadow flitted quickly across his face, and he looked up to see a circle of buzzards overhead. His first impulse was to fire his father’s shotgun to frighten the scavengers away, so he quickly loaded a couple of shells in the double-barreled weapon and fired once in the air. The result was what he had hoped, for the coyotes immediately scattered in fright. But the success was short-lived, because within minutes the beasts began to slink back and the buzzards became even bolder, enticed by the abundance of food. It was then obvious to the eleven-year-old boy that he was not likely to win a battle with the law of nature. Even if successful in the endeavor, he was not willing to use up his precious shotgun shells in an attempt to kill all the coyotes and buzzards. Neither was he prepared to dig enough graves to bury all of the victims; so, accepting the fact that he was obliged to look out for his own existence, he joined in the scavenging of the wagons.

Knowing he was alone in the world, he searched for blankets and clothes to keep him warm, a pan to cook in, water sacks or a canteen, and anything else of use that the Indians might have overlooked. There was not much to find, for the war party had been pretty thorough. However, he was lucky to find a hatchet and a skinning knife in the storage compartment beneath the boards of a wagon bed. His fellow predators ignored him for the most part, having plenty of food sources to choose from, only challenging him once when a coyote contested a half side of bacon left in a barrel under a wagon. The contest was determined when Tom spent one of his shotgun shells to settle the debate, leaving one more meal for the other scavengers. When he had searched all the wagons and was satisfied there was nothing else of value for him to find, he looked around at the carnage still in progress. Then he turned and looked at the mountains to the north. It occurred to his young mind that there was safety for him in the mountains. He needed a place to hide, for he feared there would be other war parties riding through South Pass.

He was not sure of the exact date, but it was late August, and he knew that winter was already on its way. His father had been worried that they had started too late in the season to reach Oregon before the mountain passes would be closed with snow, and thoughts of the Donner party some ten years before had come to haunt him. Now similar thoughts came to trouble the boy’s mind as he decided what to do. The possibility of continuing on to Oregon was out of the question with nothing awaiting him there. There was nothing for him at Fort Laramie, either, if he tried to return to that army post. Seeing no choice but to seek a place in the mountains where he could become invisible to the Indians, he turned his concentration toward finding the right spot to build his nest. Using twine from a ball he found in one of the wagons, he tied his blanket in a roll, with everything he could pack inside. With his hatchet and knife in his belt, his shotgun in one hand, and a sack containing the quarter side of bacon in the other, he started walking to the north.

With his sights set on the mountains, he continued to walk across the wide expanse of prairie and sagebrush until reaching the foothills that offered some protection from hostile eyes. With his father’s flint and steel, he was able to build a fire to cook the bacon he had managed to save from the coyote. With hatchet and knife, he constructed a rough shelter to provide some protection from the cold mornings in this high elevation. With his first camp now established, he determined to hunt for food.

He had hunted many times with his father, and he was confident of his ability to use his father’s shotgun, but he knew that he would soon be out of shells, so he assigned himself the task of making a bow for small game. With no one to teach him, he experimented with many failures, using limbs from various trees and twine for a bowstring, forcing him to rig traps for squirrels and other small animals to keep from starving. In time, he fashioned a crude bow that provided him with a weapon that worked after a fashion, but it would be some time yet before he learned to shape the proper wood and use animal gut for a bowstring. Through trial and error, he learned to survive.

Over the next several years, the boy found that he was at home in the mountains, and he moved from camp to camp, sometimes high up in the mountains, sometimes along the river that flowed through the valley, following the game that provided his food and clothing. Satisfied with the solitude he found, he had no desire for contact with other humans, and occasionally it was necessary to melt into the trees quickly to avoid an Indian hunting party. Isolation was not his intention in the beginning, but more a natural evolvement that made him at home in the forest, like the coyotes and wolves that hunted the prairie and mountain ridges. Before long, stories of a wild boy began to circulate among the different Shoshone villages when hunters caught a fleeting glimpse of him as he slipped away into the forest.