The Saga of Harlan Waugh (The Mountain Men) (24 page)

The arrows in the bodies were those of the Gros Ventre, and many of the dead, including the women, had been shot at close range. As near as Harlan could tell, the trail was two days old at the most. Without a word, Harlan remounted his horse and, with the boys trailing, rode over to Limps-Ahead-of-His-Horses.

“Do not send a war party after the killers. The boys and I will hunt them down if possible and kill every one of them. We will leave them in such a condition that even the wolves will not find enough to eat,” Harlan uttered though clenched teeth. As an afterthought, he asked, “Would you send someone over to care for our stock? When I return, I will see that this person is richly rewarded.”

A nod from Limps-Ahead-of-His Horses settled that deal.

Not another word was spoken, just a handshake of understanding, and the meeting was over. Then Harlan and the boys headed back to their cabins without another word. There they exchanged their jaded horses for fresh ones and saddled them for the hunt. They added extra powder and bullets to their bags of possibles, quickly filled the saddlebags with jerky, and tied several sacks of grain to each horse’s saddle horn.

This trip would be a hard one, and the horses had to hold up on the long trail. The key to pushing the horses was the high-energy grain they now carried. Each horse was checked to make sure it had good shoes, and the men were ready for the trail. Each man carried two horse pistols and an extra Hawken. In addition, each wore a long-bladed gutting knife. Now that they were fully prepared for the trail, their eyes met, and that was enough.

Heading cross-country on an intercept course, Harlan and the boys soon cut across the track of the killers. They hadn’t gone more than a mile on the cold track when they ran across the shallow graves of those killed in the battle at White Bear’s camp. Digging up the eight graves, Harlan and the boys scalped all of the bodies. Harlan noticed one man with his belly ripped open by a knife. Birdsong had her revenge, he thought grimly.

They left the bodies exposed for the animals to have their turn, which in accordance with Indian tradition forbade those dead from ever roaming the Happy Hunting Grounds because their bodies would not be complete after the animals had finished.

Then they continued along that trail, and hard. After all, they had several days to make up.

That night, the pursuers cold-camped after heavily graining their horses. There was no open fire, and they quietly ate jerky that had been prepared in happier days. It was apparent that the killers had not expected pursuit because they were taking their time as they headed almost due north toward what Harlan figured might be the Judith Gap. The spacing of the tracks showed that their quarry had slowed their horses to a walk to save the livestock and themselves from exhaustion.

The men didn’t get much sleep that night because of the family memories and what lay ahead. Four against twenty remaining men was tough odds, but every one of the pursuers welcomed the chance to close with those who had destroyed their little family.

By daylight, the men were hard on the trail once again as it casually continued north along many well-worn Indian and animal trails. Harlan’s party doggedly continued the pursuit.

Kneeling by his horse, Harlan checked the tracks and horse droppings for freshness. Looking up to the boys, he said, “Maybe one day old. They sure aren’t in any hurry. We best make sure we aren’t walking into an ambush. We will start out wide and continue to cut back and forth across their trail. That way we can continue after them and not be led into an ambush.”

The eyes of the men on the horses agreed.

Harlan swung back into the saddle and headed out at an angle, not directly on the trail in case someone was smart enough to watch their backs. Three hours later, the four men cut back to the trail and crossed it where the Indians and possibly their white partners had camped. There the tracks told another story. The killers had rested, and the ashes of their fires were still warm. But those riding the shod horses had split away and headed due west toward what is today White Sulphur Springs, Montana, and beaver-trapping country.

Big Eagle checked the Indians’ tracks and, looking up at Harlan, said, “Four to six hours old.”

Harlan sat on his horse for a second and then said, “Those eight are probably renegade trappers heading for the beaver grounds in the Big Belt Mountains. My guess is that is where they will hole up, especially with winter coming on. The Indians, on the other hand, will continue heading north to their stomping grounds in the hope that any Crows chasing them will be intimidated, since it is now the country of the Blackfoot, and will turn around and go back. My vote is to catch and punish the Gros Ventre and let others of their kind see what happens when they venture south. As for the trappers, if the snow doesn’t get too deep, we can run them to ground in their winter camp later. Unless any of you have different thoughts, that is my vote.”

***

Coming up on the south bank of the Musselshell River, Harlan and the boys smelled wood smoke! Quickly hiding their horses, Runs Fast and Winter Hawk sneaked up to the river’s edge and peered into several campfires thirty yards away, surrounded by Gros Ventre cooking supper in a heavy growth of willows. There were eighteen men eating and two guarding their horse herd.

None looked like they were really on guard, the boys reported back to Harlan and Big Eagle. It was clear that pursuit was not on their minds this far north.

“We will wait until early morning, when they are sleeping the soundest, and then crawl into their midst and kill as many as we can before they kill us or run away,” Harlan said slowly.

He spoke in such a way that the dark meaning of his words and the violence to follow would not be lost on the boys. This group of Indians had crossed the line, as far as Harlan was concerned. They had ripped the hearts and souls out of his family, and now it was time to return the favor. Many would pay for killing Birdsong, Autumn Flower, and their children.

The two Gros Ventre guarding the horses died in their own blood gurgling from deeply slit throats before they even realized there was any danger. Falling asleep on guard duty had ensured them a long sleep! Runs Fast and Big Eagle held their heads and kept their mouths shut until they quit wiggling so they would not make any noise and arouse the rest of the camp.

Then the four trappers crawled in from one side of the sleeping Indians by the first campfire and with their knives commenced quietly cutting throats, holding each dying man still before moving on to the next in line. Soon the men were smeared with spurting arterial blood. Nine Indians, sleeping off a long ride and a big meal of venison, died around the campfire that morning.

Shifting their attention to the second campfire several yards away, where another nine Indians lay huddled together for warmth, the men rose to their knees as if on command and quietly shouldered their rifles.

“Hey!” yelled Harlan.

The Indians jumped up en masse from a sound sleep, only to be met by the blazing ends of four Hawkens and then eight horse pistols, quickly fired at very close range. None survived the onslaught, falling back and dying in the sleeping skins from which they rose.

Reloading their weapons in case there were more Indians in the group or others within hearing distance, the men waited as their emotions ran wild for more killing. Upon seeing no one, the four men rose in unison and, as if following an unspoken command, scalped every man around the two campfires and the two by the horse herd. Then they cut off their man-hoods and shoved the organs into each man’s pried-open mouth.

They chopped off the heads with their tomahawks and dumped them into the shallow edges of the Musselshell River for anyone to find. Then, off came the bodies’ arms and legs, which were thrown into a pile with a stack of firewood over the top, which was then set afire. The torsos were stacked alongside trees as if they had crawled that far before dying, but not before their hearts were ripped out and placed on sharpened sticks for all to see.

With the carnage complete, the men set some of the Indian’s venison on sticks around the campfires and ate a hearty breakfast. Still covered with drying blood on their hair, faces, and clothing, the four men made a hideous scene.

That is good, though, thought Harlan, because they were now trailing twenty Gros Ventres ponies as they started toward where he figured the trappers involved in the killing had holed up.

Now they could ride even faster because of the fresh mounts, and they did so, coming within twenty miles of where Harlan figured the trappers might have made their winter camp that first day. If any Gros Ventres or Blackfoot wanted to tangle with this group of grim mounted men, all they had to do was look at them—four determined-looking mountain men, all smeared with blood—and ask themselves if they really wanted a part of that terror.

But the killing of the rogue trappers was not to be. Mother Nature brought an end to the killing with two feet of heavy, fresh snow and foreshadowed a like storm on the way.

Winter is finally here, and in all its fury, thought Harlan as he sat on his horse looking in the direction he needed to go to get at those riding the shod horses. But from what snow lay on the ground now and what was possibly still coming, he decided against continuing the pursuit.

This was not the time to get caught in four feet of snow in the dead of winter in the high country, with just a few pounds of jerky among them and only several blankets apiece. They would have to come back in the spring, when the weather was better and the suspected white men were still trapping before the beaver went out of their prime.

He discussed the matter with the boys, and they also decided that it would be best to come back in the spring and settle up with those riding the eight shod horses, who had participated in the slaughter at White Bear’s camp. Each man took one hard look in the direction their quarry had gone and resolved in his own way on a return that would be appropriate.

However, none other harbored the horrible dark thoughts Harlan had. When he finished, if he had his druthers, every man he was following would cry out to the devil to come take him to the fires of hell!

After a week of hard going south in snowstorm after snowstorm, Harlan and the boys finally arrived back at camp, exhausted, as were their saddle horses and Indian ponies. They had long since run out of grain, and the horses had been forced to fend for themselves in the ever-deepening snow. With nighttime temperatures dropping below zero, the men had damn near frozen to death every time the sun had gone down.

Thank heaven for the blankets we acquired from the dead Indians before leaving the Gros Ventres killing field, thought Harlan.

After unsaddling their horses, they hobbled them and let them out into the trees and field near the cabins to feed. The Indian ponies, not used to hobbles, were hobbled anyway with ones made from rope. There was a fair amount of bucking, snorting, and crow-hopping, but the ponies soon settled down and joined the other horses and mules. Now the trappers had a horse and mule string that numbered thirty-one horses and ten mules, which was of major value in the West, but it was a small thing in light of the loss of their loved ones.

For the first two weeks back at the cabins, the men had a hard time adjusting. It seemed as if everything they saw or touched reminded them of the two women who had been such a huge part of their lives.

It also made Runs Fast and Harlan think of their sons and wonder what they might have been like if they had been allowed to live and grow into young men. The dark thoughts of the two married men did not rival those of Big Eagle. His life had just started and had now been snuffed out, to his way of thinking, by those dead Indians to the north and the white men still living comfortably in their trappers’ cabins in the Big Belt Mountains.

The fury they will feel to their bodies will be far from anything earthly. Big Eagle darkly thought many times a day and night with tear-filled eyes.

Come spring, Harlan took to looking daily at the new grass shoots poking their heads out of the semi- frozen ground. Without good feed for the horses, we will have a difficult time accomplishing our goals of hunting down and killing the trappers, he thought. This time we will not fail, and woe to those at the ends of our rifle barrels or blades of our knives.

His feelings, suppressed by the long winter months, began to rekindle and surfaced continually with a hatred not of this world.

Finally, the grass was of sufficient length for the trip north. Having made arrangements with their friends the Crow to once again take care of their cabins, stores, and livestock, the four men made ready to strike out for where they believed the trappers were living and trapping beaver in the Big Belt Mountains, or more probably along the waters of the Smith River, where beaver trapping would soon commence.

“Everyone loaded and ready to go?” Harlan asked grimly.

His three sons nodded as they sat astride their horses, each trailing a pack mule loaded with supplies. This time they had several months before the beaver went out of prime, and in that time they hoped to procure eight more horses, tack, and plews.

Carefully looking to see that each pack mule carried the boys’ spare Hawkens, Harlan turned and walked his horse the five miles to White Bear’s old campsite. As they passed slowly by the burial platforms of the women and their children, still high in the oak trees, each man made a pact with his God, a pact of promised revenge on those who had murdered their loved ones.

***

In a camp along the Smith River, just north of what would become the town of White Sulphur Springs, Montana, were four trappers skinning, fleshing, and hooping out beaver plews. Quietly circling the men, Harlan stepped out from the surrounding brush and told them to air out their hands.

Surprised by the onslaught, one went for his rifle, only to have the unseen stock of Big Eagle’s Hawken smash in the side of his face! That was all it took for the remaining three to do as they were told, seeing that they were surrounded and outgunned.