The Saga of Harlan Waugh (The Mountain Men) (29 page)

BOOK: The Saga of Harlan Waugh (The Mountain Men)
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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 shattered 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

 

 

Join the
Wolfpack Publishing mailing list
for information on new releases, updates, discount offers and a copy of
Cherokee Lighthorse
, free.

 

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

BOOK: The Saga of Harlan Waugh (The Mountain Men)
11.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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