Pursuit Of The Mountain Man

THE HIGH LONESOME

Smoke rode deeper into the mountains, memories of the old mountain man called Preacher all around him. Ol’ Preacher had talked about this country and took Smoke through it when Smoke was a young boy. It seemed to Smoke that his friend and mentor was still guiding him on.

Smoke had crossed the Salt River Range and was not far from where the mountain man, William Sublette, had reached a particularly beautiful and lonesome place and named it Jackson Hole, after another mountain man, David Jackson. Preacher had told Smoke that was back in ’29, long before the damn settlers started coming in and civilizing everything they touched.

Smoke frowned and turned in his saddle. He was going to test those men following him. He was going to give them a taste of what was in store for them if they persisted in hunting him clear up into northwest Wyoming, where peaks pushed two-and-a-half miles into the sky—and one misstep meant death.

Here in the hole is where he’d find out if those on his backtrail really meant to kill him. For if that was true, he would surely leave them to be buried among the aspen, Englemann spruce, Douglas fir and lodgepole pine-in a land where the mountain men of old had joined the wolves in their howling, lending their voices to the ever-sighing winds of the High Lonesome.