Last Mountain Man

breath, he told Smoke and Nicole what he knew, and about the gold in the bottom of his father’s grave at the Hole.

“When your woman births the baby, wait till spring and then get the hell out of this country. Find you a safe place to live out your lives. Right now, you get my fancy buckskins out of that there trunk over in the corner and then leave me be for a while.”

On the porch, Nicole asked, “What is he going to do?”

Smoke sighed heavily, a numbness gripping his heart. “Get all dressed up in his fancy buckskins and sash and such, prepare himself to die, mountain-man style.”

Smoke and Nicole sat on the porch of the cabin and waited, listening as Preacher hummed a French song as he dressed.

“I don’t know why he’s doing this,” Nicole said, tears running down her face.

“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.