Son of the Hawk (35 page)

O
ld Man Winter had come on with a vengeance that year, with the north winds blowing wave after wave of his icy breath through the tiny valley that a handful of settlers had christened “Promise.” On this bitter morning, Buck Ransom stood outside the door of his simple one-room log cabin, his eyes squinting against the sun’s glare of the frozen valley. It was the first time he had seen the sun in over a week. It had been a hell of a storm, the kind of trick Old Man Winter enjoyed playing on mortals—waiting until he had everybody fooled with signs of spring, then slappin’ ’em down with one last blizzard.

He took a deep breath of air so frigid that it made his lungs ache deep down inside him. Holed up in his cabin for weeks at a time, Buck had all he could do to keep from becoming terminally melancholy. To combat it, he told himself stories from the past, reliving the days when he and his old companion, Frank Brown, trapped beaver for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. When it reached the point where he was talking directly to Frank about things that happened at the rendezvous on the Green River or the Wind River, or Popo Agie, he suddenly realized that he had better get out of his cabin and see some real people.

Now on this frozen morning, his thoughts turned to his friend, Trace McCall, and the day they had parted
company near the Bighorns. “I wonder if Trace has found that boy yet,” he said aloud—a habit he had acquired during the long winter weeks. It had been months since Trace had ridden off after White Eagle. It was not the first time Trace had stayed away all winter, but Buck had a nagging fear this time because Trace was heading deep into hostile territory. If he caught up with the boy as soon as he had expected, they would have been back in a month. “Maybe he found the boy and took him up in Wind River country to find his mother’s people,” Buck speculated, hoping that accounted for his friend’s long absence.
That young’un’s likely dead
, Buck thought, as he made his way around the cabin to the lean-to where his horses were.

“You’re damn lucky I took in some hay from Jordan Thrash,” he said to the buckskin mare. “You’d be scratching around in the snow for your supper.”

The mare whinnied and jerked her head up. Buck thought she was answering his comment until the other two horses in the shed snorted and whinnied also, announcing the presence of other horses. Buck turned to look out across the valley. Two riders leading a packhorse made their way slowly down the western slope to the valley floor. Buck could see that one of them was probably a boy. The other, even at that distance, could be none other than Trace McCall. No other man sat a horse like that, straight and tall, riding easy like man and horse came out of the womb together.

Buck felt his pulse quicken with strength as a flood of joy and relief overwhelmed him after the long solitary winter. His family had returned. The sight of Trace and the boy brought a tear to the eye of the grizzled old trapper.
Maybe I ain’t gonna die alone in this damn cabin after all.

C
HARLES
G. W
EST
lives in Punta Gorda, Florida, and was the proprietor of a commercial typesetting and printing business. He now devotes his full time to writing historical fiction.
Son of the Hawk
is his ninth novel.