What follows is the first chapter of my upcoming novel Medicine Woman, which is now available for pre-order and will be releasing 03 March, 2025.
Chapter 1
Death Trees
Levi Thurston woke wet, miserable, and in pain. It was the morning’s dew that first woke him, having soaked through his buckskin pants and into his bones, but it was the arrow still lodged in his shoulder that brought him to full consciousness.
His breath rattled and he coughed into his hand. He squinted in the lowlight of dawn and searched the phlegm for blood. He found none, a good sign. The arrow had only pierced his shoulder, not a lung.
He ran his fingers over the jagged remains of the arrow’s shaft. He’d broken it off last night, just after he’d made a run for it. His horse was gone, stolen by the same Utes that had tagged him with an arrow.
Around him, the mountains were still. Too still, with only the faint whisper of the wind moving through the treetops. With the sky just beginning to lighten.
Just above him, a skeletal hand hung delicately off the side of the burial platform he'd apparently spent the night beneath. Finger bones held in place by little dried bits of gristle.
He fumbled around for his rifle then, and let out a sigh of relief as his hand closed around the smooth maple stock of the Hawken. Come what may, he still had his rifle. He struggled to his feet, ignoring the ache in his bum shoulder.
He was in a small canyon of sorts, more platforms woven into the trees around him like so many floating tombs. Skeletons wrapped in blankets, some of them still wearing their beads and feathers. They stared at him from their floating beds, gaping eye sockets following his every move. Ragged ceremonial feathers shifting slightly in the small breeze, ghostlike, almost alive.
This was a bad place and he’d just spent the night in it.
He hadn’t known where he was last night, dark as it was, but it explained why the Utes had given up the chase. Damned things buried their dead in trees and let the birds and buzzards pick them clean. Something about bringing their spirits closer to the sky.
They’d stolen his horse, and his mule, or rather he’d left them. Took off on foot as fast as he could when he caught the arrow. It had been just nigh of dark when they’d come upon him, and he kicked himself for not picking a better camp. But the Utes had always been friendly enough with him, even traded a time or two, and he hadn’t seen any fresh sign for days. He'd let his guard down, and had paid the price.
And that was the thing with Injuns—you could never quite figure out what one was thinking or planning. At all times, a man had to be on the lookout. There'd only been three of them. He figured they were just young bucks looking to count coup and prove themselves and not a proper war party.
He started off then, with the burial trees and their dead residents providing constant company. He followed a dry creek bed up into higher country, and finally found his way clear of the place.
Levi paused under the shade of a cottonwood to scan the way he’d come. Nothing stirred.
He took stock of his weapons—he still had the Hawken which was chambered in .53, a horn of powder, and a bag of caps and balls. His hatchet and his scalper knife still hung on his belt. Everything else was with his horse, and by proxy the Utes, to include a brace of pistols and a smoothbore flintlock he kept loaded with buck and ball.
He wished he had those pistols now. The Hawken was the best, but when the fight got up close and personal, nothing beat having a pistol or two. If those braves came back looking for him, he’d get one good shot out of the Hawken, maybe two if they were a ways off, and then it would be hand to hand. And that smoothbore, loaded with both buck and ball, was no finer weapon to stop a charge, for he'd often cut down two or more Indians with a single shot.
Working diagonally up the mountain, he found a small spring and a place where the water pooled. He threw himself into the water in an attempt to wash off the stink of death. Though clear of the graveyard, he still felt dirty, as if death was communicable.
It was about midday when he found the cave, and the pain in his shoulder finally outweighed the urge to put distance between him and any potential pursuers. Less of a cave and more of an overhang, wider than it was deep, he figured that a fire in the back of it would be okay. The smoke would diffuse across the rock ceiling and travel upward, scattering along the face of the mountain. And he was so high up that any smell would be carried away on the high country winds and dissipate over miles.
As he inspected his shelter, he noticed the dead branches scattered about the back of it, in an unnatural sort of way, as if they'd once been gathered. He wondered at that, for if they were gathered, it had no doubt been by a man. But a long time ago by the looks of it. This country had a way of fooling a man into thinking he was the first to ever see it, but that wasn't ever really true.
He gathered the sticks together and piled on the leaf litter. Sparks caught the spoonful of powder he poured from his horn and a bright orange flame flashed to life. He added small twigs, nursing the flame to good health.
He sat there for a while, just warming his hands, dreading what he needed to do.
But when the fire was going hot, he set the blade of the scalper knife in the beginnings of its coals. Then, shrugging out of his shirt, and careful to guide the remains of the arrow through the hole where it had pierced his buckskin, he examined the wound.
He hoped to God they’d used a stone head. Some of the tribes had started to use iron arrowheads, cut from pig iron that they traded for. He’d seen a few men snatch such an arrow and the results were always ugly. They bent inside the body, or bunched up next to a bone, and made for a hell of a time getting them back out. Did more damage on the way out than in.
Taking the buckskin shirt, he used it to grip the arrow shaft, now slick with blood, and wrenched the arrow out. It came free in a blaze of white-hot pain and anger climbed his gut. Pain made him mad, and he sucked wind through his front teeth. But it felt good too. The same relief one got from plucking a splinter, and it came in equal proportion to the size of the splinter.
He felt consciousness fade, but he refused to go, refocusing on his breath. Breathing controlled the pain. Steadied the mind.
He refocused his attention on the arrow in hand. It was bloody and short. About four inches in all—with a stone head.
He slapped the hot blade over his wound and clenched his eyes shut, counting to ten in his head. He only made it to five before removing hot iron from flesh, so he slapped it back down and started the count over.
Such was his way of discipline. There was no room for weakness of the mind. The body was its own thing, wanting what it couldn’t have. But he could allow none of it. He had to be in charge if he was to survive. Nothing could run him, not pain, nor fear.
With the full count complete, he removed the knife and collapsed backwards on the stone floor. He lay there panting and sweating for a long while. His vision narrowed. He found faces in the rock ceiling above him. Waves of heat and pain washed over him. Sweat beaded, burnt flesh nauseated.
And in those dim moments, where all was silent, and the walls of consciousness pushed in on him he wondered if he was to die alone. Here, in this cave where no one would know the better. The idea of it scared him.
He looked and smelled like an animal. His hair was dark brown, long and knotted, and his fist-length beard matched. At just over six feet tall, he was panther lean and bigger than most men. He had always been proud of his size, even though he’d not had a hand in it. It had made fighting easier, and getting on with women was never a problem, even though they mostly cared about the size of his purse—at least the kind of women he'd ever had access to. Yet here, lying on the cave floor, he felt small. Small and insignificant.
The moccasins he wore were Shoshone. His deerskin pants traded for off the Crow. Same as his fringed buckskin shirt. All of which, besides his weapons, now seemed the limits of his possessions.
His age lay somewhere past his twentieth birthday but not yet his thirtieth, he knew not which was closer for he’d lost track. He’d trapped, hunted, and fought the mountains for over a decade, and each year he made it further West. It was his fourteenth birthday when he ran off from his father’s farm in the middle of the night. He called it a farm, but you could hardly call what they did in the Smoky Mountains farming. And he wondered then if the old bastard he'd called a father was still alive.
When the Company had set its eyes on the plains, he’d been one of the first to ride a keelboat up the Missouri, or at least second since Lewis and Clark. Which was not at all true, but made for big talk around a campfire.
But they were only stories. That was the sum of him. Stories about silent places that no one would remember, about a life that no one would mourn. It had always been a lonely life, of that, he was sure. He’d thought often of taking a wife, but the opportunity never came, and if it did he doubted he could stay in one place. This was the measure of him. The measure of a man who ended up cornered and dying in a dirty cave, dying like some wounded animal, and no further along than the earliest of his forebears.
Then sleep—or unconsciousness—found him.
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Frank! Congratulations! Remember us when you get famous.
Good ending!