by Terry Grosz
About an hour into his sleep, Iron Hand’s eyes suddenly flew wide open and having been raised and living so long on the dangerous frontier, he did not move or give away the fact that he was now wide awake and alert to what had just awakened him so abruptly! His right hand slowly moved to the side of his bed and his fingers quietly closed around the comforting cold wood and steel butt of his nearest pistol loaded with buck and ball. Slowly transferring that pistol to his left hand, his right hand once again silently dropped over the side of his bed frame and closed over the comforting handle of his second pistol lying close at hand. Now holding both pistols across his chest and the thick-haired bearskin sleeping robe for the silence it would provide in what he was about to do, he silently cocked both guns against the silencing blanket of fur!
Listening intently, he once again heard the sounds that had originally had to have been the ones that had awakened him from his deep and tired sleep. The horses outside in their corral were now making all kinds of shifting and shuffling-around noises and other restless sounds in their near at hand corral. Sounds like maybe a corralled horse would make when a grizzly bear was close at hand. But Iron Hand soon realized that the restless animals were not making any alarm sounds like they would upon scenting a bear, but were making horse-sounds like they would generally make when strange humans came into sight or were close at hand to them...
Quietly taking his right hand and using the pistol barrel as an assist, he carefully moved his top bearskin sleeping fur off his long body and laid it off to one side where it would be out of his way in case he had to hurriedly exit his bed. Then ever so slowly, Iron Hand quietly moved his legs over the side of his bed so that he was soon in a sitting position in the coal-black darkness of the cabin and facing their unlocked front door. Controlling his breathing to just slow and shallow quiet breaths as if that would help his hearing and not raise any alarm to other hostile listening ears, he listened intently once again to the mystery sounds their horses were making. It was then that his hearing shifted from the sounds the horses were making to another closer at hand and more sinister sound. THAT SOUND WAS THE SLIGHT SCRAPING NOISE THE WOODEN HANDLE TO THEIR DOOR MADE WHEN SOMEONE WAS SLOWLY SLIDING THE WOODEN LATCH BACK IN ITS HOLDER PRIOR TO OPENING THE DOOR AND ENTERING THEIR CABIN!
Iron Hand was and always had been a light sleeper. As such, he knew none of his fellow trappers had left the cabin earlier to go outside to the bathroom and were now coming back inside to go back to bed. Turning slightly in his sitting position on his bed frame once again so as not to make any noise or alert anyone who might be listening, he was now facing dead-onto their cabin door. THEN IRON HAND HEARD THE DOOR HANDLE FINALLY RELEASE WITH HARDLY A DISCERNIBLE ‘CLICK’, AND COULD SENSE EVEN IN THE DARKNESS OF NIGHT THAT THEIR DOOR WAS SLOWLY BEING OPENED ON ITS SQUEAKY SOUNDING LEATHER HINGES!
Then all of a sudden, their heavy log door was flung wide open with a loud ‘CRUMPING SOUND’, as it slammed against the inside wall of their cabin!
“HIYIYIYI!” SCREAMED A LOUD VOICE, which was followed by the sounds of a human rushing through the narrow door opening, only to be followed with another loud ‘CRUMPING SOUND’ as that individual, not familiar with Big Foot’s long-stepping board below the door’s sill, tripped and crashed violently onto their hard-packed dirt floor face first, with a loud OOOMPFFF! That was followed by another man yelling “HIYIYIYIEH!” just as he plowed through the open doorway behind the first man, with what had to be another Indian on the attack!
BOOM! went Iron Hand’s pistol full of buck and ball and at ten feet, tore off most of the face from the second man moving through the open doorway, blowing him off to one side and into a crumpled heap just inside their cabin! When Iron Hand shot, the brilliant flash of his pistol being fired for just an instant in the trappers’ dark cabin illuminated several more Indians trying to push their ways through the purposely-built narrow doorway all at the same time! However, Big Foot’s idea of creating a doorway that only accommodated one man at a time coming through its framing was now bearing survival fruit of the finest kind...
When the third Indian tried pushing himself through the open doorway, he stumbled over the first man through, who had stumbled on Big Foot’s cleverly raised door sill and had fallen hard onto the dirt floor of the cabin, stunning him in the process. Down went the third Indian through the open doorway into a squirming pile on top of the first man through the doorway still lying on the floor as well. The fourth Indian to push his way through the open doorway was shot in the chest with Iron Hand’s second pistol shot, the force of which blew him backwards out the open doorway and into the fifth Indian trying to push his way inside the cabin! Upon impact from the backwards-flying dead man, the fifth Indian trying to push his way inside so he could have at the trappers inside, found himself being flung outward and knocked down outside the cabin!
In the flash of Iron Hand’s second pistol discharge, he could see more Indians outside the doorway trying to get in at the men inside, as well as seeing his three fellow trappers now making ready to shoot since they were more than wide awake, armed and making ready to get into the battle posthaste!
Yelling in the darkness to voice-identify himself so he would not get shot in the darkness by one of his fellow trappers, Iron Hand grabbed the first Indian through the door who had stumbled over the high door sill, had recovered from his hard fall onto the cabin’s hard-packed dirt floor, and was now rising to his feet yelling loudly. His yelling suddenly stopped seconds later, as Iron Hand, now having ‘run dry’ with his pistols, grabbed the man’s head and lower jaw with a two-handed grip that would have stopped a runaway horse, gave a vicious sideways twist and heard the stocky Indian’s neck snap like a muffled pistol shot!
The next Indian through the door also died a quick death! The other three trappers all fired at the sound of the yelling man’s voice coming through the doorway with their pistols simultaneously! When they did, the man literally blew apart, as the three .69 caliber lead balls and buck crashed into his body, flinging him out the open doorway backwards, in a ‘flushing’ of blood, pieces of meat, flying snot, and facial pieces of bone and splintered teeth!
Yelling loudly once again for the voice recognition so he would not be shot in the cabin’s pitch black and now dense black powder smoke filling the interior, Iron Hand grabbed the next Indian beginning to charge through the open doorway just illuminated by the three just-fired pistol shot flashes and the two of them crashed into the back wall of the cabin with a hard THUMP! Iron Hand could feel a tomahawk in the Indian’s upraised hand, grabbed it from the still surprised Indian and split his head clear down to the man’s first neck vertebrae! When the head was split open with such force, Iron Hand’s face was heavily splashed with blood and brains, as the tomahawk’s handle busted off in his hand because such tremendous downward force had been used by the adrenalin-fueled trapper when he struck!
Then the third Indian who had stumbled over the first one through the doorway and had also fallen to the floor, rose and fired his pistol in the darkness at where he figured Iron Hand was standing. Iron Hand felt the burning hot sensation as the bullet churned through his previously damaged cheek skin from his first fight back at the cave with a Blackfoot’s tomahawk a year earlier. That same bullet also burned off a sizeable portion of hair from Iron Hand’s heavily whiskered face. Feeling the rise of fury he had felt during that first battle with the Blackfoot back at the cave, Iron Hand reached out where he had last seen his Indian adversary in the flash of his firing pistol, and grabbed a portion of the man’s buckskin shirt. Jerking the Indian into him, Iron Hand kneed him in the groin and when the severely damaged man bent over in pain, another hard knee to the man’s head violently snapped it back, breaking his neck and killing him instantly in the process!
BOOMBOOMBOOM! went three almost deafening blasts inside the cabin from the other trappers’ Hawken rifles, now that they had ‘run dry’ with their pistols. In the lightning-like brilliance from three rifles going off a
t the same instant in such close quarters, Iron Hand just saw part of another Indian trying to come through the door, only now flying backwards and out through the door frame! His three friends, not being able to see individual Indians coming through the door in the cabin’s darkness, knew where its opening was roughly located and were just firing blindly whenever another screaming savage came through the narrow doorway, and being in a ‘fatal funnel of fire’, that savage also joined the Cloud People in their land of eternity…
Finally, the last of the attackers burst through the open doorway, yelling to the high heavens in the emotion of the moment, realizing he was going into a fierce battle with the trappers based on all the sounds of battle ongoing from within the cabin’s walls. His yelling was quickly drowned out, as Iron Hand’s quickly retrieved Hawken sent him off to the Happy Hunting Grounds to join the rest of his recent brethren who had been foolish in attacking the trappers in their cabin...
Then utter silence and the acrid smell of burned black powder flowing outward from the open cabin doorway now rent the air from the attacking Indian side of the doorway. “Think we got ’em all?” yelled Crooked Hand.
“Don’t know,” said Iron Hand, as he fumbled for his possibles bag in the darkness so he could reload his Hawken in case there was more danger yet to come in the form of hostile Indians bursting through the cabin’s narrow doorway.
Soon, the other men could also be heard quickly reloading their rifles in the darkness without uttering a word. They jointly figured that to say something would mean any other remaining attackers could echolocate onto anyone inside the cabin by the reloading sounds or their voices, and blindly shooting in that direction. So the reloading quietly continued, as the heavy smell of burned black powder filled the air and made seeing anything of the attackers because of the heavy smoke in their cabin and the surrounding darkness outside the open doorway, impossible! However, the men now took up better defensive positions other than their beds and quietly waited for more attackers to show themselves through the open doorway... Attackers who would soon join the other Cloud People if they decided to unwisely enter through the narrow cabin door frame.
Come the dawn when the men could finally safely see, they got a firsthand look at the carnage around them. Inside and out of the cabin lay eight dead Indians! Indians later identified as Gros Ventre by Old Potts because of the clothing they were wearing. However, no more Gros Ventre could be seen anywhere at or near their cabin. Later as the four men cautiously left the protection of their cabin’s heavy log walls and took a look around, it appeared they had been attacked by a small party of Gros Ventre, who had apparently either witnessed the trappers setting beaver traps the day before or had smelled their wood smoke from their previous evening’s cooking fire. Those Indians had waited until dark, after ‘cold tracking’ through either sight or smell the men back to their cabin and when they figured the trappers were sound asleep, they had viciously attacked.
Had it not been for one of their kind being a light sleeper, the Indians may have succeeded in killing the lot of them as they slept. Iron Hand later ‘cold tracked’ their Indian attackers with Crooked Hand as his backup and discovered where they had hidden their horses. There were only eight horses staked out, so the men figured they had killed the entire group of Indians that had found them out and had attacked them from the night before.
When Old Potts heard that news, he was more than pleased. “That means none of them red devils escaped and that also means we will not have to worry about any of their kind that got away, telling the others back in their village and bringing back more of their kind to do us in,” he said through his heavily whiskered grin.
“Yeah, but what do we do with all of their bodies? We just can’t go out and bury them. If we do, the wolves and grizzly bears will sure as shooting just dig them up and then the rest of the Gros Ventre looking for those eight warriors will eventually discover what happened to them. When that happens and it will, they will then go on the warpath looking for those who did their brethren in,” said Iron Hand, as he nursed the skin on his bullet-creased cheek with the application of some bear grease in order to close up the slight wound.
“You are right,” said Old Potts. “We need to find a way to make them just plain disappear so their killing cannot be tracked back to us and our campsite. ’Cause if we don’t and those red devils get their hands on us realizing we were the ones doing the killing of their kin, what they will do to us will not be ‘purdy’. Maybe if we toss them into the river, they will wash down to the Missouri and then we be rid of the problem as they continue washing downriver to the south,” he continued, with just a lilt of hope in the tone and tenor of his voice.
“I got an idea that should keep them off our trail and onto us and what we did,” said Iron Hand. With that, he shared his plan with his friends and with a number of heavily whiskered grins from his partners, approved the rather oddball but guaranteed to work plan, if they could pull it off and ‘the buffalo would help’ with a little cooperation.
An hour later found the four trappers trailing eight Indian horses westward out onto the open prairie. As they went led by Iron Hand, the men passed numerous small herds of feeding and resting buffalo, which figured highly into their plans for disposal of the eight Indian bodies now being carried over the backs of their own horses. After an hour of riding around and still trailing the unshod Indian horses behind the trappers’ shod ones to confuse anyone running across their tracks, Iron Hand finally said, “I think this is the spot I am looking for. This small valley lying to the front of us will be perfect for what I want it to do. It forms a perfect funnel out onto the plains below and should work if we can get the buffalo to cooperate. Let us take the eight bodies and scatter them out on a line for about a half-a-mile down through this funnel-like valley like they were killed while hunting buffalo. You know, like a buffalo stampede got the better of them and caused the men to lose their lives. Big Foot, you take these two horses and run them out along the line of dead men we are going to leave all spread out like they were killed while running the buffalo. Then somewhere along the line of bodies, kill both horses and let them lie there with their bridles and saddles in place. That way, it will look like those horses were killed when their riders were trying to shoot some buffalo as well. When we lay these bodies out on a line like they were running the buffalo, we also need to make sure their rifles and everything else they owned are laid out there with them just like it would be in normal life. They need to look like they died while hunting buffalo to anyone who comes to investigate the remains. Because if they look all normal-like, then the searching Gros Ventre will be satisfied that they died naturally like occurs on many an Indian hunt of buffalo and they will not suspect foul play by any white man. Now, let us get this done as quickly as we can so we can cover our tracks and deed like I explained earlier.”
After the men had disposed of the bodies as Iron Hand had instructed and Big Foot had killed the two horses like the buffalo had done them in, the men still trailing the rest of the unshod Indian horses behind them to cover their shod horses’ tracks, returned to the large buffalo herd Iron Hand had spotted earlier feeding at the head of their small valley. Coming in behind the large herd of quietly feeding buffalo, the four trappers, still trailing the Indians’ unshod horses in order to cover their shod horses’ hoofprints, sent the buffalo onto a full-blown stampede towards the small funnel-like valley Iron Hand had selected as their cover story holding the Indians’ bodies. Soon the large herd of stampeding buffalo had picked up numerous other smaller herds of buffalo and all of them were now running in the direction that Iron Hand had planned. As the buffalo were stampeded along, they were directed down the small funnel-like valley where the dead Gros Ventre and their two horses had been laid out in a line like they had been hunting the shaggy beasts the day before and had run afoul of a buffalo stampede.
Once the four trappers had the buffalo lined out and running like they wanted, the men fired off their
guns behind the running buffalo, sending them into a full-blown panic. Herding them along down through the small valley, the charging herd ran right over all the dead Indians and their two horses, making it look like the men had been careless in their hunting tactics and the buffalo had gotten the better of their antagonists... All that was left once the buffalo had stampeded through the small valley, was muddy, buffalo hoofprinted soil and human mush where the eight men and two of their horses had been laid to their final rest, just like Iron Hand had planned.
Then still trailing the remaining six Indian horses behind their shod horses, Iron Hand led the men to the Poplar River and walked their horses into the water where there was a strong enough current to erase all evidence of their horses’ shod tracks. With that, the six Indian horses were released to run wild on the open prairie like they had escaped the buffalo stampede unlike their masters.
Moving out from the river’s current further upstream, the four trappers then returned to their secluded cabin for some much-needed rest and a good supper, topped off with several cups of strong rum to celebrate their continued existence in the world of the living... However, they also celebrated Big Foot’s ingenious narrow door-opening design, allowing the entry of just one man at a time and his clever use of an extra high board below the door’s sill. A board meant to trip the unwary of its presence and thereby giving any sleeping inhabitants a second chance at survival if they were attacked in their sleep...
For the next two weeks, the trappers ran their extensive trap line without incident. The men now remained extra vigilant suspecting once the eight Gros Ventre members were missed, they would have some friends out looking for them. However, except for the ever-extensive herds of buffalo at every turn on the prairie, all was quiet on the hunting grounds of the dreaded Gros Ventre.
