Jubal Sackett (1985) (43 page)

My pistol was ready, and I waited my chance. The roaring of the bull and the trumpetlike blasts from the mammoth were deafening. Now they faced each other again, and Paisano was dwarfed by the mammoth. Moving carefully, I started to work myself around to one side to get in a shot. Paisano had come to my rescue and I could not desert him now. Suddenly Komi was beside me, gripping a spear.

"Get away from here," I said. "You'll be killed!"

"If you die I shall die with you. I can use a spear."

Blood dripped from Paisano's nostrils. He shook his huge head and began moving forward, warily, like a boxer moving in on an opponent. The great beast swung to face him, and then the mammoth seemed to see me for the first time. With a blast from his great throat, he charged. Holding steady I aimed for his eye and squeezed off my shot, using my left hand to steady the barrel.

Paisano swung his head and lunged, smashing the mammoth again in the side, where the leg joined the body. He struck with terrific impact, and the mammoth staggered and fell.

It struggled to rise, blood running from the eye socket, for a dread moment I thought the beast would rise, but it failed at last and sank down. Again it tried to rise, and mercilessly, Paisano charged, striking the monster in the head.

"Paisano!No! "

Many times I had yelled, but this time he seemed to hear me and he stopped, lowering his great head. Blood dripping in great, slow drops, he watched for his enemy to move. Now, no more than twenty feet from the mammoth, I could see the cause of its fury, its vicious attack.

It had been hurt. There was an arrow imbedded in its shoulder, and a great festering wound was there.

"Paisano. It is all right. Come now."

He would not move. Head lowered, he watched the mammoth, ready for it to rise.

Walking over I put a hand on his shoulder. "It is all right now, Paisano. It is finished. Come!"

Slowly, reluctantly, he turned and followed. Once he stopped and looked back, head up, peering. The mammoth lay where it had fallen, head up, but whether alive or dead I did not know.

As we sighted our camp a man was coming from it with a spear in his hand. I dropped my hand to the pistol, but he lifted a hand and called out.

It was Unstwita.

"You came back!"

"I say I come. I come."

"Alone?"

"Four other come. They come to walk behind Daughter of the Sun. To guard."

Five more, and that made eight fighting men. Five more to feed, but five more to hunt.

With water from the creek I bathed the long gash on Paisano's side. It was not deep. A nostril was torn. He had come from his fight in good shape. Rubbing his ears, I talked to him, softly. He rubbed his head against me.

Unstwita walked over to see the mammoth. The huge hairy monster had died where he had fallen, his head up, braced by his tusks.

He was huge, but old. Had he been alone, or were there others like him close-by? I had seen no tracks. Perhaps he had been migrating, searching for others of his kind. There was compassion in me for the great beast. How must it feel to be alone, with no others of your kind anywhere?

Perhaps there were others, but they were being hunted out of existence. Each had too much meat to offer, and the Indians had learned how to kill them. Someday I would tell the story of this monster, but who would believe me? It had coarse, shaggy hair as Keokotah had said, and which I had not believed. He was a fugitive, probably, from some much colder place.

Komi was beside the fire. She held out a cup of the coffee, which had not quite bubbled away. "Drink," she said, and I drank.

We stood together and looked up at the mountains that towered above us. Someday soon I would go up there. I had a feeling something waited for me, something I must find. There were caves up there, perhaps more than were known.

Long ago a voice in a cave had seemed to say, "Find them!" And something within me said that what I was to find was here, close-by.

My arm went about the waist of Itchakomi Ishaia. Perhaps this was what I was to find. Whether or no, I was content.

"Do you remember," I asked, "long ago when you told me of a dream you had? Of a boy who spoke to a bear? A bear with a splash of white on his face?"

"I remember."

"I was that boy."

"I know," she said.

The aspen leaves made a slow dance in the sunlight. A brief wind stirred the ashes of our fire.

"It grows late," Unstwita said. "We must go."

We stood, waiting a little, reluctant to leave. Unstwita said, "The Ponca woman has found your yellow earth. She will show you."

"Tomorrow we will come back for the tusks," I told Unstwita.

Now there were shadows in the valley, but sunlight on the mountain. My eyes followed a dim trail upward into the peaks where lay the secret lakes, the caves I must explore, and what else?

"Find them!"The voice had said.

Were "they" up there now, waiting?

Between Itchakomi and Paisano, I started walking back. Unstwita lingered, drinking the last of the coffee.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

There are seventeen other completed novels featuring members of the various Sackett generations. Readers interested in learning more about Jubal's mother and father, Barnabas and Abigail, and his brothers, Kin-Ring, Yance, and Brian, and sister, Noelle, can readSackett's Land, To the Far Blue Mountains, andThe Warrior's Path.

Succeeding Sackett generations are developed in these books, listed in more or less chronological order, starting with:Ride the River, which tells the story of Echo Sackett, the youngest female descendant of Kin-Ring, andThe Daybreakers andSackett, which begin the story of Tell, Orrin and Tyrel Sackett, the brothers who follow the trails blazed by their forefathers to help settle the west. Other novels featuring the Sackett brothers and their cousins of the same generation areLando, Mojave Crossing, The Sackett Brand, The Lonely Men, Treasure Mountain, Mustang Man, Galloway, The Skyliners, The Man From the Broken Hills, Ride the Dark Trail, andLonely on the Mountain.

In the near future, I'm planning to fill in additional portions of the Sackett family saga, including the story of the Sacketts in the Revolutionary War and Tell Sackett's early experiences in the Tennessee mountains and his service in the Sixth Cavalry during the Civil War.

Listed below are some additional points of interest about selected people and events written about inJubal Sackett:

GRASSY COVE:The place where Jubal broke his leg and survived until Keokotah returned for him is a lovely spot. Jubal intended future Sacketts to locate there, only a few miles from the Crab Orchard area where Barnabas met his death.

MAMMOTH, MASTODON, etc.:According to scholars mammoths died out around 6000 B.C. Nonetheless, American Indians record hunting and killing them. One such report occurs in the Bureau of Ethnology reportThe Ponca Tribe . Returning from their "long hunt" west to the Rockies, the Poncas saw a mammoth, as well as what was probably a giant ground sloth, near what is now Niobrara, Nebraska.

David Thompson, the distinguished Hudson's Bay Co. explorer, on January 7, 1811, came upon some tracks near the Athabasca River in the northern Rockies which the Indians told him were those of a mammoth. The Indians had assured him the animal was to be found there. Many Indian tribes had accounts of seeing or hunting the mammoth.

Near Moab, at Hys Bottom close to the Colorado River, there is a petroglyph of a mastodon. And in the Four Corners area near Flora Vista a small boy found two slabs on which were carved many glyphs, including pictures of two elephants. They have been called fakes, which is the most convenient way of getting rid of something that does not fit current beliefs.

PRINCE MADOC:Prince Madoc's existence is doubted by many (not by me), and much has been written from time to time. Perhaps the best account isMadoc, and the Discovery of America, by Richard Deacon.

ROMAN COINS:Several Roman coins have been found in Tennessee, Ohio, and Kentucky. Comments on these are made in Judge Haywood'sNatural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. This history covers white settlements up to 1768 and was published in 1823. Haywood also comments on burials of bodies with blue eyes and auburn hair, wrapped in hides and left in caves.

TENNESSEE:Ramsey, in hisAnnals of Tennessee, says: "At the time of its first exploration, Tennessee was a vast and almost unoccupied wilderness--a solitude over which an Indian hunter seldom roamed, and to which no tribe put in a distinct and well-defined claim."

One hundred years before Daniel Boone, James Needham was sent into Tennessee to explore the possibilities of trade, traveling there in 1673. He had been sent by a trader, Abraham Wood, whose previous expedition in 1671 had provided too little information. With Needham was a young indentured servant, Gabriel Arthur, who was left behind to learn the Cherokee language.

About the Author

"I think of myself in the oral tradition -- of a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered -- as a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his "yondering" days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could talk." After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel,Hondo , in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

His hardcover bestsellers includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe Haunted Mesa . His memoir,Education of a Wandering Man , was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L'Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties -- among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .

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