Whiteout! Read online

  Whiteout!

  Henry Mullins, a young cowboy from Southern California, sits back and watches the woman he loves marry someone else. That’s when he decides to leave and ride off into the great unknown.

  Intending to get to Los Angeles, he is forced inland by marauding Mexican bandits and eventually into the Sierra Nevadas, where he starts to trap wild animals to stay alive. Coming across a bi-annual meeting of trappers, he begins to learn the tricks of the trade and takes up trapping seriously.

  Attacked by wolves, bears and the elements, Henry gradually learns the art of survival. And then he comes across a teepee with a beautiful squaw and her dying grandfather inside. Henry’s life begins to change.

  Winter sets in high in the mountains, Henry’s first. And it turns out to be the biggest battle Henry has ever faced.

  By the same author writing as Ben Ray

  Sharper

  Sharper: Avenging Gun

  Angel of Death: Sharper

  Sharper’s Revenge

  Hell Riders

  Sharper’s Quest

  Yellow Streak

  Gunslingers

  The Plains Killers

  A Rolling Stone

  Badge of Office

  Black Smith

  Mountain Trail

  Hell on Horseback

  Writing as Adam Smith

  Money Thicker Than Blood

  Death Came Calling

  Stolen Fortunes

  Writing as D.D. Lang

  Woebegone

  Last Stop Liberty

  Death Storm

  Burnout!

  Deadly Venom

  Blood Money

  Writing as Will Black

  Avenger from Hell

  Tombstone Scarlet

  The Legend of Broken Saddle

  Death Comes Easy

  Blood River

  Writing as Del R. Doyle

  Showdown at Ghost Creek

  Blood at Ghost Creek

  Rustlers at Ghost Creek

  Ghost Creek Renegades

  Whiteout!

  Jay D. West

  ROBERT HALE

  © Jay D. West 2018

  First published in Great Britain 2018

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2733-4

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.bhwesterns.com

  Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press

  The right of Jay D. West to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This one is for my beautiful grandchildren

  Ellie, James, Reuben and Grace

  with love

  CHAPTER ONE

  The last of the dying sunlight reflected off the bright red and yellow leaves of the scattered maples, sending beams of light like bright fingers into the dark woodland floor below. Henry Mullins stretched his lean frame and eased the aches and pains that filled his muscles and joints. The day had, as ever, been long and hard. Setting the traps in the morning and, hopefully, finding them all full come sundown, meant an evening of skinning and stretching and packing pelts ready for the bi-annual trip to the fur emporium near Walker Pass at the southern end of the Yosemite Valley. Henry sat staring at Half-Dome, a smooth, granite mountain that had been sliced in two by a glacier, the same glacier that had dug out Yosemite Valley and raised the mountains skyward creating waterfalls and altering the course of rivers. The sheer, rock wall of the strange-looking mountain never ceased to fascinate Henry. One day, he knew, he’d have to climb it just for the hell of it.

  Winter was coming and there wasn’t a thing Henry could do about that. Autumn usually lasted a week – ten days at the most, then the snows came, the rivers froze over and he’d be hunting white fur, getting that ready for the Spring trip.

  The beaver had been plenty that summer, but the mountains were filling up with men. There was a time when Henry could go a whole year without seeing a single, living soul except at the Trading Post. Now, the mountains were crawling with men eager to trap the beaver for its valuable fur.

  It had taken Henry nearly a whole year to discover why there were more and more trappers. It was all down to the sea otter, or rather, the lack of them. The otter had all but been extinct. Henry had heard tales of otters in rafts or schools of up to a hundred animals being killed in a matter of hours. They were killing them quicker than the otter could pup. The way things were going, the beaver would follow suit and then, maybe, the buffalo, too.

  There was no way Henry could use all the meat left after skinning, and it grieved him to waste it. He kept what he needed, salting away meat for the winter in secret hidey-holes so that if worst came to worst, at least he’d have food when the snows came. The rest he left for the buzzards and mountain lions.

  Henry was an entrepreneur, a free trapper. Not for him the restrictions of being what was commonly called engagers, men who were supplied and salaried by a major fur-trading company, neither was he a sharecropper, a man who operated on credit advanced by a company. No, Henry was a free man, but he had his doubts as to how long that would last.

  Henry hadn’t always been a trapper. In his youth, he’d been a farmer, a cattle roper and brander, fence builder, bronco buster – you name it, Henry had done it. Worked in a general store way down south near San Diego, but, there was never enough excitement for him.

  He’d fallen in love and sat back, watching as she married someone else. That was when Henry decided to move on.

  Leaving the rooming-house he’d spent six years at, six years in which he’d grown from youth to man, Mrs O’Reilly, the landlady, always treated him like a son and saw his departure as a betrayal – her little bird fleeing the nest.

  Henry felt bad about it, but there was no way he could stay. At twenty-four years of age, Henry’s possessions were packed up in two saddle-bags. Not much to show for a life, he’d mused.

  Heading north from San Diego, he tried keeping to the coastline, his aim was Los Angeles and then maybe up to San Francisco or Sacramento. Mexican bandits forced him inland where the air was clammy and the temperature too hot for his liking, but he had little alternative.

  Riding due east, it wasn’t long before Henry had his first proper taste of the desert; the Mojave Desert. A great, yellow, barren area where it seemed impossible that anything could survive, let alone live there.

  But he was wrong.

  It didn’t take Henry long to discover that the seemingly lifeless desert was teeming with wildlife.

  Scorpions, rattlesnakes, sidewinders, lizards the like of which he never knew existed; wolves, coyotes and tracks of an even larger animal, that he shuddered to think what it was.

  The days of riding had been torturous, the heat incessant, the light blinding as the sun reflected off the now almost bleached-white sand and bore into his eyes. Sweat stained his clothing, only to evaporate. Two of his five canteens had already been emptied and Henry hoped he’d find a place to rest up and refill his depleted water supply.

  Naive though he was in the laws of Nature, Henry knew that without water, he’d be dead quicker than crushing a bug under his b
oot.

  His only constant companions were the buzzards that circled overhead. They circled and waited. Henry knew they were waiting on him.

  That first night alone in the desert had been the scariest thing he’d ever done. The wailing of distant coyotes and some not so distant; the bark of what he thought were wolves or prairie-dogs, and the blood-curdling roar of pumas or mountain lions, set his nerves on edge.

  Building a campfire had been easy enough, there was enough dried-out wood and kindling to last a lifetime.

  Once the fire was lit, Henry’s night-vision disappeared; all he could see was black, all he could hear were animal noises.

  His first taste of snake – roasted over an open fire – had made him sick. The second mouthful made him gag, the third he managed to keep down and hardly noticed the rest.

  The white meat kept his belly full and he took a liking to it. So much so, that it didn’t take him long to try a lizard next, but the meat was tougher and had a strange taste, so Henry returned to snake-meat. The nights spent in the desert were freezing. After the heat of the day, the cold took on a sharper edge and no matter how close he got to the campfire, Henry awoke frequently, shivering, his teeth chattering so much his jawbone ached.

  He survived. Henry reached the Sierra Nevada mountain range and that’s when he began trapping.

  First, just for food and clothing, but as the days turned into weeks and the weeks to months, Henry started to keep the pelts of the animals he managed to catch; jack-rabbits, an elk or two and even a puma, as he travelled northwards through the precipitous mountain range.

  Making his own traps from whatever he could find, it was pretty much trial and error until, unexpectedly, he came across a rendezvous point where he met a whole bunch of trappers laden to the gills with fur. It made Henry’s small load look insignificant when he saw the amount these veterans toted.

  At first, the trappers were wary of a stranger in their camp. Solitary men by nature, the only time they congregated was at a rendezvous, usually set up by a fur-trading company, where a buyer would purchase everything they had.

  Bales of beaver pelts were the favourite and Henry wondered how in the hell they caught so many. He had six.

  He was soon recognized as a greenhorn, and that made him safe in their company. Safe to the point where the grizzly trappers passed on some of their time-honoured skills.

  Henry managed to raise thirty-seven dollars from his haul; some of the other men were coming away with the best part of a thousand dollars, more money than Henry had ever seen in his life.

  It was here that Henry learned about the fur trade. About folks called Russians who operated further north, coming out of a place called Alaska, enslaving local Aleut and Kodiak Indians to do their trapping for them, as they lacked the skills. He heard of a strange country called China, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. A country that bought all the fur it could get its hands on and traded back in silk and rare spices.

  Most important of all, Henry bought his first beaver traps and a bottle of castoreum, a liquid that was obtained from beavers which gave off a musky odour that attracted the animal to its death. He also traded his town horse for a mule, reluctantly, but the mule would prove to be a better animal in the mountains.

  Also traded in were Henry’s town clothes. He bought a buckskin hunting shirt, leggings and moccasins. He learned that the fringes weren’t just ornamental, they actually helped shed rain. The buckskin was liberally greased to help with waterproofing and stank to high heaven and back. The Hawken rifle was a bargain. Henry was all for keeping his Sharps breech-loader, but soon saw the error of his ways.

  The Hawken rifle had a shorter barrel and larger bore and the power of its heavy ball could kill a grizzly or a buffalo at up to two hundred yards. Being a percussion rifle, it was ignited by a copper cap – better in rain than a flintlock. Nothing worse, he was told, than being charged down by a grizzly, having it in your sights only for the rain to spoil the powder, and ending up the grizzly’s supper.

  Henry spent nearly a week at the rendezvous before, one by one and without saying a word, the trappers drifted back to their isolation, getting ready for the winter and to start trapping for the next rendezvous.

  There were no written laws of the mountain man’s existence, only the unwritten ones: you don’t steal traps from another trapper, and you don’t hunt in their neck of the woods.

  There was enough killing and robbery going on as it was. A whole year’s supply of pelts could be lost in one unguarded moment.

  So, loaded up with a half-dozen traps, a wooden bottle full of castoreum, some ground pemmican, jerky, a hunting knife, a bag of nuts, the Hawken rifle and ammunition, a Colt Frontiersman with a box of slugs, empty sacks and a mule, Henry set off to hunt in earnest.

  Travelling north, he followed streams and rivers for two or three days. Catching his first deer, he had enough fresh meat to last him for a week, and enough to salt down and stash away.

  The winding river that threaded its way through the mountains, drained out into a long, wide valley and Henry saw the beaver dam and smiled. Now it was time to find out if he remembered all he’d been told.

  Grabbing the sack that contained his traps, Henry walked upstream for half a mile so that the beavers wouldn’t be able to smell him. Using a wooden stake to anchor the heavy, baited traps underwater in what he hoped to be a beaver runway, he smeared castoreum on the stake as he’d been told, and got out of the water, his feet and legs freezing.

  All he had to do now was wait.

  Henry waited and fell asleep; only the insistent braying of the mule woke him up.

  Henry drew his pistol but for the life of him saw nothing to shoot at. He dozed some more and the mule quietened down and continued to graze on the rich grasslands that ran alongside the riverbank.

  Gazing towards the sun, Henry tried to estimate how long he’d been asleep. He hadn’t got a clue. He’d forgotten to sight the sun before he slept!

  Walking upstream again, Henry decided to check on the first trap. Success. His first trapped beaver, dead, having drowned in the water, awaited him.

  Releasing the trap, Henry lifted the animal out of the water, a fine specimen weighing in, he estimated, at fifty or sixty pounds, then tossed it to the riverbank, then re-set the trap. Now to practise skinning.

  Cutting the tail off to use later for food, Henry slit the animal open along the belly from head to tail-less end, allowing the guts to spill out freely. The guts sent up a shower of steam and a foul smell that Henry could well have done without.

  The skin came off the body like butter off a knife and Henry cut off the legs just above the paws and pulled the stumps through, freeing the pelt.

  Fishing through the guts, he found what he hoped to be the castoreum gland and placed it carefully in the deer-hide pouch attached to his belt. All he had to do now was find something he could use as a graining block and clean the pelt’s underside.

  Lifting the pelt, Henry was amazed at how heavy it felt in comparison to the ones he’d caught by shooting them with his Sharps a couple of weeks earlier.

  This is going to be easy, he thought to himself. He was never to utter that sentence again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Trapping beaver did become easier. The heavy, metal traps were the only danger, apart from being attacked by angry beavers of course.

  Setting the traps, coating the fix-stick with castoreum and then waiting became an everyday event and pretty soon, Henry was building up quite a collection of beaver pelts, tails and castoreum glands. Trouble was, he was getting a bit tired of eating tails and beaver meat. He tried every which way of cooking them, boiling, frying, stewing, but the taste was always the same: strong and tough.

  Loneliness was also playing a part in his existence. Although that’s what Henry sought, the reality – only having the mule to talk to – was not an exciting prospect.

  As the summer began to die and the quick spread of autumn permeated the mountains a
nd valleys below, the air became crisper. Henry had spent most of the summer in the valleys by the side of the swift-running river that the beavers continually dammed up, and he’d made only occasional forays up high; he’d seen mountain goats and had tried to catch one for its milk but failed miserably.

  He’d killed another deer and the change in his diet was welcome. Skinning the deer proved harder than the beaver, but he needed the skin to repair his moccasins and he’d also need a shelter for the winter.

  For four months now, Henry had slept each night under the stars; rain had been the biggest problem, the heavy squalls often waking him in the middle of the night and soaking him to the skin. He seemed to be continually wet or damp or both and Henry noticed that some of his joints were getting stiffer each morning, so a shelter for the winter became a priority.

  The skin on his face had gone a deep brown, calluses and blisters covered his hands but they were becoming easier now as the skin toughened, and Henry took to bathing in the fast-flowing waters, using his knife to shave, and then running around like a madman and rolling in the grass to dry off; if anyone had seen him in that state, buck-naked with a white body but deeply-tanned face and hands, they’d’ve skedaddled back to civilization, vowing never more to enter the mountains!

  Fishing was the next thing Henry tried. The river was full of salmon, at least that’s what Henry thought they were. They were certainly big and although he’d never eaten fish in his life, it couldn’t be any worse than deer or beaver and the occasional handful of nuts and berries that had so far supplemented his diet.

  Cutting a sapling, Henry made a spear by whittling down one end and, standing thigh-deep in the cold water, he waited for a fish to swim by.

  He didn’t have long to wait. Time and again he thrust the makeshift spear into the water, but each time he missed. Getting the angle right was the biggest problem, the water seemed to distort how far away the fish were, they to be within touching distance of the spear, but Henry just kept right on missing.