Frozen Prairie

By Kelly Jacobs

From the mountains and the valleys, they came to Texas for a new start, for freedom and for liberty. They didn’t settle for anything less. From the Great Smoky Mountains, a young Tennessean hunter came west in search of personal freedom. What he got was so much more. After meeting a struggling family of foreigners, David helps them along and their eldest son helps himself to the fresh meat. They share each other’s bodies and make each other’s Christmas truly meaningful, even though the threat death by a renegade Comanche war party.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eXtasy Books Inc
• Release date: Feb 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781554878819

Kelly Jacobs

Kelly Jacobs is kind of a mystery. No one knows Kelly's real identity, or even if Kelly really exists. So far, according to the writer's half-naked blog, it is generally believed the writer is in Parts Unknown or Texas, which ever. Maybe also be a communist... alert Hoover.

Book preview

From the mountains and the valleys, they came to Texas for a new start, for freedom and for liberty. They didn’t settle for anything less. From the Great Smoky Mountains, a young Tennessean hunter came west in search of personal freedom. What he got was so much more.

After meeting a struggling family of foreigners, David helps them along and their eldest son helps himself to the fresh meat. They share each other’s bodies and make each other’s Christmas truly meaningful, even though the threat death by a renegade Comanche war party.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Frozen Prairie

Copyright © 2011 Kelly Jacobs

ISBN: 978-1-55487-881-9

Cover art by Angela Waters

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

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Smashwords Edition

Frozen Prairie

By

Kelly Jacobs

Dedication

To the men of the Alamo, to Sam Houston and to all those brave enough to not take orders.

Chapter 1

As the sights on his rifle lined up to perfection, David eyed his target. The scrawny deer was maybe forty or fifty yards away. As his finger gently pressed down on the trigger, the flint leapt to the frizzen and the heavy forty caliber lead ball jumped to its target.

David lowered his muzzle-loader to spot the deer and saw it run a few yards, then drop. The vultures jumped immediately into action. That wouldn’t do. He had walked for five miles to spot a deer and he wasn’t going to let a buzzard have his dinner.

David started running with a mad dash to the food that lay on the ground. As soon as he had the deer in sight, a big black buzzard landed down near the carcass. It spread its wings, lowered its head and gave a sour hiss. David used his backup plan. He pulled out his knife and stared in outrage at the buzzard looming on his future meal.

With arms flailing and a yell like a madman that he would be embarrassed to perform in public, David charged at the buzzard. They were evidently terrified at the reaction, both the maker and the receiver.

Before David could get near the buzzard, the old bird hopped away across the short grass, looking as though his pride was damaged and his mind was baffled.

David stopped at the carcass, huffing for breath and probably more shocked than the buzzard. After the surprise of the situation wore thin, he set to camp. He whistled for his horse, who didn’t come. It wasn’t that the horse wasn’t there, it was just that the horse was either deaf or apathetic. David wasn’t sure which.

The gray mare stood, waiting patiently, for David to be done with fooling around and take her back to the tent for some grain and salt. He picked up the deer carcass by its hind legs and carried it back to the horse.

After David tossed the carcass across the blanket and leather pad, which he used in place of a legitimate saddle, he set off for his temporary home. It was just a small log cabin fifty miles south of Waco, in a stretch of homesteads.

He had purchased a few hundred acres after trading away an Indian trade musket and handing over a few silver pesos to make up the difference on the bill, and had plans to start a small farm. He lived off the land and was mostly self-sufficient. He hoped to start peddling his trade as a carpenter in the future, managing to get a few extra dollars when he needed it.

His rifle was the only thing he had to protect himself. If he had the money, he would have gotten another rifle, but in the republic, money was the rarest of all luxuries.

His linen and wool clothing had worn out long ago, the work of thorn bushes, hard falls and other such knocks had taken away the fabric piece by piece. He had replaced the articles with bucked deer hides cut close to the way his old clothes had looked, only with fringe at every seam.

The buckskins, somewhat similar to his old clothing, lacked the familiar appearance. He wore moccasins that he learned to make from a Caddo farmer, who he thanked with a deer carcass. Shoes were hard to get on the frontier and boots were unheard of.

His body was young, trim and hard with tough muscle, due to the harsh environment that surrounded him. He had grown up in a hard world, but in the smile he often wore and the warmth within his mind, was his resistance to the cold and unfeeling world.

Through the woods and bushes, David made his way to the cabin he’d set up. He hadn’t been robbed yet, but with an influx of new and strange people in Texas, he kept close to camp. A small wagon, a pair of Mexican burros, and two horses made up the rest of his major possessions.

A hunter from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, David had set out to settle a small swatch of land and eventually send his family news that they had a new parcel of land to clear and farm. But even if it was a justifiable and honorable lot in life, it wasn’t what he wanted.

David longed to explore the deep wilds of the distant frontier and see all that the new world had to offer. He had heard tale of a mountain stretch that had bears twice as tall as a man and with claws the size of daggers. He had also heard of buffalo herds up north in the Black Prairie that spread so far across the earth that the grass was enveloped in a solid black blanket of wooly bulls and cows.

His heart was full of wanderlust, but he knew that his chance to be part of the new Texas was yet to come. He was a foreigner in a strange land, a far sight from America. He was an illegal immigrant in land Mexico still thought they owned, but luckily, Mexico really didn’t care. The Comanche and the high society of Mexico City kept the elite of the Mexican empire busy enough where he was safe from the end of a bayonet, or so he thought.

David neared his camp, saw his white canvas tent and hobbled burros. He smiled at the feeling that there was at least a tiny refuge for him in a terrifying land of Comanche raids and near constant war.

As David started on his journey to Texas, he crossed paths with the Comanche only once, and it was enough. As he rode along the prairie, he recalled the happening as if it were only yesterday.

An old slave had gone with his master, an inept thrill seeker, in the soulless land of north Texas. The Comanche had tortured the slaveholder to death and decided to sell the slave to smugglers, but the old gentleman escaped when the Comanche were asleep and made his way blindly in the night toward the nearest light he saw.

David had never been so alarmed in his life at the sight of the terrified man who begged for protection. The five Comanche came within one hundred yards of the tent before a ball from David’s rifle plowed a hole into the skull of a screeching warrior and sent him on a short ride to the dirt below.

The Comanche didn’t want the slave to escape. Slaves were walking money to them. They rode full speed to the tent, hoping to kill David before he could reload his rifle. They didn’t know that David was the fastest loader in his county, nor did they know about David’s pistols.

The Comanche screamed at him as they came toward him, arrows flying through the air like lightning bolts. David tossed the rifle and his bag to the slave and ordered