A Yondering

By Darrel Bird

Jason Allen heads west from the Clinch Mountains of Tennessee , and these are his adventures during the time the west is being settled. When he leaves the Mountains of Tennessee, he has his rifle and his mule. Trouble soon begins to loom in his path as he makes his way to the Wyoming territories.

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The author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darrel Bird
• Release date: Nov 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310089015

Darrel Bird

Darrel Bird has written and published 47 short stories. He attended Bakersfield college, and is an avid motorcyclist.

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A Yondering

by Darrel Bird

Copyright 2014 by Darrel Bird

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In the dim light before dawn, I slammed the door hard enough to shake the rafters. I was aiming to wake my older brother Jedediah, knowing he would come tearing out of the back bedroom where he slept with his rifle in hand, which he did.

What's all the racket?

Time to get up, Jed; daylight's a comin'.

I ought to shoot you with this rifle. He said this, wiping sleep from his eyes.

What you ought to do is make biscuits. I made them yesterday.

What you made yesterday wasn't biscuits; they were rocks. Jason, you really goin' yondering?

I reckon I am. Since Ma and Pa died and there's just the two of us, I aim to leave you and Linda Barnsley something to live on.

We ain't married yet, and it doesn't seem right for you to leave because of that anyhow.

You asked her, and she agreed; I've got to go saddle the mule and get going.

It just doesn’t seem right; I wish you would stay; Pa left this place to the both of us.

I want to see the western lands that Uncle Ed always talked about. I got me a good mule and a hunting rifle, so don’t you worry about me. I am going to drop down to Asheville to hand you clear title to the land, and then I’ll be on my way.

Then there is no stopping you.

Nope.

I know Jed didn’t care for it too much, but I had a powerful hankering to see lands I hadn’t laid eyes on, although I would miss my brother. Our folks had hacked the farm out of pure wilderness but had gotten along with the Cherokee. My family had come over by ship from Ireland before the war of 1775–1783 and, after the war, kept moving west until they settled in the Clinch Mountains of Tennessee. My great-great-grandpa Bernard Allen felt he had gone far enough to stay out of everybody’s way.

There was a passel of Allens in the mountains. I had cousins galore come over to Virginia. Folks referred to us mostly as them wild Clinch Mountain boys, I guess because we Allens ran to boys who mostly staid close to home. What girls there were married quickly, disappeared into other families like a skunk down a skunk hole, and didn’t come back around except for Sunday dinner or election time down at Asheville.

There was some low-land Allen’s I’d heard of, but our boys mostly ran to the long hunt. They just sort of faded out of the woods, and then when the doin’ was done, they faded back in again. sometimes never to be heard from again. An awful lot of things can happen to a man who spends most of his time in the woods.

I reckon I took after them because I was at home in the woods, along the forest trails, creeks, and rivers. My mother used to say that if it weren’t for the woods, I wouldn’t have any place to stay at all. One thing in our favor was that if any one of us was in trouble, the rest would come running. I remember an incident where a family by the name of Jergens started a scuffle with a couple of us Allens down at Asheville, figuring to lessen our clan. The Clinch Mountain Allens came down out of those mountains like peaches falling off a tree at first frost. The Jergens bunch backed up and went home.

Jed begged me to stay until the next morning, which was the 1st day of