Iron Medicine

By Richard B. Brady

Spurred to vengeance by the murder of his cousin, a young man declares war on the beaver trappers encroaching into Blackfoot Country. Iron Medicine is the story of his war, his People, and his enemies. It occurs at the turn of the 19th Century, when Americans began manifesting their destinies on native Peoples of the new Louisiana Territory.

The story’s multiple perspectives include an American gunsmith, an African slave, and a Blackfoot woman who are caught up in a war to turn back the flood of beaver trappers who followed Lewis & Clark to the Rocky Mountains.

Two worlds collide when the line between savage and civilized disappears among beaver trappers determined to exploit at all costs the sacred beaver of the Blackfoot People.

In the early 1800s, beaver fur was one of the most valuable commodities on earth and gunsmiths were among the most important craftsmen in America. The gunsmith Hugh McGarity takes the chance of a lifetime and leaves civilization to venture into the heart of the new American frontier. Along the way, he discovers the reverence placed upon his skills by frontiersmen and Indians alike.

Iron Medicine chronicles a rare moment in American history when Native American’s held the upper hand. The story unfolds through the viewpoints of McGarity, the African slave Clement, and the Blackfoot woman Many Tongues.

Many Tongues is enslaved by her People’s enemies and during her captivity she learns French, the trader’s tongue. She becomes part of a Padouca camp whose leader agrees to help McGarity and his companions reach the beaver-rich waters flowing down from the Rocky Mountains. Among the party is Clement, a slave whose duties include making the charcoal so necessary to a gunsmith’s forge.

If you are weary of tales ending with a cavalry rescue, Iron Medicine should be on your reading list.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Brady
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578689012

Book preview

IRON MEDICINE

Richard B. Brady

Iron Medicine is a work of fiction. Everything, even the few historical names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents, all sprouted from the author’s imagination.

Copyright © 2020 Richard B. Brady

First Edition

ISBN: 978-0-578-68901-2

Cover Design by Elizabeth Mackey

To Diane, the love of my life, my muse, my wife, my collaborator, the believer who enabled this pursuit of adventure in words. Diane enthusiastically gave her ideas and heart to the story and her unquenchable enthusiasm and belief pushed us when I lost the focus. And in the end, Diane pulled me across the finish line.

Table of Contents

1 Matriarch

2 Vision Quest

3 A New Name

4 A Craftsman’s Fate

5 The Old Spaniard

6 Captive Spirits

7 Fate

8 Strong Medicine

9 Drama & Destiny

10 Beyond the Frontier

11 Raging Currents

12 Strangers

13 Savage Grandeur

14 Hard Bargain

15 Changing Course

16 A Vast Plain

17 Fresh Meat

18 A New Sense of Time

19 Slaves

20 Tested With Fire

21 Trail’s End

22 No Bridge to Burn

23 Vengeance

24 Kinship

25 Unable to Die

26 Smoking Waters

27 A New Tongue

28 Apprentice among Savages

29 Stone Walls

30 Long Nights of Winter

31 The Changes of Spring

32 A Sickness

33 Grand Entrance

34 Survivors

35 Bride Price

36 Mountain Drums

37 Beaver War Trail

38 Thieves

39 A Slave’s Death

40 Homeward

41 Trespassers

42 Blood Lust

43 Naked Truths

44 Homecoming

45 Time of Heavy Snows

46 Hunters and Prey

47 Reunion

48 Bone Cold and Alone

49 Here and Now

50 The Eastern Trail

51 Aged In the Wind

52 Second Guesses

53 Benito’s Fort

54 Trail to Vengeance

55 Ghosts

56 Council

57 Song of the Hammer

58 Too Many Words

59 Nights Without Sleep

60 Ultimatum

61 Beaver Hunters or Bison

62 Devil’s Choice

63 Freedom

64 Iron Mender No More

The only two sensible men in the entire [Lewis & Clark] expedition are the worker of iron and the mender of guns.

Hidatsa Leader, 1805

1 Matriarch

A communal belief possessed her clan—the spring floods would overwhelm them at any moment. She worked at an almost frantic pace beneath the moonlight carrying a rock weighing as much as she did. The Matriarch wedged it against a seep escaping one of the many long structures her ancestors had engineered to hold back the floods. Her mathematical mind knew nothing of numbers or calculations but ten fingers intermingled wood and rock and mud into a barrier much larger and stronger than any one contribution to its whole.

A slow tsunami brought on by the moon of melting ice pressed against the intricately layered monument begun a thousand generations past. Inevitably, the liquid mass found weaknesses in the barriers and erupted fountains along vertical walls pressured by tens of millions of gallons intent in their dance with gravity. Throughout the night and into the day, the matriarch and her family worked to plug breaches one by one and shore up the triangulated buttresses that held back so much weight and power. Leaks were still boundless but skilled engineers minimized the damage and prepared for upcoming moons after the deluge subsided.

The matriarch and her family cut down the water-sucking willows and turned that vertical energy into the horizontal resistance of their dams. The dark hubris of decaying life regenerated in the ponds and enabled plants like tobacco to flourish along the fertile banks in harmony with purple-flowered camas and their nourishing tubers. Moose waded out into the still water and grazed in the lush aquatic vegetation. Fish spawned in the still shallows. A unique chain of life flourished in the wetlands and meadows thriving behind dams created by her People.

During the day, the matriarch’s family slept in a wood-and-earth lodge. In the twilight, they returned to the endless task of delaying water’s magnetic draw to the sea. The matriarch began the evening with a swimming patrol of her territory. Her nose picked up the scent of an unrelated dam builder presumptuous enough to enter her water and the olfactory trail led to a stick hanging from a budding willow. She moved toward it and her front foot jerked back from an uncertain purchase. The water roiled around two iron jaws that snapped her leg with enough force to crush bone. She screamed, she slapped her powerful tail and dove away, desperately trying to shake off a terrifying weight that smashed and agonized her leg. The matriarch swam to deeper water where she could fight with her big teeth capable of felling trees two feet thick.

Her snaking tormentor weighed her down and denied access to air her lungs demanded. Weak and bewildered, the matriarch paddled wildly with her tail and three free legs. She gasped at the surface and sucked in a single whiff of the crisp spring breeze before the trap’s rooted chain halted her in place and dragged her back down. The leg flopped, broken, her foot useless and unfeeling. The matriarch chewed away at her own hide and muscle with jaws made too spastic from lack of air to succeed. Cramped and useless muscles still tried to regain the surface but she could not stop her chest from breathing in again, and again. The murky sediment she kicked up shocked her lungs and the matriarch sank down to the bottom, bewildered eyes staring up through silt-clouded water.

2 Vision Quest

The sizzling darkness burned with every breath that Watches Water in the Moonlight tried to gulp down. The young man blinked sweat-dripping eyes at the faint red glow of a rock heating his cousin’s purification lodge. His pores oozed hot runoffs trickling down his bent back while he tried to think of ways to cool the air before it burnt his nostrils and blew fire through his lungs. Watches Water sat next to the lodge entrance, close enough to pull back the bison hide flap and immerse himself in the air outside. But he refrained. He had a duty to his cousin, Always Rides Too Fast.

Watches Water chanted along with the seeker’s father, Loud Dog Eater, urging Always Rides to find a strong vision of manhood. But inside a mind completely overheated, Watches Water imagined opening the flap and bolting for the cold air. Mustang Thief, older brother of the vision seeker, poured more water on the hot rock near the center of the lodge. The hissing steam immediately sent a boiling shockwave into Watches Water’s already seared lungs, and he felt his eyeballs melting.

Are you ready to leave Mother Earth’s womb? asked Loud Dog Eater through the darkness. More water exploded off the rock and immersed the lodge in steam.

Almost, mumbled the man-soon-to-be.

Watches Water nodded his unwilling chin and tried to calm twitching legs on the brink of mutiny. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the lodge’s willow frame, so hot it sent a spark through his mind that began as the image of white against black tumbling into a redtail hawk swooping down upon a black horse ridden by a silhouette with hooves kicking turf into the air. Mustang Thief splashed more water on the rocks and the steam blasted lightning from the horseman’s hands, sweeping fire across the mountain meadow where Always Rides intended to seek his manhood vision. It all exploded inside his closed eyes and dissolved into a vaporous cloud when he opened them.

Watches Water In The Moonlight! grunted Always Rides. Open the lodge!

Watches Water, only one summer beyond his own manhood quest, pulled back the bison hide and a rush of cool air conquered the suffocating heat. He saw himself racing to the glowing twilight but his legs and body obeyed his duty to remain until the vision seeker emerged from Mother Earth’s steaming womb ready to begin his life anew, as a man.

Watches Water crawled out of the lodge on hands and knees behind Mustang Thief and gratefully regained his legs with help from his uncle. He felt better standing, his body caressed by the freezing air. His companions followed Always Rides to the stream where they ran into the icy current. All air expelled from Watches Water’s lungs and numbness replaced the intense heat. He stood up in the slow-flowing water and stumbled back to the bank. He followed the others up the snow-tamped path to the proud father’s hunting lodge at the mouth of the canyon.

Loud Dog Eater placed a branch in the fire pit that generated faint flames and revealed the smallpox-ravaged face of Walks Slow, grandfather of Always Ride. Old age and battle scars could not mask the horrific torture the great sickness had inflicted on the old man. In the dim firelight, his dark eyes hid far back in their swollen and scarred sockets. Walks Slow was the tobacco man, holder of the thunder medicine bowl of the Smoking Waters camp. The old man lifted to his ready lips a long wooden stem wedged into a bowl carved from red stone. Redtail hawk feathers and scalplocks lashed to the stem floated between his uplifted forearms. The tobacco man inhaled slowly in celebration of the sun and the moon, for the morning star and the earth. When he finished his invocations, the tobacco man lowered the sacred pipe and handed it to his grandson and Always Rides Too Fast, the seeker of manhood, lifted it to his mouth as the tobacco man spoke.

Since the sun has arrived from the east, the Real People have known this land, Walks Slow said. We follow the seasons and the ripening of the earth’s bounties, and have done so as long as bison roamed the high prairies. But in the summers encompassing my lifetime, our world has changed in ways I could never imagine. On the day when I prepared for my manhood vision, the Real People had no horses, no fire arms. We tied our travois to the backs of dogs and moved our camps only a small distance and in the summer we gathered with camps who lived nearby. As hunters, we crept beneath wolf skins hoping to approach the bison and often went to sleep with empty bellies. Now, the son of my son seeks his manhood and the Real People have many horses to race the bison and many fire arms to keep our enemies away. Now our bellies are full and our women give us more warriors every summer.

Always Rides handed the pipe to his father. Loud Dog Eater reverently tapped gray ashes into the fire and refilled the tobacco man’s sacred calumet.

All the prairies belonged to the Real People after we found horses and guns, until the great sickness nearly wiped us out, continued Walks Slow. Those of us who remained alive had no time for war. Entire camps became carcasses for the wolves. Most of us starved or froze to death after surviving such a horrible sickness. My sons and I were lucky and found others who crept away from the camps of the dead, and together we found ways to remain alive. We wept at our ugliness while we washed the blisters and scabs and scratched the scars covering our bodies and faces. Women learned again to sew lodges, men learned where to hunt and when to plant the tobacco. And the People in camps untouched by the sickness gave us their lodges and horses and weapons. They shared with us the secrets of the beaver bundles and tobacco bundles—stories and songs that died with the ones not strong enough to survive our tragedy.

Walks Slow pointed at Loud Dog Eater. My sons became strong again, but there were so few of us. Those remaining among the Real People gathered, and it was decided to make war on the Kalispel and Serpent People when they came out of the mountains to hunt bison. We killed their men and took their horses to strengthen our herds and bred their women to increase our numbers.

Walks Slow pointed at the vision seeker. "And now it is your time, Always Rides Too Fast, to follow the path of manhood leading to summer war trails. But you will not attack the Serpents to steal wives, because other enemies lurk along the frontier of Piikani Country. New strangers have crossed our prairies and spotted our bison and elk, and they kill the beaver. A warrior of the Elk Grease Pemmican People died by the hands of these intruders during the moon of deceiving skies.

And do you remember—yes, at the summer gathering—when Bear Leggins told the story of his red-haired scalp? He spoke of the pale-skinned stranger hunting with the Crow. He spoke of the many hides of beaver stacked high, all killed by just three men. No, when the man returns who was once called Always Rides, he will seek the scalps of others like the red-hair, beings less than dogs who have no conscience and kill without thought.

The sacred calumet went from man to man until Loud Dog Eater handed it back to his son. Always Rides smoked for the last time as a boy.

That night, black horsemen raged through the troubled sleep of Watches Water and ignited the horizon like prairie fires forcing bison toward winter camps. His ghostly apparitions bubbled up out of a mountainous hot springs and stampeded in violent gallop down the canyon on a trail of blazing orange flames. The skeletons on horseback set fire to the timber near his mother’s lodge and he bolted upright, awakening his cousin Mustang Thief.

Black riders come out of the Smoking Waters and attack our camp, Watches Water whispered, unsure of his words even as they left his mouth.

Did they have fire in their eyes? asked his groggy cousin.

They left a trail of fire, yes. Watches Water nodded in the faint glow of the lodge fire’s coals. Did you see them?

No, mumbled Mustang Thief. You only saw them in a dream. It is cold, and tomorrow my brother is going out on his own. Go to sleep. Dawn will be here soon enough.

In the morning, Always Rides gathered his possessions and checked his snowshoes. Mustang Thief pointed up the snow-clogged canyon where his brother hoped to find manhood and medicine. Maybe you should have waited until the moon when the ice breaks in the rivers, he said.

I have prepared for five sleeps, brother, Always Rides replied. To become a noted warrior and skilled hunter, I must have a powerful vision. When I dreamed of this canyon, the pine boughs hung down from the weight of snow. And you found your manhood vision in the moon of deceiving skies. So did our father. A man does not allow a little snow to block his path.

Mustang Thief could not help but smile at his brother’s infectious grin. This summer, after the gathering, we will follow the Arapaho south to the country of the Spaniards and steal many of their proud stallions and mules and take one or two of their scalps, he said, extending his hand to his brother’s shoulder.

Always Rides gripped Mustang Thief in the same fashion, laying his extended arm atop his brother’s. Enough horses to pay for wives, the vision seeker said.

Maybe we will steal some wives also, Mustang Thief said with a nod.

Always Rides turned to his father and shared the same embrace of hands to shoulders. I will find a powerful vision and join a warrior society when I return.

Loud Dog Eater slowly let go of his son. I weep already for the boy who leaves us forever, he said. But I can imagine the great victories ahead for the man I see in your eyes.

Always Rides joined arms with Watches Water. I also had a dream last night, cousin, he said. What do you think of the name Black Horse?

I look forward to calling you that when you return in four sleeps, cousin, Watches Water replied.

3 A New Name

Loud Dog Eater smashed the skull of a mongrel howling against the rain that had begun shortly after Always Rides disappeared from view. He butchered the carcass while the young men gambled over whether there would be any snow remaining when the vision seeker returned. Watches Water displayed horrible luck in the stone game and by the fifth afternoon he owed his cousin Venetian beads, redtail hawk feathers, and an iron-tipped arrow. But the gambling barely masked a growing tension among men who were losing their patience. Silence and brooding dominated an afternoon that gave way to dusk and finally a moonless night warm enough to melt the snow.

Mustang Thief awoke sullen and restless well before dawn. Everyone joined him in checking weapons and saddling horses. The melting snowshoe tracks had doubled in size and led up to a small meadow below the peaks where Loud Dog Eater and Mustang Thief had both found their own visions.

No! Loud Dog Eater screamed at the sight of blood in the snow. He kicked his horse into a gallop toward the skinned carcass of a beaver missing its tail. A beaver, the visionary’s father said, obvious relief in his voice. My son might have needed—

But Mustang Thief erupted in his own wail, falling from his horse and crawling to the motionless, naked body of his brother. Always Rides’ hair was tangled in dried blood except for a hand-sized patch above his forehead that had been hacked away.

Watches Water’s brother, Laughs Often, nudged him and used his chin to point at footprints in the snow. They filled the priming pans of their muskets and pistols before riding slowly and cautiously into the trees. The tracks came from two sets of snowshoes that left the meadow and turned up a low hillside and continued down another drainage. They dismounted at the crest and crept through the snow until they could see into the other canyon. The tracks disappeared on the sun-heated southern slope but a small swirl of smoke along the stream below gave the only sign required.

They returned to the saddle and had almost made it to the trees when two horsemen appeared from the shadows, right out of Watches Water’s dream. Their hands blazed with lightning and projectiles whistled above the brothers’ heads. Laughs Often jumped from the saddle and steadied his musket before pulling the trigger. His shot staggered the horse on the left, sending it head over rump and crushing its rider. Watches Water felt the ground shaking from the other horse’s hooves pounding the earth as it galloped straight at him. He brought his father’s musket to his shoulder and fired, too quick, too soon, and his charging enemy closed in.

Watches Water pushed the musket into its scabbard and his hand glanced over his father’s pistol at his waist. He looked at it, knowing the weapon could not shoot straight at any distance farther than an arm’s length. In a single movement, he grabbed his bow and arrow and strung them together. His mount responded to the rapid nudging of Watches Water’s knees to its ribs and erupted forward.

The shadow became an enemy who tried to pour gunpowder into the pan of his fire arm as his horse skittered between forward gallop and sideways escape. Watches Water stared into the barrel and saw the stranger raise his weapon. A flash of flint and steel exploded the gunpowder. Everything paused in the silence between visual and auditory awareness. The muzzle cascaded flames out the barrel and from that chaos emerged a bullet spinning like a metal arrowhead aimed directly at him. Watches Water leaned hard to the right as the projectile parted the air too close at hand to contemplate. It would never matter that the poor, terrorized beaver hunter had spilled most of his powder and what had made it into the weapon was barely enough to push out the lead. But truly, Watches Water saw the bullet, a living memory, a sign, a vision like no other.

With limbs suddenly relaxed and muscles recharged, both horse and rider surged ahead before the explosion caused its first echo up the canyon. Watches Water hugged his loyal gelding’s neck and together they became a deadly weapon bearing down on a man fumbling with an unwieldy gun and its ramrod. The beaver hunter gave up and reined in his mount. He struggled to turn the horse toward the trees without dropping his weapon and ammunition.

Galloping forward, Watches Water rose in his saddle and delivered an arrow into the stranger’s shoulder. His target cried out in pain and his hands dropped both the fire arm and reins in their attempts to grab at the arrow. Watches Water delivered a second arrow to his back and the horse bolted, leaving its rider cursing in midair and praying on his way to the ground.

The crack of a fire arm resounded from the trees and Watches Water turned back towards Laughs Often, already removing the scalp of his own victim. His older brother grunted and grabbed his left side as his knees gave way. Laughs Often stumbled behind the still-breathing horse and looked down at a dark stain of blood running out of his hunting shirt. He took his wife’s special poultice from his medicine pouch and applied it, grunting in agony when the herbs met the bullet hole.

In a nimble downward tug on the rein knotted to his gelding’s lower jaw, Watches Water pulled his mount to the ground. He went to the body of the first beaver hunter he ever saw and took the unfired pistol from his hand. He jumped back up and jabbed his heels into the gelding’s flanks. They jolted forward through the muddy snow in a skittering dance of no particular pattern except forward, toward the trees where Watches Water thought he had seen the flash and smoke.

The wind whistled above his ear just after the lightning of another gunshot illuminated the position of his enemy. Watches Water swung right, the movement of his knees enough to prompt obedience from his horse. The beaver hunter struggled to reload his musket among the bare willow and aspen trunks but threw it to the side when his pursuer drew close. He pulled at the wooden handle of a pistol and aimed it when Watches Water was twenty feet away, pulling the trigger at ten. The gelding startled at the explosion and veered left, the unseen hot lead screaming past Watches Water’s shoulder. The beaver hunter turned and stumbled on an upturned root just as horse and rider overtook him, themselves black in silhouette before the glaring sun reflected off snow.

Like a hunter pursuing bison cows, Watches Water leaned in the saddle and aimed the stranger’s pistol at his prey. He pulled the trigger and saw  the powder-burnt hole the explosion created on the stumbling man’s left shoulder. Watches Water dropped the spent weapon when his horse dashed past the gasping, yelling man. He jumped to the ground and fired his father’s pistol at wild, furious eyes that were close enough to touch.

His companions rode cautiously through the trees while Watches Water, who had never followed a war trail, gathered and reloaded his weapons. Loud Dog Eater’s angry, tear-filled, pox-hollowed eyes stared at the powder-burnt face of a mixblood intruder. He turned toward Watches Water and grabbed his shoulder roughly, emotionally. My son is twice avenged by my nephew, the warrior who kills close, he said.

Kills Close, Walks Slow spoke from his horse. Where there are some beaver hunters there will be others. We must find what horses these fools might possess. Their camp is near. The old tobacco man pointed at the young warrior given a new name. Kills Close, you will gallop back to our camp as fast as Always Rides would have and bring the others to us. But first you will claim your trophies of war.

Kills Close, who had awakened that morning with a different name, did not dwell on the cratered eye of his second victim but stared at his ornately beaded ammunition pouch. He slipped it off the dead man’s body along with a knife and another satchel filled with all sorts of treasures: fire-steel, metal spoon, a gold chain holding a cross of the Spaniards, and, most prized of all, a far-seeing glass that collapsed down to the size of his forearm. While he loaded the plunder into his saddlebags, Mustang Thief walked up with a weapon different from any seen before. The inside of its long barrel was jagged, not smooth like all the other fire arms.

This belonged to one of the strangers whose scalp you will soon possess, Mustang Thief said. It is yours now. It is different, a mystery for you to discover. He grabbed his cousin’s shoulder, his eyes weeping, if not his voice. I will never forget what you have done for my brother. I am proud to be the cousin of the warrior Kills Close.

It was all too much to think about and yet it consumed Kills Close in an avalanche of memories and guilt and an overwhelming elation that came from vanquishing his enemies. Visions and realities collided in an uncertain fog as he raced across the few miles that separated the murder site from the winter camp of the Smoking Waters People. After hearing about Always Rides, forty men and women saddled their horses and followed Kills Close back into the foothills where Loud Dog Eater mourned his son. Both he and Mustang Thief had severed the tips of the little fingers on their left hands to show their grief. Laughs Often lay by the fire, his wife’s poultice strong enough to slow the bleeding from the entry and exit wounds until she arrived with stronger medicine and better bandaging.

The noted warrior Appaloosa Man scouted ahead and discovered a camp where the skins of many beaver hides were stretched inside willow hoops and hung from nearby trees, like elk teeth on a woman’s dress. Two sets of tracks went out from the camp. One led to a Crow woman with an infant, discovered and claimed by the old warrior Bison Horn Always Ready. The second went up the canyon toward a gap between ridgelines. Loud Dog Eater and Mustang Thief and Appaloosa Man quickly pursued the snowshoe imprints of a beaver hunter who tried to remain atop a thinning layer of sun-hardened snowpack but continually crashed through to his knees in shaded powder. As the riders prepared to overtake their prey, the beaver hunter brought a pistol to his heart and pulled the trigger.

Everyone in the Smoking Waters winter camp mourned Always Rides Too Fast but Kills Close hung back from the songs and dances and wailing relatives. His fingers obsessively fumbled with the hair of his first two scalps while his thoughts collapsed around a loss that should not have been. He was a supporter, there to make sure Always Rides was safe, and he had failed. In a hollow memory that would never fade, there was little solace in the praise heaped upon him by the camp’s great warriors and hunters. Kills Close’s mind was elsewhere while his eyes examined the strange new fire arm with the jagged barrel.

Kills Close. His father’s voice cut through his thoughts. My son has a strong name. Silver Band extended his sun-weathered bare arm and his hand grasped his son’s shoulder.

I had a vision in my cousin’s purification lodge, Kills Close confessed. It was not right. This was his time to become a man.

It was time for Always Rides to die, replied Silver Band. It is not usually a man’s choice, when it comes to visions, or death. Or what his name will be. He examined the pistol his son had acquired in battle. Tell me your vision.

Kills Close shared his dream.

Silver Band nodded. The dark horseman is the beaver hunter but he is also you, he said. When you found your vision, you believed you would follow my path and protect the beaver bundle. But a different destiny awaits you.

When I found my own vision, Kills Close said, it was the beaver and its waters that brought me medicine. Father, I have spent many winters listening to you repeat the songs and stories of the beaver bundle which you and your sit-beside-him-wife keep for our camp. It is the most revered of our totems, and when I saw the beaver in my manhood vision, I knew I would follow your path and become the beaver man when my chance occurred. Only two sleeps past, I was certain that was my purpose and my name reflected this.

Kills Close pulled back the flintlock and opened the priming pan of his victim’s rifle. Now I know the beaver are my spirit beings but my purpose is to kill the strangers who come to hunt them. At the summer gathering I will find a black horse to train for war.

4 A Craftsman’s Fate

St. Louis, Louisiana Territory, March 1807

Hugh McGarity’s thick-wristed hands compressed the accordion bellows and sent a blast of air gushing from its nozzle towards the forge. His pale blue eyes watched fresh oxygen renew the dance of orange flames swirling around a long iron bar nestled in the homemade charcoals. Sweat dripped down his nose while the forge’s heat slowly coaxed solid metal into pliability. Mind and memory concentrated on the transformation taking place before his eyes as the metal’s color shifted from shadowy gray to dull red. When its connection to the coals became a scarlet brilliance that hurt his eyes, the craftsman’s right hand picked up a sledgehammer while his agile left fingers manipulated long-handled tongs and pulled the iron from the luminescent coals. Time worked against him when McGarity steadied the metal on the anvil horn and raised his hammer for the first measured blow. He was intent on creating an arched right-angle bend one third of the way down the bar’s length. He accomplished less than half his intention before the iron lost its elasticity and forced the