Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Read Online Free PDF

tougher, wiser. And around women he was still as much a green buck as any of the lads. If Bending Reed, who’d once been his young sweet squaw, could see him today, she’d see he was still some. Some, and shining with the best. He might have the miseries in his right leg now and again, yes, but his thoughts were young willow and his narrowed gray eyes could still spark like a hungry wolf’s with down buffalo calf in sight.
    Hugh was about six feet two in height, which, not counting the boat crews of pork-eating neds or the halfbreed voyageurs, was about the average of Ashley’s company. Hugh was bulky in the shoulders, round and slim as a young cottonwood bole through the middle, with ash limbs for arms and young forked oak for legs. For all his six two he didn’t look tall until someone of average height stood up to him, and then he not only towered but loomed.
    His hair was gray and thick. Even the hair over his arms and his brushlike brows and the matt over his chest and back was thick and gray. He didn’t shave like the other mountain men did, something both General Ashley and Major Henry requested of all their men. Major Henry had been in the mountains many years as an explorer and a leader of trappers, and it was his opinion that shaven palefaces got along better with the beardless Indians. Instead, Hugh clipped his beard, or rather sawed it off with his skinning knife, when it got more than a couple inches long. Hugh said he liked the comfort of the gray bush in winter blizzards and the shade of it in the summer. Major Henry also wanted his men shaved as a way of keeping the graybacks—the lice—under control, but Hugh said he wasn’t bothered much with graybacks, probably because there was bitter alkali in his sweat which gave them the spits.
    Since the days of his captivity with the Pawnees along the Platte River, Hugh had worn hide instead of cloth for clothes: a wolfskin cap, a fringed elkskin hunting shirt that came almost down to his knees, a soft clay-worked doeskin undershirt, soft doeskin breeches, tough buckskin leggings stagged at the knees, and double-soled moccasins fashioned out of the neck leather of tough old buffalo bull. His leathers were dark with sweat and dirt and the fat of many a feast of buffalo meat, and they smelled a little like an open crock of old rancid lard. He wore a powder horn and bullet pouch slung over his left shoulder and under his right arm. In the pouch he carried such other possibles as flint and steel for fire-making and a small whetstone.
    He wore a belt around his middle with a long sheathed butcher or skinning knife stuck in it along with a loaded horse pistol. Hugh’s set of possibles, the knife, the gun, the flint, the steel, were prime. He knew the value of being prepared for the worst with the best. His rifle, which he affectionately called Old Bullthrower, and which he kept at his side night and day, was a Henry, made in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a flintlock of a simple though sturdy make with a thirty-six inch barrel and a .59 bore and a full stock of hard maple. With it Hugh had made many a spectacular shot, plumb center, well-aimed or snap shot.
    Unlike most mountain men, Hugh was not much for trapping. He didn’t like the bone-chilling icy water that a man had to wade in before dawn to set the beaver traps and again after dusk to pick up the beaver. Such cold doings were not for his game leg. From a long life with the Pawnees he had picked up the Indian brave’s scorn for trapping. That was squaw work, not work for braves. He liked hunting and scouting better, alone, at which he was the company’s acknowledged master. Making meat and scalping red devils was an honorable profession for a brave.
    Hugh didn’t take easily to other men, nor they to him. He had a look about him that kept others from confiding in him. His brushy brows shadowed haunted gray eyes, eyes that one moment could be fierce with battle, the