Skye Fargo has faced killers of every shape and size. But when a monstrous grizzly bear outside Gold Creek starts splitting people's skulls, he finds himself pitted against a bloodthirsty beast that has already slaughtered and devoured everyone who tried to hunt it down. And the Trailsman might be next on the menu...
The Trailsman
Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.
The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.
1.
The first to die was a prospector. Old Harry, folks called him. Elk hunters were near his diggings and decided to pay him a visit. Everyone liked the old man. He could spin yarns by the hour.
His yarn-spinning days were over. They found Old Harry’s legs near his cabin. A blood trail led to an arm and more blood led to the rest of him. His head had been split open and his brains apparently eaten.
The tracks of the culprit were plain enough. Old Harry’s attacker was a bear. Judging by the size of the prints it was a grizzly. An exceptionally large grizzly, but then, large bears were nothing new in the mountains that far north.
The hunters buried the remains and went on with their hunt.
The bear was long gone and they figured they had nothing to worry about. They found elk and shot a bull and skinned it and dried and salted the meat. There were five of them with families to feed so one elk wasn’t enough. Four hunters went off the next day while the fifth man stayed at camp. The four returned toward sunset, worn and tired and hungry and empty-handed, to find their camp in a shambles and their companion missing. Their effects had been torn apart. The racks of elk meat had been shattered. They looked for their friend and finally came on parts of his body in a ravine. It was Old Harry all over again, only worse. Their friend’s head, too, had been split like a melon, and the brains devoured.
The hunters got out of there. They rode like madmen the twentyfive miles down to Gold Creek and told everyone what had happened. It was the talk of the town for weeks and then they had new things to talk about.
Bear attacks were common enough that the deaths didn’t alarm them.
Then one evening a horse came limping into town. It was lathered with sweat and bleeding from claw marks. Some of them knew the man who owned it. A large party hurried to his cabin four miles up the creek.
The front door had been busted in. Inside was horror. Blood was everywhere, along with bits and pieces of the victim.
That a bear was to blame was obvious. That it was the same bear occurred to them when they found that the man’s brains had been scooped out.
They realized the grizzly must have followed the elk hunters down. That was unusual but not remarkable. They thought they were dealing with an ordinary bear and organized a hunt to put an end to the man-killer before anyone else died.
Fifty men bristling with weapons rode out to wage battle with the beast. They used dogs to follow the trail, big, fearless dogs that had gone after other bears and mountain lions many a time. The dogs found the scent and their owner let them loose and for over a mile their baying showed they were hard after their quarry.
The men hurried to catch up. They were excited and confident and told one another that the grizzly was fit to be stuffed and mounted.
When the howls changed to yowls of terror, it stopped them in their tracks. They sat breathless and still as the screams and shrieks seemed to go on forever. When silence fell they cautiously advanced.
It was as bad as they imagined it would be. The dogs had been slaughtered. For half an acre the ground was a jigsaw of legs and tails and ribs and bodies. They tried to take up the trail without the dogs but they soon lost it.
For a few days Gold Creek was as quiet as a church. But these were hardy men and women, used to life in the wild, and gradually their lives returned to normal.
A couple of weeks passed. One day smoke was seen rising above a cabin along the creek. So much smoke, it drew others to investigate. The cabin was in flames. They yelled for the prospector who lived there but he didn’t answer. They reckoned he must have knocked a lamp over and they worried that he was still inside and had been burned to death. Then someone noticed blood and they followed it into the trees. The remains were like a trail of bread crumbs. Here an arm, there a leg, at another spot a foot. The torso was whole, which surprised them. The brains were missing, which didn’t.
A town meeting was called. Everyone agreed this was a serious situation. Four people and seven good dogs were dead.
