Nathaniel Johns Messenger

Chief Smoke-on-the-Lake

Leftenant Colonel Hafis Thaddeus 'Teddy' Wyatt

Chief Tells-Old-Tales

Orpheus Peake

Mr Greaves & Mrs Eunice Greaves

They say Gunpowder Wallace's wife was the great-niece of Chief Smoke-on-the-Lake. Whether that was true or not, the chief had a shine on that man. They rode together sometimes. He led the Coorinna People below Mount Faulkner. Might be what we call the head of the confederacy. There was many native tribes that feared Smoke-on-the-Lake from Valley Consquence to Bishop's Creek, and many settlers too. The Leaguer lives in constant fear, and their most northerly tribes were known to reave Musket Station. Smoke-on-the-Lake was like any native: vindictive, peace-loving, and proud. Like gin, whisky, and beer on top of one another.

Chief of the Lory People. Their lands spread far in the south-east. The woodhawks were their biggest trespassers, so folk like Odie Tailor and the sons of Good Companion learned long ago how to pay tribute. Their hunting grounds stretched far down to the borders of the Commonwealth. Passage Bridge knew them. So did Fort Knightley. They were rife in the Pageant Valley and along the lower railroad. They controlled a large patch of the Obsidian River. The next tribe over were the Numbat. How Tells-Old-Tales hated the Numbat. He bludgeoned them into submission sometime before Founder's Farm was founded so that many Numbat were sold by the Lory into slavery. I think those farmers bought Numbat slaves out of fear for Tells-Old-Tales. He was grizzly. Old, scarred, always dressed in bright feathers. Did war like no other savage. Ruthless. Great leader. The army hated him.

Peake's beard never cared much for the man. It always grew in divers directions despite how vehemently he combed it. Peake had a brother once, Atlas his name was. Atlas once said, ever since the boy could grow hair he hated it, but never shaved for the pimples that grew beneath. It was ever the loving hate. Besides, no man can be without a beard. Orpheus is just not quite a man.

Atlas went missing long ago, but his words lived on, especially on the tongue of Uriah who fought with him as much as his beard did. But Uriah loved that man more than any. He went to the outhouse when Orpheus died. As we say. Though we never knew at that time. We only had the clues that he left behind. Uriah dug deep in the Big Timber Country. Messenger didn't even find him at his cabin.

Anyway, Peake is dead now.

They don't belong here, mother and father Greaves. Eunice has been through too many bloody child-bearing beds and Greaves himself too many lost fingers. You know, he only has six fingers? Three to each hand. Logging, mining, warring, you name it, he's lost a finger to it. He carries one around his neck. As for the others, they say there's a finger in the headband of Chief Smoke-on-the-Lake, a finger in the big fish of Fifteen River, one in Urquhart's pocket, and one in the Frontier Museum in Faulkner. But six fingers don't hold him back. He's the most efficient overseer Musket Station ever knew, so much so that the youngin's can't remember a station without him. Eunice is a mother to 'em all. But they hate the natives.

Odysseus 'Odie' Tailor

Nathaniel Johns Messenger

Aeneas

Ezra Longbow

Gunpowder Wallace

Ezra Longbow was a bullocky. He lived in a hut north of the High Shiels and south-east of the haunt of Horseshoe Toby. Season after season he drove his cattle from Founder's Farm to West-Merchant, and back again, wintering on occasion below the High Shiels. He feared the natives. Actually, he feared most men. Spoke in the bullocky speech to his driving team, but didn't fancy mortal tongue. Some say he only loved his bullocks. He named everywhere he went after those twelve. Sackcloth Spur. Ironbark Run. Steel's Path.

John's Messenger? That pious son of a bitch. He was the truest mountain man I ever knew. I met him trapping in the tablelands beside Mount Guilty. Always wandering and thinking. Loved his own company. They say a lone mountain man is a dead mountain man. That must have made him a dead man, then, for he spent many a day alone. Never joined a trapping company. Fancied himself a longhunter above all. But I gather even the selling of pelts and ivory that he gathered wasn't the point of it all for him. I would say he ran away from something down below, but that just doesn't sit right. I am confident he was chasing something, rather, chasing something that only the mountains can give.

If you had have asked Dulcie of Good Companion, I know exactly what you would have heard:

Tragedy, that one. He goes alright now, poor darling, but there was a time when you couldn't pull him off the opium. They called him 'Opium Odie.' Darl lost ma and pa when he was knee high, and all his sisters went to natives. Only boy. I nursed him a bit at the farm in the good days. Then he said he wanted to be a woodhawk. At least it got him off the opium. That fresh mountain air is better for him than Faulkner. Did I mention he grew up in town? Yea, started in town and came out to the mountains like many's the mountaineers. And like many's it's done him good. Young boy's a man now, and I see him in the summer when the season takes its break.

The truth is he was never Opium Odie. The truth is, Dulcie of Good Companion is his aunt.

Aeneas brought out the Leaguer five years ago. They have moved thirty miles since. Winters done them bad. Otherwise, I think he's stuck between the precipice and fortune. The mountains have a way of hemming folk in. For Aeneas, each valley could mean death. If he rolls the Leaguer over to new dale one summer, he might get snowed in by winter and die. So he has settled for a while on stationary wagon wheels. All the men and women follow his lead. I reckon The Leaguer will form some kind of palisade and stay put. Just like most mountain men I know, they've come too far to turn back. But I don't know if they'll ever make it north of the colony like they intended.

In all my time on the Mountain, no mountain man ever matched the grit of old Gunpowder. Perhaps Horseshoe Toby was the craziest, but Gunpowder Wallace was the cut that most folks down below picture when they think mountain man - and they never knew half of it. At the start he was a railway man then he turned from the engine to the train tracks and from the sleepers to paling splitting in the foothills. Some men work the other way, but old Gunpowder he worked backwards. He hunted backwards too. Became quite good at it, so that the days he went out splitting palings became a feature to his long-hunts. After some time he left the timber gangs and disappeared into the wilds beyond Valley Consequence. But he didn't disappear like that old Emmanuel Urquhart. He kept contact with the union men at Passage Bridge and the settlers of Good Companion. He traded with 'em. But as much as he kept contact with the settlers he kept as good a word with the natives. Married a gin from the Coorinna tribe. Started dressing like them after that. He saved more likes in council with Tells-Old-Tales than any trooper from Fort Sutton ever did. Cost less money too. If he started as a railway man he became a Coorinna brave. But that didn't mean he put away the cocaine. That's how he got his name. Gunpowder. He used to sprinkle it in the white snuff. I never knew another man to do that.

Virgil

Saul Emmanuel Urquhart

Tobias 'Horseshoe Toby' Tanner

Uriah

There ain't nothin' much to Virgil. He's a farmer down at Good Companion. I don't know what he was before that. After, however, he will probably become a rack of teeth around the neck of a Coorinna chief. The farmers and storekeeps at Good Companion are into their second generation but I doubt they'll reach four. The next children will be the last. They'll go back to Faulkner, or they'll take up the mountain call. I can't say which way Virgil will go, but he spends more time with the woodhawks like Odie Tailor. It's not far then from the Pageant Valley to the foothills and from the foothills to the rising peaks. Virgil has it in his back, he just needs to muster the strength in his spirit. Maybe when his mother dies he'll go.

I nearly wrote the book about Urquhart. That was when I thought Messenger was him, for they wore the same bush-dog cap. But word is Urquhart has not been seen in decades. Not even years. Decades. Some men come up to the foothills and lie for nine years or ten. These are the woodhawks and lumberers. The mountain men, they're always gone but they either range in companies or cross tracks with the lowlanders by means of necessity. But Urquhart was gone. He didn't trade, he didn't whisper. No one knew the scent of him, and the only thing I was ever told was "bush-dog cap" that's how you know him. According to Gunpwoder Wallace, Urquhart was a trooper when he was a lad. I reckon that a gaudy lie because Wallace was never a lad in these parts. He came in with the railway. Nowadays men say Urquhart is a ghost, that he never did climb these mountains. Others say he took a wife and sired a son. In one tale he's a sailor or pirate. I reckon he's out there, six feet of bones in a icy cave is my bet and I'll only come down from that notion when I see a bush-dog cap.

Was he evil? Can a mutt be evil? Sometimes a hungry hand can't be blamed, only castrated and left to wilt. 'Ye bastard dog, that'll teach ye to bite.' But Uriah was never neutered. He just kept nipping. He bit the Whitewall Company that paid him, because he took issue with the union. And he bit any man who worked with him at the saw mills. He was a restless one, and unkind to the company of man. The only man he ever loved was Peake, and when he died, he went to the outhouse. I don't remember hearing that he loved the company of woman either. He was a lonely man, and bitter for it. His way of surviving was deception. Untrustworthy. But a fine survivor. The kind of creature who would be a bachelor until he died. But he was a good mountain man. A hardy, undying bastard who the world spat high onto the hills and never wanted to see again. It's a shame. The hills didn't want him, but what the world spits high the mountain always catches.

One with the moon, that bastard. Toby had a lot to do with the folk down below. He hunted and trapped in the valleys west of Consequence. He often traded with the Hannans of Japheth, but sometimes he roved as far as the old claims and the big timber country. He was a capital tracker. They say he could track the shadow of a wing at night. Learned that trick from the natives. Any man worth his salt in the mountains learned his craft from the natives. Without those lessons they were all no better than lost settlers. That's what Toby was originally, a settler who tried grazing cattle in the colony west of the mountains. The savage tribes got the best of him, so he got work shoeing horses in Good Companion. Then the gold rush hit and he up and left like most men from the flat. He was gone probably nine years on the rush. Followed the claims from east to west, as they went. Ended up running Quill's Claim from the alluvial days to the battery engines of deep shaft. Nearly got a job building them batteries down below, they say. He was offered work by the surveyor who came out on the company's behalf. But one look at the long road that led to Faulkner made up his mind for him. He'd bent his way after the gold so long that a longer road backwards sent him sick. That's often the way. It's hard getting up them mountains. You push, push, push. But you get through. It's a shivering thought to look back, and near on impossible to fathom taking the same way back down again. Some foment of waste clings to your brain I guess. The dream of wasting all those miles, all those years.

No, Horseshoe Toby sent the battery man packing. And not long after the quartz gave up and the rush failed like a dud spark on dynamite. Horseshoe sold up and went riding. Eventually made his way down south. That's where he built a cabin, the most settled a mountain man can ever get. He's still there I hear. Calls the place Serendipity.