Porcupine Mountain Kings

Chapter 2

Remembering

On an early spring morning high above the sacred Lake of the Clouds the man sat on a large rock and let the sun warm his face.  His hat and rifle lay next to him and his long hair layed on his back and hung down to the fringe across his chest on the front of his buckskin shirt.  A small contented smile split the full white streaked beard on his tan and weathered face.  His eyes were closed as he thought of the richness of his life and of their village. 

A gentle puff of breeze rustled his long hair and whiskers.  It brought the fresh smells of spring's new life to him and he breathed it in deeply.  He raised his face and opened his eyes to see a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds.  As he peered at the sky above, his lips parted and he said softly, "thank you Man Above."

He closed his eyes again, lowered his head, and went back to his thoughts.  He thought of the wonderful life of the man called, by those people closest to him, Beartooth.  His life.

He wasn't always known by that name.  He had started life as Joshua O'Kane, the son of immigrant farmers.  He wasn't always a frontiersman or mountain man, a free man; that came later to him than it had to most of his kind.  It also came to be in a different place than most considered mountain men to live.  He lived in the Porcupine Mountains of the Michigan Territory.  Like most of his kind, it had been his choice to go to the mountains and make his life one of hunting, trapping, fishing, and exploring.

Beartooth thought, no he knew, that his life was as close to perfect as he could imagine any life could be.  He thought of it as the third season of his life and he not only had everything he needed, but everything he wanted.

He came to be called Beartooth for two reasons; the first was his fondness for bear meat and the second was because he wore a canine tooth from the first bear he killed on a piece of rawhide around his neck.

His wife was a short woman with well rounded breasts and hips.  She had the biggest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.  She had long dark hair that, when it wasn't braided, fell to her waist.  She was half Scottish and half Ojibwa Indian.  They had met in a logging camp in northern Wisconsin.  She had worked as the camp cook and he had worked as the camp hunter and sometimes saw sharpener and blacksmith.

Beartooth had often thought to himself that that was where his life had really begun.  It had begun in The Big Piney of Wisconsin.  That's where he had met Fawn (her mother was the Ojibwa half of her heritage and had given her the name because of her large eyes) and had gotten to know Polecat, his young partner in adventure, and both Swampy and Stick his other good friends.  It was also the place where they had first talked about going to the mountains and making their lives what they had become.

He sat thinking about their village and what a wonderful place it was.