The Kirby Jonas-Julia Robb Short Story Challenge

Kirby Jonas

When I came up empty for something to run Sunday at juliarobb.com, my website, I had an idea.

What if I wrote a short story and challenged friend Kirby Jonas to do the same thing.

Kirby is also a writer and currently has multiple books in print (the latest being Drygulch to Destiny).

Catch: We were limited to 800 words.

Kirby said sure, and wrote about a young man searching for gold. I wrote about Grizzly Jim Hawthorn, a dreamer who wants to be a mountain man.

I confess, I think I wrote 810 words while Kirby wrote about 797.

Read them and see if we entertained you.

Richest Man on the Mountain, by Kirby Jonas

I told Mama I’d be rich within a year. She didn’t believe me. Aunt Martha didn’t believe me. Even Jenny thought I was crazy. My own gal! Goes to show what women know.

From my viewpoint down here in this creek bottom, I could see little but the glitter of the largest vein of gold I had ever dreamed of.

Man panning for gold.

The wind howled like a forlorn woman. Air as cold as Jenny’s feet swirled down into my shirt. Black clouds scudded across the sky, some with long tails sweeping down, bluish against the canvas-white of clouds behind them. Snow approached.

How much time did I have?

I looked at the gold in my hand. I had been in Colorado enough to see gold before, and lucky enough to be standing in the assayer’s office when some prospector weighed his in. The nugget was pure and gleaming yellow as any I’d ever beheld. It couldn’t have been worth less than five hundred dollars. I had clawed it off a ledge where it had fallen out of a vein in the side of the mountain.

Green River Cliffs Wyoming, by Thomas Moran

No telling how deep that vein ran, nor how wide it might get inside the mountain, but to judge it offhand, on the surface alone, it shone like four or five thousand of the most beautiful dollars in God’s creation.

“I won’t get rich, huh, Mama?” Would she find out now! Her boy wasn’t as worthless as folks made out.

They had all laughed—menfolk too. Ab Jeeters, the bully of my childhood, had jeered and told me not only was I not going to get rich, but while I was gone he was going to steal my Jenny. Truth told, I was mad at her anyway, since she had no more belief in me than in a shredded Confederate dollar.

Still, I didn’t want to lose her—especially not to Ab, a man I still wanted to give back the gift of all the bloody noses he had ever given me in one pretty package.

Jenny

I’m telling this to the wind, since she is the only one to hear me—her and the birds I see darting from branch to branch at the corner of my vision. I’m the richest man on this mountain! And here’s how this came to be . . .

I woke up on day three hundred sixty-four of my absence from Connecticut with an empty belly and ragged clothes. My boots were in tatters, and winter snapping at my heels. I had finally found me a rich creek. Panning it in my bare feet, so I wouldn’t ruin what remained of the fragments of my boots, I got me a stake. Maybe two-hundred fifty in dust. A long ways from its mother source, to be sure. Too far to think I had found me a mine.

But at least I could buy some food, and maybe some lumber, and build a sluice.

I saddled up my bob-tail mule—yeah, some corral mates had harassed her and chewed her tail near in two, picked on just like her master—and I headed into town to buy supplies.

That’s when I met up with local thug Jig Hawley. And five of his men. They joked about taking my clothes, but they didn’t. They only degraded me some and then stole my mule and gold and left me alone and afoot.

I had nothing left, and winter kissing my neck. Tomorrow would be a year since I left home. I wasn’t rich. I was dead-broke. I would have no Jenny, no respect from Mama or my other relatives. No nothing. I was the exact failure they all claimed.

Well, they would never know. They could just wonder whatever happened to their dreamer. I found this cliff, and I started climbing, and I have no shame in telling you I meant to jump from the top of all hundred feet of that rock into this same creek and take my life. That’s what I was down to.

So I got almost to the very top, all set to jump, and as I pulled myself over the rim, there gleamed the most beautiful sight in my whole life—and I think that includes my fickle Jenny. Thousands of dollars in pure gold, with nothing to do but pick it up and haul it out.

I reached for that biggest nugget, just lying there, and before I knew it my feet slipped, and I found myself plummeting through the air. I landed in this creek on my back, and other than my head and my arms, I couldn’t move. Winter coming, me alone in a half-freezing creek, and with probably a million-dollar claim just waiting to be staked.

With a grim, weak smile, I let the gold roll off my fingers into the depths of a watery hole. Probably no one but the trout would ever see that gold again.

So, Mama, my claim came true. Tomorrow is a year, and I am a rich man—with gold to throw away.

 THE END

Mountain man, by Kenneth Freeman

The Rendezvous, by Julia Robb

  Grizzly Jim Hawthorn swaggered through the Mountain Man Rendezvous, roaring “Nothing can beat this child, I’ll raise your hair, I’ll palaver you into the ground, I’m half-alligator, half-horse and all man.”

Jim was happy.

Re-enactors swarmed around him, between hundreds of teepees and campfires, costumed in fur hats, buckskin leggings, moccasins, beards down to their chests, muzzleloaders in hand and tomahawks on their hip.

Mountain men stooped over blankets covered with turquoise jewelry for sale, get your hand-hewn scalp poles and Arkansas toothpick knives.

In the competition, Jim was convinced he would load his rifle faster, and throw his tomahawk closer to the target, than any other mountain man.

In the meanwhile, the tanglefoot whiskey he guzzled from a jug lit his brain with white lightning.

This was an annual event and the only place Jim felt at home and never wanted to leave.

From Monday through Friday, 365 days per year, Jim toiled at his desk in Cleveland, Ohio, at “We’ve Got Your Back” insurance agency.

Kimberly had to commute further, so Jim got home first, fed the kids, plunked them in front of the TV and had dinner on the table when his wife walked in the door.

“Did you have a good day?” she asked him, nibbling Marie Callender’s (formerly frozen) lasagna.

“Fine.”

“Well, I’m going to the gym. Can you put the kids to bed?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll just help you with the dishes.”

“I’ll do them.”

Truth was, he wanted her to go. The sooner she left, the faster he could pick up one of Louis L’Amour’s Sackett stories, the ones about the mountain men.

Or pop a DVD in the player, watch old Grizzly Adams episodes and plan where he would practice shooting his muzzlerloader.

Vivid dreams, in which he was the star, swam through his nights.

There he was, saving the wagon train from the Indians, guiding the whites through the mountains, dodging hostiles.

When he woke, he sighed, stared at his face in the mirror while he tightened his tie and tried to imagine one good thing which could possibly happen to him.

Kimberly wanted him to take her on a cruise, or just anywhere, Hawaii for God’s sake, she said.

But Jim counted the hours and days until he could leave for the rendezvous: Alone.

In the middle of his brag about being half alligator, Jim suddenly felt annoyed.

The enemy danced on the other side of the rendezvous.

The Snake Indians, the Nez Perće, the Sioux and the Cheyenne were meeting for an inter-tribal pow wow.

He could hear the drum and see them stomping and swaying.

Nobody asked the redskins to the rendezvous, they asked themselves, he grumbled.

Trying to make white men feel sorry for what happened to them, those welfare queens, got their just deserts, lucky they’ve got reservations, and what about all the pretty ladies who lost their hair?

If I’d been there, I could have saved them, Jim thought, without asking himself who “them” was and what historic episode he was thinking about.

But Jim did know when he thought about fighting the red man he felt alive. He could feel the buckskin gripping his muscles and the tomahawk swaying at his side.

He ought to tell them a thing or two, he thought and strode toward the dancers, breaking them apart.

Indian men stumbled back, staring at him. The drum stopped.

“Come on dude, what’d you doing?” an Indian asked him, a young man with braids, a sleeveless sweatshirt and beaded moccasins.

“I’m laying the law down. I want you redskins out.”

Indian men began bunching toward him, dark eyes narrowing.

“This is our powwow, what the hell are you doing, you pussy white man?” an older Indian asked.

“Wait a minute, maybe he’s crazy,” the young man said, pushing the other Indians back with his arms.

“I’m the law west of the Pecos,” Jim roared, the joy of combat filling his heart.

Jim reached for his knife and before the young man could dodge, he brought it down and slashed the Indian’s bare arm.

“What the hell,” the young man exclaimed, scuttling backward and clutching his bleeding arm.

Seeing the blood, Jim felt a lightning bolt of joy hit him, and he remembered he had never taken a scalp.

So Jim charged and grabbed the top of the young man’s hair.

It was an awkward position for scalping someone.

Before he could slash at the Indian’s scalp, the other men grabbed Jim, punched him in the stomach and face, forced him to the ground and yelled, “9-11, 9-11, police, help.”

Later, when Jim tried to explain what happened, he couldn’t do it.

He didn’t know.

The only thing he told the police, as they handcuffed him, was, “I’m half alligator and all man.”

 

The End

 

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