A Book Series Set In The Wild West
Silver Vein Chronicles by Clay Houston Shivers
Series Excerpt
The story of what happened to the sheriff became legend. Pap Kickins did a full inter-view with the sheriff and ran it in the Daily Silver Vein, which in truth only came out when something actually newsworthy happened in the town, which was close on to never and certainly not every day. I’ll just summarize it here. After he climbed down out of the tree, the sheriff wandered for two days, barefoot, smack in the middle of winter and out of his head from thirst. He wandered and wandered, lost and confused, desperate for water, until finally he followed a bunch of birds and found some water and then he got lucky and found a cave out of the sun; he curled up in the cave and he killed and ate any varmints that wandered inside.
He did that for a couple of weeks, naked and surviving off wandering critters, before the bear that had been hibernating somewhere deep within the cave woke out of its slumber and chased the sheriff away. The sheriff ran from the cave and wan-dered through the desert, feverish and half crazy from the sun. Then he came across an old Indian sitting in front of a fire burning sage and singing. At first he thought the Indian was a figment of his imagination. But the old Indian was very real; he was also a healer, and set about mending the sheriff. He cleaned the sheriff’s wounds and gave him water and fed him soups and small pieces of game to help him get his strength back. He gave him animal skins to wear and made moccasins to protect his wounded and bloody feet. After several months of fighting his failing body, hovering between life and death, the sheriff eventually recovered and built his strength back up. His scars healed and the red burn around his neck, with the help of the Indian and his herbal potions, turned from an angry red to a somewhat angry pink to blue to yellow to final-ly skin colored.
In time, the old Indian had to go back to his people, and so the sheriff wandered the desert by himself, though he was no longer lost, as the Indian had shown him wa-tering holes and places to shelter at night.
One day a couple of bushwhackers saw the sheriff and took him for an Indian and circled him with their horses and started whipping him with their quirts. So the sheriff pulled them out of their saddles and took their horses and clothes and guns and their boots and water and suggested they go looking for a cave he knew about, where they could take shelter. The way the sheriff figured it, you bushwhack someone walk-ing in the desert, you deserve to get eaten by a bear.
I told you the sheriff was scrappy. The only varmint I ever ate was a squirrel, and that was back in Illinois when I was a boy. At least it was cooked. The sheriff never went into great detail about the varmints he ate. He ate some of them raw, which I can’t even imagine. To have something furry and still wiggling in your hands and to go about biting into it with your teeth—it’s a horrible thing to even think about. Which I would do often. Every time I saw the sheriff eating dinner at the restaurant I would wonder if he was thinking about that possum or raccoon or rat he’d eaten raw.
When the story ran in the paper, the sheriff got mad and accused old Pap of having an overactive imagination. This is just one example, but Pap had the sheriff eat-ing an entire antelope raw, which defies belief.
Pap wasn’t the only one with an active imagination. Before long the sheriff was taming bears and talking to animals and even flying through the desert on the back of an eagle. Over the next few weeks, the myth grew and grew and it like to drive the sheriff mad. If there was one thing you could say about Sheriff Jim Shepland, he was certainly an honest man. When he told you a story, you could be sure there would be no embellishments or exaggerations. The story might be dry as an old buffalo bone, but you would know for a fact all of it was true. So, for citizens to go through town tell-ing people passing through about their sheriff, and how he talked to bears and flew on the backs of eagles…well, for the sheriff, it was like being surrounded by a swarm of stinging flies.
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