Hunter's Moon

Book 3: Hunter Buchanon Black Hills Western

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Ex–Rebel tracker Hunter Buchanon and his faithful coyote Bobby Lee come face to face—and tooth and claw—with the biggest, fiercest killer they've ever known . . .



CURSE OF THE GRIZZLY MOON



A cattle ranch stalked by the ultimate predator. A heiffer gutted and beheaded by razor-sharp claws. A ranch hand crushed and shredded by powerful jaws. According to legend—foretold by Sioux Chief Red Otter—the attacks are an omen of terrible things to come. When a grizzly attacks a man or his property during a blue moon, it is a sign that the bear has been sent from someone on the other side seeking revenge against the man that killed him. And that man—the avenger's true target—is Hunter Buchanon . . .



To end the curse, Hunter must hunt down the grizzly and kill it—before it kills him and everyone he loves. He sets off into the wilderness for the final showdown between predator and prey. But this time, Hunter is the hunted . . .

Release date: July 27, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 295

Sample

Bullets crackled like miniature lightning bolts around Hunter Buchanon’s head. They were followed by the screaming reports of at least two, maybe three rifles.

“Whoa!”

Trotting along to his left, Hunter’s pet coyote, Bobby Lee, gave a yelp and jerked to one side as a bullet tore up sod in front of him.

Hunter looked around quickly, saw a low rise off to the south, the opposite direction the lead was coming from, and put spurs to his fleet grullo Nasty Pete’s flanks.

“Sudden lead storm, Bobby Lee!” he told the coyote. “Time to split the wind!”

Nasty Pete put his head down, laid his ears back, and stretched his long legs into a ground-consuming gallop. Hunter hunkered low, the wind bending the brim of his high-crowned gray Stetson against his forehead. He whipped a quick glance over his right shoulder as more bullets caromed around him, some plunking into the ground to each side of him or behind him. One spanged shrilly off a rock inches to his left, then severed a sage brush branch, flipping it high in the air.

Maybe forty yards to the north—way too close for comfort—smoke puffed from the top of a long, shelf-like rise. Three sets of intermittent smoke puffs lined up maybe ten feet apart. Three rifles, all right. The shooters were close, but Nasty Pete was pulling away from them fast.

However, as Hunter turned his head back forward, one of those bullets sliced a burn across the outside of his right cheek to ricochet off a rock ten feet ahead of the galloping grullo. He swept a hand across his cheek, saw the blood streaking his fingers. Hot rage rose in the big ex-Confederate as he approached the knoll he’d been heading for.

He’d been ambushed before, but not on his own range and doing something as innocent as riding out to check the graze along Sweetwater Creek. The bushwhack really put a bee in his bonnet. The only good thing he could see about the situation was that the three ambushers, while way too close for comfort, were lousy shots.

They seemed overly determined to snuff his wick, firing too quickly, not taking the time to line up their sights, firing as though in desperation. If they’d have waited a minute or two, he’d have ridden up to the very front of that shelf, and at six-feet-four-inches tall and broad of shoulder and chest, he’d have been a hard target to miss.

Rustlers, most likely. Raggedy-heeled broad-looping sons of Satan who had spotted Hunter riding toward them. Knowing the penalty for rustling in beef country was a necktie party, they’d panicked and started firing without taking the time to aim.

Jumpy sons of bucks.

“Hurry up, Bobby!” he called to the coyote streaking along in a gray-brown blur beside him.

Hunter put the grullo around behind the knoll and drew back on the reins. Nasty Pete skidded to a halt, kicking up dust and needle grass, snorting and blowing. Hunter leaped out of the saddle, grabbed his Henry repeating rifle from the saddle boot, and ran up the back side of the knoll, fleet of foot for a man his size. He gritted his teeth and flared his blue eyes in fury.

Behind him, Bobby Lee stood, copper eyes bright with anxiety, tongue drooping down over his lower jaw as he panted.

Ten feet from the top of the hill, Hunter dropped to his knees, shucked away his hat, and crawled, his long, blond hair bouncing down his back and across his shoulders. He swept it back from his eyes with his gloved right hand, cocked the Henry, and laid the barrel over the top of the knoll, gazing over the octagonal barrel toward the shelf from which the shooters had flung lead at him.

They were no longer firing, and they were hunkered low, but he could catch glimpses of the men and their rifles as they glanced up from behind the shelf ’s lip from time to time, jerking their heads sharply this way and that, likely conferring in frustration over having lost their quarry when they should have had him dead to rights. The ambusher left of the other two from Hunter’s perspective poked his hatted head out from behind a thumb of ground he’d been hunkered behind and started to extend his rifle in Hunter’s direction.

Hunter snarled an oath as he quickly but carefully lined up the Henry’s sights, steadied the rifle, and squeezed the trigger.

Boom!

The man jerked back with a yelp, dropping his rifle and falling away out of sight.

The other two jerked their rifles up over the lip of the shelf and hastily resumed firing, rifle maws stabbing smoke and orange flames, the rifles cackling shrilly. Hunter pulled his head down beneath the crest of the knoll as bullets plundered dirt and gravel from the hill’s far side. He rolled to his right. When the shooting tapered off, he quickly lifted his head and rifle again, lined up his sights on the black hat of one of the bushwhackers, and fired a hair too late.

As he pulled the trigger, the bushwhacker saw him and jerked his head down behind a juniper root. Hunter’s slug tore up dirt and grass just beyond where the man’s head had been a second before.

Hunter pulled his head down as the other shooter opened up on him again, the rifle belching across the distance of ninety yards or so, the slugs pluming dirt at the knoll’s crest. He fired only two rounds before silence descended once more. Hunter raised his head and rifle again, but they were waiting for him.

He pulled his head and the Henry back down as two slugs hammered the side of the knoll well wide of where his head had been. He gave a dry chuckle and wagged his head. “Just because they can’t shoot for mule fritters don’t mean they ain’t gonna continue to throw lead. They might even get lucky!”

He turned his head to one side and up a little, encircled his mouth with his gloved hands, and yelled, “Why don’t you two tinhorns give it up and throw your rifles out before you end up wolf bait like your friend!”

Two seconds passed before one of the bushwhackers returned with: “Go to hell, Buchanon!”

Hunter frowned. The voice had been familiar. Nasally but familiar.

His mind shuffled through a deck of faces and recent encounters until he stopped at the leering, long-nosed face of Rolly Piper. A small-time outlaw from Missouri, Rolly was one of a small clan of brothers and cousins who haunted the Black Hills, rustling stock and selling it to corrupt ranchers, pulling occasional stagecoach holdups, and rolling drunk miners for their pokes in dark alleys behind grog shops and hurdy-gurdy houses in Hot Springs, Tigerville, and Deadwood.

Just last week, Hunter had bent Piper’s nose sideways against his face when Hunter had caught him pestering a young lady on a side street in Tigerville. The girl had been walking toward the main drag to sell eggs to a local grocer when a drunken Piper grabbed her skirts from where he’d been lounging with a mug of beer on a loafer’s bench in front of one of Tigerville’s seamier side-street grog shops.

Hunter had been buying feed next door, and intervened. Piper had told him to mind his own business and to cart “his big, Confederate grayback self ” off to hell where he and his “old man and that saloon girl” he’d married belonged. Then he’d continued to paw the girl with the egg basket, who’d been all of fourteen. That, and what he’d said about Hunter’s father, Angus, and his new bride, the former Annabelle Ludlow, had cost Rolly Piper a broken nose with one vicious swing of Hunter’s right fist.

Hunter had dried the egg girl’s tears with his hankie, sent her back on her way without so much as a single broken egg. He finished loading the feed sacks into his wagon, climbed aboard, clucked to his horse, and clattered off down the street, leaving Piper lolling back against the saloon, clutching his nose and wailing.

So here he was on Hunter and his father’s—and, more recently, his wife Annabelle’s—4-Box-B range, likely rustling cattle as his cowardly way of getting even for that busted beak. He couldn’t have known Hunter himself would be riding out this way today, to check the grass along Sweetwater Creek to which, now after roundup and having sold five hundred steers to a packer in Belle Fourche, he intended to settle his remaining herd. The creek, here in the low country near the ranch headquarters, was the perfect place for these remainders over the long Black Hills winter.

No, Piper hadn’t been expecting Hunter. But when he’d seen him heading his way, he’d seen a chance for an even more satisfying revenge than merely rustling a few head of 4-Box-B beef. But he’d gotten his nerves up, lost his patience, and he and his partners in rustling, likely as nervous as Piper was about turning to cold-blooded murder, or maybe knowing Buchanon’s renegade Confederate war record and remembering how he’d handled the men who’d burned his ranch two years ago, had been too quick to throw lead.

Now they had a pretty good idea they were going to die, and they were even more nervous than before.

Hunter halfway hoped they’d run. He didn’t want to kill. He’d had enough killing during the War for Southern Independence. When his father, Angus, had hauled him and his two brothers, Shep and Tyrell, out here from Georgia, leaving their mother behind in a grave—she’d died during the war when Hunter and his father had been off fighting it—Angus had wanted him and his boys to leave bloodshed behind.

But two years ago, they’d run into another war, albeit a smaller one, after Hunter had met a pretty Yankee girl, his now-wife Annabelle Ludlow, the daughter of a rich area rancher and proud, Confederate-hating Yankee, to boot. To show how much he’d disapproved of the notion of his daughter marrying a lowly Southern hillbilly, Graham Ludlow, with the backing of the crooked county sheriff and help from his thuggish business partner, Max Chaney, had sent their henchmen to sack the 4-Box-B. Many men had died that day, including Shep and Tye.

Also on that day, Hunter had learned that there was likely nowhere on earth a man could go to flee the trouble of other men.

He was looking at that again now.

At least he was armed. Before his ranch had been attacked, he’d been naïve enough to believe he could walk among other men unarmed. Max Chaney’s son, Luke, a deputy sheriff every bit as crooked and loutish as his father, had taught him he couldn’t. Luke, wanting Hunter out of the way so he could pursue Annabelle, had ambushed the unarmed Hunter one day when Hunter had been on his way to town to deliver his father’s locally famous Scottish ale to several saloons in Tigerville. Luke hadn’t lived to learn the lesson that you never messed with a Buchanon, even an unarmed one.

Hunter, however, had learned his.

Today, he had his Henry repeating rifle, which had belonged to his older brother Shep, and the pretty LeMat revolver, a gift from a Confederate general whose life Hunter had saved and which he wore in a black leather holster thonged on his right thigh. The bowie knife he’d made himself was sheathed on his left hip, opposite the French-made LeMat, which fired five .44-caliber rounds from the secondary barrel under the main one, and a twenty-gauge shotgun shell from the stouter, longer barrel above.

Now it was time to teach a lesson to Rolly Piper, who likely wouldn’t run. He was a coward, but he was too afraid of his own cowardice to run. He’d stay and try to finish the business he’d started in order to save some semblance of his pride.

That was all right with Hunter. If he didn’t finish Piper off now, he’d only have to do it later. Besides, he couldn’t let the man get away with rustling. That would only encourage him to try it again, and encourage others to do the same. The 4-Box-B could never be seen as an easy target.

Hunter looked around, pondering the situation. He glanced over the top of his covering knoll once more. They’d been waiting for him to do just that. He saw the two rifles extending over the lip of Piper’s shelf, and just as he jerked his head back down behind his own covering knoll, flames and smoke stabbed from each barrel at nearly the same time.

The bullets plunked into the lip of the knoll, spraying Hunter with dirt and grass.

He cursed and shook the debris from his hair.

A man laughed jeeringly.

Another one yelled, “Give you a close shave there, Buchanon?”

The other man laughed again.

Hunter cursed again. They had him pinned down and outnumbered. He could sit up here and swap lead with them all day, but it would likely take a lucky shot to grease Piper or the other fellow, staying low as they were now since the third man had taken a pill he couldn’t digest and was likely shaking hands with old Scratch.

Hunter had to figure something else out.

He looked down the long slope of the knoll he was on. A wash slithered along the base of it, running generally from south to north. It cut through the sagebrush prairie back toward Piper’s shelf and then, maybe another hundred yards farther north, it swung around behind the shelf, angling east. That was Juniper Creek, though it was dry most of the year and was good only for watering cattle during the spring snowmelt.

The cut of the creek was sharply gouged and maybe six feet deep. Deep enough to conceal Hunter if he kept his head down.

“Hey, Buchanon!” Piper called from the north. “Why don’t you throw that rifle down? We’ll throw ours down, too, shake hands, and call it a day? Yeah, you’ll lose a few beeves, but that’s better than your life, ain’t it? I mean, you wanna go back to that purty saloon girl you married, don’t you?”

The man’s voice rose a few jeering pitches as he added, “I sure know I would! All that long, red hair! In fact, if we have to kill you out here, I might just ride over to the 4-Box-B and introduce myself—if you know what I mean! ”

Piper cackled a goatish laugh.

The other man howled.

Hunter’s heart burned again with anger. Annabelle was not a saloon girl. She might have worked in a saloon for a few months in Tigerville, prancing around in skimpy outfits and fishnet stockings, but that had been only to make Hunter jealous.

She’d wanted her prospective husband to see the error of his ways in postponing their marriage until he could relocate the gold he’d dug up to secure his and Anna’s future in the ranching trade, and to rebuild the 4-Box-B. The gold had been stolen from his secret stash by Annabelle’s own brother Cass, who’d returned it after he’d realized just how deeply in love Hunter and Annabelle were.

No, Anna was not a saloon girl. She was Hunter’s wife. Rolly Piper, on the other hand, was a gutless cur who was going to die a gutless cur’s death.

Squeezing the Henry in his gloved hands, Hunter gained his feet and walked down to where Bobby Lee stood near Nasty Pete, both animals looking anxious.

Hunter leaned down and patted the coyote’s head. “You stay with Pete, Bobby Lee. If you were armed, it’d be a different story. But since you ain’t, you stay.”

Bobby lifted his snout and gave a low yapping whine.

Hunter turned and began jogging down the long slope toward the creek at the bottom, ready despite his war-weary self, to draw some blood.

Hunter leaped into the creek’s dry bed, both boots sinking into the alluvial sand pocked here and there by chunks of driftwood washed down the previous spring. There were also the bleached bones of a dead deer and something he noted in passing, though it did linger in his mind for a second or two, troubling him vaguely—a large pile of bear scat bristling with fur and bits of undigested bone.

Hunter swung to his left and began jogging north.

He stopped suddenly, looked down at his boots, and shook his head.

He leaned his rifle against the cutbank, then sat down in the sand and removed his boots and socks. He’d fought most of the war barefoot, moving fast as a deer behind enemy lines. A fellow couldn’t run in boots that were made for toeing stirrups, not speed.

He lined the boots up neatly against the creek bank, each sock stuffed into each well, then took off running again, moving more fluidly now, faster, easier. During the war his feet had acquired thick, leathery soles, the product of many callouses. His feet had grown a little more tender since the war, since he didn’t go barefoot nearly as much, but a good, thick skin remained on the soles, and the sharp bits of gravel and burrs didn’t bother him overmuch.

He ran to the north.

When he moved out into the open ground between his knoll and the shelf on which Piper and his fellow rustler and bushwhacker perched sixty yards beyond, both formations on his right now, he crouched low, grateful for the fringe of brush growing along the embankment, offering good cover in most places, though there were still some open patches he had to be wary of. Piper and his cohort might spy him and shoot through one of those open patches and just might, even poor marksmen as they were, land a lucky shot.

As he ran, wending his way around obstacles, keeping his head low, the big ex-Confederate, on the lee side of his twenties now, glanced often to his right, noting his progress in closing the ground between his knoll and Piper’s shelf. He was roughly halfway between them ... then two-thirds . . . then he was at the west end of the shelf so that he could see the erosions and rocks and twisted cedars and the autumn-red leaves of the shadbark shrubs peppering the shelf’s steep western slope.

A deer trail angled up the side to the crest, starting at a gap in the brush fringing the cut to Hunter’s right.

Hunter jogged around a bend in the wash and stopped suddenly.

So did Rolly Piper and Otis Lowery.

They’d seen him at the same time he’d seen them, and both men’s eyes widened in shock. Lowery, a thickset, suety man in a sweaty shirt and funnel-brimmed, badly weathered Stetson, took one leaping step back, as though he’d just seen a coiled rattlesnake. He held an old Spencer repeater on his right shoulder. Now he lowered the stock and angled the barrel up, wanting like hell to take the gun in two hands but too wary to do so . . . yet.

His washed-out blue eyes rolled nervously around in their sockets.

Piper froze, chin down, elbows out, crouched slightly, eyeing Hunter sharply from his badly swollen black eyes above his bandaged nose and shaded by the brim of his flat-crowned, black Stetson. He was holding a saddle ring Winchester carbine low in his right hand. Keeping his shocked eyes on Hunter, he angled the rifle up slowly now, a leering grin shaping itself on his thick-lipped mouth mantled by three days’ worth of dirty brown stubble.

He was a skinny man of average height, sort of coyote-faced and patch-bearded, his pasty skin mottled red from sun and windburn. His nose, bruised black and yellow and with a little inky green around the edges, looked sore as hell. He wore a shabby wool coat over a sweaty, wash-faded longhandle top, canvas trousers, and mule-eared boots. Always having fancied himself a gunman against the evidence, he wore two Schofield revolvers in low-slung, tied-down holsters, both for the cross-draw.

Both men looked at the Henry in Hunter’s right hand, held as low as Piper’s.

Their eyes kindled darkly. Sweat glistened on their brows.

They glanced in silent conferral at each other, then shifted their gazes back to Hunter, who grinned despite the anger-burn in his chest.

He remembered what Piper had said about Annabelle. Damn his crazy Rebel heart, anyway, he wanted Piper to raise that rifle so he could blow him back to the hell the man had come from. Otis Lowery was Piper’s cousin, so Lowery too.

The third man, now presumably dead, had likely been the Tigerville ne’er-do-well and close pard of Piper and Lowery, Titus Wilcox, who’d once worked for Max Chaney and Graham Ludlow until Chaney, whom Hunter had shot through his mouth, had cashed in his chips at the local sawbones’ office, and Ludlow, having lost his daughter as well as the war, and with a bad ticker, was holed up and likely sulking at his appropriately named Broken Heart Ranch to live a life of brooding seclusion with his son, Cass, awaiting the end which he likely did not dread.

Yeah, Piper and Lowery needed to go the way of Wilcox. Yeah, Hunter would have more blood on his hands. But he’d be making the world a better place.

He quirked his mouth corners with a smile at the thought. That seemed to rattle Piper and Lowery a little more than they’d been rattled before. They stared at him, tensely, both men sweating profusely now, their foreheads glistening. Dark sweat crescents streaked the armpits of their jackets.

Piper did not like the mocking smile on Hunter’s lips. The man flared his nostrils angrily. He bunched his mouth, and the skin wrinkled across the bridge of his nose and forehead as he suddenly raised the Winchester in his hands, straightening as he snapped the butt plate to his right side.

Hunter raised his faster and shot Piper in the belly.

The man squealed, crouched, and stumbled backward.

Hunter cocked the Henry quickly, the ejected casing arcing back behind him as he slid the Henry slightly right. His own eyes widened in surprise when he found that Lowery had gotten the drop on him and was twisting a wicked smile as he drew his index finger back against the Spencer’s trigger.

Hunter flung himself to his left as the Spencer roared. He hit the ground on his left hip and shoulder, rolled once, brought the Henry up again, and shot Lowery just as the man was ramming a fresh .56 cartridge into the Spencer’s action. Hunter’s bullet took the man through the dead center of his forehead.

The man lifted his chin and dropped the Spencer. He gaped at Hunter, shocked and horrified. His chin came up as his head settled back and both eyes rolled up in their sockets. Lowery stepped back stiffly, dying fast on his feet, then fell straight back against the ground, doing nothing to break his fall.

He struck with a loud thump and a grunt and lay there, still, showing only the whites of his eyes through half-closed lids.

Piper was on his knees, crouched forward, arms crossed on his bullet-torn belly, wailing.

Hunter walked up to him and stood staring down at him. “Where are the cattle?”

Piper lifted his head and cast a glassy-eyed glare at Hunter. “You go to hell!”

Hunter lowered his rifle and turned and headed for the wash’s east bank.

“Wait!” Piper screeched at him. “You can’t leave me here to die like this! Like a damn dog!”

Hunter climbed the bank and began moving off to find the cattle.

“Please!” Piper cried.

Hunter stopped, wheeled, cocking a live cartridge into the Henry’s breech, and fired. The bullet tore through Piper’s left temple, silencing the man forever. Piper flopped back, as still now as Lowery in death.

Hunter cursed. He shouldn’t have wasted the lead on the man. He ejected the spent shell and racked a live one into the Henry’s breech. He held the rifle out from his right hip as he strode forward, looking around for the cattle. Piper, Lowery, and Wilcox might not have been the only ones out here. He’d taken only a few steps before he heard muffled lowing off to his left.

He moved between two low buttes, crossed Juniper Creek where it swung to the east, then followed the gradually loudening lowing into a broken canyon area filled with scrub and rocks and burr oaks whose leaves were turning brown now in the early fall. He bottomed out on the twisting canyon floor, stepped around a bend in its meandering course, and stopped.

Ahead, lay the cattle. They’d been herded into a small box canyon. A makeshift fence of oak and aspen logs had been erected across the canyon mouth as a gate. The restlessly milling cattle stared out at Hunter from between the rails, kicking up their nervous lowing.

A boy stood near the makeshift gate. He was a small, narrow-faced, sandy-headed boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, clad in wash-faded blue overalls and sack shirt under a shabby black coat, and a floppy-brimmed black hat. The boy stood watching Hunter, scowling skeptically.

Hunter removed his finger from the Henry’s trigger and dropped the barrel.

He looked around quickly, making sure no other men were around. Seeing no one but the boy out here, he returned his gaze to the child.

The boy lifted his chin and said with a strange indifference, “Uncle Rolly dead?”

Hunter winced. Damn the luck, finding a child out here. One related to a man he’d killed. “Yes.”

If he felt any emotion, the boy did not betray it. He continued to regard Hunter flatly from his deep-set, brown eyes beneath the floppy brim of his hat.

Hunter strode slowly forward, partly afraid that if he m. . .