The Winterfox Journals Book One: Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter

By Brian P. Easton

Among the Northern Cheyenne of the Great Plains lives a boy named Winterfox, whose family has fought monsters since the days of the Spanish conquistadors. In the aftermath of Westward Expansion, he has become the sole heir to their blood feud against the Beast.

Winterfox comes of age in the long shadows of the American frontier, a time when magic has not yet passed into myth. It is a place where the mundane and fantastic still walk side-by-side, and the warrior society of the Rédo’osnin Dog Men will be remembered a little while longer.

Hidden away for almost a hundred years, the story behind the legend can finally be revealed. Told from his own journals, this first installment in the life of Michael Winterfox follows the early years of a fierce youth from an outlawed culture; a youth who will ultimately become the venerable hermit and mentor in the original Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Permuted
• Release date: Aug 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781682618509

Brian P. Easton

PictureThe son of a Southern Illinois pastor, Brian Easton grew up a fan of classic horror films during the 70's. His favorite, as you might imagine, was The Wolfman."When I was a baby, my mother used to rock me while watching Dark Shadows. I cut my teeth on a steady diet of Creature Feature and Night Gallery, the old school Universal Monsters and spaghetti westerns. I started writing when I was ten, after I was given a hand-me-down Royal typewriter."He has studied the occult since 1985 and obtained a degree in anthropology to further his research. His first novel When the Autumn Moon is Bright and his second novel Heart of Scars were finalists in the 2003 & 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards."I'm a sucker for tragedy and anti-heroes. Even the most unscrupulous character can become the good guy when pitted against an evil greater than himself. My novels, 'When the Autumn Moon is Bright' and 'Heart of Scars' feature such a protagonist and deliver an autobiographical account of the awful price of hatred. It tells the life story of Sylvester James whose life is tragically altered by a marauding werewolf, and what happens when he hardens his heart to vengeance. As he becomes a man, he learns that it takes more than just silver bullets to kill a werewolf...it demands a perfect willingness to die. A third book is planned to complete the trilogy, and after that a prequel chronicling the life of Sylvester's mentor."

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A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-68261-849-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-850-9

The Winterfox Journals Book One:

Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter

© 2018 by Brian P. Easton

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Dean Samed

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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Permuted Press, LLC

New York • Nashville

permutedpress.com

Published in the United States of America

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What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but sharing of enemies.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian,

or the Evening Redness in the West

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Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Afterword

Appendix A - The Scions & Bloodlines of the First Beast

Appendix B - Rites of Provenance and Hierarchy

Appendix C - Glossary of Terms

About the Author

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240088.jpg book was compiled from the handwritten journals of the greatest man I ever knew. Its literary narrative is my best attempt to tell you his story in his own words without merely transcribing the source material. My intention in this is not merely to preserve a legacy but to arm you with knowledge I didn’t have. I’ve omitted as many vagaries and redundancies as seemed sensible but there are still errors here, owing to my own limitations, the style with which the journals were kept, and a generation gap big enough to choke a mule. Certain thoughts may have wandered in interpretation, some ideas left incomplete. Even though my efforts to relate the life of this extraordinary man are far from perfect, I take full responsibility for its presentation just as I have its preservation. Your task is to learn from it as much of it as you can. Maybe I flatter myself, but I doubt anyone ever knew Michael Winterfox like I did.

Many of the events Michael recorded read like Native folklore, and early in the going I wondered if certain parts of the story were meant as parables. But, as I pushed on I was struck by the notion that those mythic qualities most generally consigned to the dim and ancient past are not so far removed from us as we might believe.

Michael’s father had been a war chief called Stands-in-the-Tombs, and he’d left the Indian Nations at seventeen to protect Northern Cheyenne homesteaders bound for Montana Territory. It was there he met Red-Deer-Lady, who bore him three sons: His-Horse-Is-Thunder, White Eyes and Michael whom she named Winter Fox.

Michael was only two years old when Stands-in-the-Tombs went with Colonel Roosevelt to fight with Spain. As a veteran of the Black Hills War twenty years earlier, Stands-in-the-Tombs didn’t enlist in the U.S. Cavalry for love of the American government, but only because his ancestors had passed down a grudge against the Spaniards. This feud had endured for three centuries, surpassing all reason or recollection, and ran too deep in the blood to ignore a call to battle.

Before Stands-in-the-Tombs left for Cuba he’d already started training his two older sons in the tradition of the Rédo’osnin, an elite subset of the Dog Men warrior society. As a boy, he’d been one among others chosen into the order, but in that autumn of 1898 he was one of its final remnants. His children, as it is with all children, were his stake in its future and upon his return to Montana the training resumed.

While Michael was still a small child his mother, who was a má’heóná’e or medicine woman, looked to the new Ghost Dance religion to bring back the buffalo and the old ways. She made for her husband and elder sons Ghost Shirts, which were said to be impervious to white man’s bullets. They three left their homeland to ride as self-appointed escorts for Ghost Dancers traveling into South Dakota from the Nations. It was a fateful and wintry December that saw some 300 men, women and children gunned down at Wounded Knee Creek. The day after that terrible massacre, Michael’s father and brothers fought alongside the Brulé and Teton at White Clay Creek and trapped the 7th Cavalry in a low valley. They would have killed them all if a battalion of 9th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers hadn’t come to the rescue. Michael’s brothers died in the snow with the Sioux that day, shot by men their father had fought beside on San Juan Hill just a year before.

Though Mother was the wiser, fighting Spaniards was how Father had interpreted the feud. By the time it was handed down to me, the Spanish had practically nothing to do with it.

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240078.jpg first complete memory is of my father and his men searching for the person who had stolen children off our Reservation. Some of the people claimed to have seen a crazy white man living alone in Indian country, and they believed this man was selling his young captives to tribes whose populations had been decimated. Others said the abductions were the work of a Crow witch, who used the body parts of Cheyenne children for black medicine. I was not yet old enough to fight, nor even ride but my father brought me on the hunt anyway.

The morning was warm even though it was still dark when we set out, and when the sun was high we had tracked the robber to a deep place in the land where the light could not reach and there was no grass. Father dismounted at the edge and took down his war club which had been his father’s, and then together he and I descended that steep swale. At the bottom was a cave carved into the earth, its doorway covered with a hide on a crooked frame of sticks. Father tossed it aside to reveal the entrance and cool air seemed to breath out of it like a mouth and it filled the little valley where we stood like water in a trench.

My father’s men were mostly veteran remnants of other military societies and they had also dismounted and stood at the rim of the pitch. With their backs to the daylight they appeared as black cutouts against the sky. Father signaled and two of them started down after us, but as they did a weird wailing noise blew over the plain. It was a hollow and distant sound, a wild rasping mixed with mournful laughter spread by the wind over many miles, except for all the blast of it there was no wind. Father’s men did not ride skittish horses, but the sound spooked them and made them rear and stamp. Every man saw to his weapons, and with a wave of his arm father directed three of them to search the hill for any opening that might be used as an escape. A group of others fanned out over the face of the hill so they could cover the entrance with their bows from above. In their faces, I saw they were not afraid of the noise nor of the dim trench below them. I was not afraid either; how could I be when I was with Stands-in-the-Tombs?

I entered the cave first and was overcome by the darkness. I could not understand why father had not fired a torch or how he expected me to see without one, but then I had known him to cut for sign at night without so much as starlight to guide him. Inside the belly of the hill it smelled of worms and then of excrement. I reached out in my blindness, groping my way deeper into the earth. I could hear a creaky, rustling sound like tree limbs rubbing together in a storm, and then something seized my ankles and pulled me down. I was dragged away from father even as I heard his war club strike some other unseen enemy. It felt like I was sinking into moldy darkness, and my cries for help were lost among the whoops and shouts of the warriors. My father’s own battle cry was like a clap of thunder inside the chamber.

With its knee against the side of my head, the creature which had grabbed me bound my knees and wrists. It stank of rotted fish and had hard, thin hands, long fingernails. As I struggled against it, I called out again and again but there was too much noise over which to be heard. It stuffed a ball of dirt and moss into my mouth and I bit down on its fingers behind. The knee tightened against my head and another set of strong, wiry fingers forced open my jaw. Then there was a dull whack, and a warm mist in my face. My attacker wilted away and a friendlier pair of hands pulled me free. It was Laughing Dog, father’s cousin and Red Shield soldier-chief who undid my cords and saw me through an exit at the rear of the cave.

From atop of the embankment I watched several of the men take the scalps and ears of those strewn across the adjacent hill, but the hair came apart like rancid meat under their scalping knives and the trophies were discarded almost before they had been claimed. One of the warriors pulled something out of its hole by the legs, and then clove the skull with his tomahawk. All of Father’s men were red-handed, and it was hard to know what to make of those they had killed; they seemed to be people, but were not Indians and did not look like Whites either. Some were pale as ash and others nearly yellow in the sunlight, ornamented with small bones strung into belts and scapulars but otherwise completely naked. There were seven in all, mostly men, and all of them deformed; humped backs, a cleft palate, extra fingers, a vestigial tail, and one with hands like the pincers of a scorpion.

Four naked children came stumbling out of the hill like filthy gnomes and two of Father’s men snatched up one under each arm and carried them into the sun. Everything was quiet again as the band regrouped and the dead lay with their partially peeled skulls darkening in the sun and already drawing flies.

Only Stands-in-the-Tombs had not yet returned from under the hill, and everyone watched for him and waited. Nothing was said. When he finally emerged from the mouth of the cave, he bore in one hand by its matted locks an enormous, ogre-like head. He held it high amid renewed whoops and victory cries and then brought it up for all to see. The grotesquely bloated face stared up at us, its skin the color of river clay and its bulbous cheeks pinched against a flap of skin that covered a single nose hole. Father nudged the horrible thing with his foot and as it wobbled to one side, a tress of hair fell over the face to reveal in the scalp a second face. The warriors looked guardedly at it for a moment and whispered, Hestovatohkeo’o among themselves— Double-Face, a legendary terror known by many tribes. That other face had a jumble of small yellow teeth behind stringy lips and a narrow bump of a nose without nostrils, but the closed eyes were perfect and delicate enough to have been a sleeping infant’s. Father and his men took turns stomping on the head in a kind of dance until they had broken it apart and it had no shape whatsoever. Inside the hill father had found several small dens caged off with shin bones of antelope and buffalo, and a cold stew of human meat, some of it still on the bone.

We rode back to our small and secluded village, and the story was told and the children returned to their parents. The song we sang told of the death of Double-Face and of how it and its kindred had stolen children and butchered them for food. We sang of how Stands-in-the-Tombs had battled the monster under the earth and had hacked off its head. We praised the warriors who had rescued the living children and those who had avenged the spirits of the murdered. What the song could not tell was how profoundly the events of that day would shape the life of a boy too young to do anything but play the part of bait.

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My brothers had been five and eight years older than me, and because I was only a little boy when they were trained I cannot say what rigors they endured. Speaking from my own experience, Father had no patience for failure and seemed determined that I should prove myself worthy of the Rédo’osnin name no matter the suffering, or even if it caused my death. It was well known that many boys chosen into the society did not survive its training. As my family’s last son, I shouldered not only the weight of my father’s hopes and my mother’s grief, but the heritage of a culture in its dying breath.

For many generations, rédo’osnin masters had selected only the most accomplished warriors to receive their training, but such men became increasingly rare as more and more Whites came. An old master named Kills-With-His-Hands restructured the training and saved the order by selecting into it the children of notable warriors. This was a great honor for the fathers, and selection was almost inevitable for the sons of Dog Men. When my brothers and I were born, our father buried the afterbirth in soil that had been enriched by the blood of battle. This was done to bind us to our fighting traditions and to win the favor of our ancestors.

I was about five years old when my training formally began. Father and I, and his mentor Walks-with-a-Stick, sweated ourselves and prayed for three days. Afterwards I was dressed in a special suit of white buckskin that had been worn once before by a boy who had not survived the Winter-Ordeals. Walks-with-a-Stick sang a song of death while father ritually killed me with an imaginary knife. I was laid on my back as though dead and father closed my eyes with his thumbs smudged with charcoal. My face was painted for this ceremony while Walks-with-a-Stick continued to sing. Then I was sewn inside a buffalo hide and taken from the lodge to lay upon a ceremonial scaffold until first light when I was cut free to rise with the sun.

Walks-with-a-Stick helped supervise the early stages of my training, making sure all was done properly. He was not a rédo’osnin himself, but was wise in the tradition and was a powerful medicine man to whom the greatest warriors of his day had looked for guidance. He had ridden with Morning Star against Custer and had counseled both Crazy Horse and Roman Nose. He was a short sinewy old man who went crazy sometimes, and he had lost his ears and one eye to the Pawnee. The left side of his face sagged around his empty socket, so when he looked at someone it was with a kind of leering appraisal. He was a fearful sight for a child, but my mother disliked him only for his foul disposition made worse by drink, but she would not speak against his medicine or his wisdom regarding the spirits.

The word rédo’osnin is itself a mystery. Through oral tradition, its origins have been attributed to an ancient and hidden language used by those who work for the sacred. Even Walks-with-a-Stick was not certain of its translation, and though over time there had been elders who had dreamed its meaning. none of them seemed to agree. Whatever the word might ultimately mean, the rédo’osnin warrior was expected to start off tough and only get tougher until body, mind, and spirit were near unbreakable.

I was only small, but father liked to tell how he had once seen a hawk driven from its roost by a sparrow. Sometimes it was enough, he said, to be smart and quick. Wild creatures were the benchmarks against which our skills were graded. A warrior needed to be as stealthy as an owl on the wing and as fierce as a panther with her young, as clever as the coyote and as fleet as a pronghorn. He also had to be patient like the spider and resourceful like the raccoon, for only when he had mastered these rudiments could the wolf teach him to hunt, the bear to fight, and the falcon to kill. Some of the ordeals were meant to challenge concentration or pain threshold, while others intended toward sharpening the reflexes or the natural senses. Every new skill built into the next, one enhancing the other, and each complimenting all until they had formed a thing greater than the sum of its parts; a common body of proficiency acting as a single unit in all its appendages and organs.

Each test was an ordeal of patience and pain. At least one of them, I recall, was designed to test one’s ability to remain still for a long time. It involved lit candle stubs placed upon the chest and belly, positioned to fall off at the slightest movement. If that happened, or if one made a sound before the wicks had gone out, the test was a failure. During my ordeal one of the flames did not end in its puddle of tallow, but continued to burn as if the wick had grown into my skin. Taking notice of this, Walks-with-a-Stick drew water from a pail and held the tin dipper over my chest with his head oddly extended, as if he was holding a lantern to better see my face. He gestured with the dipper, silently asking if I wanted him to douse the fire, but I did not answer quickly enough and he poured it on the ground. Then, while the cherry coal smoldered, he studied me as though estimating the worth of my pain. When the ember finally went out in a curl of foul black smoke, Walks-with-a-Stick chewed a mouthful of herbs and applied the pulp to the charred and blistered hole.

When I was tall enough to ride a horse, I learned the guerrilla tactics of the plains and became a formidable archer and lancer. I learned single combat with the instruments of war and without them. Fighting was the lifeblood of the rédo’osnin, and so the Battle-Ordeals were especially intense and included an array of opponents. I learned how to fight enemies larger than I, quicker than I, and those who were simply smarter and more creative. Fighting while injured was especially important, and so the ability to withstand or block off pain was invaluable. It was hand-to-hand combat in every attitude, handicapped by every conceivable misfortune and practiced until it was a thing driven by brute instinct. We were shown how to kill quickly, craftily, like a cat who pounces and then vanishes into the dark. We learned to subdue the enemy as well, to take prisoners and if needed to inflict more suffering than a man could bear. There was much to learn and to know, and they said I conducted myself always with the discipline and pride for which we Northern Cheyenne were known. Walks-with-a-Stick even said the heart of an ancestral warrior beat inside my chest.

For a rédo’osnin there was more to skirmishing and to war than club and arrow—there were battles to be fought where no horse could go and no lance could reach. For all the Rédo’osnin’s martial prowess, there was no arena of combat more dangerous than the one inhabited only by maiyun, or spirit-beings. And so, the long dusks of summer and long nights of winter were spent learning the sacred powers, ma’heono, with my mother. She taught me the Renewal of the Sacred Arrows, ceremonies for the Buffalo Hat, and the ancient Animal Dance, or Massaum. I pledged the Sun Dance when I was nine and from the New Life Lodge learned to leave my body to go into the different realms. Red-Deer-Lady had instructed my brothers in the paths of the spirits too, but with me she gave her full attention and spared no detail—she told me this in confidence.

I think most children believe their mother is beautiful, even if she is not. My mother was a very plain looking person, and because she had survived smallpox as a younger woman, perhaps her face was even a little less than plain, but her voice was so sweet and her manners were so kind that to this day I consider her one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. She could calm my father’s bad moods with a single look or a well-timed word. She was patient in all things and she approached her part in my training the same way—quite the opposite of father and Walks-with-a-Stick.

To fight with weapons made of bone, or wood, or steel, she told me, requires skill and cunning, or strong arms and swift feet. This is the way of men at war, and you have studied it well. Now, I will teach you another way.

From the first rédo’osnin to the last, initiates into the order were chosen by nésemóono, guardian spirits who most usually assumed the appearance of animals. They became one’s totems if they found you worthy of fellowship, and if you passed whatever trial they may put before you, your purpose would always be bound with theirs.

Without looking, mother selected two stones from a bowl and smudged each with buffalo fat before setting them very deliberately in the fire, as though they had a proper place there. As the stones sizzled and popped, she read their smoke and their pools of grease. When she was satisfied with what she had seen, she reached into the fire with her naked hand and removed the stones one at a time and sat them on the ground in front of me. She would not name the spirits who had chosen me; it was my part to seek them.

These are good helpers, Mother said, looking quite pleased, but they may expect much of you for what they offer.

The next day she took me to a holy place on the banks of Tongue River and there I was left to pursue the unknown. These quests always begin with fasting, prayers and days of bodily deprivation so the spirit may become receptive, but some people, especially children, are already more open to those other realms than they know. Especially, it seems, a child with the heart of ancient warrior.

I had followed the river for less than an hour when my stomach began to groan with hunger. I kept hearing something in the trees above me, but I could never see anything there until a big pickerel fish hit me on top of the head. It nearly knocked me down and flopped there beside me as I squinted into the sky. I wanted to eat it but I remained faithful to my fast and let it lay. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, another fish landed right next to me with its gill slits still flaring. Again, I wondered what to make of it but did not want to succumb to distractions. I left the crappie behind and moved on down the bank when I clearly saw vóaxaa’e, the bald eagle, roosting in the uppermost limbs of an elm. He was having his dinner and I could see that he had dropped one or two other fishes in the small branches beneath him. I went back and picked up both fish, as I believed he had sent them down as gifts, and ran to find my mother, excited as I had ever been.

When I first showed up with the fish, Mother looked both surprised and disappointed; she demanded to know why I was not at the river. When I told her the story she kissed my face, and told me the first stone had truly represented the vóaxaa’e, who was now to guard my days with power and purpose. She said the fact he had fed me when I was hungry was a good sign that I would live a long life, then she prepared the fish and I ate them with gratitude, as a sort of sacrament. Afterwards, she took a bone from each and wrapped them together and put them in a little rawhide bundle for me to wear around my neck—the rédo’osnin medicine pouch.

When I went looking for the spirit of the second stone I had already fasted for three days. My father led me deep into the forest of the watershed and gave me counsel.

Eagle met you where you were … do not expect to be so favored twice, he warned. "When I was training, making pacts with my animal spirits was more tiring than any of the ordeals."

This was something he had told me before, how his heart had been bad, and at times still was. He had been so full of anger for what had happened to his people, that the spirits had been hesitant to take him into their company. I think he envied me and the ease with which I had found Eagle. Because of that, I believe he wanted my pact with the second spirit to be so much more difficult.

I had been instructed to wait alone in a gloomy wood known to be haunted by spirits; here, they told me, would I find my guardian by night. From one daybreak until nearly the next I stood in that lonely dell, pondering every sound in the dark until I was well acquainted with the maiyun who lived there. My legs no longer seemed to be under me, and the world beyond eyes almost too heavy to keep open had become a watery haze. Then, just before I thought I would fall asleep, there came a chirping sound the likes of which I had not heard all night. It was a faintly pleasant sound, high-pitched and succinct. I blinked in the false dawn and shuffled toward the sound, hardly aware I was walking at all except in the intention. When I heard the sound again, it was accompanied by the distinct but sluggish rattle of a chain. My eyelids fluttered and I wondered if I was dreaming when I saw a spotted puma cub caught in a leg-hold trap. Its foot seemed to be unharmed, for someone had weakened the trap spring which would have otherwise snapped its small bones. That meant, whomever had set the trap had meant to catch a young animal, probably to sell as a pet. Without thinking much more about it, I bent down and eased back the steel jaws while the cub spit and yowled but otherwise did me no harm before springing away. It was a simple effort but it had exhausted me, and I wilted from one knee onto the duff where I dreamt of feeding alongside the cub at mother-lion’s teat.

It was still morning when I woke,