Ode To Mountain Mike
He was a mountain man through and through.
You could tell by the way he would talk to you.
He was tough as cow hide and twice as strong.
Once he started, he wouldn’t stop all day long.
He crawled 20 miles on cracked ribs & a broken leg.
Took him two weeks. Then he drank a keg.
He made it to a small, outback store for help.
To pay for it, he gave the guy a pelt.
Hunting and trapping was his stock and trade.
He made his living by what it paid.
When the Rocky Mountains were first explored,
mountain men made the first scores.
Our mountain man, we’ll call him Mike,
was as tough as a steel spike.
He had a one room cabin way up in the mountains.
He called it base camp. It was near some fountains.
He roamed an area now called Yellowstone.
He saw hot pools of water, bubbling up with foam.
He saw geysers, rivers, and hot mud flats.
The mud felt good on his tired feet. It’s a fact.
He would hunt & trap bear, beaver, badger, and elk.
He would eat the meat and save the pelts
Once a year he would go to civilization.
Take his large store of pelts in preparation.
He would then buy supplies for another year.
Then, off he would go hunting elk and deer.
He would often fish for himself. Nothing was fished out.
He would catch big, beautiful rainbow trout.
A fish dinner cooked on an open fire.
It would fill him up and he would retire.
Next day he was up early and off again.
One day he ran into a group of red men.
It was an Indian hunting party out for the day.
He knew enough of their language to say.
“How is it going? Was hunting good?”
They would answer as best they could.
He had made peace with the local Indians.
Since the day he saved the chief’s son’s skin.
The kid was pinned down by a bear.
Mike nailed the bear with a shot from nowhere.
He was so far away, the Indians could hardly believe
the shot was possible to achieve.
Such things Mike took as a task to be done.
Indians respected him. He was the ‘one.’
Many stories of mountain men are told.
Most were exaggerated to sound bold.
But, the stories of Mountain Mike were true.
There was nothing that he couldn’t do.
But, today, we are running out of time.
We will tell another of his stories another time.
——————————————R. W. Johnson—–(2015)