The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time Read Online Free Page B

They grew their own patches of corn and maize and sometimes potatoes and they were unquestionably a hardy lot. Many of these backwoodsmen were God-fearing people and Darius wrote of enjoying a Sunday morning church service attended by families who had—in some cases—started out long before daybreak to arrive at the farm where services would be held that week.
    Between these settlements, Darius found many more people living in isolation. For one reason or another, single men or even entire families had decided to risk Indian attack and all sorts of other deprivations for the chance to plow virgin soil, or just to live where no neighbor's smoke could even be seen. Among these people Darius remarks that he met all kinds, from sullen, cantankerous old men who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, to gregarious women braving the frontier without the aid of menfolks, to even an old dutchmen who had papers showing he had once been a baron and a man of some importance in Europe.
    Darius found burned-out cabins, as well, proving the catastrophic turns life on the frontier could present. On two occasions he found the remains of white people who had been killed and scalped, he presumed by Indians. He also came across an Indian camp in which the fires still smoldered and the evidence there led him to believe it was white men who had done the slaughtering.
    Darius wrote in one of his diary entries of having spoken with several of these pioneers who claimed to have—years before—met a tribe of Indians who were fairer of skin than most, boasted the occasional red-head, had green eyes, and spoke a language remarkably like Welsh. Darius writes of hearing that some members of the Mandan tribe fit these descriptions but says he has never met them himself. In one of the many notes to himself that he never came back to follow up on, Darius "resolves" to track down these rumors and see if there really are Welsh-speaking Indians.
    The frontier was not an easy place to live, but even amid such hard conditions, Darius writes of falling in love with the land, and it's people. He told of his admiration for the undaunted pioneers and even for the noble Indians he saw some of which he shared a meal with, while never losing his hold on his knife or his hair. He speaks of standing on the top of hills and looking across tree-carpeted valleys, unbroken by a single road or path, such as we can only imagine nowadays. Reading his journal, it is almost as if one can see Darius becoming less and less of a colonist and more and more of a new kind of man. A mountain man? A frontiersman? A woodsman? A long hunter? All of these, yes. But most of all, a westerner.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
    Garison Fitch was a handsome man, though he would never have admitted to the fact himself. He stood right at six foot two, with straight dark hair and a matching mustache. He had the build of an athlete, which he had been, but his muscles came these days from hard labor rather than lifting weights.
    When trying to wrestle with a problem in the world of particle physics, or think through a particularly vexing legal matter, Garison went to work with his hands. He enjoyed getting out with the post-hole diggers and repairing his fence-line (a never-ending job in a land with so many deer and elk). He loved the feel of a good piece of wood beneath his foot on a sawhorse while he held his father's old hand-saw and began to cut. And he had found that few jobs in the world gave him as much chance to work his muscles and his mind than cutting wood, hauling it to his yard, then splitting it for use in the fireplace. All the while, the same activity that provided plenty of time for thinking and contemplating served the ever-practical (and, thus, Garison-like) quality of heating his house.
    Garison was a western man, and maybe that was part of why he could not make himself fit into the Soviet ideal. The important people and significant events of Soviet society were