Uncle Jack's Door

You've had some hard miles with me, friend, so here's a kinder one. It does start with a dead man, but stay with me. South of this valley, down in the Snake River canyon, there lived a hermit that people called Uncle Jack Davis. Local tradition says he'd mined up in Virginia City, Montana, and that one night in a saloon, drunk, he struck a fellow too hard. He ran before they could hang him. That's tradition, not record. Nobody ever came after him. He never quit fearing they would. For twenty-four years he kept to that canyon, and when he needed supplies he walked fifty miles up the river to Bill Menor's store. He'd go hungry before he'd shoot a thing. When callers wondered why there was no meat on the table, he'd say he'd had so much of it lately he was giving it a rest. It fooled no one. A doe named Lucy lived with him for years, and a cat named Pitchfork Tillman. His cabin had no windows. One spring two bluebirds came in at the open door, looked the place over, and nested behind a broken piece of mirror on his wall. And that great big hermit cut his door down off its leather hinges and left it down until fall. Six summers running those birds came back. Six summers running, the door was already down. In March of nineteen eleven, Ranger Al Austin found him out of his head, and eleven days later he was gone. Austin knocked a coffin together out of the hermit's own sluice box. All that canyon had paid him came to twelve dollars, with about that much again in gold. That's what they counted, and I say they missed some. That door leaned against the wall all summer. That big hermit ate his supper in the draft, and a bluebird went in and out past his ear like she owned the place.