Chapter 1

I was lucky and I new it. Not in everything, but mostly I was lucky. I'd been born to a well to do mother and father and I had it made growing up. I didn't have to worry about clothes or food. It didn't mean I got everything I wanted because I didn't, but I'll have to say I got everythig I needed, and then some.

My good luck lasted too. By the time I finished high-school and then a couple of years of trying out college I knew higher education wasn't for me. If I'd been a real go-getter it might have been, but I wasn't and I didn't really need it. My grandfather had been one and my father too. They'd been in the sawmill business and later my father started a retail business.

It was sort of like a general store, but supersized. I think he actually got the idea from running the sawmill commisary back when a mill was sort of like a small town. It was another way the mill made money, or earned back the money it paid its employees. They bought what they needed for life at the commisary, or the company store, as many of the employees and their families called it, and the money they were paid went mostly back to the mill.

Hell, it wasn't even really money they were paid with. It was company script. Of course it would only spend at the company store but then again where else did they have to spend their earnings?

That was neither here nor there, it was back then. Back befoe Wal-Mart, K-Mart or any of the other Marts. It was in the past as far as my father and family went. We lived in town by the time I came along and my Dad had left the compeny store and started his own store in town.

Of course I worked when I was going to high-school, in fact I started when I was in junior high. Hell, I had a wanter, I guess I was born with it. I wanted a horse, and I wanted a rifle and later a shotgun and then I got off into pistols. Revolvers, I guess they are more correctly called. Anyway, my father had never been interested in guns or hunting and if I wanted to own any guns or do any hunting I had to work.

All that came to an end when I headed out for college though. All the working that is. In fact, durig the second year I spent at college my working came to an end, literally. My aunts and uncles started dying off and leaving me things and they turned out to be really nice things. Like mineral rights.

In the old time sawmill business a lot of land ended up being purchased by the mill. People were funny about selling their timber and they always seemed to think they'd do better just selling the land the timber was on. I guess it was because they didn't know how to sell their timber. They didn't want to learn about it either. They didn't know a board foot from a kick in the ass and they didn't take the trouble to learn. They thought they understood what was happening when they got so many dollars per acre and they reasoned they would be better off without the land after the timber was cut off since they wouldn't have to pay taxes on the land any longer.

Hell, why would my grandfather or father or any of my uncles want to tell them different. They just bought the land, cut the timber off it and then held onto the land, including the mineral rights. The Arabs and their oil embargo caused me to give up on higher education, indirectly of course. When a company paid me fifty thousad bucks to drill over some of my mineral rights one of my dearly departed aunties had left me I decided I could do just as well riding horses and deer hunting as I could working. When the well came in and I got my first month's production check for eight thousand dollars I knew I had done the right thing.

Suddenly I forgave my father for his stingy ways with allowance while I was growning up. I was old enough now to live on my own and I bought fifty acres, sold off the timber, kept the land and the mineral rights myself, and built a little house on the place, and a nice barn to keep my horses in.

I didn't have a lot of horses, but they were nice ones. I had a three year old sorrel Quarterhorse stallion, and two bay Quarterhorse mares. I trained them myself, or at least I trained at them and we taught each other how to get along together.

I called myself Arab rich every month when the checks came in and the land, house, barn, and horses weren't the only things I spent money on. I bought some nice firearms too. Of course I had to have a saddle gun and I went for a Marlin 336c in .35 Remington. For bird hunting I bought a Browning 12 gauge automatic. I know, the really top of the line shotgun for bird hunting is an over and under double barrel, but I settled for the Browning automatic because I wanted to do a little duck hunting too.

With the duck hunting came a shock. I could train a horse with no trouble, but I couldn't train dogs worth a shit. I got up off the money for an already trained pair of black labs. At least I was able to encourage their aggressive behavior for when someone undesireable came around so I guess I did sort of train part of the way they acted.

The oil money changed my life and made me a man of liesure at twenty-two years old, and I didn't mind it one bit, but another thing changed my life and it was related to my newly acquired life of liesure, at least it was related tangentially. With my new bankroll I leased some land to deer hunt on in southwest Texas. That's where the other life changing event occured.

I loaded up my pickup, a 1976 Chevy four wheel drive short and wide. That means a short wheelbase fleetside. I had an extra fuel tank added in the bed, a one hundred and fifty gallon model and I also had a camper shell put on and a bed, or at least a mattress, put in the pickup's bed also.

I had hell getting the fuel tank vent lines extedned outside the camper shell, and there was also trouble getting the filler tube extended outside the shell, but I didn't want to be sleeping in the back with a young vapor bomb in there with me. Still it was worth the extra trouble. I could pull over and go to sleep when I got tired without the bother of dragging a camper trailer along with me. Besides, I needed to tow my horse trailer along and when I asked a Texas Highway Patrolman he told me I couldn't legally tow two trailers no matter if I did have a commercial drivers license with a doubles endorsement.

I'll admit, by now I was wishing I'd bought a long bed pickup instead of the short-bed model, but still, the short wheelbase made it easier to get out of serious mudholes, and I hated being stuck so bad I'd already added a Warn bunper and winch to the front just in case I got somewhere four wheel drive wouldn't get me out without help.

Anyway, deer season drew near and I packed up my hunting clothes and other things including my Marlin, my Super Balckhawks, and plenty of ammunition for both. I even took along my reloading equipment and plenty of primers, powder, bullets, and shot for the shotgun. I put my horses and my mule in the trailer and headed for West Texas to do a little hunting.

That's where I found the next big thing in my life, on my deer lease. I drove out to nearly the center of the five hundred acres I'd leased. About a hundred of the acres were tied up in a mini mountain range nearly in the exaxt center of things and damned if I didn't find a cave among 'em. It hadn't been mentioned by the real estate guy who leased me the land and I considered it a big bonus. Hell, was it ever.

It was large enough for me to pull my truck and horse trailer into and the horses wern't bothered a bit being unloaded in a cave. I put them right back in the trailer though, grabbed my best flashlight and took off looking around in the cave.

I found a sort of passage near the back and headed down it. At first I thought I might get lost if I fucked around and wandered too far so I promised myself I'd go back and get a roll of twine to unwind and mark my way if the passage branched off. It didn't happen though. The passage was long, but there was only one choice of a way to go so I couldn't get lost. Hell, I didn't have to go very far until I came to another opening to the outside. I did feel a little funny when I went outside though, I got a kind of queasy feeling in my stomach, but I got over it soon enough.