BIG SOUTHERN (CHAPTER ELEVEN)

DECEMBER 1874

HOKANSEN

Hokansen was right on schedule, third year in a row. Soon as the dirt was too frozen to dig, there he'd be, looking for work though he wouldn't be saying it.

Hank Oliver turned away from the entering figure to face his wife behind the bar. He winked and she gave him the thinnest of smiles. They'd been discussing the probability of Hokansen's arrival, even placed a bet between themselves—which she had now won—on when he would show up.

Though the list of destitute figures coming through was long, Hokansen's appearance put him near the top in regards to general dirtiness and shabbiness. Hank had been told that at one time, when Hokansen first showed up in the area years ago, that he was perfectly sane, generally clean, but both those traits were on the decline by the time the Olivers opened their way station in 1871.

They had served and boarded plenty of rough fellows and a few civilized ones, feeding Bill Hickman, whose wife (the only one of twelve that still called him husband, he being disfellowshipped for tattling on Brigham Young), and the notorious Bob Tartar, who terrorized the country when he wasn't rounding up wild horses. But Hokansen was in a class of his own, enough so that even the Indians let him be as he wandered the Reservation digging randomly. The holes he left numbered enough that Major Danilson, the Indian Agent, had asked him to start filling them in afterward, their appearance on the flat too sudden for horses moving at any significant speed to avoid.

The Camp Lander recruits, before they abandoned their short-lived post, had filled Oliver in on Hokansen's story. He had hung around the Lander unit in the winters before he started coming to the Olivers', claimed to have helped move the adobe bricks, which were strewn from Fort Hall in the '62 flood, southward to help fashion their Camp.

"Ground frozen?" Oliver asked as Hokansen sat at the bar.

His gear, deposited inside the door where Hank wished he wouldn't leave it, had the look of a makeshift existence, all one drab color and shapes too chaotic to discern their origin—sticks and squares and circles and none of them attached to discernible objects without dismantling the entire pack. "All except by the creeks and river," Hokansen said.

"Any gold this season?"

Hokansen grinned slyly. "Now, I couldn't divulge that if there were now, could I?"

Oliver laughed. "Don't suppose so."

Though Hokansen, when pressed, would say he was mining, the initial word from the Lander men was he was looking for gold buried by highwaymen over a decade prior. He had been a deputy when the event occurred, played a part in both the killing of one of the men and the hanging of the other, and though he kept his position as lawman for four years he couldn't get the curiosity out of his system. Or so he had said, stringing out the information over several binges that spanned a couple years. Since then, his cog had slipped a tooth or two.

He had dug, according to Sheriff Atwood, a couple places before he quit being deputy, taking a shovel with him every time he headed to Corinne or the new Fort Hall over at Ross Fork. When Atwood asked him about his endeavor, Hokansen just laughed it off and called his excursions a lark. "Just curious," he said. "Ain't you ever been curious?"

Hokansen spoke up. "How's my credit?"

"Same as always. You going to cut ice for us again?"

"Don't have a freight wagon."

"You can use ours. Same as before."

Hokansen pretended to consider the proposition, as if he were weighing options. "I s'pose I can spare a couple weeks. I got a place near some springs I suspect there's some good dust at, though, so I can't guarantee it."

"You can stay in the ice house until then, same as last year." And the year before, Oliver thought. It was a good thing the ice would share Hokansen's quarters—the cold would kill whatever vermin infested his clothing. "Eva's got some bacon already fried up, if you're hungry."

His eyes lit up but he shrugged, careful to think about the offer. "That'd be a solution." He turned to Oliver's wife. "I'd be honored, Eva, if you put it on my tab."

The Olivers, starved for news like all who lived on the plain or bottoms, kept tabs on Hokansen throughout the year. As a standard feature in the area, he was recognizable to what few trappers remained and the cattlemen knew his mien well, though the second a herd appeared near him he moved his work. Everyone was well aware of his scheme for treasure though they didn't give their knowledge away. They veered from his position if they knew it aforehand in order to give him the space he required to maintain his imagined secret.

Hokansen ate. Like a hungry man pretending he wasn't hungry.

©2025 Ralph Thurston