Shadow Of The Longhunter
(2026)(A book in the Obie Trask: Mountain Man series)
A Story by C Wayne Winkle
Obie Trask is a man of few words and fewer attachments—until the morning a wounded puma tears his partner’s throat out beside a half-dressed buck.
Dutch dies with blood on his lips and a single request: don’t waste the meat. Obie keeps the powder dry, takes the knife from his friend’s cooling hand, and follows the blood trail into the laurel. The cat is old, scarred, and cunning. It does not run straight. It doubles back, lays false sign, and watches from high ground. Obie marks every drop, every bent fern, every place the animal pauses to listen.
When the trail leads to a remote cabin, he finds a widow and a boy who already know the Ghost’s work. Maeve Callahan’s husband died at the lower pen. Young Finn still flinches at the sound of something heavy moving outside the shuttered window. The same torn-eared tom has been circling their place for weeks, testing rails, waiting under the eaves, reading the ground the way only an animal that has survived every hunter can.
Obie stays. Not for silver. Not for thanks. Because the cat that killed Dutch has already claimed this ground, and because a man who starts a trail owes it an ending.
Storms wash sign. Fever burns through open claw wounds. A rival trapper with more greed than sense tramples the track and nearly gets them both killed. Through it all the Ghost keeps teaching the same hard lesson: the mountains do not care about justice, only about who is still standing when the light fails.
What begins as a simple blood hunt becomes a brutal contest of endurance between one longhunter and a predator that has already outlived better men. In the end, only one of them will walk out of the den of bones.
Gritty, atmospheric, and unflinching, Shadow of the Longhunter is frontier survival at its most elemental—where every decision costs blood, every silence carries weight, and the only law left is the one a man carries in his own hands.
Genre: Western
Dutch dies with blood on his lips and a single request: don’t waste the meat. Obie keeps the powder dry, takes the knife from his friend’s cooling hand, and follows the blood trail into the laurel. The cat is old, scarred, and cunning. It does not run straight. It doubles back, lays false sign, and watches from high ground. Obie marks every drop, every bent fern, every place the animal pauses to listen.
When the trail leads to a remote cabin, he finds a widow and a boy who already know the Ghost’s work. Maeve Callahan’s husband died at the lower pen. Young Finn still flinches at the sound of something heavy moving outside the shuttered window. The same torn-eared tom has been circling their place for weeks, testing rails, waiting under the eaves, reading the ground the way only an animal that has survived every hunter can.
Obie stays. Not for silver. Not for thanks. Because the cat that killed Dutch has already claimed this ground, and because a man who starts a trail owes it an ending.
Storms wash sign. Fever burns through open claw wounds. A rival trapper with more greed than sense tramples the track and nearly gets them both killed. Through it all the Ghost keeps teaching the same hard lesson: the mountains do not care about justice, only about who is still standing when the light fails.
What begins as a simple blood hunt becomes a brutal contest of endurance between one longhunter and a predator that has already outlived better men. In the end, only one of them will walk out of the den of bones.
Gritty, atmospheric, and unflinching, Shadow of the Longhunter is frontier survival at its most elemental—where every decision costs blood, every silence carries weight, and the only law left is the one a man carries in his own hands.
Genre: Western
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Used availability for C Wayne Winkle's Shadow Of The Longhunter