In inquiring of Ishmael, a onetime elk-hunting guide and native of the area once hunted by the infamous white man known as the Liver-Eater, as to some details on being a Mountain Man that might help me write a story or two about the subject, I ended up promising to do a book about America’s least known warrior—actually a few, though this article concerns one.

14 months from now I should be embarking with Ishmael and his friend Shayne on a physical search for the last and most wicked of the Mountain Men. In the meantime I have a deep reading list which must be rendered into a guidebook, the Liver Eater Reader. I am also saddled with the first task of the writer, the naming of the story, along with a plan for how to write it.

The misgiving that has haunted me from the beginning is the possibility of misrepresenting or besmirching the memory of the people we call the Crow. I could care less about the remaining Crows. They mean nothing more to me than do Manhattanites or Corsicans. I’m a superstitious sort who does not want to misrepresent the dead, and virtually the entire Crow Nation died at the time that Liver-Eating Johnson was supposed to have been slacking his vengeance on them for some of their young men killing his Flathead Indian wife, a crime that I doubt they would have committed if they had known she was married to a white man, as the Crows were the friends of the white man in that area, at odds with all of the tribes who hated and hunted men such as Johnson. They were also at war with two tribes he befriended, the Flathead and Shoshone.

I feel a great affinity for the Crow people of that time as they were a tribe apart, as alienated from the surrounding peoples and their white allies as I am from the ghetto and suburban peoples that surround me.

I am far enough into the required reading to title, subtitle and plot the course of the story I wish to tell. Below is my guide, as I do not use outlines, even for nonfiction.

Kettle of Bones

An Intertribal Myth: The Sacred Ravens and The Liver-Eater

Horror [There is simply not ample information to write a history. In taking the core aspects of the white folk tradition at face value—though no doubt wildly distorted—and seeking to minimize and illuminate it from the Crow perspective, I cannot, as an experiential writer, approach this tale as anything other than a horror story, and one that will be told on two distinct levels.]

Chronological

Use surviving Crow mythology and history to illuminate the core elements of the white folklore about Liver-Eating Johnson’s feud with the Crow, relying on logistical and tactical deductions by Ishmael and Shayne [the experienced spec ops soldier who will take the lead on developing combat scenarios] to sketch realistic interactions between the opposing warriors, as only one combat between the Crow and Liver-Eater is even alluded to in the folklore.

Minimal exposition

Third person

Strictly isolated character perspectives, avoiding extraneous identification

No internal monologue

No perspective shifts within scenes

Each character will be written in the moment without any extraneous back story

The Crow characters and Liver-Eater will not have any behaviors introduced from outside their known interactions with other Crow people and known third party antagonists such as the Sioux, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, and others.

As an experiential book, Kettle of Bones will credit Ishmael and Shayne as coauthors, with the book itself published according to a mutually agreed upon arrangement which will have no money changing hands between the authors. We just want to get at the truth of what it must have been to be a hunted killer in that primal world in its twilight.

A single paragraph introduction

No table of contents

The Swan

Each chapter will be strictly scene-based, and occur in a single location, with some Crow protagonists having multiple appearances. The number of actual combats will be determined once my reading is complete, with my initial inclination being 13.

The Black Killer

Two single paragraph entries about the protagonists

The Fate of the Sacred Ravens

The Fate of the Liver-Eater