Lonely in the Mountains

Matthew Brennan was a big man, more suited to wrestling bears than sitting a horse. He lived in a valley they called Paradise, with his young, beautiful, dark-haired, fiery wife of Spanish and Irish descent and their young son. High mountains, with only one entrance, surrounded the valley, and that entrance was a small cave with a natural hot springs that supplied the valley with water. Water ran in two directions from the cave, one small stream flowed to the outside world while the other flowed down the center of the first valley to the lake situated against the mountains, where the second leg of the valley branched north. The single entrance cave was guarded by Bitty, an old man’s best friend and possibly the largest female grizzly bear in existence. You didn’t come calling on the Brennans’. As a matter of fact, the entrance to the valley was a well-guarded secret, shared only by the few residents that occupied this paradise. One of those residents was a Cheyenne war chief with an Indian name no one could pronounce. But the literal translation in English would have been Rogue, and that was the handle Brennan hung on his good friend. Brennan had discovered the beautiful valley quite by accident. While wounded and running from those who had shot him, his Appaloosa horse Sob had stumbled through a blizzard to deposit his rider on the soft sand floor of a warm cave, somewhere in Northwestern Colorado. Matthew Brennan was found there by Val, the old self-appointed guardian of the valley, and nursed back to health.