It Wasn't the Christmas Miracle

Vern Hopkins

Our Montana ranch was on the Valley Creek Road, halfway between Arlee and Ravalli Junction. It laws about a quarter of a mile off the highway and across the Jocko River Bridge to our lane.

One day around the middle of December, a few days before Christmas, I went out in the dark as usual, to do morning chores. There was a skiff of new snow on top of a couple inches of the old. I grained the two saddle horses that I kept up to use for the winter, let my milk cow in the barn, locked her in the station and fed the barn cats.

I milked the cow, let her and her calf out for the day, took my pail of milk and headed for the house. It was light enough to see by then and I noticed what looked like fresh tracks in the snow by the corner of the barn. I took the milk in the house where my wife Kaye was in the middle of fixing breakfast and the kids were getting dressed and ready for school. I told her that I was curious about the tracks I had seen and went back out to check.

On one side of the barn there was a tack room and a couple of tie stalls for the horses. There was a manger for hay at the front of the stalls. Whenever I was going to use a horse for the day, I could saddle up, tie him in the stall and let him have his morning hay and grain.

The tracks were easy enough to read. A set of moccasin prints led from the road, down my lane and right into the horse barn. I went in the barn and looked around. At first I didn’t see anything, but then I looked in the manger and there was Mose Fyant, an old Indian man sound asleep in the hay.

It didn’t take long to piece the story together. Mose was an old bachelor reservation Indian; good natured and harmless, but was a habitual drunk. He had, no doubt, been drinking at the Log Cabin Bar in Arlee and had been “eighty-sixed” or just decided to walk up the road to Ravalli and the Four Square Bar for a change in company. He probably got sleepy and decided to take a little nap in the handiest place around… my barn.

I didn’t wake him up. I covered him up with some saddle blankets and let him sleep, and went back in to breakfast.

After the kids got on the bus at the end of the lane and left for school, I took a cup of coffee out for Mose and woke him up. He turned me down when I asked him to come in and have some breakfast. He said he didn’t want to waste a good drunk by getting over it too soon. He finished the coffee, brushed some of the hay off his clothes and headed back up the road to Arlee.

I’ll have to say, Mose was pretty content with who he was. Everybody seemed to like him. He got by on his dividend money and commodities from the tribe and appeared to be happy as a bird on a wire.

The stars in the east had disappeared and the morning sun was just casting a golden glow over the snow-capped Mission Mountains. As I watched the old man fading away in the morning mist, I was thinking about the other, “Babe in the manger”. I shook my head and wondered if maybe old Mose could actually be one of those “Wise Men” after all.