Lucky Bones

Mountain Man

50 mountain man As heard in the barbershop High on Windham Mountain there’s a man who walks so quiet he can surprise that spookiest of birds the wild turkey who hears a hunter spit at fifty yards sees a eye twitch at thirty This trigger-nerved turkey hen use t’hunters lyin behind trees rocks bushes always checks and rechecks everthin: but the mountain man sits in front of a tree so still that the turkey hen steps on his boots when she peeks behind it and the man grabs her by her scrawny neck and pops her in his bag slick as a card trick He lives by himself and a pile of bones in a cave that smells of bear but that bear ain’t comin back nohow Time was he had a real home in Greene County lived there with a one-eyed girl who loved t’dance and sing the old Irish songs while she worked in their garden and one day drove off with a encyclopedia salesman in a new Ford who said she sang like a meadowlark in heaven 51 The next day the house burnt down and no one never saw the mountain man again neither but we know he’s up there because we’ve seed his tracks in snow outside the dance hall window leadin back to the deep woods and once in a while a skier feels her skis grow heavy as she glides through birch and poplar off the beaten trail and she’s scared t’look behind her knowin the ones who do never return but lie forever in the cave and the cold night wind and the unforgivin hands of the mountain man ...